If you missed the blackout of thousands of sites across the Internet on January 18th, including Wikipedia and a black bar over the Google logo…well what the hell are you doing reading this, grandma?! I told you not to Google my name.  SOPA and PIPA are two bills that would be absolutely devastating for freedom on the Internet.  Thanks to the Herculean organizing efforts behind the January 18th blackout, SOPA and PIPA are effectively dead. 
 
But SOPA/PIPA were not the first and will certainly not be the last attempts to stifle Internet freedom.  So prepare your DDoS attacks, don your Guy Fawkes mask, and definitely don’t forget your provisions of cute cat pictures; these are the next battlefronts in the war on the Internet.   
 

People Who Don’t Understand the Internet

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While it may seem adorable when old people ask you what “The Google” is, or what all the buzz about “Twatter” is—perhaps adding an Andy Rooney-esque vignette about actually talking to people in their day—it’s actually quite dangerous.  These older people are police officers, FBI agents, judges and politicians.  And they are the ones setting legal policy in regard to the Internet.  Too often, in their opinions, the internet—this strange newfangled thing their kids and nephews use—isn’t as sacrosanct as, say, a vault of physical files in your attic.   

The problem is, to those of us who’ve had the Internet for most of our lives, our gmail account is our dusty box of personal information in the attic.  But to the FBI, pretty much anything you post online is considered part of the public domain.  Let’s not even get started on the subpoena by the Boston Police department that ensnared thousands of innocent accounts simply because they included the hashtag #BostonPD.  If either the judge or the district attorney had any idea what a hashtag was, they would have never allowed the subpoena to go forward, because of its gross invasion of privacy.  It’s almost as if they’re feigning stone-cold-ignorance of how technology is used in a deliberate effort to expand their legal reach, which is actually a lot scarier.  For now let’s just hope that they’re actually that stupid.   
 

The RIAA and MPAA (even without legislation)

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The chief forces behind SOPA/PIPA and suing children, the MPAA and the RIAA are like the cackling, evil villains of the battle for Internet freedom.  If you believe their numbers, Internet piracy is destroying the American economy, disenfranchising artists (because we’ve all noticed the lack of entertainment being produced), and probably kicking puppies and molesting children (who knows?).  And if you don’t do what they tell you to, MPAA president Chris Dodd will straight up prison-shank you. 

Well SOPA/PIPA was defeated, right?  What do we have to fear from the MPAA and RIAA if they can’t get their legislation passed?  When you have millions of dollars and friends in high places, you can exert a lot of pressure even without laws.  Even excepting the RIAA’s practice of suing people for exorbitant amounts of money, there are plenty of examples of them pressuring search engines, ISPs, Universities and even entire countries to get what they want.   

The DMCA

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The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was a 1998 copyright law intended to take copyright law into the 21st century.  Ostensibly a good idea, the DMCA was supposed to allow the Internet to continue being awesome, while also protecting the legitimate copyrights that could be easily infringed in the new digital environment.  But of course you’ll notice that this law was passed almost a good decade before streaming video was extensively widespread.   

This has led to several interesting abuses of power.  Under the law (and subsequent court decisions refining its scope), the owner of a copyright has the right to request infringing content be taken down.  That sounds all fair and good, but we’re trusting overly-litigious, private companies to responsibly claim copyrights and not use it as a cudgel to suppress customers and competitors.  Which is exactly what they did (the cudgel part, not the responsible part).  They’ve repeatedly claimed that they don’t need to consider “Fair Use” when taking down a video.  And according to Google, almost 40% of claims are illegitimate, and as many as 50% of claims are directed as competitors. 

The law’s in desperate need of updating, but assuming that it will be re-written by politicians who openly admit they have no idea how the Internet works and are solidly in the pocket of companies that get physically ill whenever someone doesn’t pay them, odds are it will only get worse. 

Private Companies

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In all the talk about SOPA and dangerous government censorship, it’s worth remembering that your Internet check goes to a private company, full of fallible individuals that can’t be booted out of office in the next election.  And there are many, many companies out there with millions of dollars and vested interest in controlling how they are portrayed on the Internet. 

The list is extensive and reads like the lovechild of George Orwell and Eugene V. Debs.  The Boston Globe and Diebold edited Wikipedia extensively to make themselves look better.  Verizon blocked the messages of an abortion rights group because it policy forbids the transmission of “unsavory” information.  Multiple companies shut off third-party donations to Wikileaks.  The cases go on and on.   

Internet Service Providers

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You likely have a long, torrid relationship with your Internet Service Provider (ISP) that, like any good relationship, is filled with hate and resentment.  Many of you may be familiar with Comcast, the proud winner of “Worst Company in America”.  But aside from the worst customer service on the planet, they’re also have a long history of doing their damndest to section off the Internet into little boxes and charge an exorbitant admission fee.  All while tracking your personal information and handing it over to the government at the drop of a hat.  

All the major providers are quickly jumping on to the Tiered Pricing bandwagon, ostensibly to provide cheaper Internet to those who only use it for light browsing and e-mail, and bigger, more expensive Internet for those with huge bandwidth requirements. 

Then there’s something known as Deep Packet Inspection. To oversimplify, it basically allows an ISP to know just about everything about your online activity.  Whether you’re browsing webcomics or Lexis-Nexis for work.  Whether you’re on a Skype call or browsing porn.  They can use this information to selectively block traffic they don’t like (or hand over information about traffic to the government).  Award-winner Comcast has already used this to block P2P traffic, and then threatened to fire anyone who talked too loudly about it.  

