I started linkrolling my bookmarks during during this weekend’s U.S. Open but soon became obsessed by Rocco and Tiger. So here’s my marketing, SEO, and social media links for last week.

• The Marketing of Fear – “The challenge of marketing with fear isn’t efficacy. Of course fear marketing works. The challenge is ethics and brand.” My first “real job” out of college was working in financial services. Fear marketing worked, it also made me feel dirty, that’s why I switched career paths.
• Marketing Sherpa: How to Grow an Email List From Nothing to 2 Million Loyal Fans in 2 Years (Hint: Give Them Something They Enjoy) – I like the example of ice cream on your birthday. My wife always wants to go get her birthday club freebie on hers.
• Copy Blogger: How to Increase Your Blog Subscription Rate by 254% – The power of carefully choosing your words to elicit responses.
• Official Google Blog: Fresher Related Search Suggestions: “Recently, we improved our algorithms to process new information faster, and the result is quite tangible — you should now see fresher suggestions for queries on current topics of interest.” [via Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim]
• Poynter Online: Seven Traits of Highly Effective Community Managers – Good list of traits for community management superstars [via Connie Bensen]
• How to Build a Useful Site @ chrisg.com – “Track where your visitors come from and what they are after, and if you can actually talk to them. If you know why visitors arrive you will be in a better position to make them happy.”
• Web Ink Now: Search Engine Optimizing a crap-filled site just makes it a little less crappy – David makes a good point, easy to find crap is still crap. Starting with good content and then optimizing for that content is the key. See my post at Marketing Piligrim thinking like a reader, a marketer, AND a search engine. Otherwise you have a one-legged stool.
• Google Trends Adds Cool New Statistical Weighting Features : SEO Book.com – Google Trends announced a cool new feature for determining the relative search volume between keywords. Aaron Wall riffs on the new Google Trends features.
• Is Google Making Us Stupid? – It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. The supreme irony about this article is its length.
• SEO Tools. Link Checker. Check Backlinks for PR, Anchor & Nofollow – Tools for checking backlinks and their quality [via Chris Brogan]
• SEM Check – Service that provides an audit of your website from an SEO standpoint. (via Marketing Pilgrim)
• Andy Beard: Never Underestimate The Power Of The Dark Side of Search – If you removed all forms of search from the internet, finding information when you need it would be highly inefficient in response to Tim O’Reilly’s post.
• Why Arrington is Wrong about Yahoo!-Google Deal – O’Reilly Radar – Great Quote from Tim O’Reilly : “Create more value than you capture” the most succint and sage advice I could ever give a commerical open source company [via Aaron Wall on SEOBBook]
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Duplicate content summit at SMX Advanced – Suggestions for dealing with duplicate site content including sitemap specifications and robots.txt.
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Deftly dealing with duplicate content – How to deal with duplication of content as seen by Google.
• Google: we don’t know how to make money from YouTube – Times Online – Google has said that it is still unsure how to make money from YouTube, the enormously popular video-sharing website it owns, but hopes to be able to do so soon.
• Micro Persuasion: Friendfeed will Change Journalism, PR and Marketing -Amazing stats for how much credence we put in the opinions of people like ourselves — 58% of opinion elites 35-64 in 18 countries said they trust “a person like me,” according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.This has been growing steadily since 2003. People are increasingly turning to their peers for news, information and recommendations.

