foreclosure auctions

Back in the 1980s, a colleague was getting a doctorate at Harvard Business School and had to take a seminar in statistical methods. Each participant was assigned a paper and was required to present to the class a critique of the statistical approaches employed.

The paper he was given was a dissertation that had caused a bit of chatter in financial economics circles. The author had used prices at which the Fed bought and sold Treasuries in its daily open market operations, and had used them to analyze the results the Treasury achieved in its periodic bond auctions. The paper concluded that the Treasury was doing a bad job, the prices it was getting at its auctions were far worse than those recorded by the Fed in its daily market operations.

When it came time for his session, my colleague stood before the class, gave a brief outline of the paper’s argument and approach, and said, “I have only one comment. Typical Fed daily market operation purchases and sales are in the millions of dollars. Treasury bond actions are in the billions. The data in this paper is irrelevant to the question it purports to analyze.” He then sat down.

He got an A for the course. And he went on to become a business school professor.

An analysis posted by the law firm, SNR Denton, “Commentary on Transfers of Mortgage Loans to RMBS Securitization Trusts,’ makes a conceptual error similar to that of the paper my colleague thrashed. It makes a very long and impressive sounding rebuttal of the line of argument made with increasing success by attorneys in court, and recapped on this blog: that the parties to the mortgage securitization failed to take the steps required to convey the borrower promissory notes and related liens (technically, the mortgage or in some states, the deed of trust) to the the securitzation entity, a trust. But as we will show, the arguments made in the article are simply irrelevant.

And unlike the graduate student who performed the misguided Fed/Treasury analysis, SNR Denton clearly knows better. SNR Denton is effectively the successor to Thatcher, Proffitt & Wood. Thatcher Proffitt was a leader, arguably the leader, in devising the legal structures and documents for mortgage securitizations.

Let’s start from the top of the article, since the efforts to misdirect start there:

There is a tremendous amount of public commentary these days about possible defects in foreclosure proceedings commenced by loan servicers.

Notice how the problem is framed as relating to “public commentary.” There is no acknowledgment of the fact that many judges have dismissed foreclosures because the party attempting to foreclose was unable to prove it had standing, or that the servicers themselves have admitted to problems (albeit of a type they are trying to pass off as merely procedural, that of the use of improper affidavits). In fact, there are problems with foreclosures that have been surfacing in courts all over the US, to the point where the media has taken notice and the servicers have had to take action to address a particular type of abuse. But according to SNR Denton, this problem is merely one of perception.

After a few words about affidavits, we get to this:

Within this overall dialogue, however, more fundamental issues have been raised challenging both the validity of the procedures used to convey mortgage loans into securitization trusts and the qualification of the securitization trusts as a real estate mortgage investment conduit (“REMIC”) at the time those trusts were formed. These statements are false and misguided.

The reasoning behind these statements appears to be as follows: (i) in order to satisfy procedural requirements in connection with foreclosure, certain steps may need to be taken in order to document the ownership of a mortgage loan by the securitization trust, and (ii) since not all of these steps were taken at the time of the securitization, the securitization trust must not own the mortgage loan. This reasoning is faulty, because some of the steps that may be required under applicable state law in order to bring a foreclosure action are not required to transfer ownership of the mortgage loan.

The purpose of this article is to refute these challenges to the efficacy of mortgage loan transfers to securitization trusts. Simply stated, the industry standard procedures used for decades in transferring mortgage loans to securitization vehicles comply with the well-settled principles of law governing the transfer of mortgage loans, and therefore are effective to transfer ownership of the mortgage loans.

Yves here. Accusations like “false” and “misguided” imply that what follows is gospel truth, or at least defensible. Yet instead what SNR Denton provides is a series of arguments that are at best narrowly accurate but irrelevant. One can only conclude the intent of the article is to mislead.

The article never directly recites the argument made here, which is that there is substantial evidence that in many cases, the notes were not conveyed to the trust as stipulated. As we have discussed, the pooling and servicing agreement, which governs who does what when in a mortgage securitization, requires the note (the borrower IOU) to be endorsed (just like a check, signed by one party over to the next), showing the full chain of title. The minimum conveyance chain in recent vintage transactions is A (originator) => B (sponsor) => C (depositor) => D (trust).

The proper conveyance of the note is crucial, since the mortgage, which is the lien, is a mere accessory to the note and can be enforced only by the proper note holder (the legalese is “real party of interest”). The investors in the mortgage securitization relied upon certifications by the trustee for the trust at and post closing that the trust did indeed have the assets that the investors were told it possessed.

Effectively, what the article endeavors to do is focus attention on aspects of the law that might be helpful to the securitization industry but are not germane. For instance, relies upon “general custom and practice in the sale of mortgage loans” and the UCC, which is the Uniform Commercial Code (which has been enacted in all 50 states, with relatively few state-level idiosyncrasies).

But rub comes not from the legal considerations surrounding note/mortgage conveyance, but the particular stipulations of the pooling and servicing agreement, which all the parties agreed to. And it is also clear that the provisions of the PSA trump the UCC.

Article 1 of the UCC allows the parties to an agreement to vary the terms (Ie deviate from the UCC) by agreement. The key points of the germane section:

1-302 Variation by Agreement

(a) The effect of provisions of this Chapter may be varied by agreement.

(b) Good faith, diligence and reasonableness are the only terms that may not be changed by agreement.

(c) The presence of the words “unless otherwise agreed” does not imply that other provisions of this Chapter may not be varied by an agreement of the parties.

That means the UCC governs only with respect to issues not varied by agreement in the PSA.

Section 2 of the PSA stipulates provisions that deviate from the UCC. Typical provisions:

Section 2.01. Conveyance of Mortgage Loans.

Each seller hereby:

Sells, transfers, assigns, sets over and otherwise conveys to the depositor, without recourse, all the right, title and interest of such seller in and to the applicable mortgage loans.

The sales shall be as provided in this agreement.

Delivery shall be on or before the applicable cut-off date

The documents shall be delivered to the Master Servicer before the cut-off date

The Master Servicer confirms that all sellers have made such transfers and deposits before the cut-off date¡

Sellers by such deposits have conveyed to the Trustee for benefit of Certificate Holders all right, title and interest in and to the mortgage loans

The PSA also very clearly provided for an unbroken chain of assignments and transfers thought the parties (the A-B-C-D or more cited above). The use of intermediary parties between the originator and the trust, with a “true sale” occurring at each step, was intended to create FDIC and bankruptcy remoteness. The investors (who are called the certificate holders in the PSA) did not want a creditor of a bankrupt originator to be able to seize notes back out of the trust.

Some PSAs allowed for each party to endorse in blank, but the note still had to have endorsements by all the parties in the conveyance chain, while others stipulated that each endorsement had to be to the next party in the chain. However per NY trust law (and New York law was chosen in the vast majority of cases to govern the trust), the final endorsement had to be to the trust, not in blank.

The “unless otherwise agreed” language in Article 1 means you cannot rely on perfection solely by the UCC. It also means possession of the original note does not prove either ownership or perfection.

Now are any of these issues addressed in the SNR Denton article? Not really. The PSA is mentioned only in passing; the article weight heavily on the UCC. This part comes closest is under a section that discusses “general custom and practice in the sale of mortgage loans.” This is a backwards acknowledgment of what we and other have described: that in 2004, perhaps earlier, the securitization industry started ignoring the requirements of the PSA and would effect the transfers through the A-B-C-D parties via e-mailing lists of loan numbers (which were verified at each step) and wire transfers. SNR Denton is effectively arguing by invoking “general custom and practice” that we all should accept how then industry did things, you can make a legal case for it, as long as you ignore the sections of the PSA which govern what was supposed to happen.

Here are the sections of the SNR Denton piece that come closest to addressing the matters at hand:

In a private label RMBS transaction, the relevant contractual agreement is typically a pooling and servicing agreement, which conveys the mortgage loans from the depositor to the trustee on behalf of the securitization trust. Another relevant document could include a separate mortgage loan purchase agreement, under which the mortgage loans are sold by the sponsor to the depositor immediately prior to the sale from the depositor to the trust, with representations and warranties that are assigned to the trustee. These documents contain clear granting language that conveys ownership of all of the seller’s “right, title and interest in and to” the mortgage loans to the trustee on behalf of the securitization trust. There is a schedule or exhibit to these documents that specificly identifies each loan sold under the agreement.

Note that none of this acknowledges the requirement of the PSA that the note be endorsed to show the full chain of conveyance. Also observe the emphasis on ” These documents contain clear granting language that conveys ownership…”. The documents cannot alone convey ownership; the stipulated steps also have to be completed. The article does acknowledge the importance of delivery of the note in the following section, but again fails to address the PSA issues:

Physical delivery of the mortgage note to the purchaser or its agent, together with an endorsement of the note by the seller in blank, are also key components in the sale of mortgage loans for several reasons.

As we indicated, many PSAs required specific endorsement (to a particular party), not in blank, so this is inaccurate (except as far as describing “general custom”). The article repeats its assertion about endorsements in blank (note the section we boldfaced):

Notes may be delivered to the purchaser with an endorsement in blank. It is common for a mortgage note for a mortgage loan that has been sold to have stamped on it an endorsement to the effect of “Pay to the order of _____________, without recourse”, signed by the originator or a subsequent purchaser. Such an endorsement has the effect that any subsequent transfer of the note presumptively only requires physical delivery (i.e., with no additional endorsement). Therefore, where there are successive purchasers to a note, the endorsement in blank by any prior holder is a sufficient endorsement for purposes of the most recent purchaser.

As we indicated, that’s rubbish. The boldfaced language falsely claims that if the note was endorsed by A in the prototypical A-B-C-D chain we set forth earlier, then D could rely simply on the endorsement by A. In fact, the PSA required the full chain of endorsement and also required the depositor (the C party) endorse the note to the trustee (it is New York trust law requirements, not specified in the PSA, which would call for the final endorsement to be to the specific trust, not just the trustee).

Some other assertions are matter of fact, not law, and SNR Denton appears not to be on top of the facts:

In private label RMBS transactions, the prevailing and nearly universally-followed practice has been for the endorsed notes to be physically delivered to the trustee, or to a custodian as the trustee’s agent, at the closing of the securitization.

First, we’ve had industry executives of large “private label”, meaning non-Fannie/Freddie originators say the notes were never conveyed from the originator, and not simply for their bank, but across the industry. It appears they were conveyed only when someone needed to foreclose, which was well after the closing of the trust.

Second, there is ample evidence in court across the country of out of time assignments. of the note and the related lien being assigned to the trust shortly before a foreclosure action was commenced, in some cased, even afterwards, so again well after the closing of trust.

If you parse the piece carefully, its contentions hinge on these arguments, which in turn hinge on ignoring key provisions of the PSA and not integrating New York trust law considerations.

It ends on a indignant tone, and amusingly, resorts to the new preferred bankster line, “loose lips will tank the markets”:

We believe that the recent allegations of possible wholesale failures to convey ownership of mortgage loans to private label RMBS trusts are baseless and unfounded. All parties to these transactions, including issuers, underwriters, trustees and investors, clearly intended that the transactions convey ownership of the loans to the trusts, and appropriate steps were taken to effect such conveyance in accordance with well-settled legal principles governing transfers of mortgage loans. Any attempts to assert otherwise today are inaccurate and uninformed, and, if left to stand unchallenged, could cause substantial and unwarranted harm to the economy.

These arguments are “baseless and unfounded” only if you do readings of the law intended to favor your clients and ignore ample evidence in past and present court cases. If SNR Denton doesn’t like what it is reading on this blog, I suggest it take up the matter with the judges who are looking at the evidence and the terms of the PSA and are in a fair number of cases ruling against the servicers and trusts for having failed to prove their standing to foreclose.

To put it another way, if this is the best defense a leading law firm in the securitization industry can mount, it shows they have a weak case.

The Huffington Post Investigative Fund website (the first I’ve heard of it) has a lengthy article on a new way that big banks are driving foreclosures. Apparently local governments do not have the resources to pursue property tax collection themselves so they bundle up past due liens and sell them off to investors that can then collect or foreclose. I hadn’t heard of this practice but the article makes it sound like it has been long standing. What it says is new in the arena is the activity of major banks and hedge funds that buy the debts and then tack on massive “legal fees.”

For example:

In May, the Investigative Fund reported how an unemployed former mental health counselor with four children named Vicki Valentine lost her home even though the mortgage had been paid in full. She had owed $362 on an overdue water bill when investors took over and added thousands of dollars in legal fees she couldn’t afford…

D.C. Attorney General Nickles criticizes Aeon Financial, LLC, a bank-financed investment group from Chicago that buys tax liens in some 10 states. Nickles asserts that Aeon has slammed homeowners, who sometimes owed just a few hundred dollars in back taxes, with $7,000 or more in legal fees.

This is in addition to upwards of 18% interest. When people can’t pay then the homes are taken to foreclosure. What is particularly egregious about this process is that everything is done through front companies that are sometimes not even registered in the country. Not even the governments know who they are dealing with:

Banks and hedge funds usually buy the liens through online auctions that permit them to bid in bulk, and they can use any name they want.

The giant Bank of America, for instance, has bid in Florida tax lien sales using colorful names such as Bennu, LLC, named after a mythical bird said to be the soul of the ancient Egyptian sun god. It also has bid as Osprey, LLC, and Ecru, LLC, named after the French word for a pale brown color…

Tax collectors in Florida don’t always know who they’re doing business with, either. Officials in Pinellas County want to know who exactly is behind a company called GL Funding Limited. Sales records show that GL Funding spent more than $10 million and dominated the tax sale in at least 10 Florida counties, most of them rural or smaller cities where interest rates tended to be much higher than in urban and resort areas.

GL Funding registered with several Florida tax collectors as a company with offices in the Cayman Islands. But other counties list a post office box in Philadelphia as its address. The person who registered GL Funding in Pinellas County’s tax sale provided Pinellas with a telephone number in Dallas, Tex. At that number, a man named Jess Weir declined to tell the Investigative Fund who is investing through the name GL Funding.

Said Sam McClelland, deputy tax collector in Pinellas County, Fla., where GL Funding acquired hundreds of liens earlier this year: “We’re still trying to sort this out.”

