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From the Blogosphere

I’ve been thinking about my presence on the Internet from the early days, from my time at Argonne National Labs near Chicago in 1988-1989 and from my graduate school days at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in 1989-1992. That was even before the web browser days, which didn’t...
I have been using Pandora’s online stream music service off and on for several years. What got me more interested lately was it being one of the many services on my Roku video streaming box, which my wife and I use mostly for watching movies from Netflix’s “watch instantly” queue. As ...
I work for a start-up and like the folks at virtually every start-up we dream of being covered by one of the Big 8  business publications: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek, The Economist, the Financial Times, and USA Today. The folks at ITData...
For the first time in over ten years, I spent the night without Internet access. Ten years of working in remote parts of Mongolia, Vietnam, Palestine, Indonesia, and other small and developing countries, and in March 2010 I finally hit the access wall. My hotel in Addis Ababa does not ...
Scott McKain wrote a post on Friday that got me going, Intellectual Dishonesty. It's an eloquent rant concerning the growing negativity and sensationalism created by supposed industry 'gurus', all for the sake of ratings and followers. IN the end that behavior all boils down to MONEY a...
This morning’s Wall Street Journal carried the front page article on Facebook and its founder, the 25 year old Mar Zuckerberg. Here are some facts in case you did not know. - Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian private equity firm invested $200M last year in May at a valuation of $1...
As we start this year, hope is mounting on a vibrant IPO market, better than last couple of years. This article lists 20 companies that are hot candidates for IPO. The list has some well-known names like Facebook, Skype, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg, Yelp, LiveOps, and Tesla Motors. The les...
Lately it seems like writing blogs is getting out of fashion, what with the rise of microblogging star Twitter. Something about Twitter is intriguing. I guess the simplicity of writing your thoughts within 140 characters is a force larger that anyone expected. Reminds me of the early d...
The news last week that Italian authorities have convicted three Google executives with criminal privacy violations got my attention for two reasons. One, the charges are based on a video that shows an autistic boy being bullied, a video that Google did not create or post. It was filme...
Advisōlocity, a social media marketing resource which is dedicated to meeting the needs of advisors and money managers on a budget, was just launched by founding members D. Bruce Johnston, Zach Hedges and John Drachman, author of this post. “At Advisōlocity, which was just launched...
Karrie Karahalios is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk entitled “Text and Tie Strength.” Karrie is a Berkman Fellow from the Univ. of Illinois. Her group looked at FB and wondered how to map FB parameters to tie strength. They set up a set of questions with continua, e.g., “How strong...
It's one of the major issues that keeps cloud computing from working its way deeper and more quickly into the enterprise IT mainstream. But what are the potential threats around using cloud services? How can companies make sure business processes and data remain secured in the cloud...
I was raised with some pretty specific rules about behavior. Say please and thank you, treat people as you would want to be treated, be courteous and polite. Then there was the 'be on time' dictate. My mom taught me that being late for a meeting with another meant my time was more i...
The news started hitting California early Saturday morning with an SMS alarm on my mobile phone – a major earthquake struck Chile, and there was a potential of tsunami activity in California and Hawaii (as well as the rest of the Pacific). First Citizen Journalism Transforming Mediasto...
I was recently introduced to this site.  And I like it a lot.  You can check out my contributions there by clicking on this link.
If you’re a small business owner, you’ll identify with the following numbers and be heartened by the following forecast. First the numbers: There’s anywhere from 14 million to 22 million small businesses online in the U.S., and they spend about 83% of their online marketing budget o...
Pew Internet has published the results of an important survey on how we’re getting our news today. I haven’t read the whole thing but one little point leaps out already: Among those who get news online, 75% get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites...
I was on the road driving Saturday and Sunday. We celebrated Lauren's 13th birthday late last night. Today was a very busy work day. Before I went to bed I browsed through "60 Minutes" and "Saturday Night Live" shows from this weekend which I missed during my 48-hour drive. I realized ...
The webinars are being hosted by SmartFinds Internet Marketing, with two upcoming sessions scheduled for Wednesday, February 24th at 10:00 a.m. EST and Thursday, February 25th at 2:00 p.m. EST. These free webinars will help introduce the benefits of Local Business Listings to local bus...
Local business listings have become a significant local marketing tool that is showing the demise of the traditional yellow pages and equally the traditional coupons. The famous Stars Wars quote comes to mind “This will be a day long remembered. It has seen the end of Kenobi, and will ...
