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Struggling industries will try anything

What do you do when you want to save your business from failure? Seek taxes, sue your customers or find some government protection, apparently.

Although the auto and financial industries’ troubles are the obvious, in-the-news examples, many other traditional businesses have been struggling for years too. Think movie, music and newspaper companies.

The Internet being the great disruptive force it is has thrown many firms into a tailspin trying to protect their old business models from its influence. Here are some recent examples.

• Record companies in Canada receive 29 cents — recently up from 21 cents — for every blank CD sold in the country. The Canadian copyright board levies this charge in an attempt to “compensate” artists record companies that are suffering loses due to music piracy. IPods, flash drives and even DVDs are not taxed.
• This guy — who is a professor, god help us — suggests newspapers should seek an antitrust exemption so they can collude and start charging for online subscriptions.
  

  Now, here’s my idea: The newspaper industry should ask the Justice Department for an antitrust exemption that would allow publishers to collaborate on a decision to begin charging for their Web sites. No paper would have to charge, and each paper could determine its own price. But if most papers in a region – San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, for example – began charging for Web access at more or less the same time, many readers would likely subscribe.

• Speaking of papers, this writer and others think the government should revive the Depression-era Federal Writers’ Project to put unemployed journalists to work.
• Ever wonder why sharing music is such a pain in the butt? Blame DRM, which many record, movie and software providers use to block you from sharing their works. What happens when companies put particularly intrusive DRMs in their products? Revolution.

  The Dark Knight, which grossed nearly a billion dollars worldwide, was 2008′s most-pirated movie. (Could have all the piracy actually encouraged people to pay and see the blockbuster movie?) Spore, a popular computer title, and despite its DRM, was ’08′s most-pirated computer game. Have they not learned?

  Sony widely received criticism for putting DRM malware in its CDs in 2005. The protection software actually opened users’ computers to viral attacks. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for the technology.

  Say what you will about piracy/sharing’s legality, but the Web makes “owning” intellectual property in the 21st century very difficult.

• The Recording Industry of America rushed to shutdown two last.fm-like music-sharing Web sites because the group couldn’t collect royalties. Never mind that these sites encourage more music consumption and exploration.
• The much-hated RIAA has shifted its failing strategy of suing its customers to suing Internet Service Providers. One record company exec has even suggested taxing universities for all the music their students steal.

Even Web companies struggle making money off the Internet. The first dot-com crash showed that your .com needs a business plan beyond piles of venture capital money and unrealistic initial public offerings. (Goodness, Netscape had revenues of just $16 million when it went public and was valued at more than $2 billion(!!).) I believe the later days of Web 2.0 are showing that you can’t count on just advertising to sustain your online business.

Still, some companies successfully mix free and charge services. Basecamp creator 37signals is an oft-cited example.

Bottom line: Businesses are struggling to survive in a world of “free” online. Competition is fierce and creating a scarcity online is difficult. With the cheap cost of entry, anyone can undercut you by being a disruptor. Taxes, suing your customers and government interference are hardly business plans, though.

Nofollow? Yes, fix! Bring some link love to your commenters

WordPress may be blocking your thoughts from the world.

The blogging software automatically inserts a rel=”nofollow” after hyperlinks in the comment section of its blogs. Google, Yahoo and other search engines do not follow links tagged this way. But what if you are legitimately including URLs in comments on WP blogs? Don’t your brilliant comments/links that contribute to the value of the Web deserve a little link love from search engines?

You can’t do much for the comments you submit on other sites, but you can help out your fellow bloggers by:

1. Manually editing the “nofollow” out of your blog’s WordPress source code, or
2. Using a plugin.

Which option should you use?

Manual edit

You are a control freak, aren’t you? Hacking your WP source code isn’t hard, but it can be tedious, especially as updates become available. This means keeping track of your changes and making sure they aren’t erased when you copy over the upgrade files.

I don’t do this to the WordPress sites I manage because it’s too much of a bother to keep track of the edits. Laziness certainly plays a role, too.

Online marketing guru Douglass Karr said he had troubles with the Do Follow plugin and developed his own hands-on solution. In his blog, he gives some tips on how to manually pluck the nofollows out of your comment section.

