Curated Stories Feb. 19, 2010

We’ve been on a “leveraging social media to boost your brand” trend lately with our Weekend Reading series here at ReadWriteStart; we previously brought you Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It! and just last week we cov…

One of the best pieces I’ve read about how stories heal is by Allison Cox, who not only describes several ways storytelling heals, but also guides practitioners in telling healing stories and lists books abou…

Good for Tiger Woods for including his sponsors (including former ones), his foundation, and his employees in his much-anticipated apology.

Do you cheat on your taxes? If so, you’re not alone. More Americans are fudging their taxes and an increasing number of people are scared of being audited, a survey from the IRS Oversight Board shows.

Tiger Woods’ sponsors said they were pleased that the golfer issued a public apology for his infidelity on Friday and many said they were eager for him to return to the golf course.

My last post was about ” The 7 Secrets to Ford’s Social Media Marketing Success” which was primarily about the success of the Ford Fiesta Project’s social media competition. What impressed me about the…

At the bipartisan health-care summit scheduled for February 25th, President Obama is pledging to champion the voluminous bills passed by the House and Senate as the foundation for reforming the $2.2 trillion me…

Reuters – An online survey of 895 Web users and experts found more than three-quarters believe the Internet will make people smarter in the next 10 years, according to results released on Friday.

Last night, we reported on a new restriction that was being applied to Apple’s App Store: no more applications with “overtly sexual content”. At this point, the exact nature of that ban is unclear. But…

Cisco is betting heavily on the network as the platform. We took a look at the role of the network in the emerging landscape of cloud computing as part one of analysis of “Will One Company be Dominant in Cloud…

by Toni Brayer, MD
The organizations that rate hospitals and doctors have proliferated as the internet has become mainstream over the past 5 years. I’m sure you have seen some of these: U.S. World News Repor…

Without a doubt, one of the most popular shiny new objects of many social media marketing programs is Twitter. There are Twitter books, Twitter conferences, Twitter blogs and numerous articles devoted to Twitte…

Title: Facebook Reflects the Real YouCategory: Health NewsCreated: 2/19/2010 9:42:00 AMLast Editorial Review: 2/19/2010 9:42:11 AM

Judging your client doesn’t help anything; figuring out how to communicate does – http://bit.ly/97nKEN (via @smashingmag)

Inspiring collection of ‘coming soon’ pages – a under-used tool that still has plenty of value – http://bit.ly/dAVrzn (via @sixrevisions)

Martin Bosworth has written up a longish post discussing what he calls “The Creative Class War.” It’s an interesting read that hits on a lot of different points, many of which I agree with, and a few I don’t ag…

It’s a game. It’s a mobile social network. It’s an urban exploration app. And it can be a tremendous new way to lure in new customers while encouraging loyalty.
We’re talking about Foursquare, the smartphone-fr…

As everyone who reads this blog knows, I run hot and cold on Twitter. On the one hand, I just don’t get what’s so magical about trying to have a conversation in a what amounts to a public chat room ofte…

For a while now, we’ve been discussing how the pricing on ebooks doesn’t make much sense, and almost certainly needs to fall. Like many industries, the book business could learn a lot from other businesses tha…

We had an interesting meetup at NYU last night, the first in what may become a series of Thursday night meetups patterened after the meetups we had at Berkman in 2003 and on.
The meeting was supposed to follow…

It’s almost March. In Apple land, this means that if this year is anything like the last two years, it’s almost time for another Apple event where company executives show off a new version of the iPhone o…

From OPEN Forum: What social network should you be using to grow your business? It depends on who your customers are.We looked into who’s using the big three social networks for businesses: Facebook, LinkedIn,…

In a recent comment I received on one of my older blog posts, a reader pointed out that much of the advice I had provided was for people who were just beginning optimization efforts and they (the commenter) wan…

It may be a 500-channel television universe but when it comes to what people are watching, it’s increasingly videos, particularly YouTube videos. A lot of this activity is being fueled by blogg…

MEETorDIE takes a humorous approach to a serious issue—how much money is wasted by large staff meetings.Its safe to argue that many times meetings arent the most efficient way to spend the time—and the payr…

J. Keir Howard ponders the complicated influence of the Bible on modern medicine. (Eternal OUP disclosure.)

Well, this is interesting. Despite the various biased, one-sided, “education programs” designed by the entertainment industry for schools, it seems that plenty of students are smart enough to make ethical deci…

You can finetune who can see virtually every aspect of what you do on Facebook, except what you share via Facebook applications—until now, that is. The Facebook Blog announced new privacy controls for applica…

*This is a guest post by Danny Cooper*
Link building is a very consuming task, in fact it’s the most time-consuming part of SEO (aside from explaining SEO, of course). Because of the time consuming nature of…

There’s hardly a person I know who is not using Gmail today. Finding an available Gmail username is no easier than finding a new .com domain.
No matter how popular Gmail is, not everyone is still aware of wha…

