This is one of the best presentations I’ve seen concerning the impact of viral factors in social games:
Metrics for Social Games by David King and Siqi Chen
View more documents from justinsmith.
Foreign Language Domain Name URL’s
They’re coming! Perhaps around mid 2010, domain name URL’s written in non-English language will become available for the internet. So a new gold rush is set to begin.
The Internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes in its four-decade history with the expected approval this week of international domain names — or addresses — that can be written in languages other than English, an official said Monday.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN — the non-profit group that oversees domain names — is holding a meeting this week in Seoul. Domain names are the monikers behind every Web site, e-mail address and Twitter post, such as “.com” and other suffixes.
One of the key issues to be taken up by ICANN’s board at this week’s gathering is whether to allow for the first time entire Internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letters. That could potentially open up the Web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic — in which Russian is written.
“This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago,” Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, told reporters, calling it a “fantastically complicated technical feature.” He said he expects the board to grant approval on Friday, the conference’s final day.
This is going to be a big change, and we will keep on top of it and report about it on this blog. Here is the full article on the matter.
How To Build A Web Business
Entrepreneurs, here is a great video and document from Mint CEO Aaron Patzer on how to build a web business from the ground up. Any serious webpreneur should take note and follow this advice.
Mint CEO Aaron Patzer on Startups from Techcrunch on Vimeo.
Ideas Versus Execution
Derek Silvers of Oreilly net wrote a simple but great article on the value of ideas related to that of execution. It’s a concept I’ve felt but never knew exactly how to articulate.
All entrepreneurs seem to understand, “It’s all about the execution”, that’s been the mantra, at least for webpreneurs. This article expresses the relationship between Ideas and Execution in a brilliant way. Thanks Derek for the insight!
Future of Marketing and Mass Communication
Dave Lakhani has an interesting post on the future of marketing and mass communication in which he coorelates it with singularity.
So as I studied The Singularity it occurred to me that the answer to how do you get your message to the masses and have it be heard most likely won’t be answered by us, it is much more likely to be answered by the individuals collectively that we hope to communicate to. In fact, it is my belief that another form of singularity will occur, in which potential customers will become evermore sophisticated in their ability to filter and consolidate information. As they become more sophisticated, they create individual influence streams from which they get all of their information, information that is highly personalized and highly selected. Rather than trying to increase the number of people they follow they become increasingly selective about who they receive information from ultimately reducing the noise while becoming much more connected to the channel through which they receive information. RSS was the first glimpse and promise of the idea that you could consolidate the information that you wanted into one single feed. In social media FriendFeed is trying to do that. And overall web wide Twine is also trying to do it. But for most consumers they don’t go far enough.
Top Industries For Starting A Business
Inc. Magazine outlines the best industries for entrepreneurs to start a new business right now. They are as follows:
- Iphone Apps
- Healthcare Technologies
- Beer, Wine Liquor Wholesale
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Home Health Care
- Yoga Products and Services
- Technical and Trade Schools
- Fast Casual Dining
- Green Consulting
- Niche Consulting
- Education Technology
- Temporary Staffing
- Government Services
- Accounting Services
- Repair Services
- Self Improvement
- Energy
Sales 101: Manipulation Versus Persuasion
Great video on the difference between manipulation and persuasion in sales situations. The basic premise Dave Lakhani outlines on the difference between manipulation and persuasion in the sales process comes down to one thing… Intent.
Dave’s definition on persuasion: “Getting people to come to their own most logical conclusion which happens to be one that you share”.
Dave goes on to outline 4 tools to persuasion; 1) Storytelling. Works subliminally and generates immediate response and reaction. 2) Be Seen to sell? Let people know you are selling, gives you credibility and authenticity. 3) Transfer of power, such as celebrity endorsements and testimonials. 4) Develop persuasive persona, even use your voice different, your body language different depending on the situation, adapt your persona to the situation.
FTC To Crack Down On Bloggers?
It seems Big Brother may be coming to the Blogsphere. Proposed FTC guidelines can be found here. While existing FTC rules already ban deceptive and unfair business practices. These new proposed guidelines aim to clarify the law and for the first time, specifically include bloggers, which they define loosely as anyone writing a personal journal online.
If these guidelines are approved, bloggers will have to back up claims and disclose whether or not they are being compensated for what they say in their writings.
The FTC does not currently specify how they plan to go about this, but they say they could order violators to stop and pay restitution to customers if found in breach of such trusts. It could also ask the Justice Department to sue for civil penalties.
Any type of blog could be scrutinized, not just ones that specialize in reviews. Even for example one line twitter posts are subject to these new guidelines. The FTC certainly will have a big job ahead of them as new communications channels continually emerge. Even advertisers now are paying some Twitter users to post tweets.
The FTC says the guidelines would cover all such arrangements, regardless of the medium. The FTC commissioners will be voting on the final guidelines this summer.
SEO News And Information
Here is a great tool for staying on top of the SEO industry: http://seo.alltop.com/
Importance Of XML Sitemaps For SEO
Randfish from SEOmoz has a descent article on top 12 mistakes made by newbie’s to SEO/SEM. In it, he list’s #6 as being the failure to include a sitemap. Specifically, an XML based sitemap, that is then submitted properly to Google using their webmaster tools.
Creation and submission of an XML sitemap is a service that Quarkis proudly offers to our clients. So naturally, we were pleased to see this listed. Specifically, Randfish says:
Maybe it’s my fault for previously recommending that webmasters don’t submit Sitemaps. Let me just go on record again as saying that I have come 180 degrees on this and now completely endorse sitemaps for nearly every kind of site. In every instance we’ve seen them used properly, they’ve added significant boosts in search traffic over a very short period. If you want an easy win, and haven’t yet invested in the sitemaps XML protocol, go do it.
So, there you have it. Don’t just take our word for it, do your due dilligence online and research these kind of issues before making any decisions. We’re just helping you a lot in the decision making process.