At SES San Jose 2009, I've been asked to make a solo presentation to kick of the Search and Community Track. The title of the session is "How to Optimize for Search & Engage the Community."

I've been working on my presentation, but it lacked a compelling case study that illustrated how a community organization had used search engine optimization and YouTube video to generate measurable results. I had planned to show examples of videos created by Barack Obama's presidential campaign, Monty Python, and Blendtec, but plans have a way of changing.

Then, I got involved with the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA), a national non-profit community advocacy and homeownership organization headquartered in Boston.

NACA is organizing a series of Save the Dream events to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, restructure home loans, and reduce mortgage rates. They have already held events in Columbia, SC, Stamford, CT, and Washington, DC. And NACA plans to hold more Save the Dream events in Cleveland, OH, July 17 - 20 at the Wolstein Center; Chicago, IL, July 24 - 27 at McCormick Place; and St. Louis, MO, July 31 - August 3 at Chaifetz Arena.

Although I don't have my case study wrapped up just yet, I do see one in the making. And it offers lots of lessons to search engine marketers, YouTube directors and entrepreneurs about how to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community.

For example, we issued an optimized press release yesterday announcing that NACA CEO Bruce Marks and Congresswoman Marcia L. Fudge (OH-11) will hold a joint press conference on Monday, July 6, at the Wolstein Center at 11:30 am to discuss the upcoming Save the Dream event in Cleveland. You can get the gist of the news at NACA and Congresswoman Marcia L. Fudge (Oh-11) Announce Same Day Solution for Homeowners with Unaffordable Mortgage.

But we also embedded a documentary video created by DigiNovations of Concord, MA, in the optimized press release. It provides background on NACA's Save the Dream program, which has helped homeowners across America restructure and renegotiate home mortgages and home loans they can no longer afford.

Documentary: NACA's "Save the Dream" - Mortgage Restructuring and Renegotiation Rescues Homeowners

Now, the press conference hasn't even been held yet -- and the Save the Dream event in Cleveland is still two weeks away. But I was stunned yesterday when one Twitter user near Memphis, TN, said "this is fantastic news" but she couldn't afford to wait, had called NACA and was "on hold" waiting to talk with someone.

I initially tweeted back that NACA will have over 500 staff and volunteers at the Wolstein Center in Cleveland, including over 250 counselors providing counseling from 9:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. from Friday July 17 through Monday July 20. Then, I realized that this information wasn't helpful today, this minute, now. So, I sent her a direct tweet with the cell phone number of the person I was working with at NACA -- in case she needed it.

I got a direct tweet back saying, "Thanks for the info... my process is well underway - so I'm all set (I hope!)"

So, something extraordinary is happening. And as I prepare for my presentation at SES San Jose 2009, I hope you won't mind if I share the story as it unfolds. That's one of the lessons I've already learned: You can't plan a search campaign and expect the community to wait to respond when you are ready -- especially if you are offering an answer to the huge subprime and predatory lending industry.

This is bigger than a case study. This is people's homes.

Oh, the drama! New rumors are swirling about an impending split for Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel. It seems the general consensus in gossip-world is that Jessica Biel is one needy, clingy girl and that JT will do anything to get away from her. These kinds of rumors are nothing new - JT and Biel have “broken up” about two dozen times already, according to the tabloids. There’s always some new variation - say, JT wants Biel to move out of his New York apartment, or that JT is cheating on Biel at a club, and only Lindsay Lohan was brave enough to tweet her citizen-journalism. Although, in that last case, it was later reported that Lohan accused JT of being a “jb cheater” because he didn’t want to hook up with Lohan.

This latest report comes from Gatecrasher. The story seems built upon JT’s London trip, where he’s been for the past week or so. JT seems to be having a great time in London - partying with Guy Ritchie, dancing with pretty girls, promoting his William Rast line with bromance-buddy Trace Ayala. Meanwhile, Jess sits in Los Angeles and sulks. According to Gatecrasher’s sources, Jessica has been extra-clingy long distance, calling JT all the time, and when he picks up, they get into “huge screaming matches”. Oh, the drama:

There’s trouble in paradise for Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel.

Pals say the two were having problems long before rumors circulated that the singer cheated at NYC nightclub Avenue late last month. Timberlake and Biel, a couple for two years, haven’t been spotted together since late May, and friends say their relationship is quickly going south.

“Things don’t look good for them right now — they’ve hit a really rocky spot,” confides a source close to Timberlake, who adds that serious problems began back in February during a boys’ trip to Las Vegas.

“Justin had to leave dinner once because Jessica was calling him incessantly. They got into a huge screaming match over the phone about how she’s always ‘checking up’ on him. She’s extremely needy and is always keeping tabs on him.”

The insider isn’t the only one who thinks Biel is a bother. “All his friends think she’s really annoying,” added the source. “She’s always trying to be one of the guys. She and Justin have no chemistry.”

And if things went badly between JT and Biel the last time the singer went away for a weekend with the boys, they’re surely no better now.

“Justin is partying in London right now,” said the insider. “Jessica wanted to go with him, but he wasn’t having it. He just wanted to get away with the guys. He needed his space from her.”

At least one Timberlake pal has Biel’s back. “Jessica is really fun to be around,” says JT’s former ’N Sync cohort Lance Bass. “I haven’t spoken to Justin in a while, but the last I knew, he really loved her.”

Timberlake’s rep says she doesn’t comment on her client’s personal life; Biel’s didn’t respond to calls.

[From Gatecrasher]

I totally buy huge chunks of this story. I buy that Jessica is clingy and needy, and that JT’s friends are annoyed with her, and that she and Justin have no chemistry. But I still don’t think they’re going to break up any time soon. Jessica is totally invested in this relationship, and she’s going to stick around until JT dumps her (my opinion). So why is JT sticking with her? I tend to think he does love her. But that love is going to fade in a hurry is Jessica continues to be so needy and boring.

Justin and Jessica is are shown on 4/30/09 at an event for Cartier. Credit: Fame Pictures. Justin is also shown at LAX on 7/2/09. Credit: WENN.com

At the bottom of this post is a coupon code to give you a $50 credit at MyAds - this is not an affiliate promotion, just a take it or leave it offer from MyAds.

Over the last week or so I’ve had the opportunity to see inside the MyAds from MySpace.

MyAds have been an advertiser here on ProBlogger for a month or two now (consider that a disclaimer) so I wanted to see for myself how it worked. What I found was a very easy to use and pretty affordable way to advertise a product, service or even your blog.

In short - MyAds is a pay per click banner advertising system where you can advertise on MySpace and get your message in front of potentially millions upon millions of MySpace users.

You can use it with an advertising budget of as little as $5 a day and have a pretty good looking ad set up to run within just a few minutes using their ad building tool (or you can upload your own using an uploader).

Worth noting before we go any further is that to run a campaign you need a US address and credit card. As someone without either of these I could only go as far as designing an ad and testing out the targeting features. I did however talk to a number of MyAds advertisers to get their feedback (see below).

Setting up an ad is easy. Even me as a design challenged guy got one set up in a few minutes. I put a mock ad together for my 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook. Here’s a screenshot of the page where you set up the ads (click to enlarge):

As you’ll see there are three ad size options and it’s as simple as typing in your ad copy, adding an image, choosing a background color and adding in a destination URL.

You can then preview your and move on to working out who you want to see it as well as setting a budget.

On the following screenshot you’ll see the section to choose your target audience:

As you make your choices about who you want to see the ad the grey area the bottom of the screen changes. It shows you how many users on MySpace will potentially see your ad as well as giving you a suggested bid price for how much the ad might cost per click to run.

The targeting options look pretty good - not only can you target by demographics (gender, age, education, relationships, parental status and location within the US) but you can also choose categories of interests and occupations of the type of person you want to reach with your ad. I tried a number of options and got the target number of people to reach quite focused and the suggested cost per click quite a bit lower than what you see in the above screenshot.

This enables you to increase the chances of conversion with your ad quite considerably.

All in all from where I stand MyAds seems like something that I’d like to use if I were running an ad campaign for a product, service or even to launch a new blog. I’ve previously used similar ad systems on other social networks with some success and the easy of use of MyAds plus what looks like great targeting make it an attractive option.

How Does it Perform? Testimony from a Heavy User of MyAds

As I was unable to go much further in the process (as a non US resident) I approached a number of people to get their feedback on the ads. One of those I talked with was Joe Frevola from Globalizer who uses MyAds quite extensively. I asked Joe a number of questions to get his insight on the why and how of MyAds:

How have you used MyAds and How has it performed?

Globalizer uses Myspace MyAds to buy media for our GlobalizerNetwork advertisers. We have had tremendous success with several campaigns on MySpace and have been impressed with its powerful targeting tools, which we have utilized to target the demographics and interests of our audience.

In comparison with Facebook, it’s hard to pick a clear cut winner and both should be a part of your media buy in most cases. Each has advantages and disadvantages and the best choice of the two will vary based on the type of campaign you are running.

While MySpace’s targeting tool is more organized and allows you to select keywords sorted by categories and sub categories, Facebook’s keyword search tool allows you to access a more robust database of target interest. MySpace does have useful demographic targeting that you can’t get with Facebook, such as the ability to specifically target mothers or recently married individuals.

Both MySpace and Facebook have solid targeting tools that should allow you to push positive ROI. While the Facebook ad platform is global, you can only target US users on MySpace currently, however word is MySpace is adding new countries later in the year. I would highly recommend the use of both ad networks to just about any advertiser.

Do you have any tips for using MyAds to share with ProBlogger readers?

There are some tricks to getting the most out of MySpace MyAds. Globalizer runs a lot of lead generation campaigns that drive a very high response, but don’t pay high bounties per conversion and therefore don’t allow us to pay very high CPC’s.

Often, when you start a campaign with a very low CPC, the ads delivers very little or no volume at all. We find that in order to kick start this sort of campaign, we overpay on CPC in the beginning and fully expect to take a short term loss as MySpace’s optimization system values the quality of our offers.

In the end, the system just wants to back into the highest eCPM, so the fact that our ads are driving very high click through rates more than compensates for the lower CPC. Once the campaign starts getting significant delivery, we are able to adjust our rate down to a profitable number and continue to experience a great a volume of traffic.

Also, when you first start running a new campaign on MySpace, definitely go with your gut and select targets that you feel will have the best chance of success with your offer. However, don’t neglect to test various demographics that you might not think would typically perform with your ads. You will often be surprised at the demos that respond to your offers.

