Google Penguin, Twitter, and Keyword Research

Trendspotter Interactive Marketing Article – by Fulcrum Marketing Group Google Penguin and SEO Google regularly updates and tweaks its algorithms in order to reduce spam and remove weak pages from the first page of its organic search results. Google’s latest update, Penguin, targets Black Hat SEO artists that use aggressive SEO techniques and over-spamming andRead… Read more »

Army Camo Controversy – Endangered Soldiers?

I’ve read a lot lately about recent news that the US Army is contemplating a replacement of the Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP), also known as digital camo because of it’s pixelated appearance. First, know that I’m not an Army insider, and there are conflicting stories out there about the circumstances around UCP’s adoption in 2004Read… Read more »

Infrastructure, superstructure and not enough sockets

It can be hard to reverse bad decisions. It can be hard to recover from having failed to anticipate the future. It can be hard not having enough power sockets in hotel rooms. There is an old (but sadly discredited) story that the design of Roman chariots constrained the design of the space shuttle. ItRead… Read more »

Twitter transparency report released

Twitter released its first Transparency Report highlighting the number of times they received: government requests for user information, government requests to withhold content, and DMCA takedown notices from copyright holders. The report shows that the U.S. government has asked Twitter 679 times to reveal user information since January 2012, followed by Japan with 98 andRead… Read more »

Digital democracy: tweeting meetings

I’m giving a talk today at a conference in Norwich for parish and town councils and one of the things I want to do is just to share some really simple ideas on how councils could get some online interactivity going. One of those ideas was to tweet meetings. I asked my network on TwitterRead… Read more »

Hadoop for Law Enforcement: Big Data contributes to public safety

CTOlabs.com, a subsidiary of the technology research, consulting and services firm Crucial Point LLC and a peer site of CTOvision.com, has just published a white paper providing context and use cases on Hadoop For Law Enforcement, an important mission-focused domain ripe for the application of more Big Data solutions. From the report: Big Data, theRead… Read more »

Automating online activities without IT intervention – using web tools to make jobs easier

There’s often lots of small – and not so small – activities that communications teams want to carry out online that would make their jobs easier, but aren’t really tasks to give to IT teams. For example, you may wish to update your agency’s Facebook and Twitter profile pictures when your logo changes, automatically postRead… Read more »

IT Functions of the Future

How IT utility is delivered in the future will be less a technical or technology only decision and more a enterprise strategy. Factors such as Operating Costs (Economics), Mobility, Service Reliability, Flexibility and Risk to the Enterprise will come more into play. This suggests that the backroom strategy topic of organizational design will play anRead… Read more »

5 Agile Project Management Tools

More and more agencies are adopting agile methodologies to designing, building and deploying apps and systems. Agile fundamentally differs from traditional development methodologies such as waterfall. It’s such a radical departure, in fact, that it also requires fundamental changes in how you manage agile projects. This is why PMI recently adopted an Agile Project ManagementRead… Read more »

Five Lessons From Joplin Tornado – Social Media and Disaster Relief

By MICAH L. SIFRY Last week, I had the privilege of talking with Genevieve Williams and David Burton, two of the three authors of “The Use of Social Media for Disaster Recovery,” a 32-page guide built on the experiences they (and their co-author Rebecca Williams) had in the wake of the powerful and destructive tornadosRead… Read more »