Open up your mind and say, ahh...

How can I go about teaching enterprise, and their B2B marketers, how to produce better content? This is a real marketing emergency, if there is such a thing.

Have you looked at the number of white papers out there lately? And how they all suck? At the collateral? At the websites? At the press releases and the fatuous corporate blogs? At the 178 social media sites per company–few of which offer much relevance or are of interest to customers, shareholders, suppliers, or even employees. Enterprise writing does not “go viral.”

There are better things to do with time and money than produce content no one will read or see. “Content marketing” is king, but not if you create the wrong content, or bad content.

I ask myself, can I help more by writing for them, or by teaching them how to write themselves? And is that even possible? As a professor years ago, I saw that by the time people got to my classes, their ability to write had been more or less fixed by the amount they read as children and the amount of encouragement they received in elementary school.

With all the time I spend at startups, I realize young companies are much better communicators and marketers than enterprise companies. They have to be. They have to get and keep customers, or they die. In the enterprise, approaching death is often non-obvious. Kodak. (Squirrel.)

Long, long ago, when I was teaching English, I belonged to a group in the National Council of Teachers of English called the Committee on Public Doublespeak. We professors were committed to wiping out jargon, bullshit, unclear writing, and all the ways people obfuscate rather than clarify.

Thirty years later, I look around me and the amount of content has proliferated, but the quality of it has gotten even worse. About five years ago, Chelsea Hardaway wrote a book called Why Business People Speak Like Idiots, addressing the same problem.

Yet B2B marketers have long discussions about whether they should be doing more or less SEO, more or less inbound or outbound marketing, more or less “earned media.” This discussion is the proverbial arranging of the Titanic’s deck chairs.

How much of what you do is never important. The quality, and relevance, of what you do is important. Every enterprise company should pretend to be a startup.

Image: Flickr user bburky

If you’re like most Mashable readers, you know plenty about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its sister bill in the Senate, the Protect IP Act (PIPA). And you’re probably plenty outraged about it, too. And rightfully so.

If enacted, SOPA/PIPA could have disastrous consequences for the basic infrastructure of the Internet. It would afford the Federal government and copyright holders excessive and far-reaching powers to take down sites they deem to be hosting protected content with little regard for the definition of “hosting.”

If a user of a news site leaves a comment with offending material, that could be grounds for a takedown. And YouTube could be in hot water should it fail to promptly detect a user who uploads copyrighted material. The same problem exists for all community-based websites, which, let’s face it, are the vast majority of our favorite sites.

It’s the punitive actions which SOPA/PIPA call for that are the most troubling aspect of the bills. They take an offending website off the Domain Name System (DNS), a sort of phone book for the Internet. For more on DNS, watch this excellent explainer video posted on The Guardian. By interfering with DNS, the bill could destabilize the foundation of the Internet. And dedicated pirates would find work-arounds.

A new law in Belarus will restrict access to foreign websites, and will require Internet cafes and clubs to report users who visit forbidden pages.

The Eastern European country’s law (Improvements to the Usage of the National Segment of the Internet, law number 317-3), goes into effect Friday — censorship making it illegal to conduct ecommerce with Belarusian citizens through sites outside the country’s .by domain name.

All companies and individuals registered as entrepreneurs in Belarus must use the national portal for conducting business, providing services and exchanging email, explains the Library of Congress in an online post. That means citizens are restricted from buying from Amazon or the Apple Store, and selling on eBay, among many other sites.

The law’s restrictions don’t stop without banning “extremist” and “pornographic” sites.

Citizens caught breaking the new law — as well as those providing Internet connection to people breaking the law — can be punished with fines of up to 1 million Belarus rubles (about $125) by the tax authorities, police and secret police.

Both the U.S. and the UK have condemned President Alexander Lukashenko’s repression of his political opponents, restricted travel to the country, and frozen assets channeled to the government, the BBC reports.

Do you think Belarus is helping its economy by keeping ecommerce on its own domain sites or is it hurting itself by restricting foreign business?

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, selensergen

Hybrids can save gas. They also can save lives.

Gas-electric vehicles tend to be more effective than their conventional counterparts when it comes to shielding occupants from injury, according to the Highway Loss Data Institute. On average, the your odds of being injured in a crash are 25 percent lower in a hybrid.

Why? Because hybrid vehicles weigh more. Although hybrids share the same dimensions as their gas-swilling sisters, the battery, motor and electronics provide greater mass. A Toyota Highlander Hybrid, for example, weighs 330 pounds more than the gasoline version. All things being equal, heavier cars fare better than lighter ones in a crash.

“Weight is a big factor,” Matt Moore, Institute v.p. and author of the report, said in a statement. “Hybrids on average are 10 percent heavier than their standard counterparts. This extra mass gives them an advantage in crashes that their conventional twins don’t have.”

There are other factors at play, including when, how and by whom hybrids are driven. The Institute included controls to minimize the impact of such variables. At the bottom line, the Institute says, the findings show consumers don’t have to trade safety for fuel efficiency.

The institute analyzed more than 25 hybrid models with conventional counterparts, all of them 2003 to 2011 models. The Toyota Prius and Honda Insight were not included because they are hybrid-specific models.

