When asked why they have no Internet connection at home, “don’t need/not interested” represented 16.7% of those surveyed, “too expensive”  was the answer for 38.9%. And when dial-up net users were asked why they don’t upgrade to broadband,  “not interested “shrank to 7.3% and “too expensive” jumped to 41.3%.

Answers for the music industry:

One solution is certainly to support The Obama administration’s efforts to spread affordable broadband access to poorer and rural areas. But another interim strategy could be to not abandon the physical format so quickly and – just as the experts preach in the digital realm – make the product available wherever the consumer spends their time.

If Wal-Mart want to shrink thier music section, would Dollar General make space for a brave rack jobber? Or what about music pop-up stores across from arena size concerts or at the county fair?

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In many ways Miller and News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch set this train in motion  when they hired all three executives in April of 2009.  Van Natta, the former COO of Facebook became CEO, Mike Jones, the founder and CEO of Userplane (acquired by AOL) was hired as COO and Jason Hirschhorn, the former president of SlingMedia, was brought in to be Chief Product Office. MySpace suddenly had three leaders with strong operations backgrounds and experience running their own shops.

Put all three men inside a struggling division overseen by the strong willed Miller who works for Rupert Murdoch, a man whose publicaly skeptical of the web; and its hard to imagine that they would all be left standing for long.  Van Natta was the most thoughtful and measured of the trio in an environment that does not favor such qualities making his eventual departure an almost certainty.

What’s next for MySpace?

In a joint statement, Jones and Hirschhorn towed the corporate line: “We joined MySpace last April with very a specific set of goals in mind, and are anxious to continue working together to make those goals a reality.  This business is now pointed in the right direction, and we have a great team of employees that will continue to push MySpace closer to its potential as the place where people go to be discovered and to discover great content.”

But MySpace has not articulated a clear vision of its future; and while the user numbers have stopped eroding,  Facebook and Twitter continue to soar. In fact, its hard to find a user  who prefers MySpace for anything other than a quick method of checking out new music; and that’s hardly a model for success.

“The last thing MySpace needs is any sign of management instability
whatsoever,” says eMarketer’s Debra Aho Williamson. “For months now we’ve heard about the company’s plan to refocus on its historic roots in music and entertainment. But the turnaround has been painfully slow, and this shakeup will only reinforce the perception that MySpace can’t be fixed.”

MySpace Music’s Courtney Holt remains in control of his corner of the enterprise; and seems determine to make things more user friendly for both fans and artists. But how much can he do own his own if the service in which he’s housed is rudderless? Probably not much.  If MySpace had made Holt CEO it would have sent a clear message.  But for now, at least MySpace is only sending out distress signals.

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What about paywalls on the local level though? How will more localized papers fare when it comes to asking people who do not subscribe to the publication to pay to see the content online? If the results at New York Newsday are any indication its not a pretty picture.
Crain’s New York Business tells us just how bad it is

Here is one paid model for online journalism that isn’t exactly setting the world on fire: Nearly three months after Newsday put its Web site behind a pay wall, Newsday.com has attracted only 35 subscribers.

In addition, traffic to the Long Island daily’s site has dropped by half, according to Nielsen.

Newsday is the local paper for all of Long Island and a good portion of the NYC borough of Queens. Not exactly a small place. In other words, if there are this many people in the area and there are only 35 of them in three months willing to fork out a few bucks a week to access the information online this has to be viewed as a failure. Here’s what readers who do not subscribe elsewhere see when they try to get information from the website

To be fair it’s not like only 35 people read the online content for the paper since the content is literally available to a large portion of the population.

Newsday.com can be accessed free by the paper’s home subscribers, as well as by Cablevision customers and subscribers to the cable operator’s Optimum Online broadband service.

According to the paper, that means about 75% of Long Island households just have to register to have access. Anyone else who wants to read the paper online has to pay $5 per week.

Still, the number of online subscribers shocked members of Newsday’s union—Local 406 of the Graphic Communications Conference of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters—which is in a bitter fight with the paper’s management over a proposed contract offer that would cut pay by 10%.

What this outcome may be telling the industry is that paywalls may very well limit the reach of your publication. Long Island is of particular interest considering just how many people have relocated from the area to parts all around the country. Now, if these people want to keep up with current events from ‘home’ they would have to pay and it looks like those folks are saying to Newsday “Forgetta about it!”.

So if this tactic isn’t working to generate more revenue what is the point of doing it? Maybe Newsday doesn’t want to be one of the first major local newspapers to try this and then be one of the first to drop it all in the span of a few short months.

Whatever the reasons this experiment looks to be a huge bust thus far. Not exactly the success story you parade out to other publications considering the same tactic. So what do you think? Will local publications be able to enact a paywall and have success or is this just a desperate move by an industry that decided to change as a means of survival rather than doing it as part of their ongoing business plan to move into the future?

