Winners in FCC Auction Talk of More ‘Open’ Networks

By Cecilia Kang Washington Post Staff Writer  Saturday, April 5, 2008; Page D01

Verizon Wireless and AT&T said they plan to create faster and more robust networks with a new chunk of radio spectrum they won at a recent federal auction of airwaves. They also talked about moving toward more “open” networks, offering consumers the ability to use a greater number of devices and more applications over their handsets.

The companies disclosed plans for their purchase of 700-megahertz radio frequencies after rules restricting them from discussing the Federal Communications Commission’s auction were lifted Thursday night.

Carriers currently control the types of phones and services their wireless subscribers can use.

Even though the companies touted their new networks as open, some said they won’t offer the extent of consumer choice that some public-interest groups and Internet companies sought.

The carriers’ definitions of an open network vary. AT&T argues that its use of SIM, operating and memory cards already allows the use of any device with those technologies on its network. It said it invites developers to create technologies for its networks, but it must approve their use.

Verizon Wireless, meanwhile, refused to elaborate on how it defines “open access.” It purchased a segment of airwaves at the auction that came with a requirement that it must build a network open to all devices and software applications. The company said it would begin testing technologies on its existing network by June.

“We don’t want to get into definitions at the moment that are ‘regulatory-ese.’ We want to get people to close their eyes and imagine all the possibilities,” said Verizon Wireless spokesman Jeffrey Nelson.

Google, the Internet phone service provider Skype and some public-interest groups had hoped to push the FCC and carriers to offer more unfettered consumer access. They also sought clearer regulatory definitions from the FCC.

“Our objective is to bring the ethos of the Internet to the wireless world . . . gathering the world’s information, making it universally accessible and easy to use,” but carriers still can control what users can do over the wireless network, said Rick Whitt, telecom and media counsel for Google.

Google, which bid in the airwave auction but didn’t win, said it will continue to stay involved with the implementation of rules to ensure that Verizon Wireless carries out the openness principles.

Wireless carriers, meanwhile, said they are being friendly to consumers.

Verizon Wireless chief executive Lowell McAdam said yesterday that the company’s purchase “will make Verizon the preferred partner for developers of a new wave of consumer electronics and applications using this next-generation technology.”

Article source - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/04/AR2008040403508.html

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Many people jump into social media marketing because they feel they “should be doing it”. Many times companies don’t take the time to identify their goals and why they want to engage in a campaign. Identifying and measuring social media metrics can be easy and inexpensive. Here are some simple things to keep in mind and free ways to track them. This list is based on a viral marketing / linkbait campaign where you are tracking one URL.

Traffic. Is your goal to get more traffic? Are you looking for more brand recognition? Do you have CPM based advertising on your website? Measuring traffic generated by a viral campaign is one of the simplest benchmarks. Simply measure the traffic generated to the specific URL through your web analytics package. Check out Tamar’s great breakdown of 6 Free (or nearly free) analytics packages here.

Links. Are you looking to naturally build links to help with your search engine optimization efforts? Linkbaiting can be extremely effective for this but you should track where the links are coming from and whether or not they are helping you. I recommend checking links at the 1 and 7 day marks using either Technorati or Google Blog Search. Then at the 30 day mark using Yahoo! Site Explorer or Google Webmaster Tools (use this FireFox plugin from Joost de Valk for extra info). Simply put the full URL (yourdomain.com/viral-piece.htm for example) into any of those engines and see who is linking back to you.

Buzz. Are people talking about you or your company due to the social media work you are doing? You need to know who’s saying what and most normal search engines won’t track this. You can use free services such as Serph to help track what’s being said in places like forums and social networks. You can use Serph to search for things like your company name, the title of your linkbait piece or tool, etc.

Bookmarks. Bookmarks will tell you how many people felt your content was important enough to want to revisit at a later time or share with their own network. There are tons of online bookmarking sites out there but I like to use del.icio.us to gauge the overall interest level. Simply go to the del.icio.us URL page and input your full URL (as explained above) - it will then tell you how many people have bookmarked your site and the different tags they used (which is important to see if people are tagging it with what you had intended).

