Front and center of this strategy is the Representative from the state of Texas, Lamar Smith, the chief supporter and architect of SOPA as it is in its present form. One of Smith’s primary strategies has to do with increasing support for his proposed bill, and to do so, he’s released a list of businesses that support SOPA, apparently aiming for the “Hey, I know that company. If they like SOPA, it can’t be that bad, can it?” reaction from consumers who take the time to view his support list (PDF).

That, however, could have a backlash because it gives the anti-SOPA crowd a better idea of what companies they should boycott, provided their commitment to a non-SOPA Internet runs that deep. Last week, we released a similar list of SOPA supporters, but because this one is coming straight from the horse’s mouth, it’s much more comprehensive. Here is the face of your enemy, or, perhaps, the company(ies) that will make you see the light concerning SOPA:

List of Supporters: H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act

60 Plus Association
ABC
Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies (ASOP)
American Federation of Musicians (AFM)
American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA)
American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP)
Americans for Tax Reform
Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States
Association of American Publishers (AAP)
Association of State Criminal Investigative Agencies
Association of Talent Agents (ATA)
Baker & Hostetler LLP
Beachbody, LLC
BMI
BMG Chrysalis
Building and Construction Trades Department
Capitol Records Nashville
CBS
Cengage Learning
Christian Music Trade Association
Church Music Publishers’ Association
Coalition Against Online Video Piracy (CAOVP)
Comcast/NBCUniversal
Concerned Women for America (CWA)
Congressional Fire Services Institute
Copyhype
Copyright Alliance
Coty, Inc.
Council of Better Business Bureaus (CBBB)
Council of State Governments
Country Music Association
Country Music Television
Covington & Burling LLP
Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard LLP
Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman, P.C.
Creative America
Davis Wright Tremaine LLP
Deluxe2
Directors Guild of America (DGA)
Disney Publishing Worldwide, Inc.
Elsevier
EMI Christian Music Group
EMI Music Publishing
ESPN
Estée Lauder Companies
Fraternal Order of Police (FOP)
Go Daddy
Gospel Music Association
Graphic Artists Guild
Hachette Book Group
HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, Inc.
Hyperion
Independent Film & Television Alliance (IFTA)
International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE)
International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC)
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW)
International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT)
International Trademark Association (INTA)
International Union of Police Associations
Irell & Manella LLP
Jenner & Block LLP
Kelley Drye & Warren LLP
Kendall Brill & Klieger LLP
Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump & Aldisert LLP
L’Oreal
Lathrop & Gage LLP
Loeb & Loeb LLP
Lost Highway Records
Macmillan
Major County Sheriffs
Major League Baseball
Majority City Chiefs
Marvel Entertainment, LLC
MasterCard Worldwide
MCA Records
McGraw-Hill Education
Mercury Nashville
Minor League Baseball (MiLB)
Minority Media & Telecom Council (MMTC)
Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp LLP
Morrison & Foerster LLP
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)
Moving Picture Technicians3
MPA – The Association of Magazine Media
National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)
National Association of Prosecutor Coordinators
National Association of State Chief Information Officers
National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA)
National Center for Victims of Crime
National Crime Justice Association
National District Attorneys Association
National Domestic Preparedness Coalition
National Football League
National Governors Association, Economic Development and Commerce Committee
National League of Cities
National Narcotics Offers’ Associations’ Coalition
National Sheriffs’ Association (NSA)
National Songwriters Association
National Troopers Coalition
News Corporation
Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP
Pearson Education
Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA)
Phillips Nizer, LLP
Pfizer, Inc.
Proskauer Rose LLP
Provident Music Group
Random House
Raulet Property Partners
Republic Nashville
Revlon
Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi LLP
Scholastic, Inc.
Screen Actors Guild (SAG)
Shearman & Sterling LLP
Showdog Universal Music
Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP
Sony/ATV Music Publishing
Sony Music Entertainment
Sony Music Nashville
State International Development Organization (SIDO)
The National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO)
The Perseus Books Groups
The United States Conference of Mayors
Tiffany & Co.
Time Warner
Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)
UMG Publishing Group Nashville
United States Chamber of Commerce
United States Tennis Association
Universal Music
Universal Music Publishing Group
Viacom
Visa, Inc.
W.W. Norton & Company
Warner Music Group
Warner Music Nashville
White & Case LLP
Wolters Kluewer Health
Word Entertainment

None of the companies appearing on this list should come as a surprise. Many are established entities with large vaults of intellectual property, and because there’s a distinct unwillingness to evolve business models to match the technology available, these groups will continue to support SOPA in whatever guise it appears in.

