Scrapbook clips catch up

Chinwag looks (back?) at 'Black Hat marketing: the dark side of search':

I can’t definitely claim a connection between a willingness to embrace black hat SEO and a willingness to cut corners in other areas of business but it’s testament to the ease with which black hat rules can be applied.

Millennial Marketing and the Obama campaign:

Design guru Michael Bierut[says] that the stand-alone logo, consistent use of the Gotham typeface ("very American ... conversational and pleasant") and his online look and feel make Mr. Obama the first candidate with a "coherent, top-to-bottom, 360-degree system at work. ... There's an absolute level of control that I have trouble achieving with my corporate clients."

Another lesson from the campaign: Integrating Social Networking Tools into Political Campaigns

Profile pages, badges, buttons and even widgets are easy to build (believe me, if e.politics can have a widget, anyone can). In other words, campaigns don't have to dive right into the deep end — sometimes a dipping a toe or two into the pool of Facebook and MySpace fans will be enough.

Mail report on the world's oldest Facebooker, Ivy Bean. Alleged I'd have to say. Post media coverage she now has '4823 friends'. It's all seemingly facilitated and I can't see anything saying she's actually using the web herself. Unlike many another so-called 'silver surfer'.

Blogging’s Glass Ceiling. NYT on just why women bloggers are a distinct minority.

All about the cyber attacks which preceded the war in Georgia. More from Wired.

"Another interesting aspect is seeing how certain countries are what I call 'cyberlocked,'" cybersecurity veteran Richard Bejtlich tells Danger Room. "We know a land-locked country has no access to the sea. Countries like .ge [Georgia] might rely too heavily on one or a handful of connections, potentially through hostile countries (eg, .ru [Russia]), for their physical connectivity. As a result, an adversary can control their network access to the outside world. A diagram from the Packet Clearing House, shows Georgia's network dilemma.

Who exactly is supporting the Great Firewall of China: XSGuard Management System, who are Dutch; Cisco, American; Radware, Israeli.

Also on board are Lucent, Sun Microsystems, Nokia, Ericsson, Acsys Biometrics and Nortel Networks.

Cisco are the main offender, it seems.

Somehow missed from the who-ha headlines about the plan for refunds if your council isn't 'performing' (arf! arf!) is that the central 'new idea' from Whitehall is something called a 'Place Survey'. This will drop through your letter box and ask you to fill in a form containing no less than 174 questions!

PSF estimates that this will cost up to £50k per council. None of which is funded by Whitehall.

But neither is the cost of the concessionary bus fares scheme, which is carving huge holes in selscted council's budgets around the country.

Pressures on councils to reduce headcounts to meet efficiency targets and the shared services agenda are exacerbating a looming skills shortage of experienced staff in London local authorities, it has been claimed.

No shit Sherlock. This is according to "a report to Capital Ambition, London's regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership body, disclosed in minutes of a meeting of its Programme Board", and reported by PSF. This comes as a poll from local government IT supplier Civica showed that the majority of council managers surveyed say their local authority lacks the necessary in-house skills for transformation programmes and that 'transformation' is actually leading to a workforce skewed to the over 50s and a 'talent drought'.

If 'transformation' is to a big extent about the web and 'online services', which it is, then some 'talent' injected from the real world and released from the usual strictures is needed.

How to get them? Neither Hazel, Tom or the opposition have the vaguest clue ...

The Electoral Commission can be added to the list of those concerned about the use of electronic counting systems in the London Mayoral count.

Very cool rip on gmaps from XKCD



Coming to a ditzy red-top near you soon? 'Binaural beats' aka 'digital drugs'. Despite being actually 169 years old.

Very bizarre first 'interactive' YouTube video, from Mexico.

Here's another tool to add to those silly wordmaps of your blog and undoubtedly others, this one 'maps' Twitter.

And another expansion on Google Trends, which I likee.

Wired carried a great analysis of Twitter's, um' 'business model' ...

Cuil? I think not.

This made me laugh out laugh when it popped in my inbox.

The Association of Online Publishers (AOP)'s 'Digital Publishing Summit's keynote is to be delivered by (drum roll) ... Trinity Mirror CEO, Sly Bailey:

on the expanding role of digital publishing, and the future of local news. Sly runs a portfolio of more than 350 local and national brands - can you afford to miss this rare appearance from the former IPC Media CEO, who led the sale of the magazine group to AOL Time Warner?

And also the loss of circa £35m @ IPC in one of the biggest f*ups during the f*up heavy dotcom crash and whose failure to improve the amateur-hour Mirror Online has amused us all for many years?

I think not.

Following another business character who I love to lampoon, Michael Grade attempted to blame ITV's failure to make money online to:

"Non-UK companies like Google and Apple [who] are free to build market-dominating positions online in the UK without so much as a regulatory murmur".

Bah, humbug.

dailymail.co.uk has introduced a new section called 'The best of the web - digested' which, when it started at least, was dominated by The Independent and The Guardian.

More when I catch up ;]