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As we talk about often it’s not even that Google is on top anymore. That’s a given. In fact, its dominance is what makes the uninformed cry monopoly. Once again market dominance doesn’t mean it’s the only game in town. People just like it better and use it more.

What is interesting is the drop in share of the next three biggest players. Google is up one percent but all three of the others are down 4%. There is no search ‘cannibalism” going on here where they are feeding off each other. Are people looking for other search options other than Yahoo, bing and Ask that are not named Google?

While this is always interesting it is certainly getting a bit mundane. I would love to see true competition for Google if only to stop the silly talk about Google’s dominance restricting others’ opportunity. I just don’t see it happening. Do you?

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Twitter’s pedigree is getting increasingly rich at the expense of Google and other Silicon Valley tech titans. With the holidays behind us, the microblogging powerhouse is starting the new year with more new faces at its San Francisco headquarters. Among them is Bakari Brock, most recently an in house lawyer for YouTube and Google focused on music, video and syndication.

Brock, whose LinkedIn profile shows him as corporate counsel at Google, starting in 2007, was heavily quoted in late 2008 when the video service introduced e-commerce capabilities enabling customers to purchase from partners including iTunes and Amazon, and his comments were included in publications such as the New York Times and GigaOM site NewTeeVee.

Last year Google was the ‘victim’ of Twitter’s need for legal expertise as well. While probably flattered one would think that losing high profile, likely high dollar and highly visible legal talent is not how Google would like to get the new year started.

Some of the background of new hires on the Twitter team include another former Googler, a ex-ning staffer and folks from Cloudera, TiVo, Bebo and VMWare. Add this to an expansion of the Twitter family tree following the acquisition of MixerLabs before Christmas and one would think that “It’s beginning to look a lot like business” (sing that to the tune of “It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas” for those wishing the holidays were still here).

So let’s go a step further on this one and see what the bold prognosticators among MP readers are predicting for Twitter in 2010. What does the need for more legal firepower say about what might be next?

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Facebook has built its brand on pushing the idea that members should share real information so real people can connect to other real people, and not to some persona that is covered up in a neat social media moniker. As a result, people have come to trust the site as a place that is safe and exists for the user.

Well, that was then and this is now. Before the new policy took effect, most of the data that was given to Facebook was kept pretty private and there was not a tremendous concern about the data beyond the normal “it’s the Internet and nothing is really private anyway” talk. What Facebook has done now is to turn their backs on the folks that they built their data community on by saying that privacy is so 2005. In order to get your privacy back, you need to manage it yourself because the doors of the barn have been flung wide open.

Well, this move is just puzzling to me. I realize that there is a need to make money, but if this is how the master plan was laid out, then someone was asleep at the wheel. Since when was it good business to build trust with people over years and then pull the rug out from underneath them for your one-sided benefit?

Now the government is being called in, which is never a good thing.

So what may have Facebook done here? Let’s think about it.

1. Pulled a Tiger Woods? Take a pretty good image and do something sleazy and what do you get? Discontent. Lower approval ratings. Nothing good comes of it an act that is disrespectful of others.
2. Shown their true colors? Those true colors may be green, for the money which has been put in front of the community. No one is saying that Facebook shouldn’t make money. In fact, it is quite the opposite. They need to make money to show that social media is a profitable business. Sometimes, how you make the money (like selling out your users) can hurt your efforts.
3. Moved toward MySpace territory? While admittedly a stretch, what if Facebook is simply the bigger version of MySpace and it has made a second or third generation social media business mistake that will make it go the way of Friendster, or even worse, be pushed to the fringes of relevance like MySpace.
4. Shown its age? Let’s face it. Facebook was started by a very young guy and he shows his age more often than not. Maybe he is being swayed by counsel that is not in the best interest of Facebook, but he simply isn’t experienced enough to know differently. Being smart and being experienced are two completely different things. Mark Zuckerberg is definitely smart. The other? Not so much.
5. Created a free monster? Maybe there is no real way to turn the switch on a pay model after being free for so long. Maybe this is just an example of being too big and too ubiquitous. People are used to everything just “being” with Facebook. Now as the company is required to make moves to be profitable (which it has not done yet) it is learning the hard lesson of its model.
6. Assumed people wouldn’t pay attention? This is the most insidious of considerations because Facebook and their terms of service have always been a real PR play. They know full well that most people don’t pay attention to Facebook policies as evidenced by not reaching the required 7,000 comments recently to put a TOS issue to a vote. Maybe they were naïve enough to think that if the users of Facebook are just not paying attention then they could CTA (cover their a%$) with some privacy announcements and never look back.
7. Realized that Google really is in control because of search? With Twitter opening their feed to the major engines, Facebook was up against it to a degree. It was forced to sacrifice one of its pillars of trust (privacy) for the demand to index the entire world in real time.

What’s your take on this? Is it an over-reaction? Did Facebook do any real damage in the long or short term to itself? Will we all forget this in a month or so? I don’t have any answers to this but my suspicion is that this is not the end of this discussion. Not by a long shot.

