Mediaboss Marketing

AUSTIN, Texas - The Internet is a way of life for billions of people but some in Washington still don't seem to get it, Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs said on Saturday.

"If you don't understand the Internet, you don't have any place in government," he told an audience at the annual South by Southwest conference in Austin.

Given the impact of the Internet on daily life, Kovacs said, he is amazed when members of Congress express a desire to hire staffers who "understand" the Internet.

"It's not something you learn, or hire someone for. It has to be the way you live your life," he said.

Washington and the tech industry have increasingly clashed as the impact of Internet and other tech issues grows. Mozilla joined other Internet companies and organizations like Google and Wikipedia in protesting proposed anti-piracy legislation in January.

But Kovacs said through internal discussions officials Mozilla have decided to avoid wading into more political fights. "That's not our place," he said. Instead, Kovacs said Mozilla will focus more on "protecting the Web."

It is incorrect to say that Web companies drove the broad online protests that ultimately scuttled the anti-piracy bills, he argued. Web sites simply "lubricated" communications between citizens and their representatives, allowing the issue to be publicized beyond people involved in technology policy.

"We enabled 30 million people to take action," Kovacs said. "Thirty million people are not nerds. Thirty million people are citizens."

Tech activists and companies are flexing their newfound lobbying muscles at the conference, but members of several different panels on the anti-piracy debate said many issues complicate efforts to harness that power again.

Major websites took unprecedented actions during piracy protestsbut Tumblr vice president Andrew McLaughlin said he doesn't expect to see a wave of more politically active web companies. Instead, concerned techies should become involved as basic citizens, he said.

Continued here:
Mozilla CEO: Don't Understand The Internet? Get Out Of Government

In December 2011 Google announced that it now has a smartphone Googlebot-Mobile. Historically, Googlebot-Mobile has concerned itself only with mobile sites designed for feature phones, so this is a pretty significant development. Today's column is going to discuss how to think about Googlebot, Googlebot-Mobile and your mobile web site.

As noted in this recent mobile SEO podcast with Cindy Krum one of the first decisions you need to make is what types of devices youre targeting. If you dont have many feature phone users who are trying to access your site, you may not need to support them, and you can focus your mobile phone site on smartphone devices.

This impacts how you set up your site. Mobile sites that dont support feature phones should use a same URL strategy - i.e. one where the mobile content renders on the exact same URL as the desktop content, and smartphone users are served the mobile version of the site using user agent detection (we call this the "Same URL" strategy). The reason you would prefer this is that your mobile site will then inherit all the SEO benefits of your desktop site (i.e. the link profile and other measures of content value and importance).

If you do support feature phones the problem becomes more complex. The technical challenges in supporting a wide array of form factors / screen sizes might make it easier from a technology standpoint to build your mobile site using a m.yourdomain.com approach. You lose the SEO goodness of the desktop site, but you can still send users to it using user agent detection.

Once you have decided on an approach, you also need to set up your user agent detection. This is the process by which you recognize incoming user agents. When you see an incoming user agent that is mobile device specific, send them to the mobile version of your site. Make sure that your user agent detection includes Googlebot-Mobile. Google just introduced a new version specific to mobile sites designed for smartphones. The current user agent strings used by Googlebot-Mobile are:

I asked Google for clarification on how they recommend the user agent detection for their crawler should be implemented. A Google spokesperson told me:

"There are two parts to this: The user agents of Googlebot-Mobile contain device names that represent certain classes of mobiles. We have two for feature phones and one for smartphone. They're all listed in the blog post you referenced.

Conceptually, our recommendation is this: Take the user agent Googlebot-Mobile has specified, remove (or ignore) the Googlebot identifying part. This leaves a device name representing a class of devices and websites should serve the best content they have for that class of device. For example, when you do this using the user agent of Googlebot-Mobile for smartphones, this kind of check will reveal an iPhone user agent and you should serve the content you have optimized for iPhones.

The corollary consideration is when the site does not have optimized content. In this case a website should serve what they would serve anyone by default. Usually that turns out to be the desktop content.

Link:
Mobile SEO: Managing Googlebot & Your Mobile Sites

11 Mar Singer Seo Tai-ji has denied the tax evasion allegations made recently by media outlets, HanCinema website reported.

