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Spend 36 Hours with Lorrie Thomas, The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course: Online Marketing!

Nathaniel Hansen, CEO of The Socializers, (traveling in Athens, Greece) caught up with Lorrie Thomas, CEO of Web Marketing Therapy (traveling in Austin, TX) today for a quick interview on the release of her new book The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course: Online Marketing.

1. What’s one of your favorite Internet Marketing tips from your new book released today, Lorrie?

My #1 tip from my online marketing book is the healthy reminder that it is not all the geeky-cool wild web tools out there, it is HOW we use the tools strategically to make and grow relationships. At the end of the day, marketing truly means making relationships. This reminder is our compass that heps us choose the social web tools and decide how to use them.

2. What do you see in 2011 in the world of the Internet and social networks?

For 2011, I see a smarter use of social networking. The use of social networking as an interactive Rolodex will continue, however, community development, service and collaboration will explode. People seem to finally get that social web tools merely amplify traditional networking we do live 🙂

3. I hear that this book is a course and the reader can actually take an online test for certification upon completing the book. Say more!

The 36 Hour Course to Online Marketing does have an online exam that can get readers a certificate in online marketing! There are 100 quiz questions (instructions of where to take them online are in the book) and it is such a smart way to grade your comprehension and boost your resume! McGraw-Hill has been a wonderful partner in this book process and their certificates are such a nice bonus.

4. What conference(s) do you recommend attending in 2011?

As the CEO of a virtual company, I first recommend attending every webinar you can to get the most bang for your buck. Web Marketing has a channel on BrightTalk.com and I’m launching a 36 Hour Online Marketing channel this year too. Devour every Hubspot webinar you can! I am attending the eMarketing conference in SF, Social Media week in SF and RISE Global in Austin live this year, check all those out!

5. Love seems to be a BIG theme lately in your posts. Any thoughts on how Love is important in the world of Internet Markting?

Ah, love :). When marketers love their current and prospective customers, everything falls into place. Love keeps us ethical, boosts how well we communicate and keeps things gentle. May we all embrace love!

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Find more on Lorrie Thomas, The Web Marketing Therapist at http://www.webmarketingtherapy.com/.

Ultraintelligent Machines, Transparency and Progress

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. ~Statistician I.J. Good, 1965

All it takes is one technology – Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or perhaps something unforeseen – that advances to the point of creating smarter-than-human minds. That one technological advance is the equivalent of the first self-replicating chemical that gave rise to life on Earth.~AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2001

TECH IS A HAIR BREADTH AWAY FROM SELF-AWARENESS: Technology is within a hair’s breadth of becoming self-aware. The social networks and properties may be seen as a mass effort by humanity to train our tech to first mimic and then evolve our actions. The intimacy of human-tech relationship has become a red-hot love affair.

I can forget my wallet at home but woe is me if my cell phone remains on the bedside table! With mobile now fully poised to take over as THE access point to all my information and action, that iPhone or Android becomes THE lover in my pocket, my EVERYTHING. I can dock my phone and access all of my content with a wireless keyboard and mouse and my 55″ 3D 1080p screen. And I can store 60 GB of my information in the cloud for $10 per month, giving me the power to link in to my info from anywhere at anytime.

And ALL of this information is scanned and makes up the ever-expanding global mind, which systems like the Chinese-made Tianhe-1A can perfect at rate of 2,507 petaflops (a petaflop is one million billion floating point operations per second). Soon all of this computing tech will occupy a transhuman body, like the hospice cyborgs in Asia.

I do agree that we may be closer than one realizes to the Singularity and that AI has advanced to truly FANTASTIC heights. One need only begin at the Singularity Summit, Singularity University and Humanity+ web pages to get thrown in the deep end of this information AND to realize that humans in the know are keeping long hours preparing for this imminent reality!

WHAT WILL IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN IN THE NEAR-FUTURE? So what happens when many more human duties are done by robots? What happens when the Transhumanists reign supreme? How does one look upon this: as an average consumer, as a corporate leader, as a major VC, as a nation-state concerned about security, as a parent raising children, as the leader of a global religion? For some, there is no action to be taken and submission is the only option due to NO TIME. For others, like the leaders mentioned, the conversation becomes philosophical and nostalgic: the good ol’ days of being human are now over.

Now we also, as leaders, have to understand what it really means to be led by our technology. It presents us with possibilities and solutions we may never have considered: Like finding the cure to cancer OR receiving a fully charted investment strategy yielding 125% growth per annum for 7 generations on your desktop OR just plain old peace of mind. We truly have more possibilities before us as humans now than ever YET at the same time we are in an economic crisis. Or are we?