Protecting Children from Pornography

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Who doesn’t want to protect children from being exploited for pornography? That’s the premise behind the Protecting Children from Pornography, and act that started working its way through the bowels of the American legislative process in 2011.  The purpose of this bill is to allow law enforcement personnel to peel back the protections of the anonymous Internet, and track down child pornographers. 

A noble goal that pretty much no one argues with.  The problem really needs no jokes, scare language or dressing up to be absolutely chilling: this bill requires your ISP to track all of your personal information—your name, address, credit card number, browsing history, etc…–for 18 months.  And they’re supposed to turn it over to law enforcement without a warrant.  All the officers need to do is ask.  To be fair, the bill specifies that they must say “please with sugar on top” and they have to promise to be “extra special careful that this isn’t used irresponsibly”.   

NSA Warrentless Wiretapping

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But before you get too up in arms about Protecting Children from Pornography, rest easy in the fact that the government can basically track you without a warrant anyway.  Remember that whole warrantless wiretapping thing a few years back?  Well despite all the hopey changey-ness floating around Obama, he’s continued using this method.  While it’s not a complete database on every American searching the Internet available at the drop of a hat, it’s pretty damn close. 

The “good” part about the NSA wiretapping, is that they still need to get approval from FISA courts, and the suspects need to be part of an ongoing investigation.  Which makes me feel so very safe knowing that this terribly powerful tool will never be misused or abused by our sterling elected officials and their record of professional ethics that are beyond reproach. 

Government Censorship (Under Existing Law)

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For all the dangers that private companies and groups and represent to Internet freedom, they have nothing on governments around the world, who have been censoring things since Caveman King Grog didn’t like Torg’s word for “rock” and ordered Torg executed by smashing.  We’re a little bit more civilized these days, and politicians at least have the decency to pretend like they’re protecting us from something terrible (usually pedophiles, sometimes democracy).  For all the fear surrounding SOPA/PIPA, the US government has no problem causing hell for websites it doesn’t like.  Just ask MegaUpload and Wikileaks, both which were shut down briefly without due process. 

And let’s not even get started on censorship in other countries.  Not even counting giant blockers like China, even developed nations who should know better have been blocking access to thousands of sites.  One of the more hilarious examples is the censorship regime in Australia, which is probably the most famous for using the “Won’t someone think of the children!?!?!” justification.  But when a secret blacklist of blocked sites surfaced, it turns out Australia was in fact using over half its time protecting its citizens from the dangers of dentists and dog kennel websites. 

Zombie SOPA

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Reports of SOPA’s death may in fact have been somewhat premature.  The bill is not becoming law any time soon, but it’s only been shelved for the time being.  It still enjoys the support of at least 65 representatives in the House, not to mention the piles of money the MPAA will continue to put into buy votes. 
 
It’s a guaranteed certainty that this bill, in some form, will rise from the grave and wreak havoc of the freedom of the Internet once again.  Lamar Smith, the bill’s chief sponsor, isn’t going anywhere and—keeping with the venerable Washington tradition—will continue to be dumber than a pile of rocks about the Internet.  The bill will likely be quietly passed through a committee and voted on before the Internet can notice and mobilize a counter-attack.  After all, you can’t expect apathetic Americans to care about politics all year long, right?  That’s just exhausting, we have episodes of Glee to catch up on.  And they can’t black out Wikipedia several times a year, can they?   
 

Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

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Sometimes referred to as “SOPA’s evil twin”, ACTA is a multilateral trade agreement designed to create a new and more robust system for protecting intellectual property.  Did you get the impression that this was a legitimate piece of legislation?  Sorry it’s actually a jumbled mess that was mostly negotiated in secret, outside of the current international body governing intellectual property, and without the input of most developing nation.  

So what’s so bad about it?  Well part of the problem is, no one really knows.  The treaty is too much of a chaotic mess of overlapping, overly-vague provisions that prescribe unnecessarily harsh punishments for levels of piracy that are never clearly defined.  One specific provision that has people especially worried is the removal of safeguards that shielded ISPs from legal repercussions as a result of the actions of their users.  Meaning that if you pirate a song on AT&T’s network, the copyright owner can go after AT&T.  And God knows what that lack of protection will do to ISP’s already draconian policies toward users.   

ACTA is so overwhelmingly unnecessary, and has already led to protests number in the tens of thousands in Poland and other cities in the European Union.  After the pitched battle over SOPA/PIPA and now this battle over yet another 4-letter word, it just leaves one wondering: in the middle of one of the worst economic downturns in recent history, with their approval ratings hanging around the single-digits, why are they so obsessed with passing an obscure and oppressive copyright law?

A lot of tech companies often start out with the most humble of beginnings – in this case: Google. Now standing as one of the most powerful companies in the world, their journey has been chronicled since the conception of “Backrub” – the first search engine for the world wide web.

The interactive infographic you’re about to see sheds some light into the world of Sergey Brinn and Larry Page’s brainchild we’ve all come to know, love, and respect.

Created by Online PhD

 
 We all know and accept that failure is a natural part of the business cycle.  Bad ideas will be rejected by the market, and good ideas will flourish and lead to a more prosperous and efficient economy.  Hell, even perfectly good ideas that outlive their usefulness will slowly die ignominious deaths no matter how marketable they were a few years ago.  But some business ideas are so catastrophically awful, so based on warped views of what the market wants, that they fail quickly and often in spectacular fashion.  And we’re not just talking about your local artisanal cheese shop that failed to flourish in a down market.  Most of these ideas had tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars and big name companies backing them, and still couldn’t manage to survive more than a year.
 

