Posts tagged person
“Define An English Person” C-Word Easter Egg or Google F-Bomb?
Dec 14th
Adaline Lau from ClickZ Asia popped on Skype this morning and told me to type “define an English person” into Google.
Um, okaaay.
In the 0.32 seconds it took for Google to deliver the results, a dozen possibilities flashed through my mind as t…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
The Prettiest Person In The Room: The Impact Of Data Sources On Attribution
Jun 23rd
Imagine a room filled with 20 men or 20 women. Setting aside for a moment that attraction is subjective, if we were asked to identify the most attractive person in the room, most of us could easily narrow it down to the one to two we thought were most attractive. Now, imagine a room with [...]
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Why Every Single Person Should Take 30 Seconds to Opt-in to the Delicious Data Transfer
Apr 29th
Earlier this week it was announced that Yahoo is selling social bookmarking service Delicious to the founders of YouTube and their new company called Avos. After the announcement was made, the companies told everyone who had ever had a Delicious account that they needed to log in and opt-in to having their data transfered over into the new company.
You should go do that right now, even if you’re not a big Delicious user anymore. It takes 30 seconds to do and is something good to do for yourself and for the good of the web. If you don’t, that data will disappear. Philosophically, that’s bad because all your “data exhaust” like that is going to become an important currency of the future web, an important asset whether it seems that way today or not. Practically, though, there are three important reasons why you should go take a moment to make sure that data is preserved.
Sponsor
When we heard in December that Yahoo was planning on taking Delicious out to the well behind the barn and “sunsetting” it, I got really upset and spilled almost all my secrets about how to use Delicious for data mining and competitive advantage. Now it appears Delicious will live on and I probably could have kept my mouth shut.
None the less, the story remains the same. Delicious is not just valuable because it saves your bookmarks on the web so they can be accessed anywhere. Delicious is also valuable because it represents a giant, semi-structured system of user-generated categorization of millions and millions of web pages.
Here’s why you should check that box and opt-in to having your data transferred to the new system.
- To preserve that which is most popular. Just this morning a co-worker asked me where I could find a list of group chat workplace collaboration technologies. Why, at http://delicious.com/popular/chat and http://delicious.com/popular/collaboration of course, I said! It felt good to be able to recommend that again. Let’s all make sure that our data gets transfered over to the new system so all those passive votes for the best online resource regarding all our tags get preserved.
- To preserve the system of classification, the taxonomy, the tags per URL. If I say ReadWriteWeb.com, Delicious says web2.0, blog, technology, news, socialsoftware, trends and many other tags. Let’s say I want more of the same. I can visit http://www.delicious.com/tag/socialsoftware+blog, for example (that’s all URLs that have been tagged with both socialsoftware and blog), and even subscribe to the RSS feed there. That nice clean URL structure, based on user generated categorization, is a very valuable resource. All your old bookmarks help categorize the best URLs around the web. Please don’t let them die.
- Hopefully new things will be born. The creator of Delicious once told me he ran out of time and support before he could build http://www.delicious.com/popular/socialsoftware+blog (popular with multiple tags). There’s far, far more that can be done with semi-structured data resulting from our everyday use of the web, including bookmarking. Check out The Locker Project, for example.
Hopefully the new owners of Delicious will appreciate the awesome resource for the world that they’ve bought and help grow it in all the more useful ways. Please take 30 seconds to go opt-in to allowing your public data to be used as the raw material for those systems of classification.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Tips for Pitching in Person
Dec 22nd
As an entrepreneur, you need to have a variety of pitches ready: the short and sweet elevator pitch that you can deliver on a moment’s notice, the email pitch that you can send to prospective investors or journalists, the pitch-deck that you have prepped.
And while, sure, many of these pitches can be done electronically – for better, for worse – you need to be prepared for the face-to-face pitch as well (again, for better, for worse).
Sponsor
First Round Capital’s Charlie O’Donnell has a number of suggestions in a recent blog post. He admits that pitch events are “a little bit contrived,” but recognizes that they’re a popular format. Unfortunately, in many cases the companies on stage at these events have innovative products, but deliver lousy (or at least mediocre) pitches.
So here are some of the tips O’Donnell offers in order to help you improve your in-person pitches:
Don’t rely on the technology
Assume that the technology will fail. Be ready to give your presentation whether or not your slides, the demo, the wireless, and/or the projector is functioning. That means having a copy of your pitch deck in multiple formats, in multiple places – in a PDF and a PowerPoint format, for example, on your machine, on a USB drive and on the Web.