Conversions. At the end of the day everything should come down to this and many people want to discount direct sales via social media marketing but that should never be the case. I firmly believe that you should craft your viral pieces in a way that will help to generate conversions and track them closely for such. Sometimes this might have to come after you have launched you have promoted your piece via the major social networks but other times it might be the whole goal. Define what conversions you want to have happen and then track each. Do you want more people to sign up for your newsletter? Subscribe to your RSS feed? BUY YOUR PRODUCTS? You can do this simply and for free using Google Analytics.

With these different metrics, its important to put a realistic expectation for each in place before you launch your campaign. Think about what you want to accomplish and define your goals as specifically as you can get. Tracking your results and measuring them against your goals is the most effective way to tell if your efforts were successful and had a positive return on your investment (whether that investment be through time or money).

Chris Winfield is the President and Co-Founder of 10e20, an Internet marketing company that specializes in social media & search marketing services and is based in New York & Florida. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land. By Chris Winfield

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Almost every blogger aims to grow their blog and reach a larger audience. Unfortunately, most new bloggers don’t know much about promoting a blog when they are just getting started. The good news is you will learn pretty quickly if you are consistently involved and working at promoting your blog. Here are ten things that I have learned to be true from my experience.

1. Building Significant Search Engine Traffic Will Take Time

New blogs generally take several months, at least, before they gain enough trust from search engines to produce any type of significant flow of traffic. If you are planning to focus on search engines as your primary source of traffic, you would be well advised to also focus on some other sources of traffic, especially in the early months.

Building a blog that is search engine-friendly is critical if you want to maximize search traffic, so take care of that from the start and focus on creating great content that others will talk about and link to.

2. Not All Traffic Is Equal

No two sources of traffic are quite the same. I get a good percentage of the traffic at my blog through social media, and I can attest to the fact that social media traffic is generally less responsive and less likely to stick around than visitors from most other sources. Focusing on stats without looking at the true results can cause a bit of an illusion. Sure, visitors are great, but are they leaving after being on the blog for 30 seconds and never returning?

Search engine traffic is highly sought after because these visitors are actively looking for what you have to offer. But other types of traffic have strong points too. Visitors who are referred from another blog will generally be more responsive since they have been recommended by someone they trust. Every source of traffic has pros and cons, so try to take these things into consideration when you are promoting your blog and analyzing the results.

3. Consistent Posting Is Key

Most bloggers need to keep publishing new posts in order to keep traffic at a certain level. Some bloggers are able to generate large amounts of search engine traffic to older posts to the point that traffic will be fairly sustained without new posts, but this is pretty rare. New posts keep subscribers coming back, they keep social media votes coming, and they keep adding new pages to search engine indexes.

Posting consistently doesn’t mean that you have to post every day, it simply means that you need to publish content on a regular basis, whatever that may be. Almost every blog that successfully draws traffic is publishing new posts with some consistency.

4. Consistent Traffic Is Almost Impossible

Although posting needs to be consistent to keep traffic levels up, that doesn’t mean that it will keep traffic levels consistent. Every blog has ups and downs and two days are rarely the same. This is a natural occurrence and it should be embraced or else it can become very frustrating. Make sure that you enjoy the times when traffic is high, and keep on plugging away to get through the slower times. Blogging would almost be boring is traffic levels didn’t fluctuate like they do.

5. Repeat Visitors Should Be the Goal

Yes, it’s great to see an impressive number of unique visitors arriving at your blog, but how many of them will be back? Repeat visitors are the lifeblood of blogs. Subscribers, of course, are most likely to keep coming back, so focusing on subscribers is typically a good thing.

Repeat visitors will not only help to improve your overall traffic flow and stats, more importantly they will be your most responsive visitors in terms of comments, social media votes, sales, and just about anything else. As they keep coming back and reading your blog, you will be earning more of their trust and your network will grow.

6. Links Help In Several Ways

Building inbound links is a priority for most bloggers, and for good reason. They drive click-through traffic from other blogs, they increase your exposure around the blogosphere, and they help to boost your search engine rankings. Link building is often prioritized because of search engine rankings, but the other factors should not be overlooked. If you blog in a competitive niche, recognition and exposure will be critical in convincing visitors that they should pay attention to you. Getting a few links from respected blogs can help with search engine traffic, but the added credibility that you get can be just as important, especially for newer bloggers.

7. Balance Is Important

Diversity in traffic will help you to avoid losing a huge percentage of your visitors if something unforeseen happens. Search engine rankings are not permanent, especially with Google being so ready and willing to penalize blogs who they feel have violated their guidelines. If you rely too heavily on search engine traffic you could find yourself losing a big portion of your traffic at any given time.

