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Apple Pays Off Nick From ThinkSecret

After a long and tumultuous struggle between Nick from Think Secret and Apple, they’ve resolved their issues and Think Secret will be publishing no longer.

This is especially interesting to me because I’ve been a reader of Think Secret for many years, essentially since the site started, and followed the lawsuit from its genesis to now. Nick is actually a few years younger than I am, is still in college, so seeing him go up against a giant company like Apple is interesting for me since I’ve enjoyed his reporting over the years.

As part of the press release that Think Secret posted, it said that a “positive solution” had been reached for both sides. To me, that means the lawsuit has been dropped and perhaps Nick got a payoff to stop writing. I don’t know what type of payoff, perhaps Apple paid his legal fees plus some cash, but maybe it was larger than that. Maybe once the EFF got behind Nick’s case Apple realized they were going to lose, so they decided to turn the tables and stop that from happening. If Nick won then other rumor sites could safely pursue information inside of a protective Apple NDA without worrying about the legal consequences, so by Apple paying off Nick it stopped the forthcoming rumor flood.

Ars Technica mirrors my sentiments in that they also believe he got a nice payday:

“Apple was faced with losing the case and having to pay attorney’s fees,” explained Opsahl, which is likely part of the reason why it decided to settle instead of continuing to pursue it. As for Ciarelli, “We understand that Nick is very satisfied with the outcome of the case,” Opsahl said. “We hope that Apple learns a lesson over this.”

With a wad of cash in his pocket and some real journalistic work experience behind him, Nick can no move forward and has many opportunities to choose from. Of course those opportunities don’t include writing about Apple rumors, but there could be far worse outcomes to this story.

Reputation Management

Scenario: Translucent, Inc. had an image problem. They wanted their customers to understand what they stood for, but were unable to communicate their values effectively. At one point a major glitch occurred in their best selling product and it took months for the PR manager to set things straight.

[Read more…] about Reputation Management

Google To Expand Its Wireless Plans?

It’s astounding to me to think about Google and then picture them buying Sprint, a “real company” in my eyes. Google’s a search company and Sprint makes things and builds things and has advertising and all the things “real companies” seem to have. But to put things in perspective, Google has a market cap of over $200 billion which is more than 4x the market cap of Sprint Nextel, so Google is certainly a larger company.

Google’s Open Handset Alliance announced last week had a lot of hand-waiving and fun illustrations, but was short on actual product. Phones running Google’s Android platform are nearly a year away from being in consumer’s hands, so there are a lot of questions still up in the air. If Google were to acquire Sprint Nextel, it would certainly give more credibility to their hand in the poker game of their cellphone “alliance” and might open up some additional avenues in regards to generating revenue.

So many people hate the telecom industry and cable companies that if Google were to purchase Sprint and use their infrastructure to build out a high-speed, long-distance wireless network, I can see many people ditching Comcast or TimeWarner and jumping on the Google bandwagon. Broadband pipes are so locally saturated in the major metropolitan areas that wireless alternatives might be a good fit for people fed up with lobbyists having a larger impact on their cable companies then their own petitions. Personally I’d love to see Google sell a WiMAX set-top widget that would coordinate with a cellphone widget to push WiMAX speeds to me wherever I am. Unfortunately with Google pursuing the handset alliance it seems if these pipe dreams (no pun intended) come true, iPhone users will be left out in the cold. At least until a 3G iPhone appears and by then anything is possible.

Nobody Cares About Smart Searching

The latest buzz in the search world is that Yahoo! has unveiled their new Search Assist functionality which is probably an attempt to reclaim the search crown that Google forcefully took many years ago.

“That sums up Yahoo! Search in a nutshell; the whole point is we want to get you from “to do” to “done.” Whatever it is you want to do: research a topic, find a website, plan a vacation, research a medical condition, view a funny video, or any of the other billions of queries we get from users — their intents expressed via a few keywords in a search box.”