Get $50 Credit with This Code

If you’d like to test MyAds for yourself (IF you’re in the US) they’ve given me a coupon code for ProBlogger readers to try it out and get $50 credit to use in doing so. You need to be new to MyAds to redeem it (ie if you’ve already used MyAds it’s not redeemable).

To use it - just design an ad and at the end of the process use the coupon code of Pro50. Of course this is only for those who are residents of the US and have US address and credit card details.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

MyAds: Promote Your Blog, Product or Service on MySpace

Share This

As the sixth instalment of the teen wizard's adventures gears up for a global rollout on 15 July, let's see who could end up the winners and, erm, winners

Holy Hogwarts! After a handful of highly publicised setbacks and real-life tragedy, the world is finally about to see its favourite gang of teen magicians charge up their wands and return to school in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. As the press screenings kick off today ahead of a global public launch on 15 July, now would seem as good a time as any to take stock of what we know about this sixth serving of magical mayhem and gaze into our crystal ball.

Questions abound. By all accounts director David Yates and lead producer David Heyman have maintained a happy atmosphere on Project Potter despite the murder of cast member Rob Knox (Marcus Belby) outside a nightclub in 2008 and the studio's ultimately unsuccessful intellectual property infringement lawsuit against the Punjabi producers of Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrors. But will moviegoing muggles forgive Warner Brothers for making Harry and chums vanish from last autumn's releasing schedule and postponing the release until now? And does that poorly-received Chicago test screening last spring spell trouble for Harry's box-office prospects?

How will audiences respond?

They'll turn up. In droves. All but the most churlish fans will forgive the studio for delaying the release until the more profitable summer season, but you can bet there'll be a collective cry of "Expelliarmus!" if the subject matter isn't handled properly. The main gripe from the Chicago test audience was that the storyline was a bit soppy. Yates has happily confessed to this episode's strong romcom tone. Let's face it: gazillions of young fans are already going weak at the knees over those upcoming clinches between Harry and Ginny Weasley and Ron and Lavender Brown. Word is there will be other changes (SPOILER ALERT), including an attack on the Weasley household that wasn't in the book.

Is this Yates chap up to the task?

Hello? Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was a mesmerising, monochromatic mashup between the forces of good and evil that became the second highest grossing movie in the series on $938m (£571.4m). Not bad for what's only your second feature film. Yates has talent to burn, as they say in talent-burning circles, and earned his stripes on the TV series State of Play and Sex Traffic. Considering Half-Blood Prince is arguably the best book in the series, he's got plenty of great source material to play with. Warner clearly loves the Briton and signed him to do the rest of the series – the studio wouldn't entrust the Potter franchise to just any old hack.

So will Half-Blood Prince make loads of dosh?

Oh come on, is this in any doubt? Warner moved the movie to July 2009 because it didn't have a potential blockbuster scheduled for the summer. It does now. Collectively, the previous five Harry Potter movies have sold roughly $4.5bn (£2.7bn) in tickets around the world, rising to about $7.2bn (£4.4bn) when you add in DVD sales, according to a recent report in the Los Angeles Times. The average Harry Potter movie has sold $896m (£546m) in tickets worldwide and this one could be the biggest of the lot. At any rate this will be one of the biggest movies of 2009, if not the biggest.

What about the competition?

Read my lips. There will be no competition. Up has come down. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will have done most of its damage by 15 July. Brüno should be entering its second weekend on a roll, but do you really think the Austrian provocateur has a chance of getting on top of Harry? Don't think so. There'll be a few counter-programming movies knocking around in the weeks after Harry Potter comes out – in other words alternative genres for those who care little for the antics of lovelorn teenage conjurors – but nothing on the Hagrid-like scale of Half-Blood Prince.

Can Warner keep the franchise going forever?

You mean something like Harry Potter and the Convenient Prequel? The studio should be so lucky. As almost the entire population on the planet knows, there are only seven books in the series. The studio pulled a fast one when it announced it was splitting Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final instalment, into two parts. Something to do with doing justice to the complexity of the story, I think the execs said. Cue uproarious laughter. Oh, that was a good one. The first part will come out on 19 November 2010, and the final episode is scheduled to be in a cinema near you on 15 July 2011.

I bet a certain other wizard will be relieved when it's all over?

Ah yes, Gandalf. You can't blame him for feeling a fair amount of staff envy. One minute you're the main magic man and next you're tugging irritably on your pipe as Dumbledore steals your thunder to become the most beloved senior conjuror in all the known worlds. What's that you say? There can be only one? Hang on a minute, surely there's room for two great wizards? Dumbledore will be around for a few more years and Gandalf will get at least one more outing in Guillermo del Toro's upcoming Hobbit projects. There. See? Peaceful coexistence.

• Harry Potter
• Guillermo del Toro
• Daniel Radcliffe

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Well, looks like Twitter has arrived for real. Companies are considering the service for their marketing and customer efforts. There still appears to be significant hype around every time someone at Twitter has gas. Twitter is looking to protect its trademark and is looking to trademark other sounds from nature like chirps and peeps. So what’s next? Well, since it is the Internet what would talking about Twitter be without now mentioning porn and spam?

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has said recently that the service will be a success when people stop talking about it and just accept it as a utility. With MediaPost talking about the proliferation of porn and spam that chatter isn’t likely to end anytime soon. That is, of course, unless Twitter does something about it.

Nude and explicit photographs have become more common on Twitter. While the site has begun to gain momentum for marketing and customer service departments looking to promote products and services, or connect with customers, it has taken a bit of a dark turn into the world of spam, pornography and escort services.

Needless to say, marketers relying on the site to promote family values tied to goods and services don’t seem too thrilled by the topless photo of Mcdowell407 and the accompanying tweet that talks about how badly one boyfriend treats her. Nor do they appreciate the half-dressed women in bra, garters, stockings and stilettos who promote escort services, such as Taylor, by clicking on the “follow” tag. Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.

Other companies using Twitter to reach their audiences are feeling the same way as do those who are regular users of the service. While it may be easy to just brush this off as “The Internet is the Internet” Twitter may be called to a higher standard. eMarketer senior analyst Paul Verna says

“If Twitter builds an advertising-supported model, they will need to develop a way to isolate the content,” he says. “YouTube did. Facebook did it. They had to be tough cops when it came to the content. On the one hand, they try to provide an open platform, but on the other, if they don’t set limits it could backfire.”

Verna says getting a handle on the spam and the sexually explicit material is another thing Twitter must fix, along with the ability to authenticate celebrity accounts — something they have stumbled with during the last few months.

While I was once would have been sure that this is no surprise to Twitter I can’t say that with complete confidence anymore. It looks pretty obvious that they will not just be able to act as if it isn’t happening. The first reason for this is that the fix for the problem is not rocket science according to Amichai Shulman — CTO at Imperva, an online security company based in Israel and Redwood Shores, Calif.

“The information from the feeds is either based on IP addresses or links, and there are services on the Internet that track and send notifications about known distributors of offending material,” he says. “It would be simple for Twitter to interface with one of those services providers to filter out at least 90% of that content.”

He feels that while the Twitter community is doing good work in policing their territory the onus should fall on Twitter to make more of an effort and it shouldn’t be too much for them to take on this kind of project.

If Twitter does just turn the other beak and not take the same ‘high road’ of YouTube and Facebook it could end up hurting it’s viability as a business tool. Ben Smith, MerchantCircle CEO cuts to the chase.

“The problem with this type of activity is that it undermines the trust in the communication channel, which will have a disastrous effect on the channel.”

So Twitter has another issue to be concerned about that will get the attention of everyone. When you are as successful as they are everyone looks to see how problems like this are handled. Of course, the critics will always want more. Ask Google. Success comes with a high price. Now if they could only make money from someone for something. We’re all still watching for that trick.

Hi I work for one of the top UK dating networks and we are looking for an experienced guy, who can do a
twitter campaign for us to bring additional targeted traffic. We have inhouse affiliate program or can
consider your rates if you have. Please respond PM if interested.

Apple has put an official warning on its website in response to the mass panic on the internet regarding the apparent overheating of many users' iPhone 3GSs. Apple warns that the device should only be used where the temperature is between 0º and 35º C, so presumably people living in Dubai, or somewhere equally as hot, can't use their iPhones outdoors? Additionally iPhones should be stored where the temperature is between -20º and 45º and not left inside cars in hot weather. The warning states that if the interior temperature of the device exceeds normal operating temperatures, the device may stop charging, display dimmer, have a weak signal or a temperature warning screen may even appear. Some users have complained, via internet forums, that their devices have become warped or even turned a pinkish colour after overheating. Not good. It's not really Apple's fault that we're currently in the midst of a heat-wave but surely the iPhone shouldn't be overheating when it's being used within the temperature guidelines. Some users are complaining that this is exactly what's happening - particularly whilst charging. Have you been affected by iPhone overheating? Let us know using the comments function. (via The Guardian)

We know about the EyeToy. We've seen that motion controller Sony showed at E3. But there is another motion controller Sony has been working on.

This new patent filing reveals a Sony motion controller that uses a mapping system to incorporate everyday objects such as "coffee mugs, drinking glasses, books, bottles, etc." as a motion controller. In the drawing, those everyday objects are illustrated by that horse-shoe-looking U in the man's hand.

Basically, this tech appears to allow players to use a variety of real world items in game play.

To map the object, players show it to the camera and rotate it so that the object is captured and saved as a file. The system can then identify this object and respond to its movements.

The manner in which the object is held can affect game play. For example, in the illustration below, the object is held "up" which reveals the lightsaber-like sword. Holding the object down turns the sword "off".

Sony Patents A Motion Control System That Uses Ordinary Objects As Controllers [Siliconera]

(Author: Bill Walsh)

Lon Allison's article "A GPS for Global Mission" from Lausanne World Pulse sums up well the current questions and issues relevant to the global changes underway in the church. At this stage, I think questions are more helpful than anything. Here are four that Dr. Allison raises,

• Since the demographic shift to the Global South is at hand, how do Western mission agencies and churches respond?
• Resources, both financial and human, have, in general, not shifted. When should they? More importantly, how should they?
• How does the Church in the West welcome missionaries from the Global South and East to re-evangelize our continents?
• What role is there for ongoing mission to the Global South and East from the West?

