Curated Stories August 11, 2010

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
Two Days After Steve Slater’s Slide Ride, Jet Blue Comes Back to the Web — Be honest — if you ran Jet Blue (JBLU), youd want to stay quiet, too. Right? — But the airlin…

The engineering team at local search and review site Yelp enjoy an occasional brewed beverage, and at a recent Hackathon, decided to put smoosh together their…

AdAge:
How Steve Slater Is Stifling JetBlue’s Social-Media Strategy — Even Good Practitioners Must Bow to Legal Department During Crisis — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — At a time when every brand wants…

The next version of the Apple TV is coming soon. There’s been a few rumors over the last month that the next version will be around $99 and feature some sort of cloud-based streaming. But that’s about it. W…

The Pew research center put out survey results today on broadband adoption and Internet use in America. There was one data point that I found startling. According to the survey, 21 percent of American adults…

Alexander Hotz is a freelance multimedia journalist and public radio junkie based in New York City. Currently he teaches digital media at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Follow Alex on Tw…

Corporate Blogging — Expert Series: Interview with Lou Hoffman. Part 1 Series Overview While many companies have corporate blogs, few do them well. My goal is to share conversations with those doing interesti…

Everyone loves a dramatic resignation story. That seems to be the lesson of the week, as Jet Blue flight attendant Steve Slater’s story of aggressively quitting his job made him into a folk hero and one girl…

Apple has released security updates for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad to address flaws in both PDF handling and I/O—these flaws had been exploited recently to create a Web-based jailbrea…

While it may be intended as a tool for adding photos to your iPad, the Camera Connection Kit can do more than Apple tells you about. Having had one for the last week or so, I’ve tested what capabilities the k…

I joke that Dan Zarrella has too much time on his hands. The “social media scientist” has been researching the social behaviors behind many social media tools long before HubSpot noticed and…

GroupTabs, a new New York City-based startup, is offering yet another twist on location-based social networking services. Like media darling Foursquare, the mobile application incorporates the idea of checking…

Matthew Latkiewicz works at Zendesk.com, customer support software. He writes for and edits Zengage, Zendesk’s blog about customer engagement. He also writes about wine for McSweeney’s and imagines stuff…

Are you launching a new viral campaign or link bait? Sharing your results by displaying your brand name recent web mentions will work like wonders. By doing that you can:

Demonstrate to your visitors how much…

With millions of Facebook fans and Twitter followers, Pepsi is one of the few big corporations who have a good handle on social media.
BigThink.com talked with Bonin Bough, Global Director of Digital and Social…

Back in the spring, M. Amedeo Tumolillo, a.k.a., Flying Flashlight, published lists of storytelling tips by three well-known storytellers, the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut, playwright David Mamet, and screenwrit…

Cliqset, a realtime online social identity platform is going mobile today, with the launch of iPhone, Android and Web apps.
The free apps include much of the same functionality as the web client, with the abil…

Postrank is one of my favorite web services online, I use it all day long, every day. The service performs real-time social media metrics to show you how much discussion any post in any feed has received in co…

Facebook’s long-awaited foray into location-based social networking could be imminent. A story on CNET says it will take the form of an application programming interface for third-party companies on the Face…

Social networks push human interaction to the utmost limits. In a comment I left at Julien Smith’s blog, I talked about how time and friendship are being distorted by the Internet. I want to elaborate on th…

Yesterday I posted some thoughts on the Google-Verizon framework, offering what turns out to be a pretty widespread sensibility, at least in the punditocracy, that this whole thing feels off, not like Google,…

Brian Cushing, a linebacker for the Houston Texans, said on ESPN that in the NFL “the game tape is your resume.”
There is no need to write your accomplishments down in a file. The game tape simply tells it…

Blackberry users in the U.S. barely click on mobile ads, while those who own a Symbian-powered phone click on more ads than anybody else. According to the latest data from mobile advertising optimization platfo…

I know the old adage really says, The best teachers are learners. I think the saying applies to we bloggers, too.
Ever find yourself stuck in the same routine?
Personally, I have a cleaning routine. I clean…

