As of a month ago Trader's title had been downgraded to VP of Partnerships and Studio Services, although no top sales or business development replacement executive has yet been named.

Why is he gone? No one is saying. CEO Mark Pincus says only AT [Andrew Trader] and zynga have parted ways. He made an awesome contribution. We need to continue scaling the company. Trader hasn't yet returned a phone call asking for his comment.

Zynga's revenue growth has been nothing short of astronomical over the last 18 months, so it would be hard to blame him for not bringing in the dollars. Perhaps he took the fall for the Scamville saga although that has largely blown over now.

Trader was with Zynga nearly three years, so he's vested on a lot of his stock. Given how much money is at stake, the whole story about why the first cofounder of Zynga has left the building may never come out. Zynga raised $180 million in December 2009, at a rumored valuation of above $2 billion.

And no, I have no idea why he's holding a banana in the picture.

140proof, which is based in San Francisco and backed by a $2-million investment raised last summer from Blue Run Ventures and Founders Fund, said that its algorithm aims ads at users based on their profiles and other public data. Other Twitter advertising services include Ad.ly, which has gotten some press attention for paying celebrities such as Kim Kardashian thousands of dollars to endorse products to their followers, as well as Magpie, Assetize and IZEA.

The question all of these services will inevitably confront including Twitter itself, once it launches its own platform is how users will react to a wave of advertising in what was once an ad-free social network (in the case of 140proof, of course, you can simply not use HootSuite's mobile apps and you won't see them). Many of these services are only just ramping up in what will undoubtedly become a much bigger campaign to bring ads to the Twittersphere. So what will you do when ads start appearing in your Twitter stream?

Related content from GigaOm Pro (sub req'd):

How Human Users Are Holding Twitter Back

But that doesn't mean we can't learn something from how China is reacting to the recession with quick and massive stimulus that is succeeding in creating jobs and growth.

The world's largest human migration the annual crush of Chinese traveling home to celebrate the Lunar New Year, which is this Sunday is going a little faster this time thanks to a new high-speed rail line.

The Chinese bullet train, which has the world's fastest average speed, connects Guangzhou, the southern coastal manufacturing center, to Wuhan, deep in the interior. In a little more than three hours, it travels 664 miles, comparable to the distance from Boston to southern Virginia. That is less time than Amtrak's fastest train, the Acela, takes to go from Boston just to New York.

Even more impressive, the Guangzhou to Wuhan train is just one of 42 high-speed lines recently opened or set to open by 2012 in China. By comparison, the United States hopes to build its first high-speed rail line by 2014, an 84-mile route linking Tampa and Orlando, Fla.

China spent $88 billion dollars on high-speed rail investment in 2009 alone, a substantial increase from previous years. It rivals the construction of the interstate highway system in America in the 1950s for its audaciousness and use of public monies to spur jobs and growth. And it's working:

As China upgrades and expands its rail system, it creates the economies of large-scale production for another big export industry. The sheer volume of equipment that they will require, and the technology that will have to be developed, will simply catapult them into a leadership position, said Stephen Gardner, Amtrak's vice president for policy and development [...]

Officials drafted a plan to move much of the nation's passenger traffic onto high-speed routes by 2020, freeing existing tracks for more freight. Then the global financial crisis hit in late 2008. Faced with mass layoffs at export factories, China ordered that the new rail system be completed by 2012 instead of 2020, throwing more than $100 billion in stimulus at the projects.

Administrators mobilized armies of laborers 110,000 just for the 820-mile route from Beijing to Shanghai, which will cut travel time there to five hours, from 12, when it opens next year.

You can do this far more quickly in a command economy, of course. But it's the priority order that is striking. China needed economic stimulus, and rapidly accelerated public investment. The US (which actually has added more in stimulus than most countries in Europe) took a balanced approach based more on tax cuts. Aside from the question of what approach works better in terms of economic activity, look at the end result practically all of China will be served by high-speed rail within a matter of years.

It's not perfect. Some Chinese have complained about the fare costs. And again, a single decision-maker rather than a phalanx of competing interests makes decision-making that much easier. But there's something that can be learned here. If you want to create jobs, rather than the Rube Goldberg approach of tax breaks and nudges toward private investment, just go ahead and create the jobs. In the long run you'll have higher growth and a better quality of life for the nation.

Credit card usage is slowing. Revolving credit largely made up of credit card debt fell by nearly 20% in November, the largest drop on record, according to the Federal Reserve, reflecting less borrowing by consumers and banks' tighter lending standards. Through October, the number of new credit card accounts was down 46% from the same period in 2008, according to Equifax.

But abandoning credit cards is a much more radical step than using them less. Consumers who don't own a credit card often have a hard time renting a car. Some hotels won't book rooms to travelers who want to pay with a debit card or cash. Those that accept debit cards may place a hold on several hundred dollars in the customer's bank account, which could cause checks to bounce. And many consumer experts say that responsible use of credit cards is one of the most effective ways to build a good credit record.

It will be interesting to see what the long term implications of this will be, because I sense a lot of people now run with the baseline perception that banks and credit card companies exist only to screw their customers.

Dallas Lawrence is Chair of the Social and Digital Media Practice at Levick Strategic Communications, the nation's top crisis communications firm. He blogs on emerging digital media trends and best practices for social media engagement on Bulletproof Blog. Connect with him on Twitter @dallaslawrence.

Social networks have truly come of age in the last year. No longer viewed as lonely outposts for youthful college slackers, the reach of these platforms has grown exponentially. Today, more than two-thirds of the world's Internet users visit the social networking sites that reel in billions of eyeballs every 24 hours.

Yet, despite the staggering growth of social networking, determining how to monetize social media platforms remains a tough code to crack for even the savviest of companies. As such, identifying new revenue models will be instrumental in kicking off the next cycle of the social networking phenomenon in 2010.

If Anyone Can Do It, Facebook Can

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Facebook, social networking's acknowledged leader, has surpassed every platform on the market today, corralling more than 350 million unique users globally. If any social network is poised to design a winning formula for successful revenue streams in 2010, it's Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has set an aggressive agenda for the company, publically stating that he expects social networks to become as essential as web browsers and operating systems, and he has set the lofty yet entirely realistic goal of 1 billion users worldwide.

In the less than five years since it expanded beyond scholastic audiences, Facebook has not only grabbed the lion's share of users, it has engaged them like no other platform on the Internet. The average Facebook user visits the site at least once a day and spends an astounding 55 minutes engaging friends and family - statistics that another Zucker (Jeff) would probably kill for over at NBC.

While translating such popularity into dollars and cents isn't easy - especially in an industry whose users have grown accustomed to getting something for nothing - Facebook could potentially provide a monetization template that would revolutionize social networking as we know it.

The Next Level of Advertising Revenue

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Advertising has traditionally provided the simplest means of generating revenue. PricewaterhouseCoopers reported in October that Internet advertising revenues totaled $10.9 billion for the first half of 2009. It's been estimated that Facebook alone took in $435 million of that total. But for a site with nearly half a billion users, a quarter of which spend more time within the network than watching television, these numbers represent just the beginning potential.

First, Facebook needs to admit to itself that it is in the business of selling ads. By better managing its advertising network, intelligently expanding its marketing options, and developing workable social ads that leverage the branding power of friends and connections, Facebook can begin to capture its rightful share of online ad revenues. The final piece is to increase awareness and understanding of Facebook ads among corporate decision makers.

For example, every executive in America today understands the value of purchasing Google ads - and that didn't happen by accident. Google understood that what caused it to dominate online search wasn't going to ultimately position the company as a global corporate powerhouse valued at nearly $200 billion. Google's aggressive marketing, communications, and lobbying shops have worked to ensure every ad buyer, political campaign, marketing executive, and public relations flack knows the value of the service and has direct and easy access to account executives who explain the much worshiped ROI Google ads provide.

Today, Facebook stands on the precipice Google inhabited just before it became a top money-maker. By taking a page from the Google playbook, and aggressively marketing and explaining its power to influence buying decisions, Facebook ads could become as essential to 21st Century marketing as the yellow pages were in the 20th Century.

E-Commerce Stop Sending Customers Away

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The launch of Facebook as a true e-commerce site holds immense potential as a business solution and could forever change the way we shop. Online purchases through the first three quarters of 2009 totaled $98.3 billion according to the Department of Commerce. For the majority of companies selling products online who are also engaged on Facebook, opening Facebook fully to direct e-commerce transactions will dramatically change how businesses advertise and how consumers buy goods online.

Consumers and companies would flock to a Facebook storefront for one simple reason: We do everything else there. Imagine an integrated, one-click solution whereby your friends see your recent purchases (because you were incentivized by the brand to share your information) in their feed and are able to simply point, click, and purchase the same item.

With a few adjustments, companies can make timely offers of birthday gifts for friends, travel arrangements for event items, or the latest music from favorite artists - and make the sale without forcing the user to leave Facebook or put in new login information.

Rather than driving their 350 million users away from the platform to close the deal with retailers and purchase the item on an external platform, Facebook could benefit financially by charging companies a percentage of sales, a fixed rate to have a storefront, or from increased advertising opportunities.

Premium Subscription Options

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Finally, whether users like it or not, Facebook will do itself a long term disservice if it does not consider premium subscription options. Users (whether they are corporations or teenagers) are amenable to paying for even the simplest features and functionality, as evidenced by the success of Facebook gifts.

Nothing good in life is free. It's a stark, mature reality that Facebook (and its users) need to face in 2010. By leveraging economies of scale, Facebook can churn a sizable profit without alienating users. Would you pay one dollar a month to share higher-resolution photos or upload higher-quality or longer videos? Last month, 2.5 billion photos were uploaded to Facebook. Even if only a quarter of the site's active users opted for premium options, this one change would generate more than $1 billion in annual revenues.

