David Unleashed

When I read that Australia had made it illegal to use the incandescent light bulb I knew it was a matter of time before it was adopted here in the United States.  Then at the beginning of the year I noted that Ireland had implemented the same law.  It was inevitable then that it was destined to become a law here. Well, that day has arrived.  In a move reminiscent of Mussolini’s fascist state, Congress has made your light bulbs illegal.  That’s right, you need to burn out all of your incandescent bulbs by 2014.

I am reminded how my town of Ferndale passed a ban on big-box stores a week after Bellingham passed their ban.  Worse, Ferndale did it without much, if any, input from residents.  They just rubber stamped the action taken by Bellingham, WA.  Well, this post is not about Bellingham.

I have nothing against saving the environment or using compact florescent bulbs (I have a house full of them).   I do resent congress mandating what type of bulbs I can use in my home ostensibly to save electricity, especially when they are funding research into alternative fuels that produce electricity so that we can consume more–to fuel our electric or hybrid cars.  Is anybody thinking about this stuff?

In the midst of the non-sense, here is one Congressman that has a sense of humor about the subject.

http://www.youtube.com/v/e-LOtKIIKcg

It is late and I have been driving my gas powered car for about 11 hours (12.5mpg highway).  Going to bed now.

I just finished a three city tour (Austin, San Antonio and Houston) with Business Wire. The purpose of the tour was to explain Business Wire’s EON services. PRWeb makes up part of the EON service.

I was impressed both with the number of people that showed up and the diversity of the group. Heck, we even had a little Market Wire plant in San Antonio. I thought it was very democratic of Business wire to allow this person to attend knowing the nature of her interest. Because of the diversity in the group we started with varying levels of technical sophistication. This made it a bit challenging in trying to cover the product because we had to try and dynamically adjust the presentation as we went along.

Speaking of Market Wire. Paul Dyer should be embarrassed by his latest post. I really feel kind of sorry for this guy. Why? Because apparently he is charged with promoting the social media distribution of Market Wire; a company that, by all indications, has either little understanding of the space or is intentionally ignoring best practices for this emerging space. I sincerely hope it is a lack of understanding because that can be corrected. I would rather help them course correct then see them trample the best practices of those who have spent so much time building this space thereby threatening the long term viability of social media PR.

I also feel sorry for Paul because he finds himself employed by a company that has contributed nothing interesting or new to the industry. For all of the ribbing I have dished out to other competitors in our industry, at least they are trying new things. Market Wire, on the other hand is intellectually lazy leaning on PRWeb and PR Newswire for product development. I challenge anyone to show me anything Market Wire has done over the last 3-6 years that is original. Their entire SEO model for example is modeled after PR Newswire model, which I still believe has its own unnecessary limitations. Market Wire also lacks any sort of thought leadership. Their marketing collateral simply parrots what PRWeb and SEO-PR have been evangelizing for years. So to recap, Marketwire has contributed nothing to the industry in terms of new technology in over half a decade (If I could remember back further I might be able to expand my claims here as far back as a decade. I certainly cannot see anything that they have contributed since we started PRWeb a decade ago.) and zero through leadership.

Now for the belly chuckle (those that know me know that it requires a lot of momentum go get a belly chuckle out of my massive belly). Paul actually had the gall to critisize Busines Wire for taking the bold step of incorporating xhtml markup as an alternate distribution within their newsML feeds. I too was a bit skeptical when BW made the announcement back in August, 2006. But I have had time to reflect on this since and it is actually pretty cool forward thinking stuff. Unfortunately Paul and company are not trained in forward thinking. What Paul does not realize is that the BW feed actually includes both the ASCII (ANPA) content and xhtml content. I am sure that it will take time for the XHTML feed to become fully adopted by companies, search engines and web sites. That said, at least they are getting started. Thought leadership is about sticking your neck out and taking risks. It is about doing what is right for your customer long-term.

