Ever actually read a website’s Terms and Conditions statement? If you have, or if you have some idea of what one contains, you might agree that, dammit, it’s time we set some terms of our own! A lot has changed since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 was signed into law protecting Web services that control access to copyrighted content. Increasingly, that content – and its associated profits – is being created by us. So webmasters, here are our Terms and Conditions:

We maintain this connection to the Web (“Individual Connection”) and collectively to all websites contained thereon (“You the Web”) for the purposes of communication, information, education, and watching Hulu. Please feel free to study our use of the Web for the purpose of enhancing our experience online by creating content to better inform us and to better waste our time. When permitted, You the Web may place cookies on our browsers in order to improve our search experiences or to facilitate our interactions with friends, friends of friends, followers or contacts. You the Web agree to clean up the crumbs.

You the Web may use information you collect from this Individual Connection for your own use. You may not, however, distribute, modify, transmit, reuse, report, or share in any way with third parties information You the Web collect from the Individual Connection without a written request delivered with great fanfare and presented to us in very large font and in our native language, which is not legalese. We must agree to your request by clicking first an “I Agree” button and then an “Are your Sure?” button and then a final button that links to the page where we may download a free app.

Your access and monitoring of the Individual Connection is also subject to the following terms and conditions (“Terms and Conditions”) and all applicable laws, including any laws we have made up and shared with, and that have been generally accepted by, our 500 million or so friends of friends of friends on Facebook.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

1. ACCURACY Information presented by the Individual Connection is provided to You the Web on an “as-is” basis. We make no warranties or representations, express or implied, as to its accuracy, particularly with regard to Photoshopped profile images, white lies included among our Likes and Interests, or any vicissitudes in our behavior that are a particular result of how You the Web use our information. We may no longer be who you think we think we are.

2. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY You the Web should assume that everything you see or read that has been generated by this Individual Connection is copyrighted or subject to trademark protection, unless otherwise noted, even if we forgot the little symbol. Nothing produced by the Individual Connection should be construed as granting, by implication, estoppel, or otherwise, any license or right to use any intellectual property displayed by the Individual Connection, regardless of how unintellectual, idiotic, dumb, inane, preposterous or plebeian it may appear, without the written permission of the Individual Connection, which, even at 140 characters or less, would itself be intellectual property.

3. USER’S RISK Your access or monitoring of the Individual Connection is at your risk. Neither the Individual Connection nor any other party involved in creating, producing, or delivering information to You the Web from the Individual Connection is liable for any direct, incidental, consequential, indirect, or punitive damages arising out of your inability to create an application or website that we can’t game. The benefit to both parties from the information You the Web collect from the Individual Connection will have a direct relationship to your ability to collect that information, and You the Web risk reducing that mutual benefit, particularly now that your Captcha phrases are becoming too hard for even humans to read.

4. LICENSE In consideration of the age of sharing, by displaying to the Individual Connection content of any kind, including, but not limited to, text, photos, or other data or materials (“Materials”), You the Web hereby grant to the Individual Connection a fully transferable, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free understanding that the Individual Connection shall endeavor to copy, steal, pilfer, modify, display, distribute, and otherwise use and exploit all such Materials in any form of media, software or technology of any kind that exists today or that will exist in the future unless otherwise agreed to in a signed written document with the Individual Connection. Your Terms and Conditions don’t count because the font is too small and because, while we may have agreed to that fragmented portion of your Terms and Conditions that appeared in a 250 x 250 pixel popup window with a flashing “I Agree” button underneath, we didn’t physically sign it.

5. PROHIBITED ACTIVITIES While monitoring or studying the Individual Connection, You the Web may not: 1) post or transmit junk mail, spam, or any other type of unsolicited mail unless the offers contained in such unsolicited mail are genuine and really will make us rich online in six day days or less; 2) transmit or otherwise distribute information constituting or encouraging conduct that would constitute a criminal offense without the expressed guarantee that such information shall provide the thrill of a lifetime; 3) stream or transmit Materials that are pornographic or sexually explicit in any way while our significant other is in the room; 4) transmit or use any information or software which contains a virus, robot, cancelbot, spider, trojan horse, worm or other harmful or disruptive component or insect, especially if you are McAfee, Norton or AVG.

6. USER’S REMEDY If You the Web are dissatisfied with the Individual Connection or with any terms, conditions, rules, policies, guidelines, or practices of the Individual Connection, your sole and exclusive remedy is to go out of business.

7. REVISION OF TERMS The Individual Connection may at any time revise these Terms and Conditions by updating this posting. You the Web are bound by any such revisions and should therefore periodically visit this page to review the then current Terms and Conditions to which You the Web are bound.

