Finally, it’s the end of the week. But what have we been reading and sharing around the office? Here’s a quick round up of the content that grabbed our attention.

Pop back later to see what our UK and US offices have being checking out as well.

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Online giants mow down Aussie department stores

After a year in which online retail grew almost 29%, around 10 times the speed of offline retail, Australia’s highest selling online operators have reached a cumulative size where their sales are now on par, or greater than, the top five Australian department stores.

Originally published 14-May-2012

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg: Does it matter that he wears a hoodie?

Mark Zuckerberg has been criticised for wearing a hoodie to a major business presentation. But should this be a problem?

Originally published 11-May-2012

India tipped to overtake the US to become the world’s biggest Facebook market by 2015

It has just seen Brazil overtake it to become Facebook’s largest overseas market, but India is being tipped to overtake the US and the Latin American country to become the planet’s largest collection of Facebook users by 2015.

Originally published 17-May-2012

5 futuristic technologies invented in the wrong century

We're all familiar with the idea that science fiction often predicts science fact. But every once in a while the universe gets its wires so crossed that something we tend to think of as the far-fetched brainchild of some science fiction writer actually happened in the real world well before we ever saw it on a movie or TV screen.

Originally published 24-April-2012

The state of social business in Australia 2012

Who is achieving strategic results in Australia by design?

Originally published 16-May-2012

Chinese daily social network use increased 15.9% to 82m+

Social networking sites in China saw the number of active users achieve a steady growth, compared to the same period year on year. 

Originally published 15-May-2012

Interest vs. Social in Japan

Japan still doesn’t have a truly dominant player when it comes to social media, the fragmentation and splintering of social and interest based communities is key to understanding the market... 

Originally published 16-May-2012

Bing launches first Australian marketing campaign

The centrepiece of the campaign is a series of mini documentaries and TVCs which tell stories of inspirational young Australians who get things done. 

Originally published 17-May-2012

Understanding social media in China

No Facebook. No Twitter. No YouTube. Listing the companies that don’t have access to China’s exploding social-media space underscores just how different it is from those of many Western markets.  

Originally published 30-April-2012

This week in bots: Robo-crime and robo-punishment

Tiny desktop real-transformer bots? Pah. This is Vaudeville, a 13-foot-high, Gundam-style combat robot. 

Originally published 17-May-2012

The democratization of literacy in the late 19th century created one of the great inflection points in human history. Knowledge was no longer confined to an elite class, and influence began to spread throughout all levels of society. Any educated person could command the power of words.

What if any educated person had equal sway over the power of machines? What if we were to expand our notion of literacy to encompass not only human languages but also machine languages? Could widespread facility in reading and writing code come to be as critical to society as the ability to manipulate spoken and written language?

The usual definition of computer literacy stops at the UI: If a user knows how to make the machine work, he or she is computer-literate. But, of course, the deeper literacy of the programmer is far more powerful. Fortunately, computer languages and human languages are basically very similar. Like human languages, computer languages vary in form and character (Python to Java to Ruby) and can be implemented in infinite ways. My Python may not look like your Python, but it can do the same thing; likewise, a single idea can be expressed using a variety of combinations of English words. And both kinds of language are infinitely flexible. Just as a person literate in English can compose everything from a sonnet to a statute, a person literate in programming languages can automate repetitive tasks, saving time for things only a human can do; distribute access to systems of communication and control to large groups of people; and train machines to do things they've never done before. Computer programming already does marvelous things like deliver this article to your mind, operate life-sustaining medical devices and enable IBM's Watson to win at Jeopardy. The current potential for innovation would be many times greater if every schoolchild had a firm grasp of programming concepts and how to apply them.

Among programmers, a movement is forming around this idea. Shereef Bishay, founder of San Francisco-based Developer Bootcamp, believes that coding is destined to become a new form of widespread literacy within the next 20 to 30 years. Everybody should learn to code, he says, because machine/human and machine/machine interaction is becoming as ubiquitous as human/human interaction. Those who don't know how to code soon will be in the same position as those who couldn't read or write 200 years ago.

300 years ago, Bishay said, "you would have to hire to write a letter for you, and hire them to read the letter for you. It is just insane." Today most people hire a skilled programmer to write computer programs for them.

The code literacy movement began to gather steam in late 2011, when Codecademy started teaching basic programming skills for free. The debate came to a head this week as two blog posts took the top spots on the tech website Hacker News. The first, dubbed “Please Don’t Learn to Code,” came from noted developer and StackOverflow.com creator Jeff Atwood on his blog Coding Horror. The second, a rebuttal entitled "Please Learn to Code," came from Sacha Greif, a Parisian designer whose clients include HipMunk and MileWise. 

“I do think (or at least, hope) that computer programming will become the next version of literacy,” Greif wrote in an email to ReadWriteWeb. “When I watch my 4 year old niece interact with an iPhone, I see her intuitively using interaction patterns that older people often have trouble with, even when they're computer-literate. And kids can easily memorize huge quantities of facts about complex abstract systems like Pokemon games. So clearly they have the potential to learn how to code.”

Not everyone in the programming community agrees. Atwood argues that verbal literacy is a different kind of skill, and more fundamental. “Literacy is the new literacy,” he told ReadWriteWeb. “As much as I love code, if my fellow programmers could communicate with other human beings one-tenth as well as they communicate with their interpreters and compilers, they'd have vastly more successful careers.”

Atwood stresses learning, and mastering, the basic skills of communication. Learn to read. Learn to write. Learn to hold a conversation. Learn some basic math. These skills, he says, are more essential than being able to program a computer.

Of course, the path to universal code literacy is not without roadblocks. The skills necessary depend on how computing evolves over the next several decades. How will quantum computing affect our relationship with computers? However, the human capacity to learn is not at issue. If it becomes necessary for me to code to interact with my machine, I will likely learn to code. It is no different than if I was dropped off in Cambodia without a place to stay or food to eat - I'd learn the local language posthaste. 

