I was asked to review a scenario for a friend this morning that deals with competition for mind share in an ongoing row between disparate entities. Ahem, feuding like Hatfields and McCoys as Waylon Jennings would say, and they're doing it primarily online.

Most of us choose to go about our business online without causing confrontation. You might not choose to be involved in a situation like this.

However, if you are put in this position tactics for a remedy are below:

1. Make sure all of your sites where dynamic content is being created on have RSS feeds
2. Make sure the sites are being indexed by Google . . . and recently cached by going to Google and typing in site:blogdomain.com blogdomain.com being the site URL
3. Most of the sites below (I was furnished with list including Topix and Blog Catalog to mention a couple) require registration and some code editing to claim the sites. Register with them and follow their protocol for submission into their directories for partner programs and additional synidcation
4. Create a press release(s) that contains links, not just copy, but links to the RSS feeds from clients site(s). Example, For more information on this ongoing issue subscribe to: http://www.blogdomain.com/rssfeed. The popular outlets have wide syndication
5. Use this tool from Google http://www.google.com/sktool/# and enter your sites and the sites of the competitor into it. Disregard the pricing listed on the page for AdWords and focus on the keywords. Compare the the keywords of your competitor with those of your sites and adjust accordingly in all digital communications. Organic search is king.
6. Next use this too from Google https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal once your keywords are set to see how you are doing
7. Depending on the blog or site platform you should have the ability to create keyword RSS feeds. Do this. Robots like structured data and favor feeds. Most, if not all, Google real-time alerts come from RSS feed links back to the source site.
8. Commenting on local (this is a regional battle for mind share) blogs with links to client site(s) and feeds is another way to increase chances of indexing and more favorable search results

If I were fighting this battle or one like it these are exact steps that I would take. So dear reader, if we ever lock horns, we may duel to a draw since you have my playbook.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

How to Win Mind Share in Online Battles is a post from: TechStartups.com

You can only neglect your users for so long before they leave you. The same goes for lovers. And I, was in love with Google Reader once.

Then one day I realized Google Reader wasn't loving me as much as I loved her. So I walked out. We see each other, maybe once a month or so, for short periods of time while we trade feeds.

Reasons

At first she didn't accept my privacy when I wanted to put authenticated feeds in the system. Then she wouldn't allow me to have my shared items back when I asked for them. I wanted all of them . . . but she only gave me 20 at a time. What about the thousands of items I had shared with her? Enough. I couldn't take it any longer. I had to do something about it.

Solution

Two years ago I began caching my Google Reader shared feed so I could access to all the items. Back then Reader hadn't added any features around sharing like search. But I had it once I was storing the items. What I had created then was a strange knowledge base that I could now query to find content that I found of value and had filtered for myself.

Value

Quickly, I added about 10 more shared feeds from friends and other people that I respected online. After about two weeks I had forgotten about Google Reader and found myself hanging out with my new friends . . . well, hanging with their knowledge bases. Here I was capturing tacit knowledge from some of the people I respected the most for their minds.

Filtering

What was now stored for my querying pleasure was content from the best publishers on the planet filtered by the sharpest people I could find. I began to build other tools around the data like grouping by publisher, sharer, keywords and gobs of new feeds.

I built tracking around it to see how robots traversed the feeds since the actual data was locked in a password protected site. Which turned out not to be that big of a deal since the title links were directed back to the publishers.

By adding new user controlled filtering mechanisms on top of pre-filtered data that was pouring into the system, it became much easier to produce pages and feeds for topics that interested me.

Here are a couple of feeds to demonstrate what I am talking about:

Keyword: http://www.filome.com/key/1/micropayments.rss
Group: http://www.filome.com/group/ksmith/1/Taminania_Brain_Science.rss
Sharer: http://www.filome.com/1/robdiana.rss
Likes: http://www.filome.com/likes/1/08100556675301148205.rss

What Reader is Doing Now

Since we broke up, she's been adding features but they are all at the feed level and not down to the individual publisher post level. The Bundles that she allows you to create are feed based. Instead of receiving 1 or 2 items of an interesting topic from a few publishers you get all the items in those feeds . . . many more than 2. It's like being in a forest and finding a twig that you want and your date cuts down 10 trees and hands them to you saying, Look, I got your twig. Happy now?

Where Reader is Going

For fear that they are going to be crushed by Facebook and Twitter, Google appears to have put some emphasis on the Reader team and either given the resources or freedom to improve the system. I would even venture to say that members of the Blogger team might be instrumental in some of these improvements. She should look to her friends for support during difficult times.

