If you own a big tech firm, you aren't Microsoft, and you weren't named in the patent lawsuit filed this week by Paul Allen's Interval Licensing, well... you're probably looking deep into your soul today and asking where it all went wrong.
If you aren't a defendant - which includes AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google and Yahoo! - why not? After all, the technology in dispute is, according to Interval, "fundamental to the ways that leading e-commerce and search companies operate today." Dammit, you say to yourself. Maybe you aren't one of those leading e-commerce and search companies.
There seem to be two poles of opinion in the SEO world around content. At one pole, you optimize everything you do within an inch of its life: writing headlines and structuring copy to engage search engine algorithms rather than human imaginations. You frame your content and choose your topics with a view to linkbait instead of what really charges your passions, and you track metrics and prune away less productive activity ruthlessly.
On the other pole, you may be no less attuned to metrics than your counterparts at the other end of the spectrum, but you direct your focus to creating great, engaging content and building a community around it. Here, you're counting less on talking directly to search engines and more on creating the kind of traffic and organic linking activity that will drive up your rankings.
Editor's note: Rob is off gallivanting around Europe on vacation this week. Enjoy this favorite from the archives. Those of us who manage online communities have learned to crowdsource a big chunk of our work: identifying user contributions that deserve a higher profile - and those that deserve to be dropped in a deep, dark hole.
But there has to be something more nuanced than just thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons. And so...
No big writeup this weekend, folks, as I'm on holiday in France, a country probably best-known as the one-time home of Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur. And maybe as the setting for some of "Julie and Julia."
But the news that PayPal will now allow you to transfer money to someone just by bumping your iPhone or Android device with theirs - that's pretty cool.
Makes you wonder what else you could swap. Maybe DNA?
I'd like to think that becoming a Foursquare mayor means something. And something more than just the achievement itself (which is, let's face it, a grade based 100% on attendance).
Let's give the Foursquare mayors real power. Not mamby-pampby discounts or free bellinis, but something meaty, like - I don't know - say, search and seizure. Or union certification.
OSCON has wrapped in sunny Portland, and with it the most ambitious conference wireless networking I've ever seen. Yet even here I heard attendees complaining about sluggish Wi-Fi... and organizers asking them not to download large files.
Now, there's little question that OSCON is an edge case. Get a few thousand developers and software engineers together and you're going to strain the bandwidth.
I'm en route to Portland, Oregon for OSCON, but here's a little something to commemorate the newest addition to the Google family.
If you're at OSCON too, give me a wave (I'll be the guy drawing madly on his iPad, as I'm cartoon-blogging the event). Or drop by my session on Wednesday.
Or just acquire me. That seems to be the new "hello!"
I've owned an iPhone now for two years, but I'm still getting my mind around it.
Not the app store, or the display, or the ubiquitous connectivity. But the way the damn thing is so aware of its surroundings.
A motion sensor tells it if it's being jostled and which way is up. A compass tells it which way it's pointing. GPS constantly updates its position on the map. Add the camera, microphone, proximity and ambient light sensors and - if you get a few drinks in me - the iPhone will know more about my immediate environment than I do.
A new cartoon series called Agents of Digital is a compilation of stories that are all too familiar to those who work in Web development and Web marketing.
ReadWriteWeb reader Fred Roed, co-founder of World Wide Creative, is behind this new series. He says it's "a cartoon strip about a fictional digital marketing agency called Schitzen & Plumstead. The agency is run by two veterans of the internet." Our five favorite cartoons poke fun at the all-too-familiar delusions of entrepreneurs, programmers, social networking enthusiasts and misguided clients. You can grab the comic's feed here.
Okay, maybe it's just me. But when you have a lot of people corroborating each other's reports that your product is malfunctioning, and a controversy is brewing over your silence on the issue, maybe this isn't the best way for your CEO to respond.
Or, to put it another way, "Dr. Jobs! Dr. Jobs! I broke my leg in three places!" "Just avoid holding it that way."