Motorola Iridium

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Way back in the late 90s (kids), there were phones that connected to the walls using cords, and voice messages were sent over these vast “wire” networks. But also around this time, the cell phones that we all know and love were beginning to gain widespread popularity (despite their giant size and weight), especially among the wealthy business elite. 
 
The problem was, they didn’t quite work everywhere.  And when savvy business execs were negotiating ways to exploit children in southeast Asia, they had some trouble getting reception because this was Vietnam in 1997, where the locals were lucky to own shoes―much less advanced electronics.  The only solution at the time was a satellite phone, which were outrageously expensive, bulky, unreliable and altogether impractical. 
 
There were several sane approaches to this problem at the time:  Pick up a normal phone.  Wait a few years for infrastructure to catch up and cell prices to go down.  Not worry about it because Motorola is a cellphone company.  Instead, Motorola went the super villain route and launched a dozen or so satellites into low-Earth orbit at the cost of several billion dollars.  After several years of work and billions invested, Motorola was finally ready to reveal…another brick of a satellite phone that cost thousands of dollars and was generally unreliable.   

Not to mention that the areas where it was necessary to use this device (poor, impoverished, devoid of infrastructure), were also the last place you wanted to pull out a $2,000 phone on the street.  Oh did we mention that the phone, like the GPS in your phone now, needed a clear view of the sky to work?  To top it all off, by the time the network was complete, cell phone service had started to become widely available in just about every corner of the globe.  The network was essentially dead upon launch.  The Iridium network is still there, and is reportedly quite popular with Arctic and Antarctic researchers. 
 

Webvan

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Obviously the dot-com boom of the 90s encouraged some of the most spectacular expenditures on the most bone-headed business ideas, so let’s start getting some of the more hilarious examples out of the way.  Webvan was founded in 1999 with a simple idea you think would take off quickly in the Internet age: we have all this Internet shopping, why not allow people to buy groceries online?  A few massive infusions of capital later, and Webvan was off, quickly building facilities 10 US cities, guaranteeing a delivery time of 30 minutes or less, and greedily eying another 16 markets. 

Hoping to copy Amazon’s success as a first-mover in the space (i.e., the first major player can scoop up market share and hedge out future competitors), Webvan’s executives spent like there was no tomorrow, gobbling up warehouses and delivery trucks.  There was just one, tiny, itty-bitty problem: no one had any freaking idea what they were doing.  None of the executives had any experience with grocery stores or retail food sales at all.  And this led them to miss one all-important detail that you think would have come up in earlier discussions when people were throwing millions of dollars at them: Profit.   

Grocery stores, as opposed to the hodge-podge of items being sold on Amazon, have razor-thin profit margins―some of the lowest of any business in the world.  And they can’t leave a product on a shelf for weeks, or even days, hoping that someone will buy it.  Webvan went from tens of millions to hemorrhaging millions within the span of a few months.   

The Kardashian Kard

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If only this had been called the “Kool Kardashain Kard”, every joke about the Kardashians that every needed to be made would have. Imagine the thrilling board meeting where this idea came up:  having exhausted all their make-up, reality shows, marriages, and divorce merchandising, some incredibly boring accountant walked into the room and said, “You know what’s exciting and kool? F*CKING DEBIT KARDS!” 

The idea here was that (shudder) tweens could live the lavish Kardashian lifestyle with this stylin’ debit card without learning a single thing about money.  It’s the American Dream!  Just like the Kardashians, kids could symbolize everything decadent and destructive about modern America. They could do it in style and possibly even without a sex tape.   

Fortunately, the Kardashian Kard of Koolness ran into several roadblocks, the first being outrage from parents and advocacy groups.  Associating important matters of finance with pop culture and a symbol of status led to outcry as some argued it would teach personal finance through opulence, rather than responsibility.  Additionally, the Kards came with various fees which could easily add up to more than $100 a year.  The second and more serious problem was pre-paid debit cards are just plain boring and way too much of a hassle.  Why buy something, put money on it, then use it to buy season one of Keeping up with the Kardashians when you could just guilt your estranged parents into buying it for you?  Unsurprisingly, the kard was a huge flop. 

Kozmo.com

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Much like Webvan, Kozmo.com jumped on to the hysterical “everyone will buy things on the Internet and everything will be delivered”-bandwagon of the late 90s and early Aughts.  Only Kozmo took the Amazon idea and dialed past 11 into 13 territory.  They promised to deliver anything, virtually anywhere inside their markets, even if it was only a $0.50 pack of gum.  It quickly became a favorite among young professionals and college students, but because this was 2000, the end was coming. 

Contrary to popular belief, the idea of delivering just about anything wasn’t all that crazy.  The problems Kozmo suffered from were twofold: low margins and jittery investors.  Seems that paying someone to deliver a pack of gum tends to cost a lot and not net the company too much money.  After an initial capital investment of $280 million, Kozmo had to find a way to make themselves profitable after overextending to too many unprofitable markets.  Believe it or not, they actually succeeded, and their top 6 regions were actually briefly profitable. 

