Curated Stories January 29, 2011

However, if we maintain a commitment to accuracy while doing some original thinking, writing, and reporting, we may be able to make valuable, independent contributions…

This week’s Ask a VC has a different twist, since we had a different kind of VC on the show, John O’Farrell Andressen Horowitz’s guru on business development and deal-making.
The questions you asked O’F…

One year ago Sree Sreenivasan, professor and dean of student affairs at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and Mashable’s Vadim Lavrusik took to the 92YTribeca stage in New York during…

Sometimes, all it takes is a little spark to set off a major forest fire. That is what seems to have happened with my New Year’s Day post on Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google. Over the last t…

Anybody who wrangles analytics data for a living knows what a pain it can be to get a handle on social media metrics. Different sources offer different metrics in different formats, and even Twitter’s official…

As the CEO of betaworks, John Borthwick is one of the most influential architects of the social web. Borthwick, who used to run technology strategy at Time Warner, co-founded betaworks as a new medium company f…

The Web Development Series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. Learn more about Rackspace’s hosting solutions here.
The first public alpha of Sublime Text 2 is now available for downlo…

One of my favorite Wired articles ever is Neal Stephenson’s insanely long, but wonderfully entertaining account of laying fiber optic cable across oceans from back in 1997. If you’ve never read it, set aside a…

Netflix Director of Cloud and Systems Infrastructure Yury Izrailevsky explains how and why Netflix migrated some of its systems to NoSQL. “In the distributed world governed by Eric Brewer’s CAP theorem , high…

Facebook has made it easier than ever to start a new page.

The new starter subsite has a visual guide that shows newbies exactly how a page will be named and classified on the site. Icons depict the different…

Blekko, the search engine that is fighting the good fight against web spam with human editors, is joining biggies Google and Bing in the mobile search arena today with an Android and iPhone application double…

Om Malik / GigaOM:
So How Much Is Quora Worth? — For the rest of the world, it may have been a very cold winter, but for Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup Quora, it has been a scorching hot few weeks. T…

class=alignright size-full wp-image-514753 /Online fraud and related crime is on the rise, affecting more lives and costing individuals and businesses more money year after year.
Not to long ago, we showed…

There are so many books and articles about passion, purpose, and passion and purpose. They all talk about them as separate and they are presented as linear, which is why it is so difficult for anyone to trul…

The guy who revolutionized baseball stats had a simple insight: past performance is a good indicator of future performance.
The stock market doesn’t follow that rule, but an awful lot of human performance trai…

With billions of dollars flowing into today’s social economy, betaworks CEO John Borthwick sees the social economy radically changing not only media, but all 21st century industries. It’s 1998 all over agai…

This is Arthur Buxton’s set of Van Gogh pie-charts; each one represents the color-distribution in a famous Van Gogh painting (can you guess which is which?)

He sez, “I know you lot are fans of new ways of vi…

When Steve Jobs announced the App Store, he made it clear that Apple would be happy to take on the costs of hosting and distributing free apps. I remember thinking at the time that he actually seemed to be push…

The Omni Group CEO Ken Case came to this year’s Macworld Expo to pitch his company’s productivity apps to those using Macs and iOS devices to get work done. These days, that could mean he…

Ive probably written about this somewhere and somewhen before, but here it is again because I want to make sure I have it in case the original source is lost. Back when Stewart Butterfield co. started Ludicorp…

Over the past few months, companies have began offering ways for you to publish the contents of your Facebook profile as a book for a lot less money than what other types of self-publishing services cost. Here…

Building up the courage to ask for a raise can be tough, but there are a few ways to increase your chances of actually getting one. Professional networking sit…

Noted speed freak, serial-killer fangirl, and Tea Party hero Ayn Rand was also a kleptoparasite, sneakily gobbling up taxpayer funds under an assumed name to pay for her medical treatments after she got lung ca…

Adam Kleinberg is co-founder and CEO at Traction, an interactive agency that aligns psychology with technology to create ideas that work. Look for Traction’s LinkedIn page and free toolkit. Catch him twee…