Improving advertising, developing an e-commerce platform, and adding subscription services will not only generate the revenue necessary to make the transition from highly adopted to highly profitable, it will open revenue streams as Google did before for the next generation of digital developments.

More business resources from Mashable:

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- Social Media Marketing: How Pepsi Got It Right
- 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Avoid Social Media Panic
- HOW TO: Take Advantage of Social Media in Your E-mail Marketing
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
- 18 Online Productivity Tools for Your Business

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, peterspiro

Tags: advertising, business, e-commerce, facebook, MARKETING, monetization, monetizing, money, social media, social networks

The iPad can run "virtually every one of these apps, unmodified, right out of the box." They can either run it very small, 1:1 pixel, in the center of the screen. Or they can "pixel double" it and run it full screen, in a low resolution mode.

For new apps, however, Apple is releasing a new SDK for apps with special interfaces for the iPad.

The iPad can run "virtually every one of these apps, unmodified, right out of the box." They can either run it very small, 1:1 pixel, in the center of the screen. Or they can "pixel double" it and run it full screen, in a low resolution mode.

For new apps, however, Apple is releasing a new SDK for apps with special interfaces for the iPad.

It won't.

I was talking not long ago with editorial folks at an unnamed media company that rhymes with The New York Times. There was some possibility of my blogging over there. They were intrigued, but couldn't fit it into their grand plan, at least not right away. The problem was resources were already allocated and such an endeavor takes months to mount and costs tens of thousands of dollars.

No it doesn't, and that's the problem with Big Media.

When I was at PBS we did occasional redesigns and I never knew what they cost because for most of my 11 years there I was just a paid contributor. But toward the end of my tenure I became a producer which means I was finally exposed to budgets and was, to some extent, even responsible for paying some of them. And I was shocked to learn that my final design for a Moveable Type blog over there did, indeed, cost tens of thousands of dollars many tens of thousands of dollars.

PBS isn't a company that rhymes with The New York Times but it still qualifies as Big Media, so the pricing was more or less confirmed.

Now look at the screen you are reading right now, my Wordpress blog at cringely.com. It cost me NOTHING to design. I did it myself in a single night with the help of an experienced and generous friend, Benjamin Higginbotham of Spacevidcast.com. This blog is hosted by Media Temple in Los Angeles and costs me $50 per month, which is a lot compared to most blogs, but then I'm getting more than a million page-views per month. One more Christmas card or IBM column and I might bump up to $100 per month just to get some more resources, but I think I've made my point: a good Internet media product doesn't have to cost a lot of money. This is my living, remember, that's putting three kids through school. What are my gross margins 10,000 percent?

While those are my gross margins they aren't the gross margins at PBS or at a company that rhymes with The New York Times. Those outfits have overhead I don't. They have legacy relationships and obligations I can't even imagine. They can't just go from there to here in an instant even if they wanted to.

Which brings us back to the iSomething to be introduced tomorrow. No matter how great it is, it can't support the legacy infrastructure of Big Media, which includes mid-town office buildings and business lunches (hence my picture of New York's 21 Club, if you hadn't already figured that out).

Big Media wants revenue approaching what they could charge if a web site was a printed magazine. Remember the original lure of the Internet for publishers was the idea that there would be more profit without the expenses of printing and distribution. But it didn't work out that way because Internet users won't generally pay for content.

But Apple has the mojo. Steve Jobs has been firm from the start that content should be paid for and his generally is, except of course for my podcast on iTunes. Big Media likes the way Steve thinks. And so they can with one breath condemn him for killing the music album, yet in a second breath they can see him as the savior of magazines, newspapers, and good-but-thinly-watched TV series.

And Apple CAN be that savior, but only after a rationalization and severe downsizing of Big Media overhead, which I am not at all sure Big Media is really ready to do.

Based on the rumors I've heard so far I'm guessing the new Apple product will be like the Apple TV a hobby, a critical success but a business failure, though one with enough potential that Apple will give it a few years to succeed. It's in giving those few years where Apple really can save Big Media, which will undoubtedly by then be not so big.

King Pharmaceuticals, Inc., v ZymoGenetics, Inc., 2009 WL 4931238 (E.D. Tenn. Dec. 10, 2009). Seattle Trademark Lawyer has some background.

This case involves the cutthroat (sorry) world of blood clotting drugs. King Pharmaceuticals sells bovine (cow) thrombin, a clotting agent. ZymoGenetics sells thrombin made from hamster ovaries and snake venom. ZymoGenetics' version has been making inroads on the thrombin market, and King isn't too pleased about that. King claims that its dropping market share is due to several bad acts on ZymoGenetics's part, including ZymoGenetics' AdWords campaign that included the King trademark "Thrombin-JM" as a keyword.

Blaming illegitimate AdWords for King's dropping market share seemed particularly implausible for two reasons. First, the product is purely B2B and has no consumer-facing side. It's used for post-surgery recuperation, so doctors/hospitals are the target customers--and for professional and liability reasons, they are pretty careful about what they prescribe to patients. So if the AdWords ads have helped facilitate doctor switching, it's more likely due to doctors learning of a new drug that doesn't have some of cow thrombin's negative side effects than any marketplace mistake over brands or other "unfair" diversion.

Second, the AdWords ads produced a trivial number of clicks. ZymoGenetics reports that it got 84 clicks on "Thrombin-JM" (and only 803 on the generic term "thrombin"). The court doesn't expressly guffaw at King for fighting over 84 clicks, but I can hear a snicker or two in the opinion. Not surprisingly given the minuscule volume of clicks, ZymoGenetics voluntarily dropped the competitive keyword purchase when it learned of King's lawsuit (it wasn't giving up much), and it agreed not to buy the keyword again. King pressed for a preliminary injunction to forcibly hold ZymoGenetics to its word, which many courts will issue in these situations, but this court decides that ZymoGenetics' promise is good enough and denied the preliminary injunction.

Now, King was going to court to redress ZymoGenetics' perceived transgressions no matter what, so it would be a little unfair to beat up on them for litigating over 84 clicks. However, this case is yet another example of how competitive AdWord lawsuits often are ridiculous overkill given the economic value at issue. (Related examples are 1-800 JR Cigar, which involved $345 of revenue, and Storus, which involved 1,374 clicks over an 11 month period). It's a good reminder to trademark owners to be smart with their litigation dollars!

This holiday season Google is shelling out the marketing dollars with Virgin America so that you can stay connected at 35,000 feet going 600 miles per hour.

I guess they figure since they own your soul, which by the way isn't made of electrical ether, it's made of the data trails that you leave online through search, email, feed reading and anything else that behemoth touches, they can give you a great holiday gift.

I'm not sure what dirty secret that Google is trying to keep by buying our attention and adoration that they thought enough about us to allow us to connect to the internet on their dime, but it must be a big one. I wonder if they cheated on mom?

Either way, big daddy is planning on keeping you dialed in while you should be working on that presentation. This is a prime example of how to keep mind share up and win over a core audience when they least expect it.

But don't worry if you aren't flying the Virgin skies this holiday season, big daddy didn't forget about you. No matter what airline you are on and if you're at one of these 47 airports the Google is picking up the tab. So bust out that laptop, PSP, wifi enabled smart phone and your netbook to make sure that you fill your gut, I mean brain, with all the bits you can. Commonly referred to in the biz as bytophan, a close relative to the favorite holiday amino acid tryptophan.

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Google Making Friends at 35,000 ft is a post from: TechStartups.com

The gadgets are flowing and they've got both publishers and subscribers in a tizzy over their options. Are they 3g? Can I put my content on it? Just wifi? What services do they deliver? Do I need to build an app? Am I locked in?

All great questions but not the one that is at the front of my mind. That question being where is the personal media hub for all of this content? Each type of media that we consume has a disparative quality of some sort that requires another gadget or format transcoder to allow usage which means, users need a hub.

I just want to know where that hub will be. I'm not sure if it belongs in the cloud or can even exist there due to limitations placed on that content by rights holders. Which is a legitimate reason not to use the cloud since publishers need to eat.

A couple reasons to use the cloud would be transfer speeds, remote accessibility and backups. With increased gadget connectivity it would make sense to do this. An example of a gadget that needs to be fed from an outside source like the cloud is the PSPgo. It relies on connectivity to fetch games, video and browse the web.

The games on PSPgo arrive from a Sony controlled hub behind a firewall. If the cloud is too limiting due to rights management the other other solution would be to offer a private hub. Another gadget, but one that resides in the dwelling of an individual. Using the Sony model for control and privacy a device like this could be the next evolution of an inclusive hub. It seems to me to be the missing link.

Media management across multiples platforms and for varying devices would require some version of a standard protocol. The protocol probably already exists and could be as simple as HTTP with SSL. The device itself a web server that connects to cars, phones, tablets, computers, televisions, etc.

A device like this could also create new opportunities for rights holders to create new models for selling content. I'm thinking in the range of micropayments for ongoing usage or payments for amount of time used. An example would be a movie that instead of a 24 hour limit would allow the consumer to view it 2 times on any device before being crippled or offered for purchase for an additional few dollars.

My personal interest would be to have a media hub that I had control over and could add content to from any device like the PSPgo, Kindle, iPhone or computer. The ability for these devices to speak a common language for file storage and retrieval would increase consumption and sales as all of a users purchases become portable, even if lockedin to a device.

There are plenty of media hubs that exist today for personal use that can be net connected, but this device would find its niche in storing and delivering content without limitation.

