Pew Internet has released its contribution to Pew’s annual report on the state of the news media. My take on the results: Online users generally want news, but we don’t much care where it comes from. 71% of us get our news online, but only 35% of us have a favorite site. Of those 35...

Ever since the burst of Dot-Com bubble, everyone is rushing towards creating a website, blog or any other sort of online presence like social media profiles. It is seems to be virtually impossible to count the number of these online profiles being created with every passing second. ...

The future of enterprise software is the platform. No software company has all the smart people in the world on its payroll. Apple recognized this and created the App Store. Google are now doing the same. These new cloud platforms will unleash unprecedented innovation and creativity th...

Lately it seems like writing blogs is getting out of fashion, what with the rise of microblogging star Twitter. Something about Twitter is intriguing. I guess the simplicity of writing your thoughts within 140 characters is a force larger that anyone expected. Reminds me of the early d...

In West Texas, we have wind gusts that match no other; we love our football; sunsets are at their best with no trees to block your view; oil means a lot to us and Tuesday is for Mexican Food tacos! Kent Dean, Director of Field Marketing, with Rosa’s Café recently spoke to our local ch...

The last time I saw Turhan Selçuk (88) was at a dinner at his brother İlhan Selçuk's house in 1982 that I attended with my boss Doğan Hızlan. Turhan Ağabey came to dinner with his wife Füruzan and daughter Aslı Selçuk. He loved his daughter Aslı very much. There were six of us tha...

A short study of this web site reveals that a hugely important factor for success in startup companies is finding ways to acquire customers at a low cost. In the Business Models section, we looked at the perfect business model: Viral customer acquisition with good monetization. However...

A recent report by E-Consultancy on the Value Of Social Media, shows some interesting statistics on the level of use of social media by over 400 companies surveyed and the general “experimental” stage most are in, regarding this new way to reach consumers. Few would argue that there...

When I saw David Skok's name on recent Ulitzer authors page I was pleasantly surprised. David is one of the key figures in the technology space for the past two decades, including his venture capital activities. Throughout his long career, he successfully launched a number of companies...

I’ve been thinking about my presence on the Internet from the early days, from my time at Argonne National Labs near Chicago in 1988-1989 and from my graduate school days at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in 1989-1992. That was even before the web browser days, which didn’t...

Last week’s “Meeting the Open Government Directive” (OGD) conference hosted by GovDelivery (new owners of the popular GovLoop.com public/private social media forum) showcased a number of very important, relevant initiatives and ideas to help Federal Agencies comply with this important ...

I have been using Pandora’s online stream music service off and on for several years. What got me more interested lately was it being one of the many services on my Roku video streaming box, which my wife and I use mostly for watching movies from Netflix’s “watch instantly” queue. As ...

I work for a start-up and like the folks at virtually every start-up we dream of being covered by one of the Big 8  business publications: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek, The Economist, the Financial Times, and USA Today. The folks at ITData...

For the first time in over ten years, I spent the night without Internet access. Ten years of working in remote parts of Mongolia, Vietnam, Palestine, Indonesia, and other small and developing countries, and in March 2010 I finally hit the access wall. My hotel in Addis Ababa does not ...

Scott McKain wrote a post on Friday that got me going, Intellectual Dishonesty. It's an eloquent rant concerning the growing negativity and sensationalism created by supposed industry 'gurus', all for the sake of ratings and followers. IN the end that behavior all boils down to MONEY a...

This morning’s Wall Street Journal carried the front page article on Facebook and its founder, the 25 year old Mar Zuckerberg. Here are some facts in case you did not know. - Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian private equity firm invested $200M last year in May at a valuation of $1...

As we start this year, hope is mounting on a vibrant IPO market, better than last couple of years. This article lists 20 companies that are hot candidates for IPO. The list has some well-known names like Facebook, Skype, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg, Yelp, LiveOps, and Tesla Motors. The les...

The news last week that Italian authorities have convicted three Google executives with criminal privacy violations got my attention for two reasons. One, the charges are based on a video that shows an autistic boy being bullied, a video that Google did not create or post. It was filme...

Advisōlocity, a social media marketing resource which is dedicated to meeting the needs of advisors and money managers on a budget, was just launched by founding members D. Bruce Johnston, Zach Hedges and John Drachman, author of this post. “At Advisōlocity, which was just launched...