There is a downside, however. A separate analysis by the Institute found hybrids may be as much as 20 percent more likely to injure pedestrians. The problem is pedestrians don’t always hear the hybrids coming. It’s a common complaint, one the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is working to address.

Photo: General Motors

This week marks the seventh anniversary of the X-Prize winning flight of SpaceShipOne. Brian Binnie’s 24 minute flight to more than 367,000 feet captured the world’s imagination and put a spotlight on the opportunity of private space flight. In the years since there have been some delays, but training for flights has already started even though a specific flight schedule has not been announced.

For those planning on a sub-orbital flight in Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, one of the first steps is going through centrifuge and high altitude training to prepare for the g-forces that will be experienced during the flight as well as learning about the effects of very thin air on the body.

The practice sessions take place at the National AeroSpace Training and Research center near Philidelphia. According to a story in Aviation Week & Space Technology, the center has provided SpaceShipTwo simulations to would be passengers, and is just one of the signs that the private space continues to grow. The center can also replicate launching from an Atlas V rocket.

Beyond the space tourists Virgin Galactic has signed up for SpaceShipTwo flights, there is also excitement in the commercial space delivery arena. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been given the go ahead to combine the final two test flights of its Dragon spacecraft into a single mission. This will allow the SpaceX team to dock with the International Space Station on its next flight, after a rehearsal ‘mock docking’ where the spacecraft will approach the ISS but not actually dock. Both events will take place on the same flight.

Musk also announced recently that SpaceX is working towards making the Falcon rocket system used for launch a fully reusable system.

“I wasn’t sure it could be solved, for a while,” Musk said at the National Press Club in Washignton D.C., “but then I think just relatively recently — probably in the last 12 months or so — I’ve come to the conclusion that it can be solved and I think SpaceX is going to try to do it.”

Making the launch system full reusable would mean the main recurring cost of a launch would be around $200,000 for the propellant. Musk believes if a $50-60 million rocket could be reused a thousand times, the cost of a launch could be reduced to just $50,000.

The SpaceX launch was expected to happen next month, but with the recent loss of a Soyuz rocket and payload bound for the ISS, the Falcon rocket launch has been put on hold.

Virgin Galactic continues flight testing of SpaceShipTwo with the 16th glide flight taking place last week. Powered flights are expected to begin soon and Virgin has said it hopes to begin passenger flights as early as late next year.

Photo: Virgin Galactic

Welcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in which we keep you in the know on what’s happening in the digital world. We’re keeping our eyes on four particular stories of interest today.

Apple Outsells Lenovo in Greater China

Apple‘s sales in greater China surpassed those of Lenovo for the first time in the second quarter of 2011, thanks to a sixfold increase in sales from last year.

AT&T Nixes Limited Texting Plan

AT&T is getting rid of a texting plan that allowed subscribers 1000 messages for $10 per month, leaving them with only an unlimited, $20-per-month plan.

Skype Selling Wi-Fi by the Minute

Thanks to a new iOS app, Skype users can now use Skype credit to pay for Wi-Fi access on their iPhone or iPad devices at more than 1 million Wi-Fi hotspots around the world.

Facebook Begins Rolling Out New Left-Hand Navigation

Facebook has begun rolling out a restructured left-hand navigation that includes revamped bookmarks and notifications for Pages, Groups and Apps.

Further News

• Hackers have posted the names, home addresses, email addresses and passwords of BART police officers after BART shut down cellphone and Wi-Fi service during a protest.
• Google has released a photo-sharing app for the iPhone.
• IBM has drafted the basic design of a computer chip modeled on the human brain.
• YouTube and the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) have signed a deal permitting music publishers and songwriters to earn revenue on songs used in fan-made videos.
• DirecTV is partnering with Sony to bring its NFL Sunday Ticket subscription package to the PS3.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, DNY59

U.S. President Barack Obama’s #Compromise campaign, which blasted his Twitter followers with the handles of reps to write to, may have cost him some 36,000 followers. (Although he has 9.4 million followers left, and the White House now says the drop was worth getting a debt ceiling deal done.) But now it seems the White House Twitter account is picking up the slack.

@WhiteHouse has added 22,000 followers in the last six days, the administration says. That’s 3,100 followers per day, or a 37% increase on the amount of new followers @WhiteHouse got each day previously. More important for the account’s influence is all the engagement it’s getting: @ mentions of the White House account surged from 500 per day to more than 9,000, a 450% increase in the kind of metric that services like Klout care about.

The reason for all this retweeting? Office Hours, the daily question-and-answer session launched last Tuesday, starring officials from the National Economic Council answering questions on fiscal policy. While that might not sound like the biggest draw on Twitter, there are a handful of reasons that explain why followers are flocking. Firstly, the economics duo — Brian Deese and Jason Furman — are answering our questions on the debt ceiling, which has been on many minds of late. Secondly, as the name of the program suggests, they’re keeping regular, pre-announced daily hours that are amenable to U.S. users. Monday, for example, Deese will be fielding your queries from 5 p.m. ET.

And thirdly, the pair appear to have a sense of humor — as shown when they rickrolled a questioner complaining of boredom. A random Rick Astley video care of the White House may not help anyone’s understanding of economics and the debt crisis, but it certainly provided some much-needed levity.