Plugins

Perishable Press provides a comprehensive list of dofollow plugins. I picked the DoFollow plugin due to its very simple options. Others allow you to specify how many comments a commenter must make, or what length of time must pass, before his or her nofollow is removed.

No spam

I already use WP-reCAPTCHA to prevent comment spam and have Akismet, which comes with WordPress, turned on. Between the two, and moderating my own comments, spam *knock on my wood desk* isn’t much of a problem. Because I “trust” the comments I approve on my own blog, I’m not worried about blog spam, either.

Why nofollow?

Philosophically, the automatic inclusion of nofollow in WP comments makes some sense, especially for bloggers who lack tech savvy or install a blog and forget about it. But moderating your comments and installing basic anti-spam plugins is all a blogger really needs to fight evil spam. Having nofollows around blog comments hurts legitimate efforts to illuminate discourse and drive link love to useful sites.

Discussions about nofollow continue. Here SEOmoz talks with Google’s Matt Cutts, who helped develop the tag in 2005.

Free isn’t always free

Web standards advocates show their love for the World Wide Web Consortium‘s recommendations every day through little buttons or links at the bottom of their pages. These links tout the sites’ sound use of W3C’s standards via popular free online validation services.

The movement’s most visible face is a growing and financially challenging component of the W3C’s budget, and the group needs your help to keep it alive. For a small donation, corporate gift (Hewlett-Packard gave a server) or volunteer time, users can help this valuable service stay in operation.

Open-sourcers find advertising antithetical to their movement. Passing on ads — a sure bet for the millions of hits the validators get a month — is a principled and costly decision.

However, the economic downturn is showing a lot of Internet companies that they can’t count on a giant pile of ad money to fuel their ventures. In a blog post, free Web dating site Plentyoffish’s founder laments about the advertisement downturn and a surging, but server-intensive, user base. He writes, “The bigger you get as a free site the less money you make per visit and the more it costs to service a visit.”

Some bloggers suggest the W3C mirror the validator and spread the bandwidth drain. Others think a desktop tool would do the job. (Enterprising developers can grab the open-source code.) As a central part of the standards movement, it seems most logical to host the validators with the W3C, but it may become necessary to spread the pain. Servers and bandwidth aren’t cheap. Even free costs something.

(Via RefreshCleveland)

5 WordPress pet peeves

WordPress 2.7 came out last week. With any software update, I wait until most of the public offers itself as a guinea pig before I upgrade. Sometimes so-called patches or upgrades just cause more misery. I haven’t installed it yet — although the list of new features and interface improvements seem to make 2.7 worth the  upgrade.

Researching other WordPress-powered blogs for major problems with 2.7 reminded me of some of my WordPress pet peeves, here addressed to news Web site and regular site operators.

1. A “Meta” section — Every install of WordPress comes with two default themes, both with a sidebar section called meta. This area contains links for users to login or register. Although probably useful as a WP newbie creates his or her first blog, these links need to go. Why would you provide access to the “secret” backend of your site? Yes, any seasoned user knows how to find the WP login without those links, but leaving them in your design makes it look tacky, almost like an untucked shirt or a piece of toilet paper dangling from your shoe. Seriously, delete this.
2. Disjointed WP installs — Your organization’s content management system will make or break you online. Eight years ago if you bought a crappy, proprietary CMS, you did so because you had no other options, and all that annoying hand coding of html you once did could be replaced by automation. But with that time-saver, came a great time-drainer: You now spend even more trying to work around the restraints of the proprietary CMS. Want to rearrange the front page? Ha! Add a blog? Double ha-ha! Out of this problem grew the disjointed WP install, a theme that looks nothing like the Web site it came from. This can be a jarring and disorientating experience for the user. A look that isn’t cohesive mars your brand and its impact. The public doesn’t go through your Web site with a checklist, but a client might, even if it’s just a mental one.
3. “Admin” — Change your default user name! Many WP security exploits are based on the widespread use of “admin” as the default login name. Besides security, using “admin” as your name makes your blog less personal.
4. “I have a blog … ?” — Remember that blog or new feature your company started a few months ago? When’s the last time you updated it? You cannot grow a community or audience if you don’t nurture it. Just as your body sometimes gets needs eight hours of sleep, a good diet and amphetamines exercise, so does your Web presence. Help it flourish by giving it regular updates. (Looking for help? See these seven good blogging tips.)
5. Coming soon — Promotion means building excitement, and no anticipation is built with a “coming soon” or “under construction” sign. Promote that new feature or section properly, or just drop the notice. If it’s any consolation, this gives you an out when things don’t roll out on time. The Web 2.0 version is “beta” — aka most services on Google.