These ought to keep us thinking for quite some time. They will be key in the discussion that takes place at the 2010 Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in Cape Town, South Africa.

Please pray for John Piper who will be speaking at the event and for the Desiring God team who will be traveling there next year.

James White

   I just received my set of Mark Shea’s three volume set, Mary, Mother of the Son. I began looking through it a bit Tuesday evening, and noticed no personal references in the indexes. But, as I looked at his attempt to force Revelation 12 into one of the few supports for the edifice of Marian theology I noted that either his publisher did not include footnote references in the index, or, they just didn’t want to include my name. In any case, ironically, yesterday morning I was sent this from Shea’s blog:
I'm happy to report that I have not yet seen a single negative review! Catholic response has been uniformly thumbs up, which makes Papa proud of his baby. (Of course, there will *be* negative reviews from guys like James White, Eric Svendsen, James Swan and the other nattering nabobs of anti-Catholicism, whose *job* is to give a negative review to stuff like this.) But once you get away from the anti-Catholic fever swamps, I will be interested to see how the book fares in place like Christianity Today, where you have honest Evangelicals who are serious about trying to engage Catholics, well, honestly.   Well, isn’t that special? Shea is one of the more acidic Roman Catholic apologists, and, of course, we see he is one of the less honest ones, for he, like so many others, dehumanizes his opponents through the “anti-Catholic” moniker, that arrogant mark of the Roman Catholic who is so enamored with the Papacy that they are willing to define others solely upon the basis of their relationship to Rome. I doubt he sees how inane the constant use of the “anti-Catholic” cudgel is in light of the wide range of work I have done over the years. I can just see a Muslim reading Shea’s words with a bemused look of confusion as to why Shea would be so narrow minded. Combine that with an implicit accusation of personal dishonesty, and you have another example of why I have repeatedly said that “Things aren’t very good in the Roman Catholic apologetics community.” I suppose it is a positive for Shea that at least he hasn’t been investing his life in digging out old posts from years ago to put them back on his blog, like Dave Armstrong has been doing the past few weeks in his on-going jihad against Tim Enloe (a spectacle in and of itself).
   In any case, I would not wish to disappoint Mr. Shea. Let me begin by talking about...global warming. You see, there are many, many people in Western Culture who are absolutely convinced that mankind is harmfully warming the earth through the production of carbon by-products, especially carbon dioxide, the chief of the “green house gases.” And those folks are now in charge in most Western nations, and they are ravaging the economies of those nations in an attempt to “save the planet.” So rabid are the devotees of this position that they have become dogmatic in their demands that everyone agree with them. They brook no opposition. They will not debate the viewpoint. They have declared all opposition null and void, the discussion is over, the facts are all theirs! Despite a wide and deep variety of counter-evidence that demonstrates their position to be mythological in nature, not factual or scientific, they boldly proclaim their position to be the truth, and all who would dare oppose it are censored. As some may know when the High Priest of Global Warming, Al Gore, “testified” in Congress recently, the “other side” was not even allowed to respond. And just this past week news broke (thankfully!) of the gross bias of the EPA in suppressing a study that demonstrates that carbon dioxide and water vapor actually can function to suppress the warming process in global weather systems.
   So why do I mention the global warming myth in response to Mark Shea? Because of the parallels I see between the wild-eyed fanaticism of the global warming proponents, who can twist any fact, any statistic, into evidence of global warming (a new record high? Global warming! A new record low? Global warming! A cat-5 hurricane? Global warming! Few hurricanes in a season? Global warming! Record cold beginning of the summer in many places? Global warming! Cardinals play in the Super Bowl? Global warming!), and the dogged, devoted, fanatical re-reading of all of history, logic, and theology that is needed to pry the Marian doctrines into the Bible, the teachings of the Apostles, and the early church. Just as the global warming advocate will trot out his “facts,” which are almost always either 1) irrelevant, 2) localized, or 3) a-contextual, so too the Marian devotee will comb through the entirety of the Bible and the corpus of ancient writers looking for anything to substantiate the massive cathedral of Marian theology that has been produced by Rome over the past centuries. And once again, most of the time the “facts” they produce are irrelevant or a-contextual as well. Though the broad body of current data, if interpreted without a horrific bias, speaks loudly against the current mania to “save the planet,” the global warming advocate has no ears to hear; he or she can only “see” the facts that support his or her theory. In the same way, the Bible and the writings of the early church together testify loudly that the Marian dogmas were unknown to the Apostles and only slowly developed as concepts over time, first outside the faith, then slowly infiltrating into the external church, eventually reaching the status of “dogma” only through a process of evolutionary degeneration and change. Just as global warming is not the “clear verdict of the scientific evidence,” so too the Marian dogmas stand against the entire weight of the evidence of sound biblical exegesis and fair-minded, non-anachronistic reading of the patristic literature.
   But a fair, non-anachronistic reading of either the Bible or the early church is not what you are going to find in Shea’s 3 volumes (which, I note, could have easily been a single larger volume). This is the work of a Marian devotee, so do not expect any fair handling of the objections to the rise of the Marian dogmas. Any reference to Mary, even if it is not amplified by the early writer from whose work it is culled, is anachronistically expanded into a wildly major element of that writer’s theology, and, hence, emblematic of a widespread Marian devotion or belief. It is not like Shea can avoid such manhandling of the patristic materials: it is the bread and butter of all Marian devotees, and hence much of modern Roman Catholic historiography, at least that which comes from the conservative elements of Rome. Anachronism is the necessary result of Rome’s dogmatic claim of infallibility and patristic consensus: those who defend Rome must “see” in the patristic sources what their ultimate authority has dogmatically defined to be there. So Shea can repeat the party line about Ignatius and the concept of the literal bodily presence of Christ as if Ignatius holds to the modern Roman dogma. We have demonstrated this is a horrible misreading of Ignatius, unsustainable for anyone who reads the text in its context, here. Now it must be remembered, Shea has already expended a lot of energy in his previous writings laying a foundation for the utter muddling of exegesis. No context is clear enough to overthrow his appeal of the “senses” of Scripture. Clearly, Scripture is but a pile of clay in the hands of the follower of Rome who wishes to “find” in its words something to substantiate what is, in reality, the teaching of the Magisterium and nothing else. So we are hardly surprised to find a world of difference in Shea’s excuse making and circular reasoning and the sound exegesis to be found in classical Reformed works relating to the Bible or church history. Again, he can’t help it: when you seek to promote that which is a-historical, that kind of thing happens. It “comes with the territory.”
   In any case, I turn to the text I ran into while thumbing through the books when they first arrived. I was naturally drawn to the chapter where Shea attempts to provide a biblical basis for his Marian doctrines. This is truly where the wheels fell off for Gerry Matatics in New York in the mid 1990s, for the only way to make the Bible teach what Rome teaches today about Mary is to twist and distort it to a massive degree, and that is harder to do in a debate where the other guy has equal time to point out your errors. In any case, Shea pulls a fast one on his readers, starting with pages of discussion of how the New Testament reads the Old Testament--an obviously important issue. But he then attempts to utilize his conclusions on that matter as a springboard for reading Marian fulfillments into New Testament passages. There is one problem: the New Testament writers never even attempt to make the application Shea does. That rather major discontinuity should not be forgotten.
   What follows is the standard issue “Mary is the Ark of the Covenant” presentation made by modern Roman Catholic apologists. I have dealt with this many times in the past (Shea shows no familiarity with the rebuttals offered). He even repeats some of the same errors Matatics did in the initial presentation of this material I heard back in 1994 or 1995. He correctly states that the verb επισκιάζω appears in Luke 1:35 relating to the overshadowing of Mary by the Holy Spirit, and says the same verb is used of the Shekinah glory overshadowing the “place where the Ark was kept” in Exodus 40:35 and 1 Kings 8:10 (p. 110). And just as Matatics did fifteen years ago, he moves quickly on, seeking to create a “wave” effect by throwing an entire series of claims together, hoping the combined weight will have the desired impact upon the reader. But just as I did back in 1994 or 1995, once again I stopped the freight train and began examining each point of the argument for consistency and truth value. And immediately we find problems.
   First, the cloud under discussion in Exodus 40:35 settled upon the tent of meeting, not merely upon the Ark of the Covenant. There were lots of other items in the tent of meeting other than the Ark: why are they not relevant? Why can’t we find a picture of Paul, or James, in, say, some piece of the furniture found in the same location? Secondly, the cloud was that which indicated the presence of Yahweh; when the cloud lifted, the people moved. It gave direction, guidance. Shall we try to read something into this, as well? But what is more, just as Matatics was in error fifteen years ago to say that the very same term is used in 1 Kings 8:10, Shea remains in error today. The verb found there is επλησεν from πίμπλημι,to fill.” I suppose the second reference could simply be to something “filling” the house of the Lord, but again, it is not the same term. So what is the relevance of 1 Kings 8:10? We can’t tell.
   So, the first part of the argument, one that Shea is going to claim is as “plain as day,” is that if the cloud settled on the tabernacle of meeting, and the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary, then clearly, Mary is the tabernacle of meeting...no, wait, she’s the Ark of the Covenant.
   Next, 2 Samuel 6:9 is cited, where David is afraid of Yahweh because of the Uzzah incident, and he asks a rhetorical question about how the Ark could ever come to him in Jerusalem in light of what has happened in striking Uzzah dead. This is forced into a position of parallelism with Luke 1:43 where Elizabeth asks, “And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” The only parallel is “to me” (the verbs “to come” are different---if Luke was trying to parallel, why did he not use the same words?), while the contexts are completely different, one expressing fear and frustration, the other blessing and honor. One’s credulity is truly strained at this point, but Shea presses on.   At this point we find Shea using another tactic so clearly illustrated by Matatics, that of the convenient “insertion” of text into a citation. He writes, “In 2 Samuel, we’re told ‘David arose and went’ to the hill country of Judah, ‘to bring up from there the ark of God’ (2 Sam. 6:2; emphasis added). (ibid). Notice that “to the hill country of Judah” is not a quotation, because, if you actually take the time to read 2 Samuel 6:2 (and most folks reading Shea’s book will not do so) it nowhere mentions the “hill country of Judah.” It mentions not a single person going up, but, David and “all the people” went to “Baale-judah.” While it is quite possible to place this location in the general area of “hill country” (most of the region could thusly be described), it is necessary for Shea to insert the parallel language, something the readers of Luke’s gospel would simply never do. In any case, he then notes that the Ark stayed in the house of Obed-edom the Gittite for three months, and then provides the parallel:
Not accidentally, Luke notes that Mary “arose and went to the hill country of Judah” (Luke 1:39) where she remained with Elizabeth for “three months” (Luke 1:56; emphasis added).    If people were not in the habit of “arising and going” a whole lot in the Bible, we might find that a truly compelling argument. Evidently, the fact that Mary did so hurriedly (and David did not) is not relevant (there really are no rules to this kind of interpretation); the verbs are amongst the most common in the Scriptures, of course. For some reason Shea does not mention that Luke says Mary stayed with Elizabeth about three months--one would think (again assuming Shea’s conclusions) that Luke would be far more specific if he were attempting to do what is being suggested. Why not use specific terminology, rather than vague, every-day language? Why show a lack of concern for the specific time frame, “about” three months?
   The last attempted parallel Shea brings forward comes from paralleling David’s “leaping and dancing before the Lord” in 2 Samuel 6:16 (ὀρχούμενον καὶ ἀνακρουόμενον ἐνώπιον κυρίου) with Luke 1:41 and the baby leaping in Elizabeth’s womb at the greeting of Mary (ἐσκίρτησεν τὸ βρέφος ἐν τῇ κοιλίᾳ αὐτῆς). Once again, however, the parallel is in the English, not in the original tongue. Luke uses a different verb (again, very odd if we grant Shea’s conclusion that Luke is “plainly” seeking to draw these parallels); David is worshipping, the baby is (by the Spirit’s intervention) giving testimony to the presence not of Mary but of the Son of God in Mary’s womb (a major disjunction that only a devoted follower of Mariolatry would miss).
   Having presented these less-than-compelling parallels, Shea concludes, “To a reader immersed in the Old Testament, these connections between Mary and the ark ar plain as day.” Well, to the devoted Mariolater, these may well be “plain as day,” but to the devoted student of Scripture, they are hardly foundation for the massive edifice of Roman Catholic Mariolatry that has been built up over the centuries.
   So it is in this context that Shea grabbed a passing quotation from my 1992 debate with Gerry Matatics (p. 112) where in reference to Revelation 12 I said, “In the early fathers, the Blessed Virgin, the Immaculate Virgin, is always the church, not Mary.” I was here addressing the issue of how one defines the traditions Mr. Matatics was claiming we needed to hold to. I would assume I was praphrasing George Salmon, from his book, The Infallibility of the Church, pp 161-162:
I think it is a very significant fact that early Patristical interpretation is altogether blind to indications of the dignity of the Blessed Virgin. In the Book of Revelation, the woman clothed with the sun, and with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars, who brought forth the man child, and then was made to flee into the wilderness (chap. xii.), in which description modern Romanists find a prediction of the glory of the Virgin, is by the ancient commentators, with absolute unanimity, understood of the Church.
   He gives as an example Hippolytus, On Christ and AntiChrist, 61.
   Shea offers two citations in rebuttal of this claim, one from Quodvultdeus of Carthage (d. 450) wherein he says the virgin “signifies” Mary, and makes not an exegetical presentation from Revelation 12, but the claim that just as Mary remained a virgin, so the church gives birth to sons without losing her virginal integrity.
   The second is from Oecumenius (sixth century) and his commentary on Revelation. Now I know that Oecumenius’ commentary on Revelation would have been unknown in Salmon’s day. And I would imagine the Quodvultdeus statement would not amount (for Salmon) to Patristical interpretation, i.e., commentary on the text itself, as it is much more an illustration or similitude as he expresses it. But for me, there is a much more relevant issue: when I speak of the early writers, I am thinking second, third, and fourth centuries, not fifth and sixth. Augustine may sometimes be considered “early” but is most often much more of a transitionary figure into the next stage in church history. So in any case, I was speaking of an earlier period than these two citations represent.
   But what struck me more than these details was this: doesn’t Shea, and his Roman Catholic readers, see something that is plainly demonstrated by his own counter argumentation? The earliest of his citations, that of Quodvultdeus, is from the 40th volume of Migne’s Patrologia Latina. Forty volumes precede it, and that is just in Latin (that does not include the Greek volumes). How did the early church manage to crank out forty volumes of material (and, of course, even Migne is not exhaustive or complete) over four centuries without once mentioning this interpretation? The fact is, those earlier centuries do witness interpretations of this text, but not the Roman Catholic one. Don’t they see what this means? The answer is, no, they do not. The fact that generations of Christians could live and die without once invoking the name of Mary, praying to her, believing the things modern Roman Catholics do about her, is lost in the scramble to find anything, and shred of evidence, upon which to hang a truckload of modern Roman Catholic teaching. If someone said a single kind thing about Mary, well, of course, they must have believed what we believe about her! They were probably praying to her and celebrating the Assumption, but they just sorta forgot to mention it. And that passage in Revelation? Sure they thought it was Mary. Just a few idiosyncratic interpreters saw it differently, and for some reason, their writings survived, while the ones that supported our view didn’t. Or something like that. When your ultimate authority is Rome’s dogmatic teachings, these kinds of things happen all the time.
   So while I had not intended to get to looking at Shea at the moment (far more pressing things to do), his taunt yesterday morning prompted the effort. Now let’s see if he responds to the facts of the matter, or does what he, Ray, and others have been known to do in the past: respond with mockery, derision, and ad-hominem argumentation.