Where Reader Should Be

I'm gonna break it down nice and easy.

1. Grouping content at the individual post level
2. Feeds for everything
3. Portability of all shared/liked items from the day a user signs up
4. Content shopping cart
5. New UI 85% of web users don't read feeds. Get pretty.
6. Open up as a hub for syndication
7. Give publishers real metrics about subscribers, sharers and likers
8. Allow publishers to create community around these users (within Google)

I am still in love, but I have better things to do

My favorite part of her is still the shared feeds. Like perfume they remain long after she has left the room. They add value to the ecosystem and to the lives of those that have access to them. And since Google Reader is sitting on this massive mountain of filtered and expertly curated data, they should use it as their greatest asset in the coming walk-off with Facebook and Twitter.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

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.

Sponsor

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

A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find -- grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.

Robotic Technology Inc.'s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot -- that's right, "EATR" -- "can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable," reads the company's Web site.

That "biomass" and "other organically-based energy sources" wouldn't necessarily be limited to plant material -- animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they'd be plentiful in a war zone.

You know, my editors frown on me for swearing, for good reason, but in this case: SERIOUSLY, PENTAGON, WHAT THE FUCK?!?

I am having a really hard time trying to figure out what the military purpose of a robot that eats dead bodies is. Maybe the idea is these robots will make it difficult for independent observers to quantify casualties? Maybe President Sarah Palin will nominate one to the Supreme Court? The article states that EATR is a "platform" that things could be "built upon" -- like an "ambulance" or a "mobile gunship." But it seems to me that the ambulances and gunships we have now are perfectly okay, and, at any rate, DON'T MAKE MY SOUL HURT.

Speaking of:

The advantages to the military are that the robot would be extremely flexible in fuel sources and could roam on its own for months, even years, without having to be refueled or serviced.

So then: some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. But it looks like it's going to end in a hail of white-hot terror at the hands of marauding, corpse-eating Roombas.

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]

Recently Stefan Andreasen, founder and CTO of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Kapow, demonstrated his company's value around managing data services quickly, without hand coding. At the Web 2.0 Expo in April, he demonstrated a, iPhone mashup application created using Kapow tools and IBM Rational EGL as an example of the conference's Power of Less theme.

Traditionally, it would have taken at least three months and significant IT resources to create and integrate a web data source and serve it to a mobile device, Andreasen explained prior to the demo, but today, through rapid application development technology from Kapow Technologies and IBM, two developers spent a total of three hours creating a dynamic personalized web application for the iPhone.

Kapow boasts that the Web Data Server 7.0 is the industry's only platform that can access, enrich and serve web data with complete assurance 100 percent of data, 100 percent of the time.

The value is more than for convenience. More than ever, web-based content plays an essential role in many business processes and analytical presentations. Doing operational and business ecology business intelligence (BI) requires fast and easy integration of web-based content and data assets.

With Kapow's patented visual development and Web data automation platform customers can gain data access to any intranet or extranet business application, as well as any website or application on the web, the company says. This cuts out manual approaches, now quite common.

Rapid data access is vital for today's agile application development, like mobile, WOA and other types of agile business applications, Andreasen says. Regardless of whether

. . . today, through rapid application development technology from Kapow Technologies and IBM, two developers spent a total of three hours creating a dynamic personalized Web application for the iPhone.

or not developers have programmatic access via an application programming interface (API), Kapow provides easy access to enterprise and public web data, then extracts and transforms it into a standard web service or data feed, he explains.

A key element in the data server are the Kapow robots that the company says use standard web protocols and security mechanisms to automate the navigation and interaction with any web application or website, providing secure and reliable access to the underlying data and business logic.

Offering an example of an application built with its technologies, the company points to a hypothetical sales app providing a full 360-degree view of prospects and customers by automatically extracting data from internal customer relationship management (CRM) systems, subscription data feeds such as Edgar Online, corporate sites, blogs and social media sites including LinkedIn, Technorati and Facebook.

New features in the Kapow Web Data Server 7.0 version include:

• 100 Percent Browser Engine Compliance, which handles complex web data sources, including JavaScript and AJAX intensive Websites.
• Intuitive point-and-click integrated development environment (IDE) for surgical data extraction accuracy with no coding.
• Scalability improvements offering real-time performance optimization and the ability to download large file downloads directly to disk for enterprise scale projects
• Browser-Based Scheduler, which provides automation of data refresh and synchronization schedules.
• Authentication for RoboServer, which provides seamless integration with existing enterprise security and authentication systems.