This statement gives us the total number of times an URL has been tweeted in the last 5 seconds. Whenever that URL is tweeted, the sum is calculated, and a listener is called. This is a very straightforward statement – we could tweak the statement a bit more, or do some stuff in code...
One of the things B2B marketers are being told to do is to "listen" to communities and get to really know their prospects. The best reason being because your prospects are controlling how and when they engage with vendors, so it's become very critical that our content marketing efforts...
Badges, Passports, the Creator, the Founder, the Mayor, getting a Pin, picking up a raccoon..This is the language of the newest phenomenon to hit the location-enabled social media marketing world. I am talking about Social Networking Games. No longer only for geeks and geocachers, t...
On social (or business) networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, there is a single simple relationship between two people: you are either “friends” (or linked), or you are not. LinkedIn also formalizes the notion of “degrees of separation”, but that is another topic for another ...
Back in 2005 a friend one day said that she had an idea for a new business: a web site for storing bookmarks on the internet. I smiled and said that it would be useful but I didn’t think that it was enough to sustain a business. I argued that a company like Yahoo! could easily add that...
The economy is supposedly improving but people still continue to lose jobs. The unemployment rate being a lagging economic indicator is predicted to increase through the rest of the year and beyond even though it is decelerating. California with one of the highest unemployment rates (1...
Metadata or data about data has been an important topic in software and the web all along. In the old days we used metadata on a HTML page source to increase its searchability. That is by adding metadata or tags to a page we would tell the search engines what the page is about so that ...
In a previous post “Shall we bookmark?” I discussed social bookmarking and covered several of the social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Reddit, Diggit and StumbleUpon. In this post I briefly describe how you can easily add social bookmarking buttons to your web pages or blog post...
Twitter is a very simple and easy service to use and becasue of its openness (via numerous APIs) there are numerous Twitter clients from providers other than Twitter itself that you can use. From thick clients such as TweetDeck to thin web-based clients such as HootSuite to mobile and ...
“Attracting new clients has suddenly gotten easier,” D. Bruce Johnston of DBJ Associates said recently. “Low-cost and creative, social media strategies are like free money to underfunded marketing departments.” Having to do more with less, smaller firms with low marketing budgets ma...
Social media gives power to our assumptions. If we're viewed as leaders in our fields - our assumptions are often taken as facts by our audiences. Have you ever found yourself disagreeing with someone - wondering how in the heck they could see the situation in their way? Only to find t...
Every year on March 17th, everything between 44th Street to 86th Street on Fifth Avenue in New York City goes green! Book a hotel in New York City in advance and be part of the world’s largest St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Nearly 150,000 people march in the annual parade, which starts a...
According to the latest survey by the National Association of Realtors (NAR), total state existing-home sales rose 13.9 percent in the fourth quarter, and are up 27.2 percent compared to the fourth quarter of 2008. Existing-home sales increased from the third quarter in 48 states and t...
Try a search engine query on “Hawaii CIO,” or “Hawaii Chief Information Officer.” You might get a couple corporate links pop up, or possibly the University of Hawaii’s CIO link, but the only state agency within the first two pages of links is for the Information and Communications Ser...

I attended a great Tech Breakfast Club event this morning near my home in Northern Virginia, in which three panelists from local B2B technology companies shared the ROI gained and lessons learn...

In part 1 and part 2 we covered the alignment between strategy, organizational culture, innovation, and cloud computing; and discussed the risk of innovation in the cloud. Now lets turn our attention towards our respective organizations. Innovation in the world of business occurs i...
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen is my favorite business book – its main idea (disruptive technologies serve new customer groups and “low-end” markets first) was the guiding principle of all my startups. The best part is that even though everybo...
So… Kevin Smith has announced he will never fly Southwest Airlines again. And, it’s a top story on CNN. Thank goodness his important statement removed trivial stories about the economy, health care and terrorism from the front page. (Yes…I’m being sarcastic.) In today’s...
A story of how two young entrepreneurs built their first entertainment company in the USA under the age of twenty-five. Foreignity launched their touring department by producing and marketing two-time Grammy nominated, multi-Platinum artist Flo Rida's first Australian tour after his re...
Google held a press event to announce the most "buzzed" topic of the week - Google Buzz. This is Google’s new product, which is being compared to social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It is integrated with Gmail and other Google products, and appears to be one of the missing links...