Alliance Blog Reviews

Back in July, Facebook was challenged by the Canadian government about some privacy concerns around third party apps and information shared that was taken about users. Many wondered how the social media giant would handle the situation. Would they thumb their nose at the information police? Would they stand up to the Canucks? Well, that was answered in August when they folded like a cheap card table and rewrote their policies to meet Canadian concerns . Well, if that was a precedent then the folks who run the Facebook Legal team fan page (Is there really one of these? I just made that up) are about to get real busy. You see there are several privacy groups who are up in arms about the latest privacy policies handed down by Zuck and the boys. According to the WSJ’s MarketWatch Ten privacy and consumer groups announced Thursday they’ve filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission alleging that Facebook Inc.’s privacy-policy changes violate federal law. The Electronic Privacy Information Center said in a statement that it and nine other groups are urging the FTC “to open an investigation into the recent changes made by Facebook … and to require Facebook to restore privacy safeguards.” These kinds of things usually sound a lot worse when they are first brought to light. Ok, so let’s stand in Facebook’s shoes and let this one sit for a second and let the scariness of the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) being called on to investigate your company’s privacy policies go away. Hmmm. Doesn’t seem to be working this time. Why? Well, because this could be a real serious deal for Facebook. They went from cruising along and just gathering more and more steam in their quest to become a money making machine to now being a social media whipping boy……again. While what they have been accused of lately (breaking a valued trust with their users by making their information, all of it, public unless opted-out) isn’t sleazy on a Tiger Woods like level, it is a serious issue. That’s not good. Now add on the possibility of the US government (you know the one that thinks it can do everything for everyone so no one needs to think for themselves anymore) being asked by not one but 10 privacy advocates to take a look at your policies. There probably were happier endings envisioned by the Facebook folks on this one, like huge profits from data being available to mine and sell. EPIC said in its statement that the service “should not be allowed to turn down the privacy dial on so many American consumers,” adding that the changes “violate federal consumer-protection law.” As they say in some parts of the world “Them thar is fightin’ words!” Of course Facebook has something to say about all of this. In a statement, a Facebook spokesman said: “We’ve had productive discussions with dozens of organizations around the world about the recent changes, and we’re disappointed that EPIC has chosen to share their concerns with the FTC while refusing to talk to us about them.” The spokesman, Andrew Noyes, also said that Facebook discussed its privacy program with regulators “including the FTC” prior to its launch. Well, shame on EPIC for telling on Facebook after the company worked so hard to grease the skids to prevent this very thing from happening. By the way, how productive a meeting is can be pretty subjective. In other words, there is no mention of groups endorsing what Facebook did, just a statement that they met and talked. Look this may turn out to be a non-issue. The FTC may decide to not act on the request of these groups but it might be hard for them to do so. Of course, with Facebook letting the world know that they spoke to the FTC before this move was made may make some wonder just what kind of ‘agreements and understandings’ may have been reached. Whatever they were, they may now be null and void if there is enough of a stink raised. So what looked like a pretty strong year for Facebook may end on a sour note. They’ll get over though just like they did with Beacon. Apparently that gaffe was either forgotten or it’s the policy of the company to see just what it can get away with until someone slaps their hands or slaps them with an investigation. Your thoughts? Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

Excerpt from:
Facebook’s Privacy Policy Produces Plea to FTC

If you are Twitter you have to be feeling a bit dizzy by now. 2009 has been a year of tremendous growth, more than a little success followed by more than a little criticism. There are always questions hovering over why Biz did that or if Jack really meant that or if Evan is saying something that isn’t supposed to be public or whatever. Meanwhile, the rest of the market is flying around at a rapid rate. Google has come up with nearly forty innovations in the past 70 days alone. Some of which involve the real time search genie that Twitter represents. Well, while not innovating at Google-like speeds (who does that anyway) there are some things emerging from Twitter like their announcement yesterday about a new ‘business’ feature. On the Twitter blog we read The feature we are beta testing is called ‘Contributors’ – it enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses by allowing those organizations to manage multiple contributors to their account. The feature appends the contributor’s username to the tweet byline, making the business to consumer communication more personal; e.g. if @Twitter invites @Biz to tweet on its behalf, then a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz in the byline so that users know more about the real people behind organizations. Here’s a picture or it for you. Now all of this was couched in very non-committal terms. Now, in its beta form, twitter is allowing what appears to be a form of sub-accounts for a business. In other words, if you have Skippy, Biffy, Buffy and Irv all tweeting on behalf of your company the tweets will all come from your company but the actual contributor will get a byline mention. The idea being to show the variety of people that are tweeting on a company’s behalf and giving that account more of the various personalities. Makes sense. The blog promises several other non-specified changes but is very cautious in how these are presented. In other words, there will not be a ‘ask for forgiveness rather than permission’ approach to new ideas at Twitter. Maybe they aren’t as willing to work out their issues as publically as Google does. This feature is one of several in development; some of them will be visible to regular users and some of them will not. Our goal at this time is to get basic feedback from business users and ecosystem partners. The beta will be released to a limited subset of folks for some time so that we can get an idea of how the features work from a system perspective. After we kick the tires a bit, we’ll do a full launch to all business users and ecosystem partners. Stay tuned! Who knows but one thing is for certain. The upcoming year will be critical for Twitter as it really needs to establish what it intends to be when it grows up and what it’s going to do to keep everybody aware of “What’s happening”.

