technology

Paper.li – content aggregation for the easily frightened

/ Brendan / Leave a comment

Content. We’re not so much waving in it, as drowning. IDC says that in 2011 we created 1.8 zettabytes (or 1.8 trillion GBs) of information. In 2012 it reached 2.8 zettabytes and IDC now forecasts that we will generate 40 zettabytes (ZB) by 2020.

Of course, that’s not all human-readable data but I’ve been looking around for those kind of figures and it seems we’ve given up on calculating the size of the blogosphere, Twitterverse or any other social media-verse-osphere in any meaningful way.

So let’s forget about quantifying data. How do you feeeeeeeeel about it?

Personally, I feel overwhelmed a lot of the time. Google Reader was great for grabbing a ton of feeds and filtering the wheat from the chaff. It closed. Yahoo Pipes does something similar but has a steep learning curve and is a bit flaky.

TweetDeck was the answer, I thought, with its persistent filters. And as I wrote recently, Feed.ly is starting to pique my interest in RSS again because it’s a better way of actually finding out what people are writing about, properly, rather than just sharing.

But it’s still all a bit, well, panic-inducing. I dip into TweetDeck and have a nibble but hop away quite quickly again like a tiny frightened rabbit. Feed.ly, while more relaxing, can also scare the faint of heart, especially with its title-only layout. There are magazine-type apps such as Flipboard, which recently expanded into the web(osphere) and Google Newsstand. This seemed a way forward, by presenting items in a neat, concise layout but try as I might, I never really managed to get them quite how I wanted them.

But Paper.li just works for me.

At its simplest and most effective, you just plug your Twitter feed into it, which creates a publication based on the most shared content, that was shared by the most influential people. So it’s almost a Twitter ‘expander’, taking the most relevant tweets and expanding them back into full articles. You can go much deeper into different sources of content, filters, customisation and so on, but at the basic level it works marvellously well.

I’ve been using it for quite some time, ever since Neville Hobson’s version cited me as contributing to his daily publication. I used it to help promote Byyd (recently reactivated I see) and am currently helping LoopMe with it too. Oh, and I’m also using it myself, obviously.

However, forget about sharing for a second. My publication is actually really useful to me. This is because it represents something of an amazing intersection between the people I want to follow, and the content I want to read.

What I really like about this approach is that I get an email in my inbox each morning telling me that the new edition’s ready. I go and take a look, and there it is: my magazine, with the most interesting articles that I really need to read. Not columns of content or masses of titles. Just the top, say, four or five articles distilled for my pleasure.

So forget about building feeds or creating lists, or scanning vast swathes of information rolling in front of your eyes like so many fruit machines. Just start up a Paper.li publication, plug your Twitter timeline into it, tweak it a little with filters, and away you go. If it’s not quite right, tweak it again a few more times and you’ll soon have your own, simple, relevant daily digest.

I think the next radical step in Paper.li’s evolution is going to be some sort of unique delivery system. I see a great opportunity to offer the magazine in, say, a PDF format so that people can print a hard copy. Or, how about this: a centralised printing facility that not only prints but delivers, maybe via third-party agents that specialise in news, with franchises based in local communities offering a valuable source of local employment. It might catch on…

From search to site through what you say

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So I’m getting back into RSS browsing. I dropped it when Google Reader died, thinking that Twitter was really the only game in town for monitoring. But there’s a difference. Twitter is really, really fast and for that reason, I tend to use it for quickly getting an idea of what’s going on. I might retweet or favourite but honestly, do I read much of what flashes by? Not really.

It’s nice getting into RSS again, building up my feeds, this time in Feedly. Feedly’s pretty good with a nice interface but still doesn’t have keyword filters. Not to worry. I liken it to sitting down with a trade magazine and spending time going through what really matters. Flipboard and Google Newsstand are good, but you really do build your own Feedly from the bottom up.

