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European Commission Joins Investigation of Apple’s Flash Exclusion Policies

The anti-Apple bandwagon grows. Is Apple being called out now for taking its shot at “owning” the Web?

The New York Post reports that the European Commission has taken an interest in Apple’s long-standing exclusion of Adobe’s Flash from its iOS devices, as well as its ban on Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone compiler and similar tools designed to allow non-native applications to be recompiled for the iOS platform. The paper was the first to report back in May that U.S. regulators were considering an inquiry into the situation.”

Read full article

The Easiest Way to Optimize Your Site

The clip below is from an article on Clickz.com which illustrates that search engine optimization doesn’t always have to be rocket science:

“The easiest way to optimize your site is to love what you do.

Every time I come across a website that’s naturally optimized, it always comes from someone who is passionate about the topic they write about.

Because they love their topic, they have an endless reservoir of material for their websites. Consequently, they come up for hundreds of key phrases in the search engines.

Do you remember when you were in school asking how many pages your research paper had to be? You asked that because you weren’t really interested in the topic. If you had loved the topic, you would have written the paper until you had covered the topic completely. The length of the paper would have been irrelevant.

When someone is just doing a “job,” they always ask if they really have to write new pages for all the key phrases we’ve found. When I say yes, their next question is, “Can we just take the content we have on one page and make a bunch of other pages with the same content and just switch out the targeted key phrases?” No …

People that truly love what they do are living a life filled with purpose and happiness. Almost without fail, they optimize their website perfectly every time.”

Read full article: http://www.clickz.com/3640886

Facebook’s Emergence as a Video Platform

Social phenomenon Facebook is now climbing the ladder as a video delivery service, according to a recent article on ClickZ:

“As traffic to Facebook continues to grow, the social network is beginning to emerge as an important stakeholder in the online video space. According to online measurement firm comScore, the number of users viewing video on the site has been growing consistently over the past twelve months, and it could end the year with the second greatest reach of all online video providers in the U.S., second only to YouTube owner Google.

Data from comScore’s Video Metrix service suggests the number of unique U.S. users viewing video content on Facebook has grown from 13.3 million in April 2009 to 41.3 million in April 2010, representing year-over-year growth of almost 211 percent.”

One of the disruptive effects of Facebook is that people are using the service instead of other websites they’ve typically used in the past for functions such as email, IM, photo sharing, and now video sharing. FB’s next step is to find a way to “monetize” this activity.

Read full article: http://www.clickz.com/3640570

Email Marketing Tips

Are you using email in your marketing mix? Email may not be the darling of today’s marketers, with Facebook, Twitter, et al. getting all the buzz. But the fact is, people use email every day, and if they subscribe to receive your messages, email continues to be a very effective tool to acquire and serve customers. Of course, there are techniques and best practices that can learn to help you get max results, which is where the ClickZ article below comes in. Shape up your email efforts and you’ll start getting better results. Then we can start talking about social media again.

Check out “7 Ways to Increase and Retain Newsletter Subscribers” Very useful: http://lnkd.in/iXWbzm

Why Facebook Can’t Be Google

Facebook’s recent privacy policy woes stem from a fundamental flaw in understanding its own platform, as an excellent post by blogger Adam Fields points out. Though phenomenally popular, FB needs a business model. Their hope, like Google’s, is to leverage the data they accumulate from their huge base of users to make money selling advertising. However, these users expect they can trust FB to keep their data private — or at least to use it only in ways they approve. Additionally, users want control over the data they provide, and they want those controls to be easy to use and stable in the sense that the privacy policy doesn’t change every few months.

The fact that FB wants to make users’ data more publicly available, and therefore more valuable to advertisers, forms the basis of the conflict they’ve created with their users. The crux is that FB’s data is social while Google’s is public, and public data is more useful when more people know about it. Social data, however, inherently has much less reach because its purpose is not for widespread consumption but to serve a limited social circle.

From Fields’ post:

“Social sharing isn’t the same as public sharing. When I write something in a public forum, I want as many people as possible to read it. In that kind of forum, Google can make more money if more people see it, as can Facebook (which is why Facebook is trying to turn its entire platform into a more public one). This is at odds with what the users want for social, which is controlled sharing among a very small group. There is certainly an aspect of making new friends and extending one’s social circle outwards, but the object here is generally to share only inside that circle. People tend to resist being forced or coerced by the platform to share more widely.”

Hijacking user data appears to be a bad strategy for FB unless it can persuade users to give up their current ideas about privacy. And just as FB can never be Google, Google will find it difficult to become a social platform like FB because the nature of the data at the heart of each platform is different.

Read full article: http://bit.ly/bOnk5t

US Gov’t Presents a Grand Scheme for the Internet

“The Federal Communications Commission is proposing an ambitious 10-year plan that will reimagine the nation’s media and technology priorities by establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network.”