Be ready to give your presentation without your pitch deck. Your presentation should always tell a story, and you should be prepared to tell that story whether or not there are slides accompanying it. You should have your talking points memorized and you should know the order of the points you want to make. (And the order of these points should be meaningful. “Don’t then lead with team because you saw it in that order on some VC blog.”)
Don’t let the technology be a distraction from your story
Whether or not the technology is fully functioning, you should be engaging. You really don’t want to be upstaged by your slides – or by your lack of slides. But then again, do make sure your presentation is professional-looking and visually-appealing.
What other tips do you have for pitching in person and on-stage at pitch events?
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Mark Zuckerberg Named TIME Magazine Person Of The Year
Dec 15th
TIME Magazine has named Mark Zuckerberg Person of the Year. Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook, arguably one of Google’s biggest threats in 2011. Facebook has made a search deal with Microsoft Bing this year, which we expect to be expanded in the future. There has been a lot of controversy…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Named TIME’s Person of the Year
Dec 15th
Despite the fact that Wikileaks front man Julian Assange won TIME’s reader poll for the magazine’s Person of the Year 2010 feature, the editors ultimately picked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckberberg as the overall winner.
Zuckberberg was chosen “for connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them … and for changing how we all live our lives.”
But was Assange robbed?
Sponsor
The photo TIME picked for Zuckerberg is the first thing we noticed in reviewing the article, now posted online at TIME.com. Those eyes! That creepy stare! It seems that the photo may end up being as controversial as the winner itself. TIME obviously wanted to imply something about Facebook’s privacy issues by choosing a photo where the young CEO seems to gaze right into your soul, as if he knew all your deepest, darkest secrets.
Facebook’s Privacy Issues Dominated Half the Year
But the photo may be an appropriate choice, given the context. Facebook had a tough year when it came to privacy, thanks to a long-running privacy debacle that began in late December/early January, where a host of forced, opt-out (not in) changes were switched on, affecting all user photos, videos, links and even status updates. Automatically, seemingly overnight, those items went from being privately shared to becoming public, unless you, as a user, manually switched them back to private.
Millions, of course, didn’t, either not knowing or not caring about the impact of that choice. (We would argue that it’s the former, given the embarrassments published daily to youropenbook.org, a Facebook public search tool that reminds you how “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life. Whether you want to or not.”
And with Facebook’s launch of Instant Personalization, a feature that let Facebook partners immediately tap into user profile data to customize websites to your needs, Facebook even came under scrutiny from federal regulators in the U.S. April. E.U. regulators weren’t happy either.
By May, the debate reached a boiling point, leading Facebook’s CEO to address the issue via press conference. At the event, Zuckerberg announced that the changes would be rolled back, would retroactively apply to all content and the company would introduce new, simpler privacy controls.
By doing so, Facebook seemed to have squelch the debate itself for now, but the damage to the company’s reputation was done. The world was clued into Facebook’s agenda at last. Simply put the agenda is: openness, openness and more openness.
2010: The Year of Openness
Another man who would argue for openness is Wikileaks’ Juilan Assange. As TIME’s managing editor Rick Stengel explained in an editor’s note:
“Zuckerberg and Assange are two sides of the same coin. Both express a desire for openness and transparency. While Assange attacks big institutions and governments through involuntary transparency with the goal of disempowering them, Zuckerberg enables individuals to voluntarily share information with the idea of empowering them. Assange sees the world as filled with real and imagined enemies; Zuckerberg sees the world as filled with potential friends. Both have a certain disdain for privacy: in Assange’s case because he feels it allows malevolence to flourish; in Zuckerberg’s case because he sees it as a cultural anachronism, an impediment to a more efficient and open connection between people.”
Assange Was Robbed!, Cry Journos
But who had more impact on the world this year? Assange with his political disruption? Or the CEO of a social networking site?
Several notable journalists disagree with TIME’s decision and Michael Calderone rounded up a few of the more memorable comments, here on Yahoo’s The Cutline blog:
- “The will of the people is fulfilled,” wrote the New York Times’ Dave Itzkoff. “Wait, no it isn’t.”
- “Once again Time editors demonstrate POTY no longer for the person who had the greatest impact on the year,” wrote ABC White House correspondent Jake Tapper, asking if “Jersey Shore” star Snooki will get the nod next year.