Yes, banks that are backed explicitly and implicitly by hundreds of billions of dollars from the government each year are tacking on thousands of dollars of fees and then foreclosing on people that owed a few hundred bucks…from the shadows. Ecru, indeed.

Shep Smith&#39;s Fox <b>News</b> Contract Renewed

Shep Smith isn't leaving Fox News anytime soon. The face of the network's news division has signed a three-year contract extension with Fox News, Deadline.com's Nellie Andreeva reported Tuesday morning.

BREAKING <b>NEWS</b>: Drunk &amp; Naked Charlie Sheen Trashes Hotel Room <b>...</b>

Trouble seems to follow Charlie Sheen - whether it be in Los Angeles, Apsen, or now, to New York. Police were summoned to the posh Plaza hotel early Tuesday, where a drunken and naked Sheen had trashed his hotel room, RadarOnline.com ...

Timothy Karr: Fox <b>News</b> Tries to Foreclose on Sesame Street

Every time PBS and NPR have come under attack, the American public has risen up in protest to defend -- not defund -- it. Whatever the rationale, Fox News' ongoing witch hunt tactic is a proven loser.

bench craft company complaints
bench craft company complaints

Shep Smith&#39;s Fox <b>News</b> Contract Renewed

Shep Smith isn't leaving Fox News anytime soon. The face of the network's news division has signed a three-year contract extension with Fox News, Deadline.com's Nellie Andreeva reported Tuesday morning.

BREAKING <b>NEWS</b>: Drunk &amp; Naked Charlie Sheen Trashes Hotel Room <b>...</b>

Trouble seems to follow Charlie Sheen - whether it be in Los Angeles, Apsen, or now, to New York. Police were summoned to the posh Plaza hotel early Tuesday, where a drunken and naked Sheen had trashed his hotel room, RadarOnline.com ...

Timothy Karr: Fox <b>News</b> Tries to Foreclose on Sesame Street

Every time PBS and NPR have come under attack, the American public has risen up in protest to defend -- not defund -- it. Whatever the rationale, Fox News' ongoing witch hunt tactic is a proven loser.

bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints

Back in the 1980s, a colleague was getting a doctorate at Harvard Business School and had to take a seminar in statistical methods. Each participant was assigned a paper and was required to present to the class a critique of the statistical approaches employed.

The paper he was given was a dissertation that had caused a bit of chatter in financial economics circles. The author had used prices at which the Fed bought and sold Treasuries in its daily open market operations, and had used them to analyze the results the Treasury achieved in its periodic bond auctions. The paper concluded that the Treasury was doing a bad job, the prices it was getting at its auctions were far worse than those recorded by the Fed in its daily market operations.

When it came time for his session, my colleague stood before the class, gave a brief outline of the paper’s argument and approach, and said, “I have only one comment. Typical Fed daily market operation purchases and sales are in the millions of dollars. Treasury bond actions are in the billions. The data in this paper is irrelevant to the question it purports to analyze.” He then sat down.

He got an A for the course. And he went on to become a business school professor.

An analysis posted by the law firm, SNR Denton, “Commentary on Transfers of Mortgage Loans to RMBS Securitization Trusts,’ makes a conceptual error similar to that of the paper my colleague thrashed. It makes a very long and impressive sounding rebuttal of the line of argument made with increasing success by attorneys in court, and recapped on this blog: that the parties to the mortgage securitization failed to take the steps required to convey the borrower promissory notes and related liens (technically, the mortgage or in some states, the deed of trust) to the the securitzation entity, a trust. But as we will show, the arguments made in the article are simply irrelevant.

And unlike the graduate student who performed the misguided Fed/Treasury analysis, SNR Denton clearly knows better. SNR Denton is effectively the successor to Thatcher, Proffitt & Wood. Thatcher Proffitt was a leader, arguably the leader, in devising the legal structures and documents for mortgage securitizations.

Let’s start from the top of the article, since the efforts to misdirect start there:

There is a tremendous amount of public commentary these days about possible defects in foreclosure proceedings commenced by loan servicers.

Notice how the problem is framed as relating to “public commentary.” There is no acknowledgment of the fact that many judges have dismissed foreclosures because the party attempting to foreclose was unable to prove it had standing, or that the servicers themselves have admitted to problems (albeit of a type they are trying to pass off as merely procedural, that of the use of improper affidavits). In fact, there are problems with foreclosures that have been surfacing in courts all over the US, to the point where the media has taken notice and the servicers have had to take action to address a particular type of abuse. But according to SNR Denton, this problem is merely one of perception.

After a few words about affidavits, we get to this:

Within this overall dialogue, however, more fundamental issues have been raised challenging both the validity of the procedures used to convey mortgage loans into securitization trusts and the qualification of the securitization trusts as a real estate mortgage investment conduit (“REMIC”) at the time those trusts were formed. These statements are false and misguided.

The reasoning behind these statements appears to be as follows: (i) in order to satisfy procedural requirements in connection with foreclosure, certain steps may need to be taken in order to document the ownership of a mortgage loan by the securitization trust, and (ii) since not all of these steps were taken at the time of the securitization, the securitization trust must not own the mortgage loan. This reasoning is faulty, because some of the steps that may be required under applicable state law in order to bring a foreclosure action are not required to transfer ownership of the mortgage loan.

The purpose of this article is to refute these challenges to the efficacy of mortgage loan transfers to securitization trusts. Simply stated, the industry standard procedures used for decades in transferring mortgage loans to securitization vehicles comply with the well-settled principles of law governing the transfer of mortgage loans, and therefore are effective to transfer ownership of the mortgage loans.

Yves here. Accusations like “false” and “misguided” imply that what follows is gospel truth, or at least defensible. Yet instead what SNR Denton provides is a series of arguments that are at best narrowly accurate but irrelevant. One can only conclude the intent of the article is to mislead.

The article never directly recites the argument made here, which is that there is substantial evidence that in many cases, the notes were not conveyed to the trust as stipulated. As we have discussed, the pooling and servicing agreement, which governs who does what when in a mortgage securitization, requires the note (the borrower IOU) to be endorsed (just like a check, signed by one party over to the next), showing the full chain of title. The minimum conveyance chain in recent vintage transactions is A (originator) => B (sponsor) => C (depositor) => D (trust).

The proper conveyance of the note is crucial, since the mortgage, which is the lien, is a mere accessory to the note and can be enforced only by the proper note holder (the legalese is “real party of interest”). The investors in the mortgage securitization relied upon certifications by the trustee for the trust at and post closing that the trust did indeed have the assets that the investors were told it possessed.

Effectively, what the article endeavors to do is focus attention on aspects of the law that might be helpful to the securitization industry but are not germane. For instance, relies upon “general custom and practice in the sale of mortgage loans” and the UCC, which is the Uniform Commercial Code (which has been enacted in all 50 states, with relatively few state-level idiosyncrasies).

But rub comes not from the legal considerations surrounding note/mortgage conveyance, but the particular stipulations of the pooling and servicing agreement, which all the parties agreed to. And it is also clear that the provisions of the PSA trump the UCC.

Article 1 of the UCC allows the parties to an agreement to vary the terms (Ie deviate from the UCC) by agreement. The key points of the germane section:

1-302 Variation by Agreement

(a) The effect of provisions of this Chapter may be varied by agreement.

(b) Good faith, diligence and reasonableness are the only terms that may not be changed by agreement.

(c) The presence of the words “unless otherwise agreed” does not imply that other provisions of this Chapter may not be varied by an agreement of the parties.

That means the UCC governs only with respect to issues not varied by agreement in the PSA.

Section 2 of the PSA stipulates provisions that deviate from the UCC. Typical provisions:

Section 2.01. Conveyance of Mortgage Loans.

Each seller hereby:

Sells, transfers, assigns, sets over and otherwise conveys to the depositor, without recourse, all the right, title and interest of such seller in and to the applicable mortgage loans.

The sales shall be as provided in this agreement.

Delivery shall be on or before the applicable cut-off date

The documents shall be delivered to the Master Servicer before the cut-off date

The Master Servicer confirms that all sellers have made such transfers and deposits before the cut-off date¡

Sellers by such deposits have conveyed to the Trustee for benefit of Certificate Holders all right, title and interest in and to the mortgage loans

The PSA also very clearly provided for an unbroken chain of assignments and transfers thought the parties (the A-B-C-D or more cited above). The use of intermediary parties between the originator and the trust, with a “true sale” occurring at each step, was intended to create FDIC and bankruptcy remoteness. The investors (who are called the certificate holders in the PSA) did not want a creditor of a bankrupt originator to be able to seize notes back out of the trust.

Some PSAs allowed for each party to endorse in blank, but the note still had to have endorsements by all the parties in the conveyance chain, while others stipulated that each endorsement had to be to the next party in the chain. However per NY trust law (and New York law was chosen in the vast majority of cases to govern the trust), the final endorsement had to be to the trust, not in blank.

The “unless otherwise agreed” language in Article 1 means you cannot rely on perfection solely by the UCC. It also means possession of the original note does not prove either ownership or perfection.

Now are any of these issues addressed in the SNR Denton article? Not really. The PSA is mentioned only in passing; the article weight heavily on the UCC. This part comes closest is under a section that discusses “general custom and practice in the sale of mortgage loans.” This is a backwards acknowledgment of what we and other have described: that in 2004, perhaps earlier, the securitization industry started ignoring the requirements of the PSA and would effect the transfers through the A-B-C-D parties via e-mailing lists of loan numbers (which were verified at each step) and wire transfers. SNR Denton is effectively arguing by invoking “general custom and practice” that we all should accept how then industry did things, you can make a legal case for it, as long as you ignore the sections of the PSA which govern what was supposed to happen.

Here are the sections of the SNR Denton piece that come closest to addressing the matters at hand:

In a private label RMBS transaction, the relevant contractual agreement is typically a pooling and servicing agreement, which conveys the mortgage loans from the depositor to the trustee on behalf of the securitization trust. Another relevant document could include a separate mortgage loan purchase agreement, under which the mortgage loans are sold by the sponsor to the depositor immediately prior to the sale from the depositor to the trust, with representations and warranties that are assigned to the trustee. These documents contain clear granting language that conveys ownership of all of the seller’s “right, title and interest in and to” the mortgage loans to the trustee on behalf of the securitization trust. There is a schedule or exhibit to these documents that specificly identifies each loan sold under the agreement.

Note that none of this acknowledges the requirement of the PSA that the note be endorsed to show the full chain of conveyance. Also observe the emphasis on ” These documents contain clear granting language that conveys ownership…”. The documents cannot alone convey ownership; the stipulated steps also have to be completed. The article does acknowledge the importance of delivery of the note in the following section, but again fails to address the PSA issues:

Physical delivery of the mortgage note to the purchaser or its agent, together with an endorsement of the note by the seller in blank, are also key components in the sale of mortgage loans for several reasons.

As we indicated, many PSAs required specific endorsement (to a particular party), not in blank, so this is inaccurate (except as far as describing “general custom”). The article repeats its assertion about endorsements in blank (note the section we boldfaced):

Notes may be delivered to the purchaser with an endorsement in blank. It is common for a mortgage note for a mortgage loan that has been sold to have stamped on it an endorsement to the effect of “Pay to the order of _____________, without recourse”, signed by the originator or a subsequent purchaser. Such an endorsement has the effect that any subsequent transfer of the note presumptively only requires physical delivery (i.e., with no additional endorsement). Therefore, where there are successive purchasers to a note, the endorsement in blank by any prior holder is a sufficient endorsement for purposes of the most recent purchaser.

As we indicated, that’s rubbish. The boldfaced language falsely claims that if the note was endorsed by A in the prototypical A-B-C-D chain we set forth earlier, then D could rely simply on the endorsement by A. In fact, the PSA required the full chain of endorsement and also required the depositor (the C party) endorse the note to the trustee (it is New York trust law requirements, not specified in the PSA, which would call for the final endorsement to be to the specific trust, not just the trustee).

Some other assertions are matter of fact, not law, and SNR Denton appears not to be on top of the facts:

In private label RMBS transactions, the prevailing and nearly universally-followed practice has been for the endorsed notes to be physically delivered to the trustee, or to a custodian as the trustee’s agent, at the closing of the securitization.

First, we’ve had industry executives of large “private label”, meaning non-Fannie/Freddie originators say the notes were never conveyed from the originator, and not simply for their bank, but across the industry. It appears they were conveyed only when someone needed to foreclose, which was well after the closing of the trust.

Second, there is ample evidence in court across the country of out of time assignments. of the note and the related lien being assigned to the trust shortly before a foreclosure action was commenced, in some cased, even afterwards, so again well after the closing of trust.

If you parse the piece carefully, its contentions hinge on these arguments, which in turn hinge on ignoring key provisions of the PSA and not integrating New York trust law considerations.

It ends on a indignant tone, and amusingly, resorts to the new preferred bankster line, “loose lips will tank the markets”:

We believe that the recent allegations of possible wholesale failures to convey ownership of mortgage loans to private label RMBS trusts are baseless and unfounded. All parties to these transactions, including issuers, underwriters, trustees and investors, clearly intended that the transactions convey ownership of the loans to the trusts, and appropriate steps were taken to effect such conveyance in accordance with well-settled legal principles governing transfers of mortgage loans. Any attempts to assert otherwise today are inaccurate and uninformed, and, if left to stand unchallenged, could cause substantial and unwarranted harm to the economy.

These arguments are “baseless and unfounded” only if you do readings of the law intended to favor your clients and ignore ample evidence in past and present court cases. If SNR Denton doesn’t like what it is reading on this blog, I suggest it take up the matter with the judges who are looking at the evidence and the terms of the PSA and are in a fair number of cases ruling against the servicers and trusts for having failed to prove their standing to foreclose.

To put it another way, if this is the best defense a leading law firm in the securitization industry can mount, it shows they have a weak case.

The Huffington Post Investigative Fund website (the first I’ve heard of it) has a lengthy article on a new way that big banks are driving foreclosures. Apparently local governments do not have the resources to pursue property tax collection themselves so they bundle up past due liens and sell them off to investors that can then collect or foreclose. I hadn’t heard of this practice but the article makes it sound like it has been long standing. What it says is new in the arena is the activity of major banks and hedge funds that buy the debts and then tack on massive “legal fees.”

