Leader's Digest March 2008
From PLN
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Leader's Digest March 2008
by Leslie Dillon
March 3, 2008
Ten management lessons
An organization’s greatest assets are its people. Entrepreneur Ryan Allis believes the “two most important things [to] look for when hiring are initiative and work ethic.” But once they’re hired, how should you manage these good people?
Here are ten tips:
- Have a vision and communicate it. No one follows a leader who can’t communicate how the organization will succeed. “Make sure your employees believe in your organization…”
- Show respect. Always treat your customers, vendors, partners, and employees with respect.
- Share your success. Provide whatever incentives you can.
- Don’t be too serious. Make business fun! Nothing beats a monthly lunchtime pizza party.
- Work with your employees. Be sure your staff sees you there working. People don’t like to work for someone who doesn’t work hard. “Especially early on, be the first to arrive and the last to leave whenever possible.”
- Keep your door open. “Make sure your [staff] know that you are approachable at any time about any problem…”
- Listen. Meet with your managers “at least every other week,” have frequent informal discussions with them and get their feedback.
- Build relationships. You need to know something about an employee’s out-of-office life in order to connect professionally with them.
- Praise more than you criticize. Too many managers “speak to an employee only when he or she has done something wrong. … [If you] only condemn and never praise, your employees will quickly either dislike you or show apathy toward their jobs.”
- Consciously build a culture. At Ryan Allis’ company they help fellow staff members move into a new house, give them rides home from the airport, etc. Their culture of helping exists because they have consciously built it.
As a manager, you “control the activity and purpose that your employees dedicate half of their waking hours to. … If you can succeed in building a team of highly motivated and happy employees who take initiative, have a bias toward action, respect you, and truly care for the business, you will have done much of the work toward building a strong and fast-growing organization.” (Ryan Allis, "10 management lessons," Sales & Marketing Management’s [http://www.managesmarter.com/msg/index.jsp ManageSmarter, Feb. 20, 2008. Excerpted from Zero to One Million,McGraw Hill, 2008)
Minding mentoring
Offering managers, especially new managers, “a lifeline of support in the form of mentoring” isn’t as easy as you might think. Here are some tips for would-be mentors:
- Prepare adequately. Be sure to offer well-thought-out advice. Don’t plan to just have coffee and shoot the breeze. Both mentor and “mentee” should should understand the purpose of each session.
- Share stories of failure. Tell them “how you overcame adversity through creativity … and include the bombs.” Young managers “need to learn how to be creative, even if that means risking failure.”
- Go offsite. Being out of the office may be just what you need for a “powerful exchange.”
- Don’t offer mentoring just to rising stars. “Reach out … to those you’re not close enough with.”
([http://www.elabs2.com/functions/message_view.html?mid=56401&mlid=73&siteid=15988&uid=e1fbbe24d3 "Minding mentoring," The Inside Training Newsletter, Feb. 27, 2008.)
Why you should talk politics at work
Conventional wisdom says we shouldn’t talk politics at work, but Stewart Friedman, founding director of Wharton’s Leadership Program and Work/Life Integration Project, argues that talk about politics among people who work together is right on target.
Civil conversations about our political future give people a greater sense of belonging, build community and a sense of trust, and enhance performance. “Smart managers, therefore, encourage real connections among people, not just as employees but as real human beings dealing with the difficulties of everyday life.”
Managers should take advantage of any opportunities that help people get to know each other. “Encourage conversation about the important things in life and people will feel better about you and their workplace.”
(Stew Friedman, "Why you should talk politics at work", [http://conversationstarter.hbsp.com/2008/02/join_online_conversations_abou.html Conversation starter, Harvard Business blogs, Feb. 25, 2008.) Friedman's book, Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life, will be published in June by Harvard Business School Press.)
The shrinking advantage of brands
What’s the world’s most recognizable brand? Google! You may have gotten the answer right, but do you know why?
Unlike Proctor & Gamble, Coke, and others who’ve worked decades to build their brands and spent 5%-10% of their annual revenues on advertising, Google has built the world’s most powerful brand in less than a decade without ever advertising.
Umair Haque, who helps organizations craft business models and strategic innovation, explains that the success of the Google brand is an example of how cheap, ubiquitous interaction is driving orthodox branding into decay.
A brand is a promise of costs and benefits that shapes your expections of a product’s value.