Availability and Pricing

Further information and pricing is availabile at http://kapowtech.com/index.php/products/overview.

BriefingsDirect contributor Rich Seeley provided research and editorial assistance on this post. He can be reached at RichSeeley@aol.com.

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.

The essence of the dispute is that Power Ventures, instead of developing its interface through the Facebook Connect developer program, created a Facebook user account and accessed Facebook content through that account. Facebook alleged that the creation and use of that account was in violation of the Facebook Terms of Use. Facebook Complaint 24, 41. The complaint also alleges that Power Ventures used the interface that it created to induce Facebook users to share their usernames and passwords, and then utilized that information to access Facebook servers via its interface in a manner that violated the Facebook ToU.

The complaint alleges that the ToU prohibits a variety of activities, including, among other things, solicitation of passwords or personally identifying information for commercial or unlawful purposes; using or attempting to use the account of another user or creating a false identity; using automated scripts; impersonating another person or entity; sending junk mail or spam; harvesting e-mail addresses; registering for more than one account; and using Facebook's website for commercial use without the express permission of Facebook. The ToU also provides that the limited license granted to access and use the site terminates when the site is used other than as specifically authorized herein.

The copyright claim alleges that in violation of the ToU, Power Ventures used its account to access and copy the Facebook Web site, including the Facebook home page for which Facebook has obtained a copyright registration. Complaint 31, 70. Judge Fogel concluded that the allegations of the complaint made out a sufficient claim of copyright infringement because Power Ventures need only access and copy one page to commit copyright infringement. The court also found that the ToU prohibited downloading, scraping or distributing content from the Facebook Web site content except that belonging to the user, and that in any event, using automated methods, i.e., data mining, robots, scraping, or similar data gathering or extraction methods to access any content were also prohibited by the ToU. Thus, the court found that the allegation that Power Ventures accessed Facebook via automated means constituted made out a claim of direct copyright infringement, while the allegation that Facebook users utilized the Power.com interface to access their own profile pages made out claim of secondary copyright infringement.

Judge Fogel also declined to dismiss Facebook's claim that the use of automated scripts to access Facebook copyrighted content bypassed specific technical measures designed to block such access and thus violated the DMCA. The trademark infringement claims were sustained based upon the inclusion in the complaint of a screenshot illustrating the use of the Facebook mark on an e-mail sent by Power Ventures to Facebook users. The court did order Facebook to file a short statement clarifying the basis for its California unfair competition claim.

The complaint also alleges a federal CAN-SPAM claim stemming from the transmission of e-mails to other Facebook users encouraging them to use the Power.com interface. According to the opinion, Power Ventures abandoned its challenge to the sufficiency of the CAN-SPAM claim, as well as its challenge to the sufficiency of the complaint under the CFAA. The CFAA claim also is grounded on the allegation that Power Ventures's access to Facebook's computers was unauthorized because it was in violation of the Facebook ToU.

The court's refusal to dismiss Facebook's claims demonstrates that careful drafting of a Web site terms of use is essential to obtaining legal redress for unauthorized access, particularly unauthorized access by competitors and others for commercial purposes. Access that violates the clear proscriptions of a ToU can form the basis for a multiplicity of legal claims, thereby maximizing the chances of a successful challenge to unwanted access.

• Metafilter comment from January 6
• User Friendly from January 12

• Metafilter comment from January 26
• User Friendly from February 16

• Metafilter comment from January 26
• User Friendly from February 13

• Metafilter comment from February 8
• User Friendly from February 12

• Metafilter comment from January 21
• User Friendly from January 27

Redirects being abused by spammers

• Scripts that redirect users to a file on the serversuch as a PDF documentcan sometimes be vulnerable. If you use a content management system (CMS) that allows you to upload files, you might want to make sure the links go straight to the file, rather than going through a redirect. This includes any redirects you might have in the downloads section of your site. Watch out for links like this:
  

example.com/go.php?url=
example.com/ie/ie40/download/?