Go here to read the rest:
Twitter Developing Specific Features for Business

Friday, Google announced new Universal Search features for Google Suggest. The query-finishing prompter used to only suggest completed or related queries as you typed: The new Google Suggest has way more than just words to offer. Google announce ten new Universal Search shortcuts available right in Google Suggest . Just start typing in a query that falls into one of these categories, and you’ll get the answer to your question before you can even click. Many of the suggestions also feature more “universally” features including weather icons and links in addition to the answers. These suggestions are available for weather, flight status, local time, area codes, package tracking, answers (like [what is the capital of Belgium]), definitions, calculator, currency and unit conversions. “Extra” results have long shown up in Google Suggest, especially with ads . In the same blog post Friday, Google announced an extension to Chrome to help you find snippets from SERPs on the resulting page. What do you think? Will these suggestions change the way people interact with Google (eventually)? Will they change the time spent on site? Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

Go here to read the rest:
Google Suggest on Steroids

If you do not have some sort of disability like impaired sight or hearing the idea of web accessibility is something that you likely don’t consider. I didn’t. I don’t think that makes any of us bad people but considering the time of year it may give us some pause to count our blessings. Apparently, the one group that needs to be thinking about the issue more than most are web designers and developers. If the article from cnet is any indication it appears that that these folks are thinking about more on the front-end rather than being reminded and having to retro-fit sites later. The cnet article draws attention to Yahoo’s efforts in this arena in particular . Yahoo’s Victor Tsaran knows how much time Web designers spend agonizing over color and font-width choices when laying out an application. So when he started Yahoo’s accessibility push two years ago, he had a tough time arousing sympathy for engineers grousing about how much extra time was needed to create accessibility features. Fortunately for Tsaran, Yahoo’s accessibility manager, he’s running into that problem less and less. Web designers are starting to take accessibility as seriously as button placement or heading layout when they develop their products, improving the Web experience not only for people like Tsaran–who lost his sight at the age of five–but for Web users in general. While not quite yet ubiquitous the idea of web accessibility is important and will continue to be so moving forward. More large companies are acting on their increased awareness according to the folks at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). YouTube has added captioning to its capabilities in response to the need. Honestly, until I read this article I was not aware how great that need actually is. There are about 60 million people in the U.S. who can’t use a computer to get on the Internet in the normal fashion, said Yahoo’s Alan Brightman, senior policy director of special communities. For those people, a mix of screen reader software, keyboards with special buttons, and even motion-sensing Web cameras must take the place of the mouse and QWERTY keyboard. That can cause problems for Web designers who rely too heavily on mouse navigation, or who design pages with special multimedia whiz-bang effects that look cool only to the people that can see them. “There can be an assumption of homogeneity on the Web,” said Naomi Bilodeau, technical program manager for Google. Users of screen readers–software that essentially reads out loud a description of text, links, and buttons on a page–are confounded the most by Captchas and Flash Web pages, according to a recent survey of screen-reader users conducted by WebAIM. 60 million people? That is 1 in 5 Americans cannot experience the web without the assistance of some form of accessibility enhancement. I had no idea. The chart below gives a general idea about how people see the progress being made. So as the web roars forward with HTML5 standards being debated and more and more advances there is a reason beside just fairness that should make businesses stand up and take notice of web accessibility concerns: money. It is estimated that there is $220 billion in discretionary spending available to disabled people. So where are you with accessibility issues for your site? Have you given them consideration? Now many may find this next question as a way to rile up some folks. If that’s the case then so be it. Consider this: In the current day and age of more and more aggressive government regulation would you be prepared both operationally and financially to make the changes to your website that could be a mandate? It’s already a requirement to do work with the government. And in order to do business with the U.S. government, companies must comply with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which insists that electronic and information technology products sold to government agencies be designed with disabled employees in mind, and that government services produced by contractors consider disabled citizens in equal measure. Are you ready?