For example:

In May, the Investigative Fund reported how an unemployed former mental health counselor with four children named Vicki Valentine lost her home even though the mortgage had been paid in full. She had owed $362 on an overdue water bill when investors took over and added thousands of dollars in legal fees she couldn’t afford…

D.C. Attorney General Nickles criticizes Aeon Financial, LLC, a bank-financed investment group from Chicago that buys tax liens in some 10 states. Nickles asserts that Aeon has slammed homeowners, who sometimes owed just a few hundred dollars in back taxes, with $7,000 or more in legal fees.

This is in addition to upwards of 18% interest. When people can’t pay then the homes are taken to foreclosure. What is particularly egregious about this process is that everything is done through front companies that are sometimes not even registered in the country. Not even the governments know who they are dealing with:

Banks and hedge funds usually buy the liens through online auctions that permit them to bid in bulk, and they can use any name they want.

The giant Bank of America, for instance, has bid in Florida tax lien sales using colorful names such as Bennu, LLC, named after a mythical bird said to be the soul of the ancient Egyptian sun god. It also has bid as Osprey, LLC, and Ecru, LLC, named after the French word for a pale brown color…

Tax collectors in Florida don’t always know who they’re doing business with, either. Officials in Pinellas County want to know who exactly is behind a company called GL Funding Limited. Sales records show that GL Funding spent more than $10 million and dominated the tax sale in at least 10 Florida counties, most of them rural or smaller cities where interest rates tended to be much higher than in urban and resort areas.

GL Funding registered with several Florida tax collectors as a company with offices in the Cayman Islands. But other counties list a post office box in Philadelphia as its address. The person who registered GL Funding in Pinellas County’s tax sale provided Pinellas with a telephone number in Dallas, Tex. At that number, a man named Jess Weir declined to tell the Investigative Fund who is investing through the name GL Funding.

Said Sam McClelland, deputy tax collector in Pinellas County, Fla., where GL Funding acquired hundreds of liens earlier this year: “We’re still trying to sort this out.”

Yes, banks that are backed explicitly and implicitly by hundreds of billions of dollars from the government each year are tacking on thousands of dollars of fees and then foreclosing on people that owed a few hundred bucks…from the shadows. Ecru, indeed.

bench craft company complaints

Shep Smith&#39;s Fox <b>News</b> Contract Renewed

Shep Smith isn't leaving Fox News anytime soon. The face of the network's news division has signed a three-year contract extension with Fox News, Deadline.com's Nellie Andreeva reported Tuesday morning.

BREAKING <b>NEWS</b>: Drunk &amp; Naked Charlie Sheen Trashes Hotel Room <b>...</b>

Trouble seems to follow Charlie Sheen - whether it be in Los Angeles, Apsen, or now, to New York. Police were summoned to the posh Plaza hotel early Tuesday, where a drunken and naked Sheen had trashed his hotel room, RadarOnline.com ...

Timothy Karr: Fox <b>News</b> Tries to Foreclose on Sesame Street

Every time PBS and NPR have come under attack, the American public has risen up in protest to defend -- not defund -- it. Whatever the rationale, Fox News' ongoing witch hunt tactic is a proven loser.

bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints

Shep Smith&#39;s Fox <b>News</b> Contract Renewed

Shep Smith isn't leaving Fox News anytime soon. The face of the network's news division has signed a three-year contract extension with Fox News, Deadline.com's Nellie Andreeva reported Tuesday morning.

BREAKING <b>NEWS</b>: Drunk &amp; Naked Charlie Sheen Trashes Hotel Room <b>...</b>

Trouble seems to follow Charlie Sheen - whether it be in Los Angeles, Apsen, or now, to New York. Police were summoned to the posh Plaza hotel early Tuesday, where a drunken and naked Sheen had trashed his hotel room, RadarOnline.com ...

Timothy Karr: Fox <b>News</b> Tries to Foreclose on Sesame Street

Every time PBS and NPR have come under attack, the American public has risen up in protest to defend -- not defund -- it. Whatever the rationale, Fox News' ongoing witch hunt tactic is a proven loser.

bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints

Shep Smith&#39;s Fox <b>News</b> Contract Renewed

Shep Smith isn't leaving Fox News anytime soon. The face of the network's news division has signed a three-year contract extension with Fox News, Deadline.com's Nellie Andreeva reported Tuesday morning.

BREAKING <b>NEWS</b>: Drunk &amp; Naked Charlie Sheen Trashes Hotel Room <b>...</b>

Trouble seems to follow Charlie Sheen - whether it be in Los Angeles, Apsen, or now, to New York. Police were summoned to the posh Plaza hotel early Tuesday, where a drunken and naked Sheen had trashed his hotel room, RadarOnline.com ...

Timothy Karr: Fox <b>News</b> Tries to Foreclose on Sesame Street

Every time PBS and NPR have come under attack, the American public has risen up in protest to defend -- not defund -- it. Whatever the rationale, Fox News' ongoing witch hunt tactic is a proven loser.

bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints

Being Right or Making Money

Many Californians live in California because they love the natural beauty that surrounds them at every turn. The beaches, the mountains and the desert are, in my mind, some of California’s greatest assets. There is nothing quite as satisfying as waking up on a morning like today and seeing the crisp outline of the San Bernardino mountain range capped in snow while enjoying 70 degree weather.

If we are being honest, the weather and natural beauty are probably some of the only things keeping many Californians from fleeing the state because of high taxes, unemployment, an inept state government and an oppressive business environment. It would make sense then, that we should try to protect those natural resources at all costs. This is the garbage that the opponents of Prop 23 would have you believe, where in today’s world everything not “green” might as well be labeled “poison”.

Take a look at just what Prop 23 is up against. In 2006, the California legislature passed AB 32, also known as the Global Warming Solutions Act. The mere name of the bill should give you the idea that they were trying to compensate for something with that lofty title, namely- common sense. What AB 32 did was create a government entity with incredible power not only to levy regulations on businesses that emit greenhouse gasses but also to create cap-and-trade laws to slow CO2 emissions.

The grand plan for AB 32 is to return California to 1990 levels of emissions over the course of 14 years, making 2020 the target year to achieve environmental nirvana. Obviously, reducing emissions isn’t a terrible idea… in a vacuum. But we don’t live in a vacuum and other factors have to be taken into account, mainly the economic cost and the loss of freedom that would come from turning over something so arbitrary as ‘the right to emit’ to the jurisdiction of the government.

Start with the title. I’m not a scientist, but I have read enough over the years to understand that global warming (and cooling) has been happening since the beginning of time regardless of CO2 emissions. I also know that the scientists who are hired by ‘green’ companies to prove global warming might not have the purest intentions based on where their funding comes from. With the incredible push in the last ten years towards ‘clean’ and ‘green’ jobs, often at the expense of politically unfavorable jobs in the industrial sector, I have a hard time believing that in the future, with AB 32 in full swing, a job that isn’t ‘green’ will struggle to survive.

The problem is that green jobs created simply because they are ‘green’ are not sustainable. Why does it matter if a job is green or not? The mere fact that the government has to categorize jobs as green means that they are giving it some intrinsic value that it lacked in the first place. In this case, that value is profitability. In a healthy economy, jobs exist because they are making someone besides worker money. Green jobs very rarely make money. Green jobs are essentially environmental welfare- a money sink that takes in far more cash than it could ever hope to create. Look at the process: the government takes money from non-green businesses in the form of fees and taxes, and then distributes it to consumers as a tax credit for installing ‘green’ appliances or to an overseas developer to manufacture clean power sources. Remind me again how this benefits Californians?

The negative impact that AB 32 will have on businesses when it is fully implemented is staggering. A 2009 Cal State Sacramento study predicted that small businesses will pay an average of $46,961 and families will face annual cost increase of $3,857 because of AB 32. The combined annual business loss would be $182.6 billion, or, as the study recommends, 1.1 million lost jobs.

These are daunting predictions to be sure. Frightening, in fact. The mere fact that legislators in Sacramento have had these numbers in hand for over a year and are still fighting Prop 23 is an indication of just how entrenched in the ‘green’ myth they have become. Prop 23 would suspend these regulations until the statewide economy improves to a point where it could support environmental welfare, which, at least in regards to AB 32, should be never.

Daniel Greenfield aptly sums up the prevailing madness and denial as it played out recently in the sentencing of Times Square would-be jihad bomber Faisal Shahzad. "It's About The Jihad, Stupid," by Daniel Greenfield in Eurasia Review, October 11:

So at long last the case of the Times Square Bomber is over and we heard it straight from the camel's mouth, that Faisal Shahzad wasn't upset over his mortgage or angry over Obamacare-- he was what he had always been, a Muslim terrorist trying to kill infidels in the name of Islam.

After the attempted attacked, the liberal media insisted on painting Faisal Shahzad as a tragic victim of the mortgage crisis, suggesting that the whole "car bomb near the Lion King" matter could have been averted with more government bailouts of borrowers who weren't paying their bills. That is how the axis of liberal media responds to every act of Muslim terrorism, by blaming Republicans and offering their own policies as the solution.

Worried about airplane hijackings? Elect us, and we'll make the Muslim world love us with hearty doses of appeasement and long deep bows. Afraid of shootings at army bases, vote the right way and we'll pull out all the troops so no more kindly Muslim psychiatrists come down with secondhand PTSD. Worried about car bombs, with more socialism no one will want to car bomb Times Square anymore.

But then Faisal Shahzad ruined everything by opening his mouth. "This is but one life," he said. "If I am given a thousand lives, I will sacrifice them all for the sake of Allah, fighting this cause, defending our lands, making the word of Allah supreme over any religion or system."

The Judge did her usual liberal shtick, foolishly lecturing Shahzad on how moderate Islam is. She suggested that Shahzad should "spend some of the time in prison thinking carefully about whether the Koran wants you to kill lots of people".

But who knows better what Islam really represents, Faisal Shahzad or Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum? Clearly Miriam thinks she knows better, as Time Magazine and Newsweek and the New York Times insist that they know Islam, better than the Muslims who keep misunderstanding what Islam really is.

But Shahzad wasn't quoting some wacky preacher living in a cave somewhere, he was quoting the Koran. The same book that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer suggested might be illegal to burn. The same book that Democrats and many Republicans insist is really a beautiful book that teaches tolerance. Unlike Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, Faisal Shahzad didn't need to spend a whole lot of time thinking about whether the Koran really wants him to kill lots of people. He could just read it...

"He it is who has sent His Messenger (Mohammed) with guidance and the religion of truth (Islam) to make it victorious over all religions even though the infidels may resist." Koran 61:9

That is the source of Faisal Shahzad's justification for his Jihad.

But surely this lovely verse has nothing to do with violence, you might say. It just means that Muslims should go out and persuade people that Islam is the only true religion. That sounds convincing, doesn't it?

Except Koran 61 is titled, "Al-Saff" or "Ranks, Battle Array". That title comes from verse 61:4 which proclaims, "Truly Allah loves those who fight in His Cause in battle array". The next two verses go on to curse the Jews, like Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, for their unbelief.

Two verses down from Faisal Shahzad's quote, the Koran promises Muslims a way to save themselves from hell. What's their "Get Out of Hell" free card? "That ye strive (your utmost) in the Cause of Allah, with your property and your persons." The Arabic word used for "strive" is, "watujahidoona" or "You will make Jihad".

Yes. It's the Jihad, stupid.

Faisal Shahzad didn't lose his home to foreclosure because of the injustice of the American banking system. He gave up his home to foreclosure because he was using that money to build a bomb instead. This wasn't some sort of radicalization in response to failure, it was a plan all along.

He led the facade of a normal life. He got a good job and a mortgage. He had a line of credit. And he had Facebook. And then right after he got US citizenship, he quit his job, went to Pakistan for explosives training, and the Times Square Car bombing was set into motion. He didn't lose his home, he abandoned it. The home and the job, and the rest of the facade of the American Dream was a sham, a disguise. Just like the 9/11 hijackers.

Faisal Shahzad was carrying out the words of the Koran, to use his property and person to carry on the Jihad against the unbelievers. His property and money were assets in a religious war.

The media refuses to understand that. Even the judge sentencing him refuses to understand that. Instead Faisal Shahzad is being treated like some sort of stupid child who doesn't know his own religion, even though he has practiced it all his life and probably knows the entire Koran by heart.

Isn't presuming to know what Islam is about better than Muslims do, the same kind of arrogance toward the Muslim world that liberals routinely accuse America of? And doesn't that drive Muslims toward greater acts of terror just to define clearly what Islam really is? In the words of the Ayatollah Khomeni; "Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless... Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for the Holy Warriors!"

That is the great liberal farce, in which liberals begin by lecturing Americans on what Islam really is, and then conclude by lecturing Muslims on what Islam really is. And the Muslims laugh in their faces, when they aren't blowing them off. Liberals haven't convinced very many Americans that Islam is a religion of peace, and they certainly aren't going to convince very many Muslims....

autosport.com - F1 <b>News</b>: Tweaks to be made to Korean track

Korean Grand Prix organisers are making minor modifications to the new Formula 1 track on Friday night following complaints from drivers about potential trouble spots on the new Yeongam circuit.

Surprise: Fox <b>News</b> signs Juan Williams to new $2 million deal <b>...</b>

Fox News Chief Executive Roger Ailes handed Williams a new three-year contract Thursday morning, in a deal that amounts to nearly $2 million, a considerable bump up from his previous salary, the Tribune Washington Bureau has learned. ...

Macsimum <b>News</b> - Jobs comments on Java-Mac OS X situation

MacsimumNews - Your Leading Apple News Alternative. Jobs comments on Java-Mac OS X situation. Posted by Dennis Sellers Apple ico Oct 22, 2010 at 10:52am. image Apple's announcement that they would be ceasing future development of their ...

eric seiger eric seiger

Many Californians live in California because they love the natural beauty that surrounds them at every turn. The beaches, the mountains and the desert are, in my mind, some of California’s greatest assets. There is nothing quite as satisfying as waking up on a morning like today and seeing the crisp outline of the San Bernardino mountain range capped in snow while enjoying 70 degree weather.

