Snowden called Australia’s Data Retention Legislation Dangerous

Edward Snowden expressed his views on Australia’s new data retention laws and pointed out that such bulk surveillance has allowed acts of terror to occur rather than foiled attacks. The world-known whistleblower said that Australia is adopting data retention legislation, which “has been proven not to work”.

Edward Snowden spoke from Moscow, saying that Australia’s role in bulk surveillance can be compared with the United Kingdom and the Tempora program, which collect everyone’s communications as part of a so-called “pre-criminal investigation”. In simple words, the surveillance outfits just watch everyone all the time. As for Australia’s outfits, they are able to search through that data not just within the country, but also share with foreign governments like the United States and United Kingdom.
It’s been a couple months that the Australia’s metadata laws had been passed to require telcos to store data on their customers for up to 24 months. According to the federal government, this measure can help fight terrorism. Edward Snowden argued that such laws were a radical departure from the operation of traditional liberal societies. Despite the fact that the company only collect metadata rather than content itself, it can still act as a proxy for content.
Edward Snowden brought a few examples, saying that mass surveillance hadn’t stopped such terrorist acts as the Sydney siege, the Boston marathon bombings or Charlie Hebdo. Snowden said that perhaps the governments missed these attacks because they had too much data to process without prioritizing. In addition, too many resources are wasted on spying on people who didn’t present a threat. The former NSA contractor suggested that governments should cooperate in order to avoid choosing between surveillance and security.
In the meantime, the US federal court ruled that mass storage of telephone data was illegal, and Edward Snowden called this decision “very significant”, as it could lead to further legal challenges of mass surveillance.
Greens senator Scott Ludlam, when discussing this issue with Edward Snowden, explained that intelligence agencies in the country operate with the “bare minimum of scrutiny” and pointed out that the debate in Australia is very stifled.

Protect Yourself with VPN While Torrenting – Save TorrentSsS

Hi Everyone!

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Trust.Zone has founded by the part of ExtraTorrent community. The tool has 3 days free TRIAL period. If period ends, unfortunately, the service asks for money from you but..... our partners tried to make it as CHEAP as possible - $3.99/mo - it's the cheapest price among all popular VPN providers...

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Protect Yourself with VPN While Torrenting – Save ExtraTorrent!
ET - The Place to Be!
Posted by: 

spectator

Date:  Saturday, May 16th, 2015

Russian Pirates Received a Final Warning

Russian government issued “a final warning” for people operating illegal websites. The local copyright legislation was amended again to not just protect more content, but also enable authorities to permanently block websites making copyrighted content available.

Following massive pressure from the copyright owners all over the world, a couple years ago Russia started taking attempts to improve its reputation of the highly pirated nation. Back in 2013, a new IP law was introduced in the country, which outlined a mechanism to block the sites by intermediaries if those failed to comply with takedown notices within 3 days.

Over the first year, preliminary interim injunctions were imposed against 175 websites, but only 12 file-sharing domains were blocked. Now the law was further amended – from May 2015, it will cover not only video? but all multimedia content (except pictures).

Under the amended law, the intermediaries (Internet service providers and webhosts) can be ordered to permanently block sites that continually make unauthorized content available online.

Russian authorities officially explained the legislation’s reach, saying that the law enables to block access to online services providing access to copyright-infringing videos, TV shows and from May 1 – to music, books and software as well. The upgraded law also states that the systematic violation of intellectual property rights will lead to permanent blockage of the infringing portals.

The operators of torrent and other file-sharing websites received a particular notice. The authorities warned they have until May 1 to enter into constructive dialogue with copyright owners who are open to cooperation. The authorities underline that the common goal of the industry is to ensure that all copyright works are adequately rewarded and successful books, music and software bring profits to their creators, and not the pirates. If the website operators fail to start a legal business, the response of the government will become quite obvious.

In the meantime, the industry observers note that the first attempt of the country at website blocking legislation didn’t produce any apocalyptic conclusion. Now we’ll see how these latest amendments work out for Russian file-sharing sites.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.

Hackers Believe that Obama's and Clinton's Communications Are Secure

According to cybersecurity experts and even hackers themselves, both Obama’s government emails and Clinton’s private, encrypted email system are secure enough to withstand the attack from foreign powers. For example, Obama carries a specially secured BlackBerry device, which so far has proved safe from cyber spies.

