Today's New York Times featured a story on what is considered Fair Use on the web.Specifically, they focused on news organizations pushing back on services that aggregate their content. This is not a new argument; since the dawn of the web there has been a struggle over what constitutes fair use. Fo...

This week, Content Matters caught up with e-marketing thought leader David Meerman Scott. David is a highly sought-after speaker and is author of the "The New Rules of Marketing and PR" and "Cashing In With Content". His newest book, World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to ...

The past two days have been a lot of fun. We launched Alacra Pulse Wednesday morning and it's been a busy couple of days. Yesterday was a whirlwind for me. I woke up with adrenaline racing, which quickly turned to "what if..." anxiety during the commute then back to an adrenaline rush the rest of th...

Newspapers had a dreadful year in 2008. So, have they hit rock bottom or are they just beginning their decline? To find out, I caught up with Ken Doctor earlier this week. Ken Doctor is author of the Content Bridges blog and is a leading authority on the newspaper industry. Ken had a 21-year career ...

The central reason that Twitter is hard to spam is that it's all based on followers. Marketers who have tried to use Twitter to blast their marketing message have found it difficult, because no one is likely to follow them. So, there have been a bunch of methods spammers have used to trick users int...

The first panel discussion of the day at SIIA was entitled "Sink or Swim: How do you Grow an Information Business Now?"The moderator was, somewhat ironically, Kevin English, SVP at Satyam, a company that is doing more sinking than swimming right now. The panelists were Vanity Fair writer (and Newser...

As we approach year-end, it's time to start thinking about predictions for 2009. My main prediction is that many people will be making predictions and most of them will be astonishingly inaccurate. But before I get to that, this year I'd like to do a closing post on 2008. I would guess that I'm not ...

As others have pointed out, there were clearly signs that something was wrong with Bernard Madoff's returns to those who care to do the required due diligence. But beyond that, there are lessons to be learned, particularly for individual investors. First, I think individual investors tend to fall in...

While marketers flounder about looking for a business model for the use of Twitter, I've seen some recent viral examples where Twitter was used for the common good. In both of these instances the network effect of Twitter made a huge impact. The first example was the use of Twitter to help identify ...

Barry Ritholtz points out the hype and spin in the media coverage of Black Friday. Journalism 101 instructs writers to understand your sources and what their motivation may be. But the media often don't seem to let that get in the way of a good story. Much of the reporting of Black Friday focused on...