Posted by willcritchlow

At Distilled, we define our purpose as "discovering, implementing and sharing the ways great companies succeed online". It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that (a) I think a lot about how to learn SEO effectively and (b) we try to build learning into pretty much everything we do.

"How should I learn more about X?" is one of the most common questions I get asked both internally at Distilled and from the community and 
"How should I learn more about SEO? is probably the most common among those.

Paddy wrote a really useful post this week covering some excellent resources for those starting out in SEO. I wanted to add my thoughts about the most effective ways of learning:

How to learn SEO

1. Curiosity is your biggest asset

Firstly, and most importantly, it's entirely up to you. Nobody else can learn for you. The single lesson that I remember most clearly from my school days was from Mr. Wilson, my electronics teacher. Paraphrasing:

Always ask yourself 'how does that work?'

I think this is one of the most critical life skills you can possibly acquire. It might surprise you to know that I think it'll make you a better SEO if you spend your time asking yourself questions like these (Spoiler: answers at the end of the post):

1. How do they get cranes on top of big buildings?
2. How come phone touch screens work through paper but not through foil?
3. How does gmail's two-factor authentication work? [Side-note: please turn on two factor authentication - it's more pain-free than you expect]

This highlights one of the key distinctions I wanted to make in this post. Learning is not the same as training. If you are provided with formal training opportunities at work then that's great, but in my opinion it's never going to be more than 5-10% of your learning. You are responsible for you – I highly recommend this talk by Sheryl Sandberg who I think is one of the best speakers on getting ahead at work:

From an SEO perspective, I suggest applying this first to the whole stack of a search result – from crawling, indexing and ranking to the actual delivery mechanism (DNS, TCP/IP etc.). The more curious you are, the better you'll be.

Closely related to this, I highly recommend getting your hands dirty in order to try to understand how things work. I'm a big advocate that this is very rarely a bad idea – though sometimes you also need a sandbox while you're learning. (This was the motivation behind our interactive modules in DistilledU – when you are learning about robots.txt syntax or Google Analytics code modifications it's nice to take the very first steps in a safe environment).

Curiosity strikes again

I would go as far as to say that if you are looking to get into online marketing from scratch, the very first thing you should do is get a small site entirely under your control – everything from registering the domain to adding the Google Analytics code. What could go wrong?

2. Take advantage of steep learning curves

It can take a lifetime to dominate specific skills, but it's surprising how much you can learn in a weekend (or even a couple of hours).

I talked about the exponential nature of learning in my Searchlove presentation in London last year. See slides 18+ here:

Link building mediocre to great from Will Critchlow

In summary, my mental model for learning is not an evenly paced journey from beginner to expert but more like an exponential scale where it gets many times harder to get from each stage to the next:

1. No experience at all – complete beginner
2. Basic competence – you start to be able to complete basic tasks (perhaps with oversight)
3. Core competence – you can handle pretty much everything in this subject area
4. "Distilled expert"(*) – one of the people that those with core competence turn to for help
5. Renowned expert – wrote the book

(*) that's what we call it at Distilled – you can use your initiative to come up with your own name for this level

Side-note: this scale deliberately includes a little confusion between excellence and fame – I'm afraid the real world works this way as well. My thinking on the subject was influenced by Joel Spolsky's writing on the subject of developer compensation [PDF]

You can make this work to your advantage – even if you don't intend to become a world expert in something, there is huge benefit to learning enough to know what you don't know. In my own online marketing journey, I've enjoyed applying this to technical skills ranging from setting up a linux server to toying with client-side jQuery as well as creative skills like basic video editing and animation.

I think Danny Dover's checklist is a great place to get started with this kind of learning for SEO.

3. You need to know the existence of trivia

I've observed that a trait that appears to separate highly successful technical marketers (and knowledge workers in general) from everyone else is the ability to recall the existence of arbitrary details.

