Curated Stories Feb. 16, 2010

A federal magistrate today ruled that a former Florida high school student suspended after creating a Facebook page to diss her teacher should receive constitutional protection under the First Amendment. The n…

Every leader I know has at least one need in common: a need to connect honestly with others. One way to help foster improved connections is by asking good questions. Leaders who excel at asking good questions h…

Anatoly Zenkov, a Russian programmer and designer, developed a mouse tracking application as an experiment. The software gives users a striking picture of their wanderings on the computer screen.

Cast Iron Systems is one of the many IT companies you don’t hear much about, yet it is playing an instrumental role in new-generation, Web-based business. Its software makes things move fast through the Web. Yo…

It’s absolutely paramount that KM sheds its skin of codifying and storing in a database…this is just information management. Sure some people may share some informal documents about experience and insight (…

Lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophes…

As you may have noticed, Facebook has gone through a lot of changes recently. Privacy settings, the public news stream and Groups have all gotten an overhaul. Some changes were more policy-based, others design…

I had some free time this weekend, so instead of going to party, I decided to look into Google Buzz. It’s not every day that a major social site is launched. I wanted to find a way to find my friends quickly, a…

When attempting to connect iPhone or iPod touch, you may see one or more of the following error messages:

iTunes could not connect to this iPhone because an unknown error occurred (0xE8000065)
iTunes c…

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m very much against enforcing net neutrality through legislation (too many unintended consequences) but I’m stunned at the ridiculous and totally bogus reasons give…

Typeface: Vitesse

Wired gets it. Today they’re going public with the prototype they shared with us a few weeks ago, and if you’re like me, your reaction will be an instantaneous “neat!” followed immedi…

Booklets promote small business and big business alike, whether it’s a printed booklet or an ebooklet. The big difference is how far a reach you get. Many people like to start by selling a single copy directly…

When can an avid inbound marketer like me get behind an outbound marketing company? When it involves creative innovation that allows marketers to cost effectively reach their target market AND create an inbou…

My soon to be seven year old son would like to go on a tour of the Cleveland Browns stadium for his birthday. This is a great idea for a number of reasons. First, we don’t have to clean the house….

At least it wasn’t Flash.

★

Think you have no control over how lucky you are in life? Psychologist Richard Wiseman says think again. Turns out you can learn to be a luckier person just by changing how you look at the world around you.Phot…

Want to instantly get millions of users to your Facebook application? All you need to do is tell them that the application they are installing will tell them who recently viewed their profile. That’s exactl…

Great post that takes a psychological look at conformity – Great insights on human behavior groups – http://bit.ly/cahlDd (via @PsyBlog)

Image by clownbastard via Flickr
Twitter is a great way to reach and engage people online. Many people think that Twitter is a number’s game. That the more people you follow, and the more people that…

It comes as no surprise that sports are at the forefront of industry adoption of social media. Everyone has a local allegiance, and fans tend to be outspoken in their opinions. They have an emotional craving to…

I came across this interesting chart from Michael Brito this morning that shows the demographic breakdown of Twitter users by age.

Interestingly the fastest growing segment on Twitter (other than bots) is amon…

Many pundits, including me, have been cranking out articles, blog posts and comments regarding the carefully studied entry into the social media milieu by …

The history of the Winter Olympics is riddled with Public Relations crises, from bribe-happy city officials, to corrupt judges, to teammates physically assaulting one another to get ahead.
Maybe it’s all the s…

The idea of ad-sponsored Tweets has been the subject of some controversy. Some say advertisements within a Twitter user’s stream could distort the user’s authority. The idea that a Twitter users (and adver…

Extract not available.

Hugh from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, “EFF has released a white paper to help readers of digital books answer questions about privacy, book licenses, DRM and other issues.”

1. Does it (your e-boo…

Lon S. Cohen is a freelance writer and is @obilon on Twitter. He’s also the Director of Communications at @ALSofGNY. This post was co-authored by Steve Cohen, who is the Founder of Baywood Consulting Group…

Recently an industry guru who is compiling a study/book on transparency emailed me and asked “What are the practices that you think an agency should follow when it comes to transparency in writing c…

New Tribes, New Rules

It seems like every day now I meet someone who is trying to make sense of the social web. Most folks seem to understand that something important is happening, but just can’t conne…

Last week Jeremy Clark from Adobe and I unveiled the first glimpse of the Wired Reader at TED. Above, you’ll see a video, narrated by Jeremy and Wired Creative Director Scott Dadich, who led our tablet te…

Originally published in MedPage Today
by Cole Petrochko, MedPage Today Staff Writer
Just over half of U.S. adults under 65 used the Internet to look up health information over the course of a year, according to…