Even the National Security Agency admitted that the president’s BlackBerry has a satisfactory level of security. Recently, the US government had to admit that hackers attacked systems at the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department, but the breach in question related to the lowest-level unclassified email.

Meanwhile, controversy continues to rage over Hillary Clinton using a private email system while serving as the secretary of state. Nicknamed her “home brew” clintonemail.com system, it has sophisticated cyber “shields” to protect Clinton’s emails from prying eyes. The private domain has been used by her to conduct government business for four years, though it is not clear to what extent. Perhaps, now she would not be using this system as much, because it can appear vulnerable to some kind of hack, although it has still not been knocked offline or breached.

At the moment, the security experts are trying to work out how the hackers gained access to White House communications recently. One suggestion is that they could have infected the computer systems through the staffers while they were working on government business outside the office. Another suggestion is that they used an intrusion method called social engineering in order to lure staffers into clicking on a malicious link.

নাম বদলেছিল যে সাত প্রযুক্তি প্রতিষ্ঠান

প্রয়োজনের খাতিরে একসময় নাম পাল্টেছিল কিন্তু বর্তমান সময়ে বহুল পরিচিত এমন ৭টি প্রতিষ্ঠানের এক তালিকা প্রকাশ করেছে প্রযুক্তিবিষয়ক সাইট ম্যাশএবল।
ওই প্রতিবেদনটির আলোকে চলুন জেনে নেয়া যাক সে তালিকাটি-
১. ইয়াহু
বর্তমানে ইয়াহু ইন্টারনেটের জনপ্রিয় ওয়েবসাইটগুলোর মধ্যে অন্যতম। কিন্তু ১৯৯৪ সালে যখন ইয়াহু যাত্রা শুরু করে তখন এর নাম ছিল ‘জেরি অ্যান্ড ডেভিড’স গাইড টু দ্য ওয়ার্ল্ড ওয়াইড ওয়েব’। স্ট্যানফোর্ড ইউনিভার্সিটির দুই সহপাঠি জেরি ইয়াং ও ডেভিড ফিলোর লক্ষ্য ছিল তাদের নির্মিত সাইটটির মাধ্যমে যেন ইন্টারনেটের অন্যান্য সাইট সার্চ করা সম্ভব হয়। ম্যাশএবলের তথ্য অনুসারে, ওয়েবসাইটটি প্রতিষ্ঠার বছরখানেক পর ওই নাম পরিবর্তন করে ‘ইয়াহু’ রাখা হয়। ইয়াহুর পূর্ণরূপ হচ্ছে ‘ইয়েট অ্যানাদার হায়ারারকিক্যালি অর্গানাইজড ওরাকল’।
২. অ্যাপল ম্যাকিনটশ
স্টিভ জবসের জীবনীর তথ্য অনুযায়ী, অ্যাপলের এই সহ-প্রতিষ্ঠাতা ম্যাকিনটশের নাম পরিবর্তন করে ‘দ্য বাইসাইকেল’ রাখতে চেয়েছিলেন। কিন্তু প্রতিষ্ঠানটির ‘ম্যাক টিম’ বেঁকে বসায় জবস আর নাম পরিবর্তন করেননি। ‘ম্যাকিনটশ’ নামটি নির্বাচন করেছিলেন অ্যাপল কর্মকর্তা জেফ রাসকিন।
জবসের নিজের ভাষ্যমতে, তিনি নিজে আপেল খেতে খুব পছন্দ করতেন। আর ফোনবুকে গেইমিং কনসোল নির্মাতা আটারির আগে যেন অ্যাপল নামটি দেখা যায়, তাই প্রতিষ্ঠানের নাম ‘অ্যাপল’ নির্ধারণ করেন তিনি। এখানে না বললেই নয়, জবস অ্যাপল শুরু করার আগে আটারিতে চাকরি করতেন।
৩. টুইটার
আরেকটু হলেই মাইক্রোব্লগিং সেবা টুইটারের নাম হয়ে যেত ‘জিটার’ বা ‘টুইচ’। কিন্তু প্রতিষ্ঠানটির সিস্টেম তৈরিতে সহায়তাকারী নোয়া গ্লাস ‘টুইচ’-এর মতো ভিন্ন শব্দ খুঁজতে যেয়ে ‘টু্ইটার’ শব্দটি আবিষ্কার করেন। প্রতিষ্ঠানটির প্রতিষ্ঠাতা জ্যাক ডরসিরও নামটি পছন্দ হয়। টুইটার শব্দের দুটি আভিধানিক অর্থ খুঁজে পেয়েছিলেন তারা। এর একটি ‘পাখিদের কোলাহল’ আর অন্যটি ‘অবান্তর তথ্যের বিস্ফোরণ’!