Okay, your ex just friended you on Facebook. Or your boss. Or your friend whose political views stream forth as constantly as the water from that broken fire hydrant when you were a kid. Oh brother.

How can you be nice about it? Hide them!

Facebook knows you’ll have friends like these, so they’ve given you two ways to tune them out.

METHOD 1:

1. Go to your Facebook homepage.

2. At the top of the page, select “Most Recent” if it’s not already selected.

3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Edit Options.”

4. Enter the name of your “friend” in the “Hide” field.

5. Click “Save.”

METHOD 2:

1. Go to your Facebook homepage.
2. In the news feed, find a post by the offending friend.
3. Place your cursor over your friend’s post, and an “x” appears in the upper right corner of the post.
4. Click that “x”!
5. You’ll be given the option to hide your friend (or report the post as spam or chicken out and click Cancel and continue to read your friend’s fascinating posts).

“But wait! I’ve change my mind!”

HOW TO UNHIDE FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK:

1. This time, at the top of the homepage click “Top News.”

2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Edit Options.”

3. Click the “Add To News Feed” button next to your rekindled friend’s name.

4. Click “Close.”

Enjoy the friendship!

The gap between my teeth was generational.  I was not yet seven, so I was years away from the tight teeth of my father. He had busied himself for months in our basement building a radio through which he would tap out Morse code night after night, sometimes connecting with a lone signaler several landmasses away. He would grit his teeth as he worked hard to remember his dots and dashes in real time; it was important to accommodate the experienced traveler on the other end.

A year later he would be the smallest business owner in the U.S. to install the IBM System/3, which was as large as a Manhattan kitchen and less powerful than an iPod Nano. A decade later he would bring home the Apple II, which originally sat on the kitchen table because furniture designers were not yet aware of the revolution.

In recent decades, I have witnessed the evolution of his PCs at work and on his desk at home and have found myself included in them as a folder. I occupy several rows in spreadsheets on family finances, and I hang childless from a digitally generated family tree.

Today, there is a gap between my niece’s teeth, but it’s narrower than mine was. Almost eight, she watches with envy as her older brother, ever occupied by his new cell phone, taps away with blurry thumbs to connect with friends several blocks away. Like Morse code, his language can be easily understood by a skilled reader. But unlike the rigid Morse, my nephew’s language evolves daily to include an increasingly private collection of acronyms and abbreviations and made-up words unique to him and his friends.

My niece doesn’t know it yet, but one day soon, when she begins to speak with her thumbs, if she likes she’ll be able to communicate in a language even her brother can’t understand.

The future is moving toward this generation more quickly than any other in history. We’re witnessing another of the great leaps forward, when human evolution is sign-posted by advances in communication. The emergence of modern human languages 50,000 years ago, Gutenberg’s creation of the modern printing press a short 560 years ago, and the capability to self-syndicate any social object – text, symbol, graphic, picture, video – have marked departure points for greater collective knowledge and awareness and have allowed for the brushing aside of barriers and the building of a new modernity.

The changes we’re seeing in language circumvent literacy, a step toward this new modernity. The clever arrangement of alphanumeric characters to form emoticons or to create some gr8 and efficient alternative representations returns symbolism to language and creates, indiscriminately for all, a visual context for thought and ideas.

For the youngest texters, cognitive abilities within a first language are still developing, so the playful use of a derivative language, an unrestrictive and imaginative language communicated on platforms that encourage innovation and deviation, is more than social. It’s evolutionary. Idioms are compressed into symbols, humor is understood earlier, syntax is not, and so semantic development occurs seemingly lawlessly among a population that will one day write and rewrite the laws that will govern more than just language.

There are many who don’t take comfort in this, and they are typically at the other end of this generation gap. They are the generation who were taught by their parents that language stood still, that neologisms were to enter language slowly if at all and to remain capitalized or hyphenated, and their daily usage was often challenged by a parent or a teacher who regulated attempts at evolving language by pulling from the shelf a dust-free dictionary.

Now the dictionary has become a lagging indicator. It is more often accessed from online spell checkers than slid from shelves. Increasingly, we dispense with words when they present barriers, and turn instead to symbols. The speed with which symbolism imparts understanding is amplified exponentially by the fiber that wraps the globe, and so in this connected world derivative language fills the communication gap. Through the added use of symbols, communication happens faster and more often, and missed meaning is made up for in repetition.

Much of this repetition is recorded for the ages. The younger generation is the first that will find it difficult to lose touch with their friends along the way. Digital breadcrumbs will keep it connected, good or bad, and it will never know what it’s like, for instance, to lose track of siblings during wartime, as happened with my grandfather who was separated from his two brothers for seven decades. Thanks to the Salvation Army, they were reunited, and a fanfare played out in newspapers across England.