Formerly, interaction was so expensive that information about the benefits of a product had to be squeezed into a slogan. Today, cheap interaction lets consumers be connected. The more they talk to each other, the less they need to listen to the “often empty promises” of advertising.
And talk they do! Traditional brands are decaying because of “the massive defection to hundreds of thousands of social networks and microcommunities, where connected consumers endlessly discuss, debate, and validate brands and their promises.”
How has Google built the world’s most powerful brand? By “investing in consumers – instead of investing in advertising…” There are no ads on Google’s home page; Yahoo did what standard branding orthodoxy would suggest: they advertised on theirs. (And look what’s happening to them now!)
Haque believes that “advantage begins in the DNA. The radical strategic decisions Google has made didn’t happen by chance. Rather, they happened because Google has radically different DNA – and investing in consumers is an almost inevitable outcome of this DNA.”
(Umair Haque, “The shrinking advantage of brands,” Feb 15, 2008, and "The new economics of brands," Feb. 29, 2008, Edge economy, Harvard Business blogs.)
Illumin8: Semantic search from Elsevier
By now, you’ve probably heard about Elsevier’s new Illumin8, but how is it different from traditional search services, and what do we need to know about it?
Barbara Quint, editor-in-chief of Searcher, explains that Illumin8 is focused around solutions needed by knowledge workers in R&D and marketing research departments.
Shore Communications’ John Blossom believes it “promises to be a real breakthrough in STM workflow solutions…”
Illumin8 adds “an important semantic twist to search processing.” Traditional search tools focus on nouns “to define how content relates to a topic.” Illumin8 “clusters results based on how they fall into verb categories…”
Drawing from five billion websites, three million full-text articles from 1,800 Elsevier journals, 33 million abstracts for 15,000 other journals, and 22 million patents, Illumin8 “categorizes the abbreviated results into products, organizations, approaches, and experts. Searchers can reach content by Topic or broad solution areas, Problem, and Benefit…”
Illumin8 is powered by NetBase’s semantic indexing technology, which was developed at MIT’s Media Lab. It’s expensive, with a base price of $100,000 for a Fortune 1000 company and additions based on the number of FTEs.
Internal enterprise collaboration features are planned for later this year, and visualization possibilities are envisioned.
(John Blossom, "Elsevier’s Illumin8 unleashes semantic search on intelligence for R&D", ContentBlogger, Feb. 25, 2008; Barbara Quint, "Elsevier and NetBase launch illumin8", Information Today NewsBreaks, Feb.28, 2008.)
2007 ebook Sales up 23.6 percent
“American e-book sales in 2007, by ‘12-15 trade publishers,’ jumped to $31.7 million or 23.6 percent higher than in 2006.” Note that this is “just part of the e-book industry (no ‘library, educational or professional electronic sales’) and that the retail figure might actually be in the $60 million range.”
And Stephen Abram, SirsiDynix VP of Innovation, reports “seeing quite a few Kindles and Readers at the airport.”
("U.S. 2007 wholesale e-book sales: $31.7M, or 23.6 percent over 2006—but should they have been still higher?", TeleRead: Bring the e-books home, Feb. 18, 2008 via Stephen’s lighthouse, Feb. 18, 2008.)
March 17, 2008
Harvard Business Review
As usual, the March 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review has some excellent articles. I've summarized two of them below. It looks as though all the articles listed on this issue's web page are free. To access an article, go to the issue's web page and scroll down to and click on the title you want.
Is yours a learning organization?
In addition to discussing the essential ingredients of a learning organization, this article presents an interactive online survey that lets you assess learning in your organization.
The authors believe that every organization needs to become a learning organization where employees are “skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge.” But unfortunately, the ideal of the learning organization hasn’t yet been realized.
Three building blocks are essential to the learning organization: "a supportive learning environment, concrete learning processes and practices, and leadership behavior that provides reinforcement.”
Building Block 1 — Supportive learning environment:
- Psychological safety. Employees must feel comfortable expressing their thoughts about their work.
- Appreciation of differences. People learn when they “become aware of opposing ideas.”
- Openness to new ideas. Encourage employees “to take risks and explore the … unknown.”
- Time for reflection. Too many people are judged solely by the number of hours they work. Encourage “thoughtful review of [your] organization’s processes.”
