Curated Stories Apr. 30, 2010

Privacy issues have been the bane of behavioral targeters’ existence for awhile now. But how much impact have privacy advocates had on the industry? According to a new study from the Ponemon Institute, marketer…

As an early adopter brand, Starbucks has reaped the rewards of social media innovation. Today the company is furthering those efforts with a Facebook application for customers to access and manage their Starbu…

I love stories of kneejerk (emphasis on the second syllable) lawyers mucking with a company’s image and relationships with their stupid cease-and-desist letters. Here’s a good one.
My sonorously named frie…

If you haven’t looked into Groupon yet, perhaps you should. In a recent post for OPEN Forum, John Jantsch argues that the online group-buying coupon service could save your business.
For the uninitiated, here’…

The Federal Trade Commission has informed women’s retailer Ann Taylor that it will not take action against the company for incidents related to blogger coverage of an event hosted by its LOFT brand in Januar…

Do you remember Google Wave? After a lot of hype around the initial launch of Wave – which some pundits billed as an “email killer” at the time – things have been rather quiet around the service. The latest upd…

We’ve been busy here on the Jackson Fish Market back lot shooting some new videos to help people understand and get excited about A Story Before Bed. The first is a 60 second commercial for the site.

The sec…

Apple’s iPad will go on sale overseas in late May.
How much will it cost to use an iPad 3G overseas via ATTs international roaming?
According to our iPad 3G, there are four international roaming plans available…

In case you haven’t noticed, there are now 2 Twitters.
The first Twitter operates just as its founders intended. Its a great broadcast medium for quickly distributing quick hits of information and/or links. I…

Ryan Lawler / NewTeeVee:
Apple May Be Gunning for Open Source Codecs — The latest indication that Apple is trying to strong-arm publishers to adopt HTML5 and H.264 came today, as Steve Jobs reportedly c…

* Its been a longstanding thesis of mine that Googles ability to reorder information in microseconds, based on our declared intent through a search query, has habituated us to expect an immediate and relevant r…

Charlie Stross / Charlie’s Diary:
The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash — There has been some … interesting news from the tech sector this week. — Firstly, the Apple vs. Adobe vendetta gets…

New data confirms that Twitter’s population is disproportionately black.
According to Edison Research’s annual report on Twitter, black people represent 25% of Twitter users, roughly twice their share of the po…

On the heels of adding over 25 books last week, we’re thrilled to add five more high quality children’s picture books to our growing catalog here on A Story Before Bed. Chronicle Books is well known for cr…

See a photo of Lisa, her bio, Part 1 of this QA, Part 2, and Part 3, and Part 4.

Lisa is repeating the teleseminar, “Success Story Secrets,” that she presented earlier this week, offering a chance for…

Kristoffer Sandven, a professional Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), wrote a piece recommending software for your small business. Three 37signals tools make the list:

Basecamp:

After using it for a while I can…

Facebook has the chance to turn a problem — negative publicity about its latest privacy shifts and confusion about how to control them — into a business opportunity: It could become the protector of your id…

I recently heard a top cable exec argue that the current cable TV business model is sound, robust, and primed for the future. His bullish rationale was that the dual revenue stream works great for everyone. C…

Josh Williams, the grinning, long-haired CEO of the rapidly growing geo-social application Gowalla, is the kind of guy who wears flower shirts and cowboy boots under a sports jacket when he goes to New York fo…

B2B marcom managers solve the content conundrum with a social media workflow.

Content , links and trust are the currencies of the internet. Relevant, useful content provided on a re…

One of the problems with working remotely is that you’ll be out of the loop when it comes to office politics. At times, that may seem like a good thing — you can actually get work done rather than participa…

Just in time for WordPress’s flagship Wordcamp event, Salesforce is providing users of the popular blogging platform with a time-saving plugin: WordPress-to-lead for Salesforce CRM.WordPress-to-Lead provides…

How’s this for a koinkydink: Just when we’ve been talking a lot about topic pages for local blogs, Google announces a set of WordPress plugins for what it calls “Living Story pages.”
That’s the same t…

One of the most interesting speakers that took the stage at The Next Web conference held in Amsterdam this week was Robert Cailliau, a Belgian computer scientist who, together with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, develope…

This post is Part Two of my State of the Internet Operating System. If you haven’t read Part One, you should do so before reading this piece.