• Internal site search result pages sometimes have automatic redirect options that could be vulnerable. Look for patterns like this, where users are automatically sent to any page after the "url=" parameter:
  

example.com/search?q=user+search+keywords&url=

• Systems to track clicks for affiliate programs, ad programs, or site statistics might be open as well. Some example URLs include:
  

example.com/coupon.jsp?code=ABCDEF&url=
example.com/cs.html?url=

• Proxy sites, though not always technically redirects, are designed to send users through to other sites and therefore can be vulnerable to this abuse. This includes those used by schools and libraries. For example:
  

proxy.example.com/?url=

• In some cases, login pages will redirect users back to the page they were trying to access. Look out for URL parameters like this:
  

example.com/login?url=

• Scripts that put up an interstitial page when users leave a site can be abused. Lots of educational, government, and large corporate web sites do this to let users know that information found on outgoing links isn't under their control. Look for URLs following patterns like this:

example.com/redirect/
example.com/out?
example.com/cgi-bin/redirect.cgi?

Is my site being abused?

• Check if abused URLs are showing up in Google. Try a site: search on your site to see if anything unfamiliar shows up in Google's results for your site. You can add words to the query that are unlikely to appear in your content, such as commercial terms or adult language. If the query [site:example.com viagra] isn't supposed to return any pages on your site and it does, that could be a problem. You can even automate these searches with Google Alerts.
  

• You can also watch out for strange queries showing up in the Top search queries section of Webmaster Tools. If you have a site dedicated to the genealogy of the landed gentry, a large number of queries for porn, pills, or casinos might be a red flag. On the other hand, if you have a drug info site, you might not expect to see celebrities in your top queries. Keep an eye on the Message Center in Webmaster Tools for any messages from Google.
  

• Check your server logs or web analytics package for unfamiliar URL parameters (like "=http:" or "=//") or spikes in traffic to redirect URLs on your site. You can also check the pages with external links in Webmaster Tools.
  

• Watch out for user complaints about content or malware that you know for sure can not be found on your site. Your users may have seen your domain in the URL before being redirected and assumed they were still on your site.
  

What you can do

• Change the redirect code to check the referer, since in most cases everyone coming to your redirect script legitimately should come from your site, not a search engine or elsewhere. You may need to be permissive, since some users' browsers may not report a referer, but if you know a user is coming from an external site you can stop or warn them.
  

• If your script should only ever send users to an internal page or file (for example, on a page with file downloads), you should specifically disallow off-site redirects.
  

• Consider using a whitelist of safe destinations. In this case your code would keep a record of all outgoing links, and then check to make sure the redirect is a legitimate destination before forwarding the user on.
  

• Consider signing your redirects. If your website does have a genuine need to provide URL redirects, you can properly hash the destination URL and then include that cryptographic signature as another parameter when doing the redirect. That allows your own site to do URL redirection without opening your URL redirector to the general public.
  

• If your site is really not using it, just disable or remove the redirect. We have noticed a large number of sites where the only use of the redirect is by spammersit's probably just a feature left turned on by default.
  

• Use robots.txt to exclude search engines from the redirect scripts on your site. This won't solve the problem completely, as attackers could still use your domain in email spam. Your site will be less attractive to attackers, though, and users won't get tricked via web search results. If your redirect scripts reside in a subfolder with other scripts that don't need to appear in search results, excluding the entire subfolder may even make it harder for spammers to find redirect scripts in the first place.
  

• You can also use Webmaster Tools to remove URLs. Chances are that the spammers have also hacked and abused other sites to generate links to the spammed section of your site. If you see suspicious sites or spammed forums linking in, feel free to report those to us, preferably with the verified spam report form in Webmaster Tools.
  

The Cartoon Network LP v. CSC Holdings, Inc., No. 07-1480-cv(L) & 07-1511-cv(CON) (2d Cir. Aug. 4, 2008)

The Second Circuit has issued an interesting and potentially important ruling that Cablevision's DVR as a service does not infringe copyright law. This ruling reverses the district court's summary judgment for the plaintiff and opens the way for Cablevision to roll out its DVR service offering in the Second Circuit.

The good news is that the opinion eliminates the odd regulatory distinctions between DVRs as a device and DVR as a service. The bad news is that to reach this conclusion, the Second Circuit has to override a lot of adverse precedent, and I'm not sure that other circuits will find this panel's arguments entirely convincing. As a result, it will be interesting to see if Cablevision interprets this opinion as a greenlight for a national rollout.

Thus, while the opinion is good news for DVR service offerings, the opinion leaves open a lot of questions that will have to be answered in the future. I think it's safe to say that this opinion is hardly the last stop in our journey.

Buffering Isn't Infringement

Cablevision's DVR service splits a broadcast feed into two streams, including a "buffer" copy that goes to a router where it is stored for no more than 1.2 seconds as the router looks to see if any consumers have asked for the program to be recorded for them. If yes, the data goes into their private storage areas; if no, the stream is discarded. The court holds that this buffer copy isn't fixed because it's not embodied "for more than a transitory duration."