At present, the ability to program computers is vocational, like carpentry or learning to cook. There's little impetus to make it universal. But imagine if it were.

Should computer programming become the new literacy? Or should it remain a vocation? Let us know in the comments. 

Images courtesy of Shutterstock

They won't say, but it's safe to assume that content licensing, app development and hiring are high on the list. Here are a few of our unsolicited recommendations. 

1. Expand the Music Catalog

Spotify already has a massive selection of music, but to stay competitive with the likes of Rdio and the cloud music lockers, it's going to need to continue to grow that library. This is one of the more expensive things a company like this has to deal with, so it's probably one of the first places that money is going to end up. 

2. Increase Royalty Payments For Independent Artists

It's still very much a growing company, but Spotify should consider increasing the royalty checks it sends to indie artists. That may not help the bottom line in the short term, but to remain viable, the service is going to need to retain those artists. Some of them are already uneasy about the meager payouts they've seen to date, and even an incremental boost in revenue would be a good way to restore their confidence. 

3. Redesigned Apps For Every Platform

This may well be something that's already underway, but a good way to mark the one-year anniversary of Spotify's U.S. launch would be with a fleet of shiny, newly-redesigned apps across all platforms. The UI of their desktop app, for instance, is functional and looks fine, but it's not the most jaw-droppingly beautiful interface we've ever seen. The same is true of the iPhone app. 

The standard set by the company's brand new iPad app is a pretty good one. There's no reason the desktop experience shouldn't be every bit as nice, and then some. The model could be shrunk down to fit on smartphones, and some lessons can be drawn from the design of Rdio's iPhone app. 

It might be a longshot, but a Web app would be nice too. Unlike Rdio and MOG, Spotify doesn't exist as in-browser experience. Since Spotify uses P2P architecture, there are legitimate technical issues on the backend that might prevent Spotify from doing this, or at least make it very challenging. 

4. More Native Social Features

Spotify's integration with Facebook is nice, and it has certainly helped the company grow its user base. The social experience of using Spotify shouldn't stop there, though. Twitter and Facebook could both be baked even more thoroughly into the service, and users should be able to interact with one another from within the app itself through basic features like comments, likes and private messages. 

5. Grow the Third Party App Platform

One of the best things Spotify has done in the last year is launch its own app store for third party developers. Right now, the selection is still fairly limited, but the potential there is huge. Apps like Last.fm, Pitchfork, Matador Records, Rolling Stone and We Are Hunted are great for discovering new music. Mood Agent, TuneWiki and Soundrop are all innovative apps that layer in a new element to listening to music. 

The innovation could go even further on this platform and the apps would be even more useful in a mobile context. To date, they only exist on the desktop. 

If you could give someone one piece of advice about social media, what would it be?

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and now we're presenting them back to you with Storify. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

Sometimes less is more. At least, that's how this social video app works. The key to this is in its limited ability to choose. Think about going to the grocery store: When there are 12 types of ketchup to choose from, everything can quickly become overwhelming and bizarre. Now reimagine that scene with only four types of ketchup. Much better, right? It's what ReadWriteWeb recommends.

Social video app Viddy has reportedly just passed the 15 million user mark, so it must be doing something right. Zuckerberg and Snoop are both onboard. (I know that because I am busy following both of them.)

On Viddy, much like Twitter, users decide to follow others, and others follow them. It takes time to gather a steady base of followers and people you want to follow, but much like any social media platform, if you invest time in it you will end up having a positive experience. Whereas on Twitter you tweet text, on Viddy you share video clips that can be up to 15 seconds long.

The next step is to attach a filter - Snoop Dogg, for example, prefers the vintage one. There are only four types of filters to choose from: none, vintage, black and white or the color-popping crystal. Select your audience - followers only or everyone - and then post the Viddy to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr too, if you'd like. 

Viddy is short with users - real short. It requires users to record and submit videos that are 15 seconds or less. In fact, even a 10 second video on this site would do the trick. There are no tunes or themes; much like Instagram, it is only about the filter "magic." In this sense, it seems most likely to be acquired by Facebook in the same way that Instagram was.

Viddy's filter options are a bit of a snoozer, but the "vintage" one does the trick in the same way that every Instagram filter that came before it does. For a more classic look, go with "black & white" or the uber-saturated "crystal" filter. There are more filters available for a price. But with only 15 seconds to shoot, it might be better to go nude.

Not only has Viddy created a new form of video - the 15-second-long "viddy" is certainly not the same as a YouTube clip or Vimeo video - it limits your options. That is not something that competitors Socialcam or Klip can do.

When it comes to content, Socialcam is a mixed bag. Its videos don't have a time limit, it encourages the use of various filters and it offers mostly cheesy music overlays that may not always make sense with the selected imagery. This social video app does offer a lot more premade options for creativity, but it also relies too heavily on filters and audio.

Klip is another competitor. It does not offer filters or a time limit on videos. What Klip does offer in terms of privacy, however, is something that neither Viddy nor Socialcam has down pat. On Klip, users can create their own Circles in much the same function as Google+ Circles but with a more Path-like functionality.

"You can define your private circle," says Klip CEO Alain Rossmann. "It is a simple but powerful concept, and allows you to have a subset of followers who might be your family, classmates and these growing user types for people who want to communicate but do not want everyone else to see what they are saying."

Do users care enough to actually take the time to create personalized and ever-changing circles? Probably not. In that sense, Viddy comes out as the quickest, most easy-to-use social video app. Will it get snatched up by Facebook in the near term?

HP has been trying to make the case that Oracle is acting against customer interests in dropping support for Itanium. Publicly, HP has been accusing Oracle of breaching contract in order to boost sales of SPARC servers.

Won't Somebody Please Think of the Customers?