If we are being honest, the weather and natural beauty are probably some of the only things keeping many Californians from fleeing the state because of high taxes, unemployment, an inept state government and an oppressive business environment. It would make sense then, that we should try to protect those natural resources at all costs. This is the garbage that the opponents of Prop 23 would have you believe, where in today’s world everything not “green” might as well be labeled “poison”.

Take a look at just what Prop 23 is up against. In 2006, the California legislature passed AB 32, also known as the Global Warming Solutions Act. The mere name of the bill should give you the idea that they were trying to compensate for something with that lofty title, namely- common sense. What AB 32 did was create a government entity with incredible power not only to levy regulations on businesses that emit greenhouse gasses but also to create cap-and-trade laws to slow CO2 emissions.

The grand plan for AB 32 is to return California to 1990 levels of emissions over the course of 14 years, making 2020 the target year to achieve environmental nirvana. Obviously, reducing emissions isn’t a terrible idea… in a vacuum. But we don’t live in a vacuum and other factors have to be taken into account, mainly the economic cost and the loss of freedom that would come from turning over something so arbitrary as ‘the right to emit’ to the jurisdiction of the government.

Start with the title. I’m not a scientist, but I have read enough over the years to understand that global warming (and cooling) has been happening since the beginning of time regardless of CO2 emissions. I also know that the scientists who are hired by ‘green’ companies to prove global warming might not have the purest intentions based on where their funding comes from. With the incredible push in the last ten years towards ‘clean’ and ‘green’ jobs, often at the expense of politically unfavorable jobs in the industrial sector, I have a hard time believing that in the future, with AB 32 in full swing, a job that isn’t ‘green’ will struggle to survive.

The problem is that green jobs created simply because they are ‘green’ are not sustainable. Why does it matter if a job is green or not? The mere fact that the government has to categorize jobs as green means that they are giving it some intrinsic value that it lacked in the first place. In this case, that value is profitability. In a healthy economy, jobs exist because they are making someone besides worker money. Green jobs very rarely make money. Green jobs are essentially environmental welfare- a money sink that takes in far more cash than it could ever hope to create. Look at the process: the government takes money from non-green businesses in the form of fees and taxes, and then distributes it to consumers as a tax credit for installing ‘green’ appliances or to an overseas developer to manufacture clean power sources. Remind me again how this benefits Californians?

The negative impact that AB 32 will have on businesses when it is fully implemented is staggering. A 2009 Cal State Sacramento study predicted that small businesses will pay an average of $46,961 and families will face annual cost increase of $3,857 because of AB 32. The combined annual business loss would be $182.6 billion, or, as the study recommends, 1.1 million lost jobs.

These are daunting predictions to be sure. Frightening, in fact. The mere fact that legislators in Sacramento have had these numbers in hand for over a year and are still fighting Prop 23 is an indication of just how entrenched in the ‘green’ myth they have become. Prop 23 would suspend these regulations until the statewide economy improves to a point where it could support environmental welfare, which, at least in regards to AB 32, should be never.

Daniel Greenfield aptly sums up the prevailing madness and denial as it played out recently in the sentencing of Times Square would-be jihad bomber Faisal Shahzad. "It's About The Jihad, Stupid," by Daniel Greenfield in Eurasia Review, October 11:

So at long last the case of the Times Square Bomber is over and we heard it straight from the camel's mouth, that Faisal Shahzad wasn't upset over his mortgage or angry over Obamacare-- he was what he had always been, a Muslim terrorist trying to kill infidels in the name of Islam.

After the attempted attacked, the liberal media insisted on painting Faisal Shahzad as a tragic victim of the mortgage crisis, suggesting that the whole "car bomb near the Lion King" matter could have been averted with more government bailouts of borrowers who weren't paying their bills. That is how the axis of liberal media responds to every act of Muslim terrorism, by blaming Republicans and offering their own policies as the solution.

Worried about airplane hijackings? Elect us, and we'll make the Muslim world love us with hearty doses of appeasement and long deep bows. Afraid of shootings at army bases, vote the right way and we'll pull out all the troops so no more kindly Muslim psychiatrists come down with secondhand PTSD. Worried about car bombs, with more socialism no one will want to car bomb Times Square anymore.

But then Faisal Shahzad ruined everything by opening his mouth. "This is but one life," he said. "If I am given a thousand lives, I will sacrifice them all for the sake of Allah, fighting this cause, defending our lands, making the word of Allah supreme over any religion or system."

The Judge did her usual liberal shtick, foolishly lecturing Shahzad on how moderate Islam is. She suggested that Shahzad should "spend some of the time in prison thinking carefully about whether the Koran wants you to kill lots of people".

But who knows better what Islam really represents, Faisal Shahzad or Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum? Clearly Miriam thinks she knows better, as Time Magazine and Newsweek and the New York Times insist that they know Islam, better than the Muslims who keep misunderstanding what Islam really is.

But Shahzad wasn't quoting some wacky preacher living in a cave somewhere, he was quoting the Koran. The same book that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer suggested might be illegal to burn. The same book that Democrats and many Republicans insist is really a beautiful book that teaches tolerance. Unlike Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, Faisal Shahzad didn't need to spend a whole lot of time thinking about whether the Koran really wants him to kill lots of people. He could just read it...

"He it is who has sent His Messenger (Mohammed) with guidance and the religion of truth (Islam) to make it victorious over all religions even though the infidels may resist." Koran 61:9

That is the source of Faisal Shahzad's justification for his Jihad.

But surely this lovely verse has nothing to do with violence, you might say. It just means that Muslims should go out and persuade people that Islam is the only true religion. That sounds convincing, doesn't it?

Except Koran 61 is titled, "Al-Saff" or "Ranks, Battle Array". That title comes from verse 61:4 which proclaims, "Truly Allah loves those who fight in His Cause in battle array". The next two verses go on to curse the Jews, like Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, for their unbelief.

Two verses down from Faisal Shahzad's quote, the Koran promises Muslims a way to save themselves from hell. What's their "Get Out of Hell" free card? "That ye strive (your utmost) in the Cause of Allah, with your property and your persons." The Arabic word used for "strive" is, "watujahidoona" or "You will make Jihad".

Yes. It's the Jihad, stupid.

Faisal Shahzad didn't lose his home to foreclosure because of the injustice of the American banking system. He gave up his home to foreclosure because he was using that money to build a bomb instead. This wasn't some sort of radicalization in response to failure, it was a plan all along.

He led the facade of a normal life. He got a good job and a mortgage. He had a line of credit. And he had Facebook. And then right after he got US citizenship, he quit his job, went to Pakistan for explosives training, and the Times Square Car bombing was set into motion. He didn't lose his home, he abandoned it. The home and the job, and the rest of the facade of the American Dream was a sham, a disguise. Just like the 9/11 hijackers.

Faisal Shahzad was carrying out the words of the Koran, to use his property and person to carry on the Jihad against the unbelievers. His property and money were assets in a religious war.

The media refuses to understand that. Even the judge sentencing him refuses to understand that. Instead Faisal Shahzad is being treated like some sort of stupid child who doesn't know his own religion, even though he has practiced it all his life and probably knows the entire Koran by heart.

Isn't presuming to know what Islam is about better than Muslims do, the same kind of arrogance toward the Muslim world that liberals routinely accuse America of? And doesn't that drive Muslims toward greater acts of terror just to define clearly what Islam really is? In the words of the Ayatollah Khomeni; "Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless... Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for the Holy Warriors!"

That is the great liberal farce, in which liberals begin by lecturing Americans on what Islam really is, and then conclude by lecturing Muslims on what Islam really is. And the Muslims laugh in their faces, when they aren't blowing them off. Liberals haven't convinced very many Americans that Islam is a religion of peace, and they certainly aren't going to convince very many Muslims....

autosport.com - F1 <b>News</b>: Tweaks to be made to Korean track

Korean Grand Prix organisers are making minor modifications to the new Formula 1 track on Friday night following complaints from drivers about potential trouble spots on the new Yeongam circuit.

Surprise: Fox <b>News</b> signs Juan Williams to new $2 million deal <b>...</b>

Fox News Chief Executive Roger Ailes handed Williams a new three-year contract Thursday morning, in a deal that amounts to nearly $2 million, a considerable bump up from his previous salary, the Tribune Washington Bureau has learned. ...

Macsimum <b>News</b> - Jobs comments on Java-Mac OS X situation

MacsimumNews - Your Leading Apple News Alternative. Jobs comments on Java-Mac OS X situation. Posted by Dennis Sellers Apple ico Oct 22, 2010 at 10:52am. image Apple's announcement that they would be ceasing future development of their ...

eric seiger eric seiger

internet marketing

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about social media, business and technology.

The television is about to become the latest medium to get a major makeover at the hands of the class='blippr-nobr'>Internetclass="blippr-nobr">Internet. Already more than half of Americans are watching TV and surfing the web simultaneously. But another trend — giving connectivity to the device itself — is going to fundamentally change the business models around television and the way we consume and interact with content.

Yahooclass="blippr-nobr">Yahoo!, which has been an early mover in the space, anticipates that 8 million to 10 million devices with its Connected Television platform preinstalled will be in consumers’ hands by March 2011. That’s triple the amount in March 2010, according to Russ Schafer, Yahoo’s senior director of product marketing for the platform. Market research firm iSuppli estimates that by 2014 some 148 million televisions with Internet connectivity will be sold annually.

Millions of consumers who buy televisions from the likes of Samsung, LG and Sony won’t just be plugging into the programming offered by their satellite or cable provider, they’ll also be able to access applications ranging from Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook to eBayclass="blippr-nobr">eBay and view content from a limitless number of video publishers.

That represents a shift similar to what we saw in print media, where the Internet (and mobile phones) opened up the opportunity for anyone to become a content creator. Blip.tv, which bills itself as a “next generation television network,” has been eyeing this trend since 2005, hosting thousands of independently created shows. Now, according to cofounder Dina Kaplan, blip.tv is serving up nearly 100 million views each month (or, put another way, about 10% of the combined audience of the major TV networks) across the web, mobile devices and, increasingly, Internet-connected televisions.

The Growing Market for Internet-Enabled Televisions

class='blippr-nobr'>Blipclass="blippr-nobr">BLIP.tv is growing its audience by forming partnerships with traditional TV manufacturers and a new breed of company in the set-top box market that lets consumers connect to the Internet via their televisions. One of those companies is Roku, which sells its entry-level box for $60. CEO Anthony Wood told me the company is closing in on 1 million customers and that the average user is consuming 33 hours of content each month using the device.

Roku rival Boxeeclass="blippr-nobr">Boxee has amassed about 1.2 million users so far, says CEO Avner Ronen. That’s just through its downloadable app, which requires users to connect their computers to their televisions. The company plans to introduce its own box in November and bring with it a string of content partnerships, like BBC and Major League Baseball, as well as from companies like blip.tv and other purely digital outfits.

Boxee is planning to monetize the set-top box in part through a transaction platform that Ronen says will let publishers “offer content and charge for it without the need for users to enter payment information … [they can pay] with just one-click” for things like premium content, tickets or subscriptions. Roku has plans for a similar platform that will launch this fall. For now, both Roku and Boxee let their content providers control their own advertising and keep the revenue generated by it.

The Changing Advertising Landscape

The potential for new forms of advertising isn’t lost on any of these players, though. Experiments are still very early stage, but Yahoo’s Schafer says that, right now, “the basic ad formats are the same as we use on the web … and you’re just playing it to a different device. But the next stage is Yahoo bringing our own advertising offering further optimized for television … monetizing our service first and then offering it to third parties.”

class='blippr-nobr'>Pandoraclass="blippr-nobr">Pandora, the popular Internet radio service that also has millions of users across connected devices, recently extended its ad platform to Internet-enabled televisions. “Campaigns on this newest platform will primarily feature audio ads, which create a more lasting and emotive connection with consumers. The ability for brands to connect with consumers using audio ads on an in-home device is a new and exciting opportunity,” says Chief Revenue Officer John Trimble.

Meanwhile, blip.tv sees opportunities for targeting ads with unprecedented levels of precision. For example, the company recently developed a campaign for Electronic Arts that was able to target Xbox 360 owners with an interactive ad for NCAA Football ‘11 that allowed them to download a demo of the game to their console. Kaplan says that such complexity can’t yet be achieved across the dozens of different television and connected device manufacturers, but that “within a year we’ll see video advertising much more seamlessly transition from web video to the TV set.”

Such interactivity is already possible with so-called “second screen” providers, which are building social experiences on smartphones and tablets that allow users to interact with friends and content as they watch their favorite shows. They simultaneously create opportunities for engagement that have both the networks and advertisers excited.

Philo is a startup that, along with competitors like Miso and GetGlue, has taken the concept of “checking in” — popularized in recent months by location-based apps like class='blippr-nobr'>Foursquareclass="blippr-nobr">foursquare — and applied it to television shows. Users can check in to shows, interact with friends who are also watching and engage with ads in unique ways. For example, the company recently launched a promotion for the upcoming film You Again that enters users into a sweepstakes when they check in to shows like Glee or Dancing with the Stars and interacts with the ads through Philo’s app.

Prime Opportunities for Television Networks

The huge shift taking place in the TV landscape isn’t lost on the networks. CBS is getting its content on a multitude of connected devices and experimenting with a variety of content plays, social features and revenue models. Zander Lurie, SVP of strategic development at the company, doesn’t see new consumption models making networks like CBS irrelevant. “We’re excited by the fact that these services are offering consumers more ways to view our content. The priority [for us] is to create more opportunities for our content to be consumed than ever before. As long as we have a business model in place for that [type of] consumption, we win,” says Lurie.

Despite all of the activity, Internet-connected television will shift even more dramatically over the next year, with both Googleclass="blippr-nobr">Google and Apple introducing their own set-top box offerings this fall. While upstarts like Boxee and Roku might see that as validation of what they helped pioneer, it could significantly disrupt the business models emerging in the quickly evolving world of Internet-connected television.

