Rather than repeat them here, I’ll give you the link: http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/16/gary-reback-why-the-technology-sector-should-care-about-google-books/

Even More Questions About the Google Book Settlement is a post from: Principled Profit

So–do we practice what we preach? Here are some of the things we’re doing to launch the book:

Building Cooperative Marketing Relationships: Practicing What I Preach is a post from: Principled Profit

Sorry—I’m not buying it! Call me naive, but I’m the parent of both a teenage boy and a bit-past-teenaged girl. Among their friends, I see a delightfully high awareness about the importance of an ethical, socially conscious lifestyle, and about the importance of leaving the world better than they found it. And I think that kids raised in the era brought about by the transparency inherent in social media will be more likely, not less, to follow an ethical path.

The study is from a respected ethics organization, the Josephson Ethics Institute. While I’ve long known their work, and respect it, I can only hope they’re wrong this time. Faith in human goodness is part of what keeps me going.

Are Kids Really More Prone to Lie than Previously is a post from: Principled Profit

Today, I went to see that poet friend for the first time since around 1980. We’d been completely out of touch–but about a year ago, a mutual friend tracked my wife down on Facebook. Turns out that mutual friend also convinced my old housemate to join Facebook, where we found each other a month or so ago.

The friend who moved in after him stayed in that apartment after I left, but later moved to Vesey Street, two blocks from the World Trade Center. It was a primitive form of social media that let me know, finally, that she was OK, two weeks after 9/11.

And there are a number of others.

I remember very clearly the first time something like this happened: AOL was still my Internet portal, so that fixes it somewhere in 1994-95. All of a sudden I got an e-mail from a high school friend. Tom and his wife Liz came up to visit (we live four hours apart), attended my wife’s book party in New York, and have generally reentered our lives. As have Lew and Katherine, the friends who connected us with my old housemate. A few months ago, they moved up from New Jersey to two towns away from us in Massachusetts; we hadn’t seen them since a falling-out somewhere around 1989. Now, we’ve seen them several times. In fact, we’re seeing them tomorrow.

Oddly enough, when I’ve searched for old friends, I haven’t had much luck finding them. But quite a few have found me.

I’ve forged or deepened many connections via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and other communities with people I hadn’t known before–but those reconnections from 20 or 30 years in the past are particularly special.

(A slightly different version of this article was published on Technorati under the title Technology Helps Me Cross Time Tunnels to the Distant Past.)

With Social Media, I Can Cross Time Tunnels to the Distant Past is a post from: Principled Profit

These two M.I.T. professors have both made substantial contributions in developing countries, bringing life-changing technology to villages that don’t even have electricity or running water.

Negroponte is the key mover behind One Laptop Per Child, an initiative to develop and distribute rugged but cheap (like $100 per unit) laptops to school children, in 18 countries so far. Quadir convinced Bangladeshi microlending pioneer Grameen Bank (founded by Mohammad Yunnis, who received the Nobel Peace prize for his efforts) to underwrite Grameenphone, a business providing cell phone services to villages with no telephone at all.

Both men spoke at a panel during the Boston Book Fair, coincidentally on Climate Action Day, October 24, 2009. And both have had a major impact.

Negroponte’s rugged, lightweight laptops can be thrown or dropped with no bad consequence, use only three watts of power (he’s aiming for just one watt on a forthcoming redesign), and both the battery and the computer are designed to last at least five years—about double the typical laptop lifespan—and to minimize waste impact when they are finally past their useful life and life extensions such as use as a TV. With no electricity grid, they’re recharged with hand-cranks, solar photovoltaics, or car batteries.

Each laptop comes preloaded with not only productivity software, but also 100 books whose creators have agreed to make their content available. That means that if a village receives 100 laptops, it suddenly has a library of 10,000 titles (a larger collection than many small-town physical libraries in the United States).

