Mediaboss Marketing

So Sean "You know what's cool? A billion dollars" Parker just declared the Internet boring! Then Brian Lam said non monsieur, you're the one who is boring.

Attention conservation notice: If you're not asleep or clicking over to Buzzfeed already, the boring one is you.

Parker just launched the last thing anyone should expend resources on given the limited time we have left on this dying planet: a Chatroulette clone called Airtime. Like its predecessor, it's about to fill up with people's genitals, because apparently its genitalia-detection algorithm doesn't work.

About the only thing of value to come out of this bonfire of investor cash is the inevitable pile-on that will follow Parker's comment. So, is the Internet boring? I say yes.

The Internet is both a utility and a medium. Only one of these things is exciting.

I have the luxury of writing for geeks whose job it is to get excited about complicated systems like the Internet, but let's face it, the more mainstream it becomes, the more the best part of the web, "geek culture," will be divorced from the web itself. In ways large and small, it's already happening. TMZ is the traffic monster, not Slashdot.

As a generator of profoundly new ideas, the web is dead. Reading Techcrunch these days is an exercise in postmodernism. (A startup that gamifies the job search gets $21 million in funding. Really?) All the innovation is in mobile, which is why Facebook is boring but Instagram is cool and therefore worth almost as much as a company that puts robots on top of thousands of pounds of high explosives and successfully flies them to the International Space Station.

As a medium, the web just kind of replaced all the other stuff that came before. If you were excited about magazines in the 90's, well, they still exist! Yeah, they're kind of different, and people who write for them have to put up with trolls in the comments, but otherwise, it's not as different as all the navel-gazing media writers would have you believe.

On the other hand, as a utility, there's hardly been a more exciting time to be on the web. It's the universal glue that binds everything else together, and mastery over its increasingly arcane ways is the ticket to participating in whatever remains of the middle class after we're done socializing all the costs of our Internet-speed financial system. But like I said, this utility function of the Internet is increasingly irrelevant to the ever large swath of humanity that relies on it. It's like asking people to get excited about civic infrastructure. (Which is awesome! This book changed my life.)

So, Internet = boring? Yes, absolutely. Now that the novelty has worn off, all we've really got is each other, saying the same ridiculous and mundane things we've always said. It remains the case thathell is other people.

The rest is here:
How the Internet Became Boring

Cisco's ASR 5500 mobile packet core will help make networks more intelligent and allow operators to charge differently for various types of content.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- By 2015, more people will access the Internet from mobile devices than from conventional PCs. A year later, in 2016, 19 billion devices and gizmos will be connected to the mobile Internet -- not just your smartphone and tablet, but your washing machine, cars and clothes will be connected too.

That's a giant problem for wireless carriers, which are already struggling to keep up with surging data demand. Trying to innovate their way out of the crunch, the industry is using new tools and tricks to optimize every bit of infrastructure.

Cisco (CSCO, Fortune 500) added a key piece to the puzzle on Tuesday, releasing a new tool that will let carriers sift through and prioritize the traffic flooding their networks.

It sounds pretty geeky -- "mobile packet core" product launches don't inspire iPhone-like frenzies -- but this back-end upgrade has some significant implications for everyday users.

The problem: Everyone has experienced the frustrating effects of wireless network congestion. Your video buffers forever, a website takes minutes to launch, or you can't get Google Maps to load when you're late to a meeting and don't know where to go.

Much of that pain comes from the way that today's networks give more or less the same priority to all kinds of traffic. Ads running on Angry Birds are treated the same as a Netflix (NFLX) video -- not a good thing, if a bunch of ads on other people's phones are causing your movie to stall.

The user experience would be noticeably better if the network were able to speed up streaming video at the expense of a slightly slower load time on an ad in a game. The typical wireless network doesn't know how to do that.

The solution: Cisco thinks it has a fix with its new ASR 5500 mobile packet core. It's a kind of gateway between the mobile network and the larger Internet that gives networks the intelligence to handle different traffic differently.