Not everyone is a trivia geek, but they all tend to remember enough about the subtleties of a problem to find the detailed answer they need to get their job done. Whether this is remembering that there can be a time-lag to DNS propagation, that googlebot only crawls from US IP addresses or that if you include a specific user-agent directive in a robots.txt file that robot will only listen to those rules(*), it's this skill that avoids disaster over and over again.

(*) this last tidbit was something I learnt while building the robots.txt interactive module for DistilledU.

I think the way you cultivate this skill is to read widely and to create things yourself (what @bfeld has been inspiring me to call maker mode).

On the "reading widely" front, I strongly recommend setting yourself up with something like Instapaper that allows you to remain curious and interested without getting sucked into reading articles all across the internet all day every day. Instapaper gives you a browser bookmark (and mobile app) that lets you save an article to read later – and formats it for easy distraction-free reading. (My favourite feature is its ability to send a weekly "magazine" to my kindle every week). Others at Distilled like Pocket which does something similar.

The need for maker mode is the realisation that you never really understand the subtleties of something until you've done it. I talk more about this later.

Of course, you probably need deep expertise in at least some areas as well (the notorious T-shaped inpidual) but I would counsel that you should avoid spending all your time learning minutiae. The internet is full of it, half of it isn't correct and for much of the rest, you are far and away better served by shipping real things.

4. Expose yourself to intimidation

I talked about this at our all-hands company meeting in London in January. I talked about the perils of letting yourself be the smartest guy/gal in the room (TL;DR get yourself into a different room – at least some of the time). I think most people who have been really good at something let themselves at some point get exposed to people who are really, really good. For me this happened when I went to college. I had an experience very much like that described by @mechanical_fish in this Hacker News comment where he talks about going to a math competition:

This was one of the most valuable experiences of my life and I heartily endorse it. Because here's what happened: I got my ass handed to me. My teammates were freakishly smart. It turns out that the distribution of math-contest talent is not at all normal, and that being in the top 1% of contest-takers doesn't mean that you're within hailing distance of the top 0.5%. Oh, no.

Last year I went back to my old high school to give a talk entitled "things I wish I'd known". As I said on slide 11, you come to resemble the people you hang out with, so you should choose carefully:

Things I wish I'd known from Will Critchlow

The desire to get smart people together and let them share ideas is one of the driving forces behind the way we have designed our conferences. It's why we go for a single-track event with social events afterwards – giving people a shared context to discuss the things they've learnt with people who've got a wide range of experiences.

You don't have to go to a conference though. I started out my learning journey in SEO hanging out in online communities. Back in the day it was cre8asite (I recently saw black_knight at a conference and had fun reminiscing about those days). More recently it was SEOmoz and Twitter. I don't think you necessarily should expect to learn everything from the social interactions, but hanging out with people you know and like who know more than you do about a subject helps to steer you to learn the right thing next.

5. Focus on learning to drive

I like to think about two very different kinds of learning:

1. Learning to drive - you remember the first time you drove (the first time you drove stick for my US friends)? The experience of going from "HOLY CRAP I HAVE TO WATCH IN FRONT AND BEHIND AND SIDEWAYS WHILE MOVING BOTH MY HANDS AND BOTH MY FEET IN HARMON…BOUNCEBOUNCEBOUNCESTALL" to "I barely think about the mechanics of coordinating feet and hands and have time to pay proper attention to the road"
2. Learning the directions to a new place - this is more like the transition from: "Before I looked up the way, I didn't know which street to take" to "After I looked up the way, I knew which street to take"

Only one of those is transformational, isn't it? So focus on things that look more like learning to drive and less on things that look like directions to a new place.

Never written any HTML? That is a great skill for an SEO to know – a form of online "learning to drive". (I recommend Treehouse and Codecademy which complement each other nicely).

Don't know the specific way to mark up a date in the hEvent micro-format? Don't worry about it until you need it – it's a form of online "learning directions".

