Infographic: Owning Your Local Web Equity

When presenting at Get Listed Local University we talk with a large number of small business owners. Many that we have met are attempting to understand the big picture of internet marketing and how the pieces relate.

These SMBs are trying to make a decisions amidst the buzz as to where to focus their on-line efforts. The goal of this infographic was to provide a foundation for that understanding from the perspective of long term investment in their marketing efforts. It is not so much a guide to those marketing priorities as it is a guide to understanding the trade offs in loss of control as you move your efforts onto the platforms controlled by others.

This graphic was originally inspired by a Lisa Barone blog post titled 11 Reasons Your SMB Still Needs A Web Site and refined with the help of David Mihm, Mary Bowling and Matt McGee.

The infographic is available for embedding in various formats and layouts on this page for both web display and print.

I would love to hear your feedback about the graphic and would like to know if you find it useful in communicating to SMBs.

(Click to view whole graphic)

Web Equity Infographic

(click to go to the infographic page)

Web Equity Infographic

Related posts:

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  2. Who is Suing Whom Infographic Revisted – Isn’t Patent Law Wonderful?
  3. Nominees in Local Search category: 2008 SEMMY Awards

YouTube Captions Uploader Web App

Captions can greatly enhance the experience of viewing a YouTube video, and the YouTube API has offered developers ways to upload and retrieve caption data in authorized requests for a while now. However, the various YouTube API client libraries don’t natively support interacting with captions at this time, and writing your own code for uploading or retrieving captions can be challenging.

With that in mind, we’re happy to announce the YouTube Captions Uploader open source project on Google Code, which provides real-world code for uploading captions to YouTube. The code is written for the Java App Engine environment, and it uses some nifty new App Engine features like the Channel API, the Blobstore Service, and Task Queues. And even if you’re not an App Engine developer, we hope that the code that interacts with the YouTube API’s captions service will provide a good starting point for writing your own code.

In addition to open sourcing the code for this project, we’re also running the code itself on a public App Engine instance, http://yt-captions-uploader.appspot.com/. So, even if you’re not a developer, you can still use the application to upload captions for videos in your YouTube account.

Please share your comments or feedback via the project’s issue tracker. We hope that you find it useful both as a standalone web application and as a starting point for writing your own code!