Curated Stories July 13, 2010

This tweet from Refe Tuma raves about the way you can integrate Twitter with Highrise:

Heres a video showing how to set it up:

Btw, you can follow 37signals on Twitter at twitter.com/37signals.

The Department of Transportation reports that driver error—throttles wide open and brakes not engaged—was the cause in dozens of Toyota crashes. According to the Wall Street Journal, only one fatal incident…

Given the amount of coverage about the iPhone 4 antenna issue, you’d think it was the first sign of the apocalypse or something. It’s one thing for tech blogs to talk ourselves in circles about an issue, it…

With its most recent privacy backlash seemingly behind it, Facebook surged ahead to a new traffic record in the US during the month of June. According to comScore, the social network pulled in more than 141 mi…

When it comes to troubleshooting the Mac, there are many cheap and some expensive utilities you can buy to get the job done; however, there are also some very robust free options out there for troubleshooting m…

Most marketers are eager to achieve a level of engagement with current and prospective customers, but the majority stop dead in their tracks when they consider this question: Where am I going to find the time t…

Old Spice is doing pretty well with it’s recent video series, starring Isaiah “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” Mustafa. Since February this year, they posted just over 20 video’s on their YouTube channel, in…

I saw this tweet today. And while it was penned by someone who, in general, has been pretty approachable, all I could think was, “How arrogant.” I purposefully did not add this person’s name…

The humble blog has developed from small beginnings to become a multi-media rich social media technology platform for personal branding, corporate thought leadership, an outlet for people’s hobbies, passion…

There’s some good news for third party networks that want to sell ads on Apple’s mobile devices. The Jesus Phone maker isn’t currently enforcing its overly strict rules designed to keep competitors from selling…

Twaggies.com is the first start-up I’ve ever, er, started up that’s made it out of the incipient early BETA test phase and has actually brought people joy. So I thought it was high time I introduced it to y…

Wish someone would give you a little respect? Want to keep the French from colonizing Central America? You know what song and what doctrine to turn to, but do you know who actually wrote them? Here are the s…

The slide deck that you show to VCs in your meetings should do more than address the requisite topics. Your presentation should tell a story that helps investors understand why this is an attractive opportun…

Give Twitter credit for growing — mostly smoothly — into a massive service from a tiny niche tool over the last several years.
All those people who called Twitter a passing fad in 2008 look pretty silly now….

San Francisco-based micro-blogging service Posterous launched a marketing campaign back in June that raised a few eyebrows across the Web for its apparently brazen approach. The company has been rolling out new…

How do you get bloggers, fans and random Internet folks to make your campaign go viral? Namecheck them in a personalized monologue delivered by a shirtless man, of course! That’s right, everyone’s favorite…

Facebook is testing out a new way of getting new Facebook Page administrators to get their Page off the ground and active. As pictured below, the company is encouraging administrators to post status updates, s…

Yup, it seems, according to Today’s Christian Woman, that one out of six women (Christian women included) are being lured into pornography addiction.
Now I want to just clarify one thing before going any fu…

FaceTime is the compelling video telephony app for the iPhone 4. And as the millions of units are out in the hands of users, so come the annoyances and the tips. Here are a few about speeding up initiation, wor…

Here’s a quick anti-pattern (an anti-pattern is something you want to avoid) that I occasionally catch in our markup and CSS.

I opened some code for a new user management screen we’re working on. The lef…

In 90 seconds I present my case for digital marketing leadership: Marketers are translators.
They’re no longer artists who deliver messages, they’re interactive, experiential shepherds that discover need as it…

Yeah, let’s go there.
Over at SEO Book yesterday, Peter Da Vanzo wrote a punchy post about how when it comes to content farming, SEOs Get It, Journalists Don’t. Honestly, I’m not so sure SEOs get it eit…

Yelp is looking for a creative and results-oriented media specialist who can help us scale our local communications efforts throughout the U.S. All domestic media relations are handled in-house and the right ca…

Few can deny that National Public Radio (NPR) excels in audio storytelling.

Now the organization is offering an Audio Storytelling Workshop on Aug. 4 in Culv er City, CA, and the deadline to apply is tomorrow….