The world ahead for the young generation will be one less of individual strategy than of collective reasoning as derivative language opens new pathways for opinions and understanding and empathy and compassion and facts. This generation will define the post-cyber age by globally addressing time-sensitive and relevant social issues.

My father and I still communicate the old-fashioned way, through email. He has a Facebook page and a Twitter account, two PCs and a Blackberry. We text each other occasionally, but our patterns and methods of communicating with each other are pretty much set. Still, we’re both amazed at how recently we marveled at the utility of punch cards and dots and dashes.

Just got off the iPhone with my friendly AT&T customer service rep. When the new iPhone 4 was announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday, I had to know if I was eligible for the upgrade. The new iPhone 4 comes in two configuration, 16 gig and 32 gig, and is available for $199 and $299, respectively, for those who are eligible.

Here’s the deal. AT&T says that typically you would have to be at least 21 months into your current 2-year contract to purchase the new iPhone for the prices listed above. However, they’ll also consider your monthly recurring charges; if they’re high enough, you can upgrade sooner than the 21 months.  When you upgrade, you’ll begin a new 2-year agreement.

Your plan and plan charges will stay the same. But here’s an important little piece of information: If you’re lucky enough to have an unlimited data plan, hang on to it. If you ever decide to downgrade to AT&T’s 2 gig or 200 MB plan, you’ll never be able to go back to an unlimited plan. AT&T no longer offers one. Subscribers lamentably attest that AT&T wireless network can at times be excruciating slow, so AT&T is taking measures to reduce activity. (Hopefully they’re also taking measure to increase capacity.) If you have an unlimited data plan, consider yourself lucky. With the new FaceTime video phone and multitasking features, you’re going to want that bandwidth.

There is a one-time $18 upgrade fee, and AT&T offers new insurance plan called Mobile Protect for $13.99 per month. You can purchase this insurance within thirty days of your iPhone 4 purchase, and it covers you if your iPhone 4 is stolen, lost, flushed down the toilet or left at a Silicon Valley bar.

Check out Apple’s infomercial for the iPhone 4:

In April, Twitter bought Tweetie and tweaked it. Now they’re releasing it as simply Twitter, the only official Twitter application in the app store. And they dropped the price from $2.99 USD to free. Tweetie fans are already calling it Tweetie 3. Yesterday, Tweetie 2 was removed from the app store, raising speculation that the new version could be released sometime very soon. There are reports the app is currently available on the New Zealand App Store. TechTree.com was lucky enough to get several screen shots.

Facebook recently unveiled several changes to its service that give users more sharing options, but in the process the company demonstrated what many have come to believe is its intentional disregard for user privacy.

This mistake feels a lot like Facebook’s February 2009 debacle when the company changed its user agreement in an “all take, no give” arrangement that gave the company the right to use, in perpetuity, all information shared by its users on the site. Users rebelled and Facebook backed down immediately.

But this one’s different. With these recent updates, Facebook has given users two important things: Easier ways to share and participate among communities of interest within the network and more privacy and protection settings to accommodate this new structure.

Facebook’s mistake is two-fold. First, the default privacy settings for the new Facebook are not Friends, Friends of Friends, or all of Facebook, but the entire Internet. This Facebook Privacy info graphic by Matt McKeon shows the evolution of Facebook’s default settings. Second, Facebook has provided no easy road map for just how to navigate to the 50 privacy settings in order to choose from among the more than 170 privacy options.

Users’ confusion over the default settings and how to change them, along with lackluster explanations of the benefits of the new changes, has created the usual uproar we’ve come to expect each time Facebook tweaks our home away from home.

Unfortunately for Facebook, this update has also created what analysts suspect is an increase in the number of users wanting to delete their Facebook accounts. The number of searches for “how do i delete my facebook account [sic]” have increased dramatically since the changes were announced, and a mass exodus from Facebook has been scheduled for May 31.

Nothing On the Web Is Free

Facebook has over 400 million users, and after the mass exodus, the site will have over 400 million users.

The changes Facebook has made are part of Facebook’s inevitable monetizing strategy. And that’s the point. Nothing about Facebook is free. Facebook has never been in the game not to make money. And it’s finally doing so. This year the company is expected to have revenues of between $1.2 and $2 billion. And yes, some of that will be profit.

Facebook will ultimately strike the necessary balance between its bottom line and its users. They always do. But what users have to realize is that one fact will remain: Facebook will make money off of the information users share on its site.

To those for whom this is a bad thing, Facebook is not the place to be. Profile information is the most valuable information for marketers on the Web, and no single Web service has more of this type of information than Facebook. Facebook will continue along its path to use this information to make money in order to stay in business and to continue to give users the services they sign up for in droves.

The critics are right: Facebook wants to make mountains of cash. But they can only do it if its users are happy.

