Here are some articles and commentary related to managing your Facebook privacy settings:

What Does Facebook’s Privacy Transition Mean For You?
(Comprehensive guide to the settings)

Facebook’s New Privacy Changes: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (EFF‘s article on the new changes)

Facebook Privacy In Transition – But Where Is It Heading? (ACLU article on the new changes)

I came across this article on developing a shopping cart by a guy who makes and sells custom bingo card creator software. He spent a great deal of time examining his shopping cart from the customer’s viewpoint. He does get into some code, but the discussion beforehand is very useful. Basically, you want to take the customer from the decision to buy (checkout) to payment as quickly as possible. You must make it easy for them to buy from you – ask them for anything not essential and it will kill your conversion rate.

Developing A Shopping Cart

If you’re going to commit a crime (or at least do something fraudulent), you might want to consider the evidence you’ve left all over the internet.

Yesterday a popular internet marketer and blogger announced he was suing a Google employee for fraudulent use of a trademarked name and suspected use of proprietary account information.

Jeremy Schoemaker is well-known on the internet as Shoemoney – a name he has trademarked.  Several months ago he noticed that someone was running ads on Google’s AdWords ad service using his trademarked name.

Apparently he contacted Google’s Adwords team to report the violation, but did not get anywhere.  He next was able to get a court order that required the person’s webhost to reveal the person’s identity.

He then contacted the person and asked them to stop. They did not.

Now we get to the good part.

Enter Facebook and Google Cached Pages.

Apparently some friends of Shoemoney found the guy on Facebook and noticed that he had several other friends who openly shared that they worked for the Google Adwords team.

Using a cached page search on Google, Shoemoney saw that this person had indeed also listed himself as working for Google Adwords, but had removed the information from his active page.

Well, as any Google employee should know, the internet never forgets.

The really good part is that the trademark violator also revealed that his ad account settings were remarkably similar the settings that Shoemoney had set up.

Generally, this would be unlikely since there are so many variables to control.  This likely means that the employee accessed data under Shoemoney’s account that is supposed to be strictly confidential.

So, if you’re thinking about doing something you really don’t want anyone else to know about, then maybe Facebook isn’t for you.

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines provide a great starting point on how to optimize your site for Google.  However, it fails to mention one aspect of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that has recently become much more important in getting your site to rank well – Branding.

On January 18th, 2009, Google updated its search engine to put a much higher emphasis on name brands.  This was not entirely unexpected – last year, Google CEO Eric Schmidt made some comments about branding and how it can be used by Google to help filter out sites of low value.

In an interview in October, 2008, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said,

The internet is fast becoming a “cesspool” where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted.

“Brands are the solution, not the problem,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”

“Brand affinity is clearly hard wired,” he said. “It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.”

After the update, SEO expert Aaron Wall reported that several well known brands were now showing up in the top 10 search results for generic keyword searches in their markets.  

For example, prior to the January update, searching on “airline tickets” did not show any of the major airlines, but only travel sites and others that were optimized for that phrase.  After the update, major airlines suddenly jumped up in the results for that same search.

Aaron also noted that RadioShack.com now shows up for the search term electronics and Hallmark.com now shows up when searching for gifts.  Prior to the update, these sites were much lower on the search results.

Why Do Brands Help Filter Out The Garbage?
One of Google’s biggest challenges is to filter out spam sites from those that contain real value for the public.  These spam sites are essentially set up to display ads or direct searchers to another site by way of an affiliate link.  These sites generally do not add substantial value to the internet and often frustrate users.  

A brand that is associated with a market takes time to build and promote and likely some monetary investment.  Most spam site creators or affiliate marketers are not willing to do any of these. Once Google can associate a brand name with a market, the link could be made to related keywords.

Note here that I’m not talking about ranking your site for some unique name or phrase you were able to come up with – that’s actually pretty easy.   The goal here is for your site to rank for a market or niche related keyword without you specifically optimizing for that keyword.  

When this happens you know Google has associated your brand with your market.

OK, So What Do I Do Now?
Well, when it comes to your website, you should definitely still follow the webmaster guidelines and other known SEO strategies.  These are no less important, especially if you don’t yet have an established brand.  These aspects of SEO help link your brand to your market.  

For the long-term, you should think about branding your business as a whole.  Branding is not something I can cover here completely, but here are some suggestions to get you going:

• Thoroughly research your market and think of ways to dominate it. This may require you to rethink your business and narrow your niche or specialize.
• Be more than just a business with a website – be active in your niche via trade-shows and conferences. Establish a tribe of dedicated followers.
• Build a great looking website that establishes credibility among peers and other media. Yes, you might just have to spend some money.
• Do not shy away from making waves – if you are bland and boring, no one will notice you.
• Once you have a logo (probably not one designed by you or your cousin Joe) be sure to use it consistently.
• Create a useful and free version of your product or provide lots of quality information for public access on your site. This will encourage people to link to your site naturally.

Again, these are just a few tips to get you thinking about branding. Remember, this is not an overnight process, so the sooner you get started, the better.  Another resource I can recommend is 48 Days.net.  This site is packed with great advice on building a business.  There is even a group centered around Branding and Positioning.

Not long ago, a client called me about some domain names he had tried to register.  He said that a few domains he had checked on several days earlier ago were no longer available, but had been available when he first checked on them.  He thought it was odd that this had happened for several domains and wondered if it was just a coincidence.

I told him this was a real problem and that he was not just imagining things.  Although I this had not ever happened to me, I did know about this problem.