Another way of thinking about this is to focus on learning real-time and bicycle skills. It's worth noting here that both these forms of learning can come with the same endorphin hit, so you need to keep asking yourself if the things you are learning are the right things. This was the main reason I left my first real job. I was a "coder-in-a-suit" (Accenture-style) for a small company. As I transitioned from learning real things (we were working on financial software, so I learnt about general ledger, P&L, balance sheets etc. as well skills as diverse as SQL and business process mapping) to learning the specific way you deploy certain changes on an IBM AS400 iSeries, I realised I'd gone from learning to drive to learning directions and I had to get out.

6. Allow yourself to fail

By its definition, learning involves new things. Some new things go wrong.

This is the greatest argument for actually shipping things – it's not until you try to ship something that you discover whether it really is a success or a failure.

If you are in a position of authority, I believe it's especially important to allow yourself to fail publicly (at least openly in front of your team). I read a great article about management at Github that talks about a management style of:

Show what, don't tell how

The core point of the article is that you can lead a team by getting stuck into the team's work but holding yourself to a form of open-ness where you not only do, but are seen to do.

The author relates this mainly to core job skills, but I think it's equally important about life skills like learning. As a leader, it's even more important that you take risks and fail visibly.

My journey of learning presentation skills falls into this category. Many of you will have seen me get crushed by Rand in a head-to-head presentation competition. Slightly fewer of you will have seen the times when the learning paid off and I repaid the favour.

7. Write

I'm a big fan of writing as a core part of learning. I was taught that writing things down helped you retain them in your memory. I suspect that is true, but the more powerful effect is that the act of composing your thoughts shapes them. Structuring and editing a piece of writing gets you thinking more deeply about a subject than anything else I know.

Perhaps most importantly, writing is designed to be published. And in a world of blogging and social media, it's easier than ever to get other people's eyes on your writing. This gives you a safe environment in which to fail, allows feedback and makes it easy to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are.

8. Remember your liberal arts

Finally, remember that being the most effective SEO you can be has remarkably little to do with SEO knowledge. We find that once you're past the basics, the bottlenecks are increasingly likely to be what I'm going to call the "liberal arts" of marketing.

To be truly effective at SEO you need to round out your education with a whole bunch of wider knowledge including:

• Regular marketing
• Business awareness
• Project management
• Presentation skills
• Writing skills
• Leadership and people management skills

I still love this post by Paddy at Distilled on his views of what it takes.

For each of these skills, you can apply the methodology outlined above.

In summary

Learning something deeply doesn't happen in hours or days. But I would really like to see people working on their own learning experience – so if you are starting from scratch, start with these specific actions from my first three suggestions:

1. Get curious – go and look up the answer to something that's been bugging you. How does that work?
2. Benefit from a learning curve – challenge yourself to learn something in 2 hours
3. File away the trivia – sign up for Instapaper

But also - update us here – I would love to hear your learning stories and any tips and tricks you have to share with the community.

Spoiler for the curious:

The answers to my "curious" questions above:

1. Cranes that build themselves
2. Capacitance
3. A shared key and epoch time

Ready to learn? Check out DistilledU

I've been a bit quiet recently.

I've been spending a lot of time working on DistilledU - our new online training platform for SEO. It's in beta just until 22nd August (the middle of next week). Now's the time to check out the free bits (a free keyword research module and interactive guide to advanced search query operators) to see if it's something that'd help you do your job because if you sign up during beta you lock in a 50% discount for life:

More information about our conferences

We recently announced the line-up of speakers for our Searchlove conferences in London in October and Boston in November. If you have done all of the above and want to see presentations from people at the top of their game, we'd love to see you there. If you sign up now, you get early bird pricing (there's an additional £100 / $150 off for SEOmoz PRO members – get your discount code here).