Verizon, for instance, could set different priorities for video services, phone calls and apps -- particularly during peak download hours -- to ensure that all services run as smoothly as possible. That way, Netflix or YouTube videos might not get interrupted if Verizon makes websites take a second longer to load.

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Cisco's new, smarter network for the Internet of things

Google's Internet evangelist, responsible for the address shortage on today's Internet, is anxious for IPv6 improvements. Also: his views on U.N. regulation, censorship, bandwidth caps, and .google.

Vint Cerf, a father of the Internet and Google's chief Internet evangelist

"Predicting is hard, especially about the future," quips Vint Cerf -- and he should know.

That's because about 30 years ago, when the now-famous engineer was helping to design the technology that powers the Internet, Cerf decided just how many devices could connect to the network. His answer -- 2 to the 32nd power, or 4.3 billion -- looked awfully big at the time. A few decades later, we now know it's far short.

Accordingly, Google's chief Internet evangelist and one of the few people at the company who looks natural in a suit and tie, is eager for tomorrow's high-profile World IPv6 Launch. The event will usher in a vastly larger Internet as many major powers move permanently to the next-generation Internet Protocol version 6 technology. IPv6 is big enough to give a network address to 340 undecillion devices -- that's 2 to the 128th power, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 if you're keeping score.

The change actually began years ago: IPv6 was finished in 1996, IPv6 networks could be constructed since 1999, and any personal computer bought in the last few years can handle IPv6 if configured properly. But because IPv4 was spacious enough for a long time, moving to IPv6 was a potentially expensive hassle that didn't have much immediate payoff. It was only last year, when the pipeline of unused IPv4 addresses started emptying out, that a sense of real urgency gripped the computing industry.

The IPv6 transition will take years as Internet plumbing gradually is updated with the ability transfer packets of IPv6 data from point A to point B. That transfer uses technology that Cerf and colleague Bob Kahn invented in the 1970s. It's called TCP/IP, and it's what wires together the Net's nervous system.

When you download that cat photo from a server, it's the job of the Internet Protocol (IP) to deliver it, broken down into a collection of individual data packets, to your computer. Countless network devices in between examine the IP address of each packet to send them hop by hop toward to your machine so IP can reassembles them into the photo.

Closely paired is Transmission Control Protocol, which takes care of ensuring the packets are successfully delivered over this packet-switching network, requesting missing packets be retransmitted if necessary, and reassembling them into the proper order to reconstitute the original photo. Curious people can read the original paper, A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication (PDF), written before TCP and IP were split into separate technology layers.

Cerf is a somewhat unusual figure in today's Internet development realm. Hotshot young programmers are pushing the limits of Web programming and other novelties, but Cerf, born in 1943, has a much longer history watching the cutting edge advance. He witnessed the arrival of e-mail, e-commerce, and emoticons.

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Internet co-creator Vint Cerf welcomes IPv6 elbow room (Q&A)

COSTA MESA, CA--(Marketwire -06/05/12)- The Orange County Chapter of the American Marketing Association (OC AMA) will host SEO In Plain English: Online Marketing and Search Engine Optimization - Demystified on June 20 at The Hotel Hanford in Costa Mesa as part of its Signature Speaker Series. The program will begin at 6:00 p.m.

Joel Tanner and Sven Johnston of GigaSavvy will present the program. The presentation and workshop will provide a plain-English explanation of online marketing and SEO -- offering tangible, real-word applicable take-aways for marketing managers through C-level executives. Attendees will gain a broad-based understanding of how their potential customers are searching for their products and services, and will learn how to identify the keywords that are most relevant to their business, and then how to best use that knowledge to drive traffic and sales, whilst ensuring they don't violate the rules of Google, Bing and Yahoo.