The developers of iPhone photography app Camera+ were hoping to offer one particularly enticing option: a hardware shutter via volume buttons. But Apple put th…

Matea Gold, reporting for the LA Times:

Carson Entertainment Group, which owns the archive of the
late-night host’s 30 years on “The Tonight Show,” is set to
announce Wednesday that it has digitiz…

When it comes to all things batteries, I’m a fanboy of Venkat Srinivasan, researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab‘s Batteries for Advanced Transportation Technologies (BATT) program, and rockin’…

Los Angeles, California – iStoryTime, a publisher of children’s storybooks for the iPhone and iPad, announced today the launch of a groundbreaking app for deaf children – a vivid audio-visual presentation…

Hold onto your hats. A new version of the Zeus trojan, called Zeus3, has wreaked havoc…

Okay…there, I said it.

Youll find no greater supporter of online content marketing than me, but marketers and agencies are talking up print for 2011. Yes, in the era or iPads and Apps, there is still a…

We published today The Future of Search Marketing; thank you to the many marketers and agencies who contributed to the research. There are a number of evolutions happening to search marketing now and in the co…

Opinions about online advertising shift like the stock market. When things are bullish, ad folks are brimming with confidence and new networks pop up like weeds. But then the bears roll in and online advertisin…

Nobody knew for a long time what Google and Verizon were cooking up on
the network neutrality front, and after the release of their brief,
two-page roadmap (posted On
Scribd as a PDF, among other places) nobody…

Earlier this month Apple opened doors to its newest and largest store in London’s Covent Garden. We thought it was time to give the 10-year-old retail phenomenon a new look. Apple’s retail store sales for t…

A series of photographs, allegedly from a woman quitting her post over her boss, have been exposed as an elaborate internet hoax.

PC World – A new Forrester Research report finds that while a number of open-source BI (business intelligence) offerings are providing many of the capabilities enterprises require, certain shortcomings remain.

Earlier this morning, while swapping my computer bags, I had one of those moments when the future flashes right in front of your eyes.

On the table were a cornucopia of devices. I had a Kindle, iPad (3G), Lumi…

Facebook has confirmed that the removal of the boxes tab is a sweeping change that will see the disappearance of all profile boxes on the left-hand side of Facebook Pages.

A Facebook spokeswoman told AllFacebo…

This morning, AdSafe released its quarterly report on the state of display advertising, comparing the various distribution channels for advertisers: ad networks, ad exchanges, and direct sales to publishers.
Th…

Many times we see successful product launches being talked about and are so dazzled by the huge sales numbers and income generated but fail to see all the hard groundwork that has been done behind the scenes f…

I noticed that Darren Rowse of Problogger and Paul Colligan, as well as Yaro Starak had checked out and endorsed Rapid Videoblogging (affiliate link), by Gideon Shalwick, and so I decided to check it out for m…

Have you been spending all of your Facebook Advertising dollars trying to reach people in your target demographic? Why don’t you strip out some of that effort and just go directly for your competitor’s fan…

You’ve heard this before:
Connect with people who have influence.
That’s one of the basics of online marketing. To grow your brand, sales, revenues, reach, etc., you need to reach and connect with people wh…

This is fascinating stuff from Microsoft, hinting at a new and more immersive way to access street level information on mapping platforms such as Bing or Google Street View
Here’s more information on the tec…

If only 16% of all brand tweets on Twitter are conversational, would you say that brands are totally screwing it up?

