Curated Stories August 31, 2010

“Everyone brings their crumbs of knowledge to the task and if they don’t, we’re the lesser for it.” I love that line about encouraging more people to bring more knowledge to Wikipedia, from a conversati…

Posted by Dennis SellersAutodesk has announced an upcoming version of AutoCAD, software for professional design and engineering, that runs natively on Mac OS X (10.5.8 or later). The company also announced the…

Social media campaigns can catch the public’s imagination and you only have to watch the Old Spice campaign or Roller Babies online video to realize the genius.
There are other social media campaigns that are…

Aug. 31 — Karl Case, an economics professor at Wellesley College and co-creator of the SP/Case-Shiller home-price index, discusses the U.S. housing market

Yesterday, I read a piece by Scott Griffith, CEO of Zipcar, on how technology makes the company both successful and profitable.
I took away something else from this piece: how important being technologically co…

This morning, VC David Pakman tweeted out a stat suggesting Facebook Places had already soared past Foursquare in usage.
He wrote, Last night at Yankee stadium: Facebook checkins – 740, Foursquare checkins –…

On the great grand list of things we’re not yet ready for, I think you might find location-aware game badges celebrating STD testing.
STD testing is a clever, responsible thing to do if you’re regular tapp…

Facebook Places launched earlier this month amid great fanfare, but right now it’s looking like fear and confusion over privacy concerns could derail the takeoff of the service.

I don’t know about you but…

Here at Mashable, we’ve been putting the iPhone 4 through its paces, and have come up with some handy tips and tricks that can help you get more out of your Apple-flavored mobile.We’ve covered all kinds of…

What’s the best way to do one-time or recurring billing for your online business? That’s an important question for the growing legion of independent service providers transitioning countless business transacti…

Some people do freemium as a publisher quite well. I really love how GigaOm does it, for instance. Lots of their posts are very informative, but then you can get even more information if you subscribe to GigaOm…

The details are right here. Created by Vook, based on the hardcover.
Includes new video and interviews with some interesting folks…
The long tail challenge of the iPad store is getting more and more obvious…

Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson recently published a list of three essential skills for CEOs. He quoted a mentor who once said:
A CEO does only three things. Sets the overall vision and strategy of t…

A recent poll found that most enterprises that have already become infrastructure-as-a-service customers worry much less about cloud security than companies that are only thinking about making the leap. But fo…

This is going to be short and (I hope) sweet enough to check out the maps.
Map 1: The (interactive) Web 2.0 Summit Points of Control Map, showing the current locations and control regions of both incumbents and…

Google may have killed Wave (prematurely by some accounts), but it has added a little bit of real-time collaboration to one of its flagship offerings, Google Docs, with the addition of collaborative highlight…

Judge James Orenstein in the Eastern District of New York ruled last Friday that historical cell phone location data is just as intrusive to privacy as GPS tracking. (ACLU)

There has been a debate going on the past few days over whether seed deals should be funded using equity or convertible notes (converts).
Paul Graham kicked it off by noting that all the financings in the recen…

Community Starts at Home

During my years in publishing, I was a serial community builder. It seems that every job I took included “rebuild the department, refocus the vision” in the role. I’m fairly…

mmm, viral

Writing for AdAge, Jim Louderback says we should screw viral videos. As marketers and content producers, we’ve developed an unhealthy fascination with viral and it’s making us fat as we foc…

The answer is…Yes.
According to a soon-to-be-released research report from MarketingProfs/Junta42, 55% of b-to-b marketers outsource some portion of their content marketing. Larger companies (1,000 employee…

Just because marketers are jumping on the interactive-marketing bandwagon doesn’t mean things on the interactive side are all rosy. The decreasing numbers for print don’t necessarily mean a particularly high RO…

No matter what kind of business you have, or how small or large your business might be, having a blog for your business helps you stay in touch with your customers.
A Blog will draw your prospects closer beca…

Move over influencers; advocates are more valuable to brands. It’s a fact. And I won’t try to make the case with research on how consumers want to engage with brands on the social web because we all kno…

In my blog post State of the Internet Operating System a few months ago (and the followup Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars), I used the analogy of “the Great Game” played out between England and Russia i…

For the first part of this series on authors, author sites and author blogging, go here first.
When approaching an author site, what I find least interesting is a sort of bland, safe, risk-free aesthetic, a hea…

A few weeks ago, Gregg Morris shared with me a Twitter recruiting video. The blogger who initially posted it, Michael Batistich, had called it a “great piece of storytelling… [that] makes me want to work th…

What happens when a small business owner gets on Google’s bad side? In Ryan Abood’s case, the answer is, “your business gets crushed and you spend a year and a half in internet Siberia.” Do not trifle with Th…

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is used for styling your site. It gives a wide variety of options, allowing you to change the size and style of fonts, colors, images and the positioning of elements on the page.