No doubt, Oracle is strongly motivated to lure customers away from HP-UX and Itanium to its Sun hardware and Linux or Solaris. But reading through the documents made public by Oracle shows that HP hasn't been straight with its customers, and its own motivations are less than charitable. Along the way, HP has felt free to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about the Sun/Oracle deal to try to move customers the other way.

Last year, when HP filed suit against Oracle, Oracle claimed that HP had been lying to customers. According to Oracle's statement, "HP issued numerous public statements in an attempt to mislead and deceive their customers and shareholders into believing that these plans to end-of-life Itanium do not exist. But they do. Intel's plans to end-of-life Itanium will be revealed in court now that HP has filed this utterly malicious and meritless lawsuit against Oracle."

In fact, the documents brought forward by Oracle show HP execs in a panic over Intel's "bombshell" in 2007 (PDF) that it wanted to cancel Poulsen (an Itanium processor scheduled for release in 2012).

In 2009, the documents show, HP was considering buying Sun (PDF) to take over the Solaris "franchise" and deal with the fact that "HP-UX is on a death march due to inevitable Itanium trajectory." More documents from 2009 discuss the "impending end of life" of Itanium, while HP hoped to keep the "Itanium situation" as "one of our most closely guarded secrets." (PDF)

To keep Itanium afloat, HP worked out a deal with Intel to pay for the development of Itanium (PDF) and fork over money to ensure that Intel wouldn't lose money producing Itanium chips. There's nothing inherently wrong in HP paying Intel to make the Itanium, by the way. Trying to drag other vendors along for the ride, and being dishonest with customers about what was going on, is another story.

An email in March 2011 from Martin Fink, senior VP and GM of HP business critical systems (BCS) (PDF), complained that HP could not say that Intel "at no time communicated to Oracle a change in commitment to the future of the Itanium processor family." In April 2011, an email from Dong Wei to HP's Kirk Bresniker said Intel "specifically told them [Huawei] that the Itanium line is at end of life with 2 more generations to go."

Oracle may be happy to lure customers away from HP-UX and Itanium to Solaris and SPARC (or Linux and x86), but it seems it had plenty of good reasons to abandon the Itanic sooner rather than later.

Lessons Learned

Aside from the corporate drama, what does all this add up to? The short of it is that companies need to be very careful when they're committing to expensive platforms like HP-UX and Itanium.

All of HP's bluster about sticking with Itanium for the customers is belied by the fact that the company has gone to great lengths to obscure from customers the dim future for Itanium and how much HP has had to prop up the ailing platform.

Despite obvious signs to the contrary, HP has spent years pushing Itanium and trying to convince customers that the platform has got a long and healthy life ahead of it. Remember that Itanium was supposed to be the next generation for Intel, and there wasn't supposed to be a 64-bit line for x86 systems. Intel was forced to jump into the 64-bit race with x86 after AMD led the way and demonstrated that, yes, customers wanted to stay on x86.

Red Hat announced it would drop Itanium support in 2009. Microsoft announced the same in 2010. Intel evidently wanted to abandon Itanium back in 2007. Companies that made new or additional investments in Itanium and HP-UX after that should be rethinking their IT practices - and how much they trust what their vendors tell them.

It also, once again, demonstrates why companies should seek commodity and open source systems. Companies that have adopted HP-UX on Itanium have paid a premium for those systems, and now find themselves at a dead end. They'll get support from Oracle on current products, but will have to deal with expensive migrations (one way or another) when Oracle's support commitment ends or when they need features in later releases. Meanwhile, customers that chose Xeon-based x86 systems and commodity operating systems are ticking along just fine.

Four of the top 10 spots go to companies that are heavily involved in Big Data: Cloudera, Palantir Technologies, Hortonworks and Splunk. Two others, Arista Networks and Nicira, are doing new things with networking and virtualization infrastructure. And then there are Box.net, Pinterest and Square, the mobile payment processor. Most of the companies are clustered in the Santa Clara area, with a few located in San Francisco.

LinkedIn did its analysis by tracking people "visiting profiles of employees looking for common connections, checking out LinkedIn Company Pages, and following companies using the LinkedIn Company Follow button." There aren't many surprises here; these are some of the hottest, best-known new companies in the Valley. If you're trying to hire engineers for your own startup, these companies are your competition. And of course, LinkedIn is looking to hire data scientists of its own. 

Hundreds of tweets, comments, emails and more than the occasional accusations of being both a “Facebook naysayer” and “Facebook apologist” all at once leave me no closer to answering that question. But they do leave me with one important conclusion, no matter where you stand on the notion that we may or may not be in a social media bubble: We need Facebook’s IPO to work. We need what may be one of the biggest companies and biggest phenomena of our lifetimes to really be everything that those who don’t believe in the social media bubble say it is.

As someone who remembers the dot-com bubble (I was writing for Dow Jones at the time and got a front-row seat to the “irrational exuberance” Alan Greenspan warned us about) and believes we are overvaluing companies like Facebook, that’s hard for me to admit. But getting my pride dinged up would be worth not living through the catastrophe of what happens if Facebook’s IPO doesn’t live up to expectations.

Money Drives Dreams, Dreams Drive Innovation

This is what I wrote on the day Facebook filed its IPO, and this is what I still believe:

“Last year was marked by a string of disappointing IPOs in the social media sector - disappointments, in large part because those interests didn't align as well as company executives had hoped... A successful Facebook IPO means some restored faith in the social media space. That means more capital and more incentive for the next Zuckerberg to come along and create something earthshaking instead of finishing a degree at Harvard.”

If Facebook raises $16 billion, as it hopes to tomorrow, it doesn’t just unleash a new string of Mark Zuckerbergs; it also unleashes a new string of Kevin Systroms who have great ideas, but no clear-cut way to monetize them. Zuckerberg may have been motivated by fear when he paid $1 billion for Instagram, but he bought it. And $16 billion can buy an awful lot of good ideas and fuel even more dreams.

But if it fails, naysayers like me get to say “We told you so,” and not much else. A chilling effect on the IPO market means less money flows from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Fool us once, shame on the dot-commers who duped us more than a decade ago. Fool us twice, shame on everyone.