The Wild Wild Web

A lot of the information you share on Facebook – your email address, phone number, physical address – is already public on the web and would remain so if Facebook went away tomorrow. This information was there before Facebook and exists online independently of Facebook.

Take a look at Pipl.com. Type in your name or the name of your best friend, or your worst enemy, and see what pops up. A recent search on this writer’s name produced the following information:

• Contact details from Whitepages.com, Spokeo.com, and two others
• Background reports from Intelius.com
• Personal profiles from MySpace, Spokeo, LinkedIn, Members-Base, Bebo and Flickr
• Email addresses from Inelius that are so old I caught myself wanting to say they pre-date the Web
• Public records including birth records from BirthDetails.com and Intelius
• Videos from YouTube
• Web pages
• Blog posts
• Documents

Many sites like this have emerged over the years. Pipl, Spokeo and Zillow.com, to name a few, all publish information many users feel is private. But in fact, it’s not. It’s quite public, and sites like these aggregate this information from public sources.

Which leads to a not-so-recent trend in social media, but one that is about to see the roof blow off because of yet another new initiative by Facebook.

The trend is social media aggregation, where information from different social media sites is pulled together in one location so that it can be more easily digested. Many aggregation services, like Gist, FriendFeed and NetVibes, offer tools and widgets that let users combine messages, search multiple social media sites at once, track friends, and even access their profile data all from one place, all in an attempt to simplify an individual’s social media participation.

With the recent introduction of Open Graph, Facebook will attempt to take social aggregation into the stratosphere. In fact, Facebook wants to turn the entire Web into your personal aggregator.

Currently, different social media sites contribute to some part of the social graph. Yelp is mapping out the part of the graph that connects people to local businesses. Pandora is mapping out the part related to music. With Open Graph, Facebook plans to bring these graphs together.

“If we can take these separate maps of the graph and pull them all together,” says Zuckerberg, as reported by CNET.com, “then we can create a Web that’s smarter, more social, more personalized, and more semantically aware.”

He goes on to say, “These connections aren’t just happening on Facebook, they’re happening all over the Web, and today with the Open Graph we’re bringing all these things together.”

If you use Facebook, you might be surprised to find you’re already participating in its new social graph. Go to Account > Privacy Settings and click on Applications and Websites. There you’ll see, as of this writing, Instant Personalization Pilot Program. Click on it to see the beginnings of a monumental change on the Web.

Good Rules of Thumb

Just consider that anything you say on Facebook is public, and don’t say anything that you would have to whisper to anyone whom you’re dining with at an outdoor cafe.

Each time you allow a Facebook app to access your profile information, read the Terms and Conditions for that app. Apps are bound by neither Facebook’s Privacy Policy nor its Terms and Conditions. They are third-party relationships, and when you share your Facebook information with them you do so independently of Facebook. Apps are how a lot of profile info leaks out of Facebook. Facebook should be clearer about this and should be more concerned for users’ privacy when it comes to third-party apps, and it wouldn’t be surprising if their approach to apps changes sometime soon.

Sites offering FacebookConnect are safe. FacebookConnect is a service that lets users enjoy their Facebook relationships on other websites. Users can sign in with their Facebook username and password and discover what their friends find interesting on a particular site. The third-party website does not have access to your Facebook profile information.

For more on Facebook Privacy Settings and how to change them, check out these resources:

Tips to Maximize Your Facebook Security (NY Daily News)

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options (New York Times)

Facebook’s “Posts By Everyone” Feature (SearchEngineLand.com)

Facebook has announced some changes that are sure to cause more than a little annoyance among its more than 400 million active users. But based on what we’ve read, it’s a dose of what most users having been asking for. This is how the Associated Press reported it:

Facebook is revamping users’ profiles to emphasize the pages for bands, books and businesses that millions have become fans of on the world’s largest online social network.

Currently, users can list their activities, interests, favorite music and TV shows as part of their profiles. But links to Facebook “pages” for wine, your local library or the Lakers basketball team would appear in a separate section lower down.

Beginning Monday, Facebook will start prompting users to essentially combine the two. So if you listed Johnny Cash in the “favorite music” section of your profile, Facebook will now ask you to join his page, if you haven’t become a fan of it already.

You’ll be able to hide this connection on your profile, but your name will still be listed on the Johnny Cash page as one of the 1.2 million “people who like this” — what Facebook used to term “fans.” The same goes for users’ home towns, education and work places.

But there are more to Facebook pages than brands and bands.

People like pickles, they like sleeping in and 641,653 people even like the Norwegian Olympic curling team’s pants. So for such things, Facebook is rolling out “community pages.”

