Curated Stories Feb. 17, 2010

David Pogue / New York Times:
Google Message Feature Moves Beyond Twitter — Funny, isnt it? The people who review gadgets generally arent the people who buy them. — After all, whom would you hir…

Retweet.com, a competitor to the much more popular Tweetmeme service, has put itself on the auction block.Retweet.com launched six months ago, declaring war on its Twitter story aggregating competitor. The se…

Dolly Lives in Texas now, and birding is still a big part of her life
What does an award-winning journalist do when she has a great story, and no one will publish it? If she’s Paige Williams, she sets her wor…

Editor’s note: This post is the first in our new “Social Superstar” column. Every Wednesday, Aliza will be writing about social media and providing hints, tips and insight; helping you to make social me…

Soren Gordhamer is the organizer of the Wisdom 2.0 Conference, which brings together staff from Google, Facebook, and Twitter with others to explore living wisely in our modern age. Mashable readers can use co…

J.K. Rowling gave a killer speech at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association last year. This speech is very much worth your time. How did J.K. Rowling go from an unemployed, near-destitute single…

Social network Facebook has passed Yahoo! and is now nearing Google in the #1 spot for most monthly unique visitors from the US, according to traffic analyst firm Compete. Compete just published its January nu…

There’s a reason why vanity URLs, personalized profile pages and recommendation systems are so popular. To a customer or site visitor, there’s nothing more interesting than themselves. As the CEO of web trackin…

Fine, let’s try to tackle it. Every rich corporate D.C. conservative establishment liar is going to (went to?) Virginia’s most famous slave ranch, Mount Vernon, today, to sign some sort of Declaration thing…

This is a report from our premium subscription research service The Internet Analyst. To sign up for a free trial, please submit your name and email address here.

The New York Times will start charging for…

My former employer, the BBC, has issued new guidelines for the official use of third party social networking and micro-blogging services. The new guidelines should not be confused with the guidelines …

I was sitting in front of Stacks, a Burlingame, California pancake house, this past Sunday morning, with my dad. We were talking about the notion of social enterprise resource planning, and what it …

One fascinating thing to watch is how people in certain content professions continue to hold out hope that there’s some way that maybe, possibly, really people will suddenly see the light and magically start “p…

The days of rifling through couch cushions for a television remote could be coming to an end, as 3-D gesture-recognition technology finds its way into set-top boxes following a deal between Intel and Softkinet…

Are you indispensible? That’s what Seth Godin asks in Linchpin, his new book about the future of work, the break with our industrial past, and what we need to do, individually, to measure up. It’s a Seth Go…

A Weekly Series by Teresa Morrow
I’m Teresa Morrow, Founder of Key Business Partners, LLC and I work with authors and writers by managing their online promotion. As part of my job I read a lot of books (and I…

AOL is continuing with its push to create content on a massive local scale, according to a story by the Silicon Valley Insider. The story says that AOL is looking to “expand Patch, its network of local news blo…

The low cost of netbooks has contributed to a shift in consumer pricing expectations, according to a survey by shopping site Pricegrabber.com. While 52 percent of surveyed customers paid more than $750 for thei…

Magazines and newspapers may have some hope in getting consumers to pay for online content after all, though people trying to generate income by writing blog posts and making YouTube video…

Google News Blog:
Open-sourcing the Living Stories format — For the past two months, small teams of reporters and editors from the New York Times and Washington Post have been experimenting with Living S…

In the age of the Kindle and the iPhone, text is more ubiquitous than ever, but that doesn’t mean users are lining up to pay for content. Readers often need a push, in the form of a strong personal brand, to…

Today, Saleforce takes the wraps off Chatter pilot program. After several months of testing with select customers, it is going into production for this group. We reviewed Chatter with SalesForce’s VP of Corp…

If you haven’t heard, big changes are soon coming for the credit card business.

Marshall McCluhan famously said: We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us. The same, I believe, holds for community. We shape our community by choosing which actors comprise it and what roles they…

Ever wondered what makes a good tweet? Let’s break it down.
But first….there are many different reasons to tweet, therefore there are many different kinds of tweets. Twitter can serve many purposes s…

This series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. Learn more about Rackspace’s hosting solutions here.If you use WordPress for your website or blog, there are lots of ways you can connect…

A Guest Post by www.lewishowes.com on driving traffic to your blog with LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is the most powerful, yet under-utilised social networking platform on the web.

