But some are so clearly and consistently focused on a single community interest that they generate with almost every post a huge number of intelligent, interesting, and polite comments. Are comments more trouble than they are literally worth? According to Animal’s Joel Johnson, the answer is a resounding Yes. believe I’m right, and I think it’s important to start the discussion. And my theory is very easy to disprove: just run your own analysis on your traffic and determine exactly how many people are scrolling down the page to read comments. Johnson’s objections to comments are many. MORE >>

If your goal is just to generate copy, you’ll never need to ask any irritating questions. At first glance, the idea behind content marketing is straightforward and appealing: by publishing great content, you can win friends, influence people, and achieve your marketing goals. But like all great ideas, it’s not as simple or as sunny as it first appears. The problem is this: To make great content, you sometimes have to be a wee bit obnoxious. If you’ve worked much with journalists and editors, you understand. The trait is not genetic, but occupational. They weren’t, and he knew it. MORE >>

That might be ever-so-slightly extreme, but it illustrates the strong feelings that stock photography can inadvertently generate. I’ve written recently about the need to use meaningful visuals to accompany your text. In passing, I mentioned the downsides of that frequent last resort, stock photography, but left it to an article by Heather Rubesch , elsewhere on the web, to provide details. Stock photo: Here be a dragon. The magazine has evidently been in the habit of taking stock shots of meat-based meals and using them to illustrate articles about vegan dishes. Probably not. MORE >>

” His plays, that is, were the result of collaboration and conversation with predecessors, contemporaries, and even later generations. Aargh? In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times , theater critic Charles McNulty wrote a marvelous column inspired by his objections to the Roland Emmerich movie, Anonymous. Though he disputes the movie’s thesis that no one with Shakespeare’s lower middle class roots could have written such great masterpieces, that wasn’t his aim in writing. Nothing McNulty tells us would surprise even a casual student of Shakespeare. MORE >>

The authors’ four criteria for highly digital companies are pretty straightforward: The company generates a high percentage of revenues digitally. You generate your work on your own, with little need for assistance, using a variety of digital tools. In a Harvard Business Review blog post discussed last week by Mark Schaefer , authors Jeffrey Rayport and Tuck Rickards asserted that most big companies are too far behind the digital curve. By their standards, only nine of the Fortune 500 corporations are highly digital. That’s no surprise. Its leadership has deep digital experience. MORE >>