Straight up, solid gold: Econsultancy, ever the publisher of sage advice, features a piece by the wonderfully named Lyndon Antcliff, explaining why an SEO should think more like a publisher. He defines an SEO as someone who gets as many people from a web search to a web page as efficiently as possible. The key to this is links. And the key to getting links? Content.

He then discusses attention, attraction, delivery, response. This is yet another variant of the marketing funnel (awareness, interest, desire, action) which I’ve used many times to illustrate content strategy.

Some people think the marketing funnel is dead. Others think it’s well and truly alive. Then again some people think PR is dead, while others think it’s thriving. Still others think Elvis is dead, the poor deluded fools.

I don’t think you can prove it either way but what I do believe is that it’s a great way to formalise your knowledge. I’m a fan of structured thinking, mainly because I find it hard. If it’s hard, it’s usually worthwhile and then, when you get the hang of it, the other stuff becomes easier.

So, looking at content through this structure you start to see that awareness is really about going to where other people live, so that you interact with them on their home turf. They’re not going to come to yours until/unless they’re aware of you. So awareness is about earned content, and you measure it by the amount of conversation you’re having with people out there. You make this work for you by identifying influencers in key topic areas and building structures through Twitter lists, Feedly lists and so on, making sure you interact with the people that matter.

Interest, then, is when people are curious enough about you to come and pay you a visit. Have a nice sit down and a cup of tea. Maybe a scone or two (yes, I’m British, it shows). This is where your owned channels are important, and you measure this by engagement. If you’ve made the right noises abroad, about the right topics, to the right people, then, when they come to you, if you continue to make the right noises, they might just shortlist you.

What of desire and action? Well, my take on this is that they’re really where your website works hardest. Visitors have surfed through the stratosphere of awareness and the atmosphere of awareness, and now they’ve landed on Planet You. This is your chance to validate their suspicion that you’re the person/team/agency/company for them, and where your case studies, awards and recommendations come into play. And action is really about conversion, so make it as easy as possible for them to get in touch.

Some people reckon the marketing funnel is circular now, with ‘retention’ feeding back from the bottom to the top, like the self-consuming serpent. I see that as a by-product of everything else you do, with maybe some specialist activities such as newsletters so they feel part of the club.

To get back to Mr Antcliff’s point, if you really want to make your content work hard to pull people from search to site, you need to think about publishing. And this is why you need to think about how your content can work for you. I remember in my early days I told people that really, I was a publisher. This blog is a publication. And as we all know, everyone is a publisher now.

Anyway, go and read his post on Econsultancy. He has, I think, a different take on the funnel but it’s broadly similar. Well worth a read.

Whoops there goes another Bitcoin

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Confidence. It’s what makes the world go around. Money too, as the song goes, but that’s pretty much an index of confidence. Watch the stocks plummet and you can be sure there’s lack of confidence there, or even the presence of panic. See the indexes climb and there will be some pretty confident people behind them. It’s certainly not love. Don’t you just wish the financial markets would hire more confident, less panicky, more loveable people?

So the latest Bitcoin hack – to the tune of $1.75 million, from Chinese Bitcoin exchange Bter – is another knock to the confidence behind the cryptocurrency. Bitcoin hacks have been coming thick and fast of late, or perhaps that’s just because the media spotlight switched onto them when James Howells threw away four million pounds’ worth of Bitcoins when he dumped his hard drives. Or it could have been when the major exchange MtGox was forced to close, taking 850,000 Bitcoin out of circulation (and then finding 200,000 of that in a discarded offline wallet).

I became intrigued by Bitcoin quite some time ago, as I do by most new shiny things that promise new ways of working. It seems to have come straight out of someone’s head (and we don’t know exactly which someone that is, although Newsweek once thought it did) and into the world quite literally without intermediation.

Bitcoin is a currency that exists outside of centralised government control, with a limited number of Bitcoins in existence. New Bitcoins come about by solving tough computational problems. The more computation thrown at the problem, the tougher the problems get. It is decentralised and self-balancing. The problem is, it doesn’t seem to work.