 ৪. গুগল
বর্তমানের ওয়েব জায়ান্ট গুগলের প্রথম নাম ছিল ‘ব্যাকরাব’। এটি অবশ্য ১৯৯৬ সালের ঘটনা, সেসময় শুধু স্ট্যানফোর্ড ইউনিভার্সিটির সার্ভারেই প্রতিষ্ঠানটির সার্চ সেবা সীমাবদ্ধ ছিল। ১৯৯৭ সালে গুগলের দুই সহ-প্রতিষ্ঠাতা সার্গেই ব্রিন ও ল্যারি পেইজ প্রতিষ্ঠানটির নাম পরিবর্তন করেন। একের পর একশটি শূণ্য থাকলে সেটিকে গাণিতিক ভাষায় গুগল (Googol) বলা হয়। গাণিতিক ভাষার এ শব্দের আদলে নিজেদের সার্চ ইঞ্জিনটির নাম পরিবর্তন করে গুগল (Google) রাখেন প্রতিষ্ঠাতাদ্বয়। অবশ্য নাম পরিবর্তনের আরেকটি উদ্দেশ্যও ছিল, তাদের নির্মিত সেবায় যে প্রতিনিয়ত তথ্যের পরিমাণ বৃদ্ধি পাচ্ছে, সেটিও বুঝাতে চেয়েছিলেন তারা। 
৫. ফেইসবুক
জনপ্রিয় এ সামাজিক যোগাযোগ মাধ্যমটি এখন শুধু ফেইসবুক নামে পরিচিত। কিন্তু ২০০৪ সালে মার্ক জাকারবার্গ যখন হার্ভার্ড শিক্ষার্থীদের জন্য ‘ভার্চুয়াল স্টুডেন্ট ডাইরেক্টরি’ হিসেবে সাইটটি লঞ্চ করেছিলেন তখন এর নাম ছিল ‘দ্য ফেইসবুক ডটকম’। পরবর্তীতে অন্যান্য শিক্ষা প্রতিষ্ঠানেও যখন সেবাটি ছড়িয়ে পড়তে শুরু করে তখন নাম থেকে ‘দ্য’ বাদ পরে যায়। ২০০৫ সালে দুই লাখ ডলারের বিনিময়ে ‘ফেইসবুক ডটকম’ ডোমেইন কিনে নেয় প্রতিষ্ঠানটি।
৬. এলজি
কোরিয়ান ইলেকট্রনিক্স পণ্য নির্মাতা গোল্ডস্টারের শুরু ১৯৫৮ সালে। কোরিয়ান যুদ্ধের পর প্রতিষ্ঠিত গোল্ডস্টারের অধীনে লাক-হুই নামের আরেকটি প্রতিষ্ঠানও ছিল। পরবর্তীতে লাক-হুই ও গোল্ডস্টার দুটি প্রতিষ্ঠানই এক সঙ্গে কাজ শুরু করে এবং পুরো প্রতিষ্ঠানটির নামকরণ করা হয় ‘লাকি গোল্ডস্টার’। সময়ের পরিক্রমায় প্রতিষ্ঠানটির নাম আরও সংক্ষিপ্ত হয়ে আসে এবং এলজি নামে পরিচিত হয়ে ওঠে। নেক্সটওয়েবের তথ্য মোতাবেক, এলজি ১৯৯৫ সালে প্রতিষ্ঠানিক নামের এই সংক্ষিপ্তরূপ লোগোটি গ্রহণ করে।