And lo, the first round of cuts to my pull list hits, as I try to wean myself off single issues and into trade paperbacks. What did I decide to keep buying in singles? Join me under the jump for the stuff I bought that’s worth typing about: robots, space horses, vampires, more vampires, and Batman. What’s most surprising, dear reader? My favorite comic this month wasn’t written by Grant Morrison. (Gasp!)

Atomic Robo: Shadow from Beyond Time #2 by Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener, Ronda Pattison, and Jeff Powell (Red 5)

This, my friends, was my favorite comic from June 2009. Mark it in your ledger!

Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener have perfected their shared wavelength and created the most entertaining comic on the stands. Clevinger’s plotting is perfectly pared down to the essentials– after all that fun banter and exposition in part one, this episode’s all action, but not without its fair share of hilarious dialogue, be it Charles Fort’s mixture of eagerness and incredulity (”Edison would never allow the likes of you or I near his necrophone”), or Robo’s carphone conversation with Nikola Tesla, in which he tries to act like nothing’s wrong and he’s not chasing down a giant Lovecraftian (literally!) beastie with a carful of lightning guns. Meanwhile, Wegener’s artwork is crispier than fried chicken, his facial cartooning brilliant– it’s marvelous how he can eke so much emotion out of a character who, by all rights, doesn’t have a face.

It’s in the last handful of pages, however, where Clev and Weg (as they shall now be known) really hit me, as Robo literally turns things up to 11 and the reader is handed the most badass, exciting comic book moment I’ve read in ages. It’s faultlessly paced, the epitome of action storytelling. “There’s one underlying scientific principle common to all existence. … Everything explodes.” That’s the best way to describe Atomic Robo– explosively awesome. And not in the “Taco Bell put the fear of God in me” way.

Batman & Robin #1 by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Alex Sinclair, and Pat Brosseau (DC)

I suppose the title is technically “Batman and Robin,” but I enjoy typing ampersands. What can I say about this comic that hasn’t already been said? Nothing, probably. Heck, reviews of the second ish are already out and I’ve just sat down with the first! Egads, Bill, get with the times! Batman & Robin #1 is so last month!

G-Mo and F-Qui have this thing down to a literal science by now. They have become such a well-oiled machine that one expects nothing less than perfection from their collaborations, and we pretty much get that here. I loved the hell out of this thing, from the vibrant yellow background on the cover to the flying Batmobile to Quitely putting the sound effects into the art to the decrepit remnants of the giant mechanical dinosaur to the cutaway of the Bat-Bunker (which I did hope would be a bigger drawing, I admit), to Damian calling Alfred “Pennyworth” to the paracapes to the brilliantly disturbing new baddie Pyg. And now I’m out of breath. But yes, absolutely gorgeous and electric, giving me the same chills I got with Morrison and Quitely’s first issue of New X-Men. You might as well call this New Batman, because that’s what it is. I didn’t think I’d care about Dick Grayson in the Batsuit, but I’d read it forever if these two Scottish blokes were in charge. Really, there is no need for another Batman comic besides this one.

So there, I’ve just repeated what everybody else said. But man! What a cool comic! Why couldn’t Morrison’s whole run to date been like this?

Beta Ray Bill: Godhunter #1 by Kieron Gillen, Kano, Alvaro Lopez, Javier Rodriguez, and Nate Piekos (Marvel)

Kieron Gillen writing pop comics about hip music and the cool cats who dance to it? I can’t wrap my brain around that. Kieron Gillen writing an action comic about a space horse with the power of a Norse god who decides to kill an unstoppable force that devours planets? Hell yeah, sign me up.

I get the feeling that Gillen’s going to be a big name in a couple years, one of those go-to guys at Marvel who follow the same path as Matt Fraction or Jason Aaron– they’ll wow you with their early creator-owned work and then start spinning cool superhero yarns, but they gotta start by paying their dues. And so Kieron Gillen gets to write a mini-series about one of my favorite characters, the noble alien warrior with a face like a dead horse who shares my name and flies a talking spaceship named Skuttlebutt. I’m surprised to see Beta Ray Bill getting the spotlight as regularly as he has been, what with the mini-series and one-shots and team books he’s appeared in over the last few years. What once was maybe a novelty pet character of Walt Simonson’s is apparently a favorite of some editor out there, and so we’re blessed with books like Godhunter, which is about the titular Bill deciding Galactus needs to die, and going about the mission. It brings him into contact with SWORD, which puts him in the path of of a being who disintegrates folks with his cosmic organ music– yes, that happens– and then into a smackdown with one of Big G’s heralds. And yeah, the story is pretty groovy, and it could be going places, so I’ll be looking forward to the second issue.

Kano should probably be a star by now, but it seems he keeps getting overlooked for the big assignments, and that’s a shame, as he really bridges the gap between a looser, cartoonier line, and more of what’s the Marvel house style, but it gives the art a real verve.