Building Block 2 — Concrete learning processes and practices:
- A learning organization arises from a “series of concrete steps and widely distributed activities.”
- Learning processes involve “generation, collection, interpretation, and dissemination of information.” They also include experimentation, intelligence gathering, disciplined analysis and interpretation, and education and training.
- Knowledge must be shared, and this can happen in a variety of ways.
Building Block 3 — Leadership that reinforces learning:
- An organization’s leaders strongly influence its learning.
- “When people in power demonstrate through their own behavior a willingness to entertain alternative points of view, employees feel emboldened to offer new ideas and options.”
Organizational Learning Tool
The online diagnostic tool can help you answer two questions about your organization:
- “To what extent is your unit functioning as a learning organization?”
- “What are the relationships among the factors that affect learning in your unit?”
- Here's a short version of the survey and for recommended lists and a related video.
- Here's the complete interactive tool, including scoring.
(David A. Garvin, Amy C. Edmondson, and Francesca Gino, “Is yours a learning organization?” Harvard Business Review, March 2008.)
David McCullough on leadership
David McCullough, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and author of John Adams and 1776, describes the qualities of “timeless leadership.”
One of the essential ingredients of great leadership is the ability to spot talent. “Good leaders also judge people by how they handle failure … [They] don’t tolerate self-pity in themselves or others.” But those who have never failed “may not have what it takes when the going gets rough.”
Essential to leadership are three qualities identified by Douglas Southall Freeman: “Know your stuff, be a man, look after your men.”
- Know your stuff. Have expertise, experience and knowledge; do the work required to know a subject — not just accruing information, but learning how to analyze problems, learning to do things by doing them. You can’t learn to play the piano by reading a book about it.
- Be a man. (Regardless of gender) Have the “attributes of courage—backbone—resilience, and strength of character.” See the strengths in others. Be someone “who can be counted on when the chips are down.”
- Look after your men. Take care of your staff. Take a “genuine interest in them.” Be empathetic. Treat them well.
A fourth essential quality of leadership, says McCullough, is the power of persuasion. But great leadership begins with listening.
Rebecca Rimel, head of the Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia, exemplifies great leadership. “She is a visionary who is able to generate a great sense of mission. Her enthusiasm is infectious, and she’s willing to take risks. She personifies the old adages ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ ‘Any job worth doing is worth doing well,’ and ‘Handsome is as handsome does.’ Those are all the kinds of things your grandmother used to say, and they probably can’t be said too often. Samuel Johnson once observed that we ‘more frequently require to be reminded than informed.’”
(Bronwyn Fryer, “Timeless leadership: A conversation with David McCullough,” Harvard Business Review, March 2008.)
Searching as a team
Today’s search tools are designed for people working alone, but that’s not always how people work. An innovative tool called SearchTogether aims to help groups work together from different computers.
Designed to solve the problems of redundant effort and inefficient communication, SearchTogether is a plug-in for Internet Explorer 7 and requires a Windows Live ID. One group member can invite other members to join in a search and assign tasks, while all the members can track progress. Simultaneous searchers can use the “peek and follow” feature to see web pages others are viewing.
The examples of the SearchTogether web site show how helpful this tool can be (e.g., How to travel on Italian trains). I wish we’d had it when my daughter and I were looking for a beach house to rent for our families!
(Erica Naone, "Searching as a team", Technology Review, Mar. 13, 2008.)
Twelve steps to stop scapegoating
Have you ever been the victim of scapegoating at work? If so, what, if anything, was done about it?
Gill Corkindale, London-based executive coach and writer, is seeing an increasing number of cases of “corporate scapegoating”—“a hostile social or psychological discrediting routine by which people move blame and responsibility away from themselves and towards a target or a group.”
The effects of scapegoating are so insidious, managers need to treat it as a serious problem. “It should no longer fester as a taboo area which managers are reluctant to address.” So what can be done about it? Ms. Corkindale “recommends the following immediate steps:”
- Develop a thorough understanding of what’s going on — history, background, context.
- Find out what the scapegoater is trying to accomplish.
- Find out what’s going on between the scapegoater and the victim.
- Make it clear that you “have spotted the process and will talk about it openly until it stops.”
- Emphasize that you won’t “be available as a target.”
- “Stay clear of the scapegoater.”