As a virtual currency it brings into sharp relief the idea that money doesn’t really exist. The money I have sequestered in bank accounts isn’t really there. It’s just ones and zeroes. Not even that – it’s actually just some magnetic impulses on a storage device somewhere. (No wonder some people still keep their money under a mattress).

The difference between Bitcoin and ‘real’ money is that ‘real’ money – even if it’s just magnetic polarisation – is backed up by the government. If a huge sunspot were to wipe all our hard drives tomorrow then hopefully the banks will have contingency plans, such as back-up centres behind lead-lined vaults buried miles beneath mountain ranges.

But virtual currency holds no such backup, by definition. OK, so the trace of payments is distributed across all peers, but as we’re finding out, rapidly, this is no protection against hacking, it would seem. Online wallets are insecure. Offline wallets can wind up in the local recycling facility. Entire exchanges go ‘pop!’, like balloons.

So another hack, another knock to the confidence of what was once supposed to be a brave new world of currency exchange. Strange isn’t it how these brave new worlds can turn so sour? Remember how the web was supposed to facilitate creative freedom? Or how social media was going to give everyone a voice? I pretty much gave up blogging because I realised my voice was being drowned out by the noise, so I had to come up for air. I’ve only started again because I need to exercise my writing muscles once in a while.

What now for Bitcoin? Let’s take it from Gavin Andresen, chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, the closest thing to a central bank for the nascent cryptocurrency: his opinion is that Bitcoin is dangerous and people should steer away from using it. That’s one of the most important figures in Bitcoin as reported by the highly credible FT. So, that gives me confidence. Don’t even approach the glass. For now.

Gotta love cloud storage

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I’ve never lost any data. Ever.

Actually, I tell a lie. I once lost ALL my data. I was recklessly drinking some Becks beer while doing some file management and somehow managed to delete everything from a drive that didn’t have the trash can activated. Thirty rather desperate (and suddenly sober) minutes later, I’d downloaded a good undelete utility and recovered it all. Phew.

Apart from that however, I’ve been something of a back-up freak over the years. It started when I got into home music production. All those hours of recording, arranging, mixing… to lose it all would have been devastating. This brings into sharp relief what we mean about the value of data. Sure, it has business value when you make it work for you. But it can also have immense personal value.

But as our data grows, and becomes more sensitive, backing up becomes more onerous. You forget. You can’t be bothered. You get out of the habit. You need a 1TB hard drive to back up a 1TB hard drive. You need secure, off-site storage – and when you’re working freelance from home, you might not have ready access to a nice, locked drawer somewhere else. And the more human intervention comes in, the more likely you are to screw it up. One day you will back up the wrong way, from the backup to the live. Or, your backup drive will corrupt and you’ll only find out when you really need it. I shudder to think…

Enter cloud storage. Now, I can just hear the stifled laughter. You’re thinking “Why is Brendan talking about cloud storage so late in the day? It’s been around for ages.” This is true enough and I suppose I’m a relatively late convert. But you never know, someone might be looking around for opinions on this, and if they find mine, then I’m telling them: go for it. In fact, if you’re looking around for opinions on this, and you just found me, then I’m telling you: go for it.

Cloud storage is brilliant. I never realised how brilliant until I really started using it. Now, whenever I save a file, and that cute little icon on the systray spins around, I know that I’ll never lose it, that in fact I can go back to a previous version if I need to, and that I can access it from any of my machines, anywhere in the world (mostly). And I don’t have to do a single thing. In fact, I don’t even have to spend one Bitcoin on it. It’s free. This is absurdly amazing. If it didn’t exist, someone would have to invent it. Which they already have, of course.

But cloud storage also opens up creative possibilities. For example, I’ve developed my own social media monitoring system, called ‘Bob’ until I think of a better name (although I’m starting to like it). Bob downloads data, aggregates it, cleans it, and then presents it in ways that I – and my clients – find useful. Where does Bob download the data? To cloud storage, of course. This means that I can query Bob at home, or in the client offices. It doesn’t matter. It’s entirely transparent to Bob. If I ever licensed Bob, I could have clients each with their own private cloud storage, all feeding data into their version of Bob. Marvellous.