Of course this was shortly after the NASDAQ tanked.  Kozmo’s executives went to investors with their profits, expecting the money needed to go forward with a merger that would keep them afloat.  That’s when some genius in the boardroom realized that, even though Kozmo was turning a profit, the margins were still too razor-thin.  They wouldn’t see the principle on their $280 million dollars for years down the road, not to mention to two to threefold return on investment they’d begun to expect in the dotcom era.  And that is the reason why we all have to get up off our asses and actually walk to the corner store like savages for gum. 
 

XFL Football

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In 2001, Vince McMahon and NBC got together to fill the NFL off-season with something other than reruns of Friends.  They decided to start a hip, new league with lots of boobs and perhaps the most annoying commercials ever played ad nauseum. 

The XFL was supposed to be a meaner, tougher, grittier version of football, designed to attract a younger demographic and, as McMahon elegantly put it, “people who watch movies”.  They cobbled together a bunch of sub-NFL level athletes and threw the whole gaudy, over-hyped mess on TV for precisely no one to enjoy.  To everyone but McMahon’s lack of surprise, it set new records in how small of an audience a sporting event could get. 

But despite our hindsight hatred of this thing that invaded every commercial space from December through February, it’s more football, isn’t it?  Who wouldn’t cheer the chance to not have to wait almost 6 months for the new season to start?  The problem was that in trying to brand the XFL as a new, edgier, more sensational football league, McMahon and NBC managed to alienate all of their viewers who like football.  The overwhelming reason cited for not watching the XFL season was “it looks too much like wrestling”.  Fans refused to believe that the entire exercise was genuine and not staged like every other thing McMahon puts his hands on.  Though it was slated for at least two seasons, the incredibly low TV ratings of the XFL led to its cancellation after only a single season. 
 

Kibu.com

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Kibu.com opened its doors to much fanfare in the fall of 2000, but quickly became yet another victim of the dot com bust.  So who cares?  Hundreds of seemingly promising businesses back by millions of dollars died in that virtual firestorm.  What makes Kibu, a site targeted at adolescent girls, any different than the hundreds of sites that thought they could get rich quick off of ad revenue alone (heh)?  Well Kibu set something of a record, even in the crazy dot com era.  A short 46 days after their opulent launch party in a San Francisco neighborhood, they shut their doors.  In less than a month and a half, the entire company tanked. 

So what happened?  Well it’s kind of unclear.  What’s likely is they made the same mistake countless other dotcoms did, they targeted a tiny, fickle, difficult-to-capture market, and expected minuscule advertising revenue to lead to the astronomical returns on investment their backers were expecting.  Still, Kibu remains as one of the shortest-lived vs. most-hyped dotcoms of the early Aughts, despite having a name that sounds like some sort of Japanese fetish site. 

The Edsel

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One of the most famous flops in business history, the Edsel was a series of cars produced by Ford from 1958-1960.  Spending a mind-boggling $400 million to develop and market the cars, the Edsel (named after Edsel Ford) was supposed to be Ford’s newest and most exciting entry, a shot over the bow of its competitors.  Instead it became one of the swiftest and most expensive flops in automotive history. 

By all accounts, the Edsel should have succeeded wildly.  It was slickly marketed, price-competitive with competitors, and a generally well-built with plenty of top-of-the-line features.  But as they rolled them out, Ford started hearing disconcerting stories about consumers taking one look, then walking out of the dealership.
   
So what was the problem?  Well there are many differing opinions on the subject, ranging from the price, marketing, appearance and reliability.  All of which sound like an exercise of “It should have worked, buuuuut”

Price: It should have worked because the Edsel was only slightly more expensive than the basic Ford models.  Buuuut, no one quite knew what the Edsel was supposed to be (a luxury car? A budget alternative?) — and so the price still seemed too high.

Marketing: The slick marketing campaign built a lot of anticipation around the Edsel’s release by only showing the car through unfocused lenses and thin, gauzy sheets. Buuuut, again, like above, no one knew what the hell the Edsel was supposed to be.  Also the name is ugly as sin.

Appearance: Even by today’s standards, the Edsel is not a bad looking car.  It’s a bold design to be sure, but it’s still slick and classy.  Buuuut, at the time it looked like “an Oldsmobile sucking on a lemon”

Reliability: On paper, the Edsel was a sturdy car built with good parts and meant to last.  Buuuut, the assembly of the Edsel often took place in different plants, making quality control nearly impossible.  Some cars were shipped to dealers only partially assembled, with instructions in the trunk.

On paper, the Edsel must have looked like a slam dunk to Ford executives, but it’s amazing that with all the numerous tiny problems, no one pointed a single one out.   

Premier Smokeless Cigarette

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By now you’ve likely ran into at least one douchebag at a party smoking an E-cigarette while gushing about how healthy it is.  If he’s really a douche, he’ll straight smoke it in bars and then yell self righteously when he gets thrown out and ruins everyone else’s night (Steve).  This futuristic-looking smoking device doesn’t burn tobacco, but instead vaporizes a nicotine gel.  The smoker gets their nicotine fix without having to tear up their lungs. Why didn’t anyone think of this before? 

They did,  in 1988. It was called the the Premier Smokeless Cigarette. Company spokespeople often said that if smokers would just stick it out, they’d quickly acquire a taste for the new cigarettes.  Which is unfortunate because consumer studies showed that few smokers made it past their first Premier.  Premier survived less than a year, which is amazing because that’s a hell of a lot shorter than Camel Snus and I dare you to find a single person not on an airplane who enjoys those. 
 