While it’s understandable companies like Viacom and Universal Music would be present, the appearance of companies like Revlon, Tiffany & Co., and Pfizer is a little puzzling. Are people actually downloading illegal copies of Viagra? What about Revlon’s newest lipstick color? If these items are being downloaded, I definitely need to update my Internet connection to one that allows for the reception of physical goods over an electronic network.

Star Trek replicators for the win, apparently.

H/t to DMA Design for creating the awesome Lemmings game, which provides our lead image.

Now that they’ve apparently addressed whatever server overload issues that plagued that attempt, the CDC is back on the zombie bandwagon, just in time for Halloween. This time, instead of relying on a generic survival guide — hey, the CDC is not above shilling for pageviews — they’ve released an impressively-drawn web comic that plays on popularity of zombies. The comic is presented in the standard PDF format, and, truth be told, after skimming it, the comic is essentially a reminder for people to make an emergency kit, one that prepares people for potential disasters, whether it’s in the form of an all-out zombie attack or, well, bad weather.

Here are a couple of screenshots from the comic, which, regardless of the CDC’s motivation, isn’t that bad:

CDC has a fun new way of teaching the importance of emergency preparedness. Our new graphic novel, “Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic” demonstrates the importance of being prepared in an entertaining way that people of all ages will enjoy. Readers follow Todd, Julie, and their dog Max as a strange new disease begins spreading, turning ordinary people into zombies. Stick around to the end for a surprising twist that will drive home the importance of being prepared for any emergency. Included in the novel is a Preparedness Checklist so that readers can get their family, workplace, or school ready before disaster strikes.

So yeah, the CDC is deftly using zombies as a way to remind others to be prepared. Granted, if a true zombie apocalypse broke out, I’m not sure how much good a CDC-approved disaster preparedness kit would do, unless it was filled with unlimited food, water, and ammo.

Again, you can read the entire web comic in its PDF form here.

If you’re wondering just how effective the CDC would be in the face of a worldwide zombie outbreak, the fantastic television show, The Walking Dead covered that subject rather well during the season one finale, which is the resource of the lead image. AMC, the channel responsible for the show, has a “webisode” of how the CDC would fare:

In other words, if a worldwide zombie outbreak actually does hit, we’re all pretty much screwed. Sure, some would survive, but most of us would either wind up as one of the walking dead or we would get eaten. Who knows? Maybe the disaster kit would give you a few more days worth of survival, so there’s that.

Moderator:

• Joe Laratro

Speakers:

• Rick Klau, Strategic Partner Development, Google
• Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts
• George Aspland, Founder & President, eVision, LLC

First speaker is Rick Klau, Strategic Partner Development, Google. Some of the first points he makes are:

• His company does not index RSS/Atom content
• Social networks encourage feed distribution
• Feedburner’s "pro" features are free of cost
• Includes TotalStats and MyBrand
• Sitemaps support feeds – RSS feeds work as a poorman’s sitemap

Rick talks about the evolution of feed publishers. In 2004, blog and visuals overlap. Feeds today include all kinds of content.

Clickthrough Tracking

Earlier, they used a 302 but now they let Webmasters choose between 302 or a 301.

MyBrand

DNS skills NEEDED!

One can map the CNAME

Significance of Full Text Over Excerpts

• It is stupid to not push your full content in a feed. There are only particular cases when a partial feed is right
• Many data says full feeds are better.
• Encourages people to check out Techmeme and how they bring in feeds and create relationships based on the links and the data in the feeds.