Another possibility: your own personal music library. If you can get enough storage (or don’t have too many songs), then just port it all across to a cloud drive and you can access that from any machine, anywhere, and you’ll never need to back it up again.

Cloud storage is also a hugely useful facilitator for collaboration. I run the social media and programme editorial for the Kop Hill Climb, now a major international automotive event in Princes Risborough, Bucks. The entire organisational crew, comprising well over 20 people, uses cloud storage to share and store files. And, as Kop Hill Climb is a charity, generating around £50,000 each year to local causes, the fact that this storage is free is a welcome bonus.

So there you go. Cloud storage. It’s ace. There are plenty of articles out there detailing the various offerings available so I won’t bore you with the details, go and have a look (the PC Advisor cloud storage review seems comprehensive and up to date at the time of writing).

But if you really want to know, this is how I’m using it (note that I’m using several services because that means I get them for free within their storage limits because I’m a cheapskate):

  • Microsoft OneDrive – for my personal work. I use this simply because it’s baked into my Windows 8 installation. It seems a bit slow to upload but apart from that it chugs away nicely in the background.
  • Dropbox – for Kop Hill, and for one client, because they both use it. I find Dropbox rock-solid, but it doesn’t cope with concurrency very well (that is, when two people are accessing the same file). This can result in lost work or duplicate files, so watch out for that.
  • Google Drive – for another client, again simply because they use it. Honestly? Don’t touch it with a barge pole. I’ve had serious issues with Google Drive not syncing, resulting in lost productivity trying to figure out what the latest versions of files are. Really. Don’t go there. Unless something radical has changed, this is, in my opinion and experience, not fit for purpose. Sorry Google.
  • Mega – to store all my music, because you get a wopping 50GB free. OK, so it’s run by Kim Dotcom. OK, so he’s a controversial figure to some. But in a strange way I trust him more than I trust the likes of Google and Microsoft. At least there is a spotlight on him. And it just works.

I’ve also dabbled with Amazon Cloud but I found that a bit clunky. Just my own take on it.

There are other services too, so check them out as per that article. This just works for me. Between them, OneDrive and Mega ensure that when I save stuff, it remains saved. And, so long as I have strong passwords that I change, it remains safe too. Meanwhile Dropbox and Google Drive enable me to work with other people, albeit with more than a little frustration from Google Drive.

Let me know how you get on.

The old web is dying and I’m not sure I like the new one

/ Brendan / 2 Comments

BlogPulse has no pulse

So I was playing around with dashboards and the like yesterday  – as one does – and noticed that BlogPulse has disappeared. BlogPulse was not the greatest blog search engine around, but it was the only one offering anything like useable charts. So, given that Technorati charts disappeared years ago (although they still have a page claiming they’ll be back soon), and other solutions such as IceRocket don’t enable you to pass keywords to create live charts, it would appear there is no longer any blog charting widget out there.

Is this the final nail in the coffin of blogging? Are we really so uninterested in blogging activity that charts are no longer considered viable? It would seem that way, and the ‘blogging is dead’ meme is very much alive right now.

Charting generally seems to be suffering

Recently, tweetcloud.com disappeared, without even a whimper. It just vanished. I seemed to be the only person who noticed, but tweetcloud.com was, like BlogPulse, the only solution that did something incredibly useful: it would create a tweetcloud for a search term on the fly. In other words, you typed in what you were looking for, and it created a tweetcloud for that search (not a tweetcloud of your own timeline, which really isn’t that much use but I suspect a lot less processor-intensive). Plus it did it quickly, and there was a widget for it, which enabled you to build dashboards giving an instant overview of the latest terms associated with any topic. It was great. And then it wasn’t. There are sort-of alternatives still such as Visible Tweets, Cloud.li and Twendz, but, while they’re very pretty, you can’t build them into dashboards.

