By @philadams of @blondedigital: So I came up with this idea for a universal social strategy.It’s a one-size-fits-all framework that will hopefully help if you’re given a blank sheet of paper and asked to develop a “social media” strategy.It’s designed to ensure that you ask the right questions and avoid some of the common pitfalls, many of which arise from the sloppy use of language.

The key thing to understand is that the rules of SEO aren’t magic or arbitrary. They’re based on the goals of a search engine, which is to find relevant results. Relevance implies genuineness, and genuineness implies trust. So, shockingly, you should try to make your site’s content trustworthy, genuine and relevant. All of the rules have come about due to their utility in detecting those three positive metrics. Good SEO is a by-product of not being a dick on the internet.

Lore and Bharara did about $180 million in revenue in 2009 and expect to bring in about $300 million in 2010. Just five years old, Quidsi (the name means "what if?" in Latin) is already breaking even in a category that wasn't supposed to work on the internet: Quickly shipping bulky, low-margin commodities. The partners don't make money on diapers, and never planned to. Diapers are the draw that brings in loyal customers who order over and over. The money comes when a shopper throws in one of the other 25,000 SKUs, or Stock Keeping Units, that Diapers.com lists on its site—higher-margin items like brand-name baby shampoo, wipes, and formula.

This book examines match strategies for creating goal scoring opportunities out of the following systems of play: 4-4-2, 4-3-3, 3-5-2, 4-3-1-2, 4-5-1. For each system, the author discusses the strategy, tactics, system and schemes of play as well as the technical, tactical and physical characteristics of the players who use the system. Several situational attacking schemes are also presented, using clear diagrams and detailed descriptions.

I really like Malcolm Gladwell's new piece on digital political organizing.

It's got an excellent structure, alternating scenes of the lunch counter protests of the 1960s with ideas about the loose social groups that activists attempt to catalyze on Facebook and Twitter. His big point is weak-tie networks don't have the dedication and structure to take on an established power structure. Martin Luther King, Jr, he notes, had a one million dollar budget and 100 staff members on the ground when he got to Birmingham.

I found myself surprised at how much I liked the piece. I'm a big fan of Clay Shirky, whose various writings about the potential of the Internet as an organizing platform would seem to run directly contrary to Gladwell's thesis.

Football is a holistic game. Advance a player here, and you must retreat a player there. Give one player more attacking responsibility, and you must give another increased defensive duties. As three at the back has become outmoded as a balanced or attacking formation – though not as a defensive formation – by the boom in lone-striker systems, coaches have had to address the problem of how to incorporate attacking full-backs without the loss of defensive cover.

Red Cross Social Media Strategy

'Tools Not Rules' says Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, the esteemed school for journalists and teachers of journalists. Clark believes that everyone can write well with the help of a handful of useful tools that he has developed over decades of writing and teaching. If you google 'Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools', you'll get an astonishing 1.25 million hits. That's because journalists everywhere rely on his tips to help them write well every day - in fact he fields emails from around the world from grateful writers. 'Writing Tools' covers everything from the basics (Tool 5: Watch those Adverbs) to the more complex (Tool 34: Turn your notebook into a camera) and uses more than 300 examples from literature and journalism to illustrate the concepts. For students, aspiring novelists and writers of memos, emails, PowerPoint presentations and love letters, here are 50 indispensible, memorable and usable tools.

Arsenal’s effective wing play, Blackpool’s adventure, two holding midfelders, and the joys of Chamakh and Rosicky.

Surprisingly, Hodgson opted to change nothing at half-time – Liverpool had rallied in the five minutes before the break, maybe convincing their manager to have faith in the 4-4-2. If Hodgson remains committed to that system long-term, then we must have patience with him, and understand that a change in formation rarely has instant results. But in the sole context of this game, Liverpool needed something different.

Yes. You know the conventional wisdom: long-form journalism doesn’t do well on the web. Our attention spans are too short and sentences are too long and and we’re too easily distrac — oooh, Macy’s is having a sale! — and, anyway, complex narratives are inefficient for a culture that wants its information short, sweet, and yesterday. Long, carefully wrought articles are tasty, sure; online, though, the news we consume is best served up quick-n-easy. The web isn’t Chez Panisse so much as a series of Sizzlers.

Everyone wants to be like Steve Jobs and his powerhouse company. It's not as easy as it looks.

This has been a decade of broadly attacking football, at least at the highest level, but at the start of 2010-11 the game stands at a crossroads. Internazionale's triumph in the Champions League, the predominance of reactive football at the World Cup and the growing realisation that nobody can match Spain/Barcelona at their brand of possession football, though, might mean a turn into defensiveness.

International competitions are always fascinating tactically if anything for the inflexibility they confront managers with. Arrigo Sacchi, in charge of the Italy side who reached the final of World Cup ’94, stated it was “impossible” for a national manager to drill the same understanding that club level coaches are afforded due to the lack of day-to-day availability of personnel. The sporadic amount of time they have with players means it can be difficult for coaches to develop plans so they usually are forced to stick with philosophies they think are correct – and that in turn highlights the common trends in the thinking of modern coaches. And certainly, what has become oblivious from the recent World Cup in South Africa and indeed club football for the past few years is that the use of two holding midfielders in front of the back four is become crucial in the modern game.