I asked him how he was checking on the availability of the names and he had been on a website I had not heard of before, which supposedly let you search for available domains.  I told him this website was likely logging the domains being searched for and were registering ones they thought might be valuable before the searcher could register them.

Back in October of 2007, the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee issued an advisory on Domain Name Front Running, a practice of registering a domain name that someone has checked on before the searcher can register it themselves.

This practice is usually done as part of a Domain Tasting operation.  Domain Tasting involves testing to see whether or not a domain is valuable in terms of search engine traffic.

The advisory was issued mostly as a warning because hard evidence of it happening has been very hard to get.  (I guess it’s hard to get anyone to admit to being sleazy).

In the rest of this article, I will give you some ways to avoid this problem…read on for the details.

How To Avoid Being A Victim

Register Quickly

This is really the only way to prevent someone from stealing a domain name idea from you.

If you find an available name you like, go ahead and register it.    With 1 year registrations costing less than $10, in the grand scheme of things it’s really inexpensive.

If you decide within 5 days of registering a domain name that you really don’t want it, you can ask your registrar to cancel the domain name and get a refund. Most registrars should do this with no problem, though you are unlikely to get back a non-refundable ICANN registration fee ($0.20).

Don’t Check For Domain Names Using Your Browser

When you enter a non-registered domain name in your browser’s address bar, it usually comes back with an “Address Not Found” error.  These errors are logged at your ISP and there is evidence that some ISPs are selling this information. The buyers use this data to possibly find valuable domain names to purchase.

Use A Reputable Domain Registrar
Personally I use GoDaddy and Moniker to register names.  While I cannot say these two companies have never participated in domain front running, I have not had a domain registered from under me.  I would still advise registering a name you like rather quickly just to be safe.

Using these techniques, you should be able to avoid being a victim of domain name front running.

In New York, as in most states, when you make a purchase online from an out of state vendor, you are supposed to pay sales tax on those products directly to your state, assuming you took delivery of the items in your state.  Of course nobody does this – I doubt most people even know you are required to.  It’s also nearly impossible to enforce since companies do not have to collect sales tax for states in which they do not have a physical presence.

Until now…

According to this article, Amazon has lost a lawsuit which requires them to collect sales tax on purchases shipped to New York.  The state of New York realized that Amazon ships tons of merchandise to New York and the state is not getting any sales tax on it.  Since they know it would be impossible to enforce existing tax law and go after each purchaser, they decided to go after the source – in this case Amazon, which is an out of state company.

How did the state of New York justify collecting sales tax from an out of state company?  They claim that Amazon affiliates in New York constitute the state conducting business in the state.  An affiliate is a person who creates a link on their website to Amazon for products that Amazon sells.  When a customer clicks on the affiliate link and buys from Amazon, the affiliate gets a small commission.  So, New York reasons that these affiliates are agents located in the state of New York and thus constitute Amazon’s “physical” presence in the state.

New York based businesses, especially bookstores, seem to be happy about this because now New York customers of Amazon will have to pay the same sales tax as if they bought from a local store.  I know that many people buy from Amazon because they do not have to pay sales tax (even if they are required to by state law).

Apparently the state of New York stands to collect 50 MILLION dollars in sales tax over the next 2 years from sales made through Amazon.

I suppose Amazon is probably weighing whether or not their affiliate programs are worth the effort.

Seth Godin has a great post regarding marketing lessons you can learn from the U.S. Presidential Election.

Read Seth’s thoughts on the marketing involved in the election.

The Phone Call
I was working at a client’s office today, taking care of several I.T. related issues that only us nerds find interesting.  Around 2pm, my cell phone rang – it was Wayne, another one of my clients.

Wayne only calls me when he either wants to talk about airplanes or if something is wrong.

Today was not an airplane day.

Wayne wanted to know if the clicking noise coming from the hard drive and the “disk not found” error message on the screen meant that his data was gone.  I told him most likely, unless he was willing to pay a data recovery company to physically recover the data.

I could tell from the silence that he had hoped I would have better news.  He then told me that ALL of his pictures of his daughter were on that drive – from birth up to 7 years.  He had emailed many of them out over the years, but had never backed them up.

I wish Wayne’s story was rare and unique, but it’s not.  In the last few months, I’ve personally come across several incidents where backing up the data would have prevented a very painful experience.  One was a church that even had a tape backup system in place that wasn’t even being used.

A friend of mine recently consulted a small business that nearly lost the ability to run their business because of a computer issue.  A single computer, not backed up at all, was used in the day to day operations of the business.

Backing Up Is(n’t) Hard To Do
Backing up your data in the 21st century is easier than ever.  Here is a short summary of options suitable for non-computer geeks:

• One-Touch Backup External Drive – this is an external hard drive that connects to your computer via USB or Firewire and along with some software, backs up your data with the touch of a button on the device.
• Online Backup – with the wide availability of high-speed (Broadband) internet, dozens of companies are now offering free or inexpensive online storage.  With some you can even configure the backups to happen automatically.
• Burning CDs / DVDs – if your computer has a CD or DVD burner installed (and most sold in the last few years do), you can periodically burn your data to a disc (and store them in a fireproof safe).

Pay Now or Pay More Later
Wayne called around to see how much a data recovery would cost – the price ranged significantly from around $450 to $2500.  With any of these, there is no guarantee the data will actually be recovered.  If you went with a mid-price range service (I’m not sure I’d go with the lowest…), you’d still be paying many times the cost of the above options.

With more and more of our lives and businesses being digitized, we run the risk of having a devastating loss than can be totally avoidable.

Now, go forth and back up thy data.