Now, let’s have a look at where this leaves the MPAA:

The MPAA represents the big content resellers of the 20th century, whose business model used to be valid in a world where content was scarce. That used to be the case in almost the entire 20th century. Clay Shirky explains this quite well in a brilliant Ted Talk on the subject.

The fact that content is not scarce anymore, the MPAA feels, is the Internet’s fault, and this is why they are actively, and desperately trying to break the Internet. In a heartfelt post Jason Calacanis explains that proponents of the Internet should not see this as a threat:

The internet is more powerful than any of us thought — and it’s getting more powerful every day. Hollywood brings a lot to the party and while it can be misguided at times, it’s not productive to say we’re going to kill it.

Silicon Valley’s job is to empower Hollywood and make it appreciate what we’ve built. In the same way it makes us appreciate its products — even garbage like “Transformers” 1, 2 and 3 which, sadly, most of us have wasted money on.

If that sentiment will be reciprocal remains to be seen, however.

The only product the MPAA have is a channel. A channel to market and distribute content on. And they are still using that same old channel. They are still showing you advertisements for their next movies before the movie you’re trying to watch.

Now, this very channel of theirs, has been replaced. By the Internet.

This is why the MPAA is spending millions of dollars to actively break the Internet.

Apparently twice as many users get their news from Facebook than from Twitter. Wait a minute, doesn't Facebook have 4 times the amount of users Twitter has? This means, normalised to the amount of users each network has, Twitter is more successful as a news delivery medium by a long shot. This makes it all the more sad that Twitter is trying to emulate Facebook features that don't suit their user base at all. Activity Feed? Twitter, your users are not interested in who's following who. They're interested in content!

Hey! What is WordPress up to?

Wordpress.com now hosts more than 60 million blogs. That is 60 million users, but with a twist: 60 million blogs engage a far greater amount of users than that, and that doesn't include self-hosted installations? So, quietly, in the background, WordPress has started turning their huge network into a social network, by adding a range of social features. They're not alone, however. Adobe has announced that they will restructure to focus on digital media and marketing. So Adobe is saying they're doing it, but not doing it (yet), and WordPress is keeping quite, but doing it. Which do you prefer?

The Plus has a Minus

Finally Google Plus launched brand pages. Fashion and Social Media Trend setter Burberry were one of the first brands to set up shop. But it's missing key features: Robert Scoble explains what's missing. Also worth a look is Econsultancy's take on it.

Truth delivered right now is stranger than fiction

Emily Bell wrote recently, with reference to the power of Twitter, that stories are most interesting as they happen. This week: two more examples. Nick Cristoff live Tweets a raid on a Cambodian brothel, and an American delivers a Masterclass in Twitter storytelling: documenting an emotional breakup in a restaurant in a way that would make Tarantino proud.

Slacktivism can kill you

When Malcolm Gladwell dissed social media recently, by saying that it has no real power and does not entails any risks, we smirked. Tunisia and Egypt showed him up. This week he was tragically and shockingly proven wrong again. Mexican drug cartels decapitated yet another blogger, warning social media users not to speak out. Horrible. Warning, graphic picture.

Tweets with High Klout scores live longer

In a fascinating piece of research it has been shown that Tweets emanating from users with very high Klout scores are shared more. A lot more. Normal tweeps like you and me can expect our Tweets to hang around for 10 to 20 minutes. Celebrities' tweets stay fresh for up to 5 hours. No wonder there's a $10,000 per Tweet market.

37signals understands content. 110%

37signals.com, the company who brought us Basecamp (a very cool project management tool), has hired a full-time filmmaker. No, they're not venturing into video production … well, not in the way you might think. Shaun Hildner, the Chicago-based filmmaker on their payroll, will constantly film the company's day to day operations. Clever!

Creative of the Week

This week's clever tinkerer is one that really tickles our fancy. Lumenoise, by Niklas Roy, is half old school electronic sound visualization, half analog synth, and half electron charmer. Yes, that makes three halves, we know. That's how great it is!