Hear the following quote from the philosopher Aleister Crowley:

“We are in the middle of a world crisis. It is a very good world crisis — better than any crisis we have had before — and there is no man alive with an intellect big enough to grasp the threads of the problems which confront the world today. There are two ways out of that. Either consult a superior intelligence, which Magick shows you the way of doing, or you can develop your own mind, for it has a faculty which is as superior to the intellect as the intellect is superior to the emotions.

All magical operations require a very elaborate training of one kind or another, but I think the only way out is that we have got to put men in charge of this planet who are really more than men. We must get back to the times of the prophets or we must make ourselves prophets. And we must look at world problems from a standpoint which is entirely alien to that existing at present.”

TECH LEADERS GUIDE GOVERNMENTS AND SIT AT THE HEAD OF THE TABLE: Just a few weeks ago, Michael Dell said, “Our report contains straightforward, proven ways to pare back $1 trillion from the deficit while increasing productivity and enabling sustainable competitiveness. We’re serious about helping to provide solutions for the mounting debt crisis, and we’re optimistic that changes today will help lay the foundation for future job growth and innovation for our country.” And the TCC report, entitled One Trillion Reasons, stated: “A $500bn savings opportunity exists by consolidating the government’s myriad supply chains. This would also render the government’s procurement process far more transparent, helping to strengthen public trust.”

With tech leaders applying the power of computing to human inefficiency, we know who the REAL kings of this planet are and will increasingly be. It’s no wonder that men like Michael Bloomberg and Silvio Berlusconi are corporate leaders, political leaders and multi-billionaires. They are the model of the world-king, the Zeus archetype. And men like these have the power and resources to orient tech around cleaning up 20th century messes. Those who have erected Kingdoms of Opacity around the these cesspools are doomed, as we already have seen, while those who embrace Transparency as a route TO greater discovery and engagement with mystery and innovation will rule. The simple mathematical and scientific rule concerning this is Pareto’s Law or Occam’s Razor and Leonardo da Vinci has captured this when he says, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

HUMAN INTERACTION NO LONGER SLOWS DOWN TECH ADAVANCEMENT: Our technology’s solutions are so beautiful now and are being packaged to accentuate this elegance. Solutions on the social intelligence front are just one example of this. With Flowtown, I can upload all of my email addresses and see exactly which social properties these entities currently occupy. With another tool just about to launch I can upload my email addresses and know the exact time of day a Facebook ad campaign should run to reach the maximum online users. With another tool also on the verge of launching, I can determine which tweets and FB statuses have the highest chances of being re-tweeted and passed along AND which ad copy will achieve the highest percentage of click-through rate.

Again, with well-priced and effective solutions, we hurdle opaque entities that shroud previously complex processes in secrecy AND end up with BETTER solutions at BETTER pricing. This principle is horizontally applicable across industries AND is the metaphorical basis for human-tech relationship to leap-frog into a new paradigm of leadership, democracy and independence.

Of course, in the context of all this left-brain, progress-oriented talk, there is the question as to whether cyborgs dream of electric sheep or can enjoy the most human of experiences.

The Golden Age of Video has Arrived! (Or wait, is that, of The Unconscious Realm?)

The game has just begun!

• GoogleTV is going to rock the world—powered by Android.
• AppleTV is going to rocket the impact of micropayments for content.
• Netflix is going to be like Switzerland (sort of)
• Boxee (now powered by the Intel Atom Processor) could be the secret GoogleTV hardware platform.
• Amazon: Great library – slow tech right now, but they’re paying attention.

SOURCE OF ABOVE PREDICTIONS: RecordedFuture finding this article.

LOGITECH’S GoogleTV BOX: (In answer to the Boxee prediction is Logitech’s GoogleTV box

VARIOUS STREAMING BOXES: Various Streaming Boxes here or on the way soon

Now, as Logitech’s selling script at their GoogleTV site says, “If you can think it, you can watch it! Chances are, you have one of the 60 million HDTVs in the US that are ready. To be smarter. To integrate the full Web and your HD cable or satellite content. To do things no TV has ever done before.”

I submit to the reader that there are literal galaxies of video ALREADY PRESENT in the social fabric of the internet, on shelves, in boxes and, most importantly, in the human imagination. To peer into video IS humanity’s method of peering into that which is not seen or spoken in the workaday world.