In many cases this page will include the Wikipedia entry on the topic, along with Facebook posts from friends and others discussing it. The page collects and displays posts by Facebook users mentioning cooking. Users will see posts from their friends and from strangers who haven’t restricted public access to their updates.

But for now, there is no option for users to interact with the cooking page, for example, by posting a message directly on its “wall.” Facebook said it will be asking people “who are passionate about any of these topics” to sign up as a contributor, though the company did not say when this would begin.

Facebook is also adding some privacy controls so that users’ friends can’t see the list of other friends they have. Under a new section called “friends, tags and connections,” users will be able to limit who can see what on their profile. Facebook had taken away this option with its overhaul of privacy settings in December, but users and privacy advocates have been asking for it back.

So what do you think? More communities, and more privacy from them. Give us your thoughts, and please tweet.

Favorite on-screen moments of the Governator include one in the 1977 documentary “Pumping Iron” where the master employs a little psychology on a young Lou Ferrigno by telling Ferrigno’s coach, who happens to be Ferrigno’s father, that the amateur shouldn’t make so much noise as they work out together in preparation for a competition. Others include just about any scene from the original “Conan the Barbarian” – what a hoot – and of course the Terminator series. And now this moment. In this short clip, Arnold thanks the people of Col-i-forn-ee-a for their tweets on how to deal with the state budget crisis.

There has been some discussion among the ranks about Twitter and how to best use it. Of course, there is no consensus. Twitter is a micro-blog with a feature set that gets richer by the day, so it becomes increasingly difficult to place in the same cubicle any two people who are using Twitter the same way. But we’ve been able to pin down a few facts that inform our own tweeting.

First, it simply isn’t true, categorically, that size doesn’t matter. While the number of people following you does often represent a vanity measurement, if those followers are targeted and if you keep them engaged, then size matters a lot. In his piece “The Science of ReTweets,” social media and viral marketing scientist Dan Zarella points out that it only makes sense that the more followers you have the more retweets you’ll get. Number of retweets is an important metric in determining Twitter influence and clout. Zarella does point out, however, that the correlation between number of followers and retweets is weak, but it is still a positive one.

Various ranking services list number of followers as their first measurement. Twitalyzer.com presents “Impact” as its first of several key metrics, and listed first under this metric is number of followers. And on Grader.com’s “Algorithm Factors,” the first measurement is, yep, number of followers.

So size matters. But not in a vacuum. To borrow from Twitalyzer, engagement, referenced citations, influence, generosity, clout, and velocity all contribute to overall Twitter rank, and more importantly to achieving your objectives with your Twitter campaigns. Here is a simple set of steps to remember:

• Target the people you follow. Look at bio information to see with whom you may easily engage, and search on terms and hash tags of interest to you or your organization.
• Unfollow anyone who hasn’t followed you back in three days (unless of course you simply love their tweets).
• Make your tweets engaging, and use keywords and links.

Another part of the discussion among the ranks deals with actually being able to read all of the tweets of the individuals you follow. What you see is less than what you get. Let’s face it, once you follow more than 50 people, and if you’re tweeting for your company or organization hopefully your sites are set much higher than that, you’ll never see all their tweets on your home page. This is why our friends at Twitter created lists, which allow us to categorize and group together those individuals we wish to keep up with by carving them out of Twitter’s rushing stream.

Okay, okay. Size isn’t everything. What matters is that you get from Twitter that which you enjoy. And that could come from a single follower.

Oh, please retweet this!

One thing Twitter isn’t is unpopular. It grew over 1400% from June of 2008 through June of 2009, one of the fastest growing services of all time on the web. And an expanding feature set is attracting even more users to this micro-blogging oddity. Twitter is a lot of things to a lot of people. So many, in fact, reluctant adopters are often left asking, “What is Twitter?”

Twitter Isn’t a Little Black Book
Once you have over 50 followers, and depending on how generous some of them are with the minutiae of their lives, you can’t read all of their tweets. This is the first lesson of Twitter. So it doesn’t matter how many people you follow, or how few. Twitter is different for everyone, but the number of people you follow doesn’t have to be constrained necessarily to the number of people you can realistically follow. I follow people whose tweets interest me those whose bios contain information indicating they may be useful to me in some way. Do they share my interests? Are they near me? Are they in my industry? Potential clients?

Follow to be reminded, search to read. If I’m interested in a person’s tweets, I follow them. They’ll appear in my list of followers and when I peruse that list I’ll be reminded to visit their Twitter page from time to time. If I’m interested in what people are saying about a particular topic, I search on that topic.

But forget about trying to read every tweet that comes in on your main feed.