A common occurrence: you or someone you know wants to create content and have it published online. A slightly less common occurrence? Having that same someone articulate high aspirations for their content. For those select few, instead of creating content destined for some digital landfill, their content is special; it’s going places and it’s taking them, their brand, and their experience with it.

Evolution never stops. As the World Cup showed, 4‑2‑3‑1 has come to replace 4‑4‑2 as the universal default (18 of the 32 teams played some form of 4‑2‑3‑1 at some stage, with another three fielding a 4‑4‑2 that perhaps should have become 4‑2‑3‑1) so the system at the very highest level has already begun to mutate. Spain, by the end of the World Cup, had followed what Barcelona did at times last season, what Arsenal seemed to be reaching towards, and set up in a 4‑2‑1‑3.

“What’s the one thing I need to know?” she asked.

I made her wait, of course, so that I could explain the premise of the book. It turns out the vast majority in the United States and other nations believe that the way to get ahead is to focus on your weaknesses and try to fix them. That’s wrong, Buckingham says.

Nice. http://whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com/

"At the dawn of the tournament Football Further posed ten tactical questions that the World Cup would answer. Three days after Spain’s tense extra-time victory over the Netherlands in the final, the answers to those questions reflect a tournament in which defensive rigour was overwhelmingly de riguer and tactical innovation conspicious by its rarity."

"... passing triangles are only important for a side looking to dominate possession. For a side looking to disrupt that, 4-4-2 can be extremely effective – the famous "two banks of four" that for a long time seemed to be such a feature of any English team playing an away game in European competition. Fulham showed last season how effective the style can still be. Sit the midfield line deep on the back four so there is minimal space between the lines for attacking midfielders or deep-lying forwards to exploit, and it becomes very hard to penetrate. It doesn't matter how many triangles you create if you never get the ball closer than 35 yards from the opposition goal."

RT @pgoricha: "the fans were treated to the incredible sight of Grenada trying to score in either goal" http://bit.ly/3iFFFp

Jonathan Wilson: Will attacking full-backs win the competition? http://bit.ly/cJmkTB #WorldCup
– Guardian sport (guardian_sport) http://twitter.com/guardian_sport/statuses/16375346348

Last season, in a bid to draw some attention to Battier’s defense, the Rockets’ public-relations department would send a staff member to the opponent’s locker room to ask leading questions of whichever superstar Battier had just hamstrung: “Why did you have so much trouble tonight?” “Did he do something to disrupt your game?” According to Battier: “They usually say they had an off night. They think of me as some chump.”

"David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases."

NEW ON ZM: Two friendlies lead Capello back to square one http://bit.ly/d8nXyM
– Zonal Marking (Zonal_Marking) http://twitter.com/Zonal_Marking/statuses/15051243296

Friendly internationals are regularly derided as meaningless spectacles with no real benefit other than gate receipts for the national football association. That said, England's match against Egypt at Wembley this coming Wednesday evening is primarily intended to give England experience in playing against an African nation, ahead of their match with Algeria in this summer's World Cup.

Wilson points out that it also provides the opportunity for England to play against a team that line up using 3-5-2, a formation that has largely fallen out of favour in recent years back to the perennial 4-4-2 and the 4-5-1/4-3-3 variant that is currently in vogue. In an article similar to a section of his 'Inverting the Pyramid' book, he draws on the work of Brazilian coach Nelsinho Baptista that explores how the 4-2-3-1 formation currently employed by Capello might nullify Egypt's threat.

Wilson's thoughts on 11 vs. 10 in football are equally applicable to almost any aspect of life where the balance is suddenly tipped in your favour: keep doing what you were doing. "If [Alf Ramsey's] game-plan was the right one against a sub-system of 11 men, he seems to have reasoned, it remained the right one when that sub-system had been weakened by the removal of its key element."

"A realization has been dawning on me as of late, one that I’ve always known, but that is easy to forget, easy to misplace, easy to neglect. The best way to learn anything is to do it, to struggle through, to forge on, to fight and gnash teeth and curse at. There is no knowledge as highly regarded as that which you have to work for."

"From the danger of highlights to celebrity undermining the team, that box in your living room could be shaping the sport's future."

"The end of the goal poacher and the rebirth of the libero are two trends we are likely to see during the next 10 years."

"At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses. Many companies will claim roughly the same thing since they know that declaring themselves to be open is both good for their brand and completely without risk. After all, in our industry there is no clear definition of what open really means. It is a Rashomon-like term: highly subjective and vitally important."

"Learning on Sesame Street, as in school, means learning Right Answers, and as in school, Right Answers come from grown-ups. We see children figuring things out. As in school, we hear children responding, without much animation or imagination, to leading questions put by adults. But we rarely see them figuring things out; in fact, we rarely see children doing anything."

"The world’s biggest food company is betting on an emerging class of health and nutrition products to spur its growth. But risks abound."

A neat venn diagram on why we should combine what we do well, what we want to do, and what we can be paid to do - aka the 'Hooray!' zone.