Technology

So the Associated Press (AP) kicked up a little kerfuffle last week when it started threatening bloggers who quote AP stories.

It seems that the AP sent a takedown notice to an independent blog site called the Drudge Retort, demanding that they stop quoting AP stories and linking back to them.

The news media and bloggers are having a field day with it. Things did NOT die down over the weekend. In fact, if anything many people are just winding up to have their say.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch responded to the AP’s actions by noting that the AP is wrong — and banning AP stories. Mathew Ingram, technology writer with Toronto’s Globe and Mail is just one of the chorus of veteran journalists and editors opining that the AP needs to get a clue. Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine goes further and says, “For shame, AP.”

What’s at issue is the interpretation of copyright law and what constitutes “fair use.” If the quoting of the AP articles is fair use, then it’s protected under copyright law. If it isn’t fair use, then it’s not protected.

There’s even a handy 4-part test of what constitutes fair use.

Sounds like an easy issue, right? Just look it up and see what’s fair use, right? Read entire article.

Posted in Planning & Strategy, Technology

In the past few posts I’ve focused on the idea of business as conversation, arguing that the Internet is the new transit of that conversation, and therefore, you are now in the Internet media business. So what next? You have a business, and that business has a site on the Web. You know all about SEO (or, more likely, you’ve read a lot about it and possibly even hired someone else to help you know all about SEO). A while back I promised some simple steps you can take to make your site ready for this new conversation.

But as I think about it, I’ve realized that the best advice I can give you has nothing to do with changes to your site, per se. Rather, it has to do with changes to yourself. If you change how you use the Web, your site changes, well, they’ll come by themselves. Read entire article.

Posted in Planning & Strategy, Sales & Marketing, Technology

Those of us who spend a fair amount of time online love our shiny new toys. We seem to always need something new to try out. And one of the shiniest toys these days is Twitter.com.

But the question I get from other entrepreneurs and business owners is, “why”? Why bother with social media tools like Twitter in the first place?

Well, today I came across a good business reason for using Twitter. Read entire article.

Posted in Sales & Marketing, Technology

For a number of years the price of technology to run our businesses has been dropping quite dramatically. Let me give you three general examples:

- Computer hardware — Computers far more powerful than the one with the Pentium I chip that cost me $2,500 a number of years ago, now sell for a little over $500. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, prices of personal computer equipment have dropped 10% to 28% each year since 2000.

- Telecommunications — The prices of making phone calls are much cheaper, too. VOIP providers now offer unlimited calling plans within the U.S. and Canada for affordable flat monthly rates. Competition from non-traditional providers, including cable companies and eBay’s almost-free Skype service, has pressured the established telecom companies like AT&T to come out with bundled services to give the VOIP and cable companies a serious run for the money, especially in big metropolitan markets. Small businesses are beneficiaries of all this competition, in the form of lower prices.

- Software – Prices for business software also have come down in price, dropping 3% to 9% each year since 2000. And that doesn’t even tell the full story. You now can find free alternatives on the market in many business productivity categories, thanks to the open source movement. Software-as-a-service options also make powerful software available at hard-to-believe low monthly prices. And as competition heats up in some segments, some vendors such as Intuit are giving away introductory versions of their feature-rich proprietary software for free, to snag you as a loyal customer with the hope of some day in the future “upselling” you to a higher level package as your needs increase.

So what’s all this talk about inflation rearing its ugly little head? Read entire article.

Posted in Money Management, Technology