More Tech Resources from Mashable:

- How a Physically Aware Internet Will Change the World/> - 10 Unique Headphones for Listening in Style/> - 10 Useful Apple iPad Tips and Tricks/> - 5 Tools for Keeping Track of Your Passwords/> - 7 Questions With AOL Co-Founder Steve Case

Image courtesy of iStockphotoclass="blippr-nobr">iStockphoto, CostinT, iStockphoto, subju

For more Business coverage:

class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Businessclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Business channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

Digital marketing budgets are expected to increase steadily during the next few years, according to Datran Media’s Annual Marketing & Media Survey, which reaches out to more than 5,000 marketing executives from Fortune 500 brands, top publishers, and leading advertising and media agencies.

This is good news for those of you hoping to break into the digital marketing industry. Whether you’re passionate about search, affiliate, social media, or another area of marketing, there are a few things you can do to prove your worthiness to prospective employers.

We asked five industry insiders about their top tips for aspiring digital marketers. Find their suggestions below and add your own in the comments.

1. Get Hands-On Marketing Experience

A degree in marketing or communications can take you a distance, but most employers are looking for candidates with marketing experience, whether that’s from a previous job, internship or side project. If you already have work experience in the marketing world, congratulations. For the rest of you, internships or other projects will be key.

“Any hands-on involvement with campaign creation, analytics, or optimization can be extremely beneficial to aspiring digital marketers,” says Traci Kuiphoff, online marketing manager at BareNecessities.com. “If you’re in school or a recent grad, the best way to gain experience is to do an internship at a company or agency that has a department or focus in online or digital marketing. Not only do you get real world hands-on experience, but it’s also great to put on your resume when you’re ready for a full-time position.”

If you are in college, look for paid or for-school-credit marketing internships at your college’s job fairs, via job search sites, and on social media sites. You could even land your next gig through Twitter.

If you don’t land an internship or find a position of interest, create your own project or enter a marketing contest. While studying marketing and international business at NYU Stern’s Undergraduate School of Business, a classmate and I entered the John Caples Student Campaign of the Year contest and created a digital marketing campaign for Pentel. Our campaign included a mix of digital, social and direct marketing communications, along with thoroughly gathered success metrics. Not only did we win first place, which included summer internships and a cash prize, but we also met industry experts who have acted as mentors to us.

2. Know the Lingo

Being able to analyze marketing campaigns and understand what worked or didn’t is the key role of a digital marketer — in order to do that, you’ll need to know (and love) the industry jargon.

“Understanding metrics on the web is key,” says Naishi Zhang, assistant marketing manager at Barnes & Noble. “The Internet provides so many ways of analyzing user behavior, and knowing how to gather and interpret data is important for success. Read widely and learn the lingo, so when someone asks about the CTR of a banner ad or the number of page views a landing page received, you’ll be ready.”

Mastering marketing terminology and metrics, and knowing what they mean, will take time and practice, but you can get a basic knowledge by picking up a marketing 101 textbook or attending an introductory course. Check out local college or continuing education courses. If that isn’t an option, the class='blippr-nobr'>Internetclass="blippr-nobr">Internet is at your disposal. About.com’s glossary of marketing terms and HubSpot’s glossary of social media marketing terms are both very useful for beginners, and you should also read some of the top marketing blogs to get your daily fill of information.

3. Nurture Your Personal Online Presence

Rick Bakas, director of social media marketing at St. Supéry Vineyards and Winery said he believes a person’s online presence can be a major deciding factor on whether an aspiring digital marketer makes the cut for a job. “If an employer is deciding between two candidates,” he notes, “they might go with the person with the strong following online. Build your personal brand online. You have to show you can build your personal brand if you’re going to build someone else’s.”

Your personal brand is value-added in the job market.

“Your online clout is sometimes referred to as ’social currency,’” he continues. “In other words, there’s a value associated with your online personal brand. Increased value carries as much weight as a great resume. A high Klout.com score for example, will help you stand out and validate what your resume says about you.”

Your Klout score is a number between 0 and 100 that measures the size of your engaged audience, the likelihood that they will amplify your messages, and your overall influence within your network. Bigger isn’t always better. Bakas explains, “Aspiring marketers would do well to grow an engaged online following, not necessarily a large online following. Again, Klout.com is a great tool to evaluate the strength of your online presence.”

4. Dabble in Everything, Specialize in Something

There isn’t just one career path in marketing. You can choose to work for an agency, with an in-house team, or start your own firm. There are multiple marketing disciplines, including affiliate, search, social media, e-mail, mobile, and display marketing, to name a few. Teams come in all sizes — some in which teammates specialize in certain areas, and others where a team can be composed of just one stellar know-it-all.

The best way to get a taste of all of the options is to dabble in a bit of everything. “Digital marketing agency experience can be extremely valuable — at an agency you can be exposed to all avenues of digital marketing from paid search, social media, mobile and everything in between,” Kuiphoff advises. ”Most likely, you’ll touch a number of different accounts which can help you choose a vertical focus or specialty.”

Once you have a base knowledge in each area of marketing, you’ll be better equipped to choose a more specific path of focus. Having a specialty enables you to hone your skills in that area and become an expert, which is a valuable asset to potential employees.

5. Attend Industry Meetups and Conferences

“Put the ’social’ in social media and spend time engaging with people in the real world,” Bakas says. “Go to lots of events to create or nurture quality interactions that can later continue online. Use plancast.com to see which upcoming events are worth going to. These experiences are ripe with opportunities to meet other digital marketers. The strongest relationships are the ones nurtured online and offline.”

Kuiphoff adds, “Digital marketing conferences not only provide a great networking opportunity, but most offer in-depth workshops that can enhance your skill set.”

Some worthwhile conferences to consider include SXSW, Search Marketing Expo, Web 2.0 Expo, Ad Age Digital Conference, ad:tech, Search Engine Strategies and Pivot.

If you’re not into the hustle and bustle of industry conferences, you can consider a more toned-down approach by attending or organizing your own Meetups. There are thousands of marketing Meetups around the world. The NY Entrepreneurs Business Network and San Francisco Entrepreneur Meetup are two of the largest.

6. Keep a Pulse on the News

Because of the nature of the Internet, digital marketing is ever-changing. If you don’t keep up with the latest trends and news, it shows in interviews and on the job. Sarah Hofstetter, SVP of emerging media and client strategy at digital marketing agency 360i, says it well:

“Remember that standing still is going backwards. Yes, it’s an adage that has been used for years to inspire ambition, but it is blatantly obvious in the digital landscape. Not only does that technology evolve at a lightening pace that transcends Moore’s law, but consumer behavior is shifting at a radical pace, and media consumption becomes more and more fragmented.

“Being on top of consumer behavior –- understanding what they’re doing online, what motivates them and their social and mobile behavior –- and staying ahead of that by learning what’s in the market and what’s on the come, will help ensure you don’t get stuck on the sidelines when interviewing for jobs in digital marketing.”

Kuiphoff recommends subscribing to industry blogs and newsletters to stay on top of the latest news. Some of my personal favorites include Ad Age, ClickZ, eMarketer, BrandWeek and AdWeek.

7. Get Technical

You won’t be coding programs or building full websites as a digital marketer, but you will need to work with developers and designers or other web specialists to communicate your marketing design needs. A basic knowledge of how the web works, HTML, and one or two programming languages, such as class='blippr-nobr'>PHPclass="blippr-nobr">PHP, JavaScript, CSS and Ruby, will help you understand the current boundaries and opportunities that will affect your marketing campaigns.

“It’s important for anyone working in the digital world, whether it’s marketing or designing features for a product, to have a basic understanding of coding,” suggests Dharmishta Rood, a research assistant at Harvard Business School and fellow at the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT. “There are great experiential benefits from understanding the underlying technologies that shape what we do online — it’s easier to understand how users can interact with content, what is possible for design with things like CSS and JavaScript, and understand the nuances of basic technical terminology.”

8. Perfect Your Resume

Everyone needs a resume; what you do with it is up to you. To help you stand out, here are a few tips from our digital marketing experts:

• “Demonstrate that you can produce results and work in a fast-paced environment, whether you’ve had previous digital experience or not. Don’t be afraid to include things about yourself that may not be directly related to the job. Resumes get scanned quickly, so it always helps to inject something creative and clever.” — Naishi Zhang, assistant marketing manager, Barnes & Noble
• “One way you can make your resume stand out is to get certified. class='blippr-nobr'>Googleclass="blippr-nobr">Google has a certification program for Adwords. If you have a paid search marketing focus this can help assure a client/employer that you’re proficient in the system.” — Traci Kuiphoff, online marketing manager, BareNecessities.com
• “I’m a big believer in making sure your resume is on LinkedInclass="blippr-nobr">LinkedIn, and to have recommendations on LinkedIn. Start asking for recommendations soon. LinkedIn is like your digital resume. Make sure the facts match up. Also, Google your name to see what comes up — your prospective employers will.” — Rick Bakas, director of social media marketing, St. Supéry Vineyards and Winery
• “Use keywords to describe your previous experience that make sense for the specific job you’re applying for — if the job description or department does ’social media outreach’ and your description of all those Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter @replies, Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook messages and moderated blog post comments is currently called ‘customer service,’ this does not play up your strengths as a digital marketer. Use common sense though. If their keywords don’t match your experience, don’t write anything untruthful, and consider doing things to get the types of experience for the jobs you want, such as volunteering to help with the social media of a non-profit whose cause you support.” — Dharmishta Rood, research assistant, Harvard Business School

To showcase your skills alongside multimedia and other online assets, check out some digital alternatives to the paper resume, including video resumes, VisualCVs, social resumes and LinkedIn profiles.

9. Let Curiosity and Passion Drive You

“Sure, it’s great to know about Facebook, iAds and whatever is coming next from Silicon Valley,” Hofstetter points out, “but when we’re looking for key talent at 360i, nothing matters to us more than intellectual curiosity and passion…In a business where answers and solutions aren’t always obvious, you need to be innately curious (about everything) and obsessed with the ‘why’ behind the ‘what.’ ”

It may sound cheesy at first, but she has a point. Without inquisitiveness and zeal, we’re just work drones on a mission to take over the Internet. Plus, these traits have a positive effect on the way we work, Hofstetter says:

“People who have these qualities can innovate and identify trends from seemingly ordinary data — they’re the first to try new things (platforms, tools, technology) and think about how marketers can benefit from them. They don’t always have the answers, but when you’re being asked to do never-been-done-before things, there isn’t a rulebook. That’s why when we’re recruiting, we look for people who know how to ask the right questions.

10. Unplug for Your Sanity

Staring at a computer screen all day long can take a toll on your body, mind and social life. Get away from that monitor and breathe for crying out loud!

Bakas advocates getting out every once in a while to work on who you are as a person outside of work. “Because transparency is important, it’s important to be a good person in the real world,” he says. “It’ll translate into the digital world — you can’t fake being a good person if you’re a jerk in real life. Unplug for your own sanity, but also to continue growing as a person in life.”

I second that. Now, get out of here and get a job.

Digital Marketing Job Listings

Every week we put out a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we post a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the best digital marketing jobs from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

• Digital Strategist at Vladimir Jones in Colorado Springs, CO.
• Brand Manager at sweetgreen in Washington, DC.
• Director of Digital Strategy at DeVries Public Relations in New York, NY.
• Marketing Manager/Director at BreakoutBand in Brooklyn, NY.
• Sr. Marketing Manager at WOWIO in Los Angeles, CA.

More Job Search Resources from Mashable

- 5 Tips for Aspiring Social Media Marketers/> - 10 Tips For Aspiring Community Managers/> - 5 Tips for Aspiring Copywriters and Art Directors/> - HOW TO: Land a Career in Digital Public Relations/> - Top 5 Tips for Aspiring Music Bloggers

Image courtesy of RICEinteractive; iStockphotoclass="blippr-nobr">iStockphoto, track5

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robert shumake hall of shame

Small Business <b>News</b>: BlogWorld Wrap Up

BlogWorld 2010 has come and gone with more than a few new revelations imperative to the small business community. This post will feature as kind of a wrap up of.

Scripting <b>News</b>: Random afternoon notes

Recent stories. Twitter links. My 40 most-recent Twitter links, ranked by number of clicks. My bike. People are always asking about my bike. A picture named bikesmall.jpg. Here's a picture. AFP news pic. Calendar ...

<b>News</b>: Jean Claude Van Damme Suffers Heart Attack On Set Of WEAPON

Images From Cronenberg's TALKING CURE � Brody Versus Argento � JCVD Has Heart Attack On Set � TROLL HUNTER Coming To America � MORPHINE Doc Gets A Trailer � Pegg / Frost Alien Comedy PAUL Trailer. Film News ...

robert shumake hall of shame

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about social media, business and technology.

The television is about to become the latest medium to get a major makeover at the hands of the class='blippr-nobr'>Internetclass="blippr-nobr">Internet. Already more than half of Americans are watching TV and surfing the web simultaneously. But another trend — giving connectivity to the device itself — is going to fundamentally change the business models around television and the way we consume and interact with content.

Yahooclass="blippr-nobr">Yahoo!, which has been an early mover in the space, anticipates that 8 million to 10 million devices with its Connected Television platform preinstalled will be in consumers’ hands by March 2011. That’s triple the amount in March 2010, according to Russ Schafer, Yahoo’s senior director of product marketing for the platform. Market research firm iSuppli estimates that by 2014 some 148 million televisions with Internet connectivity will be sold annually.

Millions of consumers who buy televisions from the likes of Samsung, LG and Sony won’t just be plugging into the programming offered by their satellite or cable provider, they’ll also be able to access applications ranging from Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook to eBayclass="blippr-nobr">eBay and view content from a limitless number of video publishers.

That represents a shift similar to what we saw in print media, where the Internet (and mobile phones) opened up the opportunity for anyone to become a content creator. Blip.tv, which bills itself as a “next generation television network,” has been eyeing this trend since 2005, hosting thousands of independently created shows. Now, according to cofounder Dina Kaplan, blip.tv is serving up nearly 100 million views each month (or, put another way, about 10% of the combined audience of the major TV networks) across the web, mobile devices and, increasingly, Internet-connected televisions.

