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If you have a blog, especially one that is monetized, you may want to pay attention. We all know that municipalities are cash strapped and looking for any way to make some money. Philadelphia is no different. The city is sending bloggers $300 bills, which is the cost of a business privilege license. What amazes me about this is… who is digging around trying to find out who has a blog with monetization? Does the very small amount of money a blogger makes really warrant some city official spending time researching to see from whom they can get 300 bucks? Apparently there is a small number of bloggers who have made a very tiny amount on their blogs and reported it who are now receiving these letters saying they have to pay for this “business privilege license” plus pay taxes on whatever small amount of money they earned.

I get that we are supposed to pay our taxes, I do. However this seems to be extreme. Most bloggers don’t make enough money on their blogs to even consider the paperwork that this would require. If we were talking federal standards, you can make up to $600 before you have to claim it on a return.
Municipalities all have their own rules and tax laws, but this is reaching so far into people’s pockets that it seems just plain money grubbing. And it feels like an invasion of sorts. Big Brother – we knew you were lurking around somewhere – who knew he reads blogs?

As the new taxes roll in in 2011 I think we can expect to see more and more of this nonsense. If you sit on a city council somewhere and have a say, please try to use a little common sense about this kind of thing. If someone makes $15 a year on a blog, I think a business license is a little over the top. I pay my babysitters way more than that. Crap. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that out loud. Now the government it gonna want me to 1099 the 13 year old nieces I pay to watch my kids once in a while so they can send them a tax bill and a request for a purchase of a business license. Sorry, Kenzie and Katie.

Cities, politicians and the federal government have all been trying to find ways to tax the web. Because we are a service based company, we don’t pay a sales tax on what we sell. Instead we have to pay a commercial activity tax. We have all heard how the FTC and FCC would like to try and regulate the web, and I am sure part of the reason is to find ways to tax. Taxing bloggers, right now seems to me to be coming out of the realization that some of them do make money on their blogs. SOME. The vast majority don’t make one thin dime. Some even pay to have their blog up, so then they are operating at a loss. This just doesn’t make sense.

Do you have a blog? Would you continue with it if you knew you would have to buy a business license and pay taxes on it? Does this make any sense to you?

More information about the Philadelphia Blogger Story can be found at the Washington Examiner.

When it comes to the web, there are always new terms being tossed around. A fairly interesting one I have come across several times that seems rather pertinent to the discussion of SEO/SEM and all things social is something called a “Digital Sociologist”. What is a digital sociologist, you ask? Great question – one I would like answered myself.

A digital sociologist is a person who studies the behavior of people when using digital technology, with it’s main focus on social media usage. This new study of people will probably remind you of the discussion we have had here many times on the topic of tribalization. Tribalization, if you recall, is the phenomena of people banding together on the web around a particular blogger, forum, brand, idea, belief, or what have you. Part of digital sociology would be to study this phenomena, and perhaps figure out how to make it work for your brand.

So many things are happening on the web. It’s only natural that some formal study of the behavior of people on the web take place. We (and most SEOs) have been doing it for years in the form of analytics. But, analytics alone can only tell us so much. They tell us what channel a user comes from, what pages they visited, what they bought, or where they spent most of their time on a particular site. From these analytics we can make educated guesses to help us tweak our strategies, but taking all of this a step further, to actually understand the feeling and beliefs of the user may help define a strategy to a greater extent. For some, it will help define why people behave they do about a particular blogger, brand, belief, etc.

Below is a very brief presentation on Digital Sociology by Ali Hadi. I would like to take the discussion much deeper, as I think this will ultimately have an impact on the way we do our jobs, especially as they pertain to social media and SEO/SEM.

Small businesses have a great opportunity with social media. It presents a “word of mouth” type of advertising that is sadly lacking in traditional marketing. People, oddly enough, are now looking to the web, and the people they ‘meet’ there, to help them make sound decisions on many major issues, including just about any purchase you can imagine. Brian Solis has an interesting article about small business utilizing digital sociology and social media if you’d like to read further and join the discussion.

Wow, never even crossed my mind to wonder if I had the right to link to someone or some entity’s content, especially when caution is used to give credit to the original poster. I mean, it’s done constantly. I do it myself in nearly every post. Every bit of information you ever wanted someone else to see is sent via a link.

