Erik Qualman just released a „refresh“ of the socialnomics video published a few months ago. Since the numbers in social media developments are so quickly evolving, this refresh seems about time.
If you just want to see the numbers and stats, you can visit Eriks blogpost here. If you’re from outside the US, chances are that you might not be able to see the youtube-video due to music rights regulations in Europe.
(Note to Erik: Next time also publish a video without the music, which is the only reason for Youtube blocking the video).
While everyone in the world is (rightly so) concerned about the election and the questionable democracy in Iran, we have to acknowledge the fact that German politics is just about to make a small step towards censorship as well. It’s not as big a news as Iran, but it does concern quite a few people in Germany, so I wanted to let my English speaking readers know, what is actually happening in good ol‘ Germany at the moment.
Here is the thing: What sounds like a very good idea for the digitally ignorant politician can actually turn into a very dangerous thing: The „Zugangserschwerungsgesetz“ (law for restricting access) is aimed at reducing child pornography on the web by blocking access to sites with this kind of content. Taking action against this kind of content is a good idea, no one disputes that!
The reason for more then 130.000 people petitioning online against it (more than 50.000 in the first three days alone) is the fact that the law proposal was very badly designed. On the petitioning website it specifically says, that the objective of preventing this cruel thing is not questioned at all. Just the means of reaching that objective are raising eyebrows of many bloggers, twitterers, etc, but also some not so digitally savvy users. Why?
The way the government wants to set up the technical blocking of sites is highly ineffective. Anyone with some technical knowledge can alledgedly circumvent this effortlessly.
But the much more important point: Judging which sites should be blocked, as well as implementing that block, was put into the responsibility of one single government body (the federal office of criminal investigation – the BKA). There also wasn’t any plan for a body controlling the BKA. In the first draft the BKA was supposed to be pretty much free to judge and execute any way they felt fit. Impossible in a modern democracy, one would think.
Had it solely been for preventing child abuse, it would have been fine. But it doesn’t prevent child abuse at all. That content will still be produced and distributed. These people will always find other channels, even if the technical blocking will someday be effective.
The reason this scared everybody is the fact that the introduction of such a law opens the gates for a number of other interests, too. Alledgedly, other lobbies interested in shutting down first-person-shooter sites, poker sites, etc. are already waiting in line until it’s their turn to get their way. (As ignorant as German official bodies seem to be at the moment, and as efficient as Germans are, I have no doubt that 10 years down the line we’d have a perfectly censored and controlled German webspace.)
By now, the law has been softened slightly. Which is an improvement – otherwise it would have been a complete desaster. Since the first draft, the following things have been adapted:
Delete instead of block: the proposal now states, that it should be the aim to try to delete those sites showing questionable content via the providers, before blocking them.
Monitoring the controls: the BKA will now have to report to a committee controlling their actions. (I just wonder who makes up that committee…currently the office of data privacy in Germany is being discussed for that post)
Prevention instead of collecting data: originally the user data of people (accidentally or intentially) accessing those sites would have been logged. This is no longer supposed to be the case.
The final vote in the German Bundestag is on Thursday. But it seems like everything is set now. And while the government tries to push this through within this legislature, the petition – the largest one sofar ever in Germany – will most likely only be administered by the petition committee after the summer break.
By that time the law might well have passed the majority vote in the Bundestag.
I should have known. The chances of having an idea first are really slim. So someone, Alister, to be precise, came up with the idea to block the URL for Marketing Meme first. A URL that could be the meme-tracker of the marketing world, just as techmeme is the meme-tracker of the technology world.
Not sure when he came up with this, of course, it doesn’t say on the site. All it says is: your vote and support is needed here. And the post behind that link was written in December of last year (so I am probably only 5 months too late – which is a decade in internet terms). Now he is asking us from the marketing community to help him to get the guys from techmeme to setup a special service for the marketing industry:
I’d be happy to see some nice ongoing volume of inbound links from SEM Search, but honestly, I’d really like to see Gabe Rivera over at techmeme.com create a “marketingmeme.com“, that removes SEM/SEO/SMO/PR/etc stuff out of techmeme and puts it under its own “engineâ€, building off, say, Lee Odden’s list, with some fuzzy logic around that, finding other on-topic blogs as well.
So if you’re interested in having such a service (I am, for sure!), go over to this site and put your vote in the comments!
I usually try not to write negative about things, because unless it’s constructive criticism for the creator of the content, nobody gains much. But since there is no possibility to comment on things at marketingvox, I will do it here.
I am referring to the post with the title „How-to: 9 Basic SEO Tips„. It caught my attention, because just the other day, I had a discussion with colleagues at the agency about how creative agencies rarely know how to properly search engine optimize the websites they build.
However, with the 9 basic tips, we won’t get very far either. Let me quote some of them:
Find out how well you rank online. […] It may be helpful to download the Google Toolbar, which gives you the „PageRank“ score for websites. Pages are scored on a scale of 1 to 10. The goal will be to make this number higher on your website.
Ok – and how? (It doesn’t say). Another great tip:
Submit your site to search engines. Do it personally; avoid „submission services“ or software. You only need to do it once.
I won’t continue with other tips like „place relevant keywords in the title tag“ or „use alt tags on images“ that they also featured.
Was any of this new to anyone? Please ? If so, just leave this blog immediately. In fact – please leave the internet and switch off your computer completely.
Gheez – we’re in 2008 by now, it’s not 1998 any more!
Not sure about the target audience of marketingvox, but for this article, it sure isn’t your average webmarketer!
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