Noindexr

• Yahoo! And Google are followers
• Turn it on in Feedburner

Robots.txt

• Force services to consume feeds or not

Use ‘Auto-Discovery,’ in order to announce the availability of your feeds to bots and browsers. If you use a podcast, do not just ping it to the MP3. Make a page and point the podcast to it . Search engines are text-friendly.

Facebook lets users import "notes"

• Rick Klau takes a poll of the number of users who import feed into Facebook account
• Almost 25% of the audience raise hand
• Rick starts to tell how to set it up

Next up is Stephan Spencer, Founder & President of Netconcepts. Spencer asks the audience if there are bloggers and how many use WordPress.

Blog SEO

• Easy enough for a child to do
• 16 year old blogger
• For passive content, you can make 1000$ a month
• Shows her blog

Optimizing your blog

• Rejig your internal linking
• Tag clouds
• Related posts
• Top 10 posts
• Next and previous posts

Build inbound links

• Add Technorati tags to your posts
• Become part of bloggers blogrolls
• Trackbacks & comments wont help with link gain

In comparison, hyphens are more ideal than tags.

• Title tags
• Blog name
• Don’t use the same text for the page title and the post title

"SEO Title Tag" plugin for wordpress

• Download an SEO Title tag Plugin from netconcepts.com
• Employ the plugin to optimize title tags
• Plugin also allows for mass edits

Related Posts

• Increases inter-linking on the site
• Can use plugins or just call out and do it manually

Blog should be ranked according to what we want to be named for.

Anchor Text

• Post’s title should have a link the the perm page
• Use neat-o-tool (webuildpages.com)
• There should be internal links to old related posts within the body of the blog.

Heading tags

• Category name on category page
• Yes for post titles, no for dates

It’s a good idea to use optional excerpts in order to minimize dupe content. Build unique content.

Sticky posts

• Should always appear at the top of the page
• Great way to add keyword-rich intro copy to a category page or tag page. e.g. adhesive plugin

relnofollow

• With this you will not pass any juice

noindex

• This tag passes juice but blog will not appear in the SERPs
• This tag could use a robots.txt to do the same thing

Optimizing your feeds

• Full texts and not just summaries
• Add twenty or more, ten is not good enough
• Multiple feeds
• Add keyword-rich items
• Brand name must be mentioned in the title
• Your most important keyword should be included in the site

Last speaker from the panel, George Aspland, the founder & president of eVision is up now.

George laid emphasis on how to achieve rankings and CTRs via SERPs. For this one needs plenty of formattable text. The text needs to be well optimized. Title is key.

Google SERPs for a PDF showed:

• Document without any title
• Text included within images

Aspland recommends pdfs as they serve well in the long run.

Link to the PDF

• Try to get links from indexed pages
• Promote link pop

PDFs can have links

• Some even have active links
• Logo also works as a link to the website

Converting URL’s in a pdf into an active link

• Links should be highlighted
• Export/print your PDF
• Open PDFs with acrobat. Acrobat also helps with editing.

Turning any text or image into an active link

• Instructions available in his site. Click here

PageRank & PDFs

• Both of these follow the same pattern as regular sites

Testing it

• Downlaod "optimizing PDFs for Search Engines
• Add links to 2 charities
• Post PDF and pass along
• Check out results in couple months

How to analyse PDF search results with Click Tracks

• Find which PDFs were entry pages to a site

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Yes, 2006, in comparison to 2005.  We’re used to seeing September’s stats in mid-October, so this seems rather slow by comparison.  Still, governments are rarely known for working quickly, and at least this data is pretty much guaranteed to be accurate and impartial.

On to the facts, then.  Internet sales reached £130.4 billion in 2006, according to the ONS, and according to the current exchange rate, that equals about $269.7 billion.  Also, the percentage of businesses selling things online rose from 5.4 to 6.5 between 2005 and 2006.

This information indicates that the Internet is becoming an increasingly important part of the business world.  Admittedly, most of us already knew that, but it’s always interesting to quantify these things.

On that note: although I’d guess that the average person is willing to call it quits at this point, overenthusiastic stats fan are more than welcome to get into the ONS’s 54-page PDF document.