BizReport just published a news item titled, Only 16% of brand Tweets are conversational. If…

The police in my community are trying something new. Troy Police Chief John Tedesco has launched a directive created by Mayor Harry Tutunjian (aka @TroyMayor) to emphasize training in community policing. The…

A lot can be said about Google Chrome. And most of it should come as no surprise to you, the die-hard PC user that likely has more browsers installed within yo…

Time Warner Cable is jumping on the iPad bandwagon, joining a growing list of cable, IPTV and satellite TV providers that are building applications for the device that are designed to increase engagement and cu…

If you’re a consumer geo-location startup, then you have to contend with one simple reality — a little company from New York called Foursquare. Not a week goes by that doesn’t have someone grumbling abou…

UPDATED: See End of Post
A few weeks ago Matt Mullenweg of WordPress threatened to take Thesis Developer Chris Pearson to court over his not supporting the GPL Licence. Fortunately they were able to works thin…

Usually on Copyblogger we talk about how to grow your business, get more customers, increase your conversion rate, build thousands of daily readers, and all the rest of it.
But you also need…

Here are some numbers we hadn’t seen before to go along with the Facebook-Foursquare acquisition chatter from earlier this year, before Foursquare raised its big round.
CNET’s Caroline McCarthy reports that Fac…

Two events held recently focused on the future of journalism and the education of journalists:
The second World Journalism Education Congress (WJEC2) in South Africa and Journalism as News…

What be the effect on voting patterns if we used digital technology to announce the current vote tally every hour (or every hundred votes).People would see the direction an election was going and be more likely…

Link Research Tools, one of the must-have link research tools for any link builder and marketer (and also one I will be giving a detailed review next week – stay tuned!), has introduced a major update this wee…

Ever have occasion to do an in-depth review of the academic and practical literature on leadership? I have — twice in the past five years. The first time was for a 2006 book with Jeff Pfeffer, Hard Facts, D…

Earlier this summer, I had the privilege of speaking to a group of independent school (private school) administrators from around the country who were attending an institute at Vanderbilt University’s Peabo…

Once upon a time there was the great debate over JSON vs XML. The past few years have seen JSONs popularity rise despite XML (and other formats) being well-established. Our own statistics on ProgrammableWeb sh…

Talentag.com, which gets an ‘official’ launch today, is the new consumer-facing product from the team behind Emp.ly, the social recruiting startup.

It’s pitching itself as a “social CV”, and features the recom…

As I scan articles about the impact of social media on marketing, I commonly come some variant of the statement “the customer is now in control.” But the more I research and think about this statement, the…

By MARGALIT GUR-AIRE One of the most promising uses of Electronic Health Records (EHR) is Research. As EHRs become more and more widespread and the clinical data previously held in silos of paper charts becomes…

The computer is a moron.Peter F. Drucker, 1909-2005I don’t know what I would do without the computer. I use it to write these blogs. I use it to tweet. I use it to email friends and colleagues. I use it…

Suffolk, United Kingdom – Elia Network Ltd and Lithuania based iPresentee – developers of add-ons for Apple’s iWork and iLife applications, are proud to announce their collaborative project ‘KeynoteStag…

Photo credit hayzlett.comJeffrey Hayzlett is the former CMO at Kodak and author of “The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing?”. You might have seen him on Celebrity Apprentice with Donald Trump or…

I just read a fascinating (and lengthy!) report from McKinsey on tech-enabled business trends to watch and thought it was important enough to summarize for our community. Here are some highlights from this…

Yesterday Facebook told the rest of us about their upcoming plans regarding the update coming to Pages in the next couple of weeks, even though it may have been on their developer’s road map since last fall….

Generally speaking, B2B organizations are well ahead of the social media
curve. Figures show a higher rate of adoption then the B2C market (86%
compared to 82% for B2C), and there’s certainly a willingness…

nk497 writes “The smudges left behind on touchscreen devices could be used to decipher passwords to gain access, according to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. The report tested the idea out (PDF)…

Before releasing elmcity as
an open source project,
it had to be reviewed by a team of Microsoft lawyers. They found no
patentable invention in the code and gave me the green light. Which is
funny in a way, b…

What would happen if I told you I could get you hired some place where you’d love to work? Or if you learned that I could hook you up with the right business partner and you’d end up making tons of money? H…

Do you know your weaknesses as well as your strengths? Early in my career, I thought I had to be good at everything. It didn’t help that I had a boss who seemed to be great at everything. This challenged me t…

Social rain part 2
In the last post, we talked about how rain is formed, and why your sales and marketing efforts are like the formation of rain. As long as you’re bumping into other water droplets, you’ll…

