An interesting development has occurred in the story of the controversial FTC guidelines for sponsored blogging/social media. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has called upon the FTC to rescind the blogger rules, and has questioned the constitutionality of them. As you may know, there have been a lot people calling them an infringement on free speech.
Update 2: Here is our exlcusive interview with Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra from the BlogWorld Expo this past weekend:
There was an interesting session on online video at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East, which WebProNews attended. The session was called "Video Search Marketing Beyond YouTube". The following tips come from a combination of presentations from that session from speakers: William Leake of Apogee Search, John McWeeny of TurnHere, and Eric Papczun of Performics.
A recent study found that 54% of businesses prohibit employee social media use completely. There are valid arguments supporting both sides of this debate. We've seen quite a few news stories in recent months about social media policies coming to light.
Twitter CEO Evan Willams made some comments at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco that have some Twitter enthusiasts in debate. He reportedly said that he wants to retire the Suggested User List (SUL) as the company prepares to launch its highly anticipated "Lists" feature.
The closing keynote of the BlogWorld Expo this past weekend was set up like The Late Show. Guy Kawasaki came out and told some jokes in David Letterman fashion (complete with Late Show-like desk and chairs), then he introduced the audience to actor/comedian Kevin Pollak.
The BlogWorld Expo out in Vegas, which wrapped up over the weekend, attracted some major star power. One session in particular included Anthony Edwards (whom you may remember from films like Revenge of the Nerds and Pet Sematary 2, as well as the television program ER), and Jermaine Dupri, the man who brought us groundbreaking hip hop acts Kris Kross and Da Brat.
An interesting topic was discussed at the BlogWorld Expo in a session called the "Death and Rebirth of Journalism," which WebProNews attended.
It is an interesting time for email marketing right now. Though it is still a quite effective medium for marketers, there are many challenges to deal with. This was the subject of a session moderated by David Daniels of Forrester Research at the Shop.org summit in Las Vegas this week.
The 2009 TechCrunch 50 conference was held this week, and 50 start-ups each had a chance to make a presentation, and then the judges picked one grand-prize winner at the end of the whole thing to win $50,000.
The winner this year, was a company called Redbeacon, which just happens to have been founded by three ex-Googlers - Ethan Anderson, Yaron Binur, and Aaron Lee, who were product managers and engineers with the Internet giant.