links for 2009-07-30

Marketers have become more than willing to start a conversation about their brands through social media. But that’s only the beginning of the marketing effort.

In late 2008, MarketingSherpa surveyed social media marketers about the effectiveness of their practices. Large majorities rated social media marketing effective at influencing brand reputation, increasing awareness and improving search rankings and site traffic.

Is Apple losing the plot? I ask this because, having just read this bollocks (Apple wants to make jailbreaking illegal because it supposedly threatens our nation’s cellphone tower infrastructure, and thereby threatens our national security), I’ve read nothing but well-reasoned, anti-Apple invective. Come, let’s explore the phenomenon.

I spend a lot of time sifting through, while ignoring, much of the garbage produced by media to find a few, small nuggets of information that are useful. I can afford to do that. It’s my job. Not only can I not imagine most people doing this, I think they stopped quite a while ago. They realised that the signal-to-noise ratio was so low that they were better served by just tuning out.

Mountain View, CA – In response to Apple pulling the Google Voice application from the iPhone App Store, Google has removed all search results leading to Apple.com from its index. Google is also redirecting searches for "iPhone" and "app store" to the IMDb.com page for Payback.

Social media marketing, while its concept and fundamentals have been around for a while, has changed remarkably in the past six months. There was a time when a social media link building campaign was very easy. The big search engines valued domains like Squidoo and MySpace to the extent that your profiles could easily rank for targeted keywords. It should come as no surprise that this is no longer the case.

Examines the role of information technology, citizen journalists, and bloggers in Burma and presents a technical analysis of the abrupt shutdown of Internet connectivity by the Burmese government on September 29, 2007, following its violent crackdown on protesters there. Completely cutting international Internet links is rare. Nepal, which severed all international Internet connections when the King declared martial law in February 2005, is the only other state to take such drastic action. Although extreme, the measures taken by the Burmese government to limit citizens’ use of the Internet during this crisis are consistent with previous OpenNet Initiative (ONI) findings in Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, and Tajikistan, where authorities controlled access to communication technologies as a way to limit social mobilization around key political events. What makes the Burmese junta stand out, however, is its apparent goal of also preventing information from reaching a wider international audience