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Where is the personal media hub for ebooks, music and videos? is a post from: TechStartups.com

This conversation about the next web and putting content up for sale through exclusivity has been a hot button issue for the last few days and worth some more thought. Notice I said, exclusivity' and I'm not calling it scarcity because it's not. Nor am I calling it a paywall'.

Paywall' being the prevailing label for this shift as media companies and independent publishers attempt to stay afloat and producing content by opening their doors to those that have paid admission. I will occasionally refer to it as such. I will also refer to it as patronage.

Like the arts or the movement to support local business, publishers of all stripes need revenue to produce content from information they have. If that revenue comes from their public supporters, so be it.

As an example, we pay admission to movies, concerts and meetups because we have an understanding that if we don't there won't be any more of them. Theaters would go away. Bands would lose their main source of income. Meetups would disappear or be held in some nerd's basement with room for five people and a big OSHA FAIL.

The value that we find in the art of entertainment or having a few drinks with friends that share our common interests is measured first by the price of admission. It is measured second by the amount of pleasure we receive from the information, conversations and moving images.

Information is art. Information is a common interest. Businesses that are in information verticals require patronage.

Does this mean that all information needs to be paid for? Yes. Paid for by you? No.

There needs to be balance in the argument that content and information want to be free. They can be free to consumers, but someone has to pay for them. Whether is through advertising dollars, paid partnership or subscription fees, the production of the content from information is a cost. Content wants to be syndicated, not free.

Those that argue that content wants to be free can have their cake and eat it too if the places that they choose to get it from are covering the costs of production or aggregation. And in this case it is free to consumers if the business at the end point is covering its operating costs with advertising dollars, lead generation or other model.

But if the content is direct to consumers, patronage is the only way to guarantee that even a small portion of it will exist in a few years. Else, you should get used to content solely full of information about the stars you pay to see on stage and screen.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lolololori/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

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Content Wants To Be Syndicated, Not Free. is a post from: TechStartups.com

The future of local journalism was the topic for the most recent meeting of the Future of Local Media NYC group. The conversation though fell short of anything resembling a dialogue about the future of local journalism. It was another example of the turf war that is plaguing publishers today Bloggers vs. Journalists.

In usual fashion only one side was present to represent their viewpoint. In this case, bloggers. If there was a journalist in the room of about 50 attendees they went unnoticed due to silence. Which was warranted given the conflicted and at time antagonistic nature of the answers panelists were giving to questions.

The panel could have been titled the Future of Local Snark. If a journalist had challenged the prevailing wisdom in the room they would have left bloodied from the snark bites. Gems like, I won't hire a journalist. They can't write what we need. and my fav The papers rip off our stuff, were guarantees that guests on the panel would have delivered swift verbal jabs to any journo speaking out of turn.

When the moderator would try to loop them back to elaborate on their answer he was typically met with the same avoidance and flippant, We rock. They suck., response.

Maybe it was brewskis that some panelists were drinking before hand that elevated their disdain for the topic at hand? Maybe is was that they really didn't have anything to offer to such a topic? Maybe they just didn't care?

It doesn't matter what the real answer is. I will never get those two hours of my life back. Much of my own emotion about this stems from the fact that these bloggers are held up as the thought leaders by the community and groups because they have traffic. Big deal when it comes from photos of a rat stuck in a sidewalk.

The fact of the matter is that the chasm is widening between bloggers and journalists even as we are being pushed closer together by digital delivery and crumbling business models. Bloggers and journalists are now face to face competing for the same eyeballs. The equation goes like this: Eyeballs equal traffic and traffic equals the ad dollars that fund both sides. Also known as the page view model.

For now it is adequate for bloggers to create life-style companies and brands around themselves. At the same time, it is the same model and the reason that print publications are being shed by the media companies that own them. Something that the panel seemed to be woefully neglectful of.

I am picking on my own people here, the bloggers. So let me address journalists for a second.

I admire the fact that journalists have chosen a profession that is supposed to reward them for their talent and skills with the written word. I do. For many decades journalists have made a go of it from the hands of global fat cats and local gentry that have two agendas making money and spreading their views.

Journalists have been eager to distance themselves from bloggers by calling them unprofessional, hacks and much worse. I was stopped by a journalist that I spoke with in preparation for this piece when I mentioned that bloggers and journalists are now competing. Oh, no we aren't. A we rock, they suck response from the other side.

It was then my turn to remind her that Rome was burning and if their isn't some innovation in how content and the production of it is paid for, not only would they be out of their current gig but they would be unable to find another that doesn't rely on test of their manual dexterity skills.

I don't know with any certainty what the future holds for journalists or bloggers. I do know, however, that right now the lack of dialogue, dismissal and inaction while great media empires fall are making the future of media less predictable. It's kind of exciting.

This is the time when the participants on both sides have the rare opportunity to shape the models. There will be winners and losers in the race to shape the future of media. But if this snark continues from both sides we're all going to be losers and our daily news will consist of Willard Scott in a tutu making fart sounds and photos of rats stuck in sidewalks while bloggers and journalists, dressed as a marching band, are led by Bill Moyers and Lady Gaga.

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The Progeny of Neglect and Great Technology is a post from: TechStartups.com

Disclaimer: I have founded several startups but none that have taken on VC funding, seed or angel investments. Not that I didn't try for the one that needed it to grow. For six months earlier this year, without success, a business partner and myself gave it our best shot, traveling around the country chasing dollars.

Save yourself some from agony and travel that befell us and read Mark Suster's great post over at The SiliconAngle today about VC funding your startup. The post is titled, Beware of VC Seagulls, and goes well beyond smart money vs. dumb money. After a couple of the phone calls we took with VC's we should have known that meeting face to face would only confirm our suspicions about their character.

Here's a sample from the first paragraph:

This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice. I write this post as a warning to pick your VC's carefully. I like to say to first-time entrepreneurs, picking a VC is more permanent than marriage. If you pick the wrong spouse at least you can get divorced.

Suster shares great information in this post about his previous experience in startups (his) and with VC's (of which he is now one).

I highly recommend this post and the others so far in his series of Startup Advice and his blog Both Sides of the Table [Feed].

Photo credit: (cc) Kenneth Yeung www.thelettertwo.com

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Shhh . . . Mark Suster Is Speaking About VC's is a post from: TechStartups.com

Are you a VIP? Did you pay for access?

These are the questions that will drive the next web, the version beyond 2.0. A trend towards exclusivity is one that appears to be gaining momentum as business models are coming apart at the seams.

The most prominent of these business models, revenue by CPM from advertising dollars, was the first to begin unraveling over last few years. As the economy tanked many sites relying on this revenue stream couldn't afford to keep the lights on.

Those that have survived are looking to premium content to supplement their income or even stay afloat. Premium meaning exclusive pay for content. And as the great Janis Joplin sang, Exclusive's just another word for nothing left to lose.

That's close right?

Don't take my tone the wrong way. I am bullish about the next web and view exclusivity as a viable method to generate revenue that can sustain a business. Many publishers, for years, played the hunch that simply building audience would lead to revenue. Much in the form of advertising dollars and we can see where that has put them. They're ready to earn.

I recently spoke with Tim Bourquin, the founder of New Media Expo. Tim was a leader in creating a community from the diaspora of global podcasters. But as Tim found out, along with others, there was no sustainable revenue stream to produce your own content. If someone wanted to make money in the medium they would need to produce shows for other people.

This is the category that I fall into. For the last 5 years I have been podcasting a free show at the rate on average of 2 episodes a week. We've done over 500 episodes and are the proud owners of an artist page in iTunes. Over that time, all but one month, I paid $200 for the server to host the show. Simple math will put my costs of production over $10,000. And that doesn't include the time to produce the shows, gear or facility (though it was my home).

We were never able to monetize our show with an audience of over 2,500 regular listeners. We looked at advertising, sponsorships and pitching our show for television. None of them were viable as our audience was too small. It was filled with the right people, just not enough of them. The only money that I have made from podcasting came from performing contract work for advertising agencies.

Bourquin is now charging for his content and building a community from and exclusive set listeners that are paying him with their attentions as well. It does change the dynamic as a publisher to have a financial obligation to an audience. In this model, every player has a vested interest in the content having value.

Exclusive purple ropes are a coming necessity for online businesses to grow from the passions of artists, publishers and regular folks. The next web will be filled with independent publishers mixing their content with that of today's mainstream media.

The difference will be that it will be paid for. Think exclusivity through micropayments and the bundling of content like a cable television provider under the umbrella of larger publishers. Both of these models rely on the new web's ability to syndicate and track content effectively.

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Post from: TechStartups.com

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The US Securities and Exchange Commission is considering a ban on a stock market practice known as "flash trading," where supercomputers get access to information milliseconds before other traders and can rapidly buy and sell in ways that are argued to influence the market unfairly - thus discouraging mere mortals from participating.

Many bleeding-edge trends in the consumer web play out writ large in financial markets; as all of us look at the growing prominence of real-time information on the web, the debate over flash stock trading raises issues worth considering outside the stock markets as well.

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If the real time web at large grows up open and democratic, then we're likely to see innovation, understanding and growth. If it's priced out of reach to all but marketing and state interests, then an experience analogous to that of small-time stock traders today could become what the web at large looks like.

It's easy for technologists to say that this is progress and rejecting the advantages technology brings would demand a return to time before the abacus. It's not so easy to explain why we have to take an all-or-nothing approach to judging technologies and their implications - why not look at them one at a time and evaluate them intelligently?

Here's how the introduction of real time information is being debated regarding financial markets, followed by some thoughts about the analogous transformation going on around the web.

