Fascinating. Channels include not only the obvious, like evangelism and prayer, but also end times, comedy and non-believers. One can’t help but wonder what will happen when the merry pranksters of the Web inevitably turn their sights on this site.
Time-suck alert: Shorpy is a compelling site that calls itself “the 100-year-old photo blog,” though some of the images date back to the 1860s. Click on over and before long you’ll find you’ve spent a few fascinating hours.
“The greatest ability in business is to get along with others and influence their actions. A chip on the shoulder is too heavy a piece of baggage to carry through life.”
—John Hancock
I’m a little belated in posting this link, but Ambar Shrivastava over on MediaPost’s Search Insider gets it exactly right, noting that “it’s a misnomer to say that SEO is about writing for search engines. Content generation is really about writing for your customers.” The complete article is worth reading.
Takeaway for marketers: How about that? Focusing on customers gets you SEO benefits, too! Who’da thunk it?!
This Washington Post article the other day reported on a remarkable assertion by the Recording Industry Association of America:
“The industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.”
So I assume that the RIAA will soon be going after Apple, because all those iPods out there are facilitating illegal behavior as people dump their CD collections onto their computers and into their iPods. They’ll also be going after Microsoft and the Zune, not to mention every other seller of MP3 players out there.
Oh, and let’s not forget the makers of USB turntables: If it’s illegal to transfer a CD onto one’s computer, it’s undoubtedly illegal to transfer cassette tapes and vinyl records.
Of course, the RIAA won’t do this. They’re more interested in making examples of people and winning high-profile cases like this one, in which a woman was ordered to pay $222,000 to Capitol Records for downloading and swapping two dozen songs.
This will all probably get worse before it gets better. Ultimately, some level of common sense needs to prevail. It’s common sense that one shouldn’t upload copyrighted material for dozens, hundreds, or thousands to download for free. But it’s also common sense that if I have a CD, I should be able to listen to it on any device I wish, whether that’s a CD player or an iPod.
Somewhere in the middle, the RIAA and the general public need to come to an understanding: The RIAA needs to acknowledge that they can’t maintain absolute and total control over everything the public does with the music they buy, and the public needs to acknowledge that there really are common-sense limitations to what can be done with the copyrighted material they purchase.