Netflix Price Raise

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Last July, the popular Netflix service decided to split its streaming and DVD services into two separate deals.  Netflix would remain a streaming service, and DVDs would be delivered through a separate account called “Qwikster”.  Oh and the price for both services combined went up by around 6 dollars.  The justification generally went that Netflix delivered hundreds of free movies instantly for one-fifth the price of your average cable bill.  Certainly a small increase shouldn’t bother anyone.   

Except they ignored one of the first rules of business: don’t raise prices without offering additional services.  As if that wasn’t enough, customers who had DVDs delivered were now responsible for two accounts, and typing in two website addresses is like, really a lot of work, man.  Trying to perform damage control, Netflix offered a sincere and heartfelt apology which was about as sincere and heartfelt as Darth Vader and Skeletor’s lovechild.   

Eventually, Netflix called it quits.  They kept the price increase, but they gave up on the unnecessarily separate services.  But not before they lost much of their “Not Comcast” credibility, upward of 800,000 subscribers, and 10% of their quarterly revenue. 
 

boo.com

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This high-end online UK retailer launched in 1999.  They left the gate with $135 million in venture capital and launched simultaneously in most major European countries. They burned through their venture capital in less than 18 months, which is more than $250,000 a day.  Unsurprisingly, the capital ran out before sales caught up, and the company went into bankruptcy in 2000. 
 
The funny story here is that boo.com was actually not doing that terribly when the company fell apart.  By the time the money ran out, sales were close to $500,000.  While that’s roughly two days of expenditures at boo, in any other environment that would have been enough to justify further capital investment. But this was the dot com era, and investors were vacillating wildly between “Where are my 300% returns in two years!” and “I need to horde my money it’s the end of the world!”.  $500k simply wasn’t enough to justify further investment.   

But the real reason behind boo’s failure wasn’t investment, it was their terrible, terrible website.  While it might not look so bad nowadays, it combined all the terrible popups and animated logos of the late nineties with the bandwidth-heavy flash widgets of 2003.  And this was in 1999, when somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% of their customers were still using dial-up. 

PAW-PALS

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A tiny little shop in Oroville, California, PAW-PALS is probably the worst business idea you’ve never heard of.  You know you’re off to a bad start when the origin story of this quaint little store began with two people walking their cats.  This is an activity that precisely not a single sane person in the world participates in, but oddly founder Jeffrey Sentose thought was a large, under-serviced market demographic.   

The story goes that Sentose was out walking his cat one brisk morning.  All of the planets and stars and quasars and brown dwarfs and asteroids and comets in the universe apparently aligned and he met yet another person out walking their cat.  The two cats got along so well that Sentose, who according to the article never met a terrible idea he didn’t try to make money off of, decided to create a lavish store for people to bring their cats for cat play-dates. 

If you’re shuddering right now, it is because you have actually owned more than one cat and know that cats are evil, angry hellspawn.  Especially when other cats are around.  And especially when they’ve been plucked from the sunny perch they’ve been lounging on for the past 72 hours to go hang out with other cats and other humans.  Cats are the hermetic, possibly homicidal, Ted Kaczynskis of the pet world, and yet Sentose decided he should open a place to bring all these murderous little furballs together like some sort of feline Madrassa.  As proof that there is some justice in the world, PAW-PALS failed within a month, presumably because those strange enough to actually visit the place were never heard from again―a point bolstered by noise complaints that (quite seriously) complained of “frequent mrrrowwwwwwwws [sic] loud and shrill enough to chill the bones of any man”.
 
[PAW-PALS is not actually real.  But honestly, could you could tell the difference?]

We’re all addicted to Facebook, and that’s a good thing – for Facebook. Now there are rumors flying about a historic IPO. At $10 billion, Facebook’s IPO would be the largest of any tech company in history, leaving Bankrate, Linkedin, Groupon and even Google in the dust by a wide margin.

Facebook will likely be valued at $100B, which will make it bigger than McDonald’s, our beloved Disney and Amazon. Mark Zuckerburg will be the largest shareholder with an estimated 24%, while co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Eduardo Saverin will own 6% and 5% respectively.

Here’s a look at how Facebook can leverage its 800 million users into a legendary IPO.

Created by: Accounting Degree Online

This article, written by BusinessPundit owner Ryan Caldwell, originally appeared on the OPEN App Center. Visit www.theopenappcenter.com for more information and resources for streamlining and growing your business.

If someone wanted to say something negative about your company online for the world to see, there is really no way you can stop them (short of a lawsuit). What you can do, though, is try to maintain and promote a positive online reputation through persistent monitoring and responding to negative comments.

Generally, when individuals leave negative comments and appear to be seeking a response, it is usually best to respond appropriately rather than try to remove the comments. Even when comment removal is ideal, it is not always possible. But you make those comments less prominent through the following tactics.

1. Monitor Your Brand Buzz.

Many business owners don’t think about online reputation management until they have an issue. The truth is that online reputation management is as much about being proactive as it is being reactive.

Get into the habit of searching Google and other search engines to check for any results that may be harmful to your reputation. At minimum, you should setup Google Alerts for your company name, brands and key employees. Google Alerts will notify you via email every time Google finds a new result for the desired search query. The goal is to make sure that the mentions are favorable, and if some are negative you have these alerts assisting you to contain any potential issues before they get blown out of proportion.