It was just a year ago that Khris Loux – then CEO of JS-Kit – declared the “death of the comment” at the hand of websites like Twitter and Flickr, announcing his venture with Echo. Today, it looks like Loux has…

Edward Harrison submits:By Frederick Sheehan Frederick Sheehan is the author of Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession (McGraw-Hill, 2009)…

By now you know, that there are some serious questions about the new iPhone 4 and its external wraparound antenna.
Perhaps the most damning of all was the credible and neutral Consumer Reports flunking it on re…

Juliet Schor: Plenitude from toddboyle on Vimeo.
I just watched a talk by economist Juliet Schor, Plenitude: Building a Post-Work Society with Resilient Community Technologies, with some interesting thoughts a…

Headed out to do some shopping and looking for a few good deals? Thanks to the proliferation of smartphones and their accompanying mobile applications, the ability to access geo-targeted coupons from nearby mer…

This series is supported by Webtrends Mobile Analytics, which lets you monitor the adoption and usage of your mobile apps and mobile sites. To keep up with Webtrends Mobile, add their blog to your RSS reader.On…

Although the internet will often reject attempts to pander to it, the Old Spice “I’m on a Horse” guy is pretty much loved by everyone.
The commercials starring Isaiah Mustafa have gone wildly viral, and…

It is great that Michelle Obama is advising US citizens to vacation in the Gulf. There are, in the end, thousands of miles of beaches that the oil has not touched yet. Getting involved in the e…

Apparently some Facebook users are still worried that one day Facebook is going to charge. To calm those fears, Facebook now says on its front page it will “always” be free (via All Facebook).

See Also: Sudden…

Only five years after its launch, the Huffington Post is rivaling established news publications such as the New York Times in terms of popularity online, and it is on track to take over the world.
Co-founder an…

It took three weeks of real-world use before I figured it out. But I’m finally convinced that the iPhone 4′s antenna problem is real, that it’s affecting my phone in certain situations, and that there’…

Women’s clothing retailer Ann Taylor has just launched its first Foursquare promotion.Shoppers who check in to one of the company’s eight New York City stores will receive 15% off their full-price purchase…

If a website touted misleading healthcare information, you’d hope the government would do something about it. But what do you do when the government is the one feeding the public bad information?
Last week t…

As millions of Americans fall behind on bills, debt collection law firms have been clogging courtrooms with suits seeking repayment.

See a photo of Barry, his bio, and Part 1 of this QA.

QA with Barry Poltermann, Questions 3 and 4:

Q: What people or entities have been most influential to you in your story work and why?

A: My first…

Shane Snow is a regular contributor to Mashable and tweets at @shanesnow. This post was co-authored by Phin Barnes, a principal at First Round Capital, SneakerheadVC and creator of the Xbox game, Yourself!Fitne…

Listening to first-time entrepreneurs talk about their competitive advantages is as predictably invalid as the local weatherman’s 10-day forecast.
Between this blog and reviewing applications to Capital Facto…

Take Too Long to Teach Someone? How Long Will It Take if You Don’t?

Personal bandwidth who has enough?
Whether we work for a huge corporation or work for ourselves, learning to ask for help in positive, p…

Talking …

Sometimes I talk without listening first. Sometimes I just spout off what I know without finding out what the person I’m talking to might know about the subject. When it happens to me, I’m…

After ranking the iPhone 4 above all other cellphones, Consumer Reports decided the antenna problem it had originally failed to replicate in its testing facilities was serious enough to withdraw its recommendat…

I read David’s post worrying about the end of the free internet and I had to respond, as I strongly disagree that free and advertising-supported content is the future. If anything, it is advertising-supported c…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Small businesses grew more pessimistic about their economic outlook in June in the face of weak sales and political uncertainty, the National Federal of Independent Businesses said on Tue…

Apple has spectacularly botched the response to complaints about the iPhone 4 antenna problem.
The simple solution to the problem was to fess up that yes, there’s a slight problem with the hardware design of th…

iPhone 4 recall “highly unlikely,” Wall Street analysts tell CNBC’s David Faber (via CNBC).Join the conversation about this story »

Next time youre on the phone with a call center, listen carefully to what the rep says. Chances are youll hear your name several times, hear a tone of empathy, maybe an Im sorry. It would be nice to think the r…

When I put together this short presentations of videos that explain social media, I included one from the Erik Qualman over at Socialnomics. Now it has been updated with more facts and figures – and yes, it use…

Sites like Yelp and Get Satisfaction have empowered consumers in recent years, with companies being forced to wrangle their way into these consumer-driven, organic customer service communities. But that’s abo…

Instead of a blog post, I decided to create a quick presentation on how (and why) to create remarkable digital content. These ideas are likely not new to some of you, however I still felt the need to create s…

LivingSocial, the daily deal site that is often referred to as the main competitor to Groupon (see our extensive guide on group-buying sites in the United States and beyond here), is experiencing fast growth….