The PR industry is in a state of flux with increasing importance on getting into the content and social web business. Consumers are spending more time with digital and social media. Advertising dollars are foll…

I have enjoyed and toyed with Twitter since I first signed up in December 2008, not expecting the journey to be so transformational.
For the first few months I sent the occasional tweet and connected with a few…

The growth rate of adults using social media has quadrupled in recent years, and is now at dizzying new heights. Twitter alone reported almost 24 million …

Social commentator Damian Barr said: “The Re-Run report shows we devote endless time, money and energy extending our youth with social media like Facebook, …

As buyers, we need help making decisions. There are just too many options.
My last post revealed my own decision anxiety, multiplied when there are no customer reviews or success stories for me to rely on.
Fro…

Worried about a tax audit? Maybe you should be. More Americans than ever may be subject to unwanted attention from the Internal Revenue Service this season as the government pumps billions of dollars into tax c…

Extract not available.

You can get paid to tweet. Average, non-celebrity users are making some decent pocket change using Twitter ad services like Twittad, Magpie, Sponsored Tweets, and Ad.ly. And while reports of $10,000 tweets abou…

In recent months, I’ve come to realize that a lot of business owners, myself included sometimes, do not proactively promote their businesses. They wait to be discovered. As I mentioned in a previous post, ma…

This post is a guest post from Sandy Smith, a hiring manager and PHP developer at Forum One Communications in Alexandria, VA. It was originally an email to a mailing list in response to a job ad posted by a rec…

Going viral doesn’t just happen! And if it does, it’s the exception to the rule. Almost always, viral content explodes because of careful maneuvering by content creators or community influencers… t…

I’m not sold on Google Buzz. It’s very noisy. Heck, if you’re following me there, you’re probably wondering what it’s about. It reminds me of Friendfeed, with the conversations looping under every p…

I do a lot of my correspondence electronically, but sometimes I still need to mail a letter. I know where the blue US Postal Service mailboxes are in my neighborhood, but it’s getting harder to find pickup lo…

For simple, on-the-fly kitchen conversions, type something like “4 tablespoons into ounces” into Google, Bing, or most any search engine. For weird units and precise measures, consider ConvertCenter, a dedicate…

Do you spend hours of time on Twitter?
Let me rephrase that.
Does Twitter mean something to your business?
If so, what would happen if Twitter went down? If you lost all of your followers? What would happen i…

The folks over at Public Knowledge have officially unveiled their plan for copyright reform, focusing on five key areas:

strengthen fair use, including reforming outrageously high statutory damages, which det…

Social Media Club Education Connection (aka #SMCEDU) is a national initiative whose goal is to unite educators, students, and professionals to further the development of social media curriculum in our schools,…

When I spoke at the Marketing Pioneers event in Amsterdam, one presentation got me thinking.

Huib Van Bockel, marketing director for Red Bull in the Netherlands and who also coaches other Red Bull marketers…

At the Mobile World Congress 2010, Facebook’s Chamath Palihapitiya just finished a 20-minute keynote, outlining the social networking juggernaut’s mobile strategy. We’ll have a video of the full presenta…

Here’s a little secret about Twitter that you may not know: some people are getting paid to tweet. We don’t mean it’s their job to Twitter as the PR front-end for some large corporation, either. They’re actuall…

My friend, Roch Parisien has been doing this a long time.
By this, I mean writing and talking about music. He’s one of the top music journalists in Canada, and in the 20 or so years I’ve known and worked w…

We’ve written extensively on this blog about the inclusion of social-media content in search engine results — we even produced a special report for our free SmartBrief on Social Media daily newsletter that…

Gillette is perhaps one of the most innovative companies in the world, constantly reinventing its own model, often upending past products in favor of the new in a fit of what most people call creative destructi…

Roger Ebert, the 67-year-old movie critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, has not been able to speak in almost four years. He had several surgeries after doctors found cancer in his jaw and now uses sign language an…

As writers, inspiration is one of the most important of the criteria for success. Without it, well, our writing ends up pretty lame.
A huge percentage of blogs see their demise before the six month milestone….

Movies, music, and games top a new list from Nielsen of the content types that consumers are most willing to pay for online. The data, which comes from a survey of 27,000 consumers across 52 countries, also i…

Collaboratory blog post offers valuable ‘Lego-principles’ applied to social media – http://bit.ly/72FMm (by @willsh via @BBHLabs)

Rick Newman submits:The history of recessions offers some unwelcome news for all those in Washington who think they have the power to boost hiring. Jobs used to return quickly after recessions. After the downtu…

Between Twitter, Facebook, and Googles new social networking tool, Buzz, its hard to turn a corner without running into another social network. But how do you know which networking tool fits you best? Were here…

The blog iPhone Alley reported Monday night that Square, the forthcoming mobile credit transaction service co-founded by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, will launch early this summer for the low price of $1. By plugging…

ChromeReminders is a Google Chrome Extension that lets you create new reminders in your Backpack account.

