In yet another example of a big company not realizing the value in free publicity, Hasbro has sued the creators of the Scrabulous Facebook application for violating intellectual property rights. The Scrabulous application was created by two brothers and quickly became listed among the top ten most popular applications on the social networking site.

The lawsuit emerged as a result of Hasbro’s recent partnership with game-making behemoth Electronic Arts to create an online version of the board game, which is now available on Facebook. In a statement, a Hasbro spokesman said, “Scrabulous infringes on Hasbro’s trademark. Like all intellectual property owners, we take this type of infringement seriously. We are reviewing a number of options with the parties involved and hope to find an amicable solution. If we cannot come to one quickly, we will be forced to close down the site and its associated distribution points.”

The popularity of the application has sparked an online protest movement. As of this morning, over fifty thousand people had joined Facebook groups with names like “Save Scrabulous!” and “Give Us Scrabulous or Give Us Death.” And message boards are exploding with comments about the affair:

“This stinks of greed and, frankly, really goes against the whole idea of ‘fun’ that a toy company should promote. I hope they wake up and realize that the result of this action is alienating customers rather than attracting them, which is what they were already doing.”

“Why don’t Hasbro just strike a deal with Scrabulous? The Scrabulous design and format is so much better than the Scrabble one. I understand fully that Hasbro want to protect their intellectual property but can they not see what a PR disaster it will be for them if they kill Scrabulous?”

“I have already been invited to the ‘official’ Facebook Scrabble and refuse to join. I own TWO travel Scrabbles and one collector’s edition AND the Scrabble dictionary. Scrabulous has encouraged thousands of people who wouldn’t normally play the game to become interested and purchase Hasbro’s products.”

Despite the clear derivation from Hasbro’s long-beloved board game, the basis for the whole “violation of intellectual property rights” argument, simply shutting down Scrabulous and suing its creators, Hasbro risks losing both current and potential customers for its ‘bullying’ tactics. Hasbro could very well have turned this into a good thing for all parties involved: Scrabulous earns tens of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue every month, and with a quiet settlement, Hasbro could have reached an agreement with the creators of the application to receive a percentage of the profits or to perhaps add its own branding to the application. Instead, they have set a precedent for future Facebook application creators who might not be so inclined to create the extremely popular applications of tomorrow.

In short, Hasbro had the opportunity to turn an awesome viral marketing opportunity into a PR nightmare, and I for one hope that sales to the 18-to-30 crowd – the big spenders – suffer because of it. In the meantime, head over to www.scrabulous.com to play the game while it’s still available.

10. Quake (id Software)

The dominance of the first-person shooter began in 1996 with the release of Quake, and with it came the wonders of online gaming. The single-player story consists of a government teleportation experiment gone horribly awry, in which hordes of deadly foes break through a portal and destroy everybody but you. The game’s graphics and music – the latter composed by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails – were unmatched by any other at the time, even id Software’s own Doom series, and paved the way for a lucrative set of games that included Quake II, Quake III Arena, Quake 4, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

9. Duke Nukem 3D (3D Realms)

I was first attracted to the Duke Nukem games simply because the lead character was just so f-ing cool. Yet another first-person shooter on this list, the game was released the same year as Quake but was entirely different in its look and feel; where Quake was dark, bloody, and rough, Duke Nukem was colorful, bloody, and, to a certain extent, amusing as hell. A game that allows you to have a weapon that shrinks enemies to the size of Barbie dolls is absolutely good for hours of fun.

8. Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (LucasArts)

While never a Star Wars geek, I was drawn to Jedi Knight for a number of reasons: a) the positive sneak peeks that kept showing up in the gaming magazines I read, b) the respect and trust I had for LucasArts, and c) the online gaming capabilities. With the help of my Diamond Monster 3D graphics card, the game took up a good number of hours of my teenage years, less so for its single-player storyline than for the multiplayer fun that included capture-the-flag, team games, and deathmatches. Of course, cheating was prevalent in these multiplayer games – unlike others, Jedi Knight had no fix for that – and the old-school servers could barely handle the load, but if you could get beyond the lag and you had a blazing-fast 56k modem, you were good to go.

7. Grim Fandango (LucasArts)

Continuing on my path of “LucasArts, rah, rah, rah!” (as five of the ten games listed here were created by that company), when I first saw the screenshots for Grim Fandango I was absolutely floored. Released in 1998, the game had probably the most beautiful cartoon graphics I had ever seen. Based on the Mexican concept of Día de los Muertos, the tone of the entire game is inherently dark with a humorous twist. I honestly spent hours upon hours working my way through the game, and its intricate puzzles and captivating storyline had me hooked all the way through.

6. Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge (LucasArts)

Though I was only eight when Monkey Island 2 was released, I managed to rediscover it in my early ‘teens. You play Guybrush Threepwood, a swashbuckling young stud who’s on a search for both a treasure (the Big Whoop) and the girl of your dreams, only to be interrupted by the resurrection of your old foe, the infamous pirate LeChuck. Hysterically funny, verging on rude, Monkey Island 2 hosts a wealth of pop-culture quotes, tough puzzles, and lovable characters that led me to play the game time and again, long after I’d beaten it for the first time.

