SOPA & PIPA

Today Internet is protesting against 2 Acts that the American government is trying to pass. The acts are designed to fight Piracy (which I think is a good thing) but it is designed in a way that might affect the foundations of Internet and how information is used and shared these days (which I think would mean a great loss).

More info on the wikipedia page here.

Some of the protest are actually creative beauties, like this one from the OpenDNS Guide: Search results get blacked-out partially, as a protest to the censorship-effects the acts may have when passed through.
The search results actually work and are clickable, so 100% Internet. Just that part of the results are hampered in sight, just as the Acts will be doing.

This was 2011: the new black comes in herds

A very quick review of 2011, now that 2012 is well under its way.

In 2011 I kept working in online marketing and e-commerce, now back on the client side. E-commerce is by far the most exciting branch of online marketing and it was good fun.

Less for more
Working client side, you get to see a lot of sales-people of all sorts. They always come in herds: when you get a call from one service or provider, you're bound to get to speak to one of its competitor really soon.
In 2011 the biggest herd of sales-people came asking for promotions. Deals and coupons, they came in every kind of form. In my opinion, the mere existence of a promotion can't justify a platform, and we've trialed with many sites who got the promotion, but didn't give us the sales promised.

Old is the new black
A lot of new services were launched in 2011. They always tend to look good and flashy, but they tend to take a hard time to deliver. An example was Google Shopping, an online directory of products. Brands and shops can upload their catalogue and clients can check online availability and prices. We went live pretty quick. But no sales. Bugger. Just because it's new and promising doesn't make it work. Sometimes it's not bad to remember that old-fashioned stuff like email still give very good results: old is the new black!

Amazon Spain
Amazon launched in Spain in Septembre. That's not world-shoking news, but boy do I enjoy buying with them.

Fiends & Privacy
From time to time friends complained about privacy in 2011, almost every time related to Facebook. I always think that's a bit weird: Facebook is among the most transparent websites on privacy and it gives control back to the user. Google is far worse on privacy, but it's not perceived that way.

The most telling story about this was when a friend of ours told that she was shutting down her Facebook account: she didn't want to give personal information to a company who makes money out of it. Fair enough, but it was a bit ironically when she told us we could still call her (on a number from a company who holds track of every call she makes, to who shee call, for how long she calls,... not to mention that her phone company could be listening to her calls) or reach her on her gmail (being a product of Google, the company that knows a little more stuff about us then just our birtday's and some status updates).

Privacy online is easy: if you don't want it to come back at you, don't publish it. 

The on-line wedding
Personally one of my favourite moments of the year was our marriage. Nice to see that internet also had a great part in it: we found a nice dress from an Israelian designer and a wedding ring (the precious, pictured on the right) from a goldsmith in Florida. We also planned our honeymoon using our smartphone and using handy apps.

Mobile
Also funny to see in 2011: in only 6 months, all our friends choose a smartphone. 5 years ago, herds of sales people told me it was going to be the 'year of mobile'. Personally I missed it back then, and now that I have a smartphone, it looks like everything still needs to be done.

So what will be the new black in 2012?

My Tag Cloud for SEO in 2011

It's nice to see that also in 2011 most of the traffic to my blog has come from organic search results. It looks like there is some relevance in what I write.

Just as in 2010, I've used Wordl to see what people have been looking for most, before coming to my blog.

Here is my little SEO Tag-Cloud 2011:

There a couple of new keywords which generate traffic, and the ones from 2010 are still there. Also nice to see that the strategy of including 'Avinash' in the title of one of my posts paid off: it provided for quite some traffic.

Here is my SEO Tag Cloud of 2010:

http://stefvanef.blogspot.com/2011/01/my-tag-cloud-of-seo-in-2010.html

Happy New Year 2012

I'd like to wish all of you a very happy new year.

Since 2010, my wife and I have been taking a picture every day from our balcony in Madrid, Embajadores 35. The view is very nice, looking over the San Cayetano & Lorenzo church. The first months that we lived here in 2010, I got caught up with the changing of the threes and wanted to capture the changing of the seasons. So we started taking pictures, one every day, for a year long. You remember Harvey Keitel in the film 'Smoke'? Well it's just like that: one picture every day.

We've now made a video of the pictures of last year.

Hope you enjoy it and hope 2012 makes for some nice views for every one of you. 

Oh, did I forget to say: Titles are in Spanish.

You can also see the video here:
http://embajadores35.tumblr.com/post/15131241275/nuestras-felicitaciones-para-2012-video-de-2011

And you can follow the project here:
http://embajadores35.tumblr.com/

We have a facebook page; you can see a widget on the right hand side of this blog.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Embajadores-35/205300912814404

Hope to hear from you this year!

My 2011 Spotify list: the year of the gals

End of the year = LISTS!!

Here is my 2011 music list. You can listen to it on Spotify: Lista 2011 Stefvanef

The first 5 tracks of the list are from my favourite 2011 albums. The others are songs I played and played and played.

Music in 2011 was pretty good. Not as surprising as in 2010, when I discovered so much new music and when I went from surprise to surprise. 2011 was more about known artist doing a good job.