And today, Trendistic, the only (again) solution for live charting of Twitter trends, is down. It was down yesterday too. Look for it on Twitter search and there are just a load of weird Polish references to it (who knows, maybe Trendistic is a Polish pop group). Surely – sssssurely – Trendistic can’t have disappeared too? And surely, again, it can’t just be me who thought it was an absolutely brilliant idea?

RSS is dying

If you’re detecting a pattern here, you’re not alone. It does seem that really great ideas are failing as the web grows bigger and faster. They just cannot keep up, it seems – or, at least, not until/unless they’re snapped up by one of the walled gardens such as Facebook. Free information – as in, really free, readily available, easily manipulated and shared across the entire web – is disappearing.

RSS was supposed to be the great hope of free information. Peel the content away from the format, and hey presto, you can share pretty much anything across any platform. But therein lies the problem: something free is not something you can fence off and charge for. It is free in every sense of the word.

So it seems RSS is suffering too. Google Reader used to be a really nice way to bring feeds together and create a static web page of the results as well as a newly aggregated feed. Not since its recent revamp however. All the sharing features have been ported across to Google+, presumably because Google+ is a neat, walled garden whereas RSS was messy and free. Yahoo Pipes was the ultimate RSS aggregator/mash-up tool but suffered from underinvestment by Yahoo. Even after a supposed major overhaul, it’s flaky and too slow to power a dashboard (unless you’re prepared to wait for a minute or so while the results load up). Another RSS mashup tool, XFruits, died a couple of years back. Do a search for RSS aggregator tools and it’s like a graveyard. The only viable tool that I can see is called FeedRinse which, while it offers aggregation and filtering (the two most useful features of Pipes), also feels a bit overloaded and slow. And, as with TweetCloud and BlogPulse, it’s the only game in town, which leads me to believe it won’t be for much longer.

RSS from search has been abandoned by major players too. Such as the bookmarking platform Delicious. You used to be able to search across the Delicious database and pull an RSS feed from that. Stunningly useful, as it showed you what other people considered important for any topic. Not any longer. Twitter has also demoted RSS from search: you can still do it, but you have to look around to find out how. It’s another candidate for the cull, I believe.

Mash-ups are harder

So where does this leave us if we want to create our own mash-ups or dashboards? Well we can dive into the APIs if we fancy it, and learn a smattering of HTML and javascript. But we still need reliable platforms to base our dashboards on. The familiar theme of ‘only game in town’ is revisited here, in that the only solution offering public dashboards – that is, pages that you can show to anyone without them needing to log in – is Netvibes. And every time I create a dashboard in Netvibes, I find I have to spend quite some time figuring out what works still and what doesn’t. Quite apart from discovering over the past few months that third-party sites have disappeared, I’m finding that third-party widgets in Netvibes are broken, or even that Netvibes itself is cranky. So for example, my attempts to create a dashboard yesterday were frustrated by HTML widgets only displaying the top portions of any image or javascript output, widgets generally not staying in the same place when I refreshed the page, RSS feeds not being imported correctly, and on recourse to their support forum, finding it full of spam.

It seems the free tools that were once so useful are now decaying or falling apart. I don’t know what ‘Web 2.0’ really meant, but I have a sense of something dying, something that was slower and smaller than the web today, that shared more freely but was doing so with less immediacy and monetary return. Whatever we’re moving towards, if it’s Web 3.0, then it’s becoming more consolidated, monetised, bigger, faster, noisier.

So the ‘roll your own’ approach is going to get harder. The smaller, innovative sites that did one thing, and one thing well, just cannot survive the double onslaught of vastly increased traffic and expectations of real-time delivery unless they can make money from  it.  The old, fluid, free web that comprised many islands of activity is solidifying into separate continents of influence. The game is so much harder now, that it’s only the really big players that can make sense – and money – out of it.

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be

Me? I preferred the more innovative, dynamic environment. I liked the way that RSS could be readily shared, and smaller enterprises could create neat tools that let you do things with it, without really needing to be a developer. I guess those days are gone. Nostalgia certainly ain’t what it used to be.