PS – I mentioned at the beginning that I've been a little busy. It's not just at work. At home, the news is a new Olympic champion in the "smallest Critchlow" event – Adam Joseph was born just over a month ago. Here he is with his sister showing off presents from Rand and the moz crew – thanks again guys:

Moz's newest fans - Rachel thinks all robots are called "Roger"

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Inuit says 53 percent of companies “reinvented their business” to survive since 2010. The pivot is a buzz word in Silicon Valley, but may be one of the smartest moves an entrepreneur can make.

A good business owner can’t be afraid of change. Markets change, consumer attitudes change, technologies change, and so companies must also change. The majority of changes small businesses make today come in the form of “overhauling” the product or service. Next in line are changes to infrastructure within the company or changes to the staff.

Pulling the trigger is undoubtedly one of the hardest decisions to make, but you are in good company. Some big names in Silicon Valley have performed the pivot, including Twitter co-founder Evan Williams who originally founded Odeo, a podcasting company. It didn’t take off like Twitter has, but while it didn’t crash and burn, Williams eventually put the Odeo up for sale.

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom was also in the pivot boat. His app Burbn was a location-based app, which included users taking pictures of their surrounding and tagging the location of those pictures. Systrom noticed that people were more interested in the photo features than the app itself. So, he pulled the photo technology out of Burbn and created the very popular Instagram, which recently sold to Facebook for a whopping $1 billion.

Need more pivot inspiration. Check out this infographic from Intuit below:

via: Is Your Small Business in Need of Reinvention? [INFOGRAPHIC]

Kevin Systrom image via LeWEB12/Flickr

Filed under: Entrepreneur

If rumors hold true, Apple should be gearing up to unveil its latest iGadgets in just a few weeks, and it’s no surprise that all sorts of questionable leaks are now worming their way into daylight.

The latest of those purported leaks comes in the form of images obtained by the French site Nowherelse.fr that reportedly depict Apple’s tiny new dock connector next to a USB plug. Got your grains of salt ready?

Good, let’s go.

Right now there are so many numbers floating around that it’s hard to make sense of what’s actually happening. TechCrunch and Reuters independently confirmed that Apple’s new dock connector would have 19 pins, but persistent rumors (along with some snippets of code within iOS 6) point to the existence of a 9-pin connector. Still others have been reporting an 8-pin connection, much like the one seen in these pictures.

So what gives? Who’s right?

At this point, who knows. It’s possible that we’re only seeing one side of the connector, and that a handful of pins live on the other side — whomever took the pictures doesn’t seem to have photographed the opposite end of the connector. Well, that or both sides of the plug are identical. It’s also possible that, as MacRumors’ Arnold Kim puts it on Twitter, the metal edge of the connector could effectively serve as a grounding pin, which pushes the number to nine.

Or, if we start paring down possibilities with Occam’s razor, we could also draw the conclusion that the images are fake and that there are better ways to spend a Friday than wracking our brains over Apple minutiae. Either way, there’s no way to get a full sense of what’s going on here.

For what it’s worth, the design doesn’t actually look too bad — I could conceivably see Apple running with something like this, though I have to wonder how sturdy the inevitably big-to-small dock connector adapter is going to be. In any case, there’s no way in hell that these images aren’t going to be followed up by even more leaks and speculation, so hold on for the ride.

UPDATE: Nowherelse.fr has updated their original post with a bit more information about the mysterious connector. iDownloadBlog‘s Sebastien Page (who in addition to being a nice guy speaks fluent French) offers up the following translation:

“We have obtained new information about this connector. We have indeed learned that it is not equipped with 8 but 16 pins with distinct functions (8 pins on each side), noting that one side would currently have no specific function and might be saved for future use.”

CCP Games, the Iceland-headquartered company behind the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game EVE Online, says it has raised $20 million in new funding.

The funding comes in the form of convertible bonds raised from Icelandic institutional investors, according to Chief Financial Officer Joe Gallo. Founded in 1997, CCP previously raised $20 million in equity financing.