৭. অ্যামাজন
ম্যাশএবলের তথ্য মোতাবেক, রিটেইল জায়ান্ট অ্যামাজনের নাম প্রথমে ‘ক্যাডাব্রা’ রাখতে চেয়েছিলেন প্রতিষ্ঠাতা জেফ বেজোস। কিন্তু যখন বেজোসের আইনজীবি নামটির ভুল উচ্চারণ শুনে একে ‘ক্যাডাভার’ বলেন, তখনই বেজোস দ্রুত নামটি পরিবর্তন করার সিদ্ধান্ত নেন এবং প্রতিষ্ঠানের নাম পরিবর্তন করে অ্যামাজন রাখেন।

International Toll Free Service (ITFS)

In the current world of globalization International Toll Free number Service plays a vital role for the businesses to reach its customers. ITFS is an ideal service for a business that focuses on strong global presence. This service enables the businesses a cost effective platform to provide their customer group to reach them at free of cost! Lack of having an ITFS can create an utter distance between a business and its customers. Recently, Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) has issued directives on commercial toll free services. A Toll Free Service is such that instead of the caller the called party is charged for the call. The basic functionality of this service lies in providing customer services, sales enhancements, conference bridge access, calling card access number etc. As per the regulation, the customers of ITFS services include, but not limited to, inbound and outbound call centers, multinational companies for their brands, calling card companies, international original equipment manufacturers, financial institutions like banks, insurance companies, money exchanges and global supply chain companies, telecom companies etc; Whereas BTRC will allocate the numbers to the licensed International Gateways (IGW), the only authorized entity to sell the service.

Along with the basic functions Toll Free Service has following features:

• Premium number as preferred by Customers
• Special discounted price based on usage to specific destinations
• Price discount for International toll free traffic of specific region
• Bundle product of high quality with seamless customer support for country specific international toll free traffic
• High quality voice with assured redundancy that ensures of reachability of customers at anytime from anywhere
• Advanced features of ITFS numbers with full hosted PBX functionality. The advanced features can be listed as

1. Call forwarding
2. Time of day routing
3. Call redirect
4. Call recording for 15 days
5. Interactive Voice Response
6. Automatic Call Distribution

Pakistan’s Mobile Subscribers Are Required to Fingerprint

Tens of millions of Pakistanis show up in the mobile phone stores nowadays, and the country’s government had to toughen its measures to curb terrorism. So, Pakistanis faced one of the largest efforts in the world to collect biometric data: their government has ordered mobile phone users to verify their identities through fingerprints. Those who refuse will lose their SIM cards, which is an unthinkable option for people who have enjoyed a dozen years of mobile phone usage.

Pakistan government seems to be concerned about a proliferation of illegal and untraceable SIM cards and tries to restore law and order. Back in December 2014, Taliban militants killed students and teachers at a school, and it turned out that 6 terrorists were using phones registered to one woman with no obvious connection to terrorists.

Security experts point out that matching people to phone numbers would require an enormous amount of work. At the moment, there are 103 million SIM cards in the country, which is almost the number of the adult population, and mobile providers have 6 more weeks to verify the owners of all of the SIM cards. Over the past 6 weeks, 53 million cards that belonged to 38 million residents have been verified via fingerprinting. The government claimed that after they verified all of the SIM cards and blocked all unverified cards, the terrorists would no longer have this tool.

First mobile phone company was set up in the country 24 years ago, but there was only sparse usage until the 21st century. Over the last dozen years, the number of mobile subscribers has increased from 5 million to 136 million. The mobile phone subscription rate in the country reaches 73% – just like in neighboring India. Given that 50 million more SIM cards are yet to be verified, mobile phone companies send outreach teams to the countryside and mountains to notify subscribers of the new measures.

The weak spot of the plan is that one region remains largely unaffected by the plan – it is an immediate area around the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Since many Islamist militants have sought refuge there, the country’s cellphone networks generally don’t cover those areas, and residents have to use Afghan networks.

The collected fingerprints are being matched with those from a national database being created since 2005, so people those whose prints are not yet in that database must first submit them to registration authority.