Postscript: … and no sooner do I file this post then I read this Observer piece by John Naughton, entitled “Has the Internet run out of ideas already?”, on the progression of information technologies: “from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel – from open to closed system.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself. In fact, I didn’t.

Whither Social Mention?

/ Brendan / 6 Comments

Social Mention is a pretty good social media aggregator. Think Google, but for social media.

When I say ‘pretty good’, I mean it’s not without its faults. It doesn’t do real phrasal searches – that is, a search for “Brendan Cooper” in quotes will give results with just “Brendan” and “Cooper” in them, which is a bit naughty really – and it also has a tendency to be a bit slow.

It does have some quite cool features though. You can get RSS feeds off searches (which you can’t do with Google but you can with Bing and Yahoo). You can get alerts (which you can also get from Google, but not exclusively for social media). You can download results as CSV files, which you can then open in Excel and start analysing. You can start to get an insight into where people are talking about topics, who they are, what words they’re using and who is the most active for a given topic. And Social Mention even gives you some metrics around sentiment, engagement and so on, and if you keep the salt cellar handy while using these figures, and apply liberally, you might find them useful.

But wait. There’s something wrong with this post. It’s all in the present tense.

Because, as of around two days ago, Social Mention vanished. It reappeared briefly, but has disappeared again. Not a peep from the @socialmention Twitter account, or from @jonnyjon who created it.

So change all the ‘is’ to ‘was’ and the ‘does’ to ‘did’.

This is causing quite a lot of consternation in the Twitterverse. Social Mention is/was pretty much the only game in town when it came to a free, full-on social media aggregator/search, especially one so well featured. Which should tell us all something, I suppose. If something is free, and it’s the only one, then there’s a reason for that. Meaning, it’s really bad, or really really good, or it’s unsustainable. I do hope it’s not the latter in this case.

So what is to be done? Apart from wringing our hair,  pulling our teeth and gnashing our hands? Stephen Dale has come to the rescue with a list of alternatives but you still need to be canny to work out how to replace the unreplaceable.

Solution #1. Do all the searches separately and aggregate them yourself. So, do a Google Blog search, get the RSS off that, aggregate it with an IceRocket search maybe, a Twitter search (if you can find out how to get RSS off Twitter searches nowadays – fortunately I made a note of how to do this before they removed it from visibility), a Google News search, etc etc. Aggregate these in Google Reader or Netvibes some such thing. Good luck with Facebook, fingers crossed Twitter doesn’t remove RSS altogether, enjoy the vaguaries of how YouTube, Flickr etc handle search queries, and so on. And, of course, you don’t get the metrics or the other coooool stuff.

Solution #2. Roll your own solution with Yahoo Pipes. I put a lot of work into Pipes quite some time ago. I built myself a completely modular social media aggregator, so you could change keywords and all the searches reflected it, or change the engine and all the results reflected that. Then I realised I’d just built my own version of Social Mention. But things kept changing and breaking, so I realised that Social Mention was doing the job for me, and instead of driving myself nuts keeping up with these changes, decided to use that instead. Guess what though? Yahoo Pipes stopped being reliable enough to use, and remains so despite a recent relaunch of the v2 engine. And guess what again though again? It’s the only solution out there that does what Yahoo Pipes does, for free. Sound familiar? Which heavily implies solution #3…

Solution #3. Accept that singularly useful, free services are an anomaly of the early years of social media, bite the bullet, and go to a pay-for service. There seems to be a new one every time I look, and I’m sure one of them will do what you want it to do. Check out the PDF report on Stephen’s page, it’s a good summary of them.

So, that’s my take on it. Solution #4 is, of course, to wait and see what happens to Social Mention. I really really really really hope this is not The End because I had plans for it. Same thing nearly happened with Delicious, which survived. But if this really is It, well, it was fun while it lasted.