5. Half-Life (Sierra Entertainment, Valve Software)

In 1998, probably the best first-person shooter was released, and the gaming world was never going to be the same. Half-Life was the most talked-about game in a decade, and while it lacked the traditional level structure of past games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D (you simply keep playing in kind of a continuous way, moving from one place to the next at your own pace), the entertainment value never faltered. Gorgeous to look at, mind-blowing to listen to, and difficult but manageable to play, Half-Life is likely to be seen as the grandfather of many of the great shooters of today.

4. Wolfenstein 3D (id Software)

In addition to being the first popular first-person shooter, Wolfenstein 3D was also one of the first examples of viral marketing gone totally right. Released as shareware, the game’s popularity flourished with the ease of copying the game; additionally, in 1994 Wolfenstein was banned in Germany for its use of the Nazi Swastika and anthem. The publicity didn’t stop there: when Wolfenstein was released for Super NES, the cartoon blood was replaced with sweat, and the guard dogs in the game were removed due to animal-rights activists protesting about, well, shooting cartoon animals. *pause* Anyway. With Wolfenstein constantly making headlines, the game maintained its popularity throughout the 1990s and has spawned a few sequels, with the next in the series under development now for PC, XBox 360, and Playstation 3.

3. Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle (LucasArts)

I have to give a shout-out to DoTT, especially since I rediscovered the wonders of this point-and-click adventure game recently when I bought the original on eBay. The sequel to 1987’s creepy Maniac Mansion, DoTT involves a trio of friends attempting to save the world from domination by the oversized, angry Purple Tentacle with the use of a time machine. In typical LucasArts adventure game fashion, the game is chock-full of humorous, illogical puzzles involving, at times, key characters from colonial America – George Washington, Betsy Ross, Ben Franklin, et cetera. Though the game itself is rather short, the creativity you need to use to get through each part of the game is extraordinary, and DoTT remains to this day my favorite adventure game ever.

2. Sid Meier’s Civilization (MicroProse)

My dad brought this home for me one day when I was twelve, and I have yet to find another game so engrossing that I can easily lose four hours at one time playing it. A single-player, turn-based strategy, Civilization offers you the opportunity to build an empire while competing with two to six other civilizations for wealth, knowledge, military prowess, and technology. The game developed into further releases, including CivNet, the online version, as well as Civilizations II, III, IV, and, most recently, Revolution, which I finally purchased after futile attempts to get it at my local Best Buy – it kept selling out.

1. Outlaws (LucasArts)

If any game influenced my career path, it was the first person shoot-’em-up Outlaws. Forever a fan of Westerns, the release of Outlaws took up all of my (rare) free time because of its addictive single-player storyline, the thrill of online play and the close-knit nature of its online community, and, of course, the creation of Outlaws Unleashed, a site I created to be the de facto resource for Outlaws players and which was featured in the unfortunately now-defunct PC Games Magazine.

Inbound links – that is, web sites that link to your site – are key to increasing your search engine position.

The best method of building links and rapport is, of course, providing interesting, informative, and useful content to your visitors. Doing this, along with updating regularly with relevant content, is key to building a solid list of people who will link to you, thus pushing you up in search positions.

Another method is to partner with related companies, as your logo and/or company information will undoubtedly be listed on their web sites, linking to yours (you do the same for them, of course). With luck, these partners will have a high Google page rank, preferably above 7, that will further benefit you. Before we continue, it is important to understand page ranking as Google sees it:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important.’”

It’s also good to make sure that those who link to you use adequate copy as the text of the link. If you have an SEO company and the link to your site reads “internet marketing,” that is a clear picture of what your site is about, and thus you up your chances of getting a higher spot in searches. However, if you have the same SEO company and someone is linking to you with “free prescription meds,” you will likely be penalized. Having a descriptive link text is even preferable to having your company name as the link.

As far as bad link building goes, first and foremost you must be wary of directories. There are hundreds of them out there currently, and while getting your link posted on so many web sites does increase awareness of your company, if the directories do not pertain to your industry or product, search engines can look at that unfavorably.

The same applies to wandering around other sites and posting comments that say, “Hey, link to www.mycompany.com.” First of all, no one with any sense will link to you, and if they do, again it all has to do with relevance and Google page rank. If the sites linking to you are in no way related to your business, or if they are ranked low on the Google scale, these links to you won’t do you any favors. Search engines aren’t dumb, and they make most of the rules.

Stefanie Ulrike Dürr, member of the Search Quality Team at Google, sums it up nicely: “Always focus on the users and not on search engines when developing your optimization strategy. Ask yourself what creates value for your users. Investing in the quality of your content and thereby earning natural backlinks benefits both the users and drives more qualified traffic to your site.”

While much of what I do entails just the use of a computer, from start to finish, there does come a time when some of our data sheets, case studies, business cards, and white papers require printing. Kinko’s is all well and good for less “in your face” projects, but sometimes you really have to leave it to the professionals.

Allow me to introduce PrintingForLess.com. The name, similar to those link-harvesting sites such as CheapAirfare.com and FreeStuff.com, is misleading; I have used them for nearly two years now, and have no plans to use anyone else because the quality of their work really is that good. On top of that, they are extremely focused on the customer’s happiness, seemingly a rare thing in this day and age, and they are quite affordable.

So, if you’re looking to do some large-scale print jobs (250 or more pieces), definitely take a look at their site. You won’t be disappointed.