So states the lead-in of a March 12, NY Times article that describes the government’s plans to advance the Internet and digital communication in our country. Government officials are interested in addressing disparities regarding how citizens access, use, and experience the Internet.

For several years, the US has trailed numerous countries in the quality and availability of Internet service. The question of how this affects our country, both competitively and economically, is becoming a concern, especially as more of life, including access to medical records, coordinating emergency services, education, and everyday business activity, becomes increasingly reliant on the ‘Net. And then there are the mega-interests — the telecoms, ISPs, entertainment and publishing industries, and electronics manufacturers, to name a few, that have important roles to play in the growth and direction of the Internet.

The blueprint reflects the government’s view that broadband Internet is becoming the common medium in the United States, gradually displacing the telephone and broadcast television industries.

Perhaps even more important is the so-called Digital Divide. “About a third of Americans have no access to high-speed Internet service, cannot afford it, or choose not to have it,” states the article. We have people who can’t afford access and/or devices, along with people who lack the skills or education to participate. On the other are people who choose not to participate. Will life in the US, especially economic life, require a connection? Will savvy users be favored? The possibility of leaving people out is a genuine concern.

Among several provisions, the plan calls for “a subsidy for Internet providers to wire rural parts of the country, an auction of some broadcast spectrum to free up space for wireless devices, and a new universal set-top box that connects to the Internet and cable service.”

This all sounds good, but if our society is to ultimately be “wired” and still depend on the free flow of information, many concerns come with it, including reliability, security, and privacy. We’d certainly enjoy having access to our favorite TV shows and movies whenever we want. But with so much vital information existing online, how safe is that information, how reliable are the systems that deliver it, and how does a government-wired world affect individuals’ freedom? Maybe China’s current Internet policies give us some clues? Hopefully, not.

Read full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/business/media/13fcc.html?hp

Cablevision-ABC Standoff a Result of Shifting Audiences

The recent blackout of ABC’s programming in the New York area can be chalked up to audiences shifting from broadcast to the Internet — a shift that has been underway for several years. “As the broadcast networks are less able to get advertising revenue, they’re turning to the cable guys [to pay more to the networks to show their programming] to make up for that shortfall,” states Todd Mitchell, an analyst with Kaufman Brothers Lp, as quoted in a recent Newsday article. Ad dollars are in short supply because TV audiences have found other options for their time, especially growing Internet use.

A similar shift has hurt the print industry, record sales, DVD sales, and other businesses with physical products that could be delivered digitally. Consumers have shown they prefer entertainment, information, and connections to be digital. Even telecoms will have to face the fact that Internet telephony is the preferred option for many consumers, and TV programmers must eventually follow suit as well.

But in the meantime, according to the Newsday article, we can expect more of these inconveniences as yet another business, built on an outdated model, tries to defy reality and force its market to stand still. Do these companies believe they can continue holding customers hostage? Tactics always lag technology. Consumers, who vote with their dollars, will have the final say, which the iTunes store has already proven when it comes to digital goods.

Read full article: http://bit.ly/dgb94E [subscription requ

Web Video Is Still a Mess

It looks like no one can agree on what is the best way to deliver video over the web. Why is this important? Because with ubiquitous fast connections and processors now available to most people, video is the preferred medium online for entertainment, and in many cases, information. If a picture is worth a thousand words, and a sound is worth a thousand pictures, then video is, well, you get the idea. If this weren’t so, TV and movies would not be at the center of the entertainment world. And because the Internet can deliver these media digitally, it is naturally the best way for consumers to access them. And that equates to big business.

So what do the people who have the power to establish the standards that allow everyone to benefit from video online do? They fight with each other, of course, since it’s much more important to own the whole pie than to create a level field for all to compete on. And the battle goes on.

First, it was Real vs. QuickTime vs. Windows Media. Then Flash stepped in and, because of YouTube’s adoption of Flash and the ubiquity of the Flash plug-in, it became the de facto web video standard. Today, it’s Flash vs. the H.264 codec, which plays without plug-ins in browsers via HTML 5.

So what’s the problem? In brief, Adobe wants to own the world of web video, and Apple doesn’t like this. Nor does Microsoft, which has designs on web media domination with its Silverlight technology. Several patent holders own the rights to H.264 and they can’t agree on anything, especially royalties. And the Firefox and Opera browsers support a format that few have even heard of (Ogg Theora – ugh).

We can only hope this mess resolves quickly, the way the format war between Blu-Ray Disc and HD-DVD did in recent years. But according to this article from Webmonkey, that doesn’t appear to be likely. So in the meantime, keep that Flash plug-in handy — although it won’t help if you own a mobile product made by Apple.

Full article: http://bit.ly/cgxcSu