This puppy’s a whole lotta pages for four bucks and has no ads! What it does have, though, is a reprint of Thor #337, the first appearance of Beta Ray Bill, written and drawn by Walt Simonson. I’ve got this issue in my collection already, but what really struck me in perusing the reprint were the colors, especially when compared to the new story. George Roussos provided the original coloring to this old story; on newsprint, it looked cool, rife with Benday dots, but on these slick magazine pages, the bold flat colors throttle one’s retinas– in a good way, of course.

Take a look at the two panels above. Which ones excites you more? Yes, coloring is far more of an art in comics these days, and I do enjoy the various digital brush strokes you can see in Thor’s face on the opening pages, but these bombastic colors in the back half of the mag really command my attention. A lot of coloring these days feels really over-rendered, which gives the pages a muddled feel, and certain contributes to the “sameyness” of Marvel art. Loads of careful attention is paid to the comics page these days, but I can’t help be more enchanted by the almost violent, done-by-hand work of Simonson, Workman, and Roussos in some old issue of Thor.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Tales of the Vampires by Becky Cloonan, Vasilis Lolos, Dave Stewart, and Comicraft’s Jimmy (Dark Horse)

I made sure to buy the one that had the Moon-n-Ba cover, because those two gents are awesome.

What Cloonan and Lolos give us here is something only tangentially related to the Buffyverse, but I’m glad that Buffy logo is on there, because that means a lot more people are gonna buy this comic, which is superbly crafted. Cloonan works away at the periphery of the Buffy mythos– folks know vampires exist now, sure, and slayers are out there, but Nashua, New Hampshire is far from the Hellmouth (well, closer to the one in Cleveland), and dull teenage life is still dull teenage life. Jacob yearns for more, and he gets it– at a price, of course. It’s about choices, and bad ones, specifically.

Cloonan’s known for her art, but she really sells the script here, especially with the mother character. Lolos’ art is excellent as always, deftly cartooned, letting the primary characters be almost swallowed by the empty backgrounds, until the vampires bring everything into close-up.

Dave Stewart’s colors are magnificent. There’s a reason he’s the best in the biz, and it helps that he falls more in line with what I talked about above. Many of the colors here are subdued– lots of mauve, surprisingly– but that works to the art’s advantage. I dig Stewart’s play with light, whether in the panel above with the parking lot lamps, or with the shadow that so often appears on the protagonist’s face for the first half of the book.

So yeah, it’s a good book, probably more akin to Demo than any issue of Buffy, and I hope the usual Buffy audience picks it up and responds well to it.

Lightning Round!

Astonishing X-Men #30 by Warren Ellis, Simone Bianchi, Andrea Silvestri, Simone Peruzzi, Morry Hollowell, and Chris Eliopoulos (Marvel)

A lot of folks rag on Simone Bianchi’s art, and I’ll say this: I really dig it. It’s not the most dynamic, and the storytelling isn’t necessarily brilliant, but my word, look at those ink washes! Every page of this looks like it wasn’t sullied by mere human birth but instead brought down from Olympus by the god of storks himself and raised on pure, massaged Kobe beef. Other than that, the story finally decides to go places in its last chapter and the X-Men become dark, mean, genocidal maniacs. Maybe this is the beginnings of a dark, longform plot from Mr. Ellis, but it takes a lot to make me enjoy an X-Men comic, and I don’t feel I’ll be back for the next arc. Sorry, chaps.

Captain Britain & MI13 Annual #1/#14 by Paul Cornell, Mike Collins, Adrian Alphona, Leonard Kirk, Ardian Syaf, Livesay, Jay Leisten, Craig Yeun, Jay David Ramos, Christina Strain, Brian Reber, and Joe Caramanga (Marvel)

You know, I read the Annual, and still I feel that I don’t know anything about Meggan or the game of cricket. There’s not much in here to excite me or make me really care about the characters. Sorry, Paul! But I did very much enjoy #14. Yes, the opening negates the previous issue’s balls-to-the-wall cliffhanger, but it does so using pieces earned from previous stories. Things are heating up for the big finale, and I’m looking forward to it, though I’m saddened that the end is near.

Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #3 by Grant Morrison, Cameron Stewart, Dave Stewart (no relation), and Todd Klein (DC/Vertigo)

I was going to write about this here, but I’m now considering saving my thoughts for a larger standalone post. But it may just have redeemed this mini-series for me; I’ll have to reread the series and get back to you later. Promise!

Two-in-One Review!

Doctor Who: Autopia by John Ostrander, Kelly Yates, Kris Carter, and Kubikiri (IDW)

Thor: The Trial of Thor by Peter Milligan, Cary Nord, Christina Strain, and Joe Caramanga (Marvel)

I try not to buy comics whose titles don’t start with A, B, or C, but sometimes I make exceptions.

I’ve lumped these two comics together because they both provoke the same feeling in me, which is that they feel like comics you’d find in a three-for-a-dollar bin in the back of a comic shop, wedged between unloved issues of Dan Jurgens’ Justice League run. By which I mean they both exude the less-than-sexy aroma of the dreaded “filler.” This Thor book is not unlike a random Thor annual you’d find in the early 80s, only with better coloring, and the Doctor Who comic lacks any of the more interesting or exciting ideas and developments you’d find in the show; it’s just what one fears when they open a licensed comic.

I know Ostrander and Milligan are good writers– I’ve read their good writing! I feel they’re more capable than this. Both comics just kinda go through the motions, shuffling towards the inevitable when they happen to run out of pages and the plot decides to stop. The artists do their best with the material– Kelly Yates’ cartooning is quite polished, and he storytells the hell out of a plot that mostly consists of guys and robots standing around; Cary Nord draws a mean fantasy barbarian comic, and this issue is no exception.

Neither book, however, thrilled, intrigued, or otherwise truly entertained me. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these comics– everybody does a professional job, nothing stands out as an eyesore– but they’re just kinda there. A mediocre comic from good creators is the most depressing comic of them all.

1 Comments

• At July 2, 2009, Chad Nevett wrote:

  Trial of Thor is almost worth it just for the whole CSI: Asgard element. I would totally buy a comic ...

read more

Want to a peek into the crystal ball and see what the future holds for you iPhone owners out there? Well, read on and be amazed at these potential iPhone 4.0 features that may soon be available in a firmware update down the road.

Discovered in a bunch of pending patent applications, this first one is called “Event-based modes for electronic devices.” What this basically does is allow your iPhone to automatically adjust its setting based on your location and “life events”. So, what exactly are these “life events”?

[via unwiredview]
More details after the break.

Based on the patent application, “life events” can be any one of the following:

any location-based event (e.g., the device entering or exiting a specific geographical location, such as a country, or a specific type of location, such as a movie theater, etc.), any environment-based event (e.g., the device being subjected to a specific physical orientation, movement, temperature, sound, light, etc.), any calendar-based event (e.g., the device reaching a specific time of day, day of week, date, etc.), any usage-based event (e.g., the device being used for a specific function, for a specific period of time, the device’s battery having less than half of its capacity remaining, etc.), any news-based event (e.g., the device receiving information about a particular worldly occurrence, such as a weather forecast, news report, or sport score, etc.), and combinations thereof.

Another pending patent is called “User-programmed automated communications.“ This feature allows your iPhone to perform an appropriate action based on a particular event, location, caller and other similar conditions. Say, for example, it’s your wife’s birthday. This new feature will allow your iPhone to automatically send an SMS to your wife greeting her on her special day.

Last, but certainly not the least, there’s also a “Systems and methods for intelligent and customizable communications between devices” that’s also waiting for patent approval. Simply put, these allow you to set up your iPhone to respond accordingly and differently to your various contacts depending on your current situation and availability.

As you can see, these new iPhone features is all about automation, but being that these are all just patent applications, there’s really no guarantee that these will make it into the real world. These do, however, give us an idea of what to expect, and based on what we’ve seen so far, it sure looks good. How about you guys? What do you make of these iPhone features waiting for patent approval?

NYS OCFS Commissioner Gladys Carrion responds to Renee Greco's murder. The 24 year old youth counselor was bludgeoned to death on June 8th while working alone at Avenue House, a group home for troubled youth, formerly under the auspices of New Directions Youth & Family...

read more

With 3.3 million+ YouTube views in the past two days, the video “Unknown Lifeform in North Carolina Sewer” (below) is taking the web by storm, becoming the most viewed video this week and beating out a performance of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The clip, which shows an alien-looking life form living in a North Carolina sewer, was posted along with a claim that it was extra-terrestrial life.

Today mainstream news has taken notice and corrected the myth: the video is indeed real, scientists say, but the strange creature is very much a terrestrial phenomenon. News14 writes:

Ed Buchan, environmental coordinator at the Raleigh Public Utilities Department, said staff biologists have confirmed that the “creature” is actually a colony of tubifex worms. The colonies attach themselves to roots that gradually work themselves into weak points in the pipes. “They seem to respond to the light from the camera,” Buchan said. “That light is pretty hot.”

The worms naturally occur in sewage and pond sediment and are actually sold both live and dried as fish food in pet stores. He said other staff members in the department have seen it before, although sightings aren’t particularly common. “I’ve seen a lot of sewer TV before and I’ve never seen them,” he said. “We were surprised. We didn’t know immediately what it was.”

It’s unclear what made the clip such a YouTube phenomenon: most likely it’s explained by the mystery surrounding the strange creature, much like last year’s Montauk Monster mystery.

Reviews: YouTube

Tags: creature, lifeform, youtube

Behavioral advertising, in which users are fed ads based on the interests revealed by their Web browsing habits, has an obvious appeal to advertisers, as it will ostensibly allow them to serve ads to the most relevant audiences. It also raises a host of privacy concerns—to work effectively, the Web surfing histories of consumers have to be aggregated and analyzed by those providing the ads. 

Both the Federal Trade Commission and Congress have asked questions about whether advertisers were doing enough to protect and inform consumers, raising the prospect that regulation of behavioral advertising was only a matter of time. In an attempt to head off the government, a coalition of advertising groups that includes Google has now issued a series of principles that will guide their self-regulation.

The industry didn't need to look far to see the downsides of a failure to respond to public concerns. One of the more aggressive approaches to behavioral advertising, the deep packet inspection used by NebuAd, saw the company's CEO dragged before Congress, and the resulting bad publicity turned the company into a pariah. It ultimately closed its doors last month.