Try to work towards a resolution in order to prevent future instances of scapegoating:
- Establish the facts — who did what?
- Make sure the scapegoater takes responsibility for his/her actions.
- Get the scapegoater to agree to stop blaming the target.
- Get the target to agree to take responsibility for anything he/she has done.
- Get the scapegoater to agree not to restart the scapegoating.
- “Convey the agreement in a way that is acceptable to the target and scapegoater.
(Gill Corkindale, "12 steps to stop scapegoating in your company," Letter from London, Harvard Business blogs, Feb. 20, 2008.)
Lessons in innovation from Tata’s Nano
The important lessons to be learned about innovation from Tata’s Nano go far beyond the tiny car and its diminutive $2,500 price tag.
Here’s what authors John Hagel and John Seely Brown as the real innovations behind the development of the Nano:
- Willingness to challenge conventional wisdom. What’s really necessary
- Frugality; doing more with less.
- Ability to remix “existing components” in ways that better serve customers’ needs.
- Creative use of information technology to encourage use and deliver greater value.
- Letting customers tinker with products.
- Investing in institutional innovation rather than process innovation.
- New distribution models. As customers’ power increases so will their demands for more customized, value-added services.
(John Hagel and John Seely Brown, "Learning from Tata’s Nano", Business Week, Feb. 27, 2008.)
March 25, 2008
Keep your ego in check
“Leaders need to feel that they make a positive difference—but not the only difference.” You should feel that you have something to contribute, that your ideas ideas are important. But if you believe yours is the only solution, you may be suffering from“importantitis,” the belief that everything you think or do is important. Symptoms of importantitis include the tendency to push yourself and your staff to take unreasonable risks.
How to avoid importantitis?
- Listen to your people. “Savvy leaders learn early on that good listening leads to good ideas…”
- Learn from your customers. Your customers can provide insights about how well your services are doing. Ask for suggestions for improvement. Listen to what your customers say!
- Surround yourself with jokesters. Humor will reduce tensions and keep you rooted in reality.
“Ego is a necessary part of leadership. Without belief in self, one cannot lead someone else. But when ego supersedes common sense, you’ve got problems. Surround yourself with equally capable and strong-willed people. Give them permission to disagree with you on a regular basis. Infatuation with one’s own brilliance can be hazardous to your ability to lead.”
(John Baldoni, “How to keep your ego in check,” Conversation starter, Harvard Business blogs, Mar. 3, 2008.)
Three-dimensional leadership development
Organizations that don’t offer development opportunities to their employees risk losing future leaders. How do you keep your best and brightest? Take “an active role in their development.”
The authors of this article believe the best approach to development is three-dimensional: through the head; through the heart; and through the guts.
- Use your head
- Be clear about what kinds of skills your organization will need to further its strategies.
- Educate your staff about the strategy and industry realities.
- Invest in your strongest performers for mission-critical roles.
- Use your heart
- Give frank, constructive, regular performance feedback.
- Develop trusted relationships with your staff.
- Create opportunities for staff to talk regularly about their strengths, weaknesses, and goals.
- Build realistic development plans for staff.
- Use your guts
- Take calculated risks; accept that failure can happen.
- Give talented staff opportunities to lead projects even if they’re not quite ready.
- Put staff in role-stretching assignments. And stretch yourself!
- Expect high performance — “good enough is not enough.”
- Be a role model.
“The payoff of this holistic approach? You will increase the depth of talent in your team today and create the leaders your [organization] needs tomorrow.”
(Seth Lieberman and Steve Krupp, “Three-dimensional leadership development,” Harvard Management Update, March 2008.)
360 mentoring
Formal mentoring programs don’t always work, and in today’s flatter organizations your best bet for successful mentoring may be a small network of five to six people, including peers and even subordinates, “who take an active interest in your professional development.”
According to Kathy Kram, coeditor of The Handbook of Mentoring at Work (Sage, 2007), here’s how to build a successful mentoring network:
- Define goals and expectations. What kind of expertise do you want to build? Technical, strategic, cultural? Limit your list to five or six objectives. Then recruit the people you want to mentor you.
- Make every mentoring relationship reciprocal. The old model was one-way; the new model is reciprocal. “Both members of a mentoring relationship have teachable knowledge.”