Twitter Isn’t Slow
Twitter, with its shortened URLs and users with huge follower lists, is the perfect medium for responding to information and disseminating information quickly to a large number of people. It can come in handy when you want to quickly get in on a conversation in social media. This is why it’s important to have targeted followers and followers who are influencers, and as many of these types of followers as possible. If they like your tweet, they might retweet, helping you to spread your message quickly.

When a tweet is retweeted often, it’s important to a particular group. A tweet that goes viral is recent, and the social signals it generates are now. If that tweet is about you or your organization, it’s good to be able to respond quickly, particularly if it happens to be a complaint.

Twitter Isn’t a Newspaper, a Book or a Magazine
Twitter is a micro-blog. It spits out tweets 140 characters at a time that contain useful words and phrases that are easy to search and that give a good indication of what’s on people’s minds. Lots of people, not just a handful who sit on an editorial board.

Twitter Isn’t Feckless
By midday on January 12, 2010, the top ten Twitter topics were related to Haiti or earthquake relief. On June 17, 2009, the State Department asked Twitter to hold off on scheduled maintenance to its servers to avoid disruptions in what had become a useful source of information coming out of Iran during its election. Twitter pushes social signals into the mainstream and helps make much of what’s important to us a little more transparent.

Twitter Isn’t a Technology That’s Going Away
The Twitter syntax is so simple and effective Facebook has adopted parts of it. Type the @ symbol followed by a letter in Facebook and you’ll see friends’ names appear. And it’s search capabilities are so strong Google began including live Twitter rolls on its search pages for timely topical searches.

Historically, search engines have determined the importance of web pages and delivered to us the most relevant ones based on our search terms. But it takes time to determine the relevancy of a web page. What about recent results? This is where Twitter soars. It gives us recent results, many of which are relevant. We’re beginning to see content authority changing, and Twitter is at the root of this change. Today, for instance, Google launched Google Buzz, a set of Twitter-like social networking features within Gmail.

Twitter is building up a feature set that has for many become indispensable. Whether Twitter the company will be around for long is to be seen, but the company is valued at around $1 billion at the time of this post, and its technology will most like be around whenever you read this.

Every search includes the “what,” but a large number of searches also include the “where.” Local search occurs whenever keywords related to “where” appear in the search string, like “Seattle pizza,” “Flagstaff charter planes” or “antiques Vermont.” These geographic modifiers restrict the search to more relevant data from the search engines.

Local search can also occur when the search is for a product or service that’s typically purchased or consumed locally, even if no geographic modifier is used, for instance “restaurants,” “horseback riding” and “chiropractor.”

Search Engines Big and Small
Local search happens on the large search engines as well as on a variety of local search engines, like Yahoo! Local, Google Maps, Bing Maps, AskCity, AOL Local, and many others, including online Yellow Pages. These local search engines provide databases of local business listings, many of which are submitted by the business owners themselves, others of which are aggregated by each search engine.

Local Search Advertising
Local search engines give local businesses a less competitive paid advertising alternative to the larger search engines for targeting local traffic. A business can be listed on most local search engines for free, and paid advertising on these sites can cost as little as $10 per month.

On the Map
Map locations are increasingly working their way into local search results. In fact, Google folded Google Local into Google Maps, offering business search results, links to websites and location maps all in a single local search. Even its main search engine provides a list of “Local business results” complete with a map dotted with clickable pushpins. The techniques used by the different search engines vary, as do their sources of information, so the results vary as well.

Doing It
First, geo-optimize your website. Include geographic modifiers in the title and meta data for geographically sensitive areas of your website, and then create specific landing pages if necessary. Submit your business listing and website address to local search engines and conduct local pay-per-click campaigns on both local and large search engines.

If you operate locally, optimizing for local search is pretty much a no-brainer. But even if you don’t, local search still has its advantages. Optimizing parts of your site for specific locations gives you more opportunity in areas that show a particular concentration of interest in whatever it is you’re offering.

Check this out for more on Local Search and how to do it effectively.

If you’re ever asked in an email from Twitter to change your password, think first and then do this. Do not click on any links in the email. Go to your web browser and sign in to Twitter as you normally would. Click on Settings in the upper right, then click on Password. This is the only safe way to change your password.

Should you change your password if you receive this email from Twitter? I would say yes, even if you think the email is not from Twitter. Password protection is the weakest point of entry on the Web, so strong passwords that are changed frequently are the best way to protect your goods online.

The Twitter API has allowed developers to create thousands of Twitter tools and applications that help us make even better use of Twitter, and these tools require that you log in to your Twitter account off site. In these cases, your username and password are protected.

But because we can sign in so easily from other places, Twitter users are easy targets for phishing attacks. And quite a few have accompanied Twitter’s rapid growth in the last 18 months. If Twitter were to ask you to change your password, most likely they would tell you the same thing: go to your Twitter account and do it there.