Click here to read the rest of this article

I received an email a number of days ago from someone who was concerned that another blogger was painting me as “a negative person.”   My impression was that they hoped it would comment in reply. In thinking how to respond, or if to reply at all, I thought of the irony of the “you are being [...]

photo credit: Lee Jordan

We have all seen the high increase in un-employment and the high increase in people fighting for the same job. You place an ad in the paper or even online and the next thing you know you have about 30-60 applicants for ONE position. So how do you choose? Just Tell Me How posted an article with some helpful tips on this matter.

Use screening questions. A short list of questions that quickly and effectively screens out candidates who just won’t make the cut. And screens in those who deserve the big interview. But the ‘don’ts’ come first.

Come up with some questions to ask the interviewer that will challenge their ability to respond quickly but yet effectively and their ability to demonstrate their true core skills for that job position. Make the list of questions should be relatively easy for you to do. Just come up with say 3 things that truly demonstrate a great work performance for the job, and then that should pretty much hand you your basic list of questions.

Set aside a certain block of time in your day to do your screening interviews, take notes during these interviews and really listen and pay attention. If need be in order for you to truly focus on what is being said, arrange for someone else to take the notes for you.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Howard Kurtz is almost certainly the nation's best-known and most influential media critic. With a regular Washington Post column, virtually unlimited space on the paper's web site, and his own television show on CNN, all dedicated to covering the media, Kurtz has an unrivaled platform from which he can opine about the Fourth Estate. Unfortunately -- though perhaps not coincidentally -- that opportunity is wasted on Kurtz.

Much has been written about Kurtz's (frequently undisclosed) conflicts of interest, his fondness for right-wingers like Michelle Malkin, and his tendency to give their critique of the media more credence than more substantive and factual critiques from progressives. I think it's clear that, whether or not Kurtz personally leans a bit to the right, his media criticism certainly does.

But that isn't why many of his readers and viewers find him so frustrating. What is really bothersome about Kurtz is that he so often gives the impression that he simply lacks the competence to critique the media. He frequently seems to overlook the obvious -- and when it is pointed out to him, it sails right over his head.

Kurtz's output this week is a perfect illustration. From Sunday through Wednesday, Kurtz hosted Reliable Sources on CNN, wrote one column for the print edition of the Post and three for the paper's website, and took reader questions for his "Media Backtalk" online discussion. (Kurtz also recorded an "Online Media Notes" video for the Post's website, which focused on the question of whether there has been too much coverage of Michael Jackson. His conclusion, as far as I can tell, was "Maybe.")

Let's start with Reliable Sources, where Kurtz hosted his Washington Post colleague Dana Milbank, Huffington Post reporter Nico Pitney, and conservative writer Amanda Carpenter.

Milbank had used his Post column to attack Pitney and the Obama White House for alleged coordination relating to a question Pitney asked the president during last week's press conference. Milbank, along with some other establishment media figures and a bunch of conservatives, were -- or pretended to be -- outraged that Obama apparently knew that Pitney was going to ask a question about Iran.

That is a strange complaint, given that reporters agree upon interview topics with subjects all the time. When reporters like Milbank or TV hosts like Kurtz want to interview an elected official, they discuss the topics they want to cover with the official's staff. Indeed, Kurtz had "coordinated" with his guest Dana Milbank when Milbank was booked to discuss Pitney's question on Reliable Sources. Somehow, though, it never occurred to Kurtz -- during a discussion about whether it is appropriate for a reporter and a subject to "coordinate" on the topic of a question -- to point out that he and the three people he was interviewing had "coordinated" on the topics he would ask about.

Or, to put it more simply: Kurtz knew that Milbank had just participated in precisely the same kind of "coordination" that he was denouncing -- because Milbank had "coordinated" with Kurtz! Yet Kurtz somehow missed this rather glaring hypocrisy.

Even when it was spelled out for him, Kurtz showed no sign of grasping the absurdity of reporters attacking Pitney and Obama for things those same reporters do every day. Kurtz eventually acknowledged, via Twitter, that he agrees on topics in advance with guests -- "it's only fair," he says -- but still hasn't managed to make the connection to the complaints about Pitney and Obama. (For the record, while Obama had strong reason to believe Pitney would ask about Iran -- Pitney had drawn widespread praise for his coverage of that country's disputed election -- there is no indication that Pitney committed in advance to asking about that topic. And as pretty much everyone agrees, Pitney's question was a good and difficult one that Obama did not directly answer.)

On Monday Kurtz had a column in the print edition of the Post, an expanded version of which appeared on the Post's website, in which he wrote: "MSNBC is down to just five daytime hours of straight news, which once formed a counterpoint to its liberal evening programming." Kurtz didn't mention former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough, who hosts a daily three-hour program on MSNBC, thus giving the false impression that MSNBC's "liberal evening programming" has no conservative "counterpoint."

This fits neatly into a pattern with Kurtz. He is convinced that MSNBC leans to the left. It's certainly his prerogative to think that -- and he is certainly not alone in that view. But Kurtz frequently places a thumb on the scale in order to make his case for MSNBC's liberalism. Sometimes, he fails to mention Scarborough's existence, as on Monday. Other times he acknowledges Scarborough, but goes to great lengths to suggest Scarborough's show isn't all that conservative, while omitting any such qualifiers for the "liberal" hosts he identifies.

And Kurtz points to Chris Matthews as evidence of MSNBC's liberalism, describing Matthews as "a former Democratic strategist who recently pondered running for the Senate from Pennsylvania as a Democrat" without noting that Matthews voted for George W. Bush, spent years gushing over Bush and ridiculing Democrats and liberals, waged war on both Clintons and Al Gore, and reportedly decided not to run for the Senate because he realized there wasn't anything he wanted to do as a senator -- not exactly signs of a reliably progressive person.

Surely, any halfway-competent media critic could recognize the problems with a news report that stacks and slants its case that egregiously. But Kurtz not only routinely does it, he appears to have no idea why it draws criticism.

A few hours after that column appeared on Monday, Kurtz hosted his weekly online discussion, where the first question pointed out his omission of Scarborough:

Scarborough Country: You wrote today: "MSNBC is down to just five daytime hours of straight news, which once formed a counterpoint to its liberal evening programming."

Why do you keep pretending Joe Scarborough's three hours a day don't exist? It undermines your crediblity when you do this. Your case for MSNBC's liberalism must be pretty weak if you have to resort to burying counter-evidence.

Howard Kurtz: My pretense hasn't been very consistent, since I've written lengthy pieces on both Joe and Mika. Morning Joe figured into my calculation, in that it's an opinionated show (with Scarborough balanced a little bit by Brzezinski) that no one would confuse with straight news. They get three hours; Matthews, Schultz Olbermann and Maddow are on from 5 to 11. But my point is the shrinking of garden-variety newscasts on MS during the day. 

The question was obviously about Kurtz ignoring Scarborough's three hours in writing that MSNBC's "liberal evening programming" lacks sufficient "counterpoint." The problem in omitting any mention of Scarborough should be self-evident. But Kurtz's response indicates a complete failure to grasp this point. He responds that at some other time he has written about Scarborough. Well, fine -- but that doesn't make it OK to omit any mention of Scarborough from Monday's article. Not when Scarborough's three hours directly undermine the point Kurtz made in that article.

Can it really be possible that Kurtz doesn't understand the problem with failing to mention Scarborough in an article in which he writes "MSNBC is down to just five daytime hours of straight news, which once formed a counterpoint to its liberal evening programming"? Or is he just pretending?

Kurtz addressed the topic further Monday night, again via Twitter. Here he is at 10:09 p.m.: "Since I've written about Joe & Mika and watch it regularly, I'm as familiar with conservative-hosted Morning Joe as with MS's lib iineup [sic]."

OK, so why did he omit any mention of it, leaving the impression that MSNBC's "lib lineup" lacked a "counterpoint"?

A few minutes later, Kurtz Tweeted again: "I don't get the criticism, @markosm, since I included Joe in my math: 3 conservative hrs, 6 liberal hrs, and now 5 for 'regular' news at MS."

Kurtz may have included Scarborough in his "math," but he included neither Scarborough nor that "math" in his article. Somehow, Kurtz still can't grasp that concept -- or he pretends not to.

(For the record, Kurtz ignored responses pointing out that, in fact, he omitted Scarborough from his article. Also for the record: I don't agree with Kurtz's assessment that MSNBC features "6 liberal hours," but I won't address it now, as my primary point here is not that his assessments of such things are incorrect, but rather that Kurtz does not seem to understand basic concepts that should be second nature to someone in his position.)

A little later in his online discussion, a reader took issue with Kurtz's contention that Scarborough is "balanced a little bit" by co-host Mika Brzezinski:

Balanced by Mika?: I love Morning Joe and don't watch the evening chatter on any cable. I do not know what Mika's politics are, but I often find her marked by deference to her men (reminds me of a "powerful" woman in '40's screwball company). Today's show featured Mika interviewing noted philanderer Rudy Giuliani regarding Sanford and political affairs. Instead of having Rudy talk about his own broad and deep experience on the subject, including the use of public funds on mistresses, she allowed it to become a discourse on Bill Clinton. Oy.

Howard Kurtz: Look, it's Joe's show, he's a former Republican congressman and an unabashed conservative (albeit one who hasn't hesitated to criticize his party). Mika is a lifelong journalist, not a liberal advocate, with views that are certainly to the left of Scarborough's. All I said is that she added a little balance. It's not set up like Crossfire where their views have equal weight.

Once again, a reader's point appears to have flown over Kurtz's head. Does he really not see the problem with Mika Brzezinski hosting Rudy Giuliani and allowing him to criticize Bill Clinton's affair without ever once mentioning Giuliani's? How could he miss it? Isn't that the kind of thing that the nation's most famous media critic should notice. And, you know ... criticize?

The very next question made the same point:

"balanced by Mika": Hey Howie, here's an example of how Mika brings that liberal balance to the Scarborough show, while interviewing Rudy Giuliani about adulterous politicians:

"Giuliani "Let's look at Bill Clinton."

Brzezinski: "Yeah.""

I'm assuming the irony of that premise is obvious. Am I overestimating you?

Howard Kurtz: I brought up Bill Clinton (and Spitzer and McGreevey and Edwards) on my program yesterday after running through the list of recent Republican miscreants (Sanford, Ensign, Vitter). How can any discussion of philandering politicians not mention the impeachment of a president? Of course, I'm sure Rudy would rather talk about that than how he started dating his current wife while living with his then-wife in Gracie Mansion.