I’ve long believed the US needs a Sputnik moment, a cause to rally around the way the nation did after the USSR launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957. While that event sparked massive growth in the space pro…

Now that Facebook has entered the space, Google appears to be ready to take it more seriously, and Foursquare is gaining some real traction, the other players in the location field need to start defining their…

Just when we thought the holiday season was over, we came across another reason to celebrate: Data Privacy Day 2011 is today.
The international event is the fourth annual “celebration of the dignity of th…

According to new research by Forrester, desktop videoconferencing isn’t yet taking the enterprise by storm. It found that nearly three-quarters of business technology users don’t want to use desktop videoc…

Here’s a video of a cool HTML5 advertisement running on the New York Times webpage on the iPad. (Yes, on the web, not in the app.) It turns the banner ad at the top of the page into a little game and takes adva…

Here is an example of Joe Biden saying something that’s basically common sense advice, but it still sounds kind of jackass-y because, well, Joe Biden is saying it about the nation’s desperate jobless people…

RealtyTrac is out with a new report on the number of foreclosures in the U.S. and rather than just doll out the dry numbers that no-one will really read Business Insider translated those numbers to dots on Goo…

A few consumers’ beef with Taco Bell this week offered some red meat to the blogosphere.
The conversation about the restaurant’s beef, spurred by a class-action lawsuit, seemed ready-made for viral media…

Facebook now carries a value of $82.9 billion, based on the closing price of the company’s shares in the latest private market auction, which occurred on SharesPost, according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The s…

Today, enterprise social software vendors are in a position of having to both differentiate products in a crowded market and make the business case for social in the enterprise. “Process” has become a mantra f…

How and Why I Use EvernoteThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Like all business owners I know, I’ve got more to do than time to do it. Without a system to stay productive I would get very little done. I’…

The start-up, now valued at $1 billion, says it will soon overtake Groupon in the U.S. market for online daily deals. CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy tells how it got there.

People always want to know how anybody is ever going to make money in social media.
Nevermind that Facebook revenues are well north of $2 billion on an annual basis – the question keeps getting asked.
Back in…

LivingSocial’s traffic skyrocketed by 80% last week with a little help from Amazon, closing the gap between it and group-buying leader Groupon.
Before last week, LivingSocial had one-tenth of the web traff…

In the last 30 days, I have seen my blog traffic jump by 81.3%. I have seen steady growth since I converted from TypePad to self-hosted WordPress two years ago (up 338.6%). But the last 30 days represented t…

We caught the interview Jim Breyer, Accel Partners VC and early investor in Facebook and Groupon (but NOT LinkedIn) just gave to Bloomberg TV from Davos.
The interview mostly touched on the LinkedIn IPO, mostly…

Picture this scene.
A reader of your blog and a loyal subscriber gets a new mobile device.
No problem: You’ve taken great care to make your site mobile friendly.
You’ve even taken the right steps to conve…

Best known for its consumer tech investments, the fund run by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz ventures into enterprise cloud computing.

With the iPhone 4 launching on the Verizon network on Feb. 10 and pre-orders starting on Feb. 3, now is a good time to go over some information on what you should and should not expect. But first, lets mak…

Squeezing the most out performance out of your network is called optimizing, and it isn’t very hard, and it doesn’t have to be all that expensive.

This post is republished from my original article on the Amex Open Forum website. It is part of “Small Business Friday” on this blog, where I share ideas and marketing techniques specifically to help small bu…

LinkedIn officially launched on May 5, 2003 with a total of 4,500 members in the first month. Known mostly as a business social network, LinkedIn has been adopted globally with nearly 2 billion people searches…

littlekorea writes Defense lawyers are increasingly gaining permission from US courts to mine the private comments and postings on Facebook accounts to be used as evidence during trials. The first example — n…

When you go into cardiac arrest, you’ve got about ten minutes to live if you don’t receive medical attention, and the average emergency response time is seven minutes after you dial 911. In an effort to get fo…

The mystery is solved. The map has been found. The X marks the spot. Heres where all your productivity—and in some cases much of your free time—vanishes: T…

LinkedIn Corp.’s plan to raise as much as $175 million in an initial public offering may be the first in a wave of share sales for U.S. social-networking companies.