News Mixer blends in smart story commenting

A group from Medill’s journalism school has created an open-source tool called News Mixer that integrates Facebook IDs into its interface.

Medill’s tool takes news-story commenting out of the ghetto. You know you’ve seen it — those awful, racist, and oftentimes off-topic comments made under some news articles. Newspaper Webmasters have been notoriously awful at moderating their communities. Ohio.com, the online home of the Akron Beacon Journal, once used Topix.net for its commenting. Not only were the BJ people outsourcing their comments, they were sending them to Topix, the ghetto of commenting ghettos. Much to the publication’s credit, the Beacon moved its comments back on site a few months ago.

News Mixer features three ways to converse:

1. Q&A – Leave questions for reporters or other readers
2. Quips – Short, less than 140-word thoughts
3. Letters to the editor – Longer than quips and the software allows editors to highlight the best

The icing on the cake, though, is the Facebook ID integration. This forces users to use their real identities — although the users could fake a profile on Facebook, just like anywhere else, but I don’t see this as likely as on-the-spot Web site registration. The social-networking integration isn’t completely new. A couple months ago, CNBC inked a deal with LinkedIn to use that social network’s profiles on its site.

Facebook Connect Live lists what sites are using its new platform. With Facebook Connect, users can utilize their Facebook ID’s to log into other sites to leave comments and extend their identity beyond the walls of Facebook. This is similar to OpenSocial and OpenID, which I’ve written about before.

Perhaps Newsmixer will help end the debate over the value of story commenting. Yes, there is value! Blogs and other non-newspaper sites have proven this for the past few years. The difference, though, as Techdirt notes (emphasis mine):

The argument [against commenting on newspaper sites] is, basically, that a lot of the comments are really dumb, and don’t add very much. That may be true, but in many cases, that’s because the newspaper doesn’t give anyone incentive to add smart comments. There’s no indication that anyone at most newspapers read the comments. The authors of the articles rarely, if ever, respond to people in the comments. There’s little to no engagement or discussion. So, instead, the comments just become a way for readers to vent. Just tossing up comments and thinking you’ve created a community is a mistake — but that doesn’t mean newspapers shouldn’t enable comments. It just means they should do so in a more intelligent manner.

I onced suggested — and received a fantastic guffaw from an older journalist — that we should treat stories online more and more like blogs. Does this mean dropping objectivity and providing more analysis than just-the-facts-m’am? I don’t know, but I do think it means writing stories and directly engaging the people who comment below them. Aside this News Mixer system, reporters should be regularly responding to and commenting below their stories. Arguably, these same journalists, with some help, should be managing the online communities of their beats.

(News Mixer stuff via Patrick Beeson)

Jealous of WDDG

Interactive advertiser World Domination Design Group in New York — although ignoring all sorts of accessibility standards — has created one amazing package of goods at its portfolio Web site.

I am an absolute sucker for throw-back, retro looks, and the WDDG spares no ounce of 1940s newsreel-inspired goodness to publicize itself. Normally promotional bits bore me, but I watched every part of the the firm’s several-minute long demonstration on how it took Mr. Rumchild’s Acme Products to financial success.

WDDG’s short films show creativity that no amount of marketing blah, blah could ever capture. Although I think the company loses quite a bit of exposure in search engine results due to its all-Flash-driven presentation, I do think its reputation and word-of-mouth probably carry it a lot farther than enhanced search results would. If you look in its portfolio, you’ll see companies such as Burger King, Volkswagen and LEGO. I don’t think WDDG has problems attracting high-paying, high-profile businesses … But the movies lack play/pause controls, some controls aren’t as obvious, etc. … Really, I’m just a little jealous.

