Mediaboss Marketing

via Know Your Meme

By Helen A.S. Popkin

Almost two years ago, the feminist writer Irin Carmon wrote an insightful piece for Jezebel titled "The Daily Show's Woman Problem." She soon paid a price.

For having the audacity to call out liberal Shibboleth Jon Stewart about The Daily Shows Mad Men-era gender hiring practices, Carmon became the target of an all-out Internet flame war. As often is the case with these things, the ad hominem attacks went way beyond her theme or even her writing ability, and straight to her viability as a human life form breathing precious air. You know how the Interwebz do.

So when Carmon notes that Internet flame wars arent necessarily a bad thing, you can bet shes given it some thought.

Some writers drop flame bait, others just constantly "troll." Either way, there's a deliberate pushing of buttons for the purpose of causing outrage and attracting attention. Though construed as useless, time-consuming and distracting, in the not-so-humble opinions of many, this behavior can also be a force for good, Carmon argues.

First and foremost, they sometimes open up a space for a conversation that might not have occurred otherwise.

In Carmon's Daily Show piece, she noted that the Comedy Central showcase has a nearly all-male, on-air staff. With the exception of Samantha Bee, the then-recent hire of Olivia Munn was the first new female correspondent in seven years. As fiercely liberal and sharp-eyed an observer as Jon Stewart can be, getting women on the air may be his major blind spot, she wrote.

At South by Southwest Interactive, Carmon led a panel extolling the virtues of Internet rage, while noting the downsides. Titled Curing a Rage Headache: Internet Drama & Activism, Carmon and other media members, each of whom has been involved in their own popcorn-passing drama in virtual space, discussed how the attention generated by thousands of angry, irrational and completely engaged Internet users posting vicious comments can lead not just to indigestion, but also to positive change.

I am tired of watching racism, sexism, patriarchism and religious bigotry going unchecked, Carmon said. Then she brought up Rush Limbaugh.

Follow this link:
Internet flame wars serve the good of humanity

DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/606874/internet_services) has announced the addition of the "Internet Services - Global Outlook" report to their offering.

The global outlook series on Internet Services provides a collection of statistical anecdotes, market briefs, and concise summaries of research findings. The report offers a rudimentary overview of the industry with an on-the-fly focus on broadband services, and details trends such as, increased broadband penetration and growth in e-Commerce applications and online advertising. Additionally, issues such as, impact of the ongoing recession, commercialization, threat to user choice and increased user monitoring are also covered.

The report identifies and discusses key regional markets, such as, the US, China, Japan, India, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain, the UK, China, India, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, and Brazil among others.

The reader stands to gain macro-level insights into recent industry developments such as service introductions, mergers & acquisitions and other noteworthy strategic corporate developments. Also included is an indexed, easy-to-refer, fact-finder directory listing the addresses, and contact details of 159 companies worldwide.

Key Topics Covered:

1. GLOBAL INDUSTRY OVERVIEW

2. MARKET TRENDS & ISSUES

3. INTERNET: A CLOSE-UP SHOT

4. SERVICE OVERVIEW

Continued here:
Research and Markets: Internet Services - Global Outlook

Internet music service Rdio.com on Tuesday unveiled a redesign intended to make it "faster, simpler and more social" as it battles with rivals such as Pandora and Spotify.

Rdio also announced that its music catalogue has grown to more than 15 million songs.

Rdio was created by Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis and the subscription-based advertising-free service was opened to the public in August 2010.

"We've made Rdio bigger and better with new features that really make discovery fun," vice president of product Malthe Sigurdsson said in a release.

"This is more than just a redesign; the new Rdio transforms the boring, spreadsheet-like way of consuming digital music into something visual and dynamic."

Social features include being able to share music with friends by email or at social networks Facebook or Twitter.

The revamped service was rolled out on Tuesday in Australia, Canada, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, New Zealand and the United States.

Rdio charges $10 monthly for an "unlimited" subscription that lets music be streamed to someone's Internet-linked computers and mobile gadgets.

Rdio is vying for fans in a streaming music arena that has proven to be a tough place to make money.

That fact has not deterred competitors, with Europe-based Spotify bursting into the US market last year and Internet titan Google fine tuning its online music offerings.

Original post:
Rdio revamps Internet music service

Today there are two live help events taking place, one on the paid search side and the other on the organic search side.

The Google AdWords team is hosting a webinar today at 3pm GMT (which is in about 2.5 hours from now). The AdWords webinar is on making mobile-friendly websites. You can still register for it by clicking here. It is a shame they aren't using Google+ Hangouts for it but I guess they can host more people this way.

The Google Webmaster team is hosting a Google Hangout today and tomorrow on Webmaster topics. The first one is today in about an hour and a half, at 2pm GMT. The second one is a week from tomorrow, March 21st, at 2pm GMT. No registration is required but you need to be one of the first ten. To get in, a few minutes prior to the start time, go to Pierre's Google+ page and watch it.

Forum discusion at Google+ and Google AdWords Help.

Read more here:
Today Get Live Help From Google AdWords & Webmaster Reps

Google has just revamped the crawl errors data available in webmaster tools. Crawl errors are issues Googlebot encountered while crawling your site, so useful stuff!

I originally started this article by writing that in most cases, these changes are for the better and in only a few (really maddening) cases, useful functionality has been removed. But now that Ive gone through the changes, I unfortunately need to revise my summary. This update is mostly about removing super useful data, masked by a few user interface changes. (And I hate to write that, because webmaster tools is near and dear to my heart.)

So whats changed?

Crawl errors have been organized into two categories: site errors and URL errors. Site errors are those which are likely site-wide, as opposed to URL-specific.

Site errors are categorized as:

URL errors are page-specific.

URL errors are categorized as:

Google now shows trends over the last 90 days for each error type. The daily count seems to be the aggregate count of how many URLs with that error type Google knows about, not the number crawled that particular day. As Google recrawls a URL and no longer gets the error, its removed from the list (and the count).

In addition, Google still lists the date Googlebot first encountered the error, but now when you click the URL to see the details, you can see the last time Googlebot tried to access the URL as well.

Continue reading here:
Google Webmaster Tools Revamps Crawl Errors, But Is It For The Better?