Show Me The Money! 6 Steps To Optimizing Your Payment Process

You’ve worked hard to convince visitors to shop from you — and even harder to get them to the checkout page. So why on earth would you make it so painfully difficult for people to give you their money?
An astounding two-thirds of shopping carts are reportedly abandoned at the payment stage. Given the hoops many websites make their visitors jump through just to enter payment details, it’s no wonder. Few buyers would tolerate such friction at the point of purchase in a brick-and-mortar store. They’d just walk out.
Your payment stage is where visitors become buyers. Here are six steps to streamlining this critical last step in your conversion funnel.

1. Optimize For Clarity & Usability

Whether you employ a single page or a multi-step checkout process, online shoppers will eventually encounter your payment page. Nobody really likes parting with their money, so it makes a lot of sense to optimize the page design to improve the user experience.
Keep Your Payment Form Short, Simple And Clear. The first step in minimizing friction is to make it appear very fast and simple to enter payment details. Perception is critical. If your page layout looks confusing and your forms ask for too much information, you’ll discourage customers from going further.
Reduce clutter on your payment form by including only elements that are absolutely necessary for the transaction. Then, once you’ve visually convinced buyers that the payment step will be quick and painless, make it so.
Don’t require special formats for credit card numbers – if they want to enter their card number with hyphens (or without), let them. Your form should be very accepting of how users enter their data. Help shoppers by auto-populating information where possible (e.g., pre-filling the address field for visitors that are signed into their accounts, or automatically choosing the card type based on the customer’s credit card number).

Cosmetics retailer Ulta.com allows users to automatically populate a billing address with the shopper’s shipping address.

Anticipate And Reduce Frustration From Errors. As an online shopper, I find it extremely annoying when a site wipes out the entire form after I inadvertently type in wrong information in one field. Clearing a form is the easiest way to turn off customers, especially when they’re inputting their credit card details. Luckily, you can easily solve this by submitting your form in AJAX, which allows you to preserve form information without storing sensitive financial data in your servers.

2. Address Security Concerns

Shoppers’ awareness of online shopping-related risks is naturally heightened at the payment stage, so go the extra mile in reassuring them.
Make sure your payment page looks consistent with your entire website and is professionally designed. The last thing you want is to trigger alarms in your shopper’s brain with a payment page that looks nothing like the website they just visited. Any visitor would also balk at giving personal and financial information to a poorly-designed form for fear of an insecure transaction.
Improve shoppers’ perception of security by displaying trust badges and encryption information prominently and in close proximity to sensitive form fields (where credit card information is required, for instance). A study conducted by Baymard Institute shows that the presence of security icons on certain parts of a checkout page served as visual reinforcements for shoppers, which tended to view these parts as more secure compared to the rest of the page.

Notice how prominent the Norton seal is on Home Depot’s payment page. Pre-checkout, the seal is tucked away in the footer, but it takes center stage once buyers enter the checkout process.

3. Offer Multiple Ways To Pay

Accepting a variety of payment methods on your site ensures that your visitors will have at least one viable option at checkout. In addition to major credit cards, consider expanding payment options to include PayPal, Google Wallet, Amazon Payments, Bill Me Later, or BitCoin.
Of course, your decision on which payment types to accept should be based upon your audience profile. For instance, BitCoin may not be used by a large percentage of your visitors, and if you know you get a lot of visitors using iOS devices, you might consider implementing Apple Pay.

Build.com offers Amazon Payment and PayPal in addition to major credit cards. For buyers who are reluctant to enter payment information, having the option of using their existing payment accounts is reassuring.

There is a caveat, however. Increasing the number of payment methods can also increase the complexity of your payment page. Too many choices can hinder decision-making and lead to choice paralysis. So, before you rush into adding a bunch of payment methods to your page, plan your design carefully. Pay attention to steps you can take to nudge users into quickly choosing the most appropriate payment method for them. Then, minimize confusion by showing only the fields relevant to the shopper’s chosen payment method.

4. Fix Fat Finger Challenges

Payment pages are especially tricky on smaller screens. According to research done by SeeWhy, 99.5% of mobile users will bail out before buying. And a major cause of friction is any place where the user is required to enter information.
Here are some things you can do to improve the payment process for mobile buyers.

