Curated Stories Apr. 15, 2010

Friday is the last day of New York Entrepreneur Week which upon its completion will have featured over 100 speakers from across the globe sharing their thoughts, advice and experience with attendees, but intere…

Is there someone out there who, for whatever reason, has it in for you? If so, ignoring them has just gotten harder — a lot harder — thanks to a new and highly controversial social media site called Unvarni…

Last week, I wrote a post on How to Ask for a Reference Letter which gave three steps for asking for (and getting!) a great letter of recommendation. The second, and arguably most important step, is to provide…

We still don’t know what to think of Bit.ly, the popular URL shortener that was spun out of Betaworks and has raised $3.5 million in venture funding.
Some people think it’s preposterous that anyone could ever t…

Spredfast, recently a finalist in the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW, has raised $1.6 million in funding from Austin Ventures. This marks the first financing secured by the startup, which markets a soci…

Cathie Dodd of Tears of Joy Video has been running number of Twitter storytelling contests. I’ve been asked to participate on the judging panel for the contest, on the theme of “friendship,” that starts…

Big Media has been producing (mis)educational videos since it’s early non-hit, Dont Copy That Floppy. Most of us have seen those Piracy: Its a Crime clips that incorrectly equate downloading with stealing. The…

Scott Belsky studies exceptionally productive people and teams in the creative world. He is the Founder and CEO of Behance, oversees The 99% think tank, and is the author of Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming The…

Foursquare is adding a familiar face to its ranks.
Alex Rainert will be the company’s chief product officer.
Alex announced the hire on his blog, saying “The opportunity to work with this absolutely kick-ass te…

I have been reading some very interesting books about strategies around becoming a customer-driven organisation and also about the benefits of Customer Engagement Programs (more on that in later posts). In the…

If you’re a Gmail user, you may have noticed a surprising new feature in your e-mail account this morning: There’s now an “Insert: Invitation” link adjacent to the “Attach a file” link in each new…

Some of you may recall my post on the 13 Types of Friends on Facebook. So here’s a companion piece, though each type of Tweeter on Twitter will be limited to 140 characters, to keep in the spirit of the post…

As I noted Tuesday, you can follow Saturday’s Golden Fleece conference using the Twitter hashtag #gmugoldenfleece.

I’ve just learned that the hashtag for tomorrow’s Smithsonian portion of storytelling we…

As local business marketing as become a hot topic in the Internet marketing industry, business owners are finding themselves confused about the various types of services that can help them tap into this loca…

San Jose, California – RiseSmart, a leading provider of Web-enabled outplacement and job search services, today announced the launch of Transition Concierge To-Go, a mobile application that delivers personali…

I’ve experienced problems with both my iPhone 3G and my iPhone 3GS, where the remote on my Apple headphones has stopped working. I’d assumed it was an issue with the cable but turns out that this is not the cas…

After a busy couple of days, oneforty app store founder Laura Fitton is in the unique position as the unofficial spokesperson for a developer community turned upside down in the wake of the Tweetie acquisition…

One month after long-time Ning CEO Gina Bianchini was replaced by COO Jason Rosenthal, the company is making some major changes: It has just announced that it is killing off its free product, forcing existing f…

Yesterday I attended an interesting webinar called “Social Media Optimization is the new SEO” by Brian Solis and put on by Hubspot. …

MediaPost Publications, April 14, 2010 — This week, Ill be presenting at Search Insider Summit with an 18-minute, TED-style talk called Rise of the Marketing Technologist. My premise is simple: marketing…

ShareHow Do You Resell Your EmployeesThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing
People come to work at your place, you hire for fit, teach them the core value and functions of the job, generally get them fired up f…

Google’s big foray into primetime television advertising during this year’s Super Bowl was arguably quite the success. Its Parisian Love ad, which wasn’t even designed for Super Bowl, was one of the most well-r…

The site is over at http://www.getpivot.com/, and the video is short and very much worth watching.
As a developer, I can only wonder what MSDN would look like with Pivot like they showed for Wikipedia.
Enjoy!

Raleigh-based online book publisher Lulu has postponed plans for an initial public offering because it ran into weak demand among investors.