Adobe, Yahoo Testing PDF Ad Service

PDF has been an appealing format due to its ability to preserve the look and feel of a document, while providing it to others in an easily accessible way. The free Adobe Reader became a fixture on computer desktops as adoption of PDF increased.

Yahoo has managed to score a significant win by beating ad competitors like Google and Microsoft to the opportunity to mine the PDF space for advertising revenue. Adobe and Yahoo announced the new program for delivering dynamic contextual ads in PDFs this morning.

The opt-in program pulls ads from Yahoo’s network to place in a panel next to the PDF content. Each time the PDF is opened, the ads will be refreshed to keep timely and relevant ones in place.

Publishers gain the ability to track their ad performance in the PDFs. Yahoo Publisher Network senior VP Todd Teresi called this a "previously untapped opportunity" for advertisers to gain exposure, and publishers to derive revenue from these documents.

The program picked up some big name participants for this initial beta. CondeNast’s Wired, IDG InfoWorld, and Reed Elsevier were among those named in a statement from Adobe.

To participate, publishers register and then upload their PDFs so the ad functionality can be enabled for the document. After that has been completed, the publisher distributes the PDF as usual.

InfoWorld’s participation is of particular interest. The long-time trade journal scrapped its print magazine in opting for an online-only, ad-supported presence. If profitable, we expect to see other print publishers express interest in trying out the program.

Another interesting possibility comes to mind with the PDF advertising. The hot Amazon Kindle electronic book reader has the capability to pick up PDF content, a feature Amazon currently lists as being experimental in its ability to convert them for readability.

If Amazon works out PDF conversions, the EVDO network supporting wireless content delivery to Kindle could work as a conduit for the PDF ad program too. Since Amazon has its own interest in delivering ads, there could be issues with this idea, however.

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Let’s say you’re on a site reading an article or post and you want to print out a hard copy. It’s common to get a result that runs into pages, more than you actually need, and not formatted for the purpose. Worse, especially if a website uses frames, you may get lots of blank pages before (or after) you get that one page you want.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get your hard copy in a format that’s designed for print, doesn’t waste half a rainforest of paper and is easy on the eye to read?

I recently discovered a great way to do this on this blog, with a plugin for WordPress from Hewlett-Packard.

Called HP Blog Printing, once you’ve installed and activated it, you get a little widget to position wherever you want to in your blog. That widget gives you a button called ‘print posts’ – you can see it on every page here at the top left of your screen.

When you’re reading a post and click on the button, you get a popup window like this:

The page you’re on is selected; clicking the print button in the window starts the printing.

Here’s where the plugin really is good.

Rather than just print out a hard copy, it creates a PDF file of your page which downloads onto your computer. You can then print that out, or not as you wish.

This is what the example highlighted in the window above looks like:

The one thing to watch out for is if you click on the ‘print posts’ button on a blog’s home page. The popup will appear with every single post highlighted, which may not be what you want or were expecting.

My take: Overall, very nice indeed. Also take a look as what Richard Gatarski says about HP Blog Printing – he’s elaborated a bit on installation and usage, and points out a couple of niggles he had with installation (I had no problems with that).

Still, a nice job from HP’s Tabblo developer community. And it’s free. In addition to the version for WordPress, there’s also one for Movable Type.

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C. Lee Giles, the David Reese Professor of Information Sciences and Technology who led the research team which developed a new search engine—BotSeer—for the study, found the result "surprising".

Giles said, "We expected that robots.txt files would treat all search engines equally or maybe disfavor certain obnoxious bots, so we were surprised to discover a strong correlation between the robots favored and the search engines’ market share".

Some of the results are:

More than any other search engine, Google’s is most favored and called most often.

Take a look at the chart below and guess who the prodigal one is.

Apparently, the study’s title is, "Determining Bias to Search Engines from Robots.txt (PDF)," Barry Schwartz has a local copy for easy download.