This Is a Story About Users

I’m going to leave predictions about where Facebook’s stock price will close on Friday to the sites that cater to investors. ReadWriteWeb is a site for people who use tech, and if we get too caught up in revenue projections, P/E ratios and and consensus analyst estimates, we miss what is important.

What is important is that if Zuckerberg remains true to his promise to not be driven by quarterly reports and share price, this ends up being a good thing for users. Yes, we will continue to complain about Facebook’s all-invasive service terms, and we will continue to hate on the world’s biggest social network. But most of us will continue to use it, if only because the people we need to keep in touch with need to use it.

By its sheer size, Facebook can generate enough revenue to keep moving forward as it has for the past eight years. As one analyst told me yesterday, if each of Facebook's 500 million daily active users saw just one ad in their news feed each day, and Facebook collected two cents for that ad, the company would generate $3.5 billion in annual revenues.

Facebook can certainly do a lot more, and it hasn’t even tapped mobile revenue streams yet. Its growth may not live up to the pace that Wall Street investors want, but Zuckerberg has insisted he’s not going to be a slave to showing revenue growth each quarter. If he keeps that promise (and if the corporate structure he has selected gives him the power to keep it), users will, at the very least, not have to worry about shareholders or a board of directors messing up Facebook.

We may very well continue to bristle with every tweak and change Facebook makes to its design, and we may grow angry about privacy policy changes that serve to further erode privacy. 

But at least we’ll know who to blame.

Starting up your own consulting agency can be quite a difficult process and often times the most challenging step to your endeavour will be finding new customers or clients.

In this week's Whiteboard Friday we will be covering some tips and tactics that you can use to get referrals and win customers. Don't forget to leave your own advice in the comments below.

Happy Friday Everyone! Enjoy!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Last week I got an email from a Moz fan who said, "Hey, Rand, I am trying to start up my SEO consulting business. My network is not that great yet. How am I going to find clients? Can you point me to a blog post?"

We've done several over the years, but I thought it was a great time to refresh and offer some practical tips and tactics for finding new business. I know there are a lot of folks out there who are seeking clients, who are considering going out on their own and starting their own consulting business, who've had success in-house, who've had success at other agencies. Let me give you some of the things that worked for us when we were in consulting and that work for a lot of the folks that we connect with in the field. Obviously, nearly 40% of SEOmoz's membership are folks who do consulting and agency work, the other 60% being in-house. Of course, we get to interact with a lot of these people and hear their stories of what works well for them. I thought I'd start with a few of those.

So number one, if you're just starting out and you have nothing else going on, I strongly recommend building a handful of case studies. What I mean by this is having a few sites and pages and projects that you can point to, even if you're very early stage. Even if you're saying, "You're my first professional customer," that's fine, that's okay. But have a few things that you've done in the past to show off your work.

So your brother has a hobby site, great. Maybe you've helped him to rank for a few keywords. Maybe you've helped him to build up a powerful Facebook fan page. Maybe you've helped him with some web marketing efforts on his Etsy store, whatever it is. Your friend's got a LinkedIn profile. Maybe she needs some help outranking some other people who are ranking for her name. She knows that she's going to be on the job market. You want to help her get position for that. You're going to help her create other profiles and write some guest pieces and all this kind of stuff that's going to help her show up highly in Google for her particular name. Maybe there's a personal blog, either one that you're running, one that someone else is running, a family member, a friend, and you can help optimize that site, get the right things installed in WordPress, get it moved over from Blogspot, get the post titles, doing some keyword research, having a few of the posts go hot. Great.

Now you can point to all of these case studies when clients talk to you and say, "Well, let me tell you about some of the things that worked well for this. Go to Google and search for this, you can see this page ranking, the reason that it's ranking so well are these different things that I did. I can help you with that kind of stuff." Having those case studies in your back pocket makes you very credible and believable, even if you are a very first-time consultant.

Of course, if you have a history of working with clients, one of the biggest problems that the SEO field has always had is that a lot of clients say, "Hey, I don't want you discussing my particular project. I'd prefer you didn't share and disclose which types of things you've worked on for me or what you've done." That's okay, and that's another great reason to have this handful of case studies that you can show off so you can say, "Hey, here's a few clients we've worked with" or "I can't tell you who they are, but if we sign an NDA, I'll be happy to disclose the names, and then they can serve as references, and then you can see the projects publicly that we've worked on, and those include some of these other ones."

A great follow-up to this is to actually offer some pro bono work, and there are two types of organizations that I strongly recommend this for. The first one is local charities or non-profits. It could be national non- profits and charities if you have a high profile and you want to do that. So here's Adorable Adoptions. It's an animal shelter. It's not actually an animal shelter. It's an animal shelter I just created in my mind. Lives here in Seattle on this whiteboard only. Fantastic, right? So you can do some SEO work to help them rank well for adopt a pet, or thinking about what to do with my pets, or those kind of things.

The other one that I think is a really good option is when you see small local startups kicking things off, so maybe it's somebody's personal project, something they're putting on Kickstarter, or something that they're launching for the first time and some friend of yours through a network or through Twitter or through Facebook, you've seen that they're launching this product through the TechPress. Great. Especially if they don't have a lot of venture backing and they're kind of on a tight bootstrap budget, maybe the founders still have day-to-day jobs, offer to kick in and help out. "Hey, do you need some help with your web marketing? I've done some things. I'm trying to build a portfolio, and I would love to show you guys how I can kick ass and then maybe build up some referrals in your network." They're going to be very, very grateful for that, especially those early stage folks who don't have time and energy to focus on the marketing components. So I really like those.