To reach this conclusion, the court has to fight against a lot of precedent, especially the MAI v. Peak holding that a copy into RAM is fixed, even though that copy may be embodied for even less time than the buffer copy at issue here. The court says that MAI v. Peak stands for the proposition that these short-duration RAM copies can be fixed but are not automatically fixed. The court says that in MAI (without citing any actual facts from the MAI case), the software surely was resident in RAM for "at least several minutes" while in this case the copies exist for only 1.2 seconds, and this factual difference explains the different conclusion regarding fixations.

There is a major slippery slope problem with this conclusion. Is 3 seconds fixed? 10 seconds? I could keep going, and the court deftly side-steps this problem. Nevertheless, this holding offers some promise for certain types of web activity. First, this ruling might excuse copies made by scrapers/robots who download copyrighted pages to extract unprotectable information on the page. This case suggests that the copies made to download the page and perhaps to process it are not fixed, at least so long as they are flushed really quickly (1.2 seconds or less would be good). Second, this case seems to provide another defense to the otherwise problematic argument that web browsing is infringement; so long as the user hits the back button (and kills any local cache) really fast, no fixation of the web page. The opinion deliberately limits itself to Cablevision's system of overwriting the data, so that may limits its overall applicability, but this case creates a new category of copies that are embodied in a medium but are not fixed, and this offers some hope for defendants.

Users, Not Cablevision, Make the Other Copies

Even if the buffer copies aren't fixed (and therefore cannot support an infringement claim), Cablevision still stores a copy of the broadcasted works in its storage area, where users can download the programs. There's no fixation problem with these, so plaintiffs challenge these copies as both impermissible copies and public performances. The court rejects these arguments, concluding that Cablevision is a sufficiently passive entity that the users and not Cablevision are doing the legally significant activity. Thus, Cablevision is at most exposed to contributory liability for these user activities. Because the plaintiffs had waived allegations of contributory infringement, Cablevision gets summary judgment.

To reach this conclusion, the court ignores Cablevision's active role in setting up its systems and providing ongoing services, including selecting which broadcast channels are DVRable in its system. Instead, the court sees this fact pattern as identical to DVR as a device, where the DVR manufacturer isn't directly liable for how the DVR is used. This is consistent with the uncited Field v. Google case, but it conflicts with numerous copyright cases where the service provider's hosting of files gives the provider more legal responsibility over the system usage than a device maker would have. Similarly, the court distinguishes the coursepack cases on the basis that a human employee of the copyshop presses the "copy" button, because here the system works automatically without manual intervention from Cablevision.

Note, of course, that the court didn't discuss contributory liability, which also raises the ugly and risky question of whether Cablevision users are directly infringing by using the DVR as a service. I think there is helpful language in the Sony Betamax case about DVRing as a fair use, but I doubt anyone wants to see that battle relitigated.

Similarly, with respect to the argument that the distribution of the files from Cablevision's storage area is a public performance, the court says that Cablevision isn't "transmitting" as required by the statute because the user is making the legally significant action.

Further, Cablevision's delivery of the file isn't "to the public" as required by the statute. This latter conclusion is totally fine with me as a matter of common sense interpretation of those words, but it runs contrary to numerous messy and analytically questionable precedents regarding the central serving of copyrighted works to private spaces, such as Redd Horne and On Command. The court deftly tries to evade those, but after 2 readings I still can't figure out what the court said. Maybe the third time will be the charm. I think it has something do with the fact that Cablevision encoded each file delivery to its consumers so that each file delivery could be consumed only by a single playback machine. Let me know if you can figure out what the court was saying here and how it might apply to anyone else. Because the ruling seems to let Cablevision freely broadcast third party content to potentially all of its subscribers without constituting a public performance, I think there may be some exploitable holes here.

One more open question: this opinion makes me wonder if the MP3.com opinion from SDNY is still good law. I'd need to go back through that opinion, but as I recall, a lot turned on the fact that MP3.com tried to act as a proxy for its users. Here, the court treats such proxy activities as passive, and perhaps that analysis would fit the MP3.com facts as well.

Conclusion

I'm excited about this opinion because it eliminates some of the legal anomalies between DVR as a device and DVR as a service. In many situations, DVR as a service will be a better consumer experience, and it is unquestionably better for the environment, so I'm happy that this opinion tries to get copyright law out of the way to enable this result. At the same time, the appellate court set up enough conflicts with other precedent, and sufficiently caveated its opinions to address the narrow facts in Cablevision, that I expect this case resolved nothing definitively. That will have to wait the many cases in our future.