This isn't just a story about robot stock traders and the SEC; it's also a story about Twitter, Facebook and the Pushbutton Web.

Robots in Financial Markets

Last month the New York Times' Charles Duhigg wrote a high-profile story about the practice of high frequency trading, including this juicy description of the practice:

Powerful algorithms -- "algos," in industry parlance -- execute millions of orders a second and scan dozens of public and private marketplaces simultaneously. They can spot trends before other investors can blink, changing orders and strategies within milliseconds.

High-frequency traders often confound other investors by issuing and then canceling orders almost simultaneously. Loopholes in market rules give high-speed investors an early glance at how others are trading. And their computers can essentially bully slower investors into giving up profits -- and then disappear before anyone even knows they were there.

Rich Miller, writing at Data Center Knowledge, a blog that tracks the powerful computers that high frequency traders (among many other industries) use, called the article one-sided and inconsiderate of the argument that "this activity provides liquidity to execute trades that would otherwise not be possible, making the market more efficient." He also said the press was widening the debate over the practice by bringing it into the mainstream.

Now U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) has sent a letter to the SEC this week, calling for action to be taken against the practice of flash trading in particular, the act of selling for a fee access to trading information milliseconds before it is otherwise available. He argues that the practice "creates a two-tiered system where a privileged group of insiders receives preferential treatment, depriving others of a fair price for their transactions. If allowed to continue, these practices will undermine the confidence of ordinary investors, and drive them away from our capital markets."

Schumer focuses on the early access to information, but always in the context of the computer-driven trading that occurs based on it.

Trader John Hempton writes that critics over-estimate the financial impact of flash traded stock, needlessly complicating a situation that he describes with the following, fascinating, story:

We trade electronically at our fund. We were recently trading in a stock with a large spread. I have changed the numbers so as not to identify the stock - but the ratios are about right. The bid was about 129.50, offer was about 131.50. We did not want to cross the spread - so when we bid for the stock we bid $129.55. Within a second a computer (possibly at our own broker but it makes no difference which broker) bid $129.60 for a few hundred shares. We fiddled for a while changing our bid and watching the bot change theirs. We would have loved to think we were frustrating the computer - but alas it was just a machine - and we were people up late at night.

Actually obtaining the stock required that we paid up - and when we did so it was probably a computer that sold the stock to us.

...It is always there - even when buying defaulted debt that trades once per month. We simply ALWAYS find the bot.

What About Real-time Robots on the Web?

Could the real time web give some people such an unfair advantage over everyone else that non-early adopters of new technologies or people outside of marketing firms could be left out in the cold? Presuming we're talking about important, actionable information online and not just real-time chat and fun - it's possible. The question is: will the most important parts of the real time web be open and democratized, or proprietary and shared only with those who can pay a high price for access? That question hasn't been answered yet.

If you were among the people who purchased the new Breaking News Online (BNO) iPhone app (released an eternity ago, yesterday!) then today you probably found out about the two US journalists being freed from North Korea and the shooting in Pennsylvania at least 45 minutes before almost anyone else did. (CNN posted a link to local PA news 45 minutes after the BNO network published.) That notification system costs $1.99 to purchase and $1 per month to stay subscribed.

If you've visited Yahoo's social-bookmarking turned real-time news service Delicious since this morning, you've seen that hot news links are now found not just by vote counting, but with a new method augmented by tracking the open, rapid conversations on Twitter.

These are innovations built out of elbow grease and publicly available feeds of data. Yahoo might be, but the scrappy guys at Breaking News Online definitely aren't, using software something like IBM's new stream processing software, for which it will charge "at least" hundreds of thousands of dollars.

No, this real-time public web is very low cost and increasingly both open sourced and decentralized. It's akin to what Anil Dash calls the pushbutton web.

Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook. The pieces of this platform have just come together to enable a whole set of new features and applications that would have been nearly impossible for an average web developer to build in the past.

As long as it's open and low cost, real time information on the web should be as democratic and fair as computer use is. It's not perfect, but it's no longer the David and Goliath-on-steroids fight that critics of high frequency stock trading say that market has become because of real time stock data.

The Risk: Facebook

The real time web is a shimmering mass of conversation and data, but there's no guarantee that it's going to stay open, free and democratic forever. Already, in fact, there's no bigger river of the real time social web than Facebook. Facebook is simply huge, it holds huge sums of information and so far it allows aggregate access to no one. As far as we know.

If Facebook, or some other equally important site of the real time web, began offering access to its data but pricing mere mortals out of that market - then we could have a situation where individual software developers and social scientists were like grandpa reading the stock pages in the newspaper and huge marketing firms and government agencies had the kind of advantage that high frequency traders are alleged to have in financial markets.

Anil Dash puts it this way:

Pushbutton technologies are not just free and open, they're decentralized, which is a serious threat to the "lobster trap" model of social software. We can expect serious competition from the centralized networks that are currently building these sorts of systems. If a threat arises to Pushbutton's adoption, this is the most likely source. Worry? Definitely.

In addition to development concerns, there are also analysis concerns. If stock trading equals liquidity and knowledge is the new currency, then open access to aggregate data could be the equivalent of high-powered stock-trading tools for all instead of for just the already-richest few.

Some research has already been performed on the connection between communication on social networks and real-world events. The Information and Language Processing Systems Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam, for example, correlated mood messages on LiveJournal closely with world events. ("Mass increase in the level of worriedness around major weather phenomena, such as hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005 - Excitedness around global media and culture events, such as the release of a new Harry Potter book on July 15, 2005 - Mass increase in the level of distress and sadness after terror attacks, as witnessed by the response to the London bombings on July 7, 2005.")

Analysis of real time mass communication could lead to a world of innovation and understanding - if that communication is an open fire hose of data and not shared only with deep pocketed commercial partners.

Everything is Complicated, Some Can Afford to Ponder It

Is high frequency, low latency, computer executed, "flash" trading unfair? It must feel that way to individual and small investors who can't afford killer number-crunching robots - but it's also pretty awesome technology and is said to provide liquidity that the markets depend on.

Could the real time consumer web be made undemocratic by being priced out of reach for edge-case developers and social scientists outside of government and the corporate world? That could happen.

As we speak, though, there's a lot of innovation going on in the real time web that's open, based on standards and available to all of us. Let's hope it stays that way

Here's a pic of the playhouse, as it stands today -

Don't you love the bright blue! My kids picked it out. The color definitely makes the playhouse easy to find in our backyard. As you can see, there's a piece of trim up top that still needs painting, and, tomorrow, an electrician is coming to run some electricity to the playhouse, so that the kids can have some lights and run a fan.

I also have a new playhouse. Actually, I have a new shed / workshop. I purchased it last week, and I got a really good deal on it. I've been looking for a shed for almost a year, but I never really found one that I liked (at a price we could afford). Two weeks ago, I was driving by a local dealership that sells prefabricated sheds, and I noticed that there were three slightly older-looking sheds near the back of the dealership. I pulled in and asked the guy who was running the dealership about the three sheds in the back. Lucky for me, they were returns - and I was able to buy a 2007 model for several hundred dollars less than the 2009 model.

Here are a few pictures of my shed / workshop -

I spent some time today wiring the shed with an overhead light and two receptacles. I've also added some pegboards, and I even re-purposed an old shelving unit that I found at the dump. I simply cut off it's back two legs, slid it in-between two studs, and the screwed it into place. Now, I have a nice little place to store various things for my lawnmower. Oh, the shed is at just the right height. All I have to do is put down two car ramps, and I can easily back the lawnmower in or out of the shed.

When he gets here tomorrow, I'll also have the electrician run power to the shed. Now, I have a (much-needed) place to store our stuff, and a place to work on future projects. I'm super-happy with my purchase.

I realize that this post has very little to do about personal finance, but after a week away with a kidney stone, I really missed you guys. I hope that you are all doing well, that you are living on budget, and that you are moving forward with your debt reduction!

I was just about to hit publish and then I had a thought. Tomorrow, I'll write about the financial side of my purchase, and let you guys in on my thought-process- how I decided between buying/building a shed, whether to purchase new/used, and what other financial impact the new shed might have. Stay Tuned!

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The New Shed And The Playhouse

Venture capital dollars going to startups in the U.S. stabilized in the second quarter at $3.7 billion, according to the latest MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. The venture money invested in the quarter is still only about half of what it was a year ago (when it was $7.2 billion in the second quarter of 2008), but is 15 percent above the low point in the first quarter of 2009 (when it was $3.5 billion). All in all, VC investments are trending at mid-1990s levels, which isn't such a bad thing.

The average deal size came up a little bit to $6 million, from $5.3 million last quarter. Seed and early stage investing picked up after venture capitalists fled to the perceived safety of later-stage investments in recent previous quarters.

The rebound, if you want to call it that, hasn't hit the Internet sector yet. Internet deals brought in only $524 million in the quarter, down from $593 million the quarter before and $1.7 billion a year ago. Clean tech isn't doing so hot either, with only $274 million invested during the second quarter compared to $911 million a year ago. Most of the action came from biotech and medical devices, which saw bigger jumps in funding during the quarter to $88 million and $628 million, respectively.

Remember, this is only one source of data (most of it from Thomson Reuters). We actually measured nearly twice the dollar amount of venture deals during the quarter on CrunchBase, which we'll share more fully soon.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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After examining the companies and their social media activity levels, the brands were ranked on an "engagement scale" where scores ranged from a high of 127 to a low of 1. Those brands that were the most engaged saw their revenue grow over the past year by 18% while the least engaged brands saw losses of negative 6%.