Can you offer any warnings on Twitter attacks you’ve encountered?

It’s important to remember that the goals of nonprofits are typically fundraising, advocacy efforts and recruiting vounteers. List building is an objective toward achieving these goals. Facebook is not the best tool for adding email opt-ins. But if you have several hundred fans on your nonprofit Facebook page, there’s your list! Use that list to help raise donations.

The idea behind social media is to go where your audience is and not to drag them to where you are. Once there, you interact with them through conversations they’re already having. Many audiences are on Facebook and Twitter.

Both are essentially micro-blogs. I know many complain about the seemingly constant changes the Facebook team implements. But these changes make it so much easier to achieve what you want to achieve. For instance, a year or so ago Facebook’s little status update — your name followed by the word “is” — became the central thread that holds together all of our interactions on the site. This status update is nothing more than a micro-blog that you publish and Facebook distributes, just like Twitter.

Just like Twitter. The rise of Twitter is what inspired Facebook to make that change. Facebook has even adopted some of the Twitter syntax. Try this: when you update Facebook, use the @ symbol and begin typing the name of one of your friends or fans. It auto-fills. That’s straight from Twitter.

Micro-blogging is all about recency (the real word is “recentness”). Your updates should be frequent in order to remain recent. But monitor the threshold with your fans. Make sure 1) you’re not annoying them with updates that are too frequent, 2) you’re contributing to conversations they’re already engaged in or initiate conversations they want to participate in, 3) the focus is on them and not you, 4) your call to action exists at the intersection of their interests and yours.

http://trendsmap.com/
Wee loved it when it debuted, but it was glitchy on the two different platforms we tested it on. But no more. And it keeps getting better. A great tool for monitoring social signals coming through Twitter.

“Trendsmap.com is a real-time mapping of Twitter trends across the world. See what the global, collective mass of humanity are discussing right now.”

A friend expressed to me recently his confusion over free. “How is anything free?” he mused. “Nothing can be really free.” But what about Facebook? Gmail? What about the notion in Chris Anderson’s “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business” (Wired Magazine: 16.03) that the Web is all about scale and if the costs can be spread over a large enough audience, something of value can essentially be had for free?

The New York Times announced today that it intends to charge frequent readers for access to its website starting in 2011. A number of weeks ago, Rupert Murdoch announced that many of News Corp’s online media properties would soon begin charging visitors, a reality that all online publishers are faced with in the post-dawn of the ad revenue model.

But let’s face it. Facebook and Gmail are not free. Anderson reminds us of what Stewart Brand said in 1984: “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive … That tension will not go away.” Facebook and Google, Gmail’s parent company, each in its own way have monetized that tension.

Google knows a shocking amount about your computer and where it goes: every keyword search you conduct, every website you visit, your IP address, where you’re physically located, and even more if you use services like Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, etc., ad infinitum. Your use of Google is not free. You give Google a lot of useful information.

Facebook knows the real you. If you’re one of over 350 million who use Facebook, you’ve voluntarily shared with Facebook the most valuable information on the Web: your profile information. Facebook knows your name, who your friends are, that you like to hike and bike, that you read Ayn Rand and Anne Rice, that your political views are complicated, and what your status is. So Facebook isn’t free either.

These are two distinct classes of information on the Web, and they drive most marketing that occurs online. Profile information, tucked relatively safely away in username and password-protected environments like Facebook, allows for ads to be served to you based on your specific interests. It’s called behavioral targeting. Search engine information, tucked away in its own protected etherworld, allows search engines to deliver to you the most relevant ads based on search behavior, yours and others.

So why does the New York Times have to charge its subscribers? Because they’re giving away their content for nothing in return. As the New York Times decides exactly how and what they’ll charge its users, they should also consider the value of profile information and site search information. They should supplement their site with a social media component and give every user the option signing up with the same kind of information that is shared on sites like Facebook. These users will be given more free access to the site and will be served highly targeted ads based on their profile information and on their page view history on the site. Users who opt not to sign up will have to pay to read.

NYTimes.com has never been free. It’s been paying the price for us, and soon we’re going to have to give them something in return to make this relationship work.

Gott Advertising: Saving the World One Click at a Time

For three years, Gott Advertising has been building, managing and optimizing online advertising campaigns for the world’s leading non-profits, charities, and progressive organizations. Happy 3rd Birthday, Gott Advertising!

I’ll let them say it: “Technorati was founded to help bloggers succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the global online conversation. Founded as the first blog search engine, Technorati has expanded to a full service media company providing services to the blogs and social media sites and connecting them with advertisers who want to join the conversation, and whose online properties introduce blog content to millions of consumers.”