I…

One of the problems I encounter on large client websites–or with clients who constantly add or update existing content–is getting this content into the index as quickly as possible. One of the tactics I re…

Today, a Verizon-backed startup is releasing its iPad application and introducing a new functionality — digital coupon clipping.CardStar makes mobile applications to digitally manage retailer club and members…

“Is it important to date someone with a similar bookshelf to yours?” My kneejerk: yes, of course. How could one possibly spend an entire evening with someone who was enthusiastic about a new Dan Brown novel…

Tom Lydon submits:

Rumor has it that retail ETFs have been ailing as consumers cut back on spending. But smartphone-based incentives for those who are shopping may help them pick up the slack.The trend of per…

For those unaware, Manifest Destiny is in vogue again. According to an interactive map from Forbes called Where Americans Are Moving, it’s clear that the West Coast (particularly the Pacific Northwest) is th…

Facebook is not just for kids anymore, nor is LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube or the many other popular social media platforms and services.
As today’s Pew Research Center study entitled “Older Adults and Social Med…

Dean: Did you know you can use your blog to make money offline?
Blogger: Offline? What is this “offline” you speak of?
Dean: It’s the opposite of “online.”
Blogger: (confused silenc…

Shopkick co-founder and CEO Cyriac Roeding thinks there are three different groups of location-based apps:

Social (ie: Foursquare, Gowalla)
Games (ie: MyTown)
Shopping

“I think that location-based shopping…

Social-media savvy airline Virgin America, which used Twitter to announce its expansion to Toronto, is making use of location-based rewards network Loopt Star to draw attention to its next international expans…

Is Mad Men a true representation of how great creative happens in Marketing?

In a typical Mad Men episode, research comes back saying something plain about the insights surrounding a brand. But the creatives,…

If you list some of the most popular and important companies on the
internet today, you’ll notice that most have one thing in common: they
offer an API. And, in most cases, for good reason. APIs can be a
valuab…

Army Golden Knights: SFC Dave Herwig (@gkdave), SGM Steve Young (@gksteve), LTC Joe Martin (gkjoe)
My presentation on how to leverage Social Media SEO to improve the reach and effectiveness of blog content for…

If your company is new to search engine optimisation (SEO)
then you need to remain in control of the work that’s being done, whether
you’re using an agency or you’ve hired someone in house.
Of course, n…

We discussed how social media is like sharecropping — you help build a network with your content and it may decide to delete your account if it changes rules or there is a glitch. Both Flickr and Faceboo…

Every business needs new customers, but don’t ever forget that your easiest and most predictable source of new revenue is right under your nose: It comes from the loyal customers who already know your company….

There isn’t one.
Corporations don’t have a conscience, people do.
That means that every time you say, “It’s just my job,” or “My department has a policy,” or “All I do is work here,” what you’ve done is abdic…

Fascinating chart on AlleyInsider this week noting that, for the first time ever, pay TV has lost subscribers. A little earlier in the week, the NYTimes argued that TV is changing (web, applications, on-demand)…

Twitter recently added more data to each tweet it returns via the API. Now your applications can access the number of retweets, whether you have retweeted a tweet and additional information about the user who w…

Ever skip a headline in your RSS reader because you don’t feel like investigating whether it’s worth your time? It sounds lazy, but time is scarce and the proliferation of content on the Web means that vaguely…

Yes, Google Wave is dead — but it won’t fully flatline until some time in 2011, Google confirmed in a post today. Well actually, their words were that wave.google.com (the front-end product) “will be avai…

Perhaps you’ve noticed that a couple days ago we flipped the switch to enable the shiny new commenting system here on TechCrunch powered by Disqus. So far, the feedback has been very, very positive — and we…

After an 18-year absence, AutoCAD is finally coming back to Mac OS X. Autodesk, the company that makes the CAD program that has become he defacto industry standard, last released a native Mac version of its fla…