It must be said it was also a pretty good year for the female artists: Joan, Tune-Yeards, Polly-Jean, Laura, EMA, Feist, and so much more: great work, keep it up. I've listened a lot to you this year.

Spotify, a returning theme in this blog, also limited drastically it's free service. When that happened a lot of my friends looked for other free options. I started to pay. A funny consequence was that I stopped wondering about Spotify's future: I became a paying user, the monthly invoice became normal and I stopped worrying about what would happen or how the business-model would work out. It just does, it became part of daily routine and it stopped being a concern. Case closed.
Also true: Oh Land, The Black Keys and Tom Waits would have probably be in this list if they had been in Spotify: sure you don't want the royalties for letting me play your songs in Spotify?

Let's bring on more music in 2012!

Amazon honours Steve Jobs on their sites

Did anybody else see the banner on the Amazon sites in honour of Steve Jobs?

It's remarcable to see how universally loved Jobs is: a tecnology and entrepeneur superstar. It's is ironic that a leader of a company who is pretty clear that it doesn't necessarily need to sell to everybody, gets so widely loved: Apple market to their fans and their fans only, but Jobs is loved by everyone. Apple doesn't spend energy on people who don't follow their story or prices, and Steve Jobs got universal recognition.

Also people who are not big Apple fans, like me, ackowledge Jobs' greatness and competitors as Google honoured him beyond the obligate statement. It's unseen for a business man and entrepeneur to cause so much emotion and recognition - I can't think of someone who comes near in his area, surely not Bill Gates. I'm sure that if he would have been a politician, people would now talk about his contributions to world peace with Mandela-like proportions.

Amazon's tribute to Jobs on their home page might of course be seen as a 'thank you' to Jobs for all the iPods, iPads and iPhones the online retailer sold: Apple made products, Amazon sold them. But since the 2 companies were growing more into competitors than in allies lateley (competing directly for instance on tablets, music and cloud services), it's a nice gesture of Amazon.

Make no mistake: the banner isn't a direct comercial move like, I first thought it might have been: the banner goes to the tribute page on the Apple-site, an external link, and not to some ill-conceived 'In Memoriam' Apple product section, ready to capitalize on the death of Jobs. That would have been pretty sick.

Bit of a tricky question maybe, but will we see a Jobs' doodle soon?

Facebook launches 'are talking about this' metric

Did anybody else noticed the new 'are talking about this' metric on Facebook Pages?

After the sad news about Steve Jobs, I entered today on the Facebook page dedicated to him. Beneath the 'Like this' metric, there is a new one now and it's called 'are talking about this'.

It surely looks like a promissing metric: I personally have 'liked' a lot of pages, which I haven't visited since, so 'are talking about' sounds like a more 'active' metric.
A bit of googling around shows that Facebook announced the change this week and implemented today.

How is the metric defined?

Facebook told in an email earlier this week that the metric would be defined like this:

“People Talking about this” counts ‘stories” – structured content that people choose to share through Facebook that is eligible to appear in a user’s news feed:

• liking your Page
• posting to your Page’s Wall
• liking, commenting or sharing one of your Page posts (or other content on your page – like photos, videos, albums)
• answering a Question you posted, RSVP-ing to one of your events
• mentioning your Page, phototagging your Page
• liking or sharing a check-in deal, or checking in at your Place.

Why is this interesting?

It's important for Search: as already pointed out in this brilliant post of BlindFiveYearOld, the new Facebook design from a couple of weeks ago includes an actual redefinition of Search. Facebook is very ready to compete with Google and has now moved towards 'social search': based on what pages we visit, web-content we read and share and even what songs we listen to on Spotify or what we watch on Netflix, Facebook indexes the web based on our social action and the way we use internet.

Facebook is already showing search-results outside Facebook. Here's an example of external links:

They also show songs from Spotify, like in this example.  

The metric is public: like pointed out in this post, the metric is public. This shows Facebook-users a new way of the 'relevant pages' on Facebook, i.e. where the people are, which is another way of saying, what content is socially relevant.
It also shows companies and Facebook page owners how good they are doing. For instance, the Facebook page of my main competitor has more than twice my 'are talking about this' metric. Bugger!

The metric is good for content: marketing people like me will have to focus more on what's relevant, not just on the people who like my page to get an occasional discount and never come back to my page.

Facebook competing with Twitter: there are already a lot of 'action-based' social metrics for Twitter, like trending topics. Now facebook, together with the 'subsribe button', competes directly with Twitter.

So, well done for Facebook, and thanks for this. We'll still have to see some more detail on this metric and it's definition: for instance, does phototagging count twice as much as someone sharing of the page?
The metric can can also evolve of course. It doesn't seem real-time for now. For instance, the Steve Jobs page has had the same 7883 are talking about metric this whole morning. But it can certainly move upwards & onwards.

[Quick update on 07/10/2011 - seems like the metric is updated daily. For instance today Steve Jobs' page has '394.990 are talking about', coming from 7.883 yesterday, and it has been during the whole morning]

For more about this you can read here in SearchEngineLand.