Whether you just created your first bl…

The Frugal Traveler sifts through the many booking sites out there, and outlines the steps he takes when booking a flight for himself.

Meta-search sites — among them, Kayak.com and Fly.com — search hundreds of travel sites at once in a quest to identify the best rates.

Search Engine Land blogger Ciarán Norris says there is no right way to blog. He cites Forresters recent policy decision to require its analysts to blog at Forrester.com, which seems like the wrong path to tak…

This is the third and final quickie blog review…for the Become a Better Leader Blog published by Harriet Meyerson. I have pointed out 6 tips that will help her optimize her blog so it’s more effective for her…

The discovery of stone tools that are possibly 130,000 years old on the island of Crete may indicate that humans were seafaring far earlier than is commonly believed.

Archaeologists and experts on early nautic…

LinkedIn Groups are similar to Facebook Pages in that they provide businesses with an avenue for leading discussions on a topic of interest with members of the LinkedIn network. With Groups, you can build thou…

A new website called PleaseRobMe.com does nothing more than aggregate publicly shared check-ins, but its name and purpose attempt to shed more light on the dangerous side effects of location-sharing.It’s no…

If content is king, and a picture tells a thousand words, then text is the currency of online credibility. Few of us actually consider ourselves “writers,” yet most people who work online spend hours each d…

Just about every business with a web site does something to market and promote it. When those companies are asked about web analytics, it’s surprising how many look back with a blank stare. This isn’t the…

The best reason that some newspapers have to stay in print — at least a few days a week — is to distribute coupons and circulars (free-standing inserts, or FSIs, in the jargon). But as newspaper circulation…

With millions of people connecting through social media, advertisers and marketers are hustling to get in on the action. In the past year we’ve seen many companies and brands attempt to step into this new wor…

Microsoft just planted a massive flag in the ground with the debut of Windows Phone 7 Series. The company’s new mobile operating system is a radical and potent departure from the past, and there’s a lot to ta…

At the Dreamforce Conference in November, Salesforce.com officially announced Salesforce Chatter, which is basically “Facebook for the Enterprise.”Today Salesforce.com has announced the private beta for Ch…

Facebook users are now a target of a new virus attack that is being spread through emails. Apparently Facebook users are getting emails with the title “Update Account Agreement”. The email is pretended to…

SmartPulse — our weekly reader poll in SmartBrief on Social Media — tracks feedback from leading marketers about social-media practices and issues.
Last week’s poll question: Is the Web becoming less unif…

Rightly or wrongly, many people have a picture in their minds of the average online gamer, and it probably involves someone not yet old enough to vote, huddled in their parents’ basement killing dwarves with…

Worth watching – Facebook’s Mobile Strategy Condensed into a 16 Min video – http://tcrn.ch/a4tl5c (via @techcrunch)

Ever wondered what makes a good tweet? Let’s break it down.
But first….there are many different reasons to tweet, therefore there are many different kinds of tweets. Twitter can serve many purposes s…

By date: Social media adoption by small businesses has doubled from 12 percent to 24 percent in the past year alone, according to the latest report from the …

A guest post by Radian6’s David Alston.
For me, like a brand, a community is an asset. Here’s how Wikipedia defines ‘brand equity’:
Brand equity refers to the marketing effects or outcomes that accrue…

Whether you’re a job applicant applying for a position, a freelancer trying to attract clients, or an employee climbing the corporate ladder, your ability to effectively communicate is one of your most valuab…

NovaPDF creates a “printer” that exports any web page, document, or anything else print-able to a PDF file, and can pull some neat tricks like appending to an existing PDF. Through the Digital Inspiration blog,…

Salesforce’s enterprise friendly social collaboration platform Chatter was announced at last year’s November Realtime CrunchUp with much fanfare. To many, there is no doubt that Chatter will have a lasting…

Conversions are king.
But to take your PPC campaigns to the next level in 2010, you must go beyond measuring traditional conversions (lead, transaction) and start measuring (and achieving!) new goals – from…