Have you read Switch by Chip and Dan Heath yet? If you haven’t, go over here and order it. (Amazon affiliate link) I’ll hang out.
Good? Okay.
One of the concepts they talk about that I utterly and completel…

It’s slow, sites don’t look like they’re supposed to in it, and all the clunky design flourishes only serve to make the actual browser window too small.
If this app was supposed to save mobile browser-maker Ope…

While I’ve been eyeballs-deep in a bunch of little edits to my manuscript, Amadeo Plaza has been thinking about “thinking small” (a key theme from the book actually) and some great think small ideas he gleaned…

Consumers may enjoy interacting with friends, acquaintances and strangers across social media channels, but that doesn’t mean they trust them as a source of advertising. However, a new host of companies are con…

If I asked you to create a compelling three-minute video with only written words, could you do it? Take a look at this interesting video treatment of words playfully telling a serious story.
Occasionally I f…

The one component that holds most businesses back from getting involved in new media (besides muttering under their breath the wrongly held belief that, This is the way it has always been done) is the concern a…

Ning, in a dramatic about-face, is shuttering its free social networking platform to concentrate solely on fee-paying networks and cutting 40 percent of its staff. Jason Rosenthal, who became CEO in mid-Marc…

If there’s one thing that always leads to success, it’s whining.
Dan Gilmartin, VP Marketing at Where, a geolocation startup that got started way before Foursquare and is profitable, complains to the Wall Stree…

Amazon spent $1.7 million on security for Jeff Bezos in 2009, up from $1.2 million in 2008, the WSJ reports. Gizmodo thinks Amazon needs to defend Jeff from rabid Nook fans.Join the conversation about this stor…

Did you know that Microsoft now employs a chief storyteller? “Every brand has a story,” Gregg Morris likes to say, “Lots of ‘em too.” Morris is a story coach and marketing consultant who helps compani…

I’ve made this point in several talks I’ve given recently so for those of you who attended or watched the talks on video aren’t new to this meme. But I thought I’d share it with the AVC community.
As software h…

“In a time of 140 character communication I’m sensing a shift back to longer form content”.
This was a statement I made in a presentation last week and it was one of the statements that I made that seemed…

Hashtags, people, conversations, topics, etc. Sometimes it can be a bit daunting to look for what you need on Twitter. However, having the right tools sure helps a lot. I’ve put together a list of 5…

The tragic story of Phoebe Prince’s suicide after relentless bullying and mobbing by teenagers at her high school in South Hadley, Massachusetts, is capturing international media attention. Nine students have n…

This series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. Learn more about Rackspace’s hosting solutions here.From the Internet’s earliest days, programmers would congregate in chat rooms and on…

Weather HD, a $0.99 weather application for the iPad, is currently the number three most popular application in the App Store.
It reach those heights even though there a bunch of great free weather apps availab…

Scott Walker points us to a fascinating paper by Carliss Y. Baldwin and Eric von Hippel, suggesting that some of the most basic theories on which the patent system is based are wrong, and because of that, the p…

Twitter has stolen the spotlight in the last week. It started off with the launch of a Twitter-built BlackBerry App and then escalated with the acquisition of Tweetie and the launch of Twitter’s ad platform…

Leaders aren’t necessarily special. They don’t wear a halo and they certainly don’t glow in the dark. Leaders are just the individuals who are further along the path that you’re traveling. Because le…

When I was 24, I quit an engineering job, declined offers to attend Harvard and Berkeley for grad school, and accepted a carpenter’s job in Nantucket. The house I worked on was being built for the CEO of a majo…

I wrote a post over at OPEN Forum called Make Love to Your Database. (First off, I’m so jazzed that the title was okay, editorially!)
Here’s the first little bit:

Lately, I’ve been thinking that we have…

We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly – or not at all – because of a stifling bureaucracy.
—Warren Bu…

Last week, Joe Pulizzi and his merry band of content strategists at Junta42 released new metrics, ranking the top content marketing blogs in the world. And guess what? The very blog that you’re reading came o…

Social media. ROI. They often seem like two pieces from two different puzzles. And for good reason: it can be hard to quantify the value delivered by a single ‘friend’ or human interaction.
But for major brands…

According to Mark Cuban, you should never listen to your customers. Does he really mean this?