The Growing Market for Internet-Enabled Televisions

class='blippr-nobr'>Blipclass="blippr-nobr">BLIP.tv is growing its audience by forming partnerships with traditional TV manufacturers and a new breed of company in the set-top box market that lets consumers connect to the Internet via their televisions. One of those companies is Roku, which sells its entry-level box for $60. CEO Anthony Wood told me the company is closing in on 1 million customers and that the average user is consuming 33 hours of content each month using the device.

Roku rival Boxeeclass="blippr-nobr">Boxee has amassed about 1.2 million users so far, says CEO Avner Ronen. That’s just through its downloadable app, which requires users to connect their computers to their televisions. The company plans to introduce its own box in November and bring with it a string of content partnerships, like BBC and Major League Baseball, as well as from companies like blip.tv and other purely digital outfits.

Boxee is planning to monetize the set-top box in part through a transaction platform that Ronen says will let publishers “offer content and charge for it without the need for users to enter payment information … [they can pay] with just one-click” for things like premium content, tickets or subscriptions. Roku has plans for a similar platform that will launch this fall. For now, both Roku and Boxee let their content providers control their own advertising and keep the revenue generated by it.

The Changing Advertising Landscape

The potential for new forms of advertising isn’t lost on any of these players, though. Experiments are still very early stage, but Yahoo’s Schafer says that, right now, “the basic ad formats are the same as we use on the web … and you’re just playing it to a different device. But the next stage is Yahoo bringing our own advertising offering further optimized for television … monetizing our service first and then offering it to third parties.”

class='blippr-nobr'>Pandoraclass="blippr-nobr">Pandora, the popular Internet radio service that also has millions of users across connected devices, recently extended its ad platform to Internet-enabled televisions. “Campaigns on this newest platform will primarily feature audio ads, which create a more lasting and emotive connection with consumers. The ability for brands to connect with consumers using audio ads on an in-home device is a new and exciting opportunity,” says Chief Revenue Officer John Trimble.

Meanwhile, blip.tv sees opportunities for targeting ads with unprecedented levels of precision. For example, the company recently developed a campaign for Electronic Arts that was able to target Xbox 360 owners with an interactive ad for NCAA Football ‘11 that allowed them to download a demo of the game to their console. Kaplan says that such complexity can’t yet be achieved across the dozens of different television and connected device manufacturers, but that “within a year we’ll see video advertising much more seamlessly transition from web video to the TV set.”

Such interactivity is already possible with so-called “second screen” providers, which are building social experiences on smartphones and tablets that allow users to interact with friends and content as they watch their favorite shows. They simultaneously create opportunities for engagement that have both the networks and advertisers excited.

Philo is a startup that, along with competitors like Miso and GetGlue, has taken the concept of “checking in” — popularized in recent months by location-based apps like class='blippr-nobr'>Foursquareclass="blippr-nobr">foursquare — and applied it to television shows. Users can check in to shows, interact with friends who are also watching and engage with ads in unique ways. For example, the company recently launched a promotion for the upcoming film You Again that enters users into a sweepstakes when they check in to shows like Glee or Dancing with the Stars and interacts with the ads through Philo’s app.

Prime Opportunities for Television Networks

The huge shift taking place in the TV landscape isn’t lost on the networks. CBS is getting its content on a multitude of connected devices and experimenting with a variety of content plays, social features and revenue models. Zander Lurie, SVP of strategic development at the company, doesn’t see new consumption models making networks like CBS irrelevant. “We’re excited by the fact that these services are offering consumers more ways to view our content. The priority [for us] is to create more opportunities for our content to be consumed than ever before. As long as we have a business model in place for that [type of] consumption, we win,” says Lurie.

Despite all of the activity, Internet-connected television will shift even more dramatically over the next year, with both Googleclass="blippr-nobr">Google and Apple introducing their own set-top box offerings this fall. While upstarts like Boxee and Roku might see that as validation of what they helped pioneer, it could significantly disrupt the business models emerging in the quickly evolving world of Internet-connected television.

More Tech Resources from Mashable:

- How a Physically Aware Internet Will Change the World/> - 10 Unique Headphones for Listening in Style/> - 10 Useful Apple iPad Tips and Tricks/> - 5 Tools for Keeping Track of Your Passwords/> - 7 Questions With AOL Co-Founder Steve Case

Image courtesy of iStockphotoclass="blippr-nobr">iStockphoto, CostinT, iStockphoto, subju

For more Business coverage:

class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Businessclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Business channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

Digital marketing budgets are expected to increase steadily during the next few years, according to Datran Media’s Annual Marketing & Media Survey, which reaches out to more than 5,000 marketing executives from Fortune 500 brands, top publishers, and leading advertising and media agencies.

This is good news for those of you hoping to break into the digital marketing industry. Whether you’re passionate about search, affiliate, social media, or another area of marketing, there are a few things you can do to prove your worthiness to prospective employers.

We asked five industry insiders about their top tips for aspiring digital marketers. Find their suggestions below and add your own in the comments.

1. Get Hands-On Marketing Experience

A degree in marketing or communications can take you a distance, but most employers are looking for candidates with marketing experience, whether that’s from a previous job, internship or side project. If you already have work experience in the marketing world, congratulations. For the rest of you, internships or other projects will be key.

“Any hands-on involvement with campaign creation, analytics, or optimization can be extremely beneficial to aspiring digital marketers,” says Traci Kuiphoff, online marketing manager at BareNecessities.com. “If you’re in school or a recent grad, the best way to gain experience is to do an internship at a company or agency that has a department or focus in online or digital marketing. Not only do you get real world hands-on experience, but it’s also great to put on your resume when you’re ready for a full-time position.”

If you are in college, look for paid or for-school-credit marketing internships at your college’s job fairs, via job search sites, and on social media sites. You could even land your next gig through Twitter.

If you don’t land an internship or find a position of interest, create your own project or enter a marketing contest. While studying marketing and international business at NYU Stern’s Undergraduate School of Business, a classmate and I entered the John Caples Student Campaign of the Year contest and created a digital marketing campaign for Pentel. Our campaign included a mix of digital, social and direct marketing communications, along with thoroughly gathered success metrics. Not only did we win first place, which included summer internships and a cash prize, but we also met industry experts who have acted as mentors to us.

2. Know the Lingo

Being able to analyze marketing campaigns and understand what worked or didn’t is the key role of a digital marketer — in order to do that, you’ll need to know (and love) the industry jargon.

“Understanding metrics on the web is key,” says Naishi Zhang, assistant marketing manager at Barnes & Noble. “The Internet provides so many ways of analyzing user behavior, and knowing how to gather and interpret data is important for success. Read widely and learn the lingo, so when someone asks about the CTR of a banner ad or the number of page views a landing page received, you’ll be ready.”

Mastering marketing terminology and metrics, and knowing what they mean, will take time and practice, but you can get a basic knowledge by picking up a marketing 101 textbook or attending an introductory course. Check out local college or continuing education courses. If that isn’t an option, the class='blippr-nobr'>Internetclass="blippr-nobr">Internet is at your disposal. About.com’s glossary of marketing terms and HubSpot’s glossary of social media marketing terms are both very useful for beginners, and you should also read some of the top marketing blogs to get your daily fill of information.

3. Nurture Your Personal Online Presence

Rick Bakas, director of social media marketing at St. Supéry Vineyards and Winery said he believes a person’s online presence can be a major deciding factor on whether an aspiring digital marketer makes the cut for a job. “If an employer is deciding between two candidates,” he notes, “they might go with the person with the strong following online. Build your personal brand online. You have to show you can build your personal brand if you’re going to build someone else’s.”

Your personal brand is value-added in the job market.

“Your online clout is sometimes referred to as ’social currency,’” he continues. “In other words, there’s a value associated with your online personal brand. Increased value carries as much weight as a great resume. A high Klout.com score for example, will help you stand out and validate what your resume says about you.”

Your Klout score is a number between 0 and 100 that measures the size of your engaged audience, the likelihood that they will amplify your messages, and your overall influence within your network. Bigger isn’t always better. Bakas explains, “Aspiring marketers would do well to grow an engaged online following, not necessarily a large online following. Again, Klout.com is a great tool to evaluate the strength of your online presence.”

4. Dabble in Everything, Specialize in Something

There isn’t just one career path in marketing. You can choose to work for an agency, with an in-house team, or start your own firm. There are multiple marketing disciplines, including affiliate, search, social media, e-mail, mobile, and display marketing, to name a few. Teams come in all sizes — some in which teammates specialize in certain areas, and others where a team can be composed of just one stellar know-it-all.

The best way to get a taste of all of the options is to dabble in a bit of everything. “Digital marketing agency experience can be extremely valuable — at an agency you can be exposed to all avenues of digital marketing from paid search, social media, mobile and everything in between,” Kuiphoff advises. ”Most likely, you’ll touch a number of different accounts which can help you choose a vertical focus or specialty.”

Once you have a base knowledge in each area of marketing, you’ll be better equipped to choose a more specific path of focus. Having a specialty enables you to hone your skills in that area and become an expert, which is a valuable asset to potential employees.

5. Attend Industry Meetups and Conferences

“Put the ’social’ in social media and spend time engaging with people in the real world,” Bakas says. “Go to lots of events to create or nurture quality interactions that can later continue online. Use plancast.com to see which upcoming events are worth going to. These experiences are ripe with opportunities to meet other digital marketers. The strongest relationships are the ones nurtured online and offline.”

Kuiphoff adds, “Digital marketing conferences not only provide a great networking opportunity, but most offer in-depth workshops that can enhance your skill set.”

Some worthwhile conferences to consider include SXSW, Search Marketing Expo, Web 2.0 Expo, Ad Age Digital Conference, ad:tech, Search Engine Strategies and Pivot.

If you’re not into the hustle and bustle of industry conferences, you can consider a more toned-down approach by attending or organizing your own Meetups. There are thousands of marketing Meetups around the world. The NY Entrepreneurs Business Network and San Francisco Entrepreneur Meetup are two of the largest.

6. Keep a Pulse on the News

Because of the nature of the Internet, digital marketing is ever-changing. If you don’t keep up with the latest trends and news, it shows in interviews and on the job. Sarah Hofstetter, SVP of emerging media and client strategy at digital marketing agency 360i, says it well:

“Remember that standing still is going backwards. Yes, it’s an adage that has been used for years to inspire ambition, but it is blatantly obvious in the digital landscape. Not only does that technology evolve at a lightening pace that transcends Moore’s law, but consumer behavior is shifting at a radical pace, and media consumption becomes more and more fragmented.

“Being on top of consumer behavior –- understanding what they’re doing online, what motivates them and their social and mobile behavior –- and staying ahead of that by learning what’s in the market and what’s on the come, will help ensure you don’t get stuck on the sidelines when interviewing for jobs in digital marketing.”

Kuiphoff recommends subscribing to industry blogs and newsletters to stay on top of the latest news. Some of my personal favorites include Ad Age, ClickZ, eMarketer, BrandWeek and AdWeek.

7. Get Technical

You won’t be coding programs or building full websites as a digital marketer, but you will need to work with developers and designers or other web specialists to communicate your marketing design needs. A basic knowledge of how the web works, HTML, and one or two programming languages, such as class='blippr-nobr'>PHPclass="blippr-nobr">PHP, JavaScript, CSS and Ruby, will help you understand the current boundaries and opportunities that will affect your marketing campaigns.

“It’s important for anyone working in the digital world, whether it’s marketing or designing features for a product, to have a basic understanding of coding,” suggests Dharmishta Rood, a research assistant at Harvard Business School and fellow at the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT. “There are great experiential benefits from understanding the underlying technologies that shape what we do online — it’s easier to understand how users can interact with content, what is possible for design with things like CSS and JavaScript, and understand the nuances of basic technical terminology.”

8. Perfect Your Resume

Everyone needs a resume; what you do with it is up to you. To help you stand out, here are a few tips from our digital marketing experts:

• “Demonstrate that you can produce results and work in a fast-paced environment, whether you’ve had previous digital experience or not. Don’t be afraid to include things about yourself that may not be directly related to the job. Resumes get scanned quickly, so it always helps to inject something creative and clever.” — Naishi Zhang, assistant marketing manager, Barnes & Noble
• “One way you can make your resume stand out is to get certified. class='blippr-nobr'>Googleclass="blippr-nobr">Google has a certification program for Adwords. If you have a paid search marketing focus this can help assure a client/employer that you’re proficient in the system.” — Traci Kuiphoff, online marketing manager, BareNecessities.com
• “I’m a big believer in making sure your resume is on LinkedInclass="blippr-nobr">LinkedIn, and to have recommendations on LinkedIn. Start asking for recommendations soon. LinkedIn is like your digital resume. Make sure the facts match up. Also, Google your name to see what comes up — your prospective employers will.” — Rick Bakas, director of social media marketing, St. Supéry Vineyards and Winery
• “Use keywords to describe your previous experience that make sense for the specific job you’re applying for — if the job description or department does ’social media outreach’ and your description of all those Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter @replies, Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook messages and moderated blog post comments is currently called ‘customer service,’ this does not play up your strengths as a digital marketer. Use common sense though. If their keywords don’t match your experience, don’t write anything untruthful, and consider doing things to get the types of experience for the jobs you want, such as volunteering to help with the social media of a non-profit whose cause you support.” — Dharmishta Rood, research assistant, Harvard Business School

To showcase your skills alongside multimedia and other online assets, check out some digital alternatives to the paper resume, including video resumes, VisualCVs, social resumes and LinkedIn profiles.

9. Let Curiosity and Passion Drive You

“Sure, it’s great to know about Facebook, iAds and whatever is coming next from Silicon Valley,” Hofstetter points out, “but when we’re looking for key talent at 360i, nothing matters to us more than intellectual curiosity and passion…In a business where answers and solutions aren’t always obvious, you need to be innately curious (about everything) and obsessed with the ‘why’ behind the ‘what.’ ”

It may sound cheesy at first, but she has a point. Without inquisitiveness and zeal, we’re just work drones on a mission to take over the Internet. Plus, these traits have a positive effect on the way we work, Hofstetter says:

“People who have these qualities can innovate and identify trends from seemingly ordinary data — they’re the first to try new things (platforms, tools, technology) and think about how marketers can benefit from them. They don’t always have the answers, but when you’re being asked to do never-been-done-before things, there isn’t a rulebook. That’s why when we’re recruiting, we look for people who know how to ask the right questions.

