From the blog: InfoCommerce Perspective

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Hard Data

I have long advocated for something I modestly call "Perkins' Law." It holds that "No company outside the information industry will voluntarily build and maintain a database if there is a viable alternative to doing so." Over the years, I have found this posit to hold up pretty well. Indeed,...

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Unlocking the Value of LinkedIn

TechCrunch posted a long and thoughtful analysis of LinkedIn this week. In short, it suggests that LinkedIn is at risk from a growing number of vertical market professional networking sites, and faces a "death by a thousand cuts." The risk of being "sliced and diced" is real. Any horizontal provider...

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History Matters

A fascinating article in Technology Review highlights and quantifies a problem that is also an opportunity: disappearing data. The article reports on the findings of a new research study of social media that finds that in an analysis of recent major cultural events (e.g. Arab Spring), 11% of the social...

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#hashtags

As Twitter continues to grow, so does the use of hashtags (those keywords and concepts in tweets preceded by the # symbol). But hashtags can help or hurt your goal of maximum visibility for your tweets. A couple tips based on observation and some quick research: Use them judiciously Use...

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Micro-Monetization

Yes, I just made up a new buzzword, micro-monetization, which is meant to describe a huge trend online to create services to monetize things that previously couldn't be monetized because they were too fleeting, too small or too difficult to bring buyer and seller together. It's a fascinating area full...