But I have a pro tip here. Make the offer very specific, and make your pens work too. Make the offer very specific. The reason being here is that if you offer to do some work, you can find yourself in these pro bono types of situations where there's just a lot of demands on your time, and as your business gets going or you have other projects you need to work on, those demands can become problematic. It can feel like a big conflict. So make sure that when you commit to something, you're committing to a very specific project that has a clear end date or that has a very clear end point. So once that project or that date has been reached, you can reach back out and say, "Hey, really loved working with you guys. I hope you'll recommend me in the future. I'd love to be able to use you as a reference for some future clients that I might get." Fantastic, but you've made that closure happen and sealed that deal. Of course, if they need more of your time, they can ask for it and those kinds of things, but you want to have that built in from the start. If you don't, you can get into a messy territory.

Number three, be a connector of people. Maybe you're an introvert or you have introverted tendencies and you don't love to go networking, that's okay. That's fine. But help people to find each other. Be on top of your local ecosystem in whatever world or niche you're in and whatever geographic region you're in. By being on top of what's happening in the field, you can say, "Hey, I noticed that you said you're looking for some software to help you with recruiting. I heard about The Resumator last week via TechCrunch or HackerNews or whatever. I'd be happy to make an introduction because I reached out to the founder there when I heard about it." Don Charlton, the guy from The Resumator probably doesn't need SEO help, but just as an example. And then help put those people together. If you have friends, if you have colleagues from former jobs, if you have people that you know through friends or family that have needs, putting them together and making those introductions can be fantastic. That becomes a referral source all on its own, and you will quickly see that other people who you've connected in the future will say, "Hey, you should meet so and so. She helped me connect with this person in the past, and she knows SEO stuff. So you should talk to her." Great way to get business.

Number four, choose a specialty. For goodness sake, especially right now it's critical because the field of web marketing is so crowded. There are so many people doing so many things that if you can choose a specialty and focus on it and then write about it and become known for it, this can really help your career.

I'll give you a great example. So this guy over here who I'm going to label AJ Kohn. So AJ, right, San Francisco-based SEO guy wrote what I consider the definitive guide to Google+ for marketing and SEO, and does a fantastic job of posting on there regularly. He's the only person I see in my stream who's really posting six, seven, eight, nine times a day, posting a bunch of interesting stuff, a bunch of fun stuff, personal stuff, whatever it is, great photography stuff that he always posts. He's made his topic area very unique. He started on Google+ in the very early days, was an early adopter of that. He wrote the definitive resource for it. By the way, he also wrote the definitive resource for Rel=Author and setting that up for sites, which I think is a great offshoot of that specialty. He contributes continuous updates to that and to other sites, like SearchEngineLand. He offers, obviously, to guest write for others, and he's showing off his skills by actually winning in that arena. When I do a lot of searches inside my Gmail account, which is the one that's connected to Google+, there's AJ, the stuff that he's Plus 1'd and shared and all these things, always ranking on page one for me because he shares so much content around the things that I consume. So he's done a great job of this.

There are tons of areas of specialty that still need or could use people in them. I would still say even old school kinds of things, like we need a new update to the old masters of curated research, guys like Dan Thies and Richard Baxter. We need someone who's getting into that world. We could definitely use someone to talk about the great advantages of Pinterest or LinkedIn. Chris from 97th Floor, Chris Bennett, does a phenomenal job with link-based still, infographics, interactive graphics. Once you get that association and are known for those specialties, people remember you, you have that branding, and then you're going to get recommended for these things. So find something you love and find the unique angle on it and the specialty. Phenomenal way to get content out there on the Web and get your name known.

Number five. This seems counter-intuitive, but when you're most desperate for business is when you make a lot of mistakes as an SEO consultant. I did this myself all the time, and I've talked to so many other people from the consulting and agency world who do this as well. They go, "Well, we have some people time free. I have some hours free. We really need the revenue coming in." So you expand to take on projects and customers that you normally wouldn't. The problem is that a lot of times, remember with accounts receivable, you're not getting paid with a credit card up front here. So you need to count on that trust factor and the likeability factor and the familiarity to make sure. It's actually a great idea when you're desperate to be able to say to someone, "Hey, I'm sorry. This is not in my wheelhouse. You're not the right kind of customer for me. I hope that you'll refer business my way, but let me point you over to this other person who does this work and who I think would be a fit." That interaction is oftentimes going to be much more positive than, "Yeah, let's start some client work. Well, I can't pay you that much, and besides I know you're desperate for business. So I'm going to offer you pennies on the dollar or 50% your normal rate. Then you're going to be locked into a contract with me, and by the way I'm unpleasant to work with." This makes for very frustrating stuff. So be cautious not to be accepting everything, to be cutting your rates, all that kind of stuff early on or when your business is struggling on the consulting side. A lot of the times, particularly in our field, you can take on some personal projects that are likely to either win you business over the long term or can actually be a channel for direct revenue, so anything from an affiliate project to a blog that sells advertising, this kind of thing.

Number six, my last recommendation and probably the best one I've got, this is via Wil Reynolds over at SEER Interactive. Help people. Help everyone you can and not just in the ways that are around marketing and SEO and social media and inbound. Help everyone you possibly can with anything that you can possibly do for them. So you see somebody who has a problem on Twitter, someone needs help moving something and you go, "Man, that guy's pretty cool. I'd really like to know him. You know what? I've got a van. I'm going to offer to pick up that chair that he needs at whatever furniture store. I'll reach out over Twitter or maybe I'll reach out over email." Fantastic, right? You have a friend who's out of work. I know you're struggling as well, right? You're trying to find clients. You obviously don't have a position for them, but it doesn't matter. As you're looking across clients, you're meeting with someone, maybe they don't take you up on it and you say, "Hey, I know that we didn't end up being your SEO agency. I didn't end up being your consultant, but I have a friend who's really good at project management and you said you were looking for a project manager position. I'd love to make the introduction." Fantastic, just by helping people in any way you can. There's a new local news site out there. There's a new neighborhood blog. Fantastic. Offer to contribute. Get to know all the people in the space. As you build up a network of people who know you and like you and who you've done nice things for in the past, you will have no problem winning clients and influencing referrals in the future.

