Today's Links: SEO your blog, Beer here, OpenCourseWare
INTRODUCING “TODAY’S LINKS”
Welcome to the inaugural edition of “Today’s Links,” a new regular feature presented by this Digital Micro-Markets Blog. “Today’s Links” is an eclectic round up pointing to noteworthy news and worthy analysis from all around the World Wide Web.
Know of any other noteworthy news or worthy analysis? SHARE: GET THE WORD OUT HERE!
TODAY'S LINKS: Does Your Blog Exist?, Get Your Beer Here!, Swathmore Student Pushes OpenCourseWare, Is Openness Inherently Democratic?, And did you catch...
DOES YOUR BLOG EXIST?
Want to Search Engine Optimize your blog? Don’t be a wordsmith. That is the advice from usability pro Jakob Nielsen in his “Use old words when writing for findability” piece.
While philosophers endlessly debate "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound," Nielsen states unequivocally: “Unless you're listed on the first search engine results page (SERP), you might as well not exist.”
How can your blog “exist”? “Speak the user's language,” says Nielsen. “Or, more precisely, when you write, use keywords that match users' search queries.”
GET YOUR BEER HERE!
Thirsty? The nations’ largest brewer of beer, Anheuser-Busch, hopes to quench your virtual thirst with Bud.TV slated to launch next February.
Why Bud.TV? "We see this as a marketing tool to talk to consumers, rather than as a production company or a network whose goal is to make money on programming.”
How? Online channels Comedy, Happy Hour and Reality…and “Bud Tube.”
SWARTHMORE STUDENT PUSHES OpenCourseWare
Samuel Asarnow, a Swathmore Junior, makes a case for OpenCourseWare in the College’s student newspaper:
It’s a sexy Internet project originally designed at MIT that’s since been implemented at Johns Hopkins, Tufts, Utah State, and 156 universities in China, all of which now make up the OpenCourseWare Consortium. Essentially, OCW is an online storage-house for information about all of the classes that a college or university offers: schedules, syllabi, reading lists, and sometimes even lecture notes.
Think of it as an glorified Blackboard, but totally complete and open to anyone who can use the Internet: no more dealing with professors who don’t know how to post their syllabi...
reasons why more faculty members haven’t already posted their syllabi and course information online, ranging from technical difficulties to worries about intellectual property rights
Oh those pesky, incompetent Professors, nit-picking over intellectual property concerns…
IS OPENNESS INHERENTLY DEMOCRATIC?
“Tactical Memory: The Politics of Openness in the Construction of Memory,” academic paper by Sandra Braman
Braman, Professor of Communication, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, has been studying the macro-level effects of the use of new information technologies and their policy implications since the mid-1980s.
Those in the openness movement believe that access to information is inherently democratic, and assume the effects of openness will all be good from the movement’s perspective. But means are not ends, nothing is inevitable, and just what will be done with openly available information once achieved is rarely specified. One implicit goal of the openness movement is to create and sustain politically useful memory in situations in which official memory may not suffice, but to achieve this, openness is not enough. With the transition from a panopticon to a panspectron environment, the production of open information not only provides support for communities but also contributes to surveillance. Proprietary ownership of information is being challenged, but there is erosion of ownership in the sense of being confident in what is known. Some tactics currently in use need to be re–evaluated to determine their actual effects under current circumstances. Successfully achieving tactical memory in the 21st century also requires experimentation with new types of tactics, including those of technological discretion and of scale as a medium…
At the most abstract level, the key political battle of the 21st century may not be between particular political parties or ideologies but, rather, the war between mathematics and narrative creativity. Data mining, searching for inference attacks, and surveillance are driven by mathematical algorithms. Against that context, it is narrative creativity, the ability to continually tell stories in new ways, that provides the means by which to elude the granularity and the logic of the mathematical nets used by those who would restrict public conversation and action to preferred forms.
AND DID YOU CATCH… “Today’s Links” will also point to a recent Digital Micro-Markets Blog post of topical interest.
In "Walt Disney World 'fingerprinting' visitors: Magic Kingdom, or Mickey Mouse?" I question if commercial enterprises should have access to U.S. Government grade security technology used to protect our nation's security:
Walt Disney shareholders are undoubtedly thrilled that the company’s theme park revenues are being safeguarded by U.S. Government grade technology. Is it a good thing, however, if systems developed to enhance our nation’s security find their way into “Mickey Mouse” corporate commercial applications?
KNOW OF ANY OTHER NOTEWORTHY NEWS OR WORTHY ANALYSIS? SHARE, GET THE WORD OUT HERE!