Back in February, CCP executives told me that EVE Online saw $66 million in revenue last year. Chief Marketing Officer David Reid says the company is now gearing up for the launch of its next title, the first-person shooter DUST 514, which is currently in beta testing and is supposedly on-track for a 2012 release on the Playstation 3.

With DUST, CCP is experimenting with a new model for console-based first-person shooters — the game will be free to play, with players instead paying for in-game goods. Perhaps even more impressive than the business model is the fact that the planet-based action of DUST will be integrated with the space setting of EVE Online, so that player activity in one game can affect the world of the other. The two games were kept separate for the initial player testing, but Reid says CCP is currently in the process of merging the two worlds, allowing players in both games to chat with each other and EVE players to cause some havoc in DUST through orbital strikes.

In part, the funding will be used to promote the DUST launch. Reid acknowledges that it’s going to be a crowded fall for video games, with a number of big releases like Halo 4 on the schedule. CCP doesn’t intend to “go head-to-head with EA and Activision,” but since the success of an online game doesn’t depend on driving a massive amount of first day sales, Reid says the company can take a more patient, long-term approach to its marketing campaign.

The launch is also coming after the disappointing performance of the highly anticipated MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic. Reid points to The Old Republic as a sign that “players by-and-large are consuming the content of triple-A games faster than anybody is able to develop them.” He contrasts that design- and story-heavy approach with CCP’s philosophy in EVE and DUST, where the universe is more of a “sandbox” and “the players become the content in the end.”

In addition to launching DUST, Reid says the funding will allow CCP to prepare for an IPO. The company doesn’t have any immediate plans to go public, but he says the money “allows us is to do some of the things you need to do for IPO preparedness,” such as building greater redundancy into its computer systems, so that it’s ready to go public when and if the time is right.

Here’s why you need to come to DEMO, the big product launch event set for Oct 1-3.

Whether you’re a company launching a product, or an executive wanting to stay on track of the latest big technology trends and conversations, DEMO is the place to be. This is one of the best places to get deals done. Entrepreneurs can sync at a single event with dozens of tech writers, investors can find promising teams to back, business development and IT officers can see what’s coming next.

DEMO is just eight weeks away, and our class of presenters is already taking shape.  Some awesome companies are lined up and ready to go, but we’re always looking for more, so if you’re working on a new tech product or service that will be ready to launch in October, we want to hear form you now.  The deadline to apply is Friday, August 17th.

This upcoming DEMO is going to be a big one. Thought-leaders like Ray Kurzweil and Evan Williams will be just part of the full roster of experts who will address the biggest opportunities in technology today, what’s coming up next, and how best to go after them. They’ll also offer tips on how they they saw earlier trends and built great companies around them. Kurzweil, one of the most the most respected tech futurists, has invented things such as the CCD flat-bed scanner, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, and the first text-to-speech synthesizer. He was founder of the company that became Nuance, the $7 billion market-cap company that drives much of the speech recognition technology today, and which powers Apple’s Siri.

Williams was at the forefront of some of the biggest web technologies of the past decade, i.e, little things like blogging (he founded Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google and became Blogger), podcasting (he founded Odeo, one of the earliest podcasting companies), and micro-blogging (he co-founded Twitter).

But the main star of the event is still you, the entrepreneur. DEMO has an unrivaled history of launching companies (Salesforce, Netscape, Tivo, Fusion-io, VMWare, WebEx, Sun’s Java, the list goes on), and we’re continuing that tradition this fall.

One of the biggest draws is that launching at DEMO is incredibly efficient. The word’s tech press is highly represented at the event (many of the leading technology reporters are based in SF, a short drive away from the event), and so a company can save time by hitting them all up at the event, either at its station during the breaks or in the hallways during the show. And then of course, for companies coming from outside of Silicon Valley, it’s a great time to schedule a trip up to Sand Hill Road to raise funding from the big venture capital firms here. Many venture capitalists attend the event. Many deals are started on the spot, at the event. And of course, if you’re a company launching at DEMO, you can use the pending event as leverage with partners or investors to make the move faster (they’d better move to invest you in, because after DEMO, your product will be known to the world). It gives company engineers a nice deadline to work toward: Get that product out now, or else!