All right everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to maybe seeing some tips from you down there in the comments, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Pinterest, which has grown quickly in 2012 to be the third largest U.S. social network behind Facebook and Twitter, is a service where people can “pin” photos and interesting Web artifacts to a digital board to share with their friends and online community. It is known to be popular among women on the Web and has gained several celebrity users, including Reese Witherspoon. 

Rakuten is one of the top Internet companies in the world. Its flagship website is Rakuten Ichiba, an e-commerce platform that is the largest in Japan and one of the largest in the world. It owns various worldwide properties including Buy.com in the U.S., Priceminister in France, Ikeda in Brazil and Play.com in the United Kingdom. 

“While some may see e-commerce as a straightforward vending machine-like experience, we believe it is a living process where both retailers and consumers can communicate, discover, and curate to make the experience more entertaining. We see tremendous synergies between Pinterest’s vision and Rakuten’s model for e-commerce. Rakuten looks forward to introducing Pinterest to the Japanese market as well as other markets around the world,” said Rakuten CEO Hiroshi “Micky” Mikitani in a press release. 

"Initially, the partnership with Rakuten will help support Pinterest's global expansion," said Neel Grover, CEO of Rakuten's Buy.com. "Rakuten's global investment in e-commerce is illustrated by a presence in 17 countries and regions through 13 group companies. Longer term, there are a number of opportunities for meaningful partnerships between the two companies, as there are tremendous synergies between Pinterest's vision and our model for e-commerce where both retailers and consumers are more social, interactive and empowered."

According to the technology blog AllThingsD, Pinterest CEO and cofounder Ben Silbermann was looking for a “global strategic investor” that can help the company grow internationally and help stave off foreign clones. There were no U.S. institutional investors and, “that is the way Pinterest’s quirky leadership wanted it,” according to AllThingsD. 

Pinterest had raised about $37.5 million through its Series A, Series B and angel rounds before the large investment from Rakuten. Its previous funding came from large VC firms and individual investors such as Jack Abraham, Ron Conway, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital. 

The future of Pinterest is likely tied to e-commerce in one fashion or another. With its high percentage of women users and focus on the “interest graph,” Pinterest is in the perfect position to become a recommendation engine for both online and offline purchases. In this regard, Rakuten is a perfect partner for Pinterest in that the social bookmarking site can help drive interest in Rakuten’s digital e-commerce properties. 

“Our goal is to help people discover things they love, by connecting people through their shared interests. Bringing Rakuten on board gives us an amazing opportunity to move a step closer to this goal,” said Silbermann in a press release. 

Here are links to the posts and topics we talked about:

• [Video] Gaming's Next Level (our RWW Hangout with game industry expert Matt Tubergen)
• Minecraft
• [Video] Working 16-bit computer built inside Minecraft!
• [Video] Building Megaobjects In Minecraft
• Second Life
• ROBLOX
• Eden for iOS
• Myst for iPhone
• Diablo III

We hang out at 11:00 a.m. Pacific on Thursdays, and you're welcome to join us or just watch live. (Here's the time for every time zone.) Make sure to follow +ReadWriteWeb on Google+ if you want to watch or participate. We'd love to have you!

Mashable founder Pete Cashmore is described as "studly" in Dan Frommer's article Rise of the Tech Bandits. Pete is undoubtedly a very handsome man, but the funny thing is for a long time nobody knew what he looked like. He was jokingly referred to as the "Loch Ness Blogger," because he was from Scotland and hadn't been spotted in Silicon Valley. After Mashable started in July 2005, Pete and I swapped some emails. However, it wasn't until January 2008 that I finally put a face to the Mashable brand. That's when we met for coffee at the now-defunct Borders cafe on Post Street, San Francisco. Because he'd been so under the radar, I was expecting to meet a shy, awkward young man. He turned out to be a tall, skinny, overly caffeinated chatterbox.

An excerpt from Dan Frommer's Rise of the Tech Bandits:

But it took a while for these publications about computers and the Internet to actually publish meaningful websites. (CNET, now owned by CBS, is one of the rare Web 1.0 media survivors.) In many cases, it was because parent companies split off the Web divisions as separate teams or even different companies.

“When I started out at MacUser, there was an Internet but nobody cared about it,” says Jason Snell, senior vice president and editorial director in charge of IDG’s Macworld and PCWorld titles. “Not from a coverage standpoint or us publishing on it. Which I found crazy. I was actually told by someone, ‘Our future is on CompuServe.’ But even there, there was a completely separate online division, and the print magazine had almost nothing to do with the online presence.”

Both Pete Cashmore and I started out as outsiders; he is from Scotland and I'm from New Zealand. I remember that cold January evening at Borders in 2008, talking with Pete about our shared interest in moving to Silicon Valley. I had some practical issues doing that at the time, but Pete was a 22-year-old, single man and seemingly had little to stop him. So I advised him to do it. Sure enough, four months later he emailed to say he had taken my advice and shifted to San Francisco. Nowadays he lives in New York.

Going to America turned out to be a great move. With his almost airbrushed looks and the kind of work ethic that makes a person skinny, Pete became a social media star. He is - literally - the face of Mashable. His stubbled visage still graces the Twitter profile for Mashable. A lot of tech blogs started out with their founder's face on Twitter, but almost all of them switched to a branded logo by the end of 2010. But then, most of us don't have the chiseled features of Pete Cashmore.

Mashable is a very popular site now, but it employed some dubious tactics in the early days in order to get traction. Artificially boosting its Feedburner subscriber numbers and re-purposing the content of other blogs helped lift Mashable into popularity. However, once Mashable got that initial popularity, it went from strength to strength, and Pete Cashmore proved himself to be a smart, fast-moving businessman. For example, Mashable was the first tech blog to put the spotlight on social networking, which led to it becoming a go-to source for news about MySpace, YouTube and more.