These computers are designed directly to foster social change: newly literate school children use satellite wi-fi to access the Internet, learn literacy as well as research skills, and even teach their parents to read. For many of these kids, their first English word is “Google.”

In October, 2009, Uruguay became the first country to get these laptops into the hands of every single school child; Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Peru are among the other countries with a program. Negroponte would love to “take one day of [the cost of war in] Iraq and Afghanistan and do the children in those countries.” In Afghanistan, where many girls are prevented from going to school, the plan he has worked out with the Afghani Minister of Education is to seed the laptops first to girls, so they can learn outside of the classrooms they’re not allowed to attend.

But his vision is much grander: “It would take $30 billion to do every kid in the world. We gave away more than twice that much to AIG.”

Grameen Phone uses a very different business model: funding new small businesses through microlending, and then changing the society as that business rewrites the entire village culture. “Connectivity is productivity,” says Quadir.

In 1993, there was one (land-line) telephone for every 500 Bangladeshis, and 73 percent for the phones were in Dhaka, the capital. Grameen came in and began lending small amounts of capital to entrepreneurs, who provided and operated a village telephone, where residents could rent time whenever they needed to make a call, and paid back the loans out of profits.

The benefits are “inclusive, egalitarian, and immediate,” and the results are astounding. Each 10 percent increase in cell phone penetration corresponds with a .8 percent increase in the country’s Gross Domestic Product. By 2005, the company had 250,000 retailers, 22 million subscribers, and 50 million cell phones (many of them smart phones that bring computing power to these remote villages). It expects to have 5 billion phones in place by 2015, which will be near-total penetration of the population.

Yet the magnitude of change from this initiative may not even be apparent for some time. Rural electrification in the U.S., says Quadir, didn’t happen immediately after the development of electrical utilities. It went to rural areas decades later, when refrigeration made it possible for farmers to store food much longer, and therefore shift perishable food production and distribution from regionally to nationally based.

Telephone service, he says, is “the low-hanging fruit. From the juice of the low-hanging fruit, you get the energy you need to climb the tree and take the higher fruit.”

Negroponte/Quadir: How Laptops and Cell Phones Attack Systemic Poverty in Developing Countries is a post from: Principled Profit

32,000 posts, including three world leaders: UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who got the very first UK post in just as the clock turned midnight–and staffers from President Obama and the ruling party of Spain.

CNN covered it here.

What’s fascinating to me is that organizer Robin Beck thinks 99% of the participating blogs have never written about climate change. I suspect that figure is high. I know that I cover climate change frequently in this space, although it’s certainly not the main focus.

Anyway, a rip-roaring success and hats off to the organizers. I’m glad to have participated. Now the real question is…while those 32,000 bloggers an their hundreds of thousands of readers put some actions into place in their daily lives?

Blog Action Day “one of largest social action events ever held on the web” is a post from: Principled Profit

When I receive a bunch of Twitter follow notices, I first scan them for any people I actually know. Of the remainder, if some include keywords of interest to me (e.g., on the environment, ethics, or marketing), I’m fairly likely to click over and have a look. And I confess, if someone has an exotic name, I may visit just to see where they’re from and who they are. For the rest, I’ll open a few at random.

Today, I opened three. The first had nearly 14,000 followers, and if I were motivated only by greed, I’d see this person as a center of influence and would want to follow in spite of unappealing content. But the Tweet stream was all either spammy-sounding bizop stuff or long lists of people to follow. I didn’t see anything that added value to me (and I wondered if the high number of following/followers had something to do with a robot scheme). As they say in Twitterese, “Fail.”

The next person tweets in German. I know a tiny bit of German and could take the significant time to puzzle out the tweets, but it doesn’t seem worth the effort. Let people who really speak and understand German fluently follow this person.

Third, another Internet marketer but one who intersperses call-to-action tweets with glimpses of the real human being…who engages in dialogue with others that has universal application…who shares highlights from conferences using hashtags to make them easy to follow–someone, in short, who adds value through Twitter. And by coincidence, this person also has about 14,000 followers, and probably a lot more legitimacy to them than the first person I checked out.

