This is a pretty cool video from The Wall Street Journal explaining the fairly complex concept of web cookies in a fairly straight forward fashion. I don’t like the narrator’s voice, but the explanation is spot on.

Interestingly, Reuters reports that the person that made the prediction, IATA Director-General Giovanni Bisignani, also predicts North American airlines will lose $1.8 Billion in 2010. The most interesting thing about this report is that it flies in the face of the commonly held belief that Latin American companies are somehow less efficient, or run in a less efficient manner than North American companies.
Latin American airlines, do not charge baggage fees, fees for booking with a live agent nor fees for booking online. Latin American airlines do not try to nickel and …

Joanna Shields, who was instrumental in Bebo’s sale to AOL for $850 million in 2008 has joined Facebook as head of EMEA operations. Technically, she’ll be vice-president of sales and business development for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
Photo Credit: AIB London
The current vp of EMEA, Blake Chandlee, was the first Facebook employee in London. He will be vice-president of sales for emerging markets. He will focus on Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America.
I’m not sure how he will manage the Latin American market for Facebook from Europe, but …

In his inimitable style, Gary Varynerchuk shows us step by step how to get advertisers for our blogs, or podcasts etc.
Basically, here are the steps:

Find companies that are already advertising on Google, Bing or whatever.
Go to the advertiser’s site, click around and find their contact information
Reach out to them and tell them why your blog/show would be a good fit for their ad money
Convince them that your channel is a good place for their ad. At the very least, get an affiliate deal with them
Popurls is your friend
Never underestimate the …

This article was originally posted on my aviation site.
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article where they talk about the history of Embraer, and its prospects for the future. I feel that they echoed what I said in my recent post where I talked about Airbus, Boeing and Embraer.
Embraer, also known as Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica SA, was officially started back in 1969 by the Brazillian government. Embraer’s, and Brazil’s, roots in aviation go back to the early days. However, it wasn’t until Embraer was privatized in 1994 that …

I recently attended the SXSWi festival, aka spring break for geeks, in Austin, TX. After the event, I was reminded of something that I read over on Mitch Joel’s blog a couple of weeks ago. It was something about how we should change our perception of our websites. Mitch argues that we should no longer look at our websites as simple places to
shill our products and services with mumbo jumbo and corporate rhetoric.
He’s right.
Your website is really an information publishing portal, and seeing it as anything other than that, is …

This is a few days late, but the advice in this email is still valid. In light of my recent stint at South by Southwest Interactive, I felt like this was an appropriate after thought to that entire event.

Photo Credit: Nyghtowl
This message is from Mike Young. He’s a lawyer that specializes in internet business law and from time to time he sends out messages to his list that are at times inspiring and at other times a forewarning. Anyway, he sent this out on St. Patrick’s day and …

In this video, I catch up with Patrick O’Keefe, aka @ifroggy on Twitter. We talk about the presentation that he gave and he goes over one of the most important things for you to avoid becoming an online ______________.

Patrick doesn’t mention it, but some of the communities that he manages are quite large, he knows what he’s talking about.
He gives us some nuggets about how to not look like a __________ whenever we’re in or on community based sites. Go to iFroggy.com for more info on managing online communities.

This weekend, and up until Tuesday, we’ll be at South by Southwest Interactive media conference. There will be sporadic updates from the event, possibly pictures, videos, etc.
Last night, I had a great conversation with Scott Allen, Fernando Labastida and Alex Barrera. We talked about social media in Spanish and how come there’s not a lot of content being produced in Spanish that is actually useful. I have a lot of video from that conversation, I think we can have that posted sometime soon.

Go here to see a list of SXSWi …

As a general rule, most people, spammers included, want to avoid looking like spammers. Despite that, a lot of innocent people end up looking like spammers because they do spammy things.
Here are 3 things to do if you want to avoid looking like a spammer:

Avoid keyword stuffing. What does that mean? It means avoid putting too many of your keywords in your posts. You should also avoid having your key words close together. So, pay attention to the density of your target words to the rest of your …