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The Biggest Search Geek brings people from all walks of life together in the name of search engine marketing. Anyone can enter online (except those who work for Marin Software, and it’s affiliates of course) by simply going to “The Biggest Search Geek” website and filling out the online application and following the instructions on the website. The contest begins on December 1, 2009 and ends on February 19, 2010. The official rules are also available online, but here is a brief summary:

Participants test their skills by answering 20 amazingly tough questions about search engine marketing (the ins and outs, and everything in between). Each entry will be judged and scored based on the number of questions correctly answered in a timely fashion (so if you think you can take a month to answer one question, think again). Each question has a possible total score of 5 points, and you can get a maximum of 100 points if you answer all the questions correctly. Partial credit for multi-part questions will be given so it does help to guess, but keep in mind this contest is designed to separate the men from the boys (or the geeksters from the posseurs). The final score will be represented as a percentage of the total questions answered correctly. Last year’s winner, Keri Morgret, went up against well over 1,600 search engine marketers to score a 76.8% and claim the title of Biggest Search Geek. This year, Keri is looking to reign supreme once again – and for good reason.

This year’s grand prize will be a free trip for two people to the Search Engine Marketing Expo (SMX) West to be held in beautiful Santa Clara, CA. The grand prize also includes round-trip airfare, and hotel accommodations. The winner will also receive an award on stage from SMX West chair Danny Sullivan, who also serves as Search Engine Land’s editor in chief. Even if you don’t win the grand prize, the SMX West expo is still an awesome happening to check out for those in the search engine marketing world.

The SMX West Expo is three days of intensive seminars, and exhibits that can help just about any search engine marketing enthusiast elevate their level of game play. A plethora of companies will be on hand to demonstrate the latest in search engine marketing tech, and grandly display highly guarded secrets to dominating your niche with SEM. Some of the topics covered will include search engine optimization (SEO), paid search advertising, analytics, social media marketing, and much more. It’s amazing how much information the event coordinators and demonstrators can cram into a few days time. Industry experts, and hopefuls come from all around to learn, network and share in the experience of the expo. If you are looking for a way to improve your skills in SEM, and be around like minded people looking to do the same, this expo is the place to be.

The SMX West expo is truly a gathering of the most elite minds and offers some of the brightest ideas in technology (some of which the outside world has never seen before). Participants get treated to some amazing information, lectures, and demonstrations (plus you get a kick butt party to boot!). If you’re in the area at the beginning of March, you are NOT going to want to miss this major event. And for those with mad skills in search engine marketing that still lack the fat pocketbook for all your hard work, you might want to check out The Biggest Search Geek contest. Who knows? You and a friend might soon find yourselves on your way to Santa Barbara, CA courtesy of a free trip to the SMX West expo – THE tradeshow to end all SEM tradeshows. Carpe Diem!

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Editor & Publisher and the Huffington Post are both talking about the updates. Interestingly enough, I heard about it from @michacha101 who is one of those people that I have no idea why I follow on Twitter but have gained value from doing so. Having said that (and given them a plug) I am learning more about the openness of the social media environment and the value that can be taken from it. Journalists drool over this kind of exposure and availability of information. Trouble is that for the sake of ‘objectivity’ or ‘political correctness or whatever there will always be rules and regs that restrict just how effective the medium can be.

The Huffington Post tells us that some of the LA Times policies include

Integrity is our most important commodity: Avoid writing or posting anything that would embarrass The Times or compromise your ability to do your job.
Assume that your professional life and your personal life will merge online regardless of your care in separating them.

Even if you use privacy tools (determining who can view your page or profile, for instance), assume that everything you write, exchange or receive on a social media site is public.

Just as political bumper stickers and lawn signs are to be avoided in the offline world, so too are partisan expressions online.

There’s a lot of detail that I am leaving out here and here’s why. I have to give the LA Times credit for being on the ball. You see the Huffington Post had only one comment but it was from Andrew Nystrom / L.A. Times social media guy / @AdNys who was completely transparent by saying:

Thank you for writing about our new Guidelines. For the record, here are links to:

- The full text of our revised Social Media Guidelines: http://latimes.com/socialmedia — our original Guidelines were issued in March 2009, before the WaPo or WSJ (and most other major media outlets) issued theirs.

- Our directory of 200+ L.A. Times(@lat¬imes)-rela¬ted Twitter accounts: http://latimes.com/twitter

- The full text of our 2007 Ethics Guidelines (currently under revision): http://latimes.com/ethics

Hope this is helpful. I welcome all feedback.

Nice move.

So let’s recap. As a result of the social media ‘world’ I got data from someone that was of interest, that was about information that can be seen both positively and negatively depending on your point of view but was ultimately made completely transparent by the source which ultimately reflects positively on them. Pretty cool.

So if you really think that people care about where you are walking and what you see it’s likely that you are just really enamored with yourself. What people really want is information that helps. Thanks to everyone who helped here.

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