The questioner was clearly pointing out -- as the previous one did -- that Brzezinski allowed Giuliani to bring up Bill Clinton's infidelity without challenging him on his own. But Kurtz still couldn't wrap his mind around this simple concept. Instead, Kurtz responds as though the question was about the propriety of Bill Clinton being mentioned at all.

It's as if someone had pointed out that two plus two equals four, and Kurtz responded "Duluth."

The rest of the discussion went on like that. A reader pointed out that neither John McCain nor Newt Gingrich, both of whom famously had affairs, were mentioned in media coverage of Mark Sanford's affair. Kurtz missed the point entirely. A reader asked about the Pitney controversy; Kurtz misstated facts about it in his response. Another reader asked about Pitney's statement that Milbank had quietly called him a name during the Reliable Sources taping, a charge Kurtz had been aware of for a day, and had addressed on Twitter. Kurtz responded that the video is inconclusive -- but gave no indication that he took the basic step of asking Milbank about it, despite the fact that they share a newsroom.

On Wednesday, Kurtz included a lengthy excerpt of a defense of Milbank in his online column. Despite widespread criticism of Milbank's Reliable Sources appearance, the only criticism of Kurtz's fellow Postie that made it into any of his columns was a pox-on-both-their-houses excerpt on Monday.

On Monday, Kurtz touched briefly on the Post's decision to get rid of Dan Froomkin:

Liberal bloggers have been lambasting The Post for dropping Dan Froomkin and his White House Watch column. Washington City Paper Editor Erik Wemple reports that the main issue was Froomkin's $100,000 contract and his declining traffic:"

Kurtz then quoted a few paragraphs of Wemple's work. And that's all he's written about Froomkin. Note that Kurtz didn't actually quote any of the "liberal bloggers" (or others) who have been critical of the decision to drop Froomkin, or even indicate what their points were.

And Kurtz's description of Wemple's piece is just wrong. Wemple didn't "report" that the main issue was Froomkin's contract and traffic; he asserted that to be the main issue. That may seem like a subtle distinction, but it is an important one -- and it should be an obvious one to the nation's most famous media critic.

Just to spell things out: the best-case scenario for Howard Kurtz's employer is for people to think that Froomkin was let go for financial and traffic reasons. And Howard Kurtz overstated the extent to which Wemple established that Froomkin was let go for financial and traffic reasons. Given his access to the people involved, you would think Kurtz might do some original reporting rather than simply hyping Wemple's Post-friendly take on the story. But he hasn't.

So two of the biggest media stories of the past few weeks have involved Kurtz's Washington Post colleagues. And in both cases, he has not only managed to avoid criticizing those Post colleagues in his column, he has also neglected to quote anything more than token criticism from others, while using his Post column to misleadingly promote defenses of the Post.

Finally, Kurtz got scooped by Politico on an explosive story about his own newspaper becoming "a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters" and selling lobbyists access to its reporters:

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few" -- Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper's own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it's a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its "health care reporting and editorial staff."

The offer -- which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters -- is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

So The Washington Post is selling access to its "own reporters" to corporate lobbyists -- and we learn about it not from Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz, the nation's highest-profile media critic, but from Politico. (Kurtz, meanwhile, was relegated to playing damage control with a follow-up article featuring Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli denying that the newsroom will play any role in the lobbyist sessions. Kurtz neglected to mention any of the flurry of criticism the Post received over the proposed sessions.)

While Politico's Mike Allen was drinking Kurtz's milkshake, Kurtz was busy writing a piece about whether "racial and gender identification" on the part of African-American women who cover Michelle Obama "produces a gauzier, more favorable portrayal of Obama." I don't recall Kurtz devoting a column to the possibility of white male reporters producing "gauzier" portrayals of their white male subjects than a more diverse news corps might.

And remember: All of this was in just four days.

Unfortunately, it is typical of Kurtz's work. Media Matters' Eric Boehlert describes it as Kurtz "playing dumb." And, indeed, it's hard to imagine that Kurtz really doesn't understand, for example, what's wrong with omitting any mention of Joe Scarbrough while claiming that MSNBC's liberal hosts lack "counterpoint." It's hard to imagine that he really doesn't get what's wrong with Mika Brzezinski allowing Rudy Giuliani to criticize Bill Clinton's affair without ever once pointing out Giuliani's own high-profile affair. Sixth-graders understand concepts like these.

But, to a certain extent, it just doesn't matter whether Kurtz is "playing dumb" or whether he is simply a bumbling and clueless reporter. Either way, he's squandering two extraordinary platforms.

Behavioral advertising, in which users are fed ads based on the interests revealed by their Web browsing habits, has an obvious appeal to advertisers, as it will ostensibly allow them to serve ads to the most relevant audiences. It also raises a host of privacy concerns—to work effectively, the Web surfing histories of consumers have to be aggregated and analyzed by those providing the ads. 

Both the Federal Trade Commission and Congress have asked questions about whether advertisers were doing enough to protect and inform consumers, raising the prospect that regulation of behavioral advertising was only a matter of time. In an attempt to head off the government, a coalition of advertising groups that includes Google has now issued a series of principles that will guide their self-regulation.

The industry didn't need to look far to see the downsides of a failure to respond to public concerns. One of the more aggressive approaches to behavioral advertising, the deep packet inspection used by NebuAd, saw the company's CEO dragged before Congress, and the resulting bad publicity turned the company into a pariah. It ultimately closed its doors last month.

Click here to read the rest of this article

p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Dutch indexing site MiniNova is threatening to sue a parliamentary working party assigned to examine Holland’s copyright laws.

In January last, the group evaluated copyright laws, say the guys at MiniNova, under attack from BREIN, Holland’s version of the RIAA and MPAA combined.

The group published Auteursrechten. Een rapport (Copyright - a report) with, “several recommendations related to reforming copyright laws,” says the MiniNova blog.

But, “Unfortunately the report includes several factually incorrect assumptions related to Mininova,” it states.

Specifically, according to MiniNova, the report states »»»

• Mininova refuses to remove torrent files after a complaint has been filed
• Mininova adds ‘reviews’ to torrent files uploaded by users
• Mininova pro-actively removes torrents that refer to ‘incorrect content (eg, porn)’

And, “Besides these factual errors, the report also implies that all torrents on Mininova refer to copyrighted material, that Mininova hosts the content itself, and that Mininova profits from distributing these torrents,” it says, the team point out, adding »»»

We are very displeased with the fact that the working group didn’t contact us prior to releasing this report, or even took a look at mininova.org. If they had done so, they would’ve seen that we offer a copyright policy service for content owners for years and that we work closely with the content industry.

We demand that the spreading of false information related to Mininova will be stopped.

In addition, we demand that the working group removes the name Mininova from the report and places a rectification on the website of the Dutch parliament and in several national newspapers.

If these demands are not met, we’ll consider legal steps. To our surprise and nuisance the working group refuses to respond to the essence of the claim, being the factual errors about us and our services.

Stay tuned.

Follow p2pnet on Twitter.

More

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi

under attack from BREIN - ‘How to bypass MiniNova filters’, May 9, 2009
MiniNova blog - Mininova demands rectification report from working group, July 2, 2009

Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile - http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.phpNet access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.

This whole global economic crisis, and its resulting massive loss of jobs got us thinking. We here at Engadget didn't want to stand helplessly by, announcing every new round of misery without giving anything back -- so we decided to take the opportunity to spread a little positivity. We'll be handing out a new gadget every day (except for weekends) to lucky readers until we run out of stuff or companies stop sending things. Today we've got an 8GB Lexar Retrax on offer. Read the rules below (no skimming -- we're omniscient and can tell when you've skimmed) and get commenting! Hooray for free stuff!

Big thanks to Lexar for providing the gear!

The rules:

• Leave a comment below. Any comment will do, but if you want to share your proposal for "fixing" the world economy, that'd be sweet too.
  
• You may only enter this specific giveaway once. If you enter this giveaway more than once you'll be automatically disqualified, etc. (Yes, we have robots that thoroughly check to ensure fairness.)
• If you enter more than once, only activate one comment. This is pretty self explanatory. Just be careful and you'll be fine.
  
• Contest is open to anyone in the 50 States, 18 or older! Sorry, we don't make this rule (we hate excluding anyone), so be mad at our lawyers and contest laws if you have to be mad.
  
• Winner will be chosen randomly. The winner will receive one (1) Lexar Retrax.
  
• If you are chosen, you will be notified by email. Winners must respond within three days of the end of the contest. If you do not respond within that period, another winner will be chosen.
• Entries can be submitted until Thursday, July, 2nd, at 11:59PM ET. Good luck!
• Full rules can be found here.

Filed under: Announcements

Engadget's recession antidote: win an 8GB Lexar Retrax! originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

This whole global economic crisis, and its resulting massive loss of jobs got us thinking. We here at Engadget didn't want to stand helplessly by, announcing every new round of misery without giving anything back -- so we decided to take the opportunity to spread a little positivity. We'll be handing out a new gadget every day (except for weekends) to lucky readers until we run out of stuff or companies stop sending things. Today we've got an 8GB Lexar Retrax on offer. Read the rules below (no skimming -- we're omniscient and can tell when you've skimmed) and get commenting! Hooray for free stuff!

Big thanks to Lexar for providing the gear!

The rules:

• Leave a comment below. Any comment will do, but if you want to share your proposal for "fixing" the world economy, that'd be sweet too.
  
• You may only enter this specific giveaway once. If you enter this giveaway more than once you'll be automatically disqualified, etc. (Yes, we have robots that thoroughly check to ensure fairness.)
• If you enter more than once, only activate one comment. This is pretty self explanatory. Just be careful and you'll be fine.
  
• Contest is open to anyone in the 50 States, 18 or older! Sorry, we don't make this rule (we hate excluding anyone), so be mad at our lawyers and contest laws if you have to be mad.
  
• Winner will be chosen randomly. The winner will receive one (1) Lexar Retrax.
  
• If you are chosen, you will be notified by email. Winners must respond within three days of the end of the contest. If you do not respond within that period, another winner will be chosen.
• Entries can be submitted until Thursday, July, 2nd, at 11:59PM ET. Good luck!
• Full rules can be found here.

Filed under: Announcements

Engadget's recession antidote: win an 8GB Lexar Retrax! originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

GlobalSpec, Inc/Troy, NYGlobalSpec, Inc. is the leading specialized search engine and information resource for the industrial community with more than 5 million registered users. Suppliers representing their products and services on GlobalSpec gain a comprehensive marketing program designed to promote their brand and generate highly-qualified sales leads.

