"Google refuses to follow the standards of objective and straightforward journalism and guess what… journalism has started to die.  Google unilaterally decides to digitize every single book they can get their hands on around the world without the copyright owners’ permission… and guess what… the book publishing industry turns into a steep downward cycle… if not a tail spin. 

Newspapers are all selling out, if not giving up.

Google pays $1.65 billion for a start up company called YouTube, that, by and large, uses stolen property to attract its customers.  Technology companies agree to censor content in China while the Chinese government applauds the fact that its piracy rate is now only slightly above the 80% level.  Kids get thrown out of fraternities, or social clubs, if they are found actually paying for music or movies they download online… let alone using e-mail.  These are no longer socially acceptable practices… or hip. 

Obnoxious and intrusive advertising smears all of our online lives.  Who produces these pop-up and banner ads anyway?  The whole advertising industry has caved into the “science” of it all… and it’s supposed to strike a delicate balance between both science and art.  Always has.”

George P. Riddick, III
Chairman/CEO
Imageline, Inc.

(via SeekingAlpha)

“I’ve been reluctant to discuss one of the findings from our eyetracking research because the conclusion is that unethical design pays off.  In 1997, I chose to suppress a similar finding: users tend to click on banner ads that look like dialog boxes, complete with fake OK and Cancel buttons.  Of course, instead of being an actual system message—such as ‘Your Internet Connection Is Not Optimized’—the banner is just a picture of a dialog box, and clicking its close box doesn’t dismiss it, but rather takes users to the advertiser’s site.

Deceptive, unethical, and #3 among the most-hated advertising techniques.  Still, fake dialog boxes got many more clicks than regular banners, which users had already started to ignore in 1997.  After much soul-searching, I’ve now decided to take a different approach and publish our new findings, despite their ethical implications...”

Jakob Nielsen

“Large-scale business adoption of Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure applications, such as Skype, will only occur when these new technologies can survive comparison with established utilities. Society has demanded that basic services—water, phone, electricity, roads, and so on—must adhere to certain levels of reliability and availability. 

Likewise, business users expect their software infrastructure to provide high reliability, especially in mission-critical domains… Such high-profile failures make consumers and businesses wary of adopting Enterprise 2.0 tools.”

Michael Krigsman

“Chances are, the interactive marketing director doesn’t include their needs in a position request for search engine marketing, and so HR is frequently left to its own devices.

In some regards, the hiring department seems to have surpassed their Internet Marketing colleagues.  While search advertisers forever ponder pay per action, Indeed.com clients are experimenting with a PPA beta: pay-per-applicant, that is.  Oh, and forget cost per acquisition, each firm has a very well-defined CPH, or cost-per-hire… As with all industries, it is only a matter of time before an underserved market is met with a product.  And in this case, one just might say that Indeed.com is this sector’s Google.”

Sara Holoubek
Contributing Editor
DM News SearchBuzz

“The real point is leverage.  Google is using YouTube as an enormous amplifier of market power.  While big media is still searching for leverage at the core, Google is mastering edge leverage.

Of course, then this leverage can go on to redefine the business models of players along the value chain—in Google’s favour.

One way to do so is by forcing a rights shift upon players with largely obsolete business models, built on older, hugely inefficient kinds of property rights.

That’s Google’s strategy—it’s about edge leverage creating enormous amounts of space for new strategic moves in a industry bereft of any kind of strategic imagination.”

Umair Haque
BubbleGeneration.com

Let’s ‘blue sky’ a bit.  If you had a few hundred thousand bucks in cash available to you (you, the savvy Internet entrepreneur who may have already built and cashed out on opportunities in affiliate marketing, domaining, etc.) and nothing but blue sky (your personal talents, peer network, and fire-in-belly) what would you strike out on? 

Many big players in domaining, like Frank Shilling, suggest that it’s NOT too late to buy domains and monetize them.  How?  Advertising arbitrage?  By building defensible Web properties with low overhead and monetizing through multiple advertising revenue streams?  Which ones?  How might you use live trading exchanges like LeadPoint.com (a lead generation exchange) and RightMedia?

Or would you just take your money and invest in a low risk mutual fund?  Has the window of opportunity closed on plays like TrafficStrategies (now part of Linkshare), AffiliateFuel (Experian), MeziMedia (ValueClick) and MediaWhiz (yet to be acquired)?

How would you spend that money, futurist Sam Harrleson?  Kris Jones?  Heather Paulson?  Andy Hagans?