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Google ski trips

Not being technically savvy, Bonnie didn’t quite fit in with the geek culture, but she got quite close to many employees. Her’s is a an inside view of an outsider, if you want. She remembers a holiday trip with the other Google employees:

Of all the Google traditions, my personal favorite was the annual ski trip. It was held at the Squaw Creek Resort in Lake Tahoe, Calif. (This was the best chance I had to form solid friendships with my coworkers, because we were both dressed and talking was encouraged.) There were, of course, limitations to my conversation time with my clients, so I loved spending a couple days skiing with them and really getting to know them as human beings, not just the physical evidence of their angst.

The first year, we stayed two nights and three days. The trip was paid for by Google and included your choice of skiing, snowboarding, dogsledding, ice skating, snowmobiling, or spa treatments to relax. My roommate didn’t show up, so I had a marvelous room with a view of the ski runs all to myself. There were only about fifty-eight employees back then. One night we filled the banquet room of a quaint restaurant on the water. Directly after dinner, as payment for losing a contest about showing up for work on time, three Googlers, whom I will leave unnamed (except to say that the face of one of them can be seen on many magazine covers) dressed in their bathing suits and hotel robes, and walked outside onto the boardwalk alongside the freezing, dark, and deep waters of Lake Tahoe. We all followed them, which made the restaurant manager very nervous. The pier was swaying under our weight and the manager was running back and forth, letting us know he would not be responsible for any of this activity. One woman and two men unrobed and slithered down into the icy water. At first, everyone was pretty shocked that they actually did it, and then they started cheering them on like kids do around a school fight. The loser had to stay in the longest because he was the most tardy to work. I felt like I was really starting to know my new colleagues.

Google’s food

Bonnie also talks about the free food available at Google, from sweet snacks in many places to the lunch food by Grateful Dead chef turned Google chef (and now ex-Google chef) Charlie Ayers:

When it got too crowded, they installed lunchroom cameras, so you could sit at your desk and click on the lunchroom site to see how long the line was, to determine when to take a lunch break. I never had time to do that, or stand in line, so I always butted. No one ever complained. After all, who wants to be mean to the masseuse? Charlie took great care of us, by providing meals using the best ingredients, and with a lot of cultural diversity in mind. I ate a broader variety of vegetables and ethnic dishes at Google than during the rest of my life put together. Lunch and dinner were provided to Googlers every day with simple menus like “Rosemary scented New Bedford sea scallop skewers with lemony apricot couscous, grilled, stuffed squid with teriyaki sauce, cauliflower asafetida …” et cetera.

One engineer informed me that it was a bad idea to tell your wife what you had for lunch. When she set down a plate of spaghetti with meatballs in front of you for dinner, it didn’t create a pleasant evening when you described your lunch at work beginning with phyllo-encrusted halibut…

Dogs at Google

And then, Bonnie remembers how dog-friendly Google was – that there were more dogs than babies around, that there was a doggy care center and so on. She also cites the following from a memo on “dog policies” which was sent around at Google (such a policy page is also available online at Google):

1. Yesterday in Building 44, some Googlers were disgusted to find a plastic bag filled with dog poop in one of the microkitchens. This is a serious health hazard (and, it also made the kitchen and the building stink like dog poop). Hopefully you get the idea on this one …
2. We’ve had reports of dogs being bathed in the showers. This has happened a few times over the past couple of months. Again, dogs should not be in the bathrooms, locker rooms, or showers.

Bonnie adds, “I don’t know, maybe it’s me, but shouldn’t dogs be playing in the yard with dirt, instead of going to work every day?”

[Thanks Search-Engines-Web.com and Julie Smith!]

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In good old ARG (alternate reality game) tradition they have started this game off with a couple of clues, in this case a fictional Mayor called Juan Ramon has put a video on youtube and created a pdf letter to share.

The pdf seems to have some writing hidden in it that alludes to some dates and times, who knows maybe there is even clues as to a prize or something, you would hope

Here’s a link to the pdf

It will be interesting to see how this unfolds, I’m also interested in if they actually hired an ARG type agency as well as the ad agency.

Some more posts on ARG’s as marketing tools:

Nine Inch Nails ARG

Beyond Viral Marketing, engagement, narrative and passion

More on ARG’s

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