2. Build Positive Results in Search.

Most people trust Google enough to be confident about the results on the first page or two, without exploring further. According to a recent study, 89 percent of click-throughs on Google are from the first page. For the few individuals that look beyond the first few pages, at least the search results ahead of the negative results will seem more credible. This means that online reputation management requires knowledge in SEO to reflect a company in the most positive light. The decrease in views on a bad article when it goes from page one to two or from two to three is easily enough for a business to see a large increase in leads.

You can do this by examining what may be causing any negative content to rank highly, and promoting quality content to outrank the bad results. There are many different methods and practices for SEO, but it almost always involves getting links on other websites that direct to the site you are optimizing. The amount of links and the quality of the linking websites influences the rankings. This is where tools like Yahoo Site Explorer and OpenSiteExplorer.com come in handy. These tools can be used to help determine what sites are linking to the bad content and what factors are influencing their ranking.

There is a great deal to learn when it comes to SEO and a little can go a long way. If you plan on practicing SEO and do not have prior knowledge, you should read Google‘s SEO Starter Guide at the very least.

3. Learn About Social Media.

For most companies, social media knowledge is a necessity for good online reputation management. This involves keeping up on your own profiles such as a blog, owning a domain name that is your full name and using tools such as knowem.com to claim profiles for your name. Social profiles such as Facebook and Twitter can be used to build a fan base and encourage positive interactions. These profiles should be monitored, maintained and updated daily.

You can ask followers for feedback, share news, give coupons and hold contests through social media platforms. In time, you can have a loyal fan base that may even defend you when people leave negative comments. Which social profiles you choose to use depends on the company and what it has to offer. For example, Last.fm is a website for bands and musicians to share music and promote upcoming albums and concerts. Just make sure to read the terms of service for the social media websites you use.

4. Create Quality Content.

Sure, you hear the same advice everywhere. But guess what? It’s true. Quality content that will help you go far in keeping your presence pristine. And optimizing good quality content is far more likely to having a lasting effect than if you hurry to create content and promote any articles you come across. If you optimize content that has no potential to generate interest from viewers, you will likely only see the immediate results of your SEO, and there will be no long term results. Long-term results come when people find the article you have optimized, and then share it on social media sites, blogs, websites, forums or elsewhere online. This process will continue to naturally optimize search results, meaning that even after any intentional SEO efforts, the public is still optimizing with the natural occurrences in which search engines are intended to base their results. If it sparks enough interest, this can have a viral effect, which will spread links to a variety of places on the Web.

You can do all the SEO you want to make pages rank higher, but natural, unplanned occurrences, such as 100 people tweeting an article because they actually liked it, will have a much more powerful influence than anything you could do on your own in the same amount of time.

5. Maintain a Clean Reputation Offline.

If you practice good ethics, you will likely be rewarded. It may even lead to more positive content showing up online from third-party sources. However, if people have a reason to bash you, many of them will. Online reputation management is not going to work out very well if you are trying to appear as something you are not. If there is something you need to own up to, do not try to hide it away. When a company runs into a crisis it is their responsibility to determine when it is appropriate to confront it by apologizing to the public, responding to the crises, taking preventative action and moving on.

It is also advisable to have employees set their privacy settings on their personal social profiles so that only people they approve can see what they post. People often associate employees within a company directly with the image of that company. You don’t want to be the next company with a bad buzz in the media because your CEO posted something on Twitter that unexpectedly raised concern among the public.

For more about online reputation management, check out this article: How to Engage for Online Reputation Management.

WEGMAN’s

Visit: http://www.wegmans.com/blog/

Wegman’s blog, dubbed “Fresh Stories,” is designed to keep customers informed and engaged. What makes the blog interesting is that you get an inside look at the journey food takes before it hits supermarket shelves, and eventually your table. Everything on the website reinforces the Wegman’s brand. You can learn about products, get recipe ideas, monitor the progress of store openings, and even pick up health tips. This is all done without beating readers over the head.
The blog is updated several times a month, which might go against the blogging adage that more is better, but when it comes to a company blog, I imagine most people prefer quality over quantity; you have better things to do than check in on a daily basis.

What truly sets the blog apart is the large range of bloggers that Wegman’s use, some have been with the company for decades, others are newcomers, each delivering an interesting perspective.

A Flickr stream of photos will make you feel as if you fresh picked the produce yourself. The Wegman’s blog puts the product first in a subtle way, all while giving the reader a local market vibe. And for anyone who has ever shopped at Wegman’s, you know that this is the same approach that has made the supermarket chain so successful. Kudos to the company for getting that messaging across on their blog.

ZAPPOS

Visit: http://blogs.zappos.com/

I know, you’re so used to seeing Zappos on a “best of” list that you are getting ready to click off this story. But wait! The accolades are well deserved. As a company that puts it’s customers (and employees!) first, the Zappos blog showcases a level of transparency rarely seen on a corporate blog. One day you’ll find useful shopping tips, the next, information on the company’s amazing adoption benefits for employees. Perhaps you will hear from upper management on why they are making a change to their backend system. Or maybe you just want to know what shoes are hot this season.
The Zappos blog was born in late 2007 but really found its legs in late 2008. If you are interested in improving your company’s customer service or just want to hook yourself up with a sweet pair of kicks, the Zappos blog is worth bookmarking.