Also, social media traffic is extremely inconsistent, so just because you have been getting decent traffic doesn’t mean it will continue. The best approach is to spread things out and focus on growing traffic from several sources rather than just one. That way you will always be safe and you won’t depend on a particular source for your livelihood.

8. Smaller Sources of Traffic Shouldn’t Necessarily Be Ignored

Not all sources of traffic will send thousands of visitors, but that doesn’t mean that they are not valuable. For example, participating in forums is likely to drive some traffic to your blog, but not tons. However, those visitors can be very valuable because they have met you or learned from you through the forum and they’ll be more likely to subscribe and become a loyal reader.

Likewise, leaving comments on other blogs will bring some traffic, but it is rare that any one comment will bring a lot of visitors. Still, this traffic is valuable because many times they have clicked through due to something that you said catching their attention.

Don’t simply assume that traffic is measured only in terms of numbers. Smaller sources of traffic have been instrumental in building many successful blogs.

9. Networking Is Critical

All successful bloggers are surrounded by a strong network of other successful bloggers. This is something that I didn’t really think much about before I started blogging, but I quickly came to realize the importance of networking.

A strong network will provide you with friends and colleagues that can be a help when you need some advice, they can provide links to your blog, they can give you social media votes, they can be an inspiration and encouragement to you, and they can even wind up being your partners in future projects. Being a strong networker is all about being willing to help others and being proactive in meeting others.

10. Blog Traffic Can Be Bought for Relatively Little Money

If you are interested in getting some extra promotion or growing your blog quickly, there are a number of affordable advertising options that will drive real traffic to your blog. Pay Per Click ads can be very effective and inexpensive (depending on what words and phrases you bid on). StumbleUpon advertising is another option. You can purchase their traffic for just $0.05 per visitor. Even banner advertisements on other blogs can be relatively cheap. Running an ad for a month or more will give you exposure to a new audience and if you were to calculate a cost-per-click it is usually pretty low.

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Magnetic fields produced by Apple iPods and other such portable music devices don’t interfere with cardiac pacemakers, an FDA study says. Network World Staff

Friday, February 01, 2008 3:50 PM PST

A Food and Drug Administration-led study refutes claims that the magnetic fields produced by Apple iPods and other such portable music devices interfere with cardiac pacemakers.

A report from the research team, which tested four iPod models, appears in BioMedical Engineering OnLine.

A report from a Michigan high school student — who teamed with a couple of heart doctors — is among earlier research that generated some buzz about whether iPods could muck up pacemakers and raised the idea of putting warning labels on portable music devices.

From a BioMed Central press release: “Using a 3-coil sensor, the team measured the magnetic field produced by the iPod at a distance of around 5 to 10 millimeters. They obtained readings for the magnetic field at various specific and small regions 10 mm from an iPod. The peak magnetic field strength was 0.2 millionths of a Tesla, a value hundreds of times lower than the levels capable of interfering with a pacemaker.”

Howard Bassen, a researcher with the FDA, said in a statement: “Based on the observations of our in-vitro study we conclude that no interference effects can occur in pacemakers exposed to the iPods we tested.”

One company breathing a sigh of relief: Tonicum. Last year it released a portable music device for DJs named, yes, Pacemaker.

Meanwhile, iPods continue to enjoy great success, most recently highlighted by the spate of new iPod-related offerings at the recent big Consumer Electronics Show show in Las Vegas. For more information about enterprise networking, go to NetworkWorld. Story copyright 2007 Network World Inc. All rights reserved.

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Researcher is building a prototype to protect users’ privacy from Facebook ‘widgets’

JANUARY 31, 2008 | University of Virginia researchers have discovered that 90.7 percent of Facebook’s most popular applications have access to users’ private data, whether they need it or not — leaving users exposed to targeted phishing attacks and identity theft. So a UVA researcher is currently building a “privacy-by-proxy” prototype aimed at hiding a user’s private information on Facebook from these apps.

Today, a third-party Facebook “widget” or application requires full user privileges to a user’s account on the social networking site, including his or her name, address, friends’ profiles, and photos.

There’s no way to specify which apps can access which personal information. So Adrienne Felt, a fourth-year computer science major at UVA, is developing an application that lets Facebook users run these widgets while keeping their private data private. It basically works like this: The Facebook server gives the application a random sequence of letters in lieu of the user’s name and other private data.