10. Unplug for Your Sanity

Staring at a computer screen all day long can take a toll on your body, mind and social life. Get away from that monitor and breathe for crying out loud!

Bakas advocates getting out every once in a while to work on who you are as a person outside of work. “Because transparency is important, it’s important to be a good person in the real world,” he says. “It’ll translate into the digital world — you can’t fake being a good person if you’re a jerk in real life. Unplug for your own sanity, but also to continue growing as a person in life.”

I second that. Now, get out of here and get a job.

Digital Marketing Job Listings

Every week we put out a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we post a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the best digital marketing jobs from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

• Digital Strategist at Vladimir Jones in Colorado Springs, CO.
• Brand Manager at sweetgreen in Washington, DC.
• Director of Digital Strategy at DeVries Public Relations in New York, NY.
• Marketing Manager/Director at BreakoutBand in Brooklyn, NY.
• Sr. Marketing Manager at WOWIO in Los Angeles, CA.

More Job Search Resources from Mashable

- 5 Tips for Aspiring Social Media Marketers/> - 10 Tips For Aspiring Community Managers/> - 5 Tips for Aspiring Copywriters and Art Directors/> - HOW TO: Land a Career in Digital Public Relations/> - Top 5 Tips for Aspiring Music Bloggers

Image courtesy of RICEinteractive; iStockphotoclass="blippr-nobr">iStockphoto, track5

For more Business coverage:

class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Businessclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Business channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

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Small Business <b>News</b>: BlogWorld Wrap Up

BlogWorld 2010 has come and gone with more than a few new revelations imperative to the small business community. This post will feature as kind of a wrap up of.

Scripting <b>News</b>: Random afternoon notes

Recent stories. Twitter links. My 40 most-recent Twitter links, ranked by number of clicks. My bike. People are always asking about my bike. A picture named bikesmall.jpg. Here's a picture. AFP news pic. Calendar ...

<b>News</b>: Jean Claude Van Damme Suffers Heart Attack On Set Of WEAPON

Images From Cronenberg's TALKING CURE � Brody Versus Argento � JCVD Has Heart Attack On Set � TROLL HUNTER Coming To America � MORPHINE Doc Gets A Trailer � Pegg / Frost Alien Comedy PAUL Trailer. Film News ...

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robert shumake detroit

robert shumake hall of shame

Small Business <b>News</b>: BlogWorld Wrap Up

BlogWorld 2010 has come and gone with more than a few new revelations imperative to the small business community. This post will feature as kind of a wrap up of.

Scripting <b>News</b>: Random afternoon notes

Recent stories. Twitter links. My 40 most-recent Twitter links, ranked by number of clicks. My bike. People are always asking about my bike. A picture named bikesmall.jpg. Here's a picture. AFP news pic. Calendar ...

<b>News</b>: Jean Claude Van Damme Suffers Heart Attack On Set Of WEAPON

Images From Cronenberg's TALKING CURE � Brody Versus Argento � JCVD Has Heart Attack On Set � TROLL HUNTER Coming To America � MORPHINE Doc Gets A Trailer � Pegg / Frost Alien Comedy PAUL Trailer. Film News ...

robert shumake hall of shame

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about social media, business and technology.

The television is about to become the latest medium to get a major makeover at the hands of the class='blippr-nobr'>Internetclass="blippr-nobr">Internet. Already more than half of Americans are watching TV and surfing the web simultaneously. But another trend — giving connectivity to the device itself — is going to fundamentally change the business models around television and the way we consume and interact with content.

Yahooclass="blippr-nobr">Yahoo!, which has been an early mover in the space, anticipates that 8 million to 10 million devices with its Connected Television platform preinstalled will be in consumers’ hands by March 2011. That’s triple the amount in March 2010, according to Russ Schafer, Yahoo’s senior director of product marketing for the platform. Market research firm iSuppli estimates that by 2014 some 148 million televisions with Internet connectivity will be sold annually.

Millions of consumers who buy televisions from the likes of Samsung, LG and Sony won’t just be plugging into the programming offered by their satellite or cable provider, they’ll also be able to access applications ranging from Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook to eBayclass="blippr-nobr">eBay and view content from a limitless number of video publishers.

That represents a shift similar to what we saw in print media, where the Internet (and mobile phones) opened up the opportunity for anyone to become a content creator. Blip.tv, which bills itself as a “next generation television network,” has been eyeing this trend since 2005, hosting thousands of independently created shows. Now, according to cofounder Dina Kaplan, blip.tv is serving up nearly 100 million views each month (or, put another way, about 10% of the combined audience of the major TV networks) across the web, mobile devices and, increasingly, Internet-connected televisions.

The Growing Market for Internet-Enabled Televisions

class='blippr-nobr'>Blipclass="blippr-nobr">BLIP.tv is growing its audience by forming partnerships with traditional TV manufacturers and a new breed of company in the set-top box market that lets consumers connect to the Internet via their televisions. One of those companies is Roku, which sells its entry-level box for $60. CEO Anthony Wood told me the company is closing in on 1 million customers and that the average user is consuming 33 hours of content each month using the device.

Roku rival Boxeeclass="blippr-nobr">Boxee has amassed about 1.2 million users so far, says CEO Avner Ronen. That’s just through its downloadable app, which requires users to connect their computers to their televisions. The company plans to introduce its own box in November and bring with it a string of content partnerships, like BBC and Major League Baseball, as well as from companies like blip.tv and other purely digital outfits.

Boxee is planning to monetize the set-top box in part through a transaction platform that Ronen says will let publishers “offer content and charge for it without the need for users to enter payment information … [they can pay] with just one-click” for things like premium content, tickets or subscriptions. Roku has plans for a similar platform that will launch this fall. For now, both Roku and Boxee let their content providers control their own advertising and keep the revenue generated by it.

The Changing Advertising Landscape

The potential for new forms of advertising isn’t lost on any of these players, though. Experiments are still very early stage, but Yahoo’s Schafer says that, right now, “the basic ad formats are the same as we use on the web … and you’re just playing it to a different device. But the next stage is Yahoo bringing our own advertising offering further optimized for television … monetizing our service first and then offering it to third parties.”

class='blippr-nobr'>Pandoraclass="blippr-nobr">Pandora, the popular Internet radio service that also has millions of users across connected devices, recently extended its ad platform to Internet-enabled televisions. “Campaigns on this newest platform will primarily feature audio ads, which create a more lasting and emotive connection with consumers. The ability for brands to connect with consumers using audio ads on an in-home device is a new and exciting opportunity,” says Chief Revenue Officer John Trimble.

Meanwhile, blip.tv sees opportunities for targeting ads with unprecedented levels of precision. For example, the company recently developed a campaign for Electronic Arts that was able to target Xbox 360 owners with an interactive ad for NCAA Football ‘11 that allowed them to download a demo of the game to their console. Kaplan says that such complexity can’t yet be achieved across the dozens of different television and connected device manufacturers, but that “within a year we’ll see video advertising much more seamlessly transition from web video to the TV set.”

Such interactivity is already possible with so-called “second screen” providers, which are building social experiences on smartphones and tablets that allow users to interact with friends and content as they watch their favorite shows. They simultaneously create opportunities for engagement that have both the networks and advertisers excited.

Philo is a startup that, along with competitors like Miso and GetGlue, has taken the concept of “checking in” — popularized in recent months by location-based apps like class='blippr-nobr'>Foursquareclass="blippr-nobr">foursquare — and applied it to television shows. Users can check in to shows, interact with friends who are also watching and engage with ads in unique ways. For example, the company recently launched a promotion for the upcoming film You Again that enters users into a sweepstakes when they check in to shows like Glee or Dancing with the Stars and interacts with the ads through Philo’s app.

Prime Opportunities for Television Networks

The huge shift taking place in the TV landscape isn’t lost on the networks. CBS is getting its content on a multitude of connected devices and experimenting with a variety of content plays, social features and revenue models. Zander Lurie, SVP of strategic development at the company, doesn’t see new consumption models making networks like CBS irrelevant. “We’re excited by the fact that these services are offering consumers more ways to view our content. The priority [for us] is to create more opportunities for our content to be consumed than ever before. As long as we have a business model in place for that [type of] consumption, we win,” says Lurie.

Despite all of the activity, Internet-connected television will shift even more dramatically over the next year, with both Googleclass="blippr-nobr">Google and Apple introducing their own set-top box offerings this fall. While upstarts like Boxee and Roku might see that as validation of what they helped pioneer, it could significantly disrupt the business models emerging in the quickly evolving world of Internet-connected television.

More Tech Resources from Mashable:

- How a Physically Aware Internet Will Change the World/> - 10 Unique Headphones for Listening in Style/> - 10 Useful Apple iPad Tips and Tricks/> - 5 Tools for Keeping Track of Your Passwords/> - 7 Questions With AOL Co-Founder Steve Case

Image courtesy of iStockphotoclass="blippr-nobr">iStockphoto, CostinT, iStockphoto, subju

For more Business coverage:

class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Businessclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Business channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

Digital marketing budgets are expected to increase steadily during the next few years, according to Datran Media’s Annual Marketing & Media Survey, which reaches out to more than 5,000 marketing executives from Fortune 500 brands, top publishers, and leading advertising and media agencies.

This is good news for those of you hoping to break into the digital marketing industry. Whether you’re passionate about search, affiliate, social media, or another area of marketing, there are a few things you can do to prove your worthiness to prospective employers.

We asked five industry insiders about their top tips for aspiring digital marketers. Find their suggestions below and add your own in the comments.

1. Get Hands-On Marketing Experience

A degree in marketing or communications can take you a distance, but most employers are looking for candidates with marketing experience, whether that’s from a previous job, internship or side project. If you already have work experience in the marketing world, congratulations. For the rest of you, internships or other projects will be key.

“Any hands-on involvement with campaign creation, analytics, or optimization can be extremely beneficial to aspiring digital marketers,” says Traci Kuiphoff, online marketing manager at BareNecessities.com. “If you’re in school or a recent grad, the best way to gain experience is to do an internship at a company or agency that has a department or focus in online or digital marketing. Not only do you get real world hands-on experience, but it’s also great to put on your resume when you’re ready for a full-time position.”

If you are in college, look for paid or for-school-credit marketing internships at your college’s job fairs, via job search sites, and on social media sites. You could even land your next gig through Twitter.

If you don’t land an internship or find a position of interest, create your own project or enter a marketing contest. While studying marketing and international business at NYU Stern’s Undergraduate School of Business, a classmate and I entered the John Caples Student Campaign of the Year contest and created a digital marketing campaign for Pentel. Our campaign included a mix of digital, social and direct marketing communications, along with thoroughly gathered success metrics. Not only did we win first place, which included summer internships and a cash prize, but we also met industry experts who have acted as mentors to us.

2. Know the Lingo

Being able to analyze marketing campaigns and understand what worked or didn’t is the key role of a digital marketer — in order to do that, you’ll need to know (and love) the industry jargon.

“Understanding metrics on the web is key,” says Naishi Zhang, assistant marketing manager at Barnes & Noble. “The Internet provides so many ways of analyzing user behavior, and knowing how to gather and interpret data is important for success. Read widely and learn the lingo, so when someone asks about the CTR of a banner ad or the number of page views a landing page received, you’ll be ready.”

Mastering marketing terminology and metrics, and knowing what they mean, will take time and practice, but you can get a basic knowledge by picking up a marketing 101 textbook or attending an introductory course. Check out local college or continuing education courses. If that isn’t an option, the class='blippr-nobr'>Internetclass="blippr-nobr">Internet is at your disposal. About.com’s glossary of marketing terms and HubSpot’s glossary of social media marketing terms are both very useful for beginners, and you should also read some of the top marketing blogs to get your daily fill of information.

3. Nurture Your Personal Online Presence

Rick Bakas, director of social media marketing at St. Supéry Vineyards and Winery said he believes a person’s online presence can be a major deciding factor on whether an aspiring digital marketer makes the cut for a job. “If an employer is deciding between two candidates,” he notes, “they might go with the person with the strong following online. Build your personal brand online. You have to show you can build your personal brand if you’re going to build someone else’s.”

Your personal brand is value-added in the job market.

“Your online clout is sometimes referred to as ’social currency,’” he continues. “In other words, there’s a value associated with your online personal brand. Increased value carries as much weight as a great resume. A high Klout.com score for example, will help you stand out and validate what your resume says about you.”

Your Klout score is a number between 0 and 100 that measures the size of your engaged audience, the likelihood that they will amplify your messages, and your overall influence within your network. Bigger isn’t always better. Bakas explains, “Aspiring marketers would do well to grow an engaged online following, not necessarily a large online following. Again, Klout.com is a great tool to evaluate the strength of your online presence.”

4. Dabble in Everything, Specialize in Something

There isn’t just one career path in marketing. You can choose to work for an agency, with an in-house team, or start your own firm. There are multiple marketing disciplines, including affiliate, search, social media, e-mail, mobile, and display marketing, to name a few. Teams come in all sizes — some in which teammates specialize in certain areas, and others where a team can be composed of just one stellar know-it-all.

The best way to get a taste of all of the options is to dabble in a bit of everything. “Digital marketing agency experience can be extremely valuable — at an agency you can be exposed to all avenues of digital marketing from paid search, social media, mobile and everything in between,” Kuiphoff advises. ”Most likely, you’ll touch a number of different accounts which can help you choose a vertical focus or specialty.”

Once you have a base knowledge in each area of marketing, you’ll be better equipped to choose a more specific path of focus. Having a specialty enables you to hone your skills in that area and become an expert, which is a valuable asset to potential employees.

5. Attend Industry Meetups and Conferences

“Put the ’social’ in social media and spend time engaging with people in the real world,” Bakas says. “Go to lots of events to create or nurture quality interactions that can later continue online. Use plancast.com to see which upcoming events are worth going to. These experiences are ripe with opportunities to meet other digital marketers. The strongest relationships are the ones nurtured online and offline.”

