Marketing Hipster

Jason Calacanis declared on his blog “Facebook bankruptcy“. Overall his post is a rant about how he is too popular and all the requests he gets is keeping him from actually doing things. Jason also decided to turn off comments on his blog.

You know as I was reading his post, I was thinking of those movie and rock stars who for years wish and work their tails off to make it big. All they want is the fame and the fortune and then one day they actually attain their goal only to complain about how they have no time for themselves and how hard it is to be famous. Boo hoo. Isn’t life cruel.

Come on Jason, please. Is there someone at your place holding a gun to your head making you accept friends requests, forcing you to send emails? I don’t really care about the Facebook thing, if Facebook is not your bag than delete your profile and move on already. What I do take issue with is you shutting off comments to your blog. You should know better than most of us that blogging is about community. It is about giving the opportunity for anyone no matter who they are to let their voice be heard. By you shutting off your comments, you are shutting the door on the community that you have worked damn hard to create these many years.

“If you do have a blog and don’t want to take the time to fire off a blog post in response to this then, frankly, how valuable is your comment? The benchmark for responding to my blog is now starting your own blog and writing a post.”

Ah, I see, so now unless you have a blog, an individuals thoughts, opinions and comments are not valuable? Coming from a true innovator like you Jason, this kind of statement is embarrassing to say the least. I agree with you Jason on one point, you are bankrupt, morally bankrupt. So enjoy yourself in that ivory tower you constructed my friend. We shall see what happens in the future when all those requests and comments stop coming, you think your attitude might change then?

Technorati Tags: Jason Calacanis, Facebook bankruptcy, Facebook, community

I stumbled upon an interesting new site called Fichey. Fichey aggregates the most popular content from Del.icio.us, Digg, Downfly, Reddit and StumbleUpon. Through their flash interface you are able to move from page to page without having to go to each web site and wait for it to load. The flash interface gives you a picture of a web page and then if you want to interact or read more than the picture shows, you can click a button and you will be brought to the actual site.

The interface is very similar to the interface of the iPhone and it is a pretty cool experience. It took me a little bit to get use to that I could not click on links on the pages itself, but it does allow you to surf and read a whole lot of content very quickly. The one thing that Fichey does not do compared to a StumbleUpon, is there are no social bookmarking, reviewing or commenting. Pretty much, the most popular content is shown and you view it and then move on.

When I first looked at it, I did not think I was going to do dig it because there was no interaction, but I found it to be a good user experience and I enjoyed being able to just check out all the pages quickly and easily instead of having to go through all these voting sites to see what is hot.

Check it out, let me know what you think.

Technorati Tags: Fichey, Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, iPhone

Listen up Motion Picture Association of America, a guy named Len might have just come up with a solution on how to stop people from pirating movies online. According to TorrentFreak, a guy named Len integrated some spoiler news from the recently released Harry Potter book. He not only took credit for it, but he also posted his URL for everyone to see.

That might not of been the smartest thing to do as people began leaving death threats on his web site. At the time I am writing this his web site netgraffiti.tk is presently offline. Yet another big surprise. I have a feeling Len might be staying incognito for a while until this thing blows over.

Come on MPAA, this could be a great idea to stop those movie pirates from watching illegal videos….

Ok, the video that Len did is below. I am warning everyone that the Harry Potter spoiler is in this video. DO NOT PLAY IF YOU PLAN ON READING THE BOOK. Don’t say I did not warn you.

Technorati Tags: Motion Picture Association of America, pirating movies

I thought this was a cute little story in MediaDaily News. Stephen McPherson, president of ABC Entertainment has been taking some flack from TV critics as he made a decision that he was going to withhold some news about the upcoming season of Lost at the Television Critics Association summer meeting and instead release the news the next day at Comic-Con, a huge comic book convention.

The TV critics were not pleased with this and starting throwing temper tantrums.

“I don’t think my editor is going to be very happy when she reads in my blog later today that Steve McPherson promised that news on one of the biggest shows on the network would be going to a fan convention the next day,” said Aaron Barnhart, TV critic of The Kansas City Star.

Oh, boo-hoo what is a person to do? You know what I would say Aaron, BECOME RELEVANT! The reason the President of ABC wanted to withhold the news from the TV critics and release it at Comic-Con is because he knows that the people attending Comic-Con will have greater reach and visibility on the web than a bunch of stodgy TV critics who write for newspapers. McPherson understands that when it comes to creating buzz and excitement for this coming season, you and the rest of your TV critics don’t have any J-U-ICE my friend.

So stop your whining and start becoming relevant. How many times do you post a day? How fast are you at releasing hot news? Are you leading or following some of the biggest TV web sites out there? You are being beaten by kids in their basements while you sit around at your Television Critics Association summer meeting. I can’t believe there is actually a Television Critics Association. 