Yahoo!’s new Search Assist feature is essentially a metadata browser that pulls up related phrases and information that may be useful to someone who has just entered a query. They show how it automatically drops in live Yahoo! Videos, Flickr images, and more right into your search results list, but how does this actually help them take down Google? Google is a verb, their search algorithm and datastore are far superior to Yahoo!’s, and to prove it it was only back in 2004 that Yahoo! decided not to use Google anymore for their own search results, because prior to then for a few years, they used Google. Yahoo! has been paying the price of their initial folly for awhile now (the folly being that “search” is not just another feature tacked onto their portal like “stocks” and “horoscopes” and is a utility in its own right) and this is their attempt to pull some users away from Google’s grasp.

The problem is that this doesn’t solve The Problem and that would be answering people’s questions in a real life scenario — who cares about videos and images when I just want an answer? To show an example, a commenter brought up this comparison:

  • “Sprint store near glendale arizona” on Google
  • “Sprint store near glendale arizona” on Yahoo!

See the difference? Google identifies what I’m trying to find and helps me solve the problem complete with a map. Yahoo! doesn’t help me find anything. Screw the Search Assist and the videos and the images, just solve my problem. And Google does that just fine.

The Corporate Blogging Genome

There have been a number of notable articles in recent years about corporate blogging, but most of them suffer from the same problem that blogging has always had: it’s different to help a large group of people understand concepts that are fuzzy and inconsistent. The business community generally accepts that corporate blogging is here to stay, but what they mean by “corporate blogging” can differ wildly from one individual to another.

While I feel that this situation is normal (and to some extent, probably desirable), I thought it might be interesting to try to impose some clarity onto the situation, based on my understanding of corporate blogging as I’ve watched it evolve in the past several years. With that in mind, I present the Corporate Blogging Genome, a simple way to classify and identify corporate blogs by their nature and type.

(Please don’t take this too seriously — this is definitely a mental exercise more than a proposed scheme for pigeonholing the varied and complicated world of corporate blogging!)

How It Works

There are four basic parameters (Audience, Emphasis, Control, and Formality), each of which has two possible options (e.g., a corporate blog’s target audience can be Internal or External).

Once you’ve identified where your corporate blog falls within each of those four parameters, you’ll take the first letter of each of your choices and string them together into a single four-letter code.

That code is your Corporate Blogging Genome. It won’t directly boost sales or seal your exist strategy, but it will help you understand your blog and focus your efforts accordingly, which can have great indirect benefits on your business.

On to the details!

Audience: Employees or Public?

The most important question (and unfortunately one of the least asked) is “Who is the blog for?”

  • Employees: Knowledge blogs, project blogs, internal goof-off blogs, etc., all fall into this category.
  • Public: Primarily oriented toward expressing something within the company (announcements, ideas, opinions, etc.) to the outside world.

Control: Open or Closed?

Companies can get understandably nervous about spilling their guts online, so some blogs are definitely more tightly controlled than others.

  • Open: Open blogs can generally be edited by a large group of people (sometimes the entire staff), giving everyone the ability to share their ideas.
  • Closed: Closed blogs are limited to a very small group or a single individual, typically the CEO or a marketing/PR person. (This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and can often be an appropriate choice for a company.)

Emphasis: Random or Targeted?

Blogs can cover almost any subject imaginable, so providing some clear (or intentionally unclear!) direction is essential for keeping things on the right track.

  • Random: Free-form blog that can cover any subject under the sun: movies, politics, funny videos, etc.
  • Targeted: These blogs focus on specific subjects, typically related to the company (e.g., industry articles) or a specific context within the company (e.g., a particular project)

Formality: Formal or Casual?

Just because it has a goofy name like “blog” doesn’t mean it has to be sloppy and haphazard! In recent years, blogs have become a signficant source of high-quality information and resources, in part because many of them have begun to regard themselves more formally, taking the time to perform research and encourage high-quality writing.

  • Formal: Features clear, well-written, and generally fact-oriented articles.
  • Casual: Characterized by brief, loosely-written, and often opinionated posts.

So, what are you?

At Forty, our blog has evolved over the years, but is currently optimized as a POTF:

  • Public: It’s geared toward business owners, rather than for our internal staff.
  • Open: All employees are able to post articles to it.
  • Targeted: We’ve removed all articles not related to issues faced by business owners, and that’s what we’ll be writing about in the future.
  • Formal: We put a lot of time and effort into our articles, rather than just dashing them off.

(That certainly doesn’t mean that POTF is any kind of ideal — it’s just what we happen to do.)

How would you categorize your company’s blog?