Curated Stories July 19, 2010

On Friday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs held a press conference to address “Antennagate”, or the issues that iPhone 4 users have been having with the phone’s antenna.
With the conference, Jobs ended up coming out on to…

As we prepare to roll out our new statistics tools tomorrow, we are looking at some of the fastest growing Facebook Pages. Given that many of the same pages remain on the leaderboard, I’ve decided to select…

Adobe is working on a new kind of creative software specifically intended to help you publish digital magazines for tablet devices such as the iPad, the company revealed today.This new software, which will soon…

Foursquare says it’s in talks with all the major search engines to index the startup’s location data. We’re hearing that Google in particular may be in talks with all the major players in the location based so…

Geolocation service Loopt has just rolled out a new feature that lets users find out when their friends are nearby, whether or not they check in.The feature, which has been in beta for the last few weeks, takes…

When you’re desperate it’s hard to win business, get that job, market a product or do anything (like find a mate).

The trouble is that most people who are desperate, can’t even muster up the levity to see, fe…

When will we see the battle of the location-based services really come to a head? Will it be when Facebook finally comes out with its much anticipated entry into the LBS market? Or will it happen with Foursquar…

One year ago, in July 2009, Tumblr was going strong. They had 255 million pageviews that month. By November of last year, that was up to 420 million pageviews. But some new stats which Tumblr is releasing today…

Nichelle Morant was on the verge of losing her three-unit house in Brooklyn, New York, earlier this year, after tenants renting the second and third floors lost their jobs and moved out.

Steve Jobs and Apple were ready to ditch ATT six times in the last three years, according to a new story in Wired. (The story is not online yet, but Jason O’Grady at ZDNet summarized it.)
Wired says Apple and A…

Has your company spent seemingly countless hours tweeting on Twitter, networking on Facebook and writing the company blog? Have you found yourself wondering if it’s all a waste of time? Maybe that last Facebook…

Jason D. O’Grady / ZDNet:
Wired on the iPhone network meltdown — The August 2010 issue of Wired magazine has an article called #ATTFAIL Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown and its a fantastic read. Unf…

Behance, a platform for creative professionals, has just launched a new collaboration between its service and LinkedIn. Utilizing a new app called Creative Portfolio Display, users can now connect their portfol…

The media really, really, really loves to write about Apple and the iPhone these days. It reminds me of Google in 2004, when the media fell in love with the concept of search.
Besides the antennae story, which…

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.Web startups comprise one of the mo…

A new report detailing the relationship between Apple and ATT, the exclusive carrier of the iPhone in the U.S., reveals that Apple CEO Steve Jobs allegedly considered dropping ATT numerous times, and considered…

While Congress fights over extending unemployment insurance, Americans remain sour on the economy. But a few proposals show promise for encouraging growth.

In the past decade, Nantucket Island has served as a barometer for the fortunes of Wall Street. The glass cracked after years of unsustainable pressures. But almost by magic, the barometer is rising once more e…

Mark Cuban says he’s getting into the check-in game, and if you think existing check-in apps are intrusive, you need to be very afraid.
Mark just invested in a company “that takes video of an area and can tell…

So, Our Lady of Ginger Devotion Maureen Dowd wrote about how the Molesty Church says the attempted priestification of ladies is pretty much just as bad as making out with infants. And for the first time in the…

Re: the iPhone 4 antenna hubbub, Apple held firm in the face of constant coverage from tech blogs, a class-action lawsuit, and vocal customer complaints. So it’s interesting that the company finally blinked i…

Hello ladies! (this is only funny if you have seen the Oldspice commercials, otherwise this is a bit awkward for all of us…)
Over the past few weeks you may have seen that the Oldspice man has been respondin…

There isn’t much good that has come out of the Great Recession to date except the humbling of some big egos on Wall Street. However, there might be one small benefit that I’ve noticed after doing some coaching…

(This is the third of a five-part series about SEO for hyperlocal blogs/web sites. Future editions will be published on the next two Mondays.)
In the first two articles of this series, we’ve introduced SEO an…

Last week, Massachusetts’s Sun Chronicle newspaper launched a feature designed to minimize derogatory comments on the web site and make the paper a few bucks on the side.
Readers can write whatever they like, f…

Seepage and “undetermined anomalies at the well head” are being reported during the extended test phase of this fancy new wondercap. There are no pictures of this legendary seepage but the mere mention of…

This morning I received an email from a reader linking to an article from Ducati, the famous motorcycle company, about why they decided to remove their Corporate Blog and replace it with a Facebook Page. In th…

Remember back when people thought their Toyotas were trying to kill them? And then the company issued huge recalls after a bunch of people peeled into traffic, blaming stuck accelerators, floor-mats, and comput…

The unloved son of recessions is the place. The town or city. When the going stops being tough for national economies places pick up the pieces. So how can places respond to the situation they now find themselv…

Be Visible, Be Focused

Mike and Larry (not their real names) had an idea. It was simple. When they came to me they had already figured out to enlist other folks by inviting them to be partners, experts, a…

Online marketplace for outsourcing Freelancer.com, formerly known as GetAFreelancer has acquired virtual content marketplace Freemarket.com and is relaunching Freemarket’s platform under the Freelancer.com br…

I’ve been fascinated with Scott Schwertly’s company, Ethos3 Communications, for quite some time, having first blogged about the firm two years ago. It’s one of a small handful of companies that create d…

More than fifty free iWork templates are now available for education professionals, students and teachers…