On 8 March, it was reported that Seo Tai-ji has been undergoing this expansion project for his KRW 3 billion worth home property in Pyeongchang since 2010 and he has reported this home to be a multi-family property instead of his own personal property. He also reported the construction expenses to amount to only KRW 1 billion when it actually amounts to about KRW 1.9 billion.

However, sources from Seo Tai-ji's agency quickly came to his rescue. They stated, "Ever since the design stage of the residence, there were contemplations on whether it is a private, personal residence or a two-family residence. However, they reached a decision of making it a private, personal residence and this was reported on 5 December 2011 to the district office. This residence is being built for Seo Tai-ji and his parents so it was first investigated as a multi-family residence but it has been changed to a private residence."

Seo Tai-ji's agency stated, "There have been problems with the construction company. Even when they were fully compensated, they did not carry on with their work. They even asked for additional compensation, so we ended up halting the construction. This situation was not acceptable anymore so on 1 November 2011, we announced that we would terminate the contract with the construction company and on 26 December, we presented the courts with multiple legal documents."

Seo Tai-ji has faced many difficulties in the past, especially the divorce lawsuit with Lee Ji-ah and he is facing another one as of the moment. However, it has been revealed that he will defend himself with the means of the law and of the construction company.

Read the rest here:
Seo Tai-ji denies tax evasion allegation

Is anyone else losing track of what year this is?

The calendar says 2012.

Every time I pick up the newspaper and read about the controversy over contraceptives, I swear we're in a time warp.

Why is birth control up for grabs? Didn't we settle that issue decades ago?

The controversy over abortion I can understand. We will always have people who oppose abortion. They believe it is the taking of a human life and will continue to fight for making abortion illegal.

But arguing against health care coverage for birth control?

Wouldn't those same people want as much birth control available as possible to prevent abortions?

Last month the New York Times carried this front- page story: "More than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage. . . . Nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30."

And we're appalled by a 30-year-old law student who doesn't want to get pregnant?

I've always taken the position on abortion that I believe the silent majority takes: We want to honor both the unborn and the mother. We want the anti-abortion people and the abortion-rights people to work to make abortions unnecessary. Get rid of abortion by making it obsolete. Having the best access to the best birth control is a good start.

See more here:
Insurance coverage for birth control is worth discussion, but not war: Regina Brett

Posted: Sunday, March 11, 2012 1:15 am | Updated: 12:29 am, Sun Mar 11, 2012.

Are you on Facebook? Keeping up with who all is getting married or having a baby? Perhaps looking pictures of a friend's grandkids? Then some wiseacre tells you that Facebook is a good way to find a job?

Can one still have fun and be an effective job seeker using Facebook? Allison Doyle of About.com has doubts. She said, "I used to think that job seekers could still have some fun on Facebook if they were careful about their privacy setting. Now I'm starting to think that unless you are super careful and set your privacy settings so your profile is almost in jail, it can be an issue when you're job seeking." One Facebook user told me, "Trying to job hunt on Facebook will either ruin my fun or lose jobs." Anthony, a dislocated technical support person, said about Facebook job hunting, "No way am I doing that -- too many dangers."

However, it is just as wrong to ignore social media in job seeking. More than half of employers now use Facebook to find employees, and 95 percent use LinkedIn. Twitter is used by 42 percent. A local county park director hired a new secretary who applied using Twitter.

"No one applied the old fashioned way by dropping off a r?sum?," he said.

Here are some tips when using Facebook:

Check your online persona. What picture will a prospective employer get of you online? Google your name using quotation marks. Some are surprised at what they find on line about themselves. What employers learn about you online can be a job killer. If you are using Facebook for fun and job hunting, present yourself as being rather square or PG.

Think of your Facebook profile as your brand. Make sure that information you want to keep private is not out there for the whole world.

Facebook job hunting is really networking. Don't think of it as something that new. It's the same networking that I taught in job search classes for 37 years. Facebook makes it easier to find jobs through the help of friends.

Have fun. Job hunt on Facebook, but be careful.

See the article here:
BOB LANKARD: Using social networking