As just about everyone knows, the season premiere of the best show on television kicked off for two nights straight on last night and Sunday night with the first four episodes.  Serial dramas are hot right now, but having mixed success as a recent article in USAToday noted.  "24" remains the gold standard in those dramas.  For those unfamiliar with the show, it follows the adventures of a secret agent, Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland), over the course of an entire day in real time.  1 minute elapsed in the show is meant to be 1 minute real time - and from my viewpoint, the show's success stems from a single principle all the other shows would do well to learn.  The show has a respect for its viewer that is frequently missing when it comes to television.  Here's what I mean by respect:

For anyone who ever wanted to be listed on the closing credits of a film, your chance has arrived online.  The 1 Second Film is a nonprofit collaborative film project that has stated a single simple aim ... to create "The World's Biggest Short Film."  To do it, the project is enlisting donations of $1 or more from anyone and everyone.  Each donor will be listed as a Producer in the 90 minute long credits of the film, in order based on amount of donation.  The actual 1 second film will consist of an animated sequence of images taken from 12 giant 5ft by 9ft paintings, each of which was individually directed and contributed to by hundreds of artists in March of 2001.

The first time I learned about Verizon's new FiOS service, I was not online (though they have a great site), but at a festival event near where I live in Virginia.  At the event they had the typical basketball games to win a prize, balloons, and an internet connection to let people find out if the Verizon FiOS network is available in their area.  Unfortunately for me, my home is not in their range yet - but like many cable consumers I would gladly switch if I could.  With a large percentage of US consumers feeling trapped in a cable monopoly with no alternatives, anyone offering the possibility of a choice is likely to be welcomed into the community.  For a company like Verizon which has had to deal with the defection of their telephone customers who are ditching their landlines to switch to VOIP - this welcome from the community must be particularly sweet.

For years now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for websites has been honed into a fine art with entire companies devoting considerable effort to defining best practices and touting the value of SEO for raising a site's performance on organic search listings.  While I believe in the power of SEO, there is a new offering we have started providing to clients which we call Social Media Optimization (SMO).  The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.  Here are 5 rules we use to help guide our thinking with conducting an SMO for a client's website: