Mediaboss Marketing

The Irish
Times - Monday, January 30, 2012

UNA MULLALLY

THE SPOTLIGHT is rarely off Facebook, but reports that the
social-networking company is planning an initial public
offering (IPO) in May have started a serious conversation about
how much Facebook is worth and how much it can raise with its
stock market flotation.

But there’s a bigger story happening in social-network land.
Facebook’s IPO comes quite late in the day. With unprecedented
growth to 800 million users in eight years, Facebook has tough
questions to answer about where it goes from here. The site has
become so embedded in so many people’s lives that the
excitement surrounding it is ebbing.

Social networks, once the web upstarts, are now the norm. The
buzz previously reserved for social networking has moved to
mobile, tablet devices, trying to make geo-location networks
take off and trend-watching the game layer. So how do you push
an industry forward when everyone is so used to it? Last
Wednesday Facebook announced changes that would bring new apps
to a user’s timeline, including Ticketmaster, film website
Rotten Tomatoes and TripAdvisor. It’s changes like this that
Facebook hopes will keep a grip on its users. Why leave your
page when you can access even more information on it?

Damien Mulley of Mulley Communications says Facebook is “at 80
to 85 per cent saturation of internet users in most countries
they’re in, so that last 15 per cent is going to be very hard
and very expensive to reach”.

Facebook has become the norm, making more dramatic expansion
hard, says Mulley. “If I go into a business now and say ‘you
should be on Facebook’ they turn around to me and say ‘duh’.
It’s standard now. That said, less hype could be good for
stability. Their issue now, with the users that they have, is
how to squeeze more value out of those users. Right now, it’s
just advertising. They’ve played around with check-ins and
location-based stuff. They tried their own version of Groupon
last year, Facebook Deals, and they’ve kind of cancelled that
now. The big worry is that they’ve grown so quickly.”

Programmer and internet activist Aaron Swartz, who founded
online lobbying group Demand Progress and was an early employee
and co-owner of social news website Reddit, says conversations
about the downside of Facebook are on the up. “Most people lead
busy lives and don’t have time to be affected by most things in
their lives or think about them, but there’s an increasing
amount of attention to issues surrounding Facebook.”

Swartz talks about “nymwars”, the debate stemming from policies
of social networks that instruct those signing up to services
to use their real names, raising issues of privacy and
identity. “Suddenly most people who didn’t get involved in
these discussions did, and it was a big deal,” Swartz says.
“Right now on the internet, you have an independent
relationship with these sites, and on the Facebook model,
they’ve become the platform that underlines all of this
[information], so you can only have one Facebook account to use
all these applications, so it kind of becomes like the Apple
store, and if any application is inappropriate it gets shut
down. There’s a huge amount of money to be made, but there are
dangers as well in terms of how free that information is.”

The fragmentation of social networking has begun. Mulley
mentions Path, a photo-sharing network not dissimilar to
Instagram, as a growing area. “The other crowds [social
networks], described themselves as a ‘Facebook for this, a
Facebook for that’ offering the same suite of services,” Mulley
says, “whereas Path, Instagram and so on are about taking
photos and sharing with a small amount of people. It will just
fragment like that. Facebook is an entire industry and when
people come in they can disrupt the industry. The ‘we’re not
Facebook’ is probably going to be the big thing, and Facebook
will probably just buy them . . . I think the cool kids are
going on to other places. That ‘first mover’ kind of stuff was
Facebook for a while, but now it’s just like everything else.”

While Facebook’s IPO is a big deal, lessons have been learned
from the less than epic IPOs of firms such as Zynga and
Groupon. As Swartz puts it: “There will be this crazy
excitement about Facebook finally IPOing, then the reality will
finally set in and people will start looking at the numbers.”

More:
Facebook floats, but has social networking passed its peak?

24-01-2012 14:07 Explains how to update from Joomla 1.7 to Joomla 2.5. Includes how to fix sql bug and schema bug. If you get "internal server error" error, or it just crashes... then follow this guide. http://www.ostraining.com

Read more here:
How to update joomla 1.7 to 2.5 - Video

02-11-2010 02:26 studiomediacam.com WordPress Blog Tips, WordPress Dashboard Tutorial After you have installed wordpress.org at your host you can access your dashboard by going to the address bar at the top of the screen and typing in your website address followed by You will be asked for your username and password, which you entered at the hosting site when you installed the wordpress.org. Near the upper left of the dashboard you'll see the word Posts. If you click on Posts you'll see Add Posts. Click there and you'll get a box with a title box above it. This will be similiar to the boxes you use to send email. There will be familiar icons that are similar to the ones in Microsoft Word. You can click an icon and browse to upload photos or videos. You can choose font colors and type your article in the box. A little way below the word Posts you'll see the word Links. If you click on that you'll see Add Links. These links show up in the Blogroll on the website. They are links that you add because their sites provide information that you think might be useful or interesting for your website visitors. A ways below Links you'll see Appearance. The choices under Appearance include Themes, Background and Header. This is where you can add your personal design touches to the site. Farther below that you'll see Settings, and General. If you click on General you'll see where you can type in the title of the site. Below that you can add a tag line phrase also. This is a brief overview of highlights ...