Just as I was reading Paul Carr’s latest column about quitting social media, my husband looked at his phone and broke into a huge smile. He is a graphic designer and has long been a fan of Chank Fonts. Earlie…

Facebook is dominating social media in almost every country where it hasn’t been banned, and the six-year old site shows no signs of slowing down. It’s creeping across generations, replacing things like the pho…

Gmail users can now choose to let Google sort their inbox by the most pressing messages, thanks to a new feature called Priority Inbox — think of it as a sort of reverse spam filter which bubbles messages to…

Navigating maps on computers and mobile devices can still be a clunky experience, especially when you try to search for places on a map. Typically, on Google Maps or Bing Maps, you get a bunch of virtual push…

Ever gone to an author reading at the local library or children’s bookstore? Now you can see authors and illustrators reading their own creations 24 hours a day on StoryTime in the Reading Room from A Story B…

You leave a big chunk of the work to be done. It’s like a lot of jigsaw pieces, and the reader has got some of them and you’ve got some of them.

WILLIAM TREVOR

American Journalism Review has an article out that is far from earth-shattering, but I think it does a fair job of summarizing the state of local news sites/blogs at the moment. In a phrase: “not for the fain…

Tonight’s news of Gmail taking on information overload directly, using a combination of intelligent algorithms and your own feedback to build in box personalization is yet another hallmark move to taking on the…

We recently discussed the idea of much more open, online-based peer review processes. In the ensuing discussion some claimed that such things might work for subject areas like math, where concepts could be rev…

I read a lot. In fact, much of my day is spent reading: news, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and—my favorite—books. All in all, I probably invest two hours a day reading. My theory (not original) is that “lead…

Just as the iPad has proven to be a boon to magazine publishers, newspapers have flocked to the device too. All of the major western newspapers have an iPad app now: the New York Times, Wall St Journal, Guardia…

As was demonstrated earlier, Plex is now available for iOS devices and the Mac.

Back in March, Greenpeace and Nestle had a little disagreement over Kit Kat bars, palm oil, and orangutans. The anti-Nestle campaign spilled onto Nestle’s Facebook page, overwhelming the company’s Social M…

TweetMitch Joel, whose blog and work I greatly admire, wrote a very interesting blog post recently that bemoaned the lack of conversation in social media. As coined by Joseph Jaffe (another good guy who was inc…

Friends and fans are not the only ones this season following what North Carolina athletes post on their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. Now, their coaches are required to, as well….

This guest post comes from Eric Ulken, an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the former editor for interactive technology at the Los Angeles Times. He blog…

As millions of students are trudging back to the classrooms this August, Facebook is returning to its roots: colleges and universities.Just in time for the back-to-school season, the company has partnered with…

If you’re running a website — be it a world-famous news portal or a personal blog — there’s a good chance you spend a lot of time poring over your stats. There are of course plenty of services avail…

When it comes to having to scale your service to handle ever-increasing data demands, there may be no better example to look at than Facebook. The social networking giant has grown from a service for Harvard st…

MindMeister, MeisterLabs’s mind mapping iPad app, has been updated with new features that include support for notes and links, map themes, and stability and synchronization enhancements.

How many times have you set a goal…and just missed it?
For a lot of us, “just missing it” is tantamount to failure. For recovering perfectionists like myself, it’s all too easy to see success in terms o…

If you run a website, you likely want to include ads of some kind in your template.
The problem is, where do you place your ads and how do you get them there?
In this article, I’ll show you the most popular p…

For those of you in the biz still trying to figure out “The Future of Advertising”, I thought this little nugget I twittered earlier today might give you something to chew on. Bon appetit.

“Also in Paul Allen’s patent pile: Stuff like Twitter and Foursquare,” TechFlash’s Todd Bishop reports.Join the conversation about this story »

If you’re anything like me, it only takes a few days away from your regular writing routine to throw everything in your life out of whack.
I’ve been in Canada visiting family for the last six weeks. That…

Twitter is killing support for basic user authentication in third-party apps on Tuesday morning, the company says. Instead, Twitter will now require all third-party app developers to use OAuth for user authent…

Since social media has become an integral part of our lives, marketers have used their creative talents to develop social media campaigns with various degrees of success which can be measured in a variety of wa…

This week’s media event could finally confirm (or scuttle) rumors of a new Apple TV device. If it’s based on iOS 4, like many pundits believe, there’s strong potential for this device to feature its own A…