Even so, I remain amused (in a cynical way, not a funny way) that the broadcasters are still fighting against giving consumers what they really want, which is to consume their content at the time and place of the consumer's own choosing. Eventually, broadcasters are going to have to bite the bullet and post their content onto the Internet for viewers to enjoy at their convenience. There always will be consumers who want to consume the content upon first release, but after that, content that's unavailable to consumers is just wasting away instead of continuing to make money for the broadcasters.

Chop Shop, the guys who made the great weRobot t-shirt with 51 robots, recently came out with The Internets featuring 29 different internet memes.

Dave Shea posted the t-shirt illustration on Flickr, providing annotations for the images which identify each meme, along with a relevant link.

via Waxy

ShareThis

This week, then, Cisco Systems announced a new class of enterprise switches called the Nexus 7000 intended to replace its Catalyst router family, which is reaching its End of Life. To me the Nexus 7000, which costs from $75,000-$200,000, looks a heck of a lot like a mainframe computer. To Cisco it looks like a frigging gold mine.

These chances to tell customers they should throw out their perfectly fine equipment come along rarely, and in this case the opportunity to throw out the old and replace with new is particularly huge and gratifying because there is so much of the old stuff to get rid of. The equipment that will be replaced with Nexus 7000 racks was generally installed during the glory days of 1999-2000, when dot-coms and V.90 modems ruled the world, there was little streaming video, and we didn't really buy all that much stuff over the Internet. In anticipation of future growth back then (and just because they could), companies like Cisco pushed so much network hardware into the sales channel that it has taken until now for most of that equipment to finally become obsolete. So now they can push a boatload of new equipment into data centers in exactly the same way.

I'm not saying the Nexus 7000 is not needed or that it is bad in any way. Quite the contrary. Cisco has spent four years and $1 billion building a new generation of routers with new capabilities that are intended to be so compelling they'll keep customers from jumping to Juniper or some other competitor. And along with ensuring customer loyalty, the Nexus 7000s that start rolling out shortly will eventually enable whole new kinds of data services, most importantly robust IP multicasting as I described in this space a few weeks ago.

One huge difference between the Nexus and Catalyst lines, for example, is that Nexus comes with IP multicast turned "on," while Catalyst came with multicast turned "off" as a default. A Nexus 7000 chassis can pump up to 15 terabits per second, which is a heck of a lot of bits. Just for example, if we imagine a DVD-quality H.264 video stream running typically at one megabit per second, that Nexus 7000 could seemingly support 15 MILLION such data streams. In practical service, however, where the Nexus 7000 would be providing bandwidth for storage and network management in addition to pure file service, it is more reasonable to expect a fully tricked-out Nexus 7000 to support more like one million or so concurrent users. It is difficult at this point to even estimate the total cost of that tricked-out Nexus loaded with 10-gigabit-per-second network cards and hundreds of terabytes of storage, but it will undoubtedly set a new low cost point for per-subscriber hardware. Cisco is going to sell a lot of these puppies to telephone companies upgrading their DSL plants to offer IP TV.

What strikes me from reading the Nexus specs and that of the associated NX-OS operating system is how this new switch reminds me of an old mainframe. Nearly all services are virtualized, with multiple copies of the OS starting and stopping as needed. Everything is redundant, isolated, and intended for nonstop service. It is hard to imagine when, if ever, you'd even need to reboot. And while the Nexus supports network connections up to 10 gigabits per second, the really fast networking takes place in parallel between cards over a passive backplane. The Nexus 7000 is a data center in a rack, only with dramatically reduced cooling and power requirements which suggest to me that Cisco has a growth strategy for this architecture that will, over time, make it look more and more like a big computer and less like a router. Throw on a virtualized AIX or Solaris and the Nexus will eventually reveal that its true competition is less likely to be Juniper than it is IBM, HP, and Sun.

Remember this new platform has to last for a decade. From today's perspective making it still attractive 10 years from now requires subsuming as many computing services as one can imagine, not just undermining cable TV.

And speaking of undermining, many readers have been asking me to put in context IBM's recent move to cut pay for almost 8,000 service and support employees. I have resisted commenting to this point mainly because I see my job here as covering stories that AREN'T being handled well (or at all) elsewhere. But in the case of this story the Associated Press and others have done a good job of explaining the problem from the perspective of the employees, so I haven't had to.