- Regularly evaluate progress. Initially, chemistry’s important, as are similar backgrounds. But another essential ingredient is “a shared commitment to the mentoring relationship.” Every quarter, you and your mentor need to ask each other if this is working, if you need to adjust what you’re doing, or just move on.
When the mentoring ends (whatever the reason), don’t just stop scheduling appointments. “Serving as a mentor is ‘an act of citizenship’. … Protégés need to reciprocate in kind by thanking their mentors for their time, energy, and assistance, and helping them ‘transition to the next phase of the relationship’.”
(Elizabeth Collins, “360 mentoring,” Harvard Management Update, March 2008.)
Long-distance Wi-Fi
Intel is now able to stretch a Wi-Fi signal over 60 miles. Later this year, Intel will begin selling a Wi-Fi platform “that can send data from a city to outlying rural areas tens of miles away, connecting sparsely populated villages to the Internet.”
The technology, called the rural connectivity platform (RCP), will help computer-equipped students in developing countries. The connections will also be able to be used for video conferencing and telemedicine.
Intel has installed and tested RCP in India, Panama, Vietnam, and South Africa, and in late 2008 will begin selling it in India, “with a target price below $500. The point-to-point technology will require two nodes, which could provide 'full back-end infrastructure' for less than $1,000.”
(Kate Greene, "Long-distance Wi-Fi", Technology Review, Mar. 18, 2008.)
Pew Internet report on mobile access to information
The Pew Internet Project’s report, Mobile Access to Data and Information, reports that 62% of Americans use wireless devices away from home or work:
- 58 percent of adult Americans have used a cell phone or PDA for “nonvoice data activities, such as texting, e-mailing, taking a picture, looking for maps or directions, or recording video.”
- 41 percent of adult Americans have logged onto the Internet via a wireless laptop or a handheld device.
How hard would it be to give up these mobile devices? Respondents “say the cell phone would be most difficult to do without, followed by the Internet, TV and landline telephone. This represents a sharp reversal in how people viewed these technologies in 2002.”
(OCLC Abstracts, Vol. 11, No. 11, Mar. 17, 2008. )
Google Books API
Google’s new Books API (application programming interface) helps people gain access to the books Google has digitized. Books Viewability lets web developers “locate titles on Google Book Search and automatically embed links to those books on their own sites.”
The earliest adopters are libraries that are linking their OPACS to Google Books. Ann Arbor (MI) District Library converted their catalog in less than a day. So now, if someone searches the AADL catalog for The Iliad, for example, they’ll find among the results a link saying “Look inside this book at Google Books.” Clicking on that link will take them to Google’s Iliad entry, which “includes references, reviews, and popular passages, not to mention a searchable text of the work.”
Some experts have responded to the new API with skepticism. Google’s Book Search has been controversial, and some worry that this will increase Google’s power even further. Several university libraries are already using the Books Viewability API, and Ex Libris and LibraryThing have integrated Google Books searching into their products.
But, as Ann Arbor’s IT and product development associate Eli Neiburger says, people “have come to expect a lot more out of book searching than the staid old card catalog could provide. … There are a lot of commercial products … that do this, but Google has a much broader reach.”
(Michael LoPresti, "Google Books reaches out with new API," [http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/default.asp Information Today NewsBreaks, Mar. 20, 2008.)
March 31, 2008
How to deal with anxious people
When people are anxious, their minds constrict. A constricted mind is ready to for “fight or flight” mode and isn’t “open to hearing new directives…”
Anyone who needs to get things done through other people needs to know this — and that’s most of us. “The more you talk over or at anxious people, … the more they will close their minds to what you are saying.” The more you talk to or with anxious people, the more you’ll alleviate the pressure they’re experiencing. But the approach you think you’re taking may not be the approach the anxious person perceives.
To handle these conversations more effectively, pay attention to the other person’s body language:
- If they think you’re “talking over” them, they’ll leave the conversation at the earliest opportunity.
- If they think you’re “talking at” them, they’ll either: a) “hunker down in a submissive pose … or b) they’ll stick their chin out at you and narrow their eyes…
- If they think you’re “talking to ” them, they’ll “nod from the neck up.” “This is the language of doing business as usual. Use this as your usual mode of speaking.”
- If they think you’re “talking with ” them, they’ll “relax their shoulders and neck…” “This is the language of intimacy. Aspire to this in matters of the heart and when possible in matters of the world and work.”