Pop a squat on your online identity

Owning your identity online — whether you are an organization or individual — is very important. Although I am not a fan of domain squatting, I do think you should squat on your “brand.”

Why should you care?

Simply because, right or wrong, just about everything done online with your name will be associated with you. Owning your name across multiple domains and spaces keeps those with malicious intents from inflicting damage to your brand. (Or, if you’re someone like John Smith, you’re pretty much already screwed.) There’s a reason why many companies own a version of their domain with a sucks.com at the end.

Brand can mean a lot of things, from simply your name (Nick Gehring) to your identity (mine1044, my longtime AIM name and otherwise being online pseudonym.) It’s a daunting task to keep track of the many, many places where “you” could exist. Usernamecheck helps a little by scanning to see if your name has been registered with a laundry list of sites.

But there are other places to check. How well do you rank in a basic Yahoo or Google search? Sounds like you need to register yourname.com, if you haven’t already, and get to some search engine optimization. If you’re any kind of serious Web professional, or an overprotective parent, getting your name is a no-brainer.

Creating a basic Wikipedia entry for your company is also a no-brainer, assuming, well, that your company is big enough or important enough to be worthy of a Wikipedia entry. Oh, and don’t forget to check back on the page! You can never be sure what some miscreant will edit into it.

Censorship at Maniac Mansion

I remember playing Maniac Mansion, a particularly strange game for the original Nintendo. Amazingly, I also recall watching a spin-off television series loosely based on the video game, created by Eugene Levy, aka Jim’s dad of American Pie or that guy on SCTV.

Yahoo! javascript guru Douglas Crockford worked on the game’s NES conversion in the early 1990s. He penned an essay on the process called “The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for the Nintendo Entertainment System” that gained some cult status on early bulletin board systems. Among his frustrations were Nintendo’s strict — and often bizarre — guidelines and how they applied to the game.

The Big N’s 10 Commandments said publishers could not create games for the NES that:

1. Include sexually suggestive or explicit content including rape and/or nudity
2. Contain language or depiction which specifically denigrates members of either sex
3. Depict random, gratuitous, and/or excessive violence
4. Depict graphic illustration of death
5. Depict domestic violence and/or abuse
6. Depict excessive force in a sports game beyond what is inherent in actual contact sports
7. Reflect ethnic, religious, nationalistic, or sexual stereotypes of language; this includes symbols that are related to any type of racial, religious, nationalistic, or ethnic group, such as crosses, pentagrams, God, Gods (Roman mythological gods are acceptable), Satan, hell, Buddha
8. Use profanity or obscenity in any form or incorporate language or gestures that could be offensive by prevailing public standards and tastes
9. Incorporate or encourage the use of illegal drugs, smoking materials, and/or alcohol (Nintendo does not allow a beer or cigarette ad to be placed on an arena, stadium or playing field wall, or fence in a sports game)
10. Include subliminal political messages or overt political statements

Additionally, developers would go through a licensing process where they couldn’t release the same game for competing systems for two years and would be limited in the amount of games they could release in a year. This is the price you paid for making games for what was essentially a monopoly in the late 1980s and early 90s. Nintendo wanted to control quality and avoid another video game crash.

Crockford mused that these restrictions “would seem to ban any game in which your character met people, killed them, took their money, and then bought more weapons. But in fact most Nintendo games are still faithful to that theme, so we were unclear as to how to interpret Nintendo’s policy. In the Super Mario Bros games, which are considered clean and wholesome, kids routinely kill creatures, and the only motivation is that they are there.”

So, Nintendo was protecting my adolescent mind without me knowing it. Remember the bloodless, grey sweat-filled Mortal Kombat on the Super Nintendo? Or the strange Nazi-less Bionic Commando? Or even that “pubs” were renamed cafes from the Japanese to US translation of Final Fantasy II/IV? These are only a few of several examples.

The Big N, however, recanted some of its puritian ways in the late 1990s as PlayStation and Xbox entered the scene. Competition ended up being the best motivator for “free speech” and the removal of the restrictions. (The game rating system created around that time provided Nintendo with some cover, which didn’t hurt either.)