How people consume online content.

An infographic from DKNewMedia, with data culled from Forrester, on how people consume content from brands. Who do they follow and why do they follow them? And more importantly; Who has the most influence?

Why you should not use Disqus

Vitaly Tennant compared the IntenseDebate, Disqus, Livefyre and WordPress comment platforms in this post.

My reply:

A major Disqus issue you should be aware of when choosing a commenting platform is that visitors that are blocking Google Analytics (In their personal firewall or another privacy program) will not be able to load the Disqus code [on your site] if Google Analytics integration is enabled in [your] Disqus [settings].

As a growing number of people are becoming more and more aware of the privacy risks they face online, site owners should take this into consideration. If a visitor is blocking Google Analytics, that's no great loss to you. The visitor can still read your content and interact with your site. He can still post comments and buy products and do all the other things a visitor usually does. If however you are closely integrating Google Analytics into your site, like the people at Disqus have done, you are making parts of your site unavailable to people with enhanced privacy settings. In the best case, they merely won't be able to comment on your blog. In the worst case, you are scaring off potential customers or preventing them from buying your products.

Ancillary copyright law under discussion in Germany

The Judiciary Committee of the German Bundestag held on 30 January 2013 an expert hearing on the proposed "ancillary copyright" law for news publishers which will require search engines and others (yes, this includes bloggers) to ask permission from news publishers to link to their content or even give summarize news content.

The draft law was criticized by civil society groups as well as the German association of Internet economy which pointed out the lack of clarity of the terms used in the text and the negative effects that the law may bring by restricting the diversity of information on the internet. Moreover, the legislation is superfluous as publishers are already protected by copyright provisions. If this bill is enacted as-is, search engines would be allowed to display snippets only after having received permission which may involve or not some payment to the news publishers.

Meanwhile, in France, Google is under similar pressure. Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google made a statement on the company blog on 1 February 2013, in an attempt to point out that the search engine had generated "billions of clicks each month" for news publishers, "and our advertising solutions (in which we have invested billions of dollars) help them make money from that traffic."