Curated Stories August 30, 2010

I love finding story texts about storytelling and just today I found a delightful little piece while serching through the Decameron:
Whereupon the gentleman, who perhaps was no better master of his weapon than…

Ever since Einstein, physicists have been telling us that time – this steady tick-tock of the universe – is much weirder than we think. It doesn’t flow in a single, linear direction, or beat like a stead…

By DAVID DRANOVE Over the next few years, the U.S. healthcare system will be in the hands of academics from Cambridge, Massachusetts. New CMS Czar Donald Berwick was a member of the Harvard Medical School facul…

Jaime points us to the news that famed comic writer Mark Waid gave a keynote talk at the comics’ Harvey Awards event over the weekend, where he apparently gave a stirring defense of unauthorized downloading, co…

Twitter has just announced that it’s opening the Site Streams feature of its API up to developers. This is big news, as it allows mobile push services and web apps like Brizzly and Seesmic Web to immediately…

Jeremy Redleaf, one of the new physicists of the narrative form and the creator of this brilliant siteinitated the scene when he sent me this email
about this JetBlue ad
which is anchored by copy that saysIn my…

This series is supported by Gist. Gist provides a full view of the contacts in your professional network by creating a rich business profile for each one that includes the most news, status updates, and work d…

The local news sites being developed by Yahoo, AOL, Huffington Post and a growing number of other online players will dash the hopes of most newspaper publishers of charging for access to their online content…

by Merrill Goozner“Why golf,” my friends often ask. They, like too many Americans, assume it is a sport for the country club set, and have a hard time fathoming why someone like me — liberal, somewhat…

(Editor’s note: Scott Edward Walker is the founder and CEO of Walker Corporate Law Group, PLLC, a law firm specializing in the representation of entrepreneurs. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.) A read…

The iPad meets many of the needs doctors say that have for a lightweight mobile computer and many are very interested in the device. An infographic below, from Mobile Health News, articulates various things do…

So after reading lots of our Facebook Pages articles you’ve become dead set on skyrocketing your fan base. After investing in advertising and growing a user base, you suddenly realize that you’ve extracted…

A couple of weeks back, Facebook rolled out their new Places feature; we promptly disabled it, mostly due to a feature that allowed others to post your locatio…

One of the bigger announcements to come out of Facebook’s controversial keynote at its developer conference last spring was the introduction of “Like buttons” that can be placed anywhere on the web, allowing pe…

A couple weeks ago, we noted the start of the “OAuthpocalypse” — that is, Twitter’s move to make all developers use OAuth rather than basic authentication for their third-party apps. Twitter expected so…

Dear Lifehacker, I’ll be leaving my job soon and will have to turn in my work laptop. How can I get my laptop sparkling clean so I can preserve my privacy and…

5 Ways to Make a Database For Your CustomersThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Standard marketing CRM type practice suggests that you should create and supplement a database of customers and prospects with…

In my last post, I talked about training your text to “engage”, “inform”, “speak” (call to action), and “convert”. The first step is to make sure the content doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. I…

Colin Gibbs, in a piece headlined “Why Apple Should End Its Fight Against iPhone Jailbreaking:

The Register reported last week that Apple is looking to fire back
at iPhone jailbreakers with an applicati…

Nearby Friends is a new Facebook application which taps into the recently launched Facebook Places check-in service to locate all your Facebook friends plotted on a Google Maps interface. The app, a simple tool…

Trefis submits:
Starbucks’s (NASDAQ:SBUX) stock is quite sensitive to the Number of Daily Customers per Starbucks Store, which is impacted by the competition that Starbucks faces from players like McDonald�…

I don’t think that Wired and Scientific American coordinated their issue planning this month–they’re competitors, at least sort of–but the two covers sure make for a cool matched set.
From the magazine…

“This old white motherfucker and his wife rolls up. He’s like, ‘Young man, do you know where the Poe house is?’” The Wire and A.N. Devers on Edgar Allan Poe’s Baltimore house.