This week Google launched its next step in its social play, Google +. We will reserve judgement for now, but what is intriguing is how serious Google is taking this project. Wired has a very good in-depth feature on it and the image that inspires it:

"The image was discovered by Google VP of product management Bradley Horowitz when he opened Google Image Search and typed “Emerald Sea” — which had just been chosen as the project code name. The first result, a depiction of an 1878 painting created by German immigrant artist Albert Bierstadt, so impressed Horowitz that he commissioned a pair of art students to copy it on the wall facing the fourth floor elevators. That way, the hundreds of workers contributing to Emerald Sea would draw inspiration as they headed to their computers to remake Google into a major social networking force. The massive wave symbolizes the ways Google views the increasingly prominent social aspect of the web — as a possible tsunami poised to engulf it, or a maverick surge that it will ride to glory."

Nowhere to hide…

The internet's collective intelligence is an incredible tool for sniffing out inauthenticity. The latest this week to suffer the ignominy: columnist Johann Hari.

In the past the internet was a place make up identities and facts were played with in a fast and loose fashion. The man that pretended to be Amina, the Syrian lesbian blogger, was outed by a concerted Twitter hunt lead by Andy Carvin. In Vancouver rioters were tagged by friends.

Of course if you are a nobody or if your actions don't goad the online denizens into action, you might get away with it. But the internet is a different wild west from what it used to be. The New York Times has a great article on the phenomenon.
 

..not even if you're Volkswagen

On a similar note, PR people at Volkswagen had their work cut out this week. Out of the blue, Greenpeace launched a full-frontal attack on the car brand, accusing them of lobbying against the increase of the greenhouse gas reductions target. How? By creating a film that smartly used VW's advertising iconography and by including a simple but effective Social Media sharing mechanic.

Interesting fact, flagged by COI director Nick Jones: the amount of people signing the petition is much higher than the number of people simply Liking. Currently the ratio is almost 3:1.

New social ad formats

In their never-ending attempt to adapt advertising to social media, Facebook is experimenting with allowing comments on Facebook ads. It allows brands to ask a question in the display ad, hoping to start an engaging discussion and get into people's Newsfeeds.

Also this week, LinkedIn introduced new ad formats, one of which uses that Facebook-style trick of showing relevant connections in the ad.
 

Foursquare starts to add value

Despite a growing user base and despite being valued at $600m this week, we still think Foursquare has their work cut out to become truly relevant. Anecdotal evidence tells us that the amount of check-ins at bigger events are roughly the same as last year.

Still, it seems that the location service is working hard at adding value to the check-in. Luxury hotel chain Ritz-Carlton is using the tips functionality to create a virtual 'concierge' service at some of its hotels.

And more striking: they're partnering up with American Express to give people cashback when they link both accounts and check-in at selected stores. Spend $75 at H&M, for example, and you'll get $10 back on your next statement.

Mobile Payment

PayPal announced this week they now have 100 million active users. More importantly, for the third time in 6 months, they amended their estimates of how much people will spend through mobile payments. They now think it'll be $3 billion for the year.

These are signs that the initial reticence of paying through your mobile phone is disappearing. Google research stated that 28% of people in the UK have used their phone to make a purchase. Still, only 17% of business have mobile-optimized websites.
 

What does digital first mean? Become a platform

The Guardian recently announced that from now on they will be driven by a digital first policy. What could this mean in practice though? In a thoughtful wide ranging article Jeff Jarvis made some suggestions, focusing on the principle that reporting remains journalists' highest calling:

"Going digital does not mean merely putting articles online before the presses roll, as then print still rules the process. No – digital first means the net must drive all decisions: how news is covered, in what form, by whom, and when. It dictates that when journalists know something, they are prepared to share it with their public. They may share what they know before their knowledge is complete so the public can help fill in blanks. In this way, digital first resets the journalistic relationship with the community, making the news organisation less a producer and more an open platform for the public to share what it knows."

Talking of reporting, sharing and crowdsourcing information. Is there a better tool for that than Twitter? Not that we have seen. So it makes complete sense that Twitter has launched a resource for journalists.