So where does Market Wire focus their efforts? Well, it appears that they are more concerned with being disrespectful (Anyone remember their attacks on Warren Buffet?) and negative marketing against their competitors. I was flattered several years ago when they started calling our customers on a daily basis to try to covert them to Market Wire. It was an indication to me that we had “arrived”. We were obviously cutting into their revenue. Luckily we have had a very loyal customer base and they send us all of the dishonest Market Wire marketing crap. We were even fortunate enough to count MW board of director members as customers back before they sold. It was really kind of cool. The good thing here is that customers are more savvy today and they are easily annoyed by the MW approach to marketing. Sometime I may post the hideous claims made by MW to PRWeb clients. I have resisted so far because I find more value in spending my time building our brand and providing thought leadership for the industry. It is almost always a sign of weakness when marketing goes negative. It basically amounts to throwing up your arms and acknowledging that you have nothing good to say about your offering.

So, let’s all cut Paul some slack. He has a hard job.

David

P.S. Paul, I think I figured out what the B.S. in your post stood for. Could it possibly stand for “Better Service”? Let me know, I think I nailed it.

Web 2.0 Implossion on the Horizon?

The social media space better wake up and learn to play nice with business to risk implosion. I really think the whole space is in jeopardy. What we really need is new fresh thought leadership in this space.
Anyone? I am currently funding a number of ventures in the space and provided the initial leadership for the social media press release. I relay this so that you know that I have a vested interest in the ongoing health of the social media space. It was in a conversation today with one group that I had invested in that I started to go off on Digg. I know it is an old story but I need to register my frustration nonetheless.

What story am I referring to here? Remember in December when Lee Odden’s Top Rank Blog was banned from Digg? This is the one that has got me most chapped of late. Lee Odden is anything but a spammer. His blog provides valuable commentary and coverage on the SEO, SEM, SMO and PR space. He at no time encourages the use of spam to get business done online.

Here’s the thing; I like his blog but I can no longer Digg it. Why, because someone had him banned from Digg. I even went so far as to try to use a redirector service such as tinyurl.com or 301url.com to digg one of recent stories. Judging from the 70+ comments to Lee’s blog post it is apparent that I am not the only one frustrated with Digg’s stupidity.

Can you imagine if we were as arbitrary as Digg in our daily lives? Essentially they shut down Lee’s blog for future diggs because they (Digg) has a few rogue users. Imagine for a minute a world controlled by digg logic. Instead of looking for a Wal-Mart shoplifter and prosecuting the shoplifter we would have to shut down the Wal-Mart. Does that make sense to anyone? Or do I not understand because I am not a self-righteous socialist?

As one commenter pointed out, this is not a very 2.0 way of dealing with spam. BTW, who decides what is spam? That may be a discussion for another day….

“Media Firms Say Google Benefited From Film Piracy”

This was the headline that caught my attention yesterday.  My first response, no kidding.  And it is not limited to film piracy.  Adsense has created an entire industry made up of content pirates.  Google cannot have it both ways.  They cannot penalize web site rankings with duplicate content penalties while at the same time encouraging individuals to create additional inventory for Adsense.  I do not have any hard data that I can provide publicaly but we have seen this at PRWeb.  Companies, generally based overseas, taking content from our archives to re-purpose on their web sites with the goal of driving traffic and Adsense revenue.

This is a big problem.  Companies and web sites are being penalized for duplicate content when they are not guilty of anything but being victims of content piracy.   Now add insult to injury.  I have seen cases where pirated copy outranks the source web site.  Come on.  Does anyone else see this?  Any solutions that we can share with the community.  This is NOT a new problem.  I gave up trying to work with Google because I found heir process is cumbersome; usually requiring DMCA compliance.  I did have a Googler come up to me at Pubcon in Boston offering to help by identifying violations in TOS that would make it easier to shut down pirate sites.  Again, it just seems like too much burden placed on the victim site.  Keeping ahead of these pirates could become a fulltime job.

Open for comments.

Now for something different. I am blogging from my blackberry, wireless courtesy of Cingular. I am sitting here waiting for the plane to board and just witnessed three customers turned away from the shake stand because they only accept cash.

The manager told them that the should use the ATM at gate E6. None did. When nobody was around I approached the manager (no sense being confrontational in front of the pax.). Anyway I told him that he should eliminate the friction and accept plastic.

His response? We are a low volume store and cannot afford the cc fees. Well duh! You just turned away 3 willing customers.

Do what is right for your customer first. Profits follow.

David