• Don’t require your customers to create an account to check out, but if you do remember customers’ account details (as is the case with Amazon), give them the option of logging in so they can access stored payment methods, shipping address and other account details.
• Minimize the customer’s effort by using technology to pre-fill information. For example, instead of asking for postal code as the last part of the address, put it before the city and state, and then pre-populate those fields based on the data entered for the postal code.
• Visually reinforce mobile shoppers’ sense of security with well-placed badges, icons and copy.
• Provide shoppers with several payment methods. According to SeeWhy’s Mobile Playbook 2014, mobile consumers are twice as likely to convert when given alternatives to entering credit card details.
• Show progress indicators to set customer’s expectation of how long the process will take, and to let them know where they are in the process.
• Error handling is an even bigger issue given how tedious it already is to enter information on small screens. Minimize frustration by having bigger text fields and buttons and clearly indicating which fields are causing errors.

5. Understand The Needs Of International Customers

If you sell to customers outside of your home country, you probably already know how challenging it can be to process international payments. Credit cards can be hard to authorize for international addresses. And even preferred payment methods will vary depending on the customer’s country.
According to eConsultancy’s “Internationalisation of E-commerce Best Practice Guide,” Germans prefer to pay through ELV and debit card, while Scandinavians prefer to pay by cash on delivery. Not surprisingly, customers will also want to pay in their local market currency, so you will need to work with your payment service provider to make this possible.
Bonus Tip: If you currently don’t process international orders, say so upfront. Don’t wait until customers are deep into the checkout process before telling them that you don’t accept non-U.S. cards or don’t deliver to other countries.

6. Speed Up Payment Processing

Even after your customer has entered his or her payment details, your optimization job is not complete. Payment processing and authorization speed is just as crucial as getting the customer to fill out the payment form.
When customers finally click that “place order” button on your site, do they end up watching a spinning circle for 5, 10, even 15 seconds before being taken to the confirmation page?  The longer the spinning circle goes on, the more anxious customers get.
A study from the Aberdeen Group reveals that a one-second delay in page load time decreases customer satisfaction by 16%. Imagine how much worse this is for people who have just given away their credit card information.
The time between clicking the “place order” button to the confirmation page should almost be instantaneous. Check how long it takes for your payment processor to authorize and confirm payments on different internet providers and devices, and address any performance issues you notice. If necessary, get a new payment processor.

Conclusion

Optimizing your payment process may be one of the least exciting projects you take on during this final pre-holiday push, but it can easily deliver the most impact. With all the effort that goes into offering the right products, optimizing conversion funnels, designing campaigns and driving targeted traffic, you owe it to your company, and your visitors, to make it as easy as possible for buyers to give you their money.

What Is Tag Management & Why Should You Care?

Over the last 15 years, marketers have seen an explosion in the number of digital marketing tools available to them, from a few dozen major email, analytics and advertising services at the beginning of the century, to as many as 2,000 marketing cloud applications today, according to Scott Brinker of ChiefMartec.com.

Sounds great for marketers, right? Yes and no.

While marketers now have nearly unlimited choice in the number of solutions they can use to engage new customers, they are also increasingly bedeviled by the management of all these sophisticated applications. More than ever, they must coordinate with their company’s software developers and IT department to get these applications up and running.

Throw in the number of fragmented customer data sources that each of these siloed applications generate, and this may not be the “Golden Age of Marketing” that some believe it to be – at least not yet.

That’s where tag management comes in.

What Is Tag Management?

Tag management is a new foundational platform that enables marketers to easily connect, manage and unify their digital marketing applications (e.g., web analytics, search engine marketing, email service provider, advertising, social technologies, etc.) without a lot of ongoing development work.

A tag, in this case, is simply another name for a piece of data-collecting code that a vast majority of digital vendors now require their customers to embed on their web pages and mobile apps.

These tags often collect visitor behavior information, but can also be used to launch product functionality such as live chat, advertising or surveys.

With tag management, marketers or developers deploy one single tag on their pages – a master tag, so to speak – and then use an intuitive web interface to add, edit or remove any additional vendor tags in a fraction of the time it would take via manual software coding.