But readers keep asking and there does seem to be an arm's length view of the situation that hasn't been well explained to date, so here goes.

If you aren't familiar with the story, IBM was sued several years ago by employees who were classified as exempt and therefore not entitled to overtime pay, yet those employees felt that had they worked at some other company their duties would have been considered non-exempt. IBM lost the case, paid a $65 million settlement in 2006, but took until now to decide that it ought to reduce by 15 percent the base pay of the affected employees in order to keep the settlement revenue-neutral for the company. If IBM had to pay overtime, it would tie that overtime to a lower base pay, thus keeping its costs steady.

While this probably makes total sense in the IBM accounting department, the change was a surprise to the affected workers, who say they are hurt by the lower base since it also cuts their vacation pay and IBM's contribution to their 401K. It might be easy to point to that $65 million settlement as making up for some of this, except that many IBM employees who were eligible to participate in the settlement for some reason didn't sign up for it and no longer can. Now there's a communication problem that needs exploration.

What the big picture shows here is the apparent end of IBM's tradition of respect for the individual. For most of its corporate history IBM has been a pioneer -- a model -- for corporate responsibility, but that era seems to be over. Maybe there is no more fat left to trim so the company is cutting muscle, instead. But I think there is more to it than that. I think this is a logical eventuality of IBM becoming a truly global corporation, not just an American company that does business abroad.

Despite the dark stories I have written about IBM over the last couple years, the company's latest financial reports were very good and the earnings guidance it gave to Wall Street was positively glowing. This makes little sense looking at the company from a U.S. perspective, where customers are upset and profits appear to be fleeting. Cutting through the recent IBM financials shows, in fact, that the company makes little or no money in the U.S. and quite a bit of money internationally. Nearly all of IBM's current profit, in fact, can be attributed to a single condition -- the weak dollar. International sales and profits are bigger mainly because the dollar is so much smaller than it used to be -- a condition that is likely to continue, hence the glowing earnings forecast.

Maybe what IBM is doing is turning itself into a business that is mainly NOT in the U.S. Those rosy forecasts could be based on an active plan to essentially abandon the bottom of the U.S. market in favor of the top of every international market. It hurts the U.S. employees (especially those in services) but makes sense in so many ways. The model it scarily reminds me of is Tyco, which went so far as to switch its incorporation to Bermuda.

And what if this strategy fails or the dollar recovers? Then they'll ramp up production of those vampire robots, I'm sure.

Sandy Weisz took some great photos of the event.

A bunch of folks blogged reviews: What I Learned at the SEED Conference | DK Design Studio SEED review | Visual Rinse SEED review | Fishsuit review (with 7-page PDF) | Giant Robots SEED review.

We're looking forward to SEED III. When we have a date we'll let everyone know. Thanks again to everyone who attended. We hope you found the conference valuable.

P.S. Special thanks to Sarah for handing registration and administrative details. She made it look easy all while handling a full load of 37signals customer support on a particularly heavy day.

NOTE FROM DANNY: We've talked with Wired about the situation, and they are putting a robots.txt block on links coming out of the wiki so that links won't pass credit. Also, our apologies to Wired in that we've ended up causing a run on the wiki with new pages being created. That was definitely not our intent -- the headline of getting a free link, and the article itself, was more tongue-in-cheek about how the system was and might further get abused, rather than advice for people to really misuse the wiki for promotional purposes. I don't agree with that type of abuse in general, and as someone who has had to deal with it in comments or submissions to our forums, it's no fun. In hindsight, we probably should have just dropped a note pointing out the vulnerability. We've also asked that our test page be completely removed -- it has served its purpose now.

Click to continue reading...

There's a good deal of fuss being made in the tech press today about some recently-revealed patent applications from Google - TechCrunch, Information Week, and ComputerWorld are among the media outlets with the details. The basic idea behind the patents is that it's now possible to recognize text in arbitrary images - pictures of street scenes or the interior of stores, for example. And where there is text, there is an indexing-and-search opportunity for Google.

Much of the speculation focuses on a section of the patent that contemplates a sort of Google Store Indexer, in which a robot with a camera roves up and down the aisles of a grocery or hardware store, taking pictures of the stock on shelves which can then be indexed for location and content. While an interesting thought, it doesn't take much reflection to realize that currently it would be cost-prohibitive to roll out this sort of service on any but a very limited scale. The average grocery store, for example, would need to be reindexed daily or weekly to stay up to date, and there's a limit to the number of robots that even the behemoth of Mountain View can deploy.