Consumer Reports confirmed yesterday what many new iPhone 4 owners already knew – that the phone indeed has a reception issue when held in the now famous “iPhone 4 Death Grip” – and made news by recommending ag…

SPEAKING of style books, I’ve just seen for the first time this sensible feature from the “Chicago Manual of Style”, a monthly QA. In the world of writing, many people crave hard-edged, unbendable advice. If th…

At any given time, something like four percent of the US population is engaged in some form of new-company-creation. And that narrow definition of entrepreneurship doesn’t count all of the managers inside est…

DoubleClick cofounder Kevin O’Connor’s new project is… FindTheBest.com, a “comparison search engine.”Join the conversation about this story »

Tucked inside a big Newsweek piece on the “The Creativity Crisis” is a sidebar filled with ideas on boosting your creativity, but also that of those you’re wor…

One of the things I often say that most bloggers get wrong is they sacrifice keyword focus for being clever, cute, or entertaining. Yes, it is important that you make your blog posts as interesting as possible…

HP Labs India has created a new technology called SiteonMobile which allows mobile phone users to “surf the Web” via SMS text message or voice commands. The cloud-based technology is designed to broaden access…

Like many others, I recently purchased an iPad out of curiosity. While my intentions were of discovery, I quickly found some productivity gains with blogging.
The upside to blogging with an iPad is that it’s…

In this week’s episode of Social Mediators, Joe Thornley and I talk with Terry Fallis about how he and his publisher, McClelland Stewart, are using social media to find and cultivate a fan b…

When Apple made it clear that apps created with Adobe’s Flash Packager
for iPhone would not be permitted in the App Store, Steve Jobs had an
explanation: “We know from painful experience that letting a third
pa…

I was talking with a client the other day about how to optimize their content. They kept saying, in a way of trying to understand what they need to do to improve their website, that what they need to do is to c…

Social media doesn’t scale. That’s right, social media doesn’t scale. Consumers will only increase their adoption of social technologies, most social networking data shows this is going ‘up and to t…

Entertainment brands.. showing us how transmedia is done
Last week was Pixel Lab, Power to the Pixel‘s (@powertothepixel) cross-media workshop.
I joined a group of tutors and producers, half with film/trans…

Posterous, the “dead simple place to post everything”, has won a lot of praise for building an easy-to-use publishing platform. And it’s so confident that users of other platforms will like it that it recently…

This is part 1 of a five-part series that outlines how to use Twitter for business. Parts two and three follow tomorrow and Thursday. The remainder of the series will be posted next week.
So, someone suggest…

PC Magazine – From the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad, Apple has a nearly perfect track record of re-energizing lackluster product spaces. FaceTime, the company’s take on the video phone, is no different.

Microsoft this morning shared additional details of its upcoming new mobile platform, Windows Phone 7, focusing on service and entertainment connectivity. As part of the keynote address during the Microsoft Wor…

As the need for managing social media evolves, so too do the technologies that help you manage your accounts. One of the most significant developments in managing social channels are Social Media Management S…

Do you have a Delicious account? What on earth is Delicious?Delicious is an apt name for a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag,
save, manage and share web pages from a
centralized source. It…

One of my favorite learning and teaching metaphors comes by way of both the martial arts and Quantum Teaching (Amazon link). Imagine for a moment that the knowledge you have to impart to students is in the shap…

Breaking down the different aspects of a cloud computing platform can be no simple feat. That’s especially true with Windows Azure. The service has multiple components.