Felt began developing the tool after studying the top 150 Facebook third-party platform applications last fall. It turns out 8.7 percent of these widgets didn’t need any personal information, she found, and only 9.3 percent required private data — the remaining 82 percent used “public” Facebook data, such as the user’s name, network, and list of friends. Felt and fellow researcher Andrew Spisak concluded that nearly 91 percent of these apps are getting access to more privileges than they actually need in order to run.

And when users install these widgets, their data gets stored on the widgets’ third-party servers. Although Facebook’s terms of service say developers can’t abuse the Facebook data they access, there’s no way for Facebook to enforce that, Felt says, because once that data leaves Facebook’s servers, it’s free game to the third-party application provider.

Privacy has always been a sticky issue for social networking sites. But Facebook’s third-party apps, which anyone with a Facebook account can develop, have been considered by some security experts as an open invitation for abuse. Earlier this month, Fortinet researchers found the first evidence of such abuse, reporting spyware disguised as a Facebook application spreading around the social networking site. (See ‘Secret Crush’ Spreads Spyware, Not Love.)

Kevin Haley, director, of product management for Symantec Security Response, says another risk with these apps is the distribution of malware. “Now that you have a platform to create programs for these sites… malware quickly follows,” he says.

Felt’s prototype is providing some hope for protecting and securing Facebook users’ privacy. “This is the first step,” says Felt, who has built several Facebook widgets herself. “Hopefully, the research findings and proposed solution will trigger more responsible privacy and information management policies from social networking sites and will better inform users.”

— Kelly Jackson Higgins, Senior Editor, Dark Reading

Fortinet Inc.

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Are you still measuring your SEO success by the rankings you obtain? If so, you need to stop—right now!

Here’s why:

1. Rankings are constantly fluctuating. You might check rankings one minute, then check again a few minutes later and see different results.

2. Search results are sometimes geotargeted. The search engines know where you’re located by your IP address, and if they want they can (and I believe they do) sometimes point you to pages that are closer to where you are searching from, as they assume those results might be more beneficial to you.

3. Personalized search. If you’re logged into your Google or Yahoo account, you may very well be getting search results that are specifically targeted to your own preferences. It’s called personalized search, and it is a reality these days. As people use Gmail, Google Analtyics, Google AdWords, or any other free Google toy, Google learns more about you and may make specific recommendations based on this knowledge. Think about how Amazon is always making personalized recommendations for you. It wouldn’t surprise me if Google and Yahoo become more Amazon-like with their recommendations in the near future. The end result is that no two people will see the same rankings, making them an even more worthless measurement than they already are.

4. Rankings don’t equal targeted traffic. Heck, rankings don’t always even equal un-targeted traffic! If you or your SEO company optimizes your pages for keyword phrases that nobody’s searching for, your optimization efforts will all be wasted. And if you’re measuring success by how you rank for those useless keywords, you may be thinking you’re successful when you’re really not. This is actually one of the oldest tricks in the book for unscrupulous (or incompetent) SEO companies to use. They fulfill their end of the bargain—get you rankings—and you’re left scratching your head wondering why your website is still a ghost town.

5. Rankings don’t equal conversions or sales. Along the same lines of #4, all the high rankings in the world won’t matter if they don’t increase your bottom line somehow. If you receive lots of untargeted traffic, or no traffic at all, your sales will remain static.

What should you be measuring instead?

The things that matter, of course—the targeted traffic, but even more important than that—the conversions and sales. Yeah, it was nice in the old days when we could say we did our job by running ranking reports each month and pointing out all the increases to our clients. But that’s simply not going to fly these days. Today, you have to be able to show your clients a positive return on their SEO investment, or you’re just not doing your job properly.

Get with the program and start measuring the things that matter.

Educate your clients or your CEO as much as possible. It can certainly be a difficult concept for some of them to grasp, as rankings are often a vanity thing for them. But once you convince them of the lack of merit in measuring rankings, you’ll be free to throw your rank checking software out the window once and for all and be on your way to true search engine success!

Jill Whalen, CEO and founder of High Rankings, a search marketing firm outside of Boston, and co-founder of SEMNE, a New England search marketing networking organization, has been performing SEO since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor search engine marketing newsletter. The 100% Organic column appears Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

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