AOL (it recently gave up the all-caps moniker) is planning an ambitious expansion of its hyper-local Patch.com venture, the one that it bought from a group of investors — including AOL CEO Tim Armstrong —…

In 2008, Nicholas Carr took to the pages of The Atlantic to make the provocative case that Google might be “making us stupid.” His basic worry was that a reliance on the Web was rewiring hi…

In an earlier blog post, I talked about how sites that generate purchasing intent (mainly “content” sites) are being under-allocated advertising dollars versus sites that harvest purchasing intent (search e…

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.Small businesses stand to increase…

Over the past two weeks we’ve taken a look at different aspects of copywriting, including aspects such as the value of good copy, outsourcing your content, and tools to make your content better. To round out…

Tiger Woods seems to think that he can solve all his problems by just delivering a rehearsed apology without taking any questions.
Read the rest of this story »See Also:The 10 Worst Winter Olympics PR Di…

Interesting headline I know…However, it’s not intended to be sensationalist, simply a matter of fact and also a topic worthy of discussion.
Facebook announced that active users of its mobile platform surpa…

Whether you are an offline marketer or digital marketer, developing integrated, multichannel marketing campaigns is now a critical element of planning and strategy.
With this in mind, I’ve been searching throug…

What single characteristic do successful companies share? The ability to allocate resources effectively.
Effective resource allocation maximizes return and minimizes waste. Yet allocating resources effectively…

Keeping tabs on your social media connections these days is like bar hopping, without the cocktails or pool tables with stained felt.
You run over to check your Twitter account. Then you dash to Facebook to se…

The social media scene has been buzzing this week with stories about PleaseRobMe.com, a new site which aggregates publicly shared posts from shiny new location-based service Foursquare. The aim of the site is…

A guest post by C.C. Chapman.
While Todd is away playing on the beach with his family, he asked me to write something to tide you over while he was away. Of course allowing me to step up on the PR-Squared Soapb…

Microsoft was under no obligation to build a ribbon component, similar to the one premiered in Office for Windows, for the Mac. That’s especially true given the fact that the menu bar is such a prominent el…

I bet you are one of those people thinking about implementing a social media marketing strategy for your company right? ‘Well here are some sure fire ways to end any and all efforts you are thinking about…

We just received confirmation from Google that Google Reader now consumes PubSubHubbub feeds in real time. Until now, it often took half an hour or longer before new posts from popular blogs and news sites woul…

The team behind the hot location-based service Foursquare took the time tonight to write a rare longer post about location privacy. Their basic stance: we take privacy very seriously and understand it. Also, th…

Thomas Fuchs gave a presentation titled “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Flash” at WebStock. It is often hard to grasp a presentation from slides, but this one is great fun to flip through.
This one really hi…

Really like this post explaining why creativity and emotional awareness can’t be crowdsourced: http://bit.ly/cCOE4i (by @benkunz)

This is one of the most common questions small business owners and new bloggers ask. Blogging is uncharted territory. What should I write about? How often do I need to write? How long should a blog post be? Goo…

The journey continues as our film web site has launched its e-commerce web site for the film and with the configuration still a work in progress, we are starting to turn our focus to getting the s…

This is a guest post by Tim Sinclair. He is a radio personality, blogger, and marketing guy who lives in Illinois with his wife Heather and their two boys, Jeremiah and Elijah. He is also active on Twitter. If…

There’s a very easy way to find out if someone is home or not: calling their landline. If no one answers, chances are the house is empty. If you really want to make sure, you can simply check if the lights a…

Wired has a story written by journalist Paige Williams about her experience putting up a long form feature story about the pseudonymously named Dolly Freed, who had written a rather successful book as a teenage…

Some consumers are short-sighted, greedy and selfish.Extend yourself a little and they’ll want a lot.Offer a free drink in the restaurant one night and they’re angry that it’s not there the next.The nuts in fir…

The “Obama technology gurus,” as The Washington Post called them, had transformed an election using social media. Slightly more than one year later, …

“Many professionals have come to rely on the stream of instant updates they receive from social media applications like LinkedIn and Facebook. …

Apple iPad buyers will have to download Apple’s “iBooks” e-reader app and bookstore separately when Apple’s tablet begins shipping next month. It won’t be installed by default, as we pointed out last week.
Rea…

The latest release of BuddyPress 1.2 now supports installation on single-user WordPress (version 2.9.x) (please see disclosure at bottom) blogs, which is exciting news as it means that millions of sites can now…

You have an idea!
You’ve thought it through, and you’re excited. You’ve uncovered something that’s really going to help your company or your boss or your client achieve their goals. You want your projec…

The entire world stops today, almost all news streamlines into one story (with the exception of a terrible plane crash/act of domestic terrorism in Texas.)
Everything has shut down now, as the world waits… Wa…