Author: JD Rucker

Do you remember who won CNET’s “Best of CES” award last year? Probably not. What you likely will remember is who should have but didn’t win it this year, thanks to a boneheaded PR move by CBS. The parent company of CNET is in heated litigation with Hopper, the Dish Network service that allows users to skip past commercials. It has been deemed dangerous and potentially illegal by just about every major television network as it promotes an technology that cuts off their revenue stream. When CNET’s editorial team voted that Hopper would get the top prize, CBS brass reacted swiftly, saying that the litigation…

There was a time when the search engines rewarded content of all types. If a website syndicated content from elsewhere on the web and exposed it to their audience, it wasn’t as good as unique content but at least it didn’t hurt. Some of the content would be de-indexed as duplicate but the overall health of the domain itself was not harmed. Today, it’s harmful. Websites that are taking a lot of content from others and posting it on their own websites, even if they link to the original source, are finding that their overall rankings are dropping as a result. It’s one of many changes in the string of content…

We all knew that astrophysicist Neil deGrass Tyson was an intelligent and witty man of science, an advocate for space and scientific exploration, and a generally entertaining guy, but we didn’t know that he had a philosopher’s soul. That is, until now, thanks to Twitter. Not enough people pause… twitter.com/neiltyson/stat… — Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) January 8, 2013   Seeing the beauty that others don’t see is at the heart of poetry. It’s apparently in Tyson’s heart as well. Here it is in full size – click to enlarge. Related articles Neil deGrasse Tyson Answers the Big Enchilada…

A recent study by AdAge, which has been tracking such things since 2009, shows that there are over 180,000 people on Twitter who claim to be social media mavens, experts, consultants, ninjas, pros, warriors, or some other noun that’s intended to fill you with confidence about their ability to save you from the evil world of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. This is up from 16k when they first checked. It’s challenging for businesses to keep up. The world of social media offers so much potential, so many options, and has so many people using it every day that the allure to get involved is high, but there…

Rumors are rumors and Techcrunch has been known to push them forward without base or backing. With that said, the latest Reddit rumor that they are raising money would make sense. But we’re hearing now from a source that, a little over a year later, Reddit is raising money. And the company’s valuation has jumped to $400 million. If it’s true, this could mark the beginning of the end for the “front page of the internet”. The site is the most powerful private site in the world that really doesn’t make any money (and don’t point to Wikipedia as that would be ignorant to think they’re not making money)….

One of the biggest problems faced when businesses try to use social media as a marketing tool is that there are simply too many social media sites. A day doesn’t go by when I’m not asked about this new site or that old site and whether or not they can be used is marketing. Most can. However, most simply do not have the reach to make them worthwhile. For the majority of businesses, if they stay focused on four current social sites, they’ll have the vast majority of their marketing covered. Some big sites were excluded. It’s not that Tumblr doesn’t have its place or that Foursquare is useless. It’s that the…

The automation of Twitter for businesses continues to become the norm. As microblogging, interaction, and expression get replaced by RSS feeds, Facebook feeds, and post scheduling that is all dominated by links, links, and more links, the power of Twitter is being replaced by the easy alternatives to actually, well, using the service. This is a huge mistake for most. There are some who are simply overwhelmed by social media and internet marketing in general and anything that they can check off their list with minimal or zero effort is a good thing. For those who actually want to find success on…

We were so close. A non-controversial bill,  the Video Privacy Protection Act, flew through the Senate and was sent to President Obama last week. The bill itself isn’t important; it allows people using services like Netflix to post the movies that they were watching directly from the service onto Facebook and other social media sites just as they can do now with music sites like Spotify. This is currently against the law because of legislation from 1988 when Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental history was leaked. That’s not the important part. What was important was that a section…

Every few months, it seems that Klout makes changes to try to bring its importance to a higher level and push itself into the mainstream consciousness. Every few months, the changes that Klout makes push them further into obscurity and away from mainstream consciousness because they try too hard to appeal to the people that simply don’t care. When they do this, they reduce the very thing that could actually make them better known and talked about more often: overall usefulness. The last algorithm change seemed to set “caps” on how “influential” people could be based upon their position in the real…

The marketing adage “content is king” has been around for a long time. In 2013, it appears that both the search engines and social media sites are focusing on content as their driving forces, but in a different way than most understand. Things are changing in the world of internet marketing. Here’s what you need to know. Content was never really “king”. Though it made a nice talking point and allowed marketing companies an opportunity to charge for their labors, it was always a temporary fix. In search, it started off as extremely important for a little while until marketers started learning how…