An injured child in Port-au-Prince receives medical treatment. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)

On January 12, Haiti’s capital was devastated by a series of earthquakes ranging from 6.3 to 7.5. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and was still recovering from the devastation of hurricanes in 2008. Our help is important. There are many ways to give. Below is a list of links to donation pages of leading charities and relief organizations. You can find other charities you can trust by visiting CharityNavigator.org.

Oxfam »
“Oxfam has over three decades of experience in Haiti, and we have rushed in teams from around the region to respond to the situation where our assistance is most needed. We are providing clean water, shelter and sanitation and helping people recover – your donation will go immediately to the most critical needs in Haiti, and we will ensure that every penny is used wisely.”

The International Rescue Committee »
“The IRC is responding to the major earthquake that devastated Haiti’s capital on January 12. Your donation will help the IRC work with partners on the ground in Haiti to rescue lives.”

American Red Cross »
“Your gift to the American Red Cross will support emergency relief and recovery efforts to help those people affected by the earthquake in Haiti. Assistance provided by the American Red Cross may include deploying personnel, sending relief supplies, and providing financial resources.”

CARE »
“We’re particularly worried about the children, said CARE’s country director in Haiti Sophie Perez. “So many schools seem to have collapsed. In Haiti, children go to school in the afternoon. Children were still in school when the earthquake hit, so there are many children trapped. It’s horrifying.”

UNICEF »
“Children are always the most vulnerable population in any natural disaster, and UNICEF is there for them. The U.S. Fund for UNICEF is absorbing all associated administrative costs so that 100% of every dollar you give to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF will support UNICEF’s relief efforts for children in Haiti.”

Doctors Without Border (Medecins Sans Frontieres) »
“MSF has been working in Haiti for 19 years, most recently operating three emergency hospitals in Port-au-Prince, and is mobilizing a large emergency response to this disaster. Our immediate response in the first hours following the disaster in Haiti was only possible because of private unrestricted donations from around the world received before the earthquake struck. We are currently reinforcing our teams on the ground in order to respond to the immediate medical needs and to assess the humanitarian needs that MSF will be addressing in the months ahead.”

Catholic Relief Services »
“Please help the people of Haiti with your support of CRS as we respond in the aftermath of a massive earthquake that struck near the capital of Port-au-Prince. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and was still recovering from deadly 2008 hurricanes when the quake struck.”

Concern Worlwide »
“Please give whatever you can afford to help victims of the earthquake in Haiti. Your donation will be used to provide water, food and shelter to those who have lost everything. Thank You!”

Direct Relief International »
“Because of the intense attention and the outpouring of generosity we have seen in response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti, we believe it is important to note that 100% of every dollar that is designated for the Haiti earthquake will be used only to pay programmatic expenses related to assisting people in Haiti.”

Partners In Health »
“Please donate now to help Partners In Health’s efforts in Haiti.”

MercyCorps »
“Our crisis-tested emergency response team is on the ground in the aftermath of Haiti’s devastating earthquake.”

World Vision »
“Your gift now will help distribute life-saving relief supplies — including food, clean water, blankets, and tents — to children and families devastated by the earthquake and aftershocks in Haiti.”

Food For the Poor »
“On January 12th a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Devastating aftershocks followed. The current number of dead and missing is estimated to be between 100,000 and 500,000. The entire capital of Port-au-Prince appears damaged or destroyed. Your help is urgently needed to bring immediate emergency relief to those affected. Please donate now.”

Pay-per-click advertising campaigns produce ads that appear on search engine results pages (SERPs) when a specific keyword or phrase is searched for. PPC campaigns can also generate contextual ads that appear on third-party websites and blogs related to the webpage’s content, as well as in newsletters and emails.

Strong PPC ad campaigns begin with good keyword research. Start by researching your organization and industry, and then conduct a competitive analysis to determine the best-targeted keywords for your PPC campaigns based on your goals.

Your ads should be carefully crafted and should contain the keywords and phrases that trigger the ad. There should be multiple versions of an ad in any given campaign and these should be tested against each other. Replace the lesser performing ads with new variations of the better performing ones. Create a landing page specific to each campaign. You can create multiple landing pages, each with a different layout or call to action. Perform A/B tests on these pages to compare layouts and designs to determine which ones elicit the best responses when someone clicks through from the ad.

By studying the analytics data from your site, look for trends, large and small, within a specific time period. Determine how visitors find your site, how they navigate once they’re on it, and where, when and why they take action. Or why they don’t. Use this information to improve your online results and ROI.

What services would make your PPC advertising easier?

More on Pay Per Click

http://twendz.com/
Twendz is a service that helps you measure sentiment and brand impact on Twitter. Sentiment is a measure of how people feel about a particular topic, and it’s an important metric in Social Media. This is a great service for companies who want to see what’s being said about them or their products.