Technorati Tags: Links, marketing, SEO

• Red Hat News | RHX: Lessons Learned – RHX is different now. The team is smaller and the target market is different; but, fundamentally, RHX is smarter. It’s very much alive and is undergoing its third iteration.
• The Real Firefox-Killer | Linux Journal – This new competitor to Firefox is called Maxthon, and, significantly, come from China. This is relevant because the Chinese computer sector has tended to evolve according to its own rules.
• Linux News: Business: Open Source Development Is Smart Business – To succeed and truly benefit the open source community, companies need to find a balance between maintaining their competitive advantage and working closely with customers and developers.
• Would the baddest Roadrunner please step forward – IBM’s supercomputer called Roadrunner is now the fastest in the world.
  It is capable of sustaining 1,000 trillion operations per second, which is a lot.
• Cloudy Saturday: Roll Your Own Cloud with Enomalism | OStatic – Enomalism uses the XMPP protocol to manage clusters of Ruby applications and helps with scaling them – a novel take from the application layer, instead of the system layer.
• OpenPanel.com | Open Source Server control panel – OpenPanel is a completely modular open source control panel for Internet Service Providers.
• Announcing the MindTouch Developer Center | MindTouch, Inc Blog – A few months ago, we made the decision to start phasing out OpenGarden – we finally took the first huge step towards completing that task today.
• Standalone OSS revenue to reach $4.83 billion by 2012 | Negative Approach – CNET News.com – –IDC expects worldwide revenue from standalone OSS to grow at a 23 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to reach $4.83 billion by 2012.
  –Worldwide revenue from standalone OSS in 2007 was $1.73 billion.
• Interchange Open Source Commerce Server – Interchange is an open source commerce server and application server/component application, written in the Perl programming language.
• Red Hat looks out for OSS community with patent settlement – Red Hat announced today that it has settled a patent dispute with Firestar and DataTern over two patents, including one that covers object-relational database mapping—a technique that is used in Hibernate
• Dimdim: Free Live Meeting, Web Conferencing Software – DimDim free web meeting software. Open source edition available.
• Linux.com :: openSUSE’s Brockmeier sees distro coming into its own – After two and a half years, the distro is not only still working out details about how its community operates — including how its governing board is elected — but also struggling to come out of the shadow of its corporate parent Novell
• Open Source Business Models: let’s start from the production of code | Commercial Open Source Software – It is useful to recap what is an open source business model. Researchers, tech writers and consultants often taxonomize open source business models mentioning just the license scheme and what is sold the most.
• The OSC’s open letter to Becta – Communication Breakdown – David Meyer’s Blog at ZDNet.co.uk Community – “Becta awarded their ‘Open Source Schools’ project to establishment insiders and cronies, with no Open Source credentials or capabilities, rather than organisations who could and would make the project work.”
• Web Browsers: Speed Testing the Latest Web Browsers – No clear winner in the browser bake-off but IE does surprisingly well, Firefox performs well in memory usage. IE is faster than expected.
• Linux.com :: Linux in education: Open Source provides a better solution for schools – Linux has been making inroads into K-12 education for years, but Microsoft’s move to require an audit of 300 school districts nationwide has brought Open Source into the educational limelight. As schools analyze alternatives to hefty licensing fees.
• Specter: Immunity for journalists, not eavesdropping telecoms – Senator Arlen Specter with a panel of journalists at the American Civil Liberties Union’s annual convention earlier this week to urge support for a federal shield law that would protect journalists from being compelled to disclose confidential sources.
• BusinessWeek – Nokia: Linux Needs to Learn Business – At the Handsets World conference in Berlin on Tuesday, Dr Ari Jaaksi told delegates that the open-source community needed to be ‘educated’ in the way the mobile industry currently works, because the industry has not yet moved beyond old business models.
• Leaving Yahoo! (by Jeremy Zawodny) – Technical evangelist Jeremy Zawodny leave Yahoo!

Technorati Tags: Bookmarks, Links, Open Source

ZDNet: Stallman comments on Oyster

Richard’s not happy about the  London’s Oyster system which does use an open source operating system and other OSS it has a “freedom flaw”.  Due to the unique ID of each card makes it very easy to be used as surveillance tool, I like Richard’s remedy…

To protect yourself from surveillance, you must pay cash. It is also a good idea to swap empty Oyster cards with other people from time to time. That way, even if Big Brother finds out which card you have today, he can’t use its number to look up all your movements for the past N years. And keep the card in aluminum foil whenever you are not using it — that way it can’t be scanned when it shouldn’t be.

[via Glynn Moody]

Linux.com: Portrait Pia Waugh

I am on the board of Software Freedom Day for 2008, and enjoyed doing serving with Pia in 2007. It’s a good awareness event.

Pia Waugh is a leading advocate for FLOSS in her home country, Australia, and all over the world. In addition to running a consultancy in partnership with her husband, she is the vice president of Linux Australia, the president of Software Freedom International (sponsor of the annual Software Freedom Day events), and on the board of directors of the OLPC Australia program.

OStatic: Look Out Asus: Acer Joins the Linux Laptop Fray

If you’ve followed our recent coverage of Asus’ success with its (primarily Linux-based) low-cost Eee PC laptops, and Hewlett Packard’s Mini-Note, you know that Linux-based portables are seeing surprising success. Now, Acer–traditionally more of a hardware titan overseas than in the U.S.–is joining the fray with its new Aspire One Linux-based subnotebooks. Because of its distribution might, this could represent major competition for Asus, HP, and the OLPC project.