If you’re interested in coming, fill out the online form, and we’ll be in touch with more details.  If you’re selected to present at DEMO, we can get start getting your company ready for the event right away.  We do a lot more to make sure everyone has a successful launch: We have a great DEMO speaking and presentation coach, Nathan Gold, who works with all of the companies leading up to the event (he’ll help you devise a sizzle-reel that you use to blow away investors, partners and others), a PR team that can offer PR support, social media advisors, and the best A/V team in the business.

The deadline to apply is August 17th.  Hope to see you on stage in October!

Filed under: DEMO

Google today agreed to pay $22.5 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charge that it bypassed Safari’s privacy settings to serve targeted ads to consumers. Google placed these cookies on Safari users’ computers, despite the fact that, as the FTC notes, “Google had previously told these users they would automatically be opted out of such tracking, as a result of the default settings of the Safari browser used in Macs, iPhones and iPads.” This, according to the FTC, was in direct violation of the earlier privacy settlement between Google and the FTC.

The FTC’s charge focused on the fact that Google exploited a loophole in Safari to place cookies on its users’ computers even though Safari, by default, blocks cookies from third-party sites. As the WSJ reported earlier this year, Safari makes an exception for cookies from sites that users interacted with before by, for example, filling out a form. To place its ad tracking cookies, Google tricked Safari into believing that users were submitting a form to Google and the browser would then allow Google to install its temporary ad tracking cookies.

The existence of today’s fine was first reported last week, but wasn’t official until today. Given that this is a settlement, it’s important to note that today’s “consent order is for settlement purposes only and does not constitute an admission by the defendant that the law has been violated.”

Despite these legal details, the FTC is clearly looking at this settlement as a success. “The record setting penalty in this matter sends a clear message to all companies under an FTC privacy order,” said Jon Leibowitz, Chairman of the FTC. “No matter how big or small, all companies must abide by FTC orders against them and keep their privacy promises to consumers, or they will end up paying many times what it would have cost to comply in the first place.” One could easily argue, though, that paying a $22.5 million fee isn’t exactly a problem for Google, which had an operating income of over $3 billion last quarter.

Google’s Response

We asked Google for a statement regarding today’s announcement. Here is Google’s response:

We set the highest standards of privacy and security for our users. The FTC is focused on a 2009 help center page published more than two years before our consent decree, and a year before Apple changed its cookie-handling policy. We have now changed that page and taken steps to remove the ad cookies, which collected no personal information, from Apple’s browsers.

Google has until February 15, 2014 to expire all of the cookies involved in today’s settlement.

Video is the undisputed darling of the marketing world in 2012. According to the Cisco VNI Benchmark Report, global internet video traffic will make up 54 percent of all consumer internet traffic in 2016 — up from 51 percent in 2011. Globally, internet video to TV doubled in 2011, while video-on-demand traffic will triple by 2016. In 2011, Strategy Analytics cited 108 billion mobile videos were viewed worldwide; in 2012 that number has already climbed to 280 billion views. Video offers greater retention and recall – up to five times greater than the written word. While the statistics are intriguing and exhaustive, the back story is even more compelling.

Why video?

There are a variety of reasons web-based video is such an important media vehicle, and marketers that understand the nuances will be more successful than the laggards. For starters, video is one of the most efficient and highest life form of media. A 30-second HD video offers four powerful media form factors to marketers: video, audio (podcast), text (transcript), and still images. Each of these form factors can be edited, optimized, syndicated, and promoted across a variety of platforms, including YouTube, iTunes, websites, blogs, Pinterest, and Flickr.