Four "Engagement Profiles"

The study grouped the brands into one of four engagement profiles that related to the number of channels they're involved in and how deep that involvement is. At the top of the list are "mavens," the brands heavily engaged in seven or more social media channels - like Starbucks and Dell, for instance. "Butterflies" are like wannabe "mavens," and are also engaged in seven or more channels but are spread too thin, investing in some channels more so than others. "Selectives" focus on six or fewer channels but engage customers deeply in the ones they've chosen. Finally, there are "wallflowers," or brands engaged in six or fewer channels with below-average engagement; these include companies like McDonalds and BP.

Out of the top 10 brands engaged in social media, the mavens dominate the list. All of the top 10 are mavens and have seen financial success even in a down economy:

1. Starbucks (127)
2. Dell (123)
3. eBay (115)
4. Google (105)
5. Microsoft (103)
6. Thomson Reuters (101)
7. Nike (100)
8. Amazon (88)
9. SAP (86)
10. Tie - Yahoo!/Intel (85)

$$$ Does Social Media Pay? $$$

Of course what everyone really wants to know is whether or not social media actually pays off in terms of dollars and cents. This study seems to show that it does. The most-engaged brands are significantly outperforming their peers across numerous industries in both revenue and profit performance. They have even sustained strong revenue and margin growth in spite of the economy, notes the report.

Whether this correlation is actually a causation cannot be proven with the data on hand, it can only make the implication. Given the large number of companies analyzed and the consistent findings, it seems probable that social media has had a major impact on the companies' financial success.

It's also worth noting that the level of engagement appears to be a factor, too. The companies deeply engaged in fewer channels ("selectives") delivered higher gross and net margins than those only lightly engaged in more channels ("butterflies"). It other words, as the report says, "it's not about doing it all, but doing it right."

The ENGAGEMENTdb Web Site

Along with the complete study, available here, an accompanying web site has also been launched at www.engagementdb.com. On the site, companies can compare their social media efforts with the top 100 cited in the report. They can also opt to detail their social media efforts for inclusion in the online database at the site for future research and study.

As a media theorist who's written about some of the most influential ideas of the digital age, Rushkoff is second to none. In Life Inc., he describes not just corporations, but how we all can change to an "open source economy" that favors decentralized value creation over banking and central currency. We spoke with to ask more about what this new economy would look like and how the Web is involved.

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How The Web Broke The Economy

ReadWriteWeb: I was particularly struck by how you position the Web as a way for individuals to create things of value for each other, as the door to an open source economy. Can you describe what exactly an open source economy would look like, and what role software and the Web have to play in that?

Douglas Rushkoff: This program written central banking and corporatist monopolies was created to favor people who had money and wanted to make money without creating value. Technology broke the monopoly centralized banking had on centralized value creation by allowing people to develop things at low cost. The gift economy that really the real Internet was built on is anathema to the GNP.

RWW: Will enterprise software the same trend? What role is there for business-to-business transactions in the decentralized economy you've laid out?

R: When I'm at the supermarket, every once in a while the cash register crashes and they restart it and they see Windows. I get the feeling that the manager and the cashier and everyone in there thinks that this shouldn't be running Windows. They're thinking, oh my god, they're using amateur-level software. You want to think that these are proprietary perfect registers.

My feeling is that businesses and the IT of business are going to want a higher order of quality. They are going to proprietary super-pro enterprise OS's. I feel business is going to want something like the business-only IBM computer, and I think that's not a bad thing.

Localized Currencies & Technology

R: I certainly hope so. The great thing about software is that you don't need a bank because that's where all kind of bizarreness and corruption happen. But you do see every transaction; software is just really really good for that. You can see how money if flowing, how transactions are flowing. The problem with our economy is that when speculators ore extracting currency, money comes first. In a distributed system money is the result of transactions.

The main thing standing in the way of it is that people don't believe its possible. It's not they cant do it its that they can;t see it. It's like when you show someone Linux for the first time.

A New, Collaborative Mindset

R: Renaissances tend to reverse whatever the last one created. This one is towards decent partner collaboration and the sharing of value. So for sure, and we're going to get different kinds of discoveries. I think that the computer may be the most central thing to making all of this happen.

A Word for Developers & Entrepreneurs

Rushkoff: My biggest message to them is this...There's this prevalent notion is that the reason you get involved is that you create a business that you then sell. I would argue that is not the path to greatest fulfillment, I would contend that it's not the path to the great technology. The less you borrow, the less you will be required to grow, and the closer you can stay you can stay to those growth metrics that are more appropriately scaled.

Life, Inc. is in bookstores now. If you're seeking a primer on the book and Rushkoff's conception of what corporatism means, be sure to watch the short Life, Inc. The Movie below

Facebook said today that application developers can now apply to test out its virtual currency platform, an aggressive move that places pressure on virtual currency companies such as Offerpal and Zong. Third-party virtual currency companies have made millions of dollars over the years through the sale of virtual goods on Facebook social gaming applications.

The social network also said it's rolling out a new feature that makes it easier for application developers to advertise to new users based on what applications they've used in the past. The same feature also lets developers advertise to current users as a way to encourage repeat visits to their applications.

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Market research you can use: Keep informed about Cloud Computing and IT Infrastructure. Learn more

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The Interview and PDF

The interview is about 20 minutes, a good listen. If you want to do justice to this subject, read the PDF first as background, and then listen to the MP3. For the super-busy skimmer, we attempt to distill the essence below.

Download the MP3.

The Return on Asset Bombshell

This is what caught our attention in the email -- and is the reason we wanted to do this interview:

"U.S. companies' return-on-assets (ROA) have progressively dropped 75 percent from their 1965 levels despite rising labor productivity."

That is dramatic. If you had to select a single measure by which to judge the value delivered by a CEO, board, or management team, it would be return on assets. To quote from the Wikipedia entry:

"The return on assets (ROA) percentage shows how profitable a company's assets are in generating revenue. This number tells you what the company can do with what it has, i.e. how many dollars of earnings they derive from each dollar of assets they control."

And here is the bit that matters:

"Return on assets is an indicator of how profitable a company is before leverage."

If you want to understand the financial meltdown that happened at the end of 2008, just think leverage, i.e. debt. Companies juiced up their earnings using leverage. They have been doing this more and more in the last 30 years.

What happens when you take that away? You get the return on asset bombshell that the Shift Index reveals. It is like taking steroids away from an athlete and then saying, "Now, how fast can you run 100 meters?"

Only a US and BigCo Problem?

The massive ROA drop was measured across all public companies in the US since 1965.

It would be very interesting to see the results for Europe and Asia. Would they be different? Has anyone run those numbers?

Public companies tend to be large. We were interested in knowing whether this was simply a BigCo problem. Here at ReadWriteWeb, we report on startups and small companies. Our assumption for some time has been that an historic shift in power is taking place from BigCo to SmallCo, which can be explained by Coase's Theorem.

Now that we've seen huge companies, household names such as Lehman and GM, crumble before our eyes, thinking that BigCos are in serious trouble is no longer a radical idea. And as nature and economies abhor a vacuum, this must create opportunities for others. The question is whether this shift will be simply from some BigCos to others, as they out-compete each other, or a more fundamental shift from BigCos to SmallCos.

We asked John Hagel about this, and he told us his view that the shift in power to smaller companies, even to free-agent individuals, is a short-term trend and that bigger companies will return to dominance once they figure out how to operate in this new environment. He told us that BigCos face a great challenge in part because:

"They grew up and became successful in a different environment, where scalable efficiency was the way to generate and sustain economic value."

He goes on to explain that money follows talent and that large companies are having a hard time articulating to the most talented and creative individuals why they would be able to grow and prosper more within large institutions than as free agents or in small ventures. He believes that large companies will be able to make that transition. Clearly, given his role with Deloitte, which provides management consulting to large companies, he has to take that view. But he has also voted with his feet on this issue, by even joining a large company like Deloitte in the first place, when he was already a successful free-agent author and consultant.

His fundamental message is that BigCos need to offer a rationale other than just scalable efficiency. This is consistent with Coase's Theorem. His view is that this rationale will be "scalable learning." Scalable learning sounds like it could become an over-used buzzword, but when you listen to him describe how companies build networks of partnerships that learn from each other, it comes alive.

It certainly will resonate with anyone who has worked at a startup.

The question is whether BigCos can learn to work like agile startups again. In other words, is it possible to teach elephants to dance?

How Can Enterprise 2.0 Vendors Articulate Their Value in This Context?

I asked John if he saw a day when more CTOs and CIOs would become CEOs, because really understanding systems and technology has become so essential for leaders. He was skeptical. In fact, John views the risk-averse nature of most CIOs as a big stumbling block.

John pointed out that most companies have "only skimmed the surface" of opportunities to use social media to build richer knowledge networks that cross the firewall and connect with partners and customers. Indeed, he talked about the problem of how "most CIOs are tending to become extremely risk-averse." He pointed out that CIO turn-over is increasing, and that the reason CIOs get fired is often because of some big operational blow-up. So, they avoid anything that puts current operations at risk. In doing so, they may be creating even bigger issues, as large companies miss opportunities to leverage social media to create new value.

John's advice to Enterprise 2.0 vendors is to become a lot better at articulating how their technology can build value and competitive advantage at scale. That is obviously easier said than done. But doing it is essential. The CIO will be motivated to look at operational risks only if the CEO tells him or her that the risks of ignoring them are greater.

The Interview and PDF

Download the MP3 and PDF.

In Part 2 we discuss: how previously reticent search engines like Google and Yahoo have begun to participate in the Semantic Web in 2009, user interfaces for browsing and using data, what Tim Berners-Lee thinks of new computational engine Wolfram Alpha, how e-commerce vendors are moving into the Linked Data world, and finally how the Internet of Things intersects with the Semantic Web.