The Economist: Open Sesame

Consumer devices: Revealing the underlying technical details of electronic gadgets can have many benefits, for both users and manufacturers

[via the Linux and Open Source Blog]

Technorati Tags: Bookmarks, Links, Open Source

• How the Web Was Won: Entertainment & Culture: vanityfair.com – 50 ago, in response to the surprise Soviet launch of Sputnik, the U.S. military set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It would become the cradle of connectivity, spawning the era of Google and YouTube, of Amazon and Facebook… (via the Real Paul Jones)
• Blogging Turns Open Source Developers into Sales People (by Sandro Groganz, Open Source Marketing Consultant) – Open Source companies can nicely take advantage of the positive effects of blogging: Markets are conversations. Weblogs are a powerful medium of communication…
• The Five Questions Companies Ask About Social Media – Jeremy Owyang has a nice summary of the 5 W’s of social media
• Hans Reiser Offers To Lead Cops to Nina’s Body – It now seems that all doubt has been quelled, since Alameda County District Attorney Thomas Orloff has revealed that Hans Reiser will disclose the location of Nina’s body for a reduced sentence. End of the ReiserFS debacle.
• Open Thoughts: A New Phase for EnterpriseDB – Andy Astor states his position on the new CEO of EnterpriseDB. Andy’s a good guy, I think EnterpriseDB has a great opportunity if they can engage the PostgresSQL community in a meaningful way. Best of luck to them.
• Woopra Review – Real-Time Web Analytics « Linux and Open Source Blog – With Woopra, you get live track of visitors coming and going and moving through your site. You get the stats now. While the visitor moves through your site, you can track their path instantly.
• Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker | InfoWorld | OpenLogic and SourceLabs should merge | June 2, 2008 10:00 AM | Savio Rodrigues – Sourcelabs Self-Support Suite adds diagnostics to your applications. When developers have a support issue, the diagnostics results are used to search for the similar problem *and* the solution from within the SourceLabs support repository.
• Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker | InfoWorld | Fixing the broken OSS business model | June 6, 2008 12:40 PM | Savio Rodrigues – Giving away all the value that a product provides and expecting that customers will pay for the “other stuff” is a mistake. I want to riff on this in the future no time today.
• Sandcastle Removed from Codeplex – Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft – A number of people have alerted me in the last 24 hours that a Microsoft project called Sandcastle, located on Codeplex, used the Ms-PL and called itself “open source” yet never posted the source code. Sam steps up and does the right thing.
• Desktop virtualization: Vista’s secret weapon? | InfoWorld | News | 2008-06-05 | By Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service – Microsoft last month closed its acquisition of Kidaro Technologies, a desktop-virtualization software vendor, and plans to use technology from that company to create a new product called Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization.
• New D&D Rolls a 20 for Playability | The Underwire from Wired.com – With the new edition, released Friday, D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast is launching one of the most ambitious attempts the tabletop-games industry has seen at redefining what it means to play an RPG.
• openSUSE Spotlight » Announcing the openSUSE Marketing Team – Zonker’s mobilizing the troops to help market openSUSE. Looks like a good cause and a good use of community.

Technorati Tags: Bookmarks, Links

ComputerWorld:Zenoss: New dog masters old monitoring tricks

Good article on Zenoss, I particularly like this quote it sums up our value prop put more elegantly than we do on our own.  

Zenoss’ key strength is a unified design that collects many types of information from numerous sources and displays them in an intelligent way. While many monitoring products feel like an amalgamation of several different pieces of software that have been stapled together, Zenoss stands apart with a unified, object-based repository and a tightly integrated set of tools and reports, yet doesn’t draw itself into a corner as far as extensibility and future growth are concerned. 

Tags: Zenoss, Network Management

Apple to Unveil Faster iPhone, AT&T’s Stephenson Says (Update2)

I would be curious to see how long before the EVDO network becomes saturated,  I noticed a particular decline in my Verizon Quality of Service in the last year, hope the same doesn’t happen to AT&T.

Apple Inc. will introduce a version of the iPhone next year that can download from the Internet at a faster rate, AT&T Inc. Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson said. 

Tags:  Apple, iPhone, ATT

Amazon’s Kindle Makes Buying E-Books Easy, Reading Them Hard

Walt Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg isn’t enamoured with the device but gives kudos to Amazon for the eBook shopping experience. However, charging for blogs and free content isn’t going to be well received. There’s a Linux tablet play here somewhere. More on that later.

I’ve been testing the Kindle for about a week, and I love the shopping and downloading experience. But the Kindle device itself is just mediocre. While it has good readability, battery life and storage capacity, both its hardware design and its software user interface are marred by annoying flaws. It is bigger and clunkier to use than the Sony Reader, whose second version has just come out at $300.

Tags: Kindle, Amazon, ebook 

Technorati Tags: amazon, apple, kindle, Links, Zenoss