Google has inked a deal with the Associated Press to keep the news organization’s content on Google News, an issue that was very much in doubt for a time earlier this year when the news aggregator stopped pos…

Digg users angry about the site’s new redesign have filled the top news page with entries from rival Reddit.Join the conversation about this story »

RubyDoc.info is a new, automatically updated Ruby documentation site by Loren Segal and Nick Plante that builds upon their earlier success with rdoc.info (which we posted about in 2009). It’s powered by YARD,…

Technology workers are often called on to donate our services, which most of us are happy to do. And we have skills that allow us to respond quickly to natural disasters or other crises.
For example, five years…

Almost two weeks ago we launched the brand new ProBlogger eBook – the Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers.
Written by SEO specialist copywriter Glenn Murray it’s an eBook designed to help bloggers get their…

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.For all the praise that brand adver…

I recently recapped the “business novels” I’ve covered here on A Storied Career and then received an e-mail from Omar Adams with a link to 50 All-Time Best Business Novels.

I thus realized that perhaps…

I’ve been thinking lately about how founders should decide when it is time to sell their startups and how to put aside the different incentives that often drive these decisions.
Large VC funds have a stron…

The new startup Diaspora, which is being called the “Facebook replacement” by many in the press, is going to fail at displacing Facebook. While the company appeared to be a proper solution back in May when…

Wed like to come to where you work and talk to you about Empowered. All of you. All on the same day, Friday September 10, at 12:00 eastern time. Feel free to bring your lunch.
We want you to embrace the innova…

The demand for personal branding is increasing faster than I can type this post. Many of the reasons why you should build your personal brand have been discussed on this blog, including global…

What to Keep and What It Means Now

At the Social Media Masters Summit, I spoke about three crucial business growth strategies.

Make an irresistible offer. Remove things that customers don’t want. Enh…

Recently, Eric Friedman published an EarlyStager approval matrix I found quite interesting. Taking inspiration from that I decided to create a modern marketing and PR professional fluency matrix. See below…

We’re all being inundated with information. Tools that help us filter that mass of data can be useful, and those that filter well can become indispensable. Workstreamer, an app currently in public beta, is a…

Bloggers have been asking the question “Do long or short headlines work better?” for a long time.
But the answer to the riddle of how to create a headline that pulls in readers doesn’t…

Between online video, DVRs, and on-demand cable the amount of time people spend watching live TV (you know, with all of those commercials that advertisers spend $70 billion a year on) is shrinking fast. Only…

Like the New York-centric consumer magazine industry, commercial book publishers and, frankly, most everyone, thinks of books found in bookstores and libraries when they consider what book publishing is. Perh…

Are you using Facebook Places? Are your friends?Join the conversation about this story »

Just a few weeks ago, location-based social network Foursquare announced that it had 2.6 million users, putting it on pace to hit an even 3 million a week or so into September.
Instead, the service saw its 3 mi…

I am posting this as a MBA Mondays post. But I did not learn this little lesson at business school. I learned it from a very experienced venture capitalist early in my post-MBA career.
I was working on a CEO se…

First, three posts by JP Rangaswami:

Does the Web make experts dumb?
Does the Web make esperts dumb, Part 2: who is the teacher?
Does the Web make experts dumb, Part 3: the issues

His bottom line in the last…

Copywriting is a tougher job than most people realize, especially when you’re writing for what pros call the “complex sale.”
One type of complex sale is when you have to convince one person they need the…

From WIRED Magazine’s controversial article, “The Web is Dead, Long Live the Internet” came this set of factoids:
The story of industrial revolutions, after all, is a story of battles over control. A tech…

It’s said that opposites attract. However, in social media, it’s quite the opposite. The idea of privacy and publicity are in fact at odds with one another. And at the heart of the matter, one social netwo…

OpenCamp’s Sunday schedule included presentations on blogging that included Chris Pirillo, Brian Clark and myself. I caught up with Brian before he gave his presentation to give us a little preview. John P. e…

From ProPublica

As Twitter evolves and grows, the etiquette and rules change, morph and evolve along with it.