Technorati Tags: Stephen McPherson, ABC, TV critics, Lost, Television Critics Association, Comic-Con, RELEVANT

I was reading an article last week which I would love to reference here, but I have been unable to find where I had read it. It was in an actual print magazine and not online. The article featured a new “Brand Identity” company that helped both companies and individuals “clean up” their names on the internet. They interviewed the CEO and he spoke a whole lot of mumbo jumbo to make his job and what his company does sound real important.

Let me walk you through what they do and I will use myself as an example. Let’s say you would do a search in Google using my name Cord Silverstein. The search results are pretty basic. The first page has links to this site, my profile pages on MyBlogLog and LinkedIn as well as a link to the company I work for. As I said pretty standard stuff.

BUT, what if when you did that same search using my name and you would see this?!?!?!?!?

Oh my!! Look what the internet is saying about me! That’s some terrible stuff. What in the world am I going to do?

No worries because this brand identity company will come to my rescue. While charging their clients $10,000 a month, they will go out and register dozens and dozens of domain names with my name in it. For example:

• cordsilverstein.com
• cord-silverstein.com
• cord-silverstein-likes-puppies.com
• cord-silverstein-humanitarian.com
• cord-silverstein-american.com
• cord-silverstein-red-white-and-blue.com
• cord-silverstein-school-marm.com

You get the idea. After purchasing these domains, the company will build web sites for all these domains. The sites will be basic HTML sites and filled with absolutely useless content, but there will be a whole lot of it! (wink) While building all these content pages, the company will also go out and register these sites with every damn directory they can find to hopefully get a nice bunch of links pointing to each one of these sites.

Now if all goes well and after this company has sucked as much money out of me as possible, hopefully, the search engines will start placing these web sites in the top of the natural search results since my name is in all of the domain names. And if that happens, all those really mean posts about me will be pushed down to page six, seven, etc. And then the company will pat themselves on the back for yet another job done incredibly well! Hurray….

Here’s the question of the day. Is this anything else other than total and unadulterated spam? Are they gaming the search engines to hide the results they do not want to be seen? Or do you feel this is acceptable since the internet never forgets and this is an option for someone or a company to try to clean up their names via the search engines?

The best answer will have the opportunity to take my place as backup singer on the next Bee Gees world tour.*

* Not only is Cord not a backup singer for the Bee Gees, but the Bee Gees would not have him even if he begged with the voice he has. So in other words, there is no prize and Cord was trying, and we emphasize the word trying, to be funny.

Technorati Tags: Brand Identity, Google, spam, Bee Gees

A report recently released by the North Carolina Attorney General states that MySpace has identified more than 29,000 registered sex offenders all members of the MySpace community. This is more than four times the amount News Corp, the owner of MySpace said they identified back in May. This news came to light during a hearing in front of the North Carolina state House of Representatives — which is considering a bill, already passed by the state Senate, that would require parental consent for children to join MySpace.

I don’t think this comes to a huge surprise to anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the last couple of years. For a sex offender, MySpace must be like shooting fish in a barrel.

I do think that some sort of regulations need to be put into place for not only MySpace, but all social networks when we are dealing with underage children. Though unfortunately, when law makers get involved they either go way overboard on the restrictions or they make laws that make absolutely no sense because they do not understand the internet, technology and especially social networks.

My question here is where are the parents? Don’t the parents have to take some sort of responsibility here when it comes to monitoring what their kids are doing in cyberspace? I don’t think I have the answers on this, do you?

Technorati Tags: MySpace, sex offenders, News Corp

Investors along with everyone else was surprised to learn yesterday that AT&T reported activating 146,000 iPhones during the first two days it was on sale. This number might seem like a large number, but analysts were predicting over 200,000 with some estimating being as high as 500,000.

“We have noticed decent inventories [of the iPhone] at stores, and thin demand at best,” analyst Ittai Kidron of CIBC World Markets wrote in a report Tuesday. “In fact, most Apple store visitors were not looking at the device and only a very small subset bought it.”

Kidron also noted a recent survey of buyers of the device found that its key drawback is “poor data connectivity” that affects how quickly users can access and use the Internet over the device. The iPhone works over AT&T’s EDGE network for data, which is slower than other so-called 3G networks that are coming online in markets around the world. Yet another very good reason why you need serious therapy to sign a two year contract with AT&T.

The iPhone is barely out of its box and the news is already cautious at best, disappointing at worst. Here’s my thoughts on what is going to happen next. We will start reading and hearing complaints from users either because of AT&T’s lousy customer service or their incredibly slow data network. People will start to become unhappy and definitely regret signing a two year contract with AT&T. Apple being incredibly smart will follow up with a 3G version of the iPhone where they will work with networks like Verizon and all the people who ran out on day one and signed a contract with AT&T will all want to kill themselves.