The last time I caught up with Pete was in New York last year. I met him for a drink at a Park Avenue bar near his Manhattan apartment in June. With bleached blond, wavy hair and a stylish white linen shirt, Pete Cashmore looked every bit the social media success story. Still only 25 at the time, he'd come a long way from being the anonymous blogger from Scotland.

Let's hope our own star stays calm for the time being.

Astronomers have recently observed superflares on sun-like stars, more than a million times more powerful than the ones our Sun spits out.

Here's video of an intense solar flare our Sun shot at us today.

In just three days, the Sun will be eclipsed by the moon, and the west coast of the U.S. will have a great view.

Our solar system must be special. It might be harboring whole planets we still haven't discovered.

But in the grand scheme of things, we're still a speck. The most powerful black holes can shut down nearby star formation before solar systems even get a chance to develop.

We're luckier than we realize. Look what happens when galaxies eat each other.

Image via Shutterstock.

Past entries from Read/Write Daily

Intellectual property theft, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden has frequently declared, is theft.  His theme would appear to indicate that, if we treated the issue plainly, the solution would be a plain and simple one.  The problem is, plain and simple solutions applied to the Internet often have complex consequences and uncontrollable repercussions.

Newly reinstalled Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed what he perceives to be a plain and simple solution to a host of Internet problems, including piracy and freedom of accessibility.  Essentially, Mr. Putin would redeclare the Internet a telecommunications medium like any other, and reassign its governance to the International Telecommunications Union - the multi-country standards and policy department of the United Nations, and an agency in existence since the 19th century.  Putin's response to critics thus far sounds a little like that of a not-so-distant predecessor:  If you think you have a better solution, put it out there and let's see if it works or if we will bury it.

One person whose job it is to respond to that specific challenge, is Sally Wentworth.  Having served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President George W. Bush, and before that, eight years crafting Internet policy for the State Dept., perhaps no other person knows more about balancing the conflicting interests of the Internet's multiple stakeholders, both in governments and the private sector.  Now Wentworth serves as Senior Manager for Public Policy at the Internet Society (ISOC), the coalition of guidance and governance bodies that collectively - if often unofficially - determine how the Internet works and what it stands for.  In a candid and exclusive interview with ReadWriteWeb, part 1 of which appears today, she states that the "plain and simple" solutions that governments like Russia and the U.S. have proposed thus far, are inadequate and incompatible with the way the Internet works.  But she adds that whatever means the Internet develops to resolve such issues in the future may require us to accept some measure of compromise - perhaps even enough to bring a smile to a certain Russian president who never smiles.

Sally Wentworth, Regional Bureau Director for Public Policy, ISOC:  I think we have never said that governments don’t have a role. Certainly, governments and policy makers could be considered stakeholders as part of a multi-stakeholder process. One challenge of the approach that Mr. Putin is suggesting is that the ITU itself is not a multi-stakeholder forum. There is no provision within the ITU context, for example, for civil society... for groups other than the telecom industry and member states. Perhaps there’s a long way to go before we get to true multi-stakeholder, but I think clearly that those impacted by the decisions need to have an opportunity to be heard and be part of the discussion, have access to the information, and have a voice. That has not been the case in the proposal that Mr. Putin is putting forward.

Scott Fulton, ReadWriteWeb:  Well, certainly from the vantage point of someone who sees the business world from a fairly Russian perspective, it’s easier to imagine the telecommunications industry having closer ties with the government - almost the same way that the Postal Service has ties with our government... So it would seem that, if you’re going to involve the telecommunications industry, at some point you’re going to have to deal with government interests as they relate to the telecom industry in those countries, wouldn’t you agree?

SW: Well, I think there are two different questions there. In one dimension, certainly government policy makers have a role in the Internet policy space. They have obligations to their people to protect consumers, conduct law enforcement, protect free speech... But obviously, the telecom industry, throughout much of the world, has been privatized. We see this trend having emerged for many years, especially since the ITRs [International Telecommunication Regulations] were renegotiated. [In Russia], there is a close tie between the telecom industry and the government. I think that’s a true statement. That isn’t true throughout the world. In the Internet industry, it is almost exclusively privatized. So there are a lot of stakeholders, there’s a lot of diversity. And that has to be preserved in any discussion about Internet public policy.

RWW: I know that one of the metaphors Mr. Putin likes to use is that, as we emerge into a more virtual world, our rules about law and enforcement don’t really need to shift all that much.  Just as we would expect to have law enforcement policing us in the real world, we should have a similar expectation about law enforcement policing us in the virtual world. He would go so far as to say, just as you’d expect a cop to pull you over on a highway, surely you’d expect law enforcement to be able to reroute you around something that’s wrong on the Internet superhighway. How would you respond to that, knowing that you and the Internet Society have to both represent the interests of major stakeholders like Russia, as well as those governments and private interests that would argue the converse, that the best Internet is a free Internet where no rerouting takes place at all?

SW: I think Mr. Putin is suggesting that the Internet operates similarly or precisely like any other physical infrastructure - that traffic goes from point A to point B, and that somehow government as a gatekeeper would be both effective and efficient. The Internet architecture, when you step back and look at it, doesn’t work that way. Just from an architectural perspective, that would be inconsistent with basic fundamentals of routing, of moving traffic around a global network of networks. Clearly, then, we have the added concern with that approach, which is, what would that mean for the global Internet as a resource for global communications, for the free flow of information, for the ability of people to recognize their human rights as set forth in the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights - the ability to impart information regardless of frontiers?

I think Mr. Putin’s approach, at least as you’ve described it, would have real problems from an architectural perspective and the technical layer of the Internet, as well as from [the vantage point of] what the Internet really is: a medium for global communication.