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Semantic Web and Search Engines Like Google, Yahoo

RWW: You've been talking about the Semantic Web for many years now. Generally the view is that Semantic Web is great in theory, but we're still not seeing a large number of commercial web apps that use RDF (we've seen a number of scientific or academic ones). However we have begun to see some traction with RDFa (embedding RDF metadata into XHTML Web content), for example Google's Rich Snippets and Yahoo's SearchMonkey. Has the takeup of RDFa taken you by surprise?

TBL: Not really, but the takeup by the search engines is interesting. In a way I was happy to see that, it was a milestone for those things to come out of the search engines. The search engines had typically not been keen on the Semantic Web - maybe you could argue that their business is making order out of chaos, and they're actually happy with the chaos. And if you provide them with the order, they don't immediately see the use of it.

Also I think there was misunderstanding in the search engine industry that the Semantic Web meant metadata, and metadata meant keywords, and keywords don't work because people lie. Because traditionally in information retrieval systems, keywords haven't proven up to the task of finding stuff on the Web. One of the reasons is that people lie, the other is that they can't be bothered to enter keywords. So keywords have gotten a bad reputation, then metadata in general was tarred with this 'keywords don't work' brush. Because a lot of Semantic Web data included metadata, then people thought that with Semantic Web data -- again, that people will lie and won't have the time to produce it.

Google rich snippets example; image credit: Matt Cutts

Now I think there's a realization that when you're putting data online, that people are motivated NOT to lie. For example when your band is going to produce its next album, or when your band is going to play next downtown, you're motivated to put that information up there on the Semantic Web. There's an awful lot of cases when actually data is really important to people; and it's on the web anyway. So I think it's great that some of the search engine companies are starting to read RDFa.

Does this mean that they [search engines] will start to absorb the whole RDF data model? If they do, then they will be able to start pulling all of the linked data cloud in.

Will they know what to do with it? Because when it's data in a very organized form, I think some people have been misunderstanding the Semantic Web as being something that tries to make a better search engine - i.e. when you type something into a little box. But of course the great thing about the Semantic Web is that you can query it, you can ask a complicated query of the Semantic Web, like a SQL query (we call it a SPARQL query), and that's such a different thing to be able to do. It really doesn't compare to a search engine.

You've got search for text phrases on one side (which is a useful tool) and querying of the data on the other. I think that those things will connect together a lot.

So I think people will search using a search text engine, and find a webpage. On the front of the webpage they'll find a link to some data, then they'll browse with a data browser, then they'll find a pattern which is really interesting, then they'll make their data system go and find all the things which are like that pattern (which is actually doing a query, but they'll not realize it), then they'll be in data mode with tables and doing statistical analysis, and in that statistical analysis they'll find an interesting object which has a home page, and they'll click on that, and go to a homepage and be back on the Web again.

So the web of linked data and the web of documents actually connect in both directions, with links.

User Interfaces for Semantic Content

RWW: At the recent SemTech conference, Tom Tague of Thomson Reuters' Calais project suggested that user interfaces for semantic content are key in getting more take-up. With that in mind, I wonder if you've seen some great interfaces or designs for semantic applications in recent months - if so which ones and why did they impress you?

TBL: I think that whole area is very exciting at the moment. The only piece of hacking I've done over the past few years has been on a thing called the Tabulator [a data browser and editor], which is addressing exactly that. Partly because I wanted to be able to look at this data. And now there are lots of different ways that people need to be able to look at data. You need to be able to browse through it piece by piece, exploring the world of data. You need to be able to look for patterns of particular things that have happened. Because this is data, we need to be able to use all of the power that traditionally we've used for data. When I've pulled in my chosen data set, using a query, I want to be able to do [things like] maps, graphs, analysis, and statistical stuff.

W3C Tabulator, a data browser/editor; Image credit: wiwiss.fu-berlin.de

So when you talk about user interfaces for this, it's really very very broad. Yes I think it's important. There's also the distinction we can make between the generic interfaces and the specific interfaces.

There will always be specific interfaces; for example if you're looking at calendar data, there's nothing else like a calendar that understands weeks, months and years. If you're looking at a genome, it's good to have a genetics-specific user interface.

However you also need to be able to connect that data, through generic interfaces. So if my genome data was taken during an experiment which happened over a particular period, I need to be able to look at that in the calendar - so I can connect the genetics to the calendar.

So one of the things I hope to see is domain-specific things for various different domains, and the generic user interfaces. And hopefully the generic interfaces will be able to tie together all of the domains.

Next Page: Wolfram Alpha; e-Commerce and Linked Data

Wolfram Alpha and Natural Language Interfaces

RWW: An interesting new product that was launched this year was Wolfram|Alpha, a 'computational knowledge engine.' It's kind of a mix between Google (search) and Wikipedia (knowledge), and it's key attribute is that enables you to compute something. The founders think that 'computing' things on the fly is something we're going to see a lot of in future. What's your take on Wolfram|Alpha?

TBL: There are two parts to that sort of technology. One of them is a sort of stilted natural language interface. We've seen those sort of natural language queries for years. Boris Katz [from W3C] created a system called START [a software system designed to answer questions that are posed to it in natural language]. I think with the Semantic Web out there, those sorts of interfaces are going to become important, very valuable, because people will be able to ask more complicated things. The search engine has traditionally been limited to just a phrase, but some of the search engines are now starting to realize that if they put data behind them and have computation engines, then you can ask for things like 'what's this many pounds in dollars' and so on. So yes, those interfaces will become important.

Conversational interfaces have always been a really interesting avenue. We've had voice browser work in W3C, that has been an interesting alternative avenue. It's possible that as compute power goes up, we'll see a prolifieration of machines capable of doing voice. It'll move from the mainframe to being able to run on a laptop or your phone. As that happens, we'll get actual voice recognition and pattern natural language at the front end. That will perhaps be an important part of the Semantic Web.

We talked before about what a great challenge the Semantic Web is going to be from a user interface point of view. Conversational interfaces are going to be part of [solving] that. Of course it's also going to be really valuable to have compositional interfaces - for the visually impaired and so on.

Wolfram|Alpha is also a large curated database of data sets. Obviously I'm interested in the big data set which is out there, which is Linked Data. This everybody can connect to. I don't really know a lot about the internals of Wolfram|Alpha's data set. I don't know whether they're likely to put any of it out on the web as Linked Data - that might be an interesting addition. I imagine that quite a lot of it may have come from the web of Linked Data.

e-Commerce and Linked Data

RWW: There have been reports recently that both Google and Yahoo will be supporting the Good Relations ontology and linked data for e-commerce. Companies such as Best Buy are already putting out product information in RDFa. What would be your advice to e-commerce vendors right now, to help them transition to this world of structured data on the Web. The same question could be asked across many verticals, but e-commerce seems like one area which has some momentum right now. Would you advise them just to put out their data as Linked Data?

TBL: Yup! Certainly this year is the year to do it. I've been advising governments to do it and when you look at an enterprise, you find that a lot of the issues are the same. But when you put your data from government or enterprise out there, make sure you don't disturb existing ecosystems. Don't threaten those systems, because you've spent years building them up.

Maybe there's an analogy with when the Web first started and the first bookshops went online. They were more or less a flyer, saying 'hey we have a great bookshop at 23 Main St, come on down!'. Let's say that a person named Joe owned one of these early online bookshops. If somebody had suggested to Joe that he should put his catalog online, Joe would've felt that that was very proprietary data. And he'd be worried that other bookshops would see where he was weak, so they'd be able to advertise themselves as filling that niche he's weak in.

But when his competitors Fred and Albert put their catalogs online, then Joe can check which books people are browsing at Fred and Albert's websites. So Joe would [finally] be pursuaded to put his book catalog up online. But he doesn't put the prices... until Albert and/or Fred does. And even if catalog and pricing is up there, nobody puts their stock levels online. And there was a period of time when nobody [i.e. online booksellers] had their stock levels up. But people got fed up with ordering stuff that wasn't in stock. So the first book shop to actually tell you about stock levels suddenly was then unbelievably attractive to its customers.

So there's this syndrome of progressive competitive disclosure. This happens when people realize that if you're going to do business with somebody, if you're going to have your partners up and down the supply chain, really it's useful to check the data web - and life goes much more quickly and open.

Best Buy may be what starts the ball rolling [among e-commerce vendors]. Now if I want to look out for what [products are] available, I can write a program to see what there is. If somebody wants to compete with Best Buy, to my program they'll be invisible unless they can get their data up in RDF. Doesn't matter whether they use RDFa or RDF XML, as long as it maps in a standard fashion to the RDF model, then they will be visible.

Next Page: Internet of Things; Conclusion

The Internet of Things

RWW: I'm fascinated by how the Internet is becoming more and more integrated into the real world. For example the Internet of Things, where everyday objects become Internet connected via sensors. Have you been following this trend closely too, and if so what impact do you think this will have on the Web in say 5 years time?

TBL: It connects very much with Semantic Web [and] with linked data. With Linked Data you've got the ability to give a thing a URI. So I can give a URI to my phone, and I can say that's my phone in Linked Data. And also the company that made it can give a URI to the model of the phone. They can also put online all the specs of the phone, and then I can make a link to say my phone is an example of that product. So now any system which is dealing with me and has access to that data will be able to figure out the sorts of things I can do with my phone, which actually is really valuable. Especially if the phone breaks.

