Yeah, pretty big topic, but this video is a quick intro, and if you want more, you can link out to YouTube and hear the whole thing.  This is really exciting stuff.  No place for cynicism here.  (Thanks to Marshall Kirkpatrick and ReadWriteWeb)

Poor Microsoft.  It is actually facing stiff competition on lots of fronts these days.  The browser wars continue, and MSFT’s contribution to the fray is the new IE8 browser launched today at noon EDT.  You can download it for free to your Windows machine running XP or Vista.

Walt Mossberg at WSJ’s All Things Digital has has published a review of the IE8 browser.  He tested pre-release and then the final versions of it for several months, comparing its features and performance against Firefox, Chrome and Safari 4 for PC.  Bottom line:  IE8 has some great new features, but it is slow in comparison to the others.  Mossberg still rates Mozilla Firefox the best browser for Windows users.

I think this is an important story, and the Techcrunch post by Brian Solis is a really nice piece for introducing how social media create an ecology of distribution and visibility.  In other words: you can gain viewers and traffic by increasing visibility through this multiple-channel — user driven —  distribution sequence.

In a nutshell, Solis reports that the SEC is set to recognize a blog post as meeting its disclosure requirements for companies’ financial reports.  Traditionally, these kinds of announcements have been distributed via public relations wires, picked up mainly by reporters, analysts, and investors who are part of a small, but attentive audience.  The issue has to do with Full Disclosure rules that are intended to guarantee the fairness of the market.  Disclosing information to analysts or investors on a selective basis biases the market in favor of those people, and the aim of the FD rules is to prevent that in favor of more timely and transparent disclosure of financial information.

The news for Social Media is summarized in the following quote from the SEC’s announcement on rule changes in the FD regs (due to be in force October 23, 2008):

As a general matter, acceptable methods of public disclosure for purposes of Regulation FD will include press releases distributed through a widely circulated news or wire service, or announcements made through press conferences or conference calls that interested members of the public may attend or listen to either in person, by telephonic transmission, or by other electronic transmission (including use of the Internet). [my emphasis]

Why the big deal?  It is official confirmation of the cost effective use of the Internet (blog posts, social media updates, even Twitter trails) in a business context, legitimizing an increasingly valuable and widely used method of communication. There will be a financial community built around this with RSS feeds, Twitter trails, and announcements through traditional email and PR distribution channels that will make this information quickly available to a much wider audience.

This is a breakthrough. 

The Atlantic Monthly has an article titled ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?‘. We don’t usually think so, but the article is worth a look.

The point is that Google (as a proxy for the Internet and search in general) is changing the way we process information. The author talks about how he and friends of his can no longer tolerate reading long articles or books — instead, they scan, they jump, they skim. And we see magazines and other media changing layouts and content to adapt to this.

Will it make us stupid? I think it could: if you don’t learn how to read a well-reasoned argument, assess the data or information it contains, and put it in context of different opinions, you cannot build up the assets you need to defend yourself against the predators who want your money or your vote. You cannot look at the quality of logic or information by skimming. Just doesn’t happen. People who think it does are happy with ‘me too’ opinions based on their preferred thought leaders. Better hope they are right, because if you haven’t got an independent critical capability, you are at their mercy.

$390 million dollars. That’s the value of the civil suits MySpace won recently against a couple low lifers running phishy scams against MySpace users.

Will they collect? Probably not, but they are aggressively going after the big time spammers. Here’s why.

Search and Deploy.  Just about says it all, doesn’t it?

People – well, almost all of us – use search to find things we want and then select the good results for action. The deployment part is the payoff.

Everyday, we at The Net Sells work and play in search. We look for things just because they are cool, and sometimes we go somewhere for information or to get something we need.  Sometimes the experience is frustrating, but it is never static.

It’s this ‘never static’ part that is the motivator for Search and Deploy.  We are going to be sharing some very short posts with you about our wanderings (sometimes very purposeful ‘wandering’) on the Internet. Mostly, we are going to post snippets about the things we find, with a link to the source if you want to know more.  A lot of these posts will be about Internet marketing and the businesses that make it happen. Some might be about search techniques, some about search engines themselves, some about the business side of the business.

We aim to give you a snapshot of things that are useful if you are interested in Internet marketing, either as a practitioner or as a marketer.  And please let us know what you think!