In 5 years the web will not look like it does now. 5 years ago cheesy thin topical directories were linkworthy and serious webmasters voted for them. If your competitors are outranking you based on

• having a more well known brand
• earlier market entry

don’t think that you are going to catch them and beat them and STAY RELEVANT by only replicating their links and doing what they are doing. 

An Indiana man was sentenced to over two years in prison for selling over $700,000 worth of counterfeit software on eBay, the US Department of Justice announced.

Courtney Smith, 36, of Anderson, Ind., was sentenced in US District Court to 27 months in prison, a two-year supervised release, and will face fines and restitution in excess of $7,000. That’s a pretty stiff penalty considering he only made $4,000 from the sale of pirated Rockwell Automation software.

If you are a startup entrepreneur, at some point, you will need to make a decision regarding your business model.  Many software startups have a strategy to build early market traction by giving away their offering for free with some plan to monetize at a later date.  I’m not going to make a strong argument against this.  So, for purposes of this article, lets assume for a moment that as a software startup, you actually *want* to charge money for your software someday. 

Periodically I get asked about bringing business rules into the Rational Unified Process or RUP. RUP and the Enterprise Unified Process are designed to apply UML and best practices in a formal way.

A client asked me today for more control in their Wordpress control panel. Specifically, when posting they wanted to control the font sizes, colors and do a bit more. As a designer I always freak at that question as I think the code is going to be filled with massive amounts of font tags and out of order strong tags and ohhh the madness. But, then again, maybe I’m overreacting.

If you want to build out your own DIY social network, then you need to check out ELGG.

ELGG is a new open source social network software package that is available on source forge. We spent the last day and a half installing the software and playing with some of the mods and other goodies that come with the software.

Good parts about this is that it is fairly easy to install, there are some mods we had to make to the SuSe Linux that we were installing it on.

I just published a new article, called "The 5 Secrets PPC Agencies Don’t Want You to Know". This article is part of  Search Engine Land’s new Strictly Business column, which covers topics related to B2B search marketing.

I saw this article on CIO magazine  – Five Things CIOs Should Know About Software Requirements. It seems to me that there is one more thing (at least) that they need to know about requirements:

Business rules are NOT requirements

The “Google Phone” is a totally unverified but interesting rumor. Someone at a mobile phone forum claims he was exposed to information on a potential Google Phone via a paid-survey website. Garett Rogers has a copy of the screenshot and some of the specs this user saw. Garett quotes from the design specs which were visible on the screenshot:

Many people think of affiliates as an added sales channel and affiliate ads as offering a branding bonus (how many text link ads affiliate banner ads have you seen?) but there are numerous benefits to running an affiliate program that many people never consider.

Exclusive Partnerships:

You do not have to let people know that you have an affiliate program unless it makes sense to. You can chose what partners to allow when special occasions come up, without risking watering down your brand equity and perceived value by chasing large distribution deals.

In today’s post, Darren Rowse at Problogger asks:

“If you had the attention of 400 internet marketers for an hour and were given the brief to talk to them about blogging – where would you take the session?”

It’s a great question, and a great opportunity to lay some important points out on the table. And why should you listen to me? Because I am a professional blog consultant who works with Alliance Software, a company whose clients are almost exclusively high-performance internet marketers. (We’re talking “gun” entrepreneurs running highly-leveraged businesses turning over millions per annum off online sales.) I am therefore in both worlds all the time, and never sure whether to call myself a blog guy or an internet marketing guy!

A little while I ago, I wrote an article on this blog titled

The New York Times Reader, a piece of software you can download to read the NYT on your PC, came out in beta last fall and I immediately downloaded it for a few reasons — including the fact that I am a geek, a newspaper journalist and a big NYT fan. And I have to admit that it was (and is) pretty slick. Thanks to Microsoft’s presentation software, it replicates the look of a newspaper, but updates itself when connected to the Web, etc.

Avinash Kaushik has challenged Web Analytics vendor ClickTracks to release more advanced features of their free analytics product: ClickTracks Appetizer. In exchange Avinash will be teaching next week’s ClickTracks Seminar: online marketing and web analytics techniques

Keyon Hedayati over at the Google Analytics Blog has posted about a useful option for a Google Analytics Resource: The Google Analytics Forum.

What is Habari?

It’s a new group that’s building new blog software. Why do I care? Because it’ll be interesting to see what a new group comes up with and because I saw several blogs (especially on Chris Davis‘ blog) mention it today.

I’ve seen this happen several times and new companies almost always result out of the effort.

Omniture, Inc. has announced the launch of Discover 2.0, analytic software designed to give companies the ability to visually explore large amounts of online customer interaction data in real-time.

Discover is a component of the Omniture Online Business Optimization Platform, and is a solution that Omniture claims can accomodate all levels of business users by generating everything from simple reports to more complex methods of data aggregation and analysis.

While online sales increased during the 2006 holiday season, some small online business owners found that they missed an opportunity to increase sales because they were not prepared to sell their products or services online.

Matt Aslett writes that Oracle may be considering Unbreakable Support for MySQL and that MySQL Co. is likely to IPO later this year.

Matt points to an interesting article about using an open business model.

Before we go too much further, let me explain a bit further what I mean when I say “competing with customers”.