The event will run from 6:00 - 8:30 p.m. and will begin with a 60-minute mixer followed by the presentation and workshop. Registration for the Signature Speaker Series is $35 for AMA members and $50 for non-members. SEO In Plain English: Online Marketing and Search Engine Optimization - Demystified will be held Wednesday, June 20 at The Hotel Hanford -- 3131 Bristol Street, Costa Mesa. There is also early bird pricing available through June 13. To register or for more information, visit http://ocama-gigasavvy.eventbrite.com/

About the presenters: Joel Tanner is a co-founder and principal of GigaSavvy where he oversees all aspects of the digital marketing firm including the SEO department, social media department and business development. With nearly 20 years of industry experience, Tanner leads his clients through the ever-evolving landscape of digital media with a commonsense approach -- offering practical insight in a space that is too often overcomplicated with unnecessary and fruitless strategies.

Sven Johnston is vice president of sales and strategic partnerships with GigaSavvy. He brings more than 15 years of international business development experience and uses his passion for online marketing to help businesses -- from Fortune 500 companies to small start-ups -- build their company brand and increase online sales.

About OC AMA: OC AMA is part of the leading national marketing organization, the American Marketing Association (AMA). OC AMA is dedicated to the advancement of marketing professionals from a broad range of industries who seek the knowledge to make themselves more effective marketers. This Orange County marketing organization offers marketers the competitive advantage they need by providing opportunities to network, learn and grow professionally. You can learn more on the OC AMA website, via Facebook, on the LinkedIn group, or by connecitng on Twitter.

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OC AMA Hosts GigaSavvy to Present SEO in Plain English to OC Marketing Professionals

I was talking with an SEO prospect a few weeks ago and they asked me What differentiates your SEO firm from everyone else?

In essence, they wanted to know what my unique selling proposition was so I gave them the usual run down I tell all my prospects; were a strictly white hat firm. Since were a smaller SEO company that means you get more personalized attention and your account manager isnt going to change every 3 months. I also only like to take on clients that I truly believe we can help so as to not waste your money or our time.

After the call though, it hit me, how many other small, white hat SEO firms could say the exact same thing? Was my unique selling proposition really that unique in the end?

Which of the 36 flavors do you want? There are big firms, small firms, black hat, white hat and every shade of grey hat in-between. You can work with a local firm or one two time zones away (thats the beauty of the Internet), individual SEO consultants, SEO experts that specialize in certain industries. There are SEO people that come from a PR background, a web development background or just a regular writing background. If I looked at each of those options as my competitors there could be thousands! But even when I start to niche it down there might still be another 50 SEO firms just like mine (java mocha is the same thing as chocolate coffee swirl in the end) scattered across the country. So how different can my company really be? There are plenty of great SEO firms out there for website owners to work with, is mine really that special?

I know that some less-than-scrupulous SEO firms will claim to have a special relationship with Google, and thats what makes them the best. I hope most site owners realize that the only one who has a special relationship with Google is Google. Other SEO companies will promise the moon in terms of resultsrecord breaking visitor growth, top of page 1 in 2 months or less, 1,000 links every two weeksto make themselves stand out, but no white hat SEO firm can really guarantee those things. Some SEO providers make price points their unique selling proposition and offer full service SEO for only $199 a month, but price gimmicks like that dont actually set one company apart from another.

I dont believe that my company is a good fit for every potential client and Im not afraid to admit it. Some clients want an SEO provider that walks them through each step of the process, others just want a report once a month and maybe the occasional call. Some SEO providers prefer to work with startups because they like the challenges that come with new websites; others prefer to work as consultants to mid-sized brands. While the work that each SEO company/provider does for their client is relatively the same the relationship we have with our clients is what makes us unique.

I realize its hard to sell a relationship to prospective SEO clients, especially in todays economy of that demands immediate ROI to justify any spending of any kind. But Id be interested to hear from other SEO providerswhat do you think makes you truly special? Can any one SEO company claim to be/do something that no other firm can and really mean it?

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How Unique Can an SEO Firm Really Be?