However, reading through the actual patent verbiage does turn up another interesting section:

In one implementation, advertisements are presented along with the presented image. For example, an advertisement can be presented for the business identified in the image. Alternatively, one or more advertisements can be presented for alternative businesses. Additionally, the advertisement can be for one or more products associated with the business in the presented image, user search terms, or according to other criteria.

Assuming that the actual image recognition works, that implementation is something that Google could use today, on one of its current products: Google Street View. There's an existing database of a huge number of photographs in enough resolution to permit text recognition, just begging to be monetized. How long will it be before you AdWords purchase on accountant can pop up a small ad on screen anyone strolls by an accountant's office in this virtual rendition of the world? Not too long, if this scenario comes to pass.

Of course, it's worth bearing in mind that Google, like any other big company, has a portfolio of patents that they'll never actually use. The road between idea and workable implementation is long and twisted, and many things don't make it out of the labs. But if this one does, I'm willing to bet that advertising opportunities drive it at least as much as any altruistic desire to index the world.

Share/Send

Let's take a slightly different look.

Click to continue reading...

The extension of the application would be that images and video indexed by Google would be searchable by the text located within the image or video itself, a big step forward in indexing that has not previously been available.

Information Week suggests that privacy issues raised by Google Maps Street View will get more complicated as eventually YouTube videos will be indexable via the text that appears within them.

A full copy of the patent application Recognizing Text In Images can be viewed here.

Some choice lines from the patent:

Digital images can include a wide variety of contentFor example, digital images can illustrate landscapes, people, urban scenes, and other objects. Digital images often include text. Digital images can be captured, for example, using cameras or digital video recorders. Image text (i.e., text in an image) typically includes text of varying size, orientation, and typeface. Text in a digital image derived, for example, from an urban scene (e.g., a city street scene) often provides information about the displayed scene or location. A typical street scene includes, for example, text as part of street signs, building names, address numbers, and window signs.

I may be stating the blatantly obvious when I say that if Google has found a way to index text in static images and video this is a great leap forward in the progression of search technology. This will make every book in the Google Books database really searchable, with the next step being YouTube, Flickr (or Picasa Web) and more. The search capabilities of the future just became seriously advanced.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Believe it or not, my strategy since the beginning of Copyblogger has been to pretty much forget search engines exist. Don't get me wrong I'm not doing anything to annoy them, and I certainly don't turn away visitors from search engines. I just don't depend on them for traffic.

This is a timely post because of the Google has been dropping the PageRank on some sites that sell links. Danny Sullivan, a premier search journalist, contacted Google about this and this is what they said:

[Google] confirmed that PageRank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links.

In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached to prevent them from ranking well.

Maybe Google even targeted this site because we've gone down from PR5 to PR4.

How to Stop Relying on Google Traffic

Brian's post gives three practical ways to stop relying on Google. First, he talks about focusing on getting repeat visitors through subscriptions. Bloggers should always be encouraging their readers to subscribe to their RSS feed. If you have a readership that is not very tech-savvy, you should also promote a RSS subscription through email. If you have a static site, build a list. I recommend Aweber for this.

Second, Brian tells us to get traffic from social media sites. The social media audience is among the fastest growing audiences on the web. The key to social media marketing is producing content the social media audience will like and building friendships with the users so they will vote on your content. Don't just rely on the big sites like Digg, Propeller, and StumbleUpon. There are niche sites too that can send more targeted traffic. Also, Brian considers blogs social media sites. I've never thought about blogs that way, but blogs do have a big social element.

Third, Brian says we should start selling. As you begin to build your subscriber base and get traffic from social media sites, you'll build trust and a reputation that allows you to sell effectively. Whether it's advertising, reviews, links, ebooks, or other products, don't be afraid to sell to your existing audience. People like to buy quality products from people they trust.

Totally Ignore Google?

If you have SEO skills, this doesn't mean you should stop doing keyword research and trying to hit the top 10 of Google. However, you should also focus on the above three tactics. If you focus too much on Google, Google could wreck you and you would lose most of your traffic. Build a defensible site that survives even if Google bans it.

Further Reading

• Build Websites Like Search Engine Traffic Did Not Exist
• Content Without Subscribers Will Become Worthless
• Robots Don't Spend Money Online, People Do (This relates to Brian's third point about selling more.)

Conclusion

Are you depending on Google too much?

For more marketing tips, subscribe to Net Business Blog.