Karrie Karahalios is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk entitled “Text and Tie Strength.” Karrie is a Berkman Fellow from the Univ. of Illinois. Her group looked at FB and wondered how to map FB parameters to tie strength. They set up a set of questions with continua, e.g., “How strong...

It's one of the major issues that keeps cloud computing from working its way deeper and more quickly into the enterprise IT mainstream. But what are the potential threats around using cloud services? How can companies make sure business processes and data remain secured in the cloud...

I was raised with some pretty specific rules about behavior. Say please and thank you, treat people as you would want to be treated, be courteous and polite. Then there was the 'be on time' dictate. My mom taught me that being late for a meeting with another meant my time was more i...

The news started hitting California early Saturday morning with an SMS alarm on my mobile phone – a major earthquake struck Chile, and there was a potential of tsunami activity in California and Hawaii (as well as the rest of the Pacific). First Citizen Journalism Transforming Mediasto...

I was recently introduced to this site.  And I like it a lot.  You can check out my contributions there by clicking on this link.

If you’re a small business owner, you’ll identify with the following numbers and be heartened by the following forecast. First the numbers: There’s anywhere from 14 million to 22 million small businesses online in the U.S., and they spend about 83% of their online marketing budget o...

Pew Internet has published the results of an important survey on how we’re getting our news today. I haven’t read the whole thing but one little point leaps out already: Among those who get news online, 75% get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites...

I was on the road driving Saturday and Sunday. We celebrated Lauren's 13th birthday late last night. Today was a very busy work day. Before I went to bed I browsed through "60 Minutes" and "Saturday Night Live" shows from this weekend which I missed during my 48-hour drive. I realized ...

The webinars are being hosted by SmartFinds Internet Marketing, with two upcoming sessions scheduled for Wednesday, February 24th at 10:00 a.m. EST and Thursday, February 25th at 2:00 p.m. EST. These free webinars will help introduce the benefits of Local Business Listings to local bus...

Local business listings have become a significant local marketing tool that is showing the demise of the traditional yellow pages and equally the traditional coupons. The famous Stars Wars quote comes to mind “This will be a day long remembered. It has seen the end of Kenobi, and will ...

This statement gives us the total number of times an URL has been tweeted in the last 5 seconds. Whenever that URL is tweeted, the sum is calculated, and a listener is called. This is a very straightforward statement – we could tweak the statement a bit more, or do some stuff in code...

One of the things B2B marketers are being told to do is to "listen" to communities and get to really know their prospects. The best reason being because your prospects are controlling how and when they engage with vendors, so it's become very critical that our content marketing efforts...

Badges, Passports, the Creator, the Founder, the Mayor, getting a Pin, picking up a raccoon..This is the language of the newest phenomenon to hit the location-enabled social media marketing world. I am talking about Social Networking Games. No longer only for geeks and geocachers, t...

On social (or business) networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, there is a single simple relationship between two people: you are either “friends” (or linked), or you are not. LinkedIn also formalizes the notion of “degrees of separation”, but that is another topic for another ...

Back in 2005 a friend one day said that she had an idea for a new business: a web site for storing bookmarks on the internet. I smiled and said that it would be useful but I didn’t think that it was enough to sustain a business. I argued that a company like Yahoo! could easily add that...

The economy is supposedly improving but people still continue to lose jobs. The unemployment rate being a lagging economic indicator is predicted to increase through the rest of the year and beyond even though it is decelerating. California with one of the highest unemployment rates (1...

Metadata or data about data has been an important topic in software and the web all along. In the old days we used metadata on a HTML page source to increase its searchability. That is by adding metadata or tags to a page we would tell the search engines what the page is about so that ...

In a previous post “Shall we bookmark?” I discussed social bookmarking and covered several of the social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Reddit, Diggit and StumbleUpon. In this post I briefly describe how you can easily add social bookmarking buttons to your web pages or blog post...

Twitter is a very simple and easy service to use and becasue of its openness (via numerous APIs) there are numerous Twitter clients from providers other than Twitter itself that you can use. From thick clients such as TweetDeck to thin web-based clients such as HootSuite to mobile and ...

“Attracting new clients has suddenly gotten easier,” D. Bruce Johnston of DBJ Associates said recently. “Low-cost and creative, social media strategies are like free money to underfunded marketing departments.” Having to do more with less, smaller firms with low marketing budgets ma...