FEDEX

Visit: http://blog.fedex.designcdt.com/

FedEx has a tremendous global reach, but the company is about more than just package delivery….and they want the world to know it. The FedEx corporate blog does that, dishing out small business best practices, a look inside of the company’s logistics, and even an eco-friendly section that is designed to make the company, and the world, a little more green. Team member stories make up a portion of the blog. Rather than read as overly-edited company fluff pieces, the stories have depth; character. FedEx’s philanthropic efforts get the spotlight center stage.

Overall the blog is professional and polished, but has just enough voice to make you feel as if you are reading an informal blog.

Which corporate blogs do you read on a regular basis — and what about them do you love?

Do you have your own blog? Get your blog reviewed and published at a PR6 site at Blogsearchengine.com, a perfect place to promote your blog

The Internet has changed the way we live—that’s obvious. But what we think people forget is how big and important the worldwide web really is. Do you know how much time people spend on the Internet every day? Do you keep track of how many times you tweeted last month? Do you know how many people bought Uggs from Amazon (shame on them!)? No? You don’t?

That’s okay—we’ve done that for you. But beware: what you have before you isn’t just any old infographic. The content might shock you. If you thought that the Internet was just “really big,” you are sadly mistaken. The Internet is colossal. The Internet is a giant elephant that is trampling all across the globe leaving its enormous footprints.

Interact with this infographic. Play with the information and think about what it means for you; to you. Become a part of the story that it has to tell. Why wouldn’t you?

You helped create it, after all.

Created by OnlineSchools.org

LinkedIn’s IPO is already a mind boggling success (up over 100% in first few hours of trading). Here’s a look at the long road to today’s IPO.

Source: The Credit Score Blog

In today’s media-rich economy, “even not having an online presence tells people something about you,” says Vizibility founder and CEO James Alexander, who himself has two first names. He founded Vizibility to address the problem of online invisibility, even for John Smiths. We caught up with him to learn more about Vizibility, what it does, and how it helps people gain search-engine traction.

Why would people want to use a Vizibility SearchMe button?

The inspiration for Vizibility hit when I couldn’t find myself in Google. I’m a guy with two first names, which makes my results impossible to find. I spent a great deal of time learning how the engine worked and experimented with the advanced search features (which less than 5% of people use because it’s so hard). Ultimately, I was able to create the perfect query for me that returned the right set of search results every time. The query was long and used a lot of Boolean jargon, but it worked.

In going through this process, I was struck by four things: First, using advanced search is just too time-consuming for most people; second, the ability to easily post or share searches didn’t exist; third, even if someone could share their personal search results, they would need to be able to change it from time-to-time (when they changed jobs or got married, for instance), and; fourth, a user also wants to know when their search results change and when they’re being “Googled.”

All the ingredients were there for a new approach to people search.

What are the biggest problems people have with the way Google displays their name or their business?

I believe one of the biggest issues is that of mistaken identity. It is a real and growing problem. In many respects, it is the opposite of privacy — many people want to be found but they can’t. Their results are buried in the results of other people who have similar names, with more relevancy. To help illustrate this point, there are more than 2,000 people on LinkedIn today who share the same name as someone on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List.

Millions of people want to be found online for professional or personal reasons. But if they are someone like me, James Alexander, with a common name, a hiring manager would never have made it past page one or two of Google search results to validate my background. Even people with unique names, which are often difficult to spell, are affected by this problem. We’re invisible.

And being invisible online can have a significant economic impact for individuals. In one recent study, 45% of hiring managers said they hired someone because of what they found online. Imagine how many people were not hired because of what could not be found or verified easily.

When 90% of recruiters make hiring decisions based on Google search results and few go beyond the first page, mistaken identity is inevitable. Our own research shows that only 12% of search results are actually about the person being searched. The consequences of making critical buying or hiring decisions with poor information are undeniable.

The second issue is that search engines hide behind a veil of algorithms, but unlike credit card monitoring services, search engines don’t verify their search results. Nor do they have to. They don’t have the mechanisms or incentives to do so. But just like credit monitoring services, however, the information that search engines provide may have significant and profound economic impact.

Vizibility is putting people in control of what others see about them online. But there are two sides to this coin. Any solution impacting search results has to be transparent because the people searching have to trust what they see. This requires full disclosure of the search criteria, including and excluding words and terms and seeing the result in the search engine itself.

It sounds like you have really big plans for Vizibility–to get a SearchMe button on 20 million professional profiles in the next 5 years. Can you elaborate on what you mean by “professional profiles”?

We define professional profiles as a brief description of one’s accomplishments, qualifications, strengths, qualities, etc., that are posted online by business professionals, job seekers, executives, singles, and service providers such as doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, etc. There are thousands of these sites, and a few examples include LinkedIn, TheLadders, BlueSteps, 6FigureJobs, About.me, Flavors.me and Match.com.

How are you going to reach your goal?

Wouldn’t it be great if got a text message whenever someone Googled you? Or you received an email whenever your personal search results changed? These are the kinds of “sticky” features that we enable partners to offer delivering a personal branding solution that is effective and unique.

We also provide our partners with a number of services with the potential to increase renewal rates and generate higher levels of engagement with their users. For example, the text messages and emails can be co-branded providing our partners a low-cost tool to remain usefully engaged with their users while reinforcing the value of their membership.

Basically, our go-to-market strategy is to partner with profile-driven websites and embed VizibilityTM into their offerings. Many of these sites face high customer acquisition costs and also have high churn rates – the average customer relationship is less than six months. With Vizibility, our partners and potential partners recognize that we deliver value to their customers by making it easy for them to be found online while providing a set of tools to help manage their online brands.