Many tag management solutions have a “tag marketplace” that enables marketers to click on a vendor logo, add their account details and other information, decide which sites and pages to load the tag on and hit publish. The vendor solution is automatically deployed via that master tag without touching the web pages.
Tag management also works with mobile apps, where the same agility applies – install the tag management solution once and reduce the cycles needed to change analytics data points or deploy mobile solutions.
The real star of tag management, however, is something called “the data layer” — the behind-the-scenes data that drives customer interactions in web, mobile and other digital channels.

The data layer resides between the application layer, comprised of various mission-critical digital solutions, and the experience layer that users interact with. Through the creation and optimization of this data layer (via tag management), organizations can easily standardize the data definitions used by each application, which enables them to sync their applications more easily.

image courtesy of Tealium

Think of the data layer as a “control plane” that allows marketers to correlate and share customer data between applications.

The data layer is greatly enhanced by complementary visitor segmentation and profile enrichment tools, such as those offered by some providers (including my employer, Tealium) that deliver real-time segmentation and additional data distribution capabilities.
This is key for creating real-time interactions. For the above reasons, the data layer is a highly strategic part of the modern digital marketing technology stack, allowing these disparate tools to work harmoniously together for the first time.

Why Should You Care About Tag Management?

Tag management offers many benefits across the organization. Below are three core scenarios and related benefits to get excited about:

*Bring Order To Chaos – With marketers using an increasingly complex array of solutions than ever before to engage customers, digital marketing has become a chaotic burden. Tag management reduces complexity for both marketing and development resources, and allows marketers to move faster and launch campaigns easier than ever before.

Tag management can also significantly increase website performance by reducing the number of tags firing on each page (tag bloat is often a main cause of site performance degradation). This, in turn, helps increase online conversions and revenue.

*Build Your Own Marketing Cloud – Some marketers believe they need to be tied to one marketing cloud vendor – such as Adobe, Salesforce.com or Oracle – for both convenience and the promise of simple data integration. But the truth is, no one cloud can be everything to everyone.

Marketers need ultimate flexibility to choose the best solutions for their unique business needs. Tag management, through that unifying data layer, enables marketers to use any solution they want, whether it’s from a marketing cloud or from a best-in-class point provider, and still have them work together.

Additionally, the same visitor profile can easily be shared across your entire marketing technology stack, leading to unified messaging across channels and devices.

*Unlock Your Marketing Potential –Tag management helps marketers and their organizations in more diverse ways than perhaps any other digital marketing solution. At a core level, tag management helps increase marketing agility, reduce costs, and boost web site performance.

At a more strategic level, it helps improve data governance and control, maximize marketing technology investments, streamline data integration processes, and drive more profitable, real-time customer interactions across all digital touch points.

Another under-rated bonus of tag management is that it helps unify internal teams by reducing technology complexity, both in managing mission-critical applications and uniting key customer data.

One of my favorite customer quotes is from a marketing executive at U.S. Auto Parts Network who once told me tag management “is the first solution both marketing and IT could agree on.”

Marketing is entering an exciting new era. Thanks to the emergence of new technologies and best practices, marketers are on the cusp of achieving what some refer to as the “Holy Grail” of marketing — the ability to deliver consistent, personalized, real-time experiences to customers across channels and devices.
Ironically, the only thing standing in their way is too much technology and data, and the inability to effectively manage it. Through tag management and a sound technology strategy, marketers can easily cross into that next marketing frontier.

The Complexity & Confusion Of Tracking Without Tag Management

Tag management is a buzzword right now, but it’s not one of those vaporware phenomena. In this case, the buzz is legit. The tag management space has seen massive growth in the last two years thanks to strong vendors like Tealium, Ensighten and Signal, along with the introduction of Google Tag Manager.
In a survey report from Econsultancy published in June 2012, 73% of marketers using a tag management system (TMS) said it speeds up their ability to run marketing campaigns, with 42% describing it as “significantly faster.”
But to truly understand and appreciate the benefits of tag management, it helps to have a grounding in the traditional underpinnings of online tracking.

What Is A Tag, Anyway?

In the earliest days of online advertising, they were referred to as Web Bugs. Advertising networks needed a way to record interactions and ad activity across thousands of websites. According to Wikipedia:

“Originally, a web bug was a small transparent GIF or PNG image that was embedded in an HTML page, usually a page on the web or the content of an email. Whenever the user opens the page with a graphical browser or email reader, the image or other information is downloaded. This download requires the browser to request the image from the server storing it, allowing the server to take notice of the download. As a result, the organization running the server is informed when the HTML page has been viewed.”