Go here to see the original:
Web Accessibility Moving More Toward the Norm

No wonder I have had this feeling lately that I am always full and the waistline is expanding a bit. It’s all this information and data that I am ingesting on a daily basis. Boy, if only limiting my data intake time would make the waistline go away I’d be there in a heartbeat but I digress. We all know that the average person is taking in more information on a daily basis than ever before but just how much is too much? According to the New York Times : The average American consumes about 34 gigabytes of data and information each day — an increase of about 350 percent over nearly three decades according to a report published Wednesday by researchers at the University of California, San Diego . According to calculations in the report, that daily information diet includes about 100,000 words, both those read in print and on the Web as well as those heard on television and the radio. By comparison, Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” contains about 460,000 words. Phew! Sounds like a lot of stuff to stuff in. Now to be fair, this amount of information is not exclusively confined to the online space. The study looks at television, radio, the Web, text messages and video games. Now, I am not an online gamer so that last one has me a little bit confused since that activity often appears to serve the opposite effect of draining someone’s brain so feel free to yell at me and tell me I am wrong. Television (another fine brain extraction tool which has done its damage on me over the years) takes up the first place in time committed daily that creates information overload clocking in at 5 hours a day. Second is radio, which the average American listens to for about 2.2 hours a day. The computer comes in third, at just under two hours a day. Video games take up about an hour, and reading takes up 36 minutes. While the report says that the printed word gets less attention the reality is that people are reading more than ever because of their online habits. Also, there is the phenomenon of much of this activity happening simultaneously as in texting while watching TV. It’s exhausting just thinking about it. As Internet marketers these studies are important because there is just a ridiculous amount of competition for peoples’ attention. The resulting din of data and noise makes it even more important to find a way to get people at a time when THEY are ready to hear your message. The old intrusive selling model is growing less and less effective because people actually control their time more than ever as it relates to media. They engage when they want to engage where they want to engage. It used to be that you take what you get. Those days are gone. So what is your technique to cut through the noise? Is the level of noise going to continue to increase thus making it more daunting to cut through or will there come a time when a person says “I can’t eat another gig!” What’s your take?

View original post here:
TMI? Americans Take In 34 Gigs of Data A Day

When we first launched Trackur , my target audience was the person that had outgrown Google Alerts, but didn’t have the budget for the existing–expensive–online reputation monitoring tools. Well, fast forward 18 months–and almost 13,000 registered accounts–and it turns out that Trackur is extremely popular among PR and marketing firms. You see, if they want to manage dozens of client accounts, they don’t want to have to blow their budget in the process. That’s why we built the Trackur Agency plan . We’ve been quietly adding all kinds of great features: Unlimited client profiles Unlimited saved searches Direct client logins No contracts White-labeling The white-labeling is the one that we’ve worked hard on and now we make it even easier to put your brand in front of Trackur–instead of ours. When you sign-up for an Agency plan , we’ll register a domain name on your behalf, upload your logo, and give you your very own social media monitoring solution! You can keep close control over your client’s monitoring, or give each client their own unique monitoring dashboard. All for around $300 a month! Actually, $297 a month is the pricing we’re offering until the end of the year. So, if you want to offer monitoring of any kind of news media to your clients, now’s the time to get your Trackur Agency plan.

Read more:
Hey Agencies! Want Your Own Online Reputation Monitoring Service?

It is a common belief that Article Marketing strategy can be practiced only by those who are talented in writing. It is not so.  Anyone can do it. It is worthwhile to consider the following points to succeed in article marketing: 1. Give an appropriate, interesting title for the article. 2. Contents should be easy to read, but should carry depth. 3. There should be no grammar mistakes or spelling mistakes. Mistake will result in   losing the faith and the readers will underestimate your talent. 4. Give a little information about yourself, preferably at the end. Out of the millions of articles floating in the Net many of them are on article directories. Major Websites, small business owners, and those looking for free content to display on their website visit article directories regularly. With this there is so much competition for article marketers. This calls for efficient market strategy, so that your time and money are not wasted. You have to bear in mind the needs of the reader. The reader will try to know as to how useful is the article for him. How much he can gain out of the article? So your focus should with respect to the reader. Your writing should have the essence to win the heart of the readers. Obviously, you have to take some pains.  You are expected to make a good introduction, body and conclusion. You must have the writing style and skill to attract the readers. Good articles will get high search rankings. Try to write about something new. Take your time to write nicely such that your efforts bear fruit. Find out the keywords needed for the topic. These keywords are necessary for the search engines. Give an impressive title. If your article tops the list with respect to the topic, you will grow. Internet site owners will back you and your articles will establish a permanent place in the website. Try to gab what the audience is interested in. Base your topic on that. Type your ideas for every article. Make your writing style consistent so that the readers recognize you. Remember, though Article marketing is free, it will require your extreme effort to find a place in the net because of stiff competition. The proper strategy comes into play how. The following tips can be useful: Article marketers always meet at forums to discuss about latest developments in marketing. You can post a small piece of your article. Make it a point to post everyday.  • Make an e-book with your articles. Your readers should be permitted to distribute the e-book as well. • Write as many articles as possible. Then more and more people can read your article. • They will also try to get an idea on how to write, where to distribute, and so on. • Test it. How good is your article? Ask your friends to read it. Take their true opinion. • Follow their advice if any as your interest may not match with that of the readers. • Present in such a manner that readers enjoy reading it. Put bullets and numbers as required.

Go here to read the rest:
Strategies of Article Marketing