As I wrote last month, it is becoming increasingly clear that the i…

I don’t usually write about client work, but I’m pretty psyched about this video we produced for Rogers so I’m making an exception.
The video features some of the coolest stats and facts…

It looks like the folks in DC are looking for all sorts of ways to further regulate companies in Silicon Valley. Senator Chuck Schumer is pushing for the FTC to regulate how Facebook handles privacy issues, wh…

Google Chrome, the web browser by Google, has been gaining market share steadily since the day it was introduced. And rightly so. It’s by far the best browser I’ve used (and I have used a number of them). I thi…

We’re currently in the midst of a CSS Zen Garden type excerise on our family of QA websites, which I affectionately refer to as “the Trilogy”:

(In…

One of the biggest challenges of corporate web working is being able to demonstrate that you are at least as productive — if not more so – while working at home or in a remote office as you would be sitti…

From Entrepreneur:
Timing is at the core of Twitter. How current is this? How new is this? What’s going on right now?
A tweet’s 140 characters take no time to read and little time to write. And tweets stay vis…

Whether you want to get smart or sound cool, here’s what ten commonly used social media buzzwords mean in layman’s terms. What other jargon is your digital agency (or, more likely, your 14 year-old…

Internet Retailer has an interesting article that offers a case study of sorts about how online retailer evogear.com convinced customers to write more reviews. While the article talks about product reviews, I t…

The tech world is still reeling from the impact of Facebook’s radical changes, announced last week a the F8 developer’s conference, and their implications for privacy, the open Web and the future of social netw…

The U.S. is leading the most significant macroeconomic revolution since the Transportation Revolution…

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.Twitter has finally answered a big…

Are you paying attention to the quotes you’re using in your press releases or just inserting them “as is” into your PR materials? Quotes are important so here are a few, quick things to keep in mind when…

You read that right — it’s the place where you watch what other people say they do. Some of them are paid and are keen on paying to to do it, namely brands. Sometimes you’re inclined to talk back — and no…

Trust is everything in business, particularly in the construction business. Working in construction, I learned that one crooked contractor can put your entire company in the red so deeply that it could take yea…

Since its incorporation just over five years ago, Facebook has undergone a remarkable transformation. When it started, it was a private space for communication with a group of your choice. Soon, it transform…

A school principal in New Jersey recently sent a letter to parents asking them to completely remove their children from any social networking sites and to keep close tabs on their text messaging habits. Anth…

Microsoft’s plans to enter tablet computing just took two steps backwards, and now it has no obvious challenger in the race with Apple’s iPad.
The latest: Microsoft shut down its experimental Courier tablet pro…

Based on data collected and analyzed using Google Ad Planner, I recently discovered that in Social Media, women rule. Across almost every major social network, the balance was revealing and in some cases, prof…

In the future, the difference between social networks and corporate websites will be hard to distinguish.

[With social recommendations, consumers can auto-populate a ‘shopping cart’ to their friends –even bef…

This post of March 31, 2010 is being reprinted with permission from a Twitter colleague and amazing business consultant, David Bookout, @effetti who blogs at Effetti Business Growth on Blogspot…

In the last month I have become even more convinced that the Splinternet is real. This is not just one of the most important trends to hit the Web in the last five years, its a war. Facebook and Apple want to…

Are you an expert or a connoisseur?
Being an expert in something is one thing, but being a passionate connoisseur of a subject is a completely different level. The expert gets to a level of proficiency and tend…

I’ve seen a lot of angst over the past week about Facebook’s moves to open up your data to other applications.
To really understand how huge these changes are I had to get away from Silicon Valley and come…

I recently bumped into David (he of Talking Heads fame) at a conference. Our paths have crossed before, we share a few friends, I’m a big fan and he uses permission marketing to sell his records now. I said “hi…

A few weeks ago I asked readers to submit video blog tips to share with the wider ProBlogger readership. The idea was that we’d get a variety of useful blog tips on how to blog – but that we’d also get a…

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to asse…

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful” ~William Morris, poet and designer
Imagine the household you would have if you got rid of every item that was nei…

Sitting beside Janice on a flight is a fascinating experience. She’s naturally social and refuses to let you not be. Mind you, she isn’t annoying or overbearing, but pleasant, friendly and i…

For the past few weeks I’ve been struggling. I’m addicted to all these location-based iPhone apps, but of the big ones, really only Loopt has had a native iPad app ready to go from the beginning. Today tha…

The battle over Flash and its role (or lack thereof) on the iPhone came to a head today when Apple CEO Steve Jobs published an open letter explaining why his company won’t support Flash on the iPhone, iPod t…

Hewlett-Packard has killed off its much ballyhooed Windows 7 tablet computer, says a source who’s been briefed on the matter.
The device was first unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at CES 2010 in Janua…

Okay, I’ll wait until you all stop laughing.
Finished yet?
Good. Now that you have picked yourself up off the floor let’s take a look at some stuff that’e been announced in the last little while that cou…

Have you noticed the many tools to share your location? There’s FourSquare and Gowalla, both about a year old. Then there are old-timers like Brightkite. And now, there’s one that works with all three (and…

There are few people who know the ins and outs of the web as well as Joe Hewitt. For the past decade, he’s had his hands deep in everything from Netscape, to AOL, to Firefox, to Facebook (where he currently w…