The Semantic Web has already given URIs to things, and to types of things. When the things themselves have an RFID chip in them, then I think it's a very exciting world. One can take that RFID chip, go to the Internet and find out the data about the thing. Whether we'll be able to do that, whether the manufacturers will be open enough to allow me to turn data about the identifier of the thing into data about the thing, is yet to be seen. But it's a very exciting idea.

Similarly, I'd like to be able to scan a barcode and get back nutritional information about what's in - for example - a can of food. But we don't have that yet. To get that sort of thing, which is very powerful, we need to build look-up systems, which allows you to translate an RFID code or a barcode into an HTTP address.

The Semantic Web is a web of things, conceptually. Tying an actual thing down to a part of the web is the last link - the last mile. Give the thing a notion of its own identity in the web.

Conclusion

The over-riding message in both Part 1 and 2 of our interview with Tim Berners-Lee, is for companies and organizations to make your data available online. Preferably as Linked Data, which uses a subset of Semantic Web technologies. But Berners-Lee noted in Part 1 of our interview that he'd even be happy with the data in CSV (comma separated values) format.

It's clear that we've seen a lot of progress in linked data already in 2009. In upcoming posts on ReadWriteWeb, we'll continue to track this trend and explain how you can contribute your organization's data.

Draw from this what you will. I've been reading coverage of the events through Memeorandum, a great source for political news, and the one thing that stands out to me in this visualization is that allegations Palin addressed the nation and not the state she was serving seem questionable given how much she talked about Alaska and Alaskans. It is also interesting to see how many times she used the word dollars. She used the word government far more than she did family, though when watching the video of her press conference it sounded like she was really talking about family a lot.

Do you think this kind of analysis can be truly useful? I think that it's most useful when comparing multiple speeches for content, but even then I'm not sure how to read the meaning of word frequency.

See also a comparison I did in January at ReadWriteWeb of President Obama's inaugural speech compared the Bushes' and other past presidents.

Data analysis is fascinating and of course much larger opportunities to engage in it are becoming available every day online. I believe we're going to see a whole lot of innovation making use of the text of conversations as a foundation for analysis in the near future. Not cute little stuff like this, but big, ongoing, ambitious projects. Hopefully for more than just marketing purposes. Here's a blog post and great audio interview on that topic, if you're interested.

Oh, and I would warn you that there'll be spoilers in this review except that, really, since I still have no idea what actually happened in this movie, I'm not sure how much I can spoil it.

Since the days of Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, filmmakers have reached beyond meaning. But with this summer's biggest, loudest movie, Michael Bay takes us all the way inside Caligari's cabinet. And once you enter, you can never emerge again. I saw this movie two days ago, and I'm still living inside it. Things are exploding wherever I look, household appliances are trying to kill me, and bizarre racial stereotypes are shouting at me.

Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that's because people don't understand that this isn't a movie, in the conventional sense. It's an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.

And the true genius of Transformers: ROTF is that Bay has put all of this excess of imagery and random ideas at the service of the most pandering movie genre there is: the summer movie. ROTF is like twenty summer movies, with unrelated storylines, smushed together into one crazy whole. You try in vain to understand how the pieces fit, you stare into the cracks between the narrative strands, until the cracks become chasms and the chasms become an abyss into which you stare until it looks deep into your own soul, and then you go insane. You. Do. Not. Leave. The Cabinet.

Michael Bay understands that summer movies are about two things: male anxiety, and pure id. That's why he casts Shia LaBoeuf, that supreme avatar of pure male inadequacy, in the lead role. LaBoeuf projects a pathetic, wall-eyed dorkhood, when he's not babbling like a tumor removed from Woody Allen's prostate that somehow achieved sentience. I imagine the DVD of ROTF will include a whole disk of outtakes where they had to stop filming because LaBoeuf was drooling on camera. As it is, the film includes several extreme closeups of LaBoeuf's dazed stare.

Where was I? Oh yes. So LaBoeuf, who's actually a fine actor, is the stand-in for the male viewers' greatest fears about themselves. No matter how great a loser they might be, they can't be as losery a loser as Sam Witwicky. And yet, Sam has awesome giant robots stomping around telling him he's the most important awesome person ever. And he has the hottest girlfriend in the universe, Megan Fox, for whom banality is a huge aphrodisiac. The more pathetic Sam gets, the more Fox's lips pout and her nipples point, like little Irish setters.

To make matters more awesome for the insecure males in the audience, Sam actually tosses aside his giant robot fanclub and his walking-pinup girlfriend, so he can have a normal life. Of course, this only leads to other robots and hawt chicks (who turn out to be robots too) throwing themselves at him and telling him how important he is. In the end, everybody learns to appreciate Sam just a bit more than they already did, and a booming voice tells him he's earned the "matrix of leadership" through his courage and stuff.

And then there's the "id" part, which is the part where stuff blows up real good, and huge machines smash each other up. And every single performance is so ridiculous that it looks down on "over the top" as if from a great height. It's the part of your brain that thinks it would be awesome to see robots with giant dangling testicles, or hot chicks turning into robot tentacle monsters, or "ghetto" robots that talk in inept hip-hop slang and smash each other playfully, or funny Jewish men who talk about their "schmear" and randomly strip to their G-strings. Is that going too far? Then let's go 100 times farther than that and see what happens!

Transformers: ROTF is so long, you'll need to wear adult diapers to it. But the movie's pure celebration of the primal urge, and unfiltered living, will make you rejoice in your adult diapers. You'll relieve yourself in your seat with a savage joy, your barbaric yawp blending in with the crowd's screams of excitement.

And yet and here's the part where I really think ROTF approaches "art movie" status the movie's id overload reaches such crazy levels that the fabric of reality itself starts to break down. Michael Bay has boasted about how every single shot in the movie has so much stuff going on in it, it would take your PC since the dawn of time to render one frame. After a few hours of this assault, you feel the chair melt and the floor of the movie theater becomes an angry mirror into your soul. Nothing is solid, nothing is real, everything Transforms.

The closest thing I can think of to this movie is the Wachowskis' Speed Racer, which had a similar kind of CG image overload, although it was only five hours long as opposed to ROTF's nine.

And around hour six of ROTF, something curious happens: the two components male enhancement and pure id start to clash, badly. Usually, in a summer movie, the two aspects go together like tits and ass: Jason Statham plays someone who faces the same insecurities as regular dudes, but he overcomes them, and in the process he blows up everything in the world. But creating that kind of fusion requires enslaving the id to the male enhancement, and that in turn means only going way over the top instead of crazy, stratospheric over the top. Michael Bay is not willing to settle for going way over the top, like other directors.

So you have a movie that tries to reassure men that they can actually be masters of their reality but then turns around and says that actually, reality is not real. There's no such thing as the "real world," and the only thing that's left for men to dominate is a nebulous domain of blurred shapes, which occasionally blurt nonsensical swear-words and slang from ethnic groups that have never existed. If you're drowning in an Olympic swimming pool full of hot chewing gum fondue, do you still care if Megan Fox likes you?

So yes, ROTF approaches the sublime, and then just keeps rocketing. Next stop: total anarchy. In a sense, it's the first war movie ever to convey a real sense of the fog of war, the confusion that comes with battle. Somewhere around hour nine, you will understand why friendly fire happens in wartime.

So I've gotten almost all the way through this review, and I still haven't summarized the movie's plot. Here goes. It's a couple years after the first movie, and Sam is going off to college, leaving his transforming car and his hot girlfriend, whom he still hasn't told he loves her. And meanwhile, the soldiers from the first movie are running around with a bunch of late-model GM cars and trucks, which turn into robots and fight other robots sometimes. Sam sees weird symbols which make no sense (and they still make no sense at the end of the movie) and they turn out to be the key to the location of a thing that can control another thing, that will enable the bad guys to destroy the sun. Sam has to embrace the heroic destiny he's rejected, so he can save us all from solarcide.

But that bare plot summary doesn't include the twenty or thirty other storylines that could also claim to be the movie's plot. There's the whole thing where someone from Washington D.C. wonders why the U.S. military is running around the globe with a bunch of late-model GM cars from outer space, and tries to put the kibosh on the military-Autobot complex. There's the teenager who's got a conspiracy website, that competes with another conpsiracy website which turns out to be the work of a secret agent who's decided that the best way to keep things secret is to put them on a website. (It works. I post secret stuff on io9 all the time.) Various robots die and then come back to life, and there's a whole strand about whether Decepticons (the bad ones) can become Autobots (the good ones). And there's the Fallen, who's sort of the movie's villain even though he barely shows up. And people from 17,000 BC who had weird teeth and fought robots. And the ancient Egyptians did stuff. And Sam's parents go to France except that they meet a robot and then they're in Egypt.

Really, I could go on and on. This movie starts out with a coherent storyline, for the first half hour or so, and then it just starts to spin faster and faster until the centrifuge of random events slams you into the walls. It doesn't help that there are 500 robots in the movie and they all look kind of the same.

Oh, but that's the other thing about ROTF. It's actually quite funny, a lot of the time. Some of the jokes fall flat, like the "twin" robots with the ghetto speak, and a lot of the stuff with John Turturro. But the movie's relentless silliness is mostly pretty hilarious, in a Saturday morning cartoon kind of way, and almost nothing in the movie seems intended to be taken seriously.

So, to sum up: Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is one of the greatest achievements in the history of cinema, if not the greatest. You could easily argue that cinema, as an artform, has all been leading up to this. It will destabilize your limbic system, probably forever, and make you doubt the solidity of your surroundings. Generations of auteurs have struggled, in vain, to create a cinematic experience as overwhelming, and as liberating, as ROTF.