Ray Wang, an industry analyst, broke do…

We’ve seen enough reports of just how lucrative it has been for various law firms to get into the mass automated threat letter business by demanding payment from accused file sharers based on very slight eviden…

According to Domino’s UK financial earnings report, the company has increased its pre-tax profit by nearly 29%, which equates to roughly $26 million. The UK pizza retailer attributes social media initiatives…

By now you’ve probably heard of Google’s App Inventor for Android, a web-based development environment that’s meant to make it possible for non-developers to build their own Android applications. The tech…

Earlier today, Joel Johnson wrote an interesting post on Gizmodo simply titled “You Are Not Your Phone.” It reads sort of like a modern day existential rant with the ultimate point being: we don’t cater t…

Mashable’s Spark of Genius series highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, see details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark…

I have always maintained that people are fooling themselves if they think social networks will always keep their promise to protect your personal and generated data. At some point, whether for collateral or as…

I’m sitting at a camp table with Megin Hatch, who’s talking about her passion for Ethiopia and her plans around it. She had it in her head for a while when she stumbled across Lobsters in the Rough, which c…

When it comes to your success, your advisors can make you or break you. In the 1990s, I made a terrible financial mistake. As a result of my success as a writer and a speaker, I made some significant extra inco…

Type 1. You can take a class where you learn technique, facts and procedures.Type 2. You can take a class where you learn to see, learn to lead and learn to solve interesting problems.The first type of teaching…

We’re very pleased to have our very first guest post here at Thoughtwrestling. Annemieke writes about the mind, personal development and more at Mindstructures.com. In this post, Annemieke…

The following essay is also my AdAge column this week.

Wither the web? It’s hard to believe but soon, if not already, the web is going to become a lot less interesting to consumers — and just as it appro…

Guest post by Elizabeth Sosnow, Managing Director of BlissPR, a New York City based public relations firm. She develops and supervises strategic communications programs for major companies in professional and…

Sponsorship is brilliant for many reasons; supporting a great cause or event, building awareness of your brand with a new audience and changing opinions of your brand through affiliation.
When it comes to so…

Fairfax Cone once said, “Advertising is what you do when you can’t go see somebody. That’s all it is.”
He was so right.
There is no better way to sell something than in-person. Talking to someone face-t…

Color As Branding ElementThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Marketing podcast with Kate Smith (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes
Color has built in mean…

Social Media Monetization is becoming THE hot issue in online community chatter. Probably because companies are getting past the “why should we care?” and into “how do we get some dosh?�…

The latest Microsoft operating system may be selling seven copies a second, but it’s no match for the behemoth Windows XP, still the most popular OS in the world despite recent nefarious attempts (we kid) to in…

Bigger, better, faster, stronger?
I’m increasingly convinced that we’re entering into a new phase of computing: one where competitive advantage is going to be gained or lost based on the quality of your dat…

Google’s Chrome browser has a well-established reputation for being not only extremely fast at rendering JavaScript, but also robust in its support of cutting-edge HTML5 technologies.
Both of these capabili…

As we have mentioned previously, the success of augmented reality depends partly on its exposure through major mainstream brands. Late last week, the Ben Jerrys ice cream empire took its first steps into the w…

Is cheap social media advertising undermining the price point of online advertising? According to AdAge, “Social Networks Sink Online-Ad Pricing.”
Overabundant inventory is a growing issue online. And there ar…

Flavorwire writes:As fans of both his work and the wonderful movie based on it, American Splendor, we were deeply saddened to hear of Harvey Pekar’s death. … Many (fans and detractors alike) will remember…

Amazon’s looking to hook ‘em while they’re young. The online retailer has launched a program for college students — appropriately called Amazon Students — that offers a free one-year subscription t…

Apple has been catching some bad breaks with its latest iPhone release. And while early leaks of the iPhone prototype on Gizmodo don’t seem to have eroded sales of the company’s latest device, a small antenna i…

There is a a saying in the offline world of real estate that there are three things that are critical when considering buying property and they are position, position, position!!
In the online digital univers…

So, you’ve decided that you need to get out of the house and are looking for a coworking space. But how do you make the most of the experience? Here are some of my favorite coworking tips:

Choose your s…

The Boston Globe is encouraging mobile users to hit the streets of Boston and learn a little more about the city’s attractions with a new checkin-based scavenger hunt.If you think the publication is using Fou…

Microsoft announced at its Worldwide Partners Conference today that it will launch a CRM SaaS service and an app marketplace as parts of CRM 2011, itself a part of Microsoft Dynamics. CRM 2011, formerly codena…

At the MobileBeat conference today, Samsung’s CSO Omar Khan talked about what he calls “the year of the superphone.”Since the iPhone made its debut in 2007, we’ve seen incredible strides in mobile hardw…