I’m in a lot of conversations these days regarding “being authentic”, and how important it is as a brand. I completely agree. Offhand I can’t think of anything more important actually. Of cou…

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz bristles at outsiders opining on what Yahoo should be doing and not doing. An example – just a couple of days ago, when asked about our post saying that Yahoo shouldn’t buy Foursquare,…

This is one for the “I Find This Rumor Extremely Hard to Believe” file: Michael Arrington of TechCrunch is reporting that a source has told him that HP has decided to cancel its “slate PC.” You know–t…

Cam Hui submits:
I got an unusual amount of hate mail after my post Would you bet on pro wrestling? In that post, I wrote that the Goldman Sachs (GS) affair had demonstrated that Wall Street had lost its way…

We were among those amazed back in February, when an Italian court ruled that three Google execs were criminally liable for a video posted on Google Video, and were sentenced to six months suspended sentences….

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has reportedly suggested the company is not de-emphasizing its focus on Mac development. The executive allegedly provided a response to questions from Greg Walker, a technical integration s…

PC World – The iPhone-Gate saga just gets more intriguing: According to reports from Wired and CNet, two of the major players involved in the sale of the iPhone prototype to tech blog Gizmodo have now been iden…

Following Apple boss Steve Jobs’ rejection of Flash for mobile devices yesterday, Microsoft has itself described HTML5 as the future of the Web.Adobe may have shipped CS5 this morning, but it is the debate ov…

Will social media offer the right pull for readers? This year, new media captured the attention of the Pulitzer Prize board, which awarded the non-profit …

It is no secret that the social media measurement and monitoring industry is hot – very, very hot. Collectively as a socially-wired society, we have created …

But social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are encroaching on the search engines’ dominance as an entryway to the internet and brands. …

But among those most experienced in using social media, habits were different. Fully 96% of marketers with years of social media experience were using …

For those who admire Apple, it’s always interesting to watch the loyalty Apple commands from its most loyal customers and how that loyalty manifests itself. It has been said that Apple CEO Steve Jobs accomplish…

You don’t have to be an SEO geek to have noticed that over the last six months or so, whenever you search for a phrase with a location in it, Google shows maps with local listings.

What you might not have…

Practicalities, tips and techniques
Video Over the past few weeks we’ve been asking you about working practices and how they are evolving based on an increasingly distributed workforce. Well, enough writing -…

One of the biggest mistakes made by someone that wants to go into business is not taking the time to do the market research and analysis.
Here’s the most common scenario: 1) a business idea, usually someth…

Put away your preconceived notions of what Facebook is all about.

For a long while, the consensus was that Facebook was the place where high school and university students go online to hangout, hook up, post d…

Indeed, Daniel Chubb, chief executive at Dansway Communications and Online Social Media, has commented: “Users right now use Facebook and Twitter more times …

Mobile donations have been a hot topic ever since they were used by The Red Cross and others to collect large sums of money to help with earthquake relief efforts in Haiti. But disaster relief is not the only s…

Earlier this week I had the chance to present at one of the largest annual meetings of customer care professionals in the world, the SOCAP International Symposium. SOCAP stands for the Society of Customer Ca…

Facebook this week announced that 50,000+ sites have implemented its “social plugins” in the week since launch.With “like” buttons permeating the web, and Facebook’s intent to connect everything onli…

Courtesy of the general-interest publication Huffington Post–whose online readership will soon blast past that of the New York Times–here’s what you’re actually interested in:
Join the conversation about this…

Chuck Dietrich is the CEO of SlideRocket, provider of the leading online presentation platform.Every day, thousands of people are forced to sit through dull, flat PowerPoint presentations. Whether you’re pre…

A bunch of folks have been submitting this story of a New Jersey middle school principal sending an email to all parents telling them to ban Facebook for their kids and to spy on all of their text messaging hab…

In case anyone was wondering just how inaccurate Nielsens automated sentiment analysis is, just read this!

So it would seem that everything nowadays has the ability to connect to Twitter and auto-update for you.
This is one of the signs of the impending apocalypse.
I actually own a scale that tweets my weight whenev…

You’ll recall, in my iPhone’s last adventure, it was recovered after being stolen. I was able to track it by using Apple’s MobileMe service. As stolen iPhones have become all the rage during the past t…

We knew that police had identified and questioned the person who found and sold the iPhone prototype, and now his identity has been publicly revealed.According to an investigation by Wired, the person who sold…

Google today announced the release of a Living Stories plugin for WordPress.

Living Stories was Google’s “experimental format for displaying news coverage” a two-month-long experiment with the New York Times…

That Will Cause Your Brand Building and Business Growth to Suffer
Could you be suffering from Social “Me”dia Syndrome and not even know it? Unfortunately, this common ailment is causing mil…

Things that make it seem like you dont really care about the issue of water management scarcity at your conference about the future: 1. provide the participants on the water scarcity panel with Fiji bottled wa…