We recently launched a new service for our partners where we pre-create Vizibility accounts for all their customers and then send a co-branded email containing their personal Vizibility SearchMeTM link, making it easy for them place on their profile, resume, social networking sites and business cards. YouTern was our first partner to provide this service to their customers, and we anticipate many others taking advantage of this service.

To date we have approximately twenty partner sites that reach over 1 million users. These include 6FigureJobs, BlueSteps, realmatch, Brand-Yourself, Reach, and MyLegal.com among others. Our plan is to more than double the number of partners over the next six months.

Any other remarks?

Today’s competitive market for professional services and jobs is changing career management behavior forever. The concept of taking control and managing one’s online identity is becoming mainstream, and expected. One’s digital content has to be managed and curated in order to reflect their online brand – even not having an online presence tells people something about you.

To address one trend, the notion of building digital bridges between your online and offline experiences, we have created a mobile solution. We are providing Vizibility users with the ability to turn their SearchMe link into a QR code that can be placed on resumes, business cards, online profiles, presentations – anywhere someone wants to provide a quick snapshot of who they are and what they are about.

It’s an exciting trend around which a set of solutions is quickly evolving to help people take control and manage what is found about them online, and Vizibility is among them.

Official bio: James Alexander is Vizibility’s founder and CEO. He’s the guy with two first names. If you ‘Googled’ his name in 2009, you would never have found him. Now, he ranks within the first few results of a Google search. Find James in Google at http://vizibility.com/james.

[Added]Google’s “Farmer” Update was a major restructuring of the company’s public search index and was released to the US public sometime around March 1st. It was designed to show higher quality results by punishing sites that detract from the user experience (because the ads are obtrusive, the content is thin, the site loads slowly, users tend to “bounce” off the site quickly, etc). The average search user typically is not aware that a major Google Update has occurred. [/Added]

Before I start this article let me make one thing very clear. In the grand scheme of things, I’ve always respected Google’s commitment to a quality index. They have made huge strides over the years to reward quality and destroy junk. And I like that. A lot. It has made the web a better place. So while there is an emerging cottage industry of Google complainers, I have no intention of joining their ranks. Because at the end of the day I believe that Google’s entire business model depends on having the best search results. So yeah, I trust Google.

The purpose of this article is to point out some concrete ways in which the latest Google update named “Farmer” has had negative effects for small businesses and their brands. Admittedly, I am going to be a bit myopic and use one of my own websites as a case study. But the purpose is to draw attention to an obvious flaw in the update and how it reflects badly upon Google.

Like it or not, a lot of small businesses live or die based on their brands. The editors at a popular website that I own called PopCrunch recognized about 3-4 years back that in the entertainment space, the site needed to “differentiate or die.” So we took two approaches to differentiation. First, we created an online tv show that was featured on YouTube. That project, while a blast to put together and a fan favorite, simply couldn’t survive because of the economics of web video. We couldn’t monetize it. I’d love to bring the show back someday, but doing so would require a major long-term sponsor.

The other approach to differentiation was to create premium content that other people weren’t making (you can see a list of our premium content here). What we ended up doing was creating annual lists that took 100+ hours worth of man power to accomplish. The idea was this: all the publishers out there are throwing out short 200 word news articles. Let’s be better. Let’s contribute to the web and make unique content that’s fun but requires hard work. The kind of work not everyone is willing to do.

So we put the hard work in. And we built some popular brands. Some so popular, that they get mentioned on radio stations across the country and drive millions of unique visitors in a single day. Examples include: 100 Hottest Women of 2011. The Hottest Women in Radio. Hottest Student Bodies of 2010.

Yeah, yeah it’s not like we’re contributing to the intellectual stores of humanity with this content. But we are making stuff that people like. And we’re putting the hard work in to make it as high quality as we can within a small brand’s budget.

So what’s the big deal with Google’s Farmer Update? Well, like I said, we often get radio mentions of our content (because it’s THAT good) and with Google’s Farmer update, people searching the titles of many of our best articles (search any of the titles here) will have a hard time finding the original source. Instead of getting the original PopCrunch article, they’ll be sent to sites that copied PopCrunch’s article or simply linked to it.

Here’s a search you can do to see what I mean: 100 Hottest Women of 2011

Showing above PopCrunch are scraper sites like InnewsToday.net , CastNews.us, Newmoviereleasesdvd.Loginby.com and Social Link Sites like Populnks.com, Topix.com, Digg.com, etc.

So imagine this situation. Radio Station X spends ten minutes talking about our list of the 100 Hottest Women of 20011. A slew of listeners go to Google, whom they implicitly trust and search for 100 Hottest Women of 2011 and what do you know, Google fails to show them what they were looking for.

We have already been told by a few of our contacts in the radio industry that they’ve had listeners calling into the station because they can’t find the article that the morning DJ’s were talking about. That’s not just PopCrunch’s problem. It’s Google’s problem too.

And it’s not just an isolated case. I’ve talked with dozens of small brand owners who run legitimate, defensible, differentiated websites who have seen very similar results.

So the moral of the story is that Google’s brand depends on returning the results that people expect to get. And I expect that it’s not just in my interest, but in Google’s interest as well to fix the issue I’ve defined as soon as they can.

In the meantime, we’ll keep producing the best content we can and strive to get even better. It’s the waiting on a giant that’s the tough part.