Recently, a very influential person on Twitter sent me a direct message saying that they were insulted because I ha…

CMOs must approach social technologies in an integration fashion
Although social technologies have been capturing marketers time for over four+ years in corporate, they’ve often been operated in a silo as exp…

Running HARO for the past three years, I’ve seen, hands down, the best ways to get your story placed, front page, EVERY TIME.
Assuming you want ALL THAT COVERAGE, as your boss has told you that you do, these…

In my last post, I mentioned that you should strive to hire people with the right kind of ambition. Surprisingly to me, I received a large number of responses from readers questioning whether or not this was g…

“Publishers are all cohorts of the devil.
There must be a special hell for them somewhere.”
- Goethe
If I were a commissioning editor in a major publishing house, I’d be feeling a little unloved right no…

“Unlimited choice” can “produce genuine suffering,” argues Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice. His research basically sums up what your mother has been telling you for years: You don’t even know…

Three-Act Structure vs. Four-Part Structure
In response to a recent post about writing in different genres – my point being that emphasis, rather than license, is the only real separation between them – I h…

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but w…

Lots and lots of links this week. You may recall us trying to define “hyperlocal” previously here on HLB, and also linking out to others (Lost Remote) as they had similar discussions. One of the links below…

This guest post comes from Pamela Fox, a developer advocate at Google. Pamela has supported the Google Maps and Wave API communities, in addition to helping developers get started with other Google APIs.
One fa…

If you’re a business of one like a consultant, or a smaller business looking to grow your presence, there are some basic steps you might take towards getting yourself into place on the web. In this example,…

Because I am in the publishing industry, and because I have written extensively on the topic of digital publishing, I get asked several times a week, what e-reader I recommend. Frankly, I’m probably not the b…

TweetReversals are a great creative challenge. They can also help you solve problems. Taking a key piece of information and reversing it early in a process (or a story) can yield unexpected insights and pow…

When the iPad was launched earlier this year, one of the big talking points was that the iPad might be the savior of magazines. By now many magazines are available on the iPad, either in their own standalone ap…

Back in the 1950s, IBM was just getting into the computer business, many companies still needed to be convinced that electric typewriters weren’t a technological boondoggle, and slide rules were still essenti…

Via Phil Franks comes an interesting HTML5/CSS3 site for There Studio, which is a kind of coworking space in London:

The site itself has a number of circles with information bouncing on the screen that respond…

After being down for an entire week, popular random video chat service Chatroulette is back with a new version.The transition to version two wasn’t exactly graceful; Chatroulette was supposed to be down for o…

Plex, the Mac OS X media center, has just made all of its competitors obsolete. A new version, dubbed Plex/Nine, will be released today at midnight EDT, and it introduces a number of new features that make it t…

There’s a 96-inch long white board in my office. It is where I collect my thoughts for specific projects as I’m writing, planning or producing them. It is currently full of lists and reminde…

If you want something done, perhaps you would ask a professional to do it. Someone who costs a lot but is worth more than they charge. Someone who shows up even when she doesn’t feel like it. Someone who stands…

If you’re reading all your RSS feeds in one big pile at Google Reader or another RSS reader, you’re probably feeling more overwhelmed than informed. One blogge…

My problem is not how to be innovative. My team often comes up with interesting ideas. But when we introduce them to top executives, they always turn them down. How can I convince my boss to invest in our ideas…

As companies emerge from the recession, IT managers need to rethink their careers, especially as businesses recast IT’s role more as growing the business than running the operations. The old approaches to car…

Google, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon — when you hear these names, you usually think about how these tech giants all compete with one another. But what if they all teamed up for one cause? They’d be uns…

David Heinemeier Hansson
DHH rings the bell and announces that Rails 3.0 (final) has been released after two years of determined effort by the Rails core team (and, significantly, Merb team members, since Rails…

GlennBeckPalooza is finally over, as you can probably tell from the smoking ruins of America left in the wake of the Martians’ attack. “Okay we have HAD IT with you idiots,” the Martians said, before bom…

Sure the social web is filled with rants and quacks, but I’ve also been thinking about how the science and technology of this channel lifts people up, and perhaps even makes us better in a deeper, spiritual…

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud’s 10 Rules for Radicals is the transcript of his keynote at the 19th World Wide Web Consortium conference in 2010. It’s a thrilling and often hilarious account of his adventures i…