Do you despise long sales letters, yellow highlighters and blood-red, hype-laden headlines?
These tried and true copywriting tactics are proven winners at converting “cold” traffic into paying customers…

Tony Robbins is an infamous American self-help author and one of the top motivational speakers in the world. His bestselling books include Unlimited Power and my personal favorite Awaken the Giant Within.Robbi…

A brand new study from the University of Massachusetts Center for Marketing Research compares adoption of social media over three years (2007-2009) by the Inc. 500, a list of the fastest-growing private…

“Every Twitter, tweet, every status update and they wil take it and create a social profile about you and sell it.” Sandberg, who researched social media …

I shouldn’t tell you this, but it’s a funny story. Do you know how I got into PR? I flipped through the course catalog to find a major that had the least amount of math involved. I liked to write and talk,…

In the ’80s, America had punk rock and, now, we have the Internet, primarily social media. Our generation has embraced sites such as Facebook, Twitter, …

This study result will definitely affect the way companies approach their use of social media marketing. Industry experts are already looking at how social …

Amazingly, it seems like there’s more social media tools than Jonas brothers, with the gap growing every day.
I don’t feel the need to experiment with every new piece of software that emerges from its chry…

Another week, another Twitter travesty. This week it’s Kevin Smith, who was kicked off a Southwest flight when the flight’s captain apparently made the call that he was too heavy to occupy a single seat. Smith…

Originally published in the Shutterstock newsletter as a two-part series…Part I / Part II
In the last post, I discussed the importance of social objects (images, videos, blog posts, comments, status updates,…

by ClickThrough | 17 Feb 2010 Social media, such as blogs and Facebook pages, is becoming an increasingly important tool for helping small firms to identify …

The New York Times reported today that Apple CEO Steve Jobs has agreed to work with former Time Magazine managing editor Walter Isaacson on an authorized biography. As Jobs is usually not someone who is terribl…

Here are things that you can now avoid:
The annual review
The annual sales conference
The big product launch
The grand opening of a new branch
Drop dead one-shot negotiation events

The reasons? Well, th…

I started my selling career in high school. I sold door-to-door for Fuller Brush and a local cable television company. In college, I sold Grolier encyclopedias. Each of these sales positions involved “cold c…

It’s not about you; it’s about them. ~ Go Givers Sell More.Truer words have never been spoken. Whether in business or our personal lives, relationships are all about adding value to other peoples live…

Whether you’re developing software, working in marketing or even a full-time writer, the odds that you’ll be asked to contribute to a blog at some point just keep going up, because blogs have become a key m…

My wife loves kids. She loves our three kids. She loves her 400 kids. That second group is the number of children she has taught in the last 15 years as a first grade teacher. This year she has a class of 2…

I’ve had to take things a little slower lately, which for me
means going from working about 70 hours a week to only 60 hours.

Nevertheless, there’s great value in slow. Going slower
makes you think faster…

It’s all over the news these days, because it’s A Good Thing: the Web will be
smarter and faster and better. And for other reasons involving politics and
vituperation.
I love parts of HTML5, but it’s cle…

Jon Fisher submits:National unemployment should peak at 10.4 percent and quickly fall to 8 percent by the end of 2010. That’s my prediction, and it flies in the face of government forecasts that call out an une…

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in his address to the World Mobile Congress on Tuesday that Google’s future is not to compete with mobile operators. Instead, he pointed primarily to search advertising as Google’s…

Warning: Twitter-specific post I told my gang over on Twitter that they should follow the legendary Tom Peters, author of several books that impacted my life. Some of them wrote back, “why should I? He doesn…

Microsoft Outlook has just become a lot more social through new partnerships with Facebook and MySpace and an existing one with LinkedIn.You might remember back in November that Microsoft announced Outlook Soc…

We all want to increase productivity and get more done with our working hours.
There’s just one problem: Most people’s view of productivity comes from an industrial age view of work. This leads to some fun…

Theres no doubting the impact of social media on our day-to-day lives in 2010. In the western world, most big brands have Facebook and Twitter accounts nowadays, many TV journalists write a blog about their bea…