Content isn't king anymore

Making content is not a platform business. The Atlantic explains the inexorable rise of Netflix, a company that became a platform distributing the content of others. If you think about it, the more profitable companies in the past did much the same. See for example the telcos who did not produce, but carried 'conversations'.

In the article, The Atlantic makes the economic argument why making content is not where it's at. So where is it at then? Business Insider reckons it lies in curation.
 

Creative of the Week – Mike Bodge

According to his own bio, "Mike Bodge is an internet-minded human and entrepreneur located in New York". He operates an interesting blog called Delete Yourself, but it is his latest creation that really caught our eye: N Sky C.

Built as a microsite, N Sky C is automatically updated every 5 minutes with the average color of the sky above New York City. Complete with HTML color code. Really cool.

Tech Insight of the Week – Drive the HTML5 canvas without tears

This week a very nifty little framework popped out of our Twitterfeeds: Paper.js. It allows you to do very serious things on the HTML5 canvas in a very simple way. We test-drived it, and found that a couple of nice examples of what you could do with it spoke louder than words could ever hope to. Read More »

But for some time now I have wondered about the added value of traditional SEO practices, and whether in fact SEO as a discipline is not in terminal decline.

SEO is being being replaced by another practice. Let me explain why SEO is in decline and what will replace it.

The SEOBOOK blog also recently wondered about the future of SEO:

SEO came about soon after the advent of the web crawler. The commercial imperative was obvious – where there was web traffic, there was money to be made. Positioning a page first in the engines was pretty much a licence to print money.

Still is, of course.

But they continued:

“In 2009, SEO plays fall into three distinct categories.

* Agency model: people offer services to others for a fee.
* Affiliate model: people gather traffic and funnel it somewhere else for a performance fee.
* Content model: people generate content and make money off advertising.

The last model is, I’m guessing, is one a lot of SEOs will pursue. Many do so now. “

That most SEOs will make their money from content may come as a startling prediction. But not if you consider these three developments killing traditional SEO:

1. Many platforms and frameworks for web development currently come out of the box SEO primed;
2. Some activity does not happen on the open web – take Facebook – and when it does, the page and the link is not its primary unit (yet). Take Twitter as another example.
3. The most successful long term SEO technique is called Linkbait and it’s got little to do with SEO.

Many platforms and frameworks for web development currently come out of the box SEO primed

Are you doing eCommerce? Magento is one of the great new eCommerce platforms and it does what you would want SEO wise. Each product has its own page and link and the Title, Headings,… tags are sorted in accordance with SEO best practise.

Matt Cutts, head of search quality at Google reckons WordPress is the best search engine optimised blog platform and in a video he tells exactly why it is a fantastic SEO choice. WordPress is of course now the platform of choice for much more than just blogs.

What about other web publishing platforms? I’m no Joomla expert, but as far as I can tell it is also SEO-ready without too much additional effort.

Put frankly, anybody building such a CMS, blogging or eCommerce platform that does not integrate SEO best practice is foolish. See how the mighty Flash is struggling for survival today. There’s only one reason. Search engines can’t make sense of Flash in spite of lots of people trying to make it SEO friendly.

It is fair to say that only when building a completely bespoke website or when significant mods to existing frameworks are done that SEO expertise needs to be on hand.

Some activity does not happen on the open web and when it does, the page and the link is not its primary unit (yet)

Facebook is huge. Facebook wants its members to be more open and expose their users’ Walls, Status Updates and Photo Albums to the open Web.

But it is a tall order to get users to change their habits when part of Facebook’s success was the exclusivity of interacting only with your crowd.

The majority of activity on Facebook is still hidden from Google and despite Facebook’s best intentions this is unlikely to change soon.

And outside Facebook there are other problems for search engines. Says the SEOBOOK:

Consider social media. Is a page the basic unit of Twitter? No, it’s the sentence. How about Youtube? The video. Social networks? The person. All can be extracted, re-purposed and dis-intermediated without losing meaning.

And then there’s the problem of the real time web.

When Michael Jackson died, Google was beaten to the punch by Twitter and Wikipedia for a couple of hours. So far the real time web remains out of SEO’s reach. Yes, Google now integrates Tweets into its results, but are they ranked? No. Then it’s outside the domain of SEO.