Yes this one I followed. I would have followed back even if only 100 were following this person.

As for those whose profile I didn’t happen to click on…they can get my attention with an @ message or DM, and I’ll take a look. If I like what I see, I’ll happily follow.

Twitter: More on Why I Often Don’t Follow Back is a post from: Principled Profit

As someone who has been writing and speaking about business ethics for seven years, I applaud this motto. But I question its authenticity as it applies to some of Google’s actions. In other words, I see Google occasionally violating the motto with at least three sets of policies that–intentionally or not–certainly do evil.

On its corporate information page, Google defines what it means by “don’t be evil”:

* We don’t allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where they are shown. And we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find – so it’s possible that certain searches won’t lead to any ads at all.
* We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy. We don’t accept pop-up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you’ve requested. We’ve found that text ads that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Any advertiser, whether small or large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium.
* Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a “Sponsored Link,” so it does not compromise the integrity of our search results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.

These are good, as far as they go. And Google has done a whole lot of other things right—starting with creating a fabulous user experience. Anyone who remembers the awful interfaces, slow and inaccurate search results, and general clumsiness of pre-Google search tools is grateful for Google’s existence. I got on the Internet in 1994, and I certainly count myself among those who appreciate what Google did for search. The AdWords/AdSense program is another example of reinventing the paradigm and doing it a good bit better, and some of the newer modules also make things easier for anyone doing research. Google’s real mission seems to be to make the world’s body of knowledge accessible on line, in seconds. In many ways, that’s a worthy goal. But on ethics grounds, Google has had some real shortcomings.

Sidewiki, as I understand it, allows users who have the Google Toolbar installed to comment, unmoderated, in an area that appears on the left side of the webpage–but those comments are only visible to others who have the Toolbar installed! Among the many evils this can lead to: spamming, blocking site owners’ sources of revenue (or even replacing them with links that benefit those commenting), loss of control over one’s own website, black hat search technique, slander of site owners or contributors, unethical business practices such as deceptive advertising, and even something as simple as wrecking the aesthetic and content integrity of a carefully designed website…all in a hijacked section of the page that may not even be visible to the site owner, if he/she doesn’t happen to install the toolbar.

I was alerted to the Sidewiki problem through two recent blogs by Paul Myers on Talkbiz. The first discusses the software and its vast potential for misuse. And the second offers site owners some possible protection, as well as a suggestion to Google about how to enable the useful parts of the feature without compromising site integrity or forcing site owners to agree to onerous privacy terms:

When someone wishes to read comments or discussion about a site they’re visiting, enable them to open a separate browser tab, program window or other display option that shows previous comments and allows them to add their own.

This is not a technically difficult change to the program, certainly. It is consistent with the goal of enabling broader visitor interaction in a time- and context-appropriate fashion.

And it respects the rights of site owners.

Google can’t hep being aware of these controversies. Sop how can it claim to abide by “don’t be evil”?

Sidewiki Makes Me Question Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” Mantra is a post from: Principled Profit

Some of this may sound harsh. Please keep in mind that as a somewhat public figure, I am absolutely bombarded with messages not only on Twitter but through many other channels. I have to cope with about 300 emails on a typical day, plus a three-inch stack of postal mail, plus the 1454 people I’m following on Twitter. 2390 are following me, and I recognize the disparity—but I also do have a business to run, a family to be with, and a physical need to be off the computer for half an hour or so after I’ve been on for about an hour.

I did seven Tweets outlining my policy, and I think they’re worth repeating here (slightly modified with the benefit of “but I MEANT to say” hindsight and spelling out the contractions/not needing to cram it into 140 characters):

1. I don’t follow you just because you follow me (on Facebook and LInkedIn, BTW, I pretty much do). I check out a few each profiles from new followers day (somewhat randomly, but if your follow notice includes a keyword I pay attention to—see #5, below—it ups the odds substantially). If your feeds interest me, I follow. I don’t unfollow you for not following back, since I followed you in the first place because I found your profile interesting and not because I expected reciprocity. And I don’t track whether or not you unfollowed me; it doesn’t matter in the way I sue Twitter unless you’re someone I have an actual friendship with.