- Slate Group editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg said that it was “gutless of Time not to name Assange.”
- “Hmmm, in 25 years, will this make sense?” asked NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd.
- Alexi Mostrous, a Times of London reporter covering WikiLeaks, said that Time must consider Assange “too controversial” because WikiLeaks “certainly had greater impact than Facebook this year.”
What do you think? Was Assange robbed? Or does Zuckberberg deserve the accolade?
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Wikileaks’ Assange May be TIME’s Person of the Year
Dec 6th
Wanted by the law across multiple countries, threatened with military action by US hawks, shut out by internet vendors from Amazon to PayPal, Wikileaks leader Julian Assange may still be named TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2010. He’s currently leading in the magazine’s online poll, ahead of the Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Erdogan, in influence score if not in votes.
Erdogan is hardly uncontroversial, either, having challenged Israel vehemently and collaborating with Turkish nationalists TIME says still deny the history of the Armenian genocide. The Person of the Year award this year is basically a media statement for or against the legitimacy of Wikileaks and what it represents. The third candidate on the list might represent the perfect abdication of responsibility for answering this or any serious questions: it’s Lady Gaga.
Sponsor
What Wikileaks Represents
Depending on your perspective, Assange and Wikileaks probably represent one of two things. As GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram wrote this weekend, “Some argue that there is nothing journalistic about the organization whatsoever, and that it is simply a lawless group of misfits spreading information around that it doesn’t have the right to distribute, without caring for the effects of its actions.”
Journalism thought leader Jay Rosen, however, calls Wikileaks “the world’s first stateless news organization.”
The organization, which isn’t at all a wiki like Wikipedia is anymore, does represent something very interesting about contemporary technology and media. This much is hard to argue with, I think, no matter your perspective: Written about by websites everywhere, spread across millions of Twitter and Facebook conversations, mirrored by hundreds of independent servers, Wikileaks represents mass accessibility of information that simply cannot be shut down, despite the best efforts of authorities.
Unlike Amazon, Paypal and others, Twitter and Facebook have allowed the organization to continue using their services. Were that to change, we’d be talking about a different ball game. Neither company has responded to inquires about their official positions on their Wikileaks accounts, but neither has shut down the accounts, either.
Twitter is passing around a press statement this morning stating that it is not censoring wikileaks from its “trending topics” section, but asked point blank about whether it will permit the Wikileaks account to remain online or whether it will be shut down, Twitter’s Matt Graves told ReadWriteWeb, “We’ve got no additional comment beyond the statement.”
Genie, Meet the World Outside a Bottle
It’s also notable that most of the “state secrets” being distributed by Wikileaks are allegedly from troves of information that thousands, if not millions, of people had security clearance to see already. There are 3 million people in the US with some level of security clearance to access classified government documents. It’s hard to believe that malevolent actors who wanted to see what Wikileaks exposes didn’t have the opportunity to, though now the documents have been analyzed by hundreds of outside analysts, indexed by search engines and pointed to by countless websites. That scale of eyeballs, minds, machines and social connections is the biggest game changer, not the mere availability of the information.
The US Government made the internet fault tolerant through redundant connections. Now unflattering information about its own activities has flooded that network it helped create. The internet is a genie that cannot be put back in the bottle.
No one has forced discussion of these questions before as much as Julian Assange and Wikileaks. I expect that TIME will award Assange the Person of the Year Award, not for any of the revelations that Wikileaks exposed, but for the way it forced the issue of a radically transparent global communications network. The magazine may reference its choice of Joseph Stalin in 1939 to emphasize that the award is not a sign of approval or support, but such an award would doubtlessly confer a new sense of legitimacy to Wikileaks and the issues the organization represents.
You can’t change your Facebook profile from dating to single these days without all your friends finding out – and neither can international diplomats put digital pen to paper without some concern that their words will be made available for universal access and analysis. How will that change the world of international relations? I suspect we’re about to find out.
Perhaps Lady Gaga will be the Person of the Year instead, though.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
What Traits Make A Person Best Suited For In-House SEM Roles?
Aug 25th
Just when I thought I was in-house, I pulled myself out. After five years working continuously and exclusively as an in-house SEO, I have decided to cast my lot with the hoards of independent consultants and contractors out there. This decision has caused me to reflect on the relative benefits and drawbacks of life as [...]
*** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***
View full post on Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
