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."

5 Minutes of Marketing Wisdom by Clay Christensen

One of the best videos on marketing you'll ever watch:

Understanding the job, makes improving the product easy.

WarriorForum Security Breach?

A good strategy to keep your inbox spam-free is to use a different email address every time you sign up for a service. It takes only a minute to setup a new address that forwards all emails to your main account, but it will save you tons of time when the spam starts rolling in. You can easily disable the forwarder, if it gets flooded with spam, and your main address will remain safe.

An added benefit is that you can find out how the spammers got a hold of your address. If your create an address like myname-twitter@mydomain.com and you only use that address to create a Twitter account, you can be sure that all email addressed to myname-twitter@mydomain.com is either coming from Twitter, from someone Twitter gave/sold the address to or from someone who gained illegal access to Twitter's servers.

Today, I received the first spam emails addressed to the email address I used to join the WarriorForum. This means the WarriorForum was either hacked or someone working for them is in bed with the spammers.

Freelancer.com added new messaging features

Yesterday, Freelancer.com announced the release of their new instant messaging system. Features include:

• New Inbox Layout
• Instant Messaging
• Pop up chat window
• Improved Attachments

The importance of getting no-follow links

A comment I just wrote on the ProBlogger blog:

"most comment links are no-follow anyway"

I would not dismiss no-follow links or their usefulness that easily. While they may not carry the same weight as a "follow" link, SE bots do spider no-follow links and any popular website will automatically get a decent number of "naturally acquired" no-follow links for every "naturally acquired" do-follow link it gets.

Several social media platforms [add] no-follow [tags to] links, so when a site becomes popular and people start talking and tweeting about it, it will get lots of no-follow links. One could even argue that a big surge in do-follow links that is not accompanied by a similar surge in no-follow links will be suspicious as it could be an indicator of a big link buying campaign.