Links & News – 25. April

  • Webmonkey has an interview aboutSearch Engine Optimization: „Bryan Zilar recently sat down with strategy consultant and SEO guru Jason McQueen to talk about all things search“.
  • Yahoo! now offers an online video meshup tool, writes business 2.0 blog.
  • Futurelab calls the Gnarls Barkley Nr. 1 hit video a casestudy in word-of-mouth.
  • Marketing.fm points me to the Technology Evangelist, who examines the differences between Online and Offline Advertising. Some interesting points he’s making.
  • Wired writes about an interesting survey: „Some 45 percent of internet users, or an estimated 60 million Americans, said the internet helped them make big decisions or face a major moment in their life during the previous two years“

Save the Internet and sign up for Net Neutrality

There is a fairly new and highly discussed movement going on, called: Save the Internet.

What does it mean, and what is this movement for? David Weinberger has answers:

Net neutrality (formerly known as the end-to-end principle) means that the people who provide connections to the Internet don’t get to favor some bits over others. This principle is not only under attack, it’s about to be regulated out of existence.

For more detail you can also check out the FAQ page of savetheinternet.com.

As Jeff Jarvis writes:

The age of business models built on scarcity and on keeping your customers from doing what they want to do is over. Now we just have to make sure that Congress doesn’t try to keep it on artificial life support.

That seems to be a big discussion in the US, while it seems strange to me, that a freedom orientated society like them might actually face such a self-imposed threat?

But then again: what IF we are currently living in an extraordinary timeslot? What IF content distribution goes back to what it used to be – large corporations dictating (programming) or at least controlling content distribution. And charging for it, too, of course. In 20 years people will have forgotten, that you could ever download content for free or make free PC-to-PC calls.

Just a thought. Please don’t say: „if you’re not with us, you’re with them“.

(via)

The (useless) evolution of the NetFlix envelope

An Article on CNN descripes how Netflix worked for 7 years on improving their envelope to be sent by mail the most cost efficient way. Nice try. They should have asked themselves, if their distribution channel was future-safe in the first place.

How well those iconic red envelopes will help the company fend off the newest threat – video-on-demand – remains to be seen.

I don’t think envelopes will matter any longer in a few years time.

Links & News – 22. April

Is Philips fooling us or not?

Scanning through my feeds, I noticed that there is a a lot of talk about the new Philips technology, that will not let the user skip ads, as AdJab writes, for example.

At the same time I now found out that
adfreak has received a comment by Philips, that this is not really the case, instead they just added a new functionality that let’s you choose whether you want to view the ads or not.

To me that sounds a little like Philips is trying to cover up a PR desaster.
Let’s see what other information we’ll get in the next couple of days…