55th Grammy Awards
The annual Grammy Award is the most coveted award for musicians.
This year’s winners represent the best in new and old artists from around the world who have made an impression in the United States.
As a side note, the Latin music market in the United States is so large they have their own separate Latin Grammy Awards. Continue reading
Windows 8 ad with Payal Balse and Prosenjit Kundu
Microsoft has a series of international ads for Windows 8 including this one based on a Bollywood movie.
The dancers use dance moves to show how easy Windows 8 is.
Yahoo and Microsoft selling data to political parties
by Lois Beckett ProPublica – Yahoo and Microsoft are using names, Zip codes and other registration information that users provide when they sign up for free email and other services.
The Web giants provide users no notification that their information is being used for political targeting. Continue reading
Hit them with your best shot, Pat Benatar
Put the important stuff on Page One of your musicians website.
People want to listen to and watch music – put your best songs and videos right on the front page.
Make sure the music starts within 5 seconds. Check out the Pat Benatar video on Vevo after the break. The music doesn’t start until 1:20 after a 15 second advertisement. Why are they giving us 60 seconds of crowd shots?
You have about 5 seconds tops to keep the viewer’s attention, unless you are a # 1 star. Then you might have maybe 10 seconds. Most people have moved on to another site.
Make sure the music player works on all browsers including Apple iOS (iPhone, iPad, and iPod).
Host your videos on an Apple compatible site, not YouTube. Apple supports the H.264 video codec. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be on YouTube because you must be there. YouTube, however, will clutter your website with their advertising messages which is what you want to avoid.
Continue reading
TripAdvisor uses Facebook personal information in webpages (click for larger image)
It shocked me when a friend told me my picture and travel history was on the TripAdvisor web page.
It was chilling and intriguing to look at the map of my mostly business travel from the 1980s and 1990s. Things are a lot quieter around here now.
How did TripAdvisor know where I had been?
Were they data-mining my old credit card records? Was the CIA keeping a file on me?
The truth is somewhat simpler – I gave it to Facebook.
Facebook is now allowing business pages and apps to use our personal information in advertising. This is part of their new efforts to monetize the free site. You do have control over your privacy but there are new places turn off the flow of private data.
Personal information can leak out of Facebook beyond the usual settings in “Privacy.” Continue reading
Firefox 4.0 beta
The ability of advertisers to spy on you will be limited in Firefox and Chrome soon.
As we wrote in Why you don’t always get the best price, your computer is watching you and telling vendors the highest price you will pay.
It’s extremely annoying and an invasion of privacy.
Washington Post – Mozilla announced it will put a do-not-track feature in its Firefox browser to allow users to opt-out of online behavioral advertising.
The company has said it does not know whether the feature, an HTTP header, will ship with Firefox 4.0. Mozilla Technology and Privacy Officer Alex Fowler posted an outline of the feature to his personal blog on Sunday, explaining the background of the feature and how the company thinks it will affect users. “We believe the header-based approach has the potential to be better for the web in the long run because it is a clearer and more universal opt-out mechanism than cookies or blacklists,” Fowler wrote.
Politico is reporting that Google Chrome will implement a similar feature today, in the form of an extension called “Keep My Opt-Outs,” based on the National Advertising Initiative’s existing opt-out tool.