Trends

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Quite simply, some charts that may be of interest. For example, note how Apple is supplanting Microsoft in search volume; that PR may be peeling upwards away from advertising and even marketing; the relative fortunes of Google+, Facebook and Twitter; social media may be levelling off; and, especially heartwarming for me, Star Wars is much more popular than Star Trek (mostly).

All charts are for all regions and years except the politics chart which is just for the UK over the past 12 months (because a lot can happen in 12 months!) Click each chart to go to the Google Trends page for more information, such as the news items that account some spikes (A, B, C etc).

● microsoft ● apple

● ed miliband ● david cameron ● nick clegg ● politics

● hp ● dell ● ibm ● hardware

● advertising ● marketing ● pr ● social media

● social media

● google+ ● facebook ● twitter

● star wars ● star trek

Want PR? Been Penalized by Google? Then lead a campaign.

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Campaigns are an often-overlooked weapon in the PR arsenal. And, when conducted properly, social media can really, really help – which is what I’m hoping will happen with the ‘Have I Been Penalized’ campaign.

I spent some of my most creative, exciting and formative years working with Dr. Marc Pinter-Krainer on the Sharepages.com website and then for its parent company, KTS. Marc went into boardrooms and blew people away with the tech (cloud computing to deliver financial information before ‘cloud computing’ had been invented), while I wrote and designed everything, online and offline, that people saw or read.

Since then, I’ve found my niche in online comms. Marc has forged a new business, One News Page, which aggregates news feeds in a cleverly direct, sophisticated and simple way. With one catch: for nine months, his site was penalized by Google, and his web traffic dropped off a cliff. I remember searching for it and not being able to find it at the time, and thinking that was, well, weird.

Now that One News Page is back on Google’s results, Marc is leading a campaign to raise awareness of the penalties, and consequences, for pretty much any business out there. Of course, it hurts more for a purely online enterprise such as One News Page, but it’s a fair bet that any company would suffer if its web traffic dropped significantly.

And Marc’s point is this: that, given the essence of running a business is balancing risk, and you’re not even aware that there’s a risk you will be penalized, then this becomes a major problem. Especially so when the channels for redress from Google are so limited, comprising just one query page that only ever seems to return an automated response.

So I’ve done a bit of Marc’s publicity for him here by writing this post. But what I really mean to say is that campaigns are such a good way to get good PR. If you’ve got the balls to do it, arm yourself with facts, figure out your campaign strategy, then stick your head over the parapet and let rip. Next thing you know you’re seen as a true leader, with a strong brand, and plenty of online copy (and, I expect in Marc’s case, offline too).

It’s the essence of PR. Don’t talk about yourself. People don’t necessarily want to hear you talk about how great your products and people and services are. But they do want to know how issues will affect them. If you can position yourself as a leader in these mission-critical areas, the doors to publicity open wide.

And social media? Well, never has the phrase ‘disintermediation of the web’ rung more true. Create a video, and a site, and maybe a Twitter account, and you can address your audience directly, in a compelling way, engaging in the debate and spreading the word. And campaigns are all about debate, right?

I’ll sign off with a bit more free publicity for Marc. Watch the ‘Have I Been Penalized?’ video to find out what the true risk of Google penalties means for you, visit the ‘Have I Been Penalized?’ website to sign up for the campaign email list, or follow the campaign’s progress to address Google penalties on Twitter. I’m watching it with interest, and it could pan out to be a fascinating case study.

Oh, and a final disclaimer: I’m not part of Marc’s campaign. Besides, he seems to be doing fine himself…

DNA/How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet

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A couple of years or so ago I was a guest on Start The Week, and I was authoritatively informed by a very distinguished journalist that the whole Internet thing was just a silly fad like ham radio in the fifties, and that if I thought any different I was really a bit naïve. It is a very British trait – natural, perhaps, for a country which has lost an empire and found Mr Blobby – to be so suspicious of change.

via douglasadams.com

This is just so brilliant. Whether or not you like Douglas Adams, or technology, or the web, or anything basically, this should be essential reading.