Women as well as men, everyone watching this film will feel the dissolution of all their certainties, all their illusory grasp on the world... but after you fall into a brazen despair that the walls of reality have become toxic ice cream of a million flavors, you will gasp with a greater realization: that once the world is reduced, forever, to a kaleidoscope of whirling shapes, you are totally free. Nothing matters, effect precedes cause, fish spawn in mid-air, and you can do whatever you want. Let yourself go in your adult diaper, Michael Bay invites you. Feel the music of total excess stir inside your deepest core. It is your Allspark, your cube. And you are a Transformer.

Courtesy the credit crisis and big bailout packages, the figure trillion has suddenly become part of our everyday conversations. One trillion dollars, or 1 followed by 12 zeros, is lots of money but have you ever tried visualizing how big that number actually is?

For people who can visualize one million dollars, the comparison made on CNN should give you an idea about a trillion - if you start spending a million dollars every single day since Jesus was born, you still wouldn't have spend a trillion dollars.

Another mathematician puts it like this: 1 million seconds is about 11.5 days, 1 billion seconds is about 32 years while a trillion seconds is equal to 32,000 years.

Now if the above comparisons weren't really helpful, check another illustration that compares the built of an average human being against a stack of $100 currency notes bundles.

A bundle of $100 notes is equivalent to $10,000 and that can easily fit in your pocket. 1 million dollars will probably fit inside a standard shopping bag while a billion dollars would occupy a small room of your house.

With this background in mind, 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) is 1000 times bigger than 1 billion and would therefore take up an entire football field - the man is still standing in the bottom-left corner.

Related: Visualize Units of Measurement

Visualizing a Trillion: Just How Big That Number Is? (Published at Digital Inspiration)

The Los Angeles authorities said John Schiefer, 27, was the nation's first defendant to plead guilty to wiretapping charges (.pdf) in connection to using botnets.

Schiefer, who went by the online handle "acidstorm," faced as many as 60 years in prison and acknowledged using a botnet to remotely control computers across the United States. Once in control of the computers, the authorities said, (.pdf) his spybot malware allowed him to intercept computer communications. He mined usernames and passwords on accounts such as PayPal and made purchases totaling thousands of dollars without consent.

The authorities said he worked by day as an information security consultant with 3G Communications. After his guilty plea, Schiefer was hired at Mahalo, the so-called "human powered search engine." Its founder, Jason Calacanis wrote that the company failed to realize that the Los Angeles company had hired a man who had pleaded guilty to being a hacker.

Calacanis point out that Mahalo users' data was not breached by Schiefer.

Note to Mahalo Users: John's work is well-supervised. Mahalo follows strict security policies and we don't store any sensitive data anyway. (Even if one of our employees did go off the deep end, the most they would have access to would be your questions and answers on Mahalo Answersnot much damage can be done there since they're all public anyway).

The defendant was among eight individuals indicted or successfully prosecuted in a crack down on black hat hackers who use armies of zombie computers to commit financial fraud, attack web sites with floods of traffic and send spam. The crimes at issue involved more than $20 million in losses, according to the FBI.

The FBI dubbed the eight cases "Operation Bot Roast II" -- the second round of its investigations against botnets, one of the most dangerous threats online today. The first FBI crackdown on botnets was announced in June, 2007.

See Also:

• Weak Password Brings 'Happiness' to Twitter Hacker
• Miley Cyrus Hacker Raided by FBI
• Pop Superstar Sting Supports Pentagon Hacker, Condemns U.S. ...
• Palin E-Mail Hacker Says It Was Easy
• Israeli Hacker Says He Contemplated Suicide
• Miley Cyrus Hacker Used Celebrity MySpace Accounts for Spamming ...
• Guilty Plea: Blind Hacker Admits Harassment, Eavesdropping, Fraud ...
• Hardware Hacker Charged With Selling Cable Modems That Get Free ...
• Security Report: Most PCs Run Outdated, Hacker-Friendly Software ...
• Hacker Reportedly Kidnaps and Tortures Informant, Posts Picture as ...
• Valve Tried to Trick Half Life 2 Hacker Into Fake Job Interview ...
• Hacker Launches Botnet Attack via P2P Software

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut), who helms the Senate's government affairs committee, is annoyed enough that he bypassed the administrators of the system and sent a letter Friday straight to the Judicial Conference of the United States.

He's asking Judge Lee H. Rosenthal to explain why in the age of Google the Public Access to Court Electronic Records, or PACER, system isn't free for citizens. He'd also like to know why federal courts still aren't blacking out sensitive information in court documents as required in the 2002 E-Government Act (a piece of legislation dear to Lieberman).

He writes:

Seven years after the passage of the E-Government Act, it appears that little has been done to make these records freely available with PACER charging a higher rate than 2002. Furthermore, the funds generated by these fees are still well higher than the cost of dissemination ...

If the complaints sound familiar, perhaps you know of public.resource.org's Carl Malamud who's been running a virtual one-man campaign against the clunky and costly PACER system. It's just part of his campaign to "open-source the nation's operating system."

He's also been vigilantly searching through court documents and using automated tools and has found that some judicial districts routinely fail to redact information that would be very handy for identity thieves to have. He's also found just plainly embarrassing and invasive information like medical records of patients not even involved in litigation.

Malamud is running a campaign to become the nation's public printer, and from the looks of this letter, he's already got one senator's attention.

See Also:

• Online Rebel Publishes Millions of Dollars in U.S. Court Records ...
• Rogue Archivist Campaigns to Be Obama's Printer
• Contrarian Libertarian
• Death to Sleepy Stock Data

Kevin Donovan is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Kevin Donovan and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

Ah, lawyers. It's a love-hate relationship.

Just this week alone, I'm working with a literary attorney (publishing), an entertainment attorney (TV), and a corporate financing attorney (angel investments). All three are great.

Yesterday, though, I received the threatening letter below from Protocol Integrated Direct Marketing, whose call centers I recommend in the 4HWW. WTF?

Click to enlarge

But what did I say about Protocol specifically? Here it is, after an group intro where I indicate providers can also be compensated per-minute:

Protocol Marketing: One of classic sales-oriented call centers. I've used them for years.

I used them as a start-up CEO and felt the recommendation was valuable to readers. Blasphemer! Even if a correction were needed somewhere, the legal bitch slap isn't needed.

My response was simple: I called the lawyer and told him I would both have the mention removed and also announce the correction to readers (that's this blog post).

I suspect the CEO, Don Norsworthy, is not aware of this letter, as he would have no doubt approached it differently after recognizing a few things:

1. How you say something IS what you say.

Ever heard it's not just what you say, it's how you say it? I would go further: how you say something is what you say. A simple call or e-mail to Random House with we're getting too many calls for the wrong services; would you mind changing it to the following? would have sufficed. Have a normal human conversation and don't come off sounding like Robocop (video above).

But what if you need to be forceful? If someone's motives are clearly bad? I've dealt with this as well. First of all, if their actions are done with obvious malevolent-intent or law-breaking, you can be more forceful. Second, for those cases that fall in the middle, it's possible to be forceful and clear without being rude. For example:

It's come to our attention that [action your want them to cease in neutral terms]. I'm sure you are unaware, but this causes [negative consequences for you], which results in [other problems]. We thank you in advance for removing/stopping/correcting X as soon as possible [notice how less abrasive this is than 'immediately', but it achieves the same effect] and confirming when this has been done. Legal action is always a last resort, but if we do not receive confirmation within one business week, we'll be compelled to take appropriate next steps. Your fastest correction and confirmation is both important and appreciated.

2. It's counterproductive to threaten someone until you determine their incentives to refuse compliance.

In other words, what do I gain by refusing to remove them? Nothing. In fact, it's in my readers' best interest to make it accurate or remove it. Threatening me with Darth Vader-speak like compel compliance with [our] demand just pisses people off, and I could have still been a strong proponent of theirs. Too bad, so sad.

3. It's better to steer the golden goose rather than kill it.

If I'm sending them enough calls to inundate their phone lines (ironic in itself, since they're offering call center services), it would be in their best interest to just make the description more accurate, no? It's free advertising in a #1 NY Times bestseller to be published in 33 languages. How much advertising cost or cost-per-acquisition (CPA) does that save them if it's accurate? Knowing the revenue model and having worked with call centers, I'd guess hundreds of thousands of dollars at a minimum. To save what? A few thousand dollars in filtering out mom-and-pop callers at $.90 per minute? That's just penny-wise and pound-foolish.

4. Don't mistake symptoms with root problems, or confuse correlation with causation.

There are no income investment requirements that I can find listed anywhere on their call center site. It strikes me that their main problem relates to a system-wide issue with pre-qualification. The blurb in the 4HWW is just a symptom any successful PR or marketing that brings people to them will produce the same filtering bottleneck. Fixing the root cause instead of threatening the person who makes the root cause come to the surface.

If they have a problem with closer, Protocol might also consider removing the following from the second paragraph of their main call center page:

Whether you need a salesperson to close deals or specialized technical support services, Protocol's contact center services can help.

Confused? Me too.

5. If you threaten someone in a digital world, it might become what your prospective customers see first.

Principle one: Better not to threaten people whenever possible. Principle two: Google someone before you threaten them. If their PageRank and SEO beats yours, recognize that the public will see what they say first and foremost. Principle three: if someone is sending you business, and you threaten them because of a positive description (even containing inaccuracies), you are disincentivizing all partners, journalists, and customers from evangelizing for you if it becomes public. Given the new dynamics of personal branding in a digital age, being nice should be company policy, if not for cheap Google insurance.

Oh, and being rude sucks.

Be firm when necessary, but be nice whenever possible. Long-term, it doesn't pay to do otherwise.

In conc