Technorati Tags: AT&T, iPhones, Apple, Verizon

I tend not to really focus any of my time or attention on SEO or search engine optimization here for many different reasons. The biggest reason is that SEO is seen by many as just tricks and scams to get better natural positioning in the search engines. And unfortunately, some search engine optimization companies and people have said and done things that have put themselves on the same levels of honesty as used car salesmen.

Rumors are running rampant that Google is preparing this weekend to update their page ranks and every SEO and his brother are scurrying like roaches when the lights turn on to do everything they can to get their page ranks increased. I have been reading articles by people using terms like “link trains” and “link baiting” and I finally decided I wanted to say a thing or two about SEO and about some of the buffoons who are seen as “experts” in this field.

You want to learn about SEO and how to do it right, here it is:

1. Build a web site with technology that will allow each and every page of the site to be read and indexed by the search engines.
2. Architect the site so that each page has the appropriate navigation so not only search engine spiders, but also real live users will be able to surf the site easily and quickly.
3. Write great content that users will find interesting and that they will want to recommend and come back for more.

That’s it. You can make it a lot more complicated, but it isn’t. It’s not about gaming the system and seeing how many links you can get and writing articles that use the same word 400 times in it. It is about very simply building a solid web site on the back end and then writing content that your target audience will want to read and interact with. It is time for people to realize that getting into the top 10 of natural search results does not guarantee success. How many times have you gone from a search result to a page and thought, “What a piece of crap” and closed that page and moved on?

Some of these SEO gurus really blow my mind. I was reading an article today on a site which is ranked under 3000 in Technorati. The guy has over 2000 blog reactions, but he has under 250 people registered for his RSS feed and a very low Alexa ranking! He has gamed the system with BS link scams, but he has absolutely no readers, no community, in other words he has nothing.

All hacks off the stage!

P.S. There was absolutely no chance that I would link to any of the hacks I referred to above and give them yet another link.

Technorati Tags: SEO, search engine optimization, natural positioning, search engines, Google, page ranks, link trains, link baiting, Technorati, blog reactions, RSS, link scams, community

Tonight was a historic night as for the first time in presidential politics, people from across the country were able to submit video questions to the democratic presidential candidates at the CNN-YouTube Democratic Presidential Debates. For someone like myself who has been very interested in politics for years now and have watched many presidential debates, I believe this was by far the most enjoyable and informative debate I have ever seen.

The questions people submitted were all poignant, very well said and most importantly, REAL! They were real questions from real people with real issues and concerns. I felt that Anderson Cooper did a good job moderating and keeping the candidates on point as well as keeping the discussions moving. Finally, I think that the style of the debate forced the candidates to speak truthfully and openly. They had to be on their toes and at least I saw who was able to think and react quickly on their feet and who could not.

I think this is yet another example of how technology is giving each and every one of us an opportunity to let our voices be heard if we want them to. I cannot see how in the future, debates could go back to the three boring reporters sitting at a table and reading questions from 3×5 cards.

What did you think? If you did not have a chance to see it, it is being replayed on YouTube. Let me know your thoughts on the debate.

Technorati Tags: presidential politics, CNN, YouTube, Anderson Cooper

We have discussed and debated much here about the “Customer Experience” and I think this most recent announcement from Apple is just fascinating. Apple will begin charging $5 just to enter the Apple stores. That’s right, you want to window shop, check out the iPhone? It will cost you $5 bucks just to get into the door.

“Part of the move was to limit crowds to keep the stores safe, but also we wanted to keep the right kind of people in the stores” said vice president of retail outlets, Vince Sciopiano.

According to reports, when you pay the $5 at the door, you will receive an an Apple button which will allow you entrance into the store and the button actually tracks the customer’s movements. Then if you decide to buy something that $5 entrance fee will be deducted from your bill.

Absolutely brilliant! What a great idea… Steve Jobs and his team are just firing on all cylinders and they can do no wrong. This works on so many levels. First off, it keeps the stores from being packed with gawkers and people who get in the way of customers who actually want to buy something, but also this is another move that continually reinforces the amazing Apple brand. This is the exact reason nightclubs keep giant lines waiting behind the velvet rope when inside the club is half empty. It is reinforcing the notion that Apple is place to be and now if you want to hang with the cool kids, you are going to have to pay just to enter.

Finally, from a revenue side, how much money will Apple make this year from literally revenues just from the door? Steve Jobs for President! He saved Apple, now we need him to save the world!

What do you think? Would you pay $5 just to enter an Apple store?

Technorati Tags: Customer Experience, Apple, iPhone, Steve Jobs