Most sites need and want links. Everyone is happy when the link juice is flowing. Rankings, followers, users, and often sales and/or conversions go up when you have more inbound links. So what’s the problem?

Possibly because the news organizations are feeling the sting of social media, i.e., that it is becoming a news source in and of itself, some news organizations are lashing out, not wanting their stories linked to, and considering charging for access to their content.

Now, without getting into all kinds of discussion on whether or not it is ethical to link, I’ll just put my two cents in and then direct you to a guy who is fighting to make sure you keep your right to link. My thoughts are that as long as the content you are linking to is public, then you have every right to pass on the information. That’s how the web functions. Without linking, no one would ever get anywhere unless they knew every url and could go directly to every site. Forget search engines, forget ever emailing a cool site or that motorcycle on Craigslist to anyone. Forget including your clients in your online portfolio. Ridiculous.

Chris Crum over @ WebProNews had a pretty interesting article back in January on the right to link – worth taking a look. I personally hope this becomes a non-issue very soon.

If you got our Spring Newsletter (way back in March), or read this blog very often, you know I use LinkedIn and feel that it has some real potential to be more relevant in the business world, in some cases than other forms of social media. In my mind, it just makes sense. It has great potential for driving traffic to your site, especially with some of the new features.

LinkedIn has in recent months added a number of new features to enable users to spread their brand over a number of applications. You can now “follow” other companies and thus, users can “follow” you. You can link your blog to LinkedIn pull your posts into your profile. It also will find all blogposts by those in your network, making it easy to keep up with the business blogs that are important to you. You can also have your LinkedIn status feed your Twitter account to get your business some additional exposure, as well as traffic.

LinkedIn has a video stream called InTips, with lots of pointers on ways to make the most of your profile. One of the really cool aspects of this is that they have developed a series of six videos for students or people graduating from college. Best ways to find a job, beef up your profile and resume, and so on. If you belong to one of those two groups, I highly recommend you check out these very helpful videos and create or work on your profile, it could really help you find the best position for you.

LinkedIn has also developed an integration with Microsoft to make networking with your contacts in Outlook that much easier. I’m all for making this stuff easier, and when it comes to using social media to make connections or drive traffic to your business or e-commerce site, I think LinkedIn should be your first stop.
Chris Crum has a great post on LinkedIn over at WebProNews. Definitely worth a look.

So, do you use LinkedIn? What are your favorite aspects of it? Are you getting traffic from LinkedIn?

If you pay any attention to the news, you’ll have heard of Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, and maybe if you really pay attention, you might have heard of Overstock SEO Patrick Byrne making news lately. I find it interesting that some of the biggest website businesses are turning out some real movers and shakers in the political realm. These companies, eBay and Overstock are two of the biggest online businesses. Online companies are carrying a lot of clout these days, they are an integral part of the economy, and will only become more so in the years to come.

Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay is currently running for governor of California. She is described as a conservative Republican. John McCain thinks she could be the next Ronald Reagan.

When Whitman joined eBay in March 1998, it had 30 employees and revenues of approximately $4 million. She was able to grow the company to approximately 15,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenue by 2008 – pretty impressive!

Good business sense often translates well to good political sense. If you have run a business, then you know how to manage people and a budget – at least if you’ve run a successful business. I am really interested to see what Whitman does in the coming years. It would be great to have some really solid candidates – people who worked in the real world, as opposed to jumping into politics without gaining experience and business sense first.

Another interesting figure born out of the web based business world is Patrick Byrne. He is currently the CEO of Overstock.com, a very popular online retailer. He joined Overstock when it was known as D2-Discounts Direct. He was asked to invest in this company and thought that online closeouts might really do well, so he sunk 7 million bucks into it and changed the name to Overstock. Overstock now generates over $800 million a year. Byrne has been named to BusinessWeek’s list of the 25 most influential people in e-Business in the past and is now known for his efforts in combating naked short selling, a practice which Byrne says has often been used in violation of securities law to hurt the price of his as well as other companies’ stock.

Byrne has also recently become a Fox News contributor on Fox’s Business programming. Below is a video clip of him detailing what is happening in Greece’s financial melt down, and how it could happen to us if we don’t stop all this spending.

I love finding these great success stories – web based business have become big, they are part and parcel of our nation’s economy. They are producing some of the movers and shakers, not only in business, but politics too.