2. You can drastically increase odds that I follow back by sending me an @ (NOT a spam), naming me in #followfriday, or Retweeting me; this will get me to look at your profile .

3. Having watched with horror as spammers killed e-mail, I zealously protect Twitter as useful tool. Spam me and I make it public/block/report. (I will tolerate a clueless auto-DM when I follow, unless it links to something scummy. If your auto DM or an @ message sends me to a game-the-twitter-system-get-more-followers site, porn, dating or gambling site, I’m gone. If you did it as other than an auto-DM on follow, I report and block you too.

4. The first time your account gets hijacked and you involuntarily spam me with “join my mafia family,” I cut you slack and tell you I’m not interested. If it happens again, I assume you’re not smart enough to change your password and that spammers will bother me through you. At that point, I block you.

5. I tend to follow: Green/eco/ethical, soft-sell marketers, book publishers and authors, social media people, folks into progressive social change, quoters, people who post interesting links, people who tweet leads from reporters looking for sources. If you fall into one of these categories and you @ me telling me so, I’ll certainly click on over for a look.

6. I always like to say that I became a writer because I’m interested in almost everything, but don’t forget the almost part. If you have a great profile about stuff that I’m simply not interseted in, now matter how good it is, I won’t follow. A few subjects I find uninteresting: online gaming, hard-sell interruption marketing, get-rich-quick stuff, football, super-techie computer coding…and schemes to get more followers you haven’t earned.

7. I tend to follow people who offer a mix of glimpses into their personal lives, interesting tidbids they find online, dialogue with the community, and no more than 20% blatant promotion. And I try to keep my own Tweets in this pattern. I try to be helpful, friendly, useful in my Tweets. Follow me because you like my posts, not to game the system with one more well-connected follower.

Seven Keys to Get Me to Follow You on Twitter and Other Twitter Etiquette Tips is a post from: Principled Profit

George gave me permission to share his very informative handout: his slides are at http://georgekao.com/socialslides

I also want to share a few of the takeaways

* Find the actions that provide the greatest benefit for the least work (he lists many of these in the slides)
* Balance the human and the professional/expert
* Find easy ways to show you care, like spending one second to click and say you like a comment on Facebook
* Multiple approaches increase likelihood of connecting
* Twitter is not only indexed by Twitter, but searchable on Google–BIG reach! Easy way to spread ideas
* Make your last comment of the day (or in a batch of posts) count–it has more staying power because it will be at the top of your page all night

This was the fourth call with George I’ve been on since June. I always learn so much! In fact, it was the incredible value of his content that made me reach out to him, form a friendship (we and our wives had dinner when I was in San Francisco this summer) and partner with him to deliver this call to my network.

I’m going to be participating in his 12-session coaching program on social media, and also his program on running webinars for fun and profit, and eagerly looking forward to both. I have *never* encountered a better social media trainer, and I’m an avid consumer of coaching calls.

You may want to as well. There’s a signup link at the end of the slides. Each course is usually $720, but I’ve arranged a discount–you can learn form this “Jedi Master of Social Media” (my term–he’s much too modest) for $480. Mention my name. If you order both of George’s programs (normally $1440) with the one-payment option, it’s $920. Mention my name (Shel Horowitz), and George will paypal you a $200 rebate on this double package.

Full disclosure: yes, I make a commission on this. But more importantly, you get a tremendous education in social media that can knock months or years off your learning curve, set you on the path to profitability, and save you hours per week.

Will I see you on the calls?

George Kao’s Social Media Secrets: Notes From the Call is a post from: Principled Profit