For a document with no actual authority behind it, the Verizon/Google policy proposal on openness rules for the country’s wired and wireless networks has caused quite the media storm.
Today the authors themse…

Twitter is launching an official Tweet Button for sharing articles on websites and counting how many times a URL has been shared, according to documents Mashable has obtained. The Tweet Button could launch as…

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty firs…

For the daily deal obsessed on the go, a Groupon mobile app is simply not enough.
Enter The Dealmap, a daily deal aggregator that is launching its iPhone app this evening. Bringing the functionality of its web…

When Amazon first released the Kindle in 2007, it confused me. The popular notion was that it was a way to move more Amazon content. But at $399, who on Earth was going to buy it? Instead, it looked as if Amazo…

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.. If you would like to have your startup considered for…

Editor’s note: We offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write posts and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to o…

Yesterday we gave you 5 reasons why you should read your next book on an eReader device. Needless to say, many paper book fans protested in the comments. And with good reason. Paper books have many things going…

Hi everyone, just a short note today to tell you about a new feature on the Thoughtwrestling blog. I’m also going to ask you for a couple of little favors, so please keep reading.
We’ve c…

At this point, pretty much every tech industry insider knows that Facebook is going to jump into the geolocation game. First rumored to be launching at Facebook’s F8 conference back in April, the exact date…

Personally, I’ve never been afraid of competition. Oscar Wilde once simply stated, be you because others are already taken.

Seth Godin had a brilliant post (as he usually does) on competition: The number one r…

About a week ago I started seeing a curious number of tweets, links and Google Alerts to a popular blog post I wrote 4 years ago. The reason was that today happens to be the four year anniversary of that post w…

Whether you’re a copywriter, marketer or fully fledged SEO ninja, the
chances are that your optimisation will be primarily focused on the
larger search engines.
More people use Google and Bing, so they’l…

In social media, influence has taken center stage. With the spotlight perfectly fixed on the “me” in social media, a large shadow is now cast over the “we” that defines the social web. As individuals b…

It is now common practice for brands to include URLs or search calls to action within TV ads to encourage viewers to go online and find out more.
Renault’s current ‘Megane Experiment’ TV ad asks users to go o…

Three months ago I couldn’t imagine a life without my iPad’s big beautiful screen. Today, I am living that life, having ditched my iPad for the iPhone 4, almos…

With Facebook’s new Page layout being rolled out on August 26th, and with the custom profile tabs being resized, Facebook has rolled out a new preview tool for administrators. The “tool” has made it so t…

Sometimes it feels like I am the only one in the world who is not into Foursquare. Or at least the only one in Silicon Valley. Or at least the only one who works for TechCrunch. I’m definitely the only one on…

If you are going to launch a new location app, creating an anti-Foursquare is probably not a bad idea. About a week ago, a Qualcomm-incubated project called Neer quietly launched on the Android market, and ha…

This Best of Kottke post was easy, because I wanted to write something about Steve Jobs over the years anyways. The kickoff is Jason’s link to a 1995 interview with Jobs for Smithsonian Magazine. It’s mostly re…

Twitter has introduced a new feature called “Fast Follow” that makes it easy to follow anyone via SMS, even if you don’t have a Twitter account (if you’re located in the U.S. at least).To use it, all yo…

In one of my posts I referred to the major milestones within a story as tent poles, supporting the weight of the canvas of your story.
Sort of like a circus tent. The show is inside, but something has to ke…

Apple released Safari 5 in June, introducing official support for browser extensions. This move now means that developers have the ability to build add-ons to enhance the overall browsing experience on Safari….

You have a right to your medical record. It’s true –- the record of every test and procedure you’ve had done, any films or studies, your doctors notes — it’s all yours if you ask for it. But it’s no…

Webtrends has bought Transpond, an application publishing tool for Facebook and smart phones, in a private deal.

Webtrends confirmed the acquisition in a blog post today. The company has spent the last two mon…

Facebook’s location service “Places” is speeding towards an imminent launch, but will take the primary form of an Application Programming Interface (API) for other location specialist services to plug-into. Th…