Video channels could become as numerous as the grains of sand on the shore. And all of these are windows INTO what Carl Jung calls The Unconscious realm. How is this so? A single music video can carry one far away from the chair one sits in, a movie can transform a life and a single ad can empty the wallets of tens of millions.

STARGATES: Accessing the unconscious realm IS the BIG opportunity arriving with The Golden Age of Video. Why is this an opportunity? We are, each one of us, on a journey of discovery every day, every moment. Video is THE biggest and hottest medium at this time in history and it could be argued that video connects the psyche to that vast and un-ending universe of the unconscious realm, populated by countless entities, pathways and vortexes. Videos act like talismans, or symbols, that represent, as Jung puts it, “stargates that point beyond themselves…(and)…mobilize our psychic energy”.

GoogleTV is an aggregator of Stargates leading directly to the limitless Unconscious Realm.

Robert Boyle's prophetic 'wish list' made in the 17th Century

Robert Boyle’s prophetic ‘wish list’ made in the 17th Century. Boyle was founder of the ”Invisible College” at Oxford University.

(Thanks to George Ure in the Predictors Group, the LinkedIn Group for RecordedFuture, a new temporal search tool that “searches the future”).

”The Prolongation of Life” – health improvements mean we are now living longer.

”The Recovery of Youth, or at least some of the Marks of it, as new Teeth, new Hair colour’d as in youth” – Botox, plastic surgery, teeth-capping, hair dye, transplants.

”The Art of Flying” – planes.

”The Art of Continuing long under water, and exercising functions freely” – submarines and scuba gear.

”The Cure of Diseases at a distance or at least by Transplantation” – transplants and keyhole surgery.

”The Emulating of Fish without Engines by Custome and Education” – free diving.

”Strength and Agility … exemplify’d by that of Frantick Epileptick and Hysterical persons” – steroids.

”The Acceleration of the Production of things out of Seed” – GM crops.

”The making of Parabolicall and Hyperbolicall Glasses” – spectacles and telescopes.

”Making Armor light and extremely hard” – Kevlar.

”The practicable and certain way of finding Longitudes” – satellite navigation.

”A ship to saile with All Winds” – boats with engines.

”Perpetuall Light” – bulbs.

”Varnishes perfumable by Rubbing” – scratch-and-sniff.

”Transmutation of Species in Mineralls, Animals, and Vegetables” – synthetic biology, genetic engineering.

The race to organise television

(The following comment was posted as a response by Colin Donald, Director of Futurescape.TV, to an article in the recent Economist: Struggling for control: The humble channel-zapper is evolving in ways that will shape television’s future)

Internet-connected TVs lead to massively increased choice and require next-generation EPGs to help viewers navigate the wealth of content.

One solution backed by many in the industry, like Rovi, is to develop social EPGs that let friends recommend TV shows and videos to each other, via social networks or via systems which use data from social networks.

However, the implications are even more radical than your article suggests.

When Futurescape.TV recently researched this nascent social TV sector, we concluded that Facebook and Twitter are already battling for key roles in the TV industry as Internet-connected televisions transform TV into a social medium.

The two social networks have an actual or potential commercial role across the entire TV value chain.

For instance:

1. Global pay-TV, estimated at $250bn in 2014, NEEDS social recommendation and discovery services because these encourage viewers to subscribe to more expensive packages and buy more video-on-demand – Facebook and Twitter are both major providers of social data.

2. Facebook in particular has a highly developed social graph of people’s relationship with entertainment content, from the ubiquitous Like button, integrated into many broadcasters’ Web sites. Both it and Twitter own considerable, detailed data about people’s behaviour, such as discussing TV shows and sharing links to videos.

3. As your article described, set-top box middleware and EPG providers similarly need social network data for recommendation and discovery – the European EPG market alone will be worth $555m by 2014.

4. TV manufacturers’ strategy to provide video-on-demand direct to viewers also requires social recommendation, while their connected TV apps enable viewers to interact with Facebook and Twitter on home TV sets.

5. Facebook aims to tap the $180bn worldwide TV ad market, competing with broadcasters for brand advertising – Google TV and similar Web-on-TV systems will put Facebook and Twitter targeted ads on TV screens.

6. Facebook and Twitter buzz affects TV ratings, while broadcasters that use the social networks for viewer engagement are effectively sharing their audiences with them.

7. The social networks know in real time how people react to TV programming – this is an essential supplement to Nielsen-type viewing data.

8. Integrating social networks with EPGs is only one manifestation of a profound and permanent change in the television industry, a change through which Facebook and Twitter are positioning themselves as major industry players.