I use Backpack (37signals) reminders all the time to push out tasks and todos into the future. This Chr…

Certain acquaintances advising large companies report signs of revival among their clientele. Apparently having concluded that the worst is over, corporate types are lifting their heads above the parapet and be…

Major media publishers are grappling with Apple’s control over the iPad store–and they aren’t too happy about it.
Some magazine and newspaper publishers are in early talks with Apple about creating iPad applic…

Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
First Peek at Path.io: Stealth Startup From Facebooks Dave Morin Sean Fanning of Napster — Three weeks ago Facebook Platform Manager Dave Morin announced he was lea…

Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, you noticed Google released their new social product buzz. Predictably, it was met with both positive and negative reactions from the industry.
I watched (mostly in…

An often overlooked tool in health care providers’ struggle with the malpractice crisis is the medical apology. Two thirds of the states provide some form of protection for the medical apology (i.e., a simp…

In a post last week that hammered off some random thoughts about Google Buzz, I noted that with all of the social media noise out sprouting up, …

From a business objectives standpoint, isn’t uni-directional social media more similar to email than it is different?

Social network connectivity is becoming the post-modern email newsletter. A way for cons…

In my recent post on the time-sucking dragon known as the social web, Jody Pirello offered some comments on how she keeps up with the latest trends. I think this is a critical career skill these days and I…

People tuning out temporarily eventually could spell trouble for networking sites such as Facebook, says Danah Boyd, social media scholar at Microsoft …

[click on image to enlarge - total is 97,476 clicks]Readers of this blog and many of you who follow what I share on Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook know that I well written and helpful content gets my atten…

You’ve probably heard the expression, “People don’t want drills. They want holes.”
This is a reminder that benefits outweigh features. While this is good advice for creating more effective advertising a…

Originally published in the Shutterstock newsletter as a two-part series…Part I)
As a brand, publisher, designer, photographer, artist, or filmmaker, the social web is your new distribution channel as well a…

My wife, Amie, spends a fair amount of time on Facebook. Part of it is related to keeping up with activities of friends and family. The other part has a distinctly business focus…sort of anyway. Allow me…

As near as I can tell, Apple is the ultimate tech industry disrupter. In recent memory, Apple’s iPhone put applications in the hands of millions of consumers, wrenched a good measure of control out of the c…

Tell me how many times you’ve seen one of these statements:

Social media needs less talk and more action.
We need better case studies.
Businesses (or People) need to be more human.
We need less pundits and m…

One of the best ways to become an industry influencer is to get involved in industry events. They’re a great way to surround yourself with respected colleagues and they offer your the opportunity to network wit…

With my big post explaining the whole CwF+RtB concept in a lot more detail, complete with examples of many artists, small to big, who are using it, we’ve been hearing about more and more artists. It’s really g…

4 ways to use analytics to super-charge your online marketing efforts: http://bit.ly/cBElEN (via @hubspot)

A set of guidelines examples anyone sending an email newsletter should read: http://bit.ly/9dSzP1 (via @smashingmag)

Wanna be a market leader? Apply your intuition. You know what I mean, that feeling that tells us a product idea has legs, a story is going to sell, a customer segment is going to love our new idea. You just…

Most marketers know that to get someone to do what you want, you have to ask them to do it, you have to have a call-to-action (CTA) that persuades them to buy your product. With social media marketing, the acti…

We recently wrote about CloudShare, a recently launched service that allows companies to demo software in the cloud. Organizations can instantly deploy multiple, independent copies of their existing demos or t…

Hat tip to my colleague at Edelman Digital, TJ Kelly for sending this to me last week.

As you can see from the chart above, more than 30% of Twitter’s visitors were under 25 up from about 20% o…

Playing a quick game of catch-up on Facebook, I nearly scrolled right past Mashable’s post–but the words “social media” and “women” caught my eye. Why Social Media Means Big Opportunities for Women. …

I love this definition from Wikipedia:In printing, a cliché was a printing plate cast from movable
type. This is also called a stereotype. When letters were set one at a time, it made sense to cast a phrase…

Ever notice the giant pile of social media “experts” who don’t have two nickels to rub together? Ever wonder why?
They spend a hell of a lot more time talking than listening.
They labor under the mistaken…

Like me, you’re probably going a little insane with all the Google Buzz noise in your Gmail inbox. Never fear, we’ve got a solution: Add a lot more noise to your inbox by adding your Facebook News Feed, to…

Brand Strategy Insider, February 15, 2010 — The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) has become one of the more commonly talked about corporate designations in recent years. Given the tremendous marketing potent…