"When you're deciding how to incorporate analytics into your strategy, the most important thing is that you are gathering actionable data. By this I mean that you have to be able to use the information you gather to make a decision and take action. If you're not going to use it to make a decision, it's a waste of time to even look at it. With this in mind, there are a few areas we should focus on: split testing, interaction tracking, conversion funnel analysis, and click tracking. These methods will give you the information you need to both improve your conversion rates and your understanding of user behavior."

Good overview of the process and possible implications now that Congress is considering the FCC's National Broadband Plan proposal.

"Facebook reached an important milestone for the week ending March 13, 2010 and surpassed Google in the US to become the most visited website for the week. Facebook.com recently reached the #1 ranking on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day as well as the weekend of March 6th and 7th."

Neat little trick! Kinda geeky, but it has its uses.

This is one approach that might work for some folks

"If you think of your blog as an online magazine (which you should) then one of the best ways to beat bloggers’block is to create an editorial calendar for your blog posts. Organizing your blog topics and future posts in this manner will help inspire you to write more and kvetch less about having nothing to write about."

"From her home in Manitoba, Karen says she is offended that the law labels her and her partners criminals, yet it would have been legal, and more socially acceptable, to disrupt her family life by leaving her husband or having an adulterous affair. As much as she hates the attention, polyamorists have to take a stand in what promises to be a high-profile case, she says. “The irony is we’re really fighting for the right to be left alone.”

"With @anywhere Twitter aims to solve two vexing problems of the increasingly crowded, noisy network: Who should I follow? And what is that person’s Twitter handle? Twitter has created recommendation lists, and there are a number of suggestion services. But compiling a crowd this way is tedious, and not conducive to serendipitous discovery. And as for who is who: Would you, for example, necessarily know that @aplusk is really Ashton Kutcher?"

results of a pretty major analysis of how people are using Twitter.

"The bottom line is this: users are more active on Twitter; more users joined Twitter in 2009 following a massive influx of celebrities to the site; and sure enough, the criminals followed the users in a forceful way causing the overall Twitter Crime Rate to spike."

"Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we’ve created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere.

"…When we're ready to launch, initial participating sites will include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube. Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page."

Interesting arguments for turning existing corporations toward social entrepreneurship/mission-driven commerce.

How to create a Google form. Useful tool!

"The future of advertising. I pointed out that @anywhere isn't (yet another) ad platform. Twitter's trying to connect people in more meaningful ways, Ev said: better connections, better information — better choices. I put it a bit more technically: Just as the fundamental challenge of the 21st century is making authentically, meaningfully better stuff, for the 21st century media it's communicating in better ways — not simply bombarding the reader-"consumer" with more, bigger, louder ads. Erasing information asymmetries is where the future of advertising lies. But you can't get there unless you can build a 21st century business first.

"Social tools can lead, through bandwagon effects, to bubbles and crashes — just like in markets. In bubbles, assets are overvalued — in crashes, they're undervalued. This particular conversation is a bit of an undervalued asset. If you're interesting in building a next-generation business, well, there might just be a bit of gold to be mined in it."

It's finally online…

Apparently poly-friendly episode of a popular TV drama. I haven't watched it yet, but will check it out later.

SXSW 2010 presentation by Christian Crumlish

PEJ's State of the News Media report provides valuable insights into the motivations of people who start community news sites and blogs. It shows that across a highly uneven and chaotic blogosphere, people value news and information in service to democracy. But the new news ecology is dizzying. As it develops in ways and with a speed we can’t predict, the requirements of academic research may leave out the context of a rapidly changing environment. As a result, this new research could be read to reinforce the out-of-date idea that citizen news and professional news are in competition.

"…I think it is helpful to look at what the research tells us about the strengths of legacy media and of citizen news sites and how they might help one another provide news and information to neighborhoods, communities, cities and beyond. How can we work together to create c more informed, engaged communities?"

A review of broadband Internet transitions and policy from around the world. US isn't doing so great, and we could end up with a monopoly situation

A bizarre bit of forgotten human history and migration. What were these Eastern Europeans doing in a remote part of China 4000 years ago?

"You don't need a smartphone to get smartphone-like services, claims AT&T. They of course have a few new handsets backing up that boast, but what's most interesting is the free online syncing for both contacts and media.

"Syncing contacts to your PC comes in the form of the AT&T Address Book, which backs up any change to a contact's details, offering two-way support for email addresses. The online interface of the Address Book also lets you send texts to other phone numbers—for free.

Bing maps TED talk

"Last week Microsoft used a talk at TED to unveil some new features for its Bing Maps platform. Goodies included slicker zooming, live georeferenced video feeds, integration of Flickr photos, Worldwide Telescope….a sort of "kitchen sink" of eye candy. But of course it's only eye candy until professional and consumer focused developers tune it to solve specific problems for work and play. Our editors share what impressed them and consider how this enhanced platform might be used."

The three of us are no spring chickens, and I would venture to say it’s entirely possible that is one of the reasons our polyamorous relationship works as well as it does. I believe that security and self-esteem increase with age. The insecurities of youth, the self-doubts of many people who are still “finding themselves,” and peer and societal pressures, make relationships difficult at the best of times. As we grow older and, one hopes, wiser, it becomes clear that not everything is as cut and dried as we were led to believe when we were much younger.

Yes, the Internet media business is much less lucrative than the print side, and may never replace it in terms of the revenues it generates. But Andreessen’s point is that the meteor is on its way and the sooner that media companies start looking for cover, the more likely they are to survive. He is not trying to be an alarmist. He’s just a realist. In the technology industry, similar disruptions happen all the time. The companies that survive are the ones that adapt and jump onto the next wave of technology before the one they are on finishes cresting. So the real question is one of timing. How long will it take that $30 billion print business to go to $20 billion, $10 billion, or zero? No doubt, it will take years, probably decades. But how long do print media companies wait before they leave their old business behind?