GMGruman writes “The end of numbering for HTML versions beyond HTML5 hides two painful realities, argues Neil McAllister. One is that the HTML standards process has failed, becoming a seemingly never-ending bur…

Apple could cause some serious disruption in the mobile payments space if it enters the field as reported, say analysts.

Last year at SXSW, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley joined Frank Eliason (previously @comcastcares), Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang and me on stage to discuss the shifting landscape of social engagement….

This week, Boing Boing posted its entire 11 year archive (63,999 posts) in XML format. But Nicholas H.Tollervey from FluidDB wanted more.” XML is good, but having a searchable database of posts is better,” he…

I got my notification tonight inviting me to switch to the new Facebook messaging platform. If you’re interested, I recorded a screencast of my life switch so you can see how it should go an…

This post is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark as a new part of the Spark of Genius series that focuses on a new and innovative startup each day. Every Thursday, the program focuses on startups within the…

It’s official: LinkedIn’s long-awaited IPO is coming soon. Earlier today, the business and social network filed paperwork with the SEC. Although the document doesn’t reveal three important pieces of…

SlideShare, the YouTube of slideshows, is firmly entrenched as the place to go for presentations. Its embedded player is also highly visible across web sites. Compared to Audio and Video, presentations fall som…

I asked people to point out the most compelling Facebook fan pages they knew about. I was asking because I am interested in making something actually happen on Facebook. My efforts to market within Facebook h…

Hitwise has a chart that seems to show LivingSocial catching up with Groupon. Of course this is website traffic, which is not the most important metric; much more important are actual subscribers to the compani…

My guess is not lately.
When you first got a fancy job, you had a tie shortage, and thus attention was paid to ties. You bought “enough for now.” Then you solved the tie problem and moved on.
When you first b…

Maybe it’s jumping the gun, but when it comes to content marketing and your content strategy, I think you need to go beyond having an editorial calendar, assignments and the like. I think you…

Fraser Speirs:

The iPad is an intensely personal device. In its design intent it
is, truly, much more like a “big iPhone” than a “small laptop”.
The iPad isn’t something you pass around. It’s no…

Increasingly, digital marketers are looking to combat banner-blindness,
the instant turn-off that users experience when confronted by obvious
advertising online.
One company looking at new ways to combat t…

This illustrated map of Central Park individually depicts, labels, and categories by species every single significant tree in the park. All 19,630 of them.

Central Park Entire, The Definitive Illustrated Map i…

Novelist Michael Chabon, after filling in for Ta-Nehisi Coates for a week:

Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and
brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday…

LinkedIn’s S-1 filing was released today, and the filing includes a wealth of information that we’ve never seen before. This includes sales, profit, revenue breakdown and more. One interesting data point s…

When you’re working with a distributed team, your written communications absolutely have to be as clear as possible. A lot of in-person communication has absolutely nothing to do with the actual words we’re…

This news has actually come a little earlier than expected as Amazon has announced that it has reached its goal of seeing eBooks outsell paperbacks. The milestone was expected to be achieved in the spring, but…

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Facebook still continues to grow and with it the personalities, musicians, companies, and brands that participate continue to see huge fan followings.
The number of Facebook users current…

In writing my recent post about the failure of Google’s Knol, I went back to look at what I had written previously about it and I dug up a post from October of 2008, in which I discussed a series of predictions…

Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie

Back by popular demand, a post I wrote back in March with a new twist.
My business mentor and friend reminded me of the importance of setting the process for making your goals happen — you get things in moti…

Don’t you think these bizarre new media “visualizations” have gone too far? The picture above is not a map of Africa on Acid, it’s a new LinkedIn product called InMaps. Here is how the company describ…

I’d be surprised if you don’t immediately grab at least one of these productivity-enhancers.
Quick tip on Jan. 28, 2011: I just discovered these tools recently and am still trying them myself….

Today, TIME Magazine lists the 50 Best iPhone Apps for 2011…