Wikipedia

Today, we speak about tags more generally, such as a snippet of code that is placed on a website on behalf of a third-party to accomplish a specific purpose. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of legitimate uses for website tags, from analytics to remarketing, conversion tracking to surveys, even A/B Testing.
Nearly every web technology vendor utilizes a tag of some sort. Google AdWords alone has multiple tag types, include conversion tags, remarketing tags and custom audience tags.

The Most Common Types Of Tags

Two of the most common tag types used by many vendors are image pixel tags and JavaScript tags. (In truth, many JavaScript tags also make use of image pixels. For example, did you know that the Google Analytics code snippet actually produces a 1×1 image pixel request to google-analytics.com?)

A Google Analytics Tag

The invisible pixel request method has been around for years, and is still a primary way to transfer data to a third-party. The image pixel request is sent with one or more data-points about the visitor and/or their activity.
For example, when the Google Analytics pixel is fired, the request is sent back to Google’s servers with information like the title of the current page, page URL, screen resolution, etc. JavaScript tags are more complex, and often make use of either first-party or third-party cookies. The tag may set a new cookie, or read data from a cookie that was previously set.
Using our Google Analytics example again, the GA tag sets one or more first-party cookies on the visitor’s browser which contain information like their unique visitor ID, campaign names, date of last visit and more. A cookie is used to identify whether the visitor has been to the website in the past or should be considered a new visitor.

What Has Tagging Looked Like Thus Far?

Traditionally, adding these marketing or measurement tags to a website was kind of a beating — especially for large sites. Why? Because each tag vendor has specific instructions for when and where to install it and, in most cases, marketers have to go through IT to get any changes made to the site.
Here is an actual excerpt from the tag implementation instructions from a leading ad network:

Install tags across all pages of the website where tracking is desired, with the exception of pages that end in .aspx (.asp is OK) or any page that references the Apollo moon landing (this breaks the tag, our engineers are working on it). Further, tags should be placed in the body section of the HTML, not too close to the top but as far from the footer as possible. If you encounter situations where existing JavaScript code interferes with {Vendor Name} tag, please remove the tags from all pages and start over using a newer version of your operating system. Finally, tags must be manually typed in each time. Do not try to copy and paste tag code, as this can result in perfect implementation which might yield unexpected results.

I kid, of course. But in my experience, this isn’t too far off.

A Hypothetical Example

So imagine — you’re a marketing manager who just helped launch a fancy new website. Now you are dealing with the various online marketing vendors your company has contracted with, and each of them are requesting their tags to be installed on the website “ASAP as possible” (as Michael Scott from The Office would say).
Fast forward six months and three IT nastygrams later, and you think 95% of the tags are properly installed and working on your fancy new website. Of course the website is spiffy, but now you are noticing something else… it is SLOW to load.
Hmm…I wonder what could have changed? You only added a bunch of extra browser requests on every single page requesting data from vendors spread out all over the solar system. But never mind…it is worth it because now you have sophisticated remarketing lists, an email marketing system that is integrated with your CMS, an affiliate program that is running on auto-pilot and killer metrics in your web analytics platform.
Fast forward another six months. The affiliate thing didn’t work out, and you’ve outsourced your remarketing campaigns to a high-end vendor (that has its own set of new tags which had to be installed). But did the old tags get removed? Nope.
Why not? Well, you didn’t want to bother IT with “another ticket request,” plus you didn’t feel like absorbing all the negative feelings from IT considering they “did you a favor” by spending six weeks installing the tags initially. Honestly, it’s not going to hurt anything to leave them right? This is what happens — I’ve seen it time and time again.
Give me any ten websites and I’ll show you seven of them that have old or unused tags installed in the HTML code, slowing things down and accomplishing absolutely nothing. (Editor’s note: some in the industry have expressed concerns about that old code continuing to send data to vendors that are no longer partners.)
Hopefully this helps tell the backstory of tag management and why it’s being seen as the holy grail by so many marketers. Stay tuned over the next several weeks as we dive deeper into tag management use cases, challenges, benefits and best practices.