More here:
WordPress Blog Tips - WordPress Dashboard Tutorial - Video

NEW YORK — A different kind of F-word is stirring a linguistic
and political debate as controversial as what it defines.

The word is "fracking" — as in hydraulic fracturing, a
technique long used by the oil and gas industry to free oil and
gas from rock.

It's not in the dictionary, the industry hates it, and
President Barack Obama didn't use it in his State of the Union
speech — even as he praised federal subsidies for it.

The word sounds nasty, and environmental advocates have been
able to use it to generate opposition — and revulsion — to what
they say is a nasty process that threatens water supplies.

"It obviously calls to mind other less socially polite terms,
and folks have been able to take advantage of that," said Kate
Sinding, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense
Council who works on drilling issues.

One of the chants at an anti-drilling rally in Albany earlier
this month was "No fracking way!"

Industry executives argue that the word is deliberately
misspelled by environmental activists and that it has become a
slur that should not be used by media outlets that strive for
objectivity.

"It's a co-opted word and a co-opted spelling used to make it
look as offensive as people can try to make it look," said
Michael Kehs, vice president for Strategic Affairs at
Chesapeake Energy, the nation's second-largest natural gas
producer.

To the surviving humans of the sci-fi TV series "Battlestar
Galactica," it has nothing to do with oil and gas. It is used
as a substitute for the very down-to-Earth curse word.

Michael Weiss, a professor of linguistics at Cornell
University, says the word originated as simple industry jargon,
but has taken on a negative meaning over time — much like the
word "silly" once meant "holy."

But "frack" also happens to sound like "smack" and "whack,"
with more violent connotations.

"When you hear the word 'fracking,' what lights up your brain
is the profanity," says Deborah Mitchell, who teaches marketing
at the University of Wisconsin's School of Business. "Negative
things come to mind."

Obama did not use the word in his State of the Union address
Tuesday night, when he said his administration will help ensure
natural gas will be developed safely, suggesting it would
support 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade.

In hydraulic fracturing, millions of gallons of water, sand and
chemicals are pumped into wells to break up underground rock
formations and create escape routes for the oil and gas. In
recent years, the industry has learned to combine the practice
with the ability to drill horizontally into beds of shale,
layers of fine-grained rock that in some cases have trapped
ancient organic matter that has cooked into oil and gas.

By doing so, drillers have unlocked natural gas deposits across
the East, South and Midwest that are large enough to supply the
U.S. for decades. Natural gas prices have dipped to decade-low
levels, reducing customer bills and prompting manufacturers who
depend on the fuel to expand operations in the U.S.

Environmentalists worry that the fluid could leak into water
supplies from cracked casings in wells. They are also concerned
that wastewater from the process could contaminate water
supplies if not properly treated or disposed of. And they worry
the method allows too much methane, the main component of
natural gas and an extraordinarily potent greenhouse gas, to
escape.

Some want to ban the practice altogether, while others want
tighter regulations.

The Environmental Protection Agency is studying the issue and
may propose federal regulations. The industry prefers that
states regulate the process.

Some states have banned it. A New York proposal to lift its ban
drew about 40,000 public comments — an unprecedented total —
inspired in part by slogans such as "Don't Frack With New
York."

The drilling industry has generally spelled the word without a
"K," using terms like "frac job" or "frac fluid."

Energy historian Daniel Yergin spells it "fraccing" in his
book, "The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the
Modern World." The glossary maintained by the oilfield services
company Schlumberger includes only "frac" and "hydraulic
fracturing."

The spelling of "fracking" began appearing in the media and in
oil and gas company materials long before the process became
controversial. It first was used in an Associated Press story
in 1981. That same year, an oil and gas company called Velvet
Exploration, based in British Columbia, issued a press release
that detailed its plans to complete "fracking" a well.

The word was used in trade journals throughout the 1980s. In
1990, Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher announced U.S. oil
engineers would travel to the Soviet Union to share drilling
technology, including fracking.

The word does not appear in The Associated Press Stylebook, a
guide for news organizations. David Minthorn, deputy standards
editor at the AP, says there are tentative plans to include an
entry in the 2012 edition.

He said the current standard is to avoid using the word except
in direct quotes, and to instead use "hydraulic fracturing."

That won't stop activists — sometimes called "fracktivists" —
from repeating the word as often as possible.

"It was created by the industry, and the industry is going to
have to live with it," says the NRDC's Sinding.

Dave McCurdy, CEO of the American Gas Association, agrees, much
to his dismay: "It's Madison Avenue hell," he says.

The rest is here:
Fracking fracas: No energy industry backing for the word 'fracking'