Kuiphoff adds, “Digital marketing conferences not only provide a great networking opportunity, but most offer in-depth workshops that can enhance your skill set.”

Some worthwhile conferences to consider include SXSW, Search Marketing Expo, Web 2.0 Expo, Ad Age Digital Conference, ad:tech, Search Engine Strategies and Pivot.

If you’re not into the hustle and bustle of industry conferences, you can consider a more toned-down approach by attending or organizing your own Meetups. There are thousands of marketing Meetups around the world. The NY Entrepreneurs Business Network and San Francisco Entrepreneur Meetup are two of the largest.

6. Keep a Pulse on the News

Because of the nature of the Internet, digital marketing is ever-changing. If you don’t keep up with the latest trends and news, it shows in interviews and on the job. Sarah Hofstetter, SVP of emerging media and client strategy at digital marketing agency 360i, says it well:

“Remember that standing still is going backwards. Yes, it’s an adage that has been used for years to inspire ambition, but it is blatantly obvious in the digital landscape. Not only does that technology evolve at a lightening pace that transcends Moore’s law, but consumer behavior is shifting at a radical pace, and media consumption becomes more and more fragmented.

“Being on top of consumer behavior –- understanding what they’re doing online, what motivates them and their social and mobile behavior –- and staying ahead of that by learning what’s in the market and what’s on the come, will help ensure you don’t get stuck on the sidelines when interviewing for jobs in digital marketing.”

Kuiphoff recommends subscribing to industry blogs and newsletters to stay on top of the latest news. Some of my personal favorites include Ad Age, ClickZ, eMarketer, BrandWeek and AdWeek.

7. Get Technical

You won’t be coding programs or building full websites as a digital marketer, but you will need to work with developers and designers or other web specialists to communicate your marketing design needs. A basic knowledge of how the web works, HTML, and one or two programming languages, such as class='blippr-nobr'>PHPclass="blippr-nobr">PHP, JavaScript, CSS and Ruby, will help you understand the current boundaries and opportunities that will affect your marketing campaigns.

“It’s important for anyone working in the digital world, whether it’s marketing or designing features for a product, to have a basic understanding of coding,” suggests Dharmishta Rood, a research assistant at Harvard Business School and fellow at the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT. “There are great experiential benefits from understanding the underlying technologies that shape what we do online — it’s easier to understand how users can interact with content, what is possible for design with things like CSS and JavaScript, and understand the nuances of basic technical terminology.”

8. Perfect Your Resume

Everyone needs a resume; what you do with it is up to you. To help you stand out, here are a few tips from our digital marketing experts:

• “Demonstrate that you can produce results and work in a fast-paced environment, whether you’ve had previous digital experience or not. Don’t be afraid to include things about yourself that may not be directly related to the job. Resumes get scanned quickly, so it always helps to inject something creative and clever.” — Naishi Zhang, assistant marketing manager, Barnes & Noble
• “One way you can make your resume stand out is to get certified. class='blippr-nobr'>Googleclass="blippr-nobr">Google has a certification program for Adwords. If you have a paid search marketing focus this can help assure a client/employer that you’re proficient in the system.” — Traci Kuiphoff, online marketing manager, BareNecessities.com
• “I’m a big believer in making sure your resume is on LinkedInclass="blippr-nobr">LinkedIn, and to have recommendations on LinkedIn. Start asking for recommendations soon. LinkedIn is like your digital resume. Make sure the facts match up. Also, Google your name to see what comes up — your prospective employers will.” — Rick Bakas, director of social media marketing, St. Supéry Vineyards and Winery
• “Use keywords to describe your previous experience that make sense for the specific job you’re applying for — if the job description or department does ’social media outreach’ and your description of all those Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter @replies, Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook messages and moderated blog post comments is currently called ‘customer service,’ this does not play up your strengths as a digital marketer. Use common sense though. If their keywords don’t match your experience, don’t write anything untruthful, and consider doing things to get the types of experience for the jobs you want, such as volunteering to help with the social media of a non-profit whose cause you support.” — Dharmishta Rood, research assistant, Harvard Business School

To showcase your skills alongside multimedia and other online assets, check out some digital alternatives to the paper resume, including video resumes, VisualCVs, social resumes and LinkedIn profiles.

9. Let Curiosity and Passion Drive You

“Sure, it’s great to know about Facebook, iAds and whatever is coming next from Silicon Valley,” Hofstetter points out, “but when we’re looking for key talent at 360i, nothing matters to us more than intellectual curiosity and passion…In a business where answers and solutions aren’t always obvious, you need to be innately curious (about everything) and obsessed with the ‘why’ behind the ‘what.’ ”

It may sound cheesy at first, but she has a point. Without inquisitiveness and zeal, we’re just work drones on a mission to take over the Internet. Plus, these traits have a positive effect on the way we work, Hofstetter says:

“People who have these qualities can innovate and identify trends from seemingly ordinary data — they’re the first to try new things (platforms, tools, technology) and think about how marketers can benefit from them. They don’t always have the answers, but when you’re being asked to do never-been-done-before things, there isn’t a rulebook. That’s why when we’re recruiting, we look for people who know how to ask the right questions.

10. Unplug for Your Sanity

Staring at a computer screen all day long can take a toll on your body, mind and social life. Get away from that monitor and breathe for crying out loud!

Bakas advocates getting out every once in a while to work on who you are as a person outside of work. “Because transparency is important, it’s important to be a good person in the real world,” he says. “It’ll translate into the digital world — you can’t fake being a good person if you’re a jerk in real life. Unplug for your own sanity, but also to continue growing as a person in life.”

I second that. Now, get out of here and get a job.

Digital Marketing Job Listings

Every week we put out a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we post a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the best digital marketing jobs from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

• Digital Strategist at Vladimir Jones in Colorado Springs, CO.
• Brand Manager at sweetgreen in Washington, DC.
• Director of Digital Strategy at DeVries Public Relations in New York, NY.
• Marketing Manager/Director at BreakoutBand in Brooklyn, NY.
• Sr. Marketing Manager at WOWIO in Los Angeles, CA.

More Job Search Resources from Mashable

- 5 Tips for Aspiring Social Media Marketers/> - 10 Tips For Aspiring Community Managers/> - 5 Tips for Aspiring Copywriters and Art Directors/> - HOW TO: Land a Career in Digital Public Relations/> - Top 5 Tips for Aspiring Music Bloggers

Image courtesy of RICEinteractive; iStockphotoclass="blippr-nobr">iStockphoto, track5

For more Business coverage:

class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Businessclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Business channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

robert shumake hall of shame

robert shumake detroit

Small Business <b>News</b>: BlogWorld Wrap Up

BlogWorld 2010 has come and gone with more than a few new revelations imperative to the small business community. This post will feature as kind of a wrap up of.

Scripting <b>News</b>: Random afternoon notes

Recent stories. Twitter links. My 40 most-recent Twitter links, ranked by number of clicks. My bike. People are always asking about my bike. A picture named bikesmall.jpg. Here's a picture. AFP news pic. Calendar ...

<b>News</b>: Jean Claude Van Damme Suffers Heart Attack On Set Of WEAPON

Images From Cronenberg's TALKING CURE � Brody Versus Argento � JCVD Has Heart Attack On Set � TROLL HUNTER Coming To America � MORPHINE Doc Gets A Trailer � Pegg / Frost Alien Comedy PAUL Trailer. Film News ...

robert shumake detroit

robert shumake hall of shame

Small Business <b>News</b>: BlogWorld Wrap Up

BlogWorld 2010 has come and gone with more than a few new revelations imperative to the small business community. This post will feature as kind of a wrap up of.

Scripting <b>News</b>: Random afternoon notes

Recent stories. Twitter links. My 40 most-recent Twitter links, ranked by number of clicks. My bike. People are always asking about my bike. A picture named bikesmall.jpg. Here's a picture. AFP news pic. Calendar ...

<b>News</b>: Jean Claude Van Damme Suffers Heart Attack On Set Of WEAPON

Images From Cronenberg's TALKING CURE � Brody Versus Argento � JCVD Has Heart Attack On Set � TROLL HUNTER Coming To America � MORPHINE Doc Gets A Trailer � Pegg / Frost Alien Comedy PAUL Trailer. Film News ...

robert shumake detroit

Small Business <b>News</b>: BlogWorld Wrap Up

BlogWorld 2010 has come and gone with more than a few new revelations imperative to the small business community. This post will feature as kind of a wrap up of.

Scripting <b>News</b>: Random afternoon notes

Recent stories. Twitter links. My 40 most-recent Twitter links, ranked by number of clicks. My bike. People are always asking about my bike. A picture named bikesmall.jpg. Here's a picture. AFP news pic. Calendar ...

<b>News</b>: Jean Claude Van Damme Suffers Heart Attack On Set Of WEAPON

Images From Cronenberg's TALKING CURE � Brody Versus Argento � JCVD Has Heart Attack On Set � TROLL HUNTER Coming To America � MORPHINE Doc Gets A Trailer � Pegg / Frost Alien Comedy PAUL Trailer. Film News ...

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Small Business <b>News</b>: BlogWorld Wrap Up

BlogWorld 2010 has come and gone with more than a few new revelations imperative to the small business community. This post will feature as kind of a wrap up of.

Scripting <b>News</b>: Random afternoon notes

Recent stories. Twitter links. My 40 most-recent Twitter links, ranked by number of clicks. My bike. People are always asking about my bike. A picture named bikesmall.jpg. Here's a picture. AFP news pic. Calendar ...

<b>News</b>: Jean Claude Van Damme Suffers Heart Attack On Set Of WEAPON

Images From Cronenberg's TALKING CURE � Brody Versus Argento � JCVD Has Heart Attack On Set � TROLL HUNTER Coming To America � MORPHINE Doc Gets A Trailer � Pegg / Frost Alien Comedy PAUL Trailer. Film News ...

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robert shumake hall of shame
robert shumake hall of shame

Small Business <b>News</b>: BlogWorld Wrap Up

BlogWorld 2010 has come and gone with more than a few new revelations imperative to the small business community. This post will feature as kind of a wrap up of.

Scripting <b>News</b>: Random afternoon notes

Recent stories. Twitter links. My 40 most-recent Twitter links, ranked by number of clicks. My bike. People are always asking about my bike. A picture named bikesmall.jpg. Here's a picture. AFP news pic. Calendar ...

<b>News</b>: Jean Claude Van Damme Suffers Heart Attack On Set Of WEAPON

Images From Cronenberg's TALKING CURE � Brody Versus Argento � JCVD Has Heart Attack On Set � TROLL HUNTER Coming To America � MORPHINE Doc Gets A Trailer � Pegg / Frost Alien Comedy PAUL Trailer. Film News ...

robert shumake hall of shame

Typically, when a business hires an Internet marketing consultant they are needing help with their marketing. They may just be staring out or they may have had a failed marketing attempt in the past. In either case, the consultant will need to know what marketing efforts have been implemented, including the statistics associated with them. This will really help the consultant when they are deciding how best to design a new marketing plan.

The Internet marketing consultant and the business owner will work closely together to design a marketing plan. The consultant will be able to help with things like search engine optimization, that the business owner may not know anything about. They will make suggestions and help the business owner to make good choices about marketing.

Using an Internet marketing consultant can really help a business owner who is clueless about Internet marketing. A consultant can offer plenty of suggestions backed by training and knowledge. Without a consultant a business owner is left to try and figure everything out on their own. That is something that will take a lot of time and possible money to do. In the end, an Internet marketing consultant is a great choice for getting a good marketing strategy in place.

The business owner will be learning from the consultant how to handle their marketing needs. Then, as the business owner becomes more savvy in the expertise of Internet Marketing, they can THEN have valuable input on the campaign.

Many business owners make the dreadful mistake of trying to deploy their own Internet Marketing campaign. Unlike many mistakes that can be repaired, approximately 50% of business owners admit to having tried to manage their own Internet marketing campaign before hiring a professional. You see, there are many sources outlining the Internet marketing process. And most all, except the good ones, have a crack-marketing plan in place with many unknowns.
However, a campaign (and its web site) can actually have negative consequences to the web site. This is amplified when the do-it-yourselfer tries to deploy advanced tips and tricks without fully knowing their impacts.

Even if you do not USE an Internet Marketing Consultant for your campaign, spend the money and get a good consult. To say 'it is worth it' is an understatement. In this case, it is, literally, worth it, as you will undoubtedly save money in the long run and have a much higher quality campaign.



robert shumake hall of shame

Small Business <b>News</b>: BlogWorld Wrap Up

BlogWorld 2010 has come and gone with more than a few new revelations imperative to the small business community. This post will feature as kind of a wrap up of.

Scripting <b>News</b>: Random afternoon notes

Recent stories. Twitter links. My 40 most-recent Twitter links, ranked by number of clicks. My bike. People are always asking about my bike. A picture named bikesmall.jpg. Here's a picture. AFP news pic. Calendar ...

<b>News</b>: Jean Claude Van Damme Suffers Heart Attack On Set Of WEAPON

Images From Cronenberg's TALKING CURE � Brody Versus Argento � JCVD Has Heart Attack On Set � TROLL HUNTER Coming To America � MORPHINE Doc Gets A Trailer � Pegg / Frost Alien Comedy PAUL Trailer. Film News ...

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Small Business <b>News</b>: BlogWorld Wrap Up

BlogWorld 2010 has come and gone with more than a few new revelations imperative to the small business community. This post will feature as kind of a wrap up of.

Scripting <b>News</b>: Random afternoon notes

Recent stories. Twitter links. My 40 most-recent Twitter links, ranked by number of clicks. My bike. People are always asking about my bike. A picture named bikesmall.jpg. Here's a picture. AFP news pic. Calendar ...

<b>News</b>: Jean Claude Van Damme Suffers Heart Attack On Set Of WEAPON

Images From Cronenberg's TALKING CURE � Brody Versus Argento � JCVD Has Heart Attack On Set � TROLL HUNTER Coming To America � MORPHINE Doc Gets A Trailer � Pegg / Frost Alien Comedy PAUL Trailer. Film News ...