Another compelling reason for marketers to pay attention to video: YouTube is the second most popular search engine by volume. That means your customers are using YouTube to for research in addition to or in lieu of Google, Bing, or Yahoo, This change in behavior provides a new opportunity for marketers: To create a dedicated TV channel on YouTube, complete with original programming and advertising. To be truly effective, a YouTube channel should contain videos for all four stages of the sales cycle: awareness, interest, intent, and purchase. I’ll go deeper into this in a moment.

Video provides the ultimate storytelling medium: If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then how many words is a 30-second video worth at 30 frames a second? Consumers and new organizations alike are catching onto this trend. According to recent research, for the 14 months between January 2011 to March 2012, the most searched-for terms on YouTube were related to news events. For example, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami was the most popular news event on the video network: In the week following the disaster (March 11 to 18), the 20 most-viewed videos related to the tragedy were viewed more than 96 million times.

As an advertising vehicle, video is equally powerful: Online video ads outperform other online ad formats. According to eMarketer, U.S. online video advertising spending will grow 52.1 percent to $2.16 billion in 2011, before reaching $7.11 billion in 2015. Online video’s ad spending growth will far outstrip TV’s growth through 2016. The charts below paint a clear picture for the future of online video advertising:

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At the end of July, Amazon updated its Cloud Player to be in fighting form as an iTunes killer, with a load of new audio features like Scan and Match technology and licensing deals with a number of labels. And at the time, Amazon said that Sonos support would be “coming soon.” Today, that functionality has arrived, with the Cloud Player now working on the Sonos Wireless HiFi System.

This will mean that users who store music in Amazon’s Cloud Player will now be able to stream that music over of Sonos’ kit, in addition to the existing ability to stream Cloud Player music over a Kindle Fire, an Android device, any iOS Apple device, Mac or PC. Amazon says it will be adding more support for further devices later this year. Roku is likely to be next in line.

The move gives Amazon the ability to snag in further users, to add to the “millions” it says are already using the Cloud Player.

“Our goal is to enable customers to enjoy all their music, wherever they are, and on any device. Launching on Sonos today is an important part of that strategy, as our customers have been asking us to add Sonos to the list of compatible Cloud Player devices ever since we first launched Cloud Player,” said Steve Boom, vice president of Digital Music for Amazon, said in a statement. “We will continue to add support for more devices and platforms later this year.”

Amazon has been aggressive in its attempt to wrest some market share away from Apple, whose iTunes remains the market leader for digital music sales. The cloud-based Amazon service lets users buy music from its own library of 20 million tracks, as well as import music as well from iTunes and their CDs, but importing comes under Amazon’s freemium model: All Amazon purchases plus the first 250 imported songs are stored for free. However, customers must pay $24.99 a year to import and store up to 250,000 tracks beyond that first 250.

Meanwhile, for Sonos, this is another example of how the wireless HiFi company is building up its own usefulness. The company already allows for streaming of a user’s iTunes library, as well as their Spotify collections and a variety of radio stations, among other music sources.

Google announced plans to discontinue paying AdSense publishers by check in all countries where they officially support paying by electronic funds transfer (EFT).

Google said “EFT payments are free of charge, less error prone, more efficient and the most environmentally-friendly payment method.” In fact, Google has recommended EFT since before 2007, just two years after the EFT option within AdSense went out of beta.

Now, Google is going to require most publishers to receive payment via EFT. For most of you, this is not a big deal. Personally, I’ve always received them via check, but switching to EFT is not a big deal for me.

Google wrote:

With these changes, please note that the new system wonât support check payments in countries where we offer EFT as a form of payment. If youâre located in a country where we offer EFT payments and you currently receive check payments, please be advised that youâll need to complete a few steps once your account is upgraded. However, no immediate action is required on your part at the moment. Once your account is transitioned to the new system, youâll receive an email notification with detailed instructions on setting up EFT payments.

To see if you are effected, see the list of countries on this page.

Here is a video Google made on EFT AdSense payments in 2009:

Is this going to be an issue for you?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.