RWW: We obviously had this same argument take place in the United States, at least to some extent, with respect to the SOPA legislation that failed Congress. Certainly, legislators felt they had an obligation as representatives of the public trust to be able to reroute traffic around anything that was either a known perpetrator or a suspected one - the argument against that being, the Internet architecture doesn’t work that way. So maybe we dodged that bullet. Then again, the problem does remain that we do have a tremendous amount of intellectual property theft taking place online, from relatively few sources. And there are congressmen who would ask, if you can’t just put a roadblock in front of them, what can we do?

SW: Again, I think we have to go back to the concept that the Internet is a global network of networks. It is not an architecture that confines itself to traditional, national boundaries. Part of the challenge, of course, with the SOPA legislation - and there were a host of challenges with it - was that the mechanism they were trying to put in place (essentially, fiddling with the DNS infrastructure) could not have achieved the goals they were trying to achieve. But it also was inconsistent with this notion that the Internet really is global. So by tinkering around the edges of something like this, you really wouldn’t be addressing the problem that you were trying to solve.

In an area like the topic of downloading of illegal content, I think one of the real solutions to that is in the area of international cooperation. We’re not going to solve this on a country-by-country level. We really do need to come together, both for the technical community, industries - there’s a wide swath of industries that have interest here - and also with law enforcement, to find ways to address this challenge without undermining the basic principles that make the Internet work.

RWW: I think most countries would agree that trafficking in illicit content is illegal under somebody’s national law. And I suppose the problem you’re pointing out here is that national law cannot apply, in a broad sense, to the Internet, which is a global entity. If that’s the case, if there really can be no “global law” that can effectively say, “If you are doing this trans-nationally, you are in violation of something,” then is there not some type of treaty that needs to be negotiated internationally? And shouldn’t that treaty look something like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement?

SW: I think the challenge there is, if you’re looking at a technology like the Internet, it’s constantly evolving. There are new challenges, new opportunities, new innovations. But it is a technology that doesn’t stand still. So that kind of treaty-like approach tends to suggest that you can take a snapshot and apply the static approach, which is what a treaty is - a static approach to a constantly evolving technology. And I think that isn’t going to ultimately solve the problem.

Having said that, there is clearly room for cooperation, and actually, it’s happening to a considerable extent, between law enforcement agencies across the world. There is considerable technical industry-led collaboration that’s happening in real-time, to address real problems as they arise. So the challenge now is illegal downloading. Perhaps we’ll see another challenge in two years, and it’s hard to think that a treaty that’s a snapshot of a moment in time is going to allow that kind of evolution, in innovation and also in the problem-solving that needs to happen.

RWW: So in a sense, there’s kind of a technical fallacy for treaties to be able to apply to any type of evolving system of telecommunications, then. If I understand the way you’re explaining it to me, a treaty can only explain the current state of affairs - you used the term “snapshot.” And I know you’ve had experience at the State Dept., so you would have first-hand knowledge of how such snapshots are built. Would we need perhaps a kind of snapshot as an interim method, something that could take us through the next five years, to give a majority of law-abiding nations, and nations that respect each other’s laws and treaties, some time to hammer out more of a collective agreement on how they can better police each other’s citizens with respect to the use of each other’s intellectual property, in a way that’s more evolving and more capable of adapting to new modes of operation than ACTA?

SW: In some ways, we have that in the U.N. Declaration of Principles that came out of WCIT [World Conference on International Telecommunications], Phase I (2003) and Phase II (2005). If you go back and look at those, you’ll see a recognition of both the opportunities of the information society, but also some of the public policy challenges that were beginning to emerge then, but are still emerging today - intellectual property, the need to preserve cultural diversity, the need to protect freedom of expression, the need to address the integration of cybersecurity. You will see in there a framework for international cooperation with regard to these things, for both the opportunities and challenges.

That, in some ways, is perhaps what you’re talking about. That took a tremendous amount of time and energy to negotiate, as you might recall. The question is, do we need to do that all over again, or do we need to move forward with the actual cooperation? Because countries have agreed to do that. I’m just not sure that a treaty is the best mechanism to accomplish that end.

RWW: You’ve argued that there are proposals going on [emerging from] WCIT that would place further restrictions on Internet cooperation, and operations between Internet stakeholders. Could you explain those a bit, and perhaps distinguish them from the act of negotiating a treaty?

SW: If you step back and look at what the International Telecommunications Regulations are, dating back to 1988 and, in fact, much further than that, it’s a framework through which countries could exchange telecommunications traffic across borders. If you think of where we were in 1988, they are - as you would expect - a snapshot of the era. This is an era where you have traditional telecom operators - in many cases, government owned; in some cases, government operated.  We didn’t have independent regulatory agencies, relatively little competition in terms of end user services and devices. But since then, obviously global communications has shifted dramatically, and countries, quite naturally, are trying to see how they can update the treaty.

One of the problems that has emerged is, there’s the perspective on the part of some countries that the Internet is simply another telecommunications service, and can therefore be regulated as such - that it can be regulated in the same way, and with much the same rules, as the telecommunications networks of 1988, in terms of numbering, routing, settlements of business relationships, security provisioning, etc. So when we look at some of the proposals that have come forward by governments, what we see is this tendency to say, “This is how we regulated point-to-point communications in the telecommunications era of 1988; we should just simply expand that approach to include the Internet.”

We see some proposals, for example, to simply apply the accounting rate regimes that have been governing the telecommunications space, to IP traffic. We’ve seen proposals to regulate routing of traffic for purposes of directing “security and fraud.”  There are a host of proposals about numbering, which may or may not include IP addressing. There’s actually some 200 pages of proposals, which is quite a heavy read. But this is what has come forward from member states.

An alternative approach to this could be to say, what has worked in the area of telecommunications since 1988?...  The things that have been effective have clearly been things like competition. We’ve seen privatization of services, tremendous innovations with respect to the role of regulators. We have independent regulators today; we have regulatory transparency. These are concepts that are not reflected in the treaty. So we’re trying to make sure we can put forward the vision of perhaps what could be included in a treaty. We’re also stating some fairly strong concerns about some of the proposals that have come forward already.