Position Summary: This position is responsible for managing the entire product life cycle from strategic planning to tactical activities including definition of market needs and translation into product requirements. Create and execute product plans which will include establishing product penetration targets, developing strategies and driving initiatives for achieving these targets. Understand customer and business requirements to define roadmaps for development of product enhancements which will increase acquisition, retention, revenue and profitability potential. Conduct ongoing evaluation of assigned products for market viability, and make product changes/enhancements when necessary.

The Marketing Manager is responsible for managing key project initiatives that enhance the existing product set while keeping an eye on the future. This will include: defining the product components, gathering and prioritizing product requirements, and working closely with IT, sales, production and engineering, marketing, and customer care to ensure that revenue and customer satisfaction goals are met. The Marketing Manager also develops strategies and oversees marketing initiatives to meet company's goals for customer acquisition, retention and growth.

The ideal candidate will have a strong background in the development and management of web-based products and services and experience in communicating strategies and business cases to stakeholders. Knowledge of online marketing a must. Familiarity with industrial business to business environment a plus.

Primary Responsibilities:

* Develop and implement effective go-to-market plans including pricing, market positioning, marketing and sales objectives, and promotional strategy for assigned products.
* Work with Sales planning to develop Sales channel strategy and launch plans for new product introductions including a detailed internal and external communication plan.
* Monitor competitive performance, customer feedback and satisfaction. Keep abreast of new technologies and marketing trends.
* Work with marketing communications to define, implement and manage promotional activities, direct marketing and lead generation, and new product launch plans.
* Assist sales and client support teams with product-related issues.
* Support the sales process and build sales tool kits and training in conjunction with Sales Management.
* Provide ongoing analysis – including the use of surveys and other feedback tools – to monitor product effectiveness, competitiveness and financial performance.
* Test, track, and evaluate results of all marketing initiatives to ensure proper use of resources and continuous improvement.
* Some travel required.
* Other duties as assigned.

Job Requirements/Skill Specifications:

Education:

· BA/BS degree in business or related degree required, MBA a plus

Experience:

· 5+ years of marketing experience

Skills:

· Excellent written and oral communication skills, including management-level presentation skills

· Ability to respond to frequent pressure to meet deadlines when work speed and sustained accuracy are paramount

· Strong analytical skills with the ability to look at the broader perspective as it relates to business strategy

· Solid understanding of Internet business models and technologies

· Ability to formulate an integrated marketing plan to reach the appropriate target audiences, communicate the most effective messages, and maximize overall marketing return on investment.

· Advanced knowledge of online direct marketing and interactive media

· Effective team building and strong leadership skills.

· Proven planning and analysis skills

· Intermediate to advanced skills in MS Excel

Equipment/software:

MS Word, MS Excel, MS Access, MS PowerPoint, IE and Netscape Web Browsers, MS Outlook, MS Project, Windows 2000 or XP environment.

GlobalSpec, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Apply To Job

Apple finally responds to reports about its heat issues...

Apple finally responds to reports about its heat issues

Matthew Ingram believes the cover-up of David Rohde’s kidnap made ‘things harder not just for future kidnapping victims such as Rohde, but for newspapers and other mainstream media outlets as a whole.’ Ingram responds to criticism in the comments below the post. Full post at this link… Also see: NYTimes.com: ‘Keeping News of Kidnapping Off Wikipedia’ Similar Posts: Nieman [...]

Samir Balwani is a social media marketer who helps businesses create effective web strategies. You can follow him on Twitter and get his newsletter.

One of the biggest misconceptions by brand managers is that the web is not a luxury market. The truth is that people are spending more money online and it’s a place luxury brands must build a presence. However, most have a nagging fear of ruining their brand reputation.

So, how can luxury brands engage in social media?

The Luxury Market Online

Before we answer the previous question, let’s define the luxury market. According to The Journal of Brand Management, Luxury as a concept is defined:

“…within the scope of socio-psychology as a result of its connection to a culture, state of being and lifestyle, whether it is personal or collective. When linked to brands, it is characterized by a recognizable style, strong identity, high awareness, and enhanced emotional and symbolic associations. It evokes uniqueness and exclusivity, and is interpreted in products through high quality, controlled distribution and premium pricing.“

So, brands with scarce products and high prices must find a way to find consumers online. The questions we haven’t answered yet are, “are premium, affluent consumers online?” and “does making a product available online hurt controlled distribution?”

In November 2007, eMarketer published a report titled “Affluent Internet Users: How the Rich Live Online.” In the report they concluded that the number of affluent Internet users will grow from 43.7 million in 2006 to 57.1 million in 2011.

Now that we know that there are luxury consumers on the Internet, and that the demographic is growing steadily, we need to determine how a brand can engage these consumers.

Problems With Luxury Brands Online

The unique luxury brand must overcome a number of obstacles upon entering the online space. Here are some of the challenges:

1. Luxury implies a sense of exclusivity; that it isn’t for everyone. It’s difficult for a brand to selectively choose who to interact with and, unless done properly, this segmentation could cause a major backlash.

2. Most luxury brands are extremely hesitant to experiment with new marketing strategies. They feel that trying new things is too risky for their brand image. Instead, this hesitation can actually limit online opportunities, hurting the brand in the long run.

3. Because of a luxury brand’s need to maintain the appropriate aesthetics, social media can be a more expensive proposition for them. Building an application or web page is an expensive, arduous task for any major brand. It’s important to remember that social media for brands is not free.

Finding Solutions

The first and most obvious solution is to simply trust your consumers. If your internal perspective of the brand aligns with the customers’ view of the brand, everything will be fine. If not, you’ll finally learn who your core demographic really is and what they are looking for.

Just as a product can be exclusive, so can sites on the web. Creating an exclusive social network, an invite only site, or a suggestion site for actual customers are ways to limit the demographic.

If you decide you must engage on a public site like Twitter or Facebook, throw out any hopes of being exclusive. Selectively following or befriending users can quickly cause a backlash as customers complain about being left out. One way to engage on public sites is to target those sites with the closest demographic to the brand’s consumers. This limits the number of “outsiders” engaging with the brand.

Lastly, if the brand finds a mention that they aren’t comfortable with, it may be better not to respond. The web is huge; not everything will be seen by the masses (especially as we move towards real-time conversations). Responding or seeking removal of a message may legitimize and simply bring attention to any negative sentiment.

Examples of Luxury Campaigns

Case studies analyzing social campaigns are a great way to determine how to position a brand online. However, too closely emulating a campaign can have a negative affect. Social media success requires implementation of something new and exciting; some kind of added value.

Use the following case studies to see what they did right and as a means to understand the fundamentals for a luxury brand in social media.

Gucci On Facebook

Gucci has built an amazing following on Facebook, with over 404,000 fans on their official Page. By continually updating the page, and introducing new content such as photos and videos the brand is keeping its consumers engaged. Each update receives over 200 interactions in the form of “likes” and “comments.”

By opening Gucci to everyone, and not selectively deciding who gets to join, or inviting only specific people, Gucci has built a community. Even though many of the Gucci fans may not be able to afford actual products, the Facebook fan page builds “lust for the product.” This idea of “one day I’ll be able to afford that,” is part of the luxury appeal.

Not only does the Facebook Fan Page build consumers’ desire for Gucci products, but also enables the community to offer free feedback, publish images, and share Gucci content.

Mercedes Benz Social Network

Scarcity online is only achieved in a closed system. Usually this is against the accepted best practices of a social campaign, but for a luxury brand it can work. Mercedes highlighted this idea by creating a closed social network for Gen Y’ers.

GenerationBenz.com, is an invite only social network where consumers can give feedback on vehicles, as well as give Mercedes Benz insight into their younger customers.

By creating a network that includes only those that are either previous buyers, Mercedes members, and potential consumers, the brand has targeted exactly the demographic they want. Mercedes is able to engage users without fear that the brand reputation will be tarnished.

Creating a successful private social network can be costly, but the return on consumer loyalty may be great. Allowing brand customers to connect with each other while connecting with the brand, as well as creating a place to introduce new products to a brand’s core demographic, can be an invaluable asset.

Summary

Social media can be a powerful tool for a luxury brand. With a growing affluent market, the online world is a place high-end brands need to be. The question is, how are you going to maintain guardianship of your brand identity, keep your product premium-priced and exclusive, or engage your customer?

Knowing that releasing your brand to your consumers doesn’t necessarily hurt brand reputation is the first step.

More social media resources for brands:

- 10 Twitter Best Practices for Brands
- 40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them
- 5 Tips for Optimizing Your Brand’s Facebook Page
- 8 Essential Apps for Your Brand’s Facebook Page
- The Importance of Focus: A Guide for Social Media Brands
- A Control Freak’s Guide to Social Media Influence

Reviews: Facebook, Twitter

Tags: brands, business, gucci, luxury, mercedes, social media

TechCrunch and others are saying that Microsofts Bing search engine is adding Tweets soon. Microsoft has finally figured out the strategy to...

...compete with Google. Cut Google where they are weak. Keep cutting. Bing!

This strategy is winning. Google is losing market share and hasnt yet figured out how to respond.

Hint to Google: your UI is stale. Your search results are, while getting faster (FriendFeed and Twitter posts are now getting into Google within a few minutes) still not real time and you havent shown any real time leadership.

But wheres Yahoo? Carol? Hello? Twitter is happening now and you need to get involved in this before Bing Tweets and gives you a headache.

Oh, its not on yet. I hate it when news leaks before the feature is ready to test.

UPDATE: My asterisk * is because it turns out that only popular Twitterers will get this feature turned on. That is totally lame and leaves a huge hole for Yahoo and Google to crawl through.

Comments

Tag: Google, Bing, SEO


Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Have a bookmark! -

In this clip from FMCG, Ken responds to Jeri's capacitor deconstruction with his own very visual (and very mechanical) demonstration of how voltage is generated and how you can build a simple capacitor, with aluminum foil and plastic, to generate charge mechanically and dump it into the cap (analogous to how a Wimshurst machine works).

I love how this was inspired by Jeri's demo and how the two of them are having a Net-carried, seemingly casual conversation, marveling over the miracles of science. I don't know about you, but this sort of thing makes me strangely happy.

BTW: Jeri's capacitor demo is cool too, but unfortunately, the sound craps out at the end.

FMCG

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!