"When people talk about patriarchy and then it divulges into a complex conversation about the shifting circles of privilege, power, and domination — they’re talking about kyriarchy. When you talk about power assertion of a White woman over a Brown man, that’s kyriarchy. When you talk about a Black man dominating a Brown womyn, that’s kyriarchy. It’s about the human tendency for everyone trying to take the role of lord/master within a pyramid. At it best heights, studying kyriarchy displays that it’s more than just rich, white Christian men at the tip top and, personally, they’re not the ones I find most dangerous. There’s a helluva lot more people a few levels down the pyramid who are more interested in keeping their place in the structure than to turning the pyramid upside down."

"While you may see banner ads on YouTube’s mobile home, search and browse pages, you won’t see ads on the clips themselves. Those will come eventually, Shishir Mehrotra, YouTube’s director of monetization, told Advertising Age, but in the near term, it’s too difficult for the company to pull off. That’s because there are too many handsets, with different standards and requirements, to support."

"Today we're posting the "iPhone Developer Program License Agreement"—the contract that every developer who writes software for the iTunes App Store must "sign." Public copies of the agreement are scarce, perhaps thanks to the prohibition on making any "public statements regarding this Agreement, its terms and conditions, or the relationship of the parties without Apple's express prior written approval." But when we saw the NASA App for iPhone, we used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to ask NASA for a copy, so that the general public could see.

"This "license agreement" is particularly relevant right now, given the imminent launch of the iPad and anytime-now issuance of the U.S. Copyright Office's ruling regarding jailbreaking of the iPhone.

"So what's in the Agreement? Here are a few troubling highlights…"

According to Clyburn, next week's Plan will recommend a three-part National Digital Literacy Program that will consist of
* a National Digital Literacy Corp
* a one-time investment to bolster the capacity of libraries and community centers
* an Online Skills portal for free, basic digital skills training.

Why? "As political dialogue moves "to online forums; as the Internet becomes the comprehensive source of real-time news and information; and as the easiest access to our government becomes email or a Web site, then those who are offline become increasingly disenfranchised," said Clyburn. "

"PON technology is expected to offer 10Gbps downloads in the next year or two, though this will amount to a guaranteed per-user capacity of "only" 160-320Mbps. Verizon is already trialing the XG-PON technology in the field, announcing in December 2009 that it had done its first successful 10Gbps test outside the lab. Standards for XG-PON should be finalized this year, but it won't be in wide use for some time. (Verizon called it a "technology validation" rather than a "product trial.")

"Somewhere around 2027, PON should offer 100Gbps of download capacity; split between end users, this should guarantee 10Gbps downstream connections."

"Part of the new feature will involve the use of Twitter’s link shortener twt.tl, which may now start popping up in some of your emails and direct messages."

"Perhaps nobody is as ambitious as PayPal. In November, it further opened up its code, giving anyone with rudimentary programming skills access to the kind of technology and payment-industry experience that Ivey used to build Twitpay. The move could unleash a wave of innovation unlike any we’ve seen since self-publishing came to the Web. Two months after PayPal opened its platform, 15,000 developers had used it to create new payment services, sending $15 million through the company’s pipes. Software developer Big in Japan, whose ShopSavvy program lets people find an item’s cheapest price by scanning its barcode, used PayPal to add a “quick pay” button to its app.

"Previously, anybody who wanted to create a service like this would have had to navigate a morass of state and federal regulations and licensing bodies. But now engineers can focus on building applications, while leaving the regulatory and risk-management issues to PayPal."

"For software developers, selling applications in the marketplace means tapping a customer base of the 25 million users — and 2 million businesses and universities — that already use Google Apps. The store launched with 50 applications, including a payroll app from software veteran Intuit(INTU) and a spate of tools from startups, such as a project-management tool from Manymoon. Developers can make their existing cloud applications compatible with Google Apps using Google's application programming interface tools. There is a one-time fee of $100 to list applications in the marketplace, as opposed to the $99 annual fee that Apple(AAPL) charges iPhone developers in the iStore."

"Facebook plans to clone Foursquare's central service — the ability for site members to use their phones to "check-in" from restaurants and bars — and make it a mere Facebook feature. But Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley says there's something Facebook can't clone: the real-life friendships between Foursquare users.

"Facebook used to be who your friends are, now it's everyone," Dennis told us in an interview. "[Foursquare] is more tightly curated to who you want to have as your check-in friends. Facebook is good place for status updates and sharing photos, not to keep tabs on where people are going."

"Here's the main problem with Dennis's very sound argument: Facebook has 400 million monthly users. Even if "checking-in" with Facebook only catches on with a small percentage of the site's users — such a userbase could easily dwarf Foursquare's half a million users."

"The larger goal here is to get managers comfortable with, and conversant in, online communications technology. This comfort can't be outsourced or delegated. As news communication businesses shift from print to online, their managers must become as comfortable and conversant in online communication as they were with the printed word. Otherwise, their leaders are reduced to followers, and their businesses run adrift."

Wow, a poly/sexual freedom activist & scholar in China!

"From a news point of view, getting story data from a writer and keeping it in a database is a solved problem. There is excellent free software out there that does this much better than I could ever hope to. What blogware does not do well is arrange stories hierarchically. Where Holovaty is right is that these blobs (and 99% of news on the web now is in blob-form) need to be repurposed, because blogware isn’t designed with news judgement in mind. This is why I wrote Homer. Homer is for news homepages."