Conclusion? SEO is still very important but its reach does no longer cover everything.

The success of Linkbait – Linkbait is not SEO

The highly respected SEOMoz blog recently evaluated the continued significance of Linkbait as an SEO strategy even when other techniques are failing or changing.

“There have been more than a few debates and suppositions over the years about the potential value of linkbait/viral content strategies and whether search engines will always reward these practices. Today (actually, it’s late at night here in Oslo), I wanted to tackle this debate and succinctly present reasons why I believe this methodology will remain powerful and effective in the long run.”

But hang on – what the hell is Linkbait? If you’re thinking it’s some uber-complicated strategy requiring sophisticated technical know-how you’re very wrong.

British SEO expert Patrick Altoft explains what Linkbait is:

Linkbait is the practise of adding content to websites with the aim of attracting links from other sites. The content can take various forms, from a unique tool, or a breaking news story, to a well written article to a controversial image.

This simple definition should send bells ringing. No, the definition is not wrong. But what kind of people do you want to hire to create so-called Linkbait? SEO experts?

A good journalist smells of Linkbait. A film director reeks of it. Calling Linkbait an SEO strategy is like calling war a kind of politics. Perhaps it is a kind of politics, but it does not describe the kind of things that happen in a war effectively. In a war you need a different set of skills and mindset than in vanilla politics.

Why does Google like Linkbait?

Because it follows the model of how Google’s search works. Namely that it’s a meritocratic selection engine, which treats links likes votes. Not unlike Digg if you think about it. In short, search is a social form of voting and good Linkbait respects that model.

In this video – which we have posted before – Matt Cutts, head of Search Quality at Google explains Linkbait and how effective and cheap it can be to use.

Linkbait encourages creativity

What kind of Linkbait has proven to be successful? A recent SEOMoz study asked this question in the context of blogs. This is what they found:

* Content is the most important thing to a post, but posts with extra visual content attract extra links.
* Adding simple visual content, like lists and images, can increase the number of (Independent Linking Domains) ILDs by good percent.
* Posts with videos will attract almost 3 times more ILDs than a plain text post.
* Posts with all three media types (videos, images, and lists) will attract almost 6 times more ILDs than a plain text post.
* Contrary to common beliefs, large posts seem to attract more links than posts with 900 words or less.
* Posts with between 1800 and 3000 words will attract more than 15 times more ILDs than a post with less than 600 words.

To summarise it. Content attracts links. And content that’s well organized attracts even more links.

If you want to play the Linkbait game really well you’re going to look to hire copywriters, journalists, photographers, editors, animators, videographers and yes even media-savvy programmers – the so-called creative technologists. (The New York Times recently laid off staff and hired two dozen programmers.)

In short, Linkbait requires content skills, not search engine optimization skills.

But is SEO’d content itself really all it is cracked up to be?

I’m going to – reluctantly – drive one more stake through SEO’s heart. Pay special attention if you are in the business of publishing.

The Guardian recently featured an interesting article on why SEO should not be the only driver in site design. It featured the opinion of Matt Kelly, the associate editor of the Mirror, responsible for their recent successful forays online.

According to Kelly, “users” are people who discover content through Google, devour it, and then return to their search engine to look for more elsewhere.

“Often they have no idea which website it was they found the content on. Result? Users don’t care about the websites they visit, and as a consequence, advertisers are less willing to spend their cash to be associated with our content.
–
“We are to blame for allowing ourselves to be talked into believing that search engine optimisation is the be-all and end-all of successful website design.”

But, said Kelly, accumulating increasing numbers of unique users is of no long-term value. It is an “absurd metric that values one visit from one random Google News user as highly as daily visits, for an hour a time, from someone who treasures the content we produce.”

He argued that the “quest for a gazillion unique users from wherever, and for however little engagement, has been responsible for denuding many of our newspaper sites of the great brand and value and character that actually differentiates what we do, from all the aggregators and cheap, worthless news sites out there.”

Yes, an SEO’d site can drive users that don’t know your service or business. But you need to make sure they love what they find.