Archive for May 20th, 2010

IMF says: “US has more to do than any other country … to bring its debt back towards sustainable levels”

May 20, 2010

The UK Telegraph says: “The  US faces one of biggest budget crunches in world”

The crux of the Telegraph’s argument:

1) Under the Obama administration’s current fiscal plans, the national debt in the US will climb to above 100% of GDP by 2015 – a far steeper increase than almost any other country.

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2) The US has a higher debt (relative to GDP) and a far shorter maturity of government debt than most other countries.  Said differently, the US must rollover its increasing debt more frequently – and is, therefore, vulnerable to increasing rates and variations in demand (e.g. what if China stops buying US debt ?).

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3) Bottom line (according to the IMF’s projections),  the US has more to do than any other country in the developed world (apart from Japan) when it comes to bringing its debt back towards sustainable levels.

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Full article:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/edmundconway/100005702/us-faces-one-of-biggest-budget-crunches-in-western-world-imf/

Full IMF Report:
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fm/2010/fm1001.pdf

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Obama, Rush, sex … what’s the connection ?

May 20, 2010

Punch line: Online, article headlines have to be descriptive and direct when they show up in mobile and RSS feeds … and they have to contain key words that play to search engine algorithms.  It’s called ‘search engine optimization’.

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Excerpted from NYT: Taylor Momsen Did Not Write This Headline,  May 16, 2010

People who worry that Web headlines dumb down public discourse are probably right.

Headlines in newspapers and magazines were once written with readers in mind, to be clever or catchy or evocative.

Now headlines are just there to get the search engines to notice. It’s called SEO — search engine optimization.

A story about whether the president would play golf with Rush Limbaugh might be headlined: “Obama Rejects Rush Limbaugh Golf Match and Says ‘He Can Play With Himself.’ ”

It would be a digital mega-hit: two highly searched proper nouns followed by a smutty entendre, a headline that both the red and the blue may be compelled to click, and the readers of the site can have a laugh while the headline delivers great visibility out on the Web.

But the need to attract attention from computer-generated algorithms sometimes makes the headlines seem like a machine thought them up as well …  it leads to a sameness that can make all the information seem as if it were generated by the same traffic-loving robot.

Full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/business/media/17carr.html?ref=business

Posted in Online Marketing, Search engines - SEO | 1 Comment »