No, what he is saying is that marketers must take matters into their own hands when it comes to …

We have seen a lot of playgrounds out there with JS Fiddle being the most recent. The latest is CSS Desk. It is an incredibly simple playground where you put in HTML and CSS, and see a live preview. That is it….

“Everybody’s on Twitter!” You hear that more and more often as Twitter gains adherents. Why, even the dead and the fictional (and the fictional dead) are on Twitter. Not to mention celebrities. (Let’s not.)

De…

Good review – A Marketers Guide to HTML 5 – http://bit.ly/b0xP6s (via @hubspot)

Another great POV on content strategy – http://bit.ly/bxW6y8 (via @boagworld)

Watching the live stream from the Twitter Developers Conference of the unveiling of a long-awaited Twitter revenue generating idea, I had several reactions to the, tah-dah, “Promoted Tweet,” a tweet that…

This infographic depicts the number of sales that must be made in order for a solo artist to make “minimum wage” in a month. The graphic is obviously meant to be a bit shocking, but even the slightest bit of d…

At the end of last week, we posted an open thread asking what application you’d build (or would like someone else to build) using linked data or open data. The thread was inspired by Georgi Kobilarov. In this p…

Jim Hein writes “a very well known Fine Art photographer is using the CwF+RtB model. He breaks things down into actual dollars and cents. He has figured out how many “True Fans” he needs to make a living.”

Ph…

Helen Wang submits:
Many people in the West believe that China is already a superpower, or will quickly replace the United States to become a superpower. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center reveals that 4…

Republicans would be busily planning their filibuster if President Barack Obama nominated to the highest court anyone who opposes the death penalty, supports abortion choice, condemns presidential overreach eve…

Ever wonder if emerging tools like Twitter and Facebook are just glorified ways to distribute coupons or links to white papers? If you want
better results from emerging digital tools it’s time to change yo…

I believe in encouraging people to do things for themselves. SEO is a vital part of evolving a website yet many businesses struggle to understand what SEO means and how they can get to grips with it.
SEO is no…

The Twitter developer community is doing backflips because Twitter bought an application called Tweetie. Here’s my advice to the community.

Last week Yelp announced, and ReadWriteWeb covered, a number of changes the company had announced to its way of doing business. It was responding to complaints, and a class-action lawsuit, that alleged it had s…

For the past few days, we attended SAS and SugarCRM user conferences in Seattle and San Francisco. These are just a few of the observations that comes from conversations with developers, business managers, prod…

A nice presentation by my buddy Paul Greenberg, giving a solid overview of the state of the market. Worth a look. Original is here.

Twitter’s @Anywhere platform was introduced at SXSW, but the microblogging service didn’t release the developer tools until today. Now anyone can integrate Twitter on their website.@Anywhere supports auto…

Social media is a tremendous environment for B2B companies to establish competitive advantage through compelling thought leadership.
In a social environment, thought leadership allows companie…

Cram was the first amongst many to submit the story that online publications won Pulitzer Prizes for the first time ever. Sherri Fink of ProPublica, a non-profit online journalism service, won the investigativ…

Later this week, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson will be giving a talk at the 99% conference entitled “10 Ways To Be Your Own Boss.” Prior to the talk, Wilson has provided a preview of his presentation…

A book about Agatha Christie’s working notebooks reveals that the writer known for her intricate plots worked in a highly nonlinear fashion. Sometimes she didn’t even know whodunnit until late in the writing pr…

Aaron Wise / The Official Google Blog:
Google Follow Finder: Find some sweet tweeps — This morning we announced a replay feature in real-time search that helps you search the public archive of updates f…

Facebook stock just hit $50 a share on SecondMarket, valuing the company at $23 billion. Thats a double since January. — TechCrunchJoin the conversation about this story »

Twiiter, at its first-ever developers conference — known as Chirp — which is being held in San Francisco had its co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams provided some hard numbers behind the growth and size…