Your goal should be to find a tone and approach that works for the anxious person. “The key is to keep attuned to their unspoken language – the more attention you pay to body language, the more expert you’ll become at reading and reacting to it.”
(Mark Goulston, "How to deal with anxious people," ConversationStarter from Harvard Business blogs, Mar. 19, 2008.)
How to avoid becoming the isolated executive
Too many executives become isolated once they reach the top. How can they protect themselves from isolation? Here are a few suggestions:
- Engage customers and employees in authentic, unscripted conversations.
- Watch how your customers behave. Don’t just rely on summary data.
- Put yourself in your front-line employees’ shoes. Work “on the line” for a day.
- Interact with young people. That will expose you to new societal and technological trends and provide a fresh perspective.
“In sum, executives must work hard to break out of the bubble that often forms around them as they rise to the top of large organizations. It takes a concerted effort, but the payoff is great. They will keep themselves grounded, … and they will create bountiful opportunities for learning. That learning can drive innovation and improvement in their organizations.”
(Michael Roberto, "How to avoid becoming the 'isolated executive'", Conversation Starter from Harvard Business blogs, Mar 13, 2008.)
Building success one relationship at a time
“Your network is your net worth.” (Tim Sanders) Library leaders are great networkers, but there’s always more to learn, especially by talented newer staff on the leadership path.
Keith Ferrazzi, co-author of Never Eat Alone And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time and a master networker in his own right, believes the secret to success is in reaching out to other people. Highly successful people are distinguished from everyone else by “the way they use the power of relationships–so that everyone wins.”
Genuine relationship–building is sharing ”knowledge, resources, time, and energy with people [you] know and trust.” Here are a few of Ferrazi’s proven strategies for building genuine relationships:
- Look for mentors. Connect with people who can help guide you and introduce you to others you need to know. Be a mentor yourself.
- Be interesting. “Develop the style, knowledge, and expertise that will draw others to you.”
- Build it before you need it. Create lists of people you know and want to know and stay in touch with them.
- “Ping” constantly. Reach out to people ”in your circle of contacts all the time–-not just when you need something.”
- Don’t keep score. Instead of just getting what you want, you need to make sure “that the people who are important to you get what they want, too.”
- Never eat alone. Avoid “invisibility”-– it’s a fate worse than failure. Constantly reach out to colleagues and future contacts.
(Amazon.com description of Never Eat Alone. Harvard Business is featuring Ferrazzi in an online seminar on relationship building for $349.00.)
Management lessons from the Girl Scouts
William C. Taylor, writer, entrepreneur, adjunct professor at Babson College and a former associate editor of Harvard Business Review believes the Girls Scouts of the USA are a study in change and renewal. The organization, whose brand was for a number of years “decidedly uncool,” has re-engineered itself and made itself relevant in a new era. Their successful change is based on four principles:
- Real change begins from the inside out. The current CEO of the Girl Scouts was promoted from within. She knew the organization’s culture, understood its nuances, and started with built-in trust.
- The way to build the future is to rediscover the past. The Girl Scouts organization studied the vision and goals of their founder, Juliette Gordon Low, and asked, “What would she do now?”
- Real strategy change is about bottom-up discussions. The new CEO assembled a 26-member team from all parts of the organization. They examined the Girl Scouts from many different points of view.
- To build a great organization, it takes a lot of smart cookies!
(Bill Taylor, "Video blog: Management lessons from the Girl Scouts," GameChanger, Harvard Business blogs, Mar. 3, 2008.)
Growth in emerging internet markets
The most recent study from comScore highlights how worldwide Internet usage is changing:
- The U.S. now has 21% of worldwide Internet users, down from 66% in 1996, while the Asia Pacific region has more than 300 million Internet users (up 14% in one year).
- Visits to social networking sites has grown 34% since last year to 530 million and MySpace and Facebook each attract over 100 million visitors per month.
- Google is the dominant search brand in most countries, except where Chinese, Korean, and Russian languages dominate.
- Online video has become the dominant online entertainment format, led by YouTube with over 250 million visitors in January.
(http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2115 "comScore 'Digital world: State of the internet' report highlights growth in emerging internet markets"] press release via OCLC Abstracts, Mar. 25, 2008.)