Hot on the heels of the death of its Kin phone line, Microsoft is scrambling to get Windows Phone 7 (WP7) ready for its October launch. The company has said it is sending out “thousands” of preview phones r…

Last week, I visited Social Security Administration headquarters outside of Baltimore to speak about social media and government at its Employee Open Government Awareness Day. Before my presentation, I sat down…

Businesses that engage in “corporate social responsibility” (think of those that choose environmentally friendly materials or sell fair trade goods) aren’t always as successful as they…

Technology entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has just invested in a video company which can identify how many people are in a specific location at a particular time. While currently the technol…

“How do you know which projects to go with and which to leave behind?”
This is a question I’ve been asked almost every time I’ve spoken at events recently so I thought I’d jot down a few thought on th…

There are subtle, precise controls for getting your Facebook privacy back the way you like inside the social networks settings. If you want the nuclear option�…

The way people talk, we’d be forgiven for thinking that social networking is one big popularity contest. The idea often seems to be to amass as many contacts as possible, regardless of whether we’ve ever me…

Foursquare is in talks with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft about deals involving the service’s location-based check-in data, founder and CEO Dennis Crowley told The Telegraph in an interview, saying the compan…

The illegal drug known as Ecstasy may help patients with refractory post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a small pilot, phase II study.

There’s a scene in the animated series Futurama that cracks me up every time I think about it.
The show’s characters are at the horse track of the future, but there’s controversy when a…

Location-based social network Foursquare is in talks with Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo about possible data partnerships, The Telegraph reports.
Foursquare would provide an anonymized stream of check-in activity…

Brands are making plenty of money in social media: Dell Outlet’s Twitter account has generated millions for Dell, the Intel Channel Voice community has decreased costs by eliminating the need for expensive i…

What story do you tell yourself about yourself?I know that marketers tell stories. We tell them to clients, prospects, bosses, suppliers, partners and voters. If the stories resonate and spread and seduce, then…

It’s summer. Everybody’s been talking about hot temperatures. Here’s the Press Association, here’s Sky, here’s the Daily Record, and here’s the Daily Express, all insisting that a temperature can be…

As a digital marketing consultant, I work with marketing teams at a variety of different software companies across industries. Today I was pondering some of the common qualities behind what makes the best te…

If you’re wondering whether your router really needs a reset, or if you want a second opinion on downforeveryoneorjustme.com’s advice, Google Chrome appears to…

When you’re buying links, you know that you’re risking a site, that you’re going against Google’s guidelines (and let’s face it, that’s the engine we all want to conquer), and that you could end…

Illiterate glory slob Sarah Palin mangles English so that her brain-damaged followers can write “peoms” praising her greatness, so why can’t you liberal elitists realize her Twitter-Facebooks are better…

HTC Corp. said one of its phones named by the Apple Inc. as having antenna signal problems received 35-times less complaints than for the iPhone 4.

We’re hardwired to play games. We play them for fun. We play them in our social interactions. We play them at work.

That last one is tricky. “Games” and “work” don’t seem like a natural pairing. Their couplin…

If you did a tag cloud on what was being bounced around the social media echo chamber in the last 14 days, the word “influence” would probably be the largest. Yes, even larger than “Old Sp…

Foursquare’s Co-founder Dennis Crowley claims the company is in talks with major companies in the search space, including giants such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.“Our data generates hugely interesting tr…

Appstream, a simple visualisation tool to help iPad owners discover new apps via a matrix-style wall (perhaps inspired by Apple’s own efforts at its World Wide Developer Conference), appears to be resonating wi…

Even as President Obama signs the mammoth financial regulation legislation designed to prevent another economy-busting meltdown, banks are already gaming the proposed regulations to generate new profits. For an…

There are a lot of ideas coming to life right now thanks to social media and networks. A year or so ago, I asked — Has Web 2.0 has made you happier? Are
your online relationships as productive or…

When you have privacy, you value it more. But when the starting point is that you don’t have privacy, you value privacy far less.

We’re used to seeing start-ups built on top of APIs. We even wrote a series of posts to do it yourself. Fueled by the popularity of location-sharing site FourSquare, marketers are using the FourSquare API (ou…

Gorgeous, image-rich magazines with long-form content, published periodically. Sometimes it feels like that’s what the iPad was made for. On its second birthday from inside HP Labs, the do-it-yourself magazin…

I finally bit the bullet today and did something I’ve been thinking of doing for a long time: I’ve made the switch from an iPhone to an Android phone, specifically the HTC Desire.
The iPhone 4 isn’t avai…

Quicken Online users have known for some time that the product they love would be terminated this year. With the shiny new Mint.com acquisition on board it was only a matter of time before they figured out that…

This blog was founded in 2003 on the philosophy of a read/write Web – a Web in which people can create content as easily as they consume it. This trend eventually came to be known as Web 2.0 – although others p…

You’ve got to feel good about yourself, and other people, before you can reach your potential. Otherwise, your life is going to be like a psychic game of Snakes and Ladders where all you do…

“How much time should I spend on Twitter?” is a question I get asked repeatedly. And last week one person upped the game by asking, “But what if I only have 20 minutes a day?”
OK, I accept the challeng…

Increasingly the issue of ownership is a stumbling block when trying to set up and organise an effective social media strategy, so how do you decide who owns your social media?
Simple, realise that no-one does….

Apple’s press conference last Friday was a notable event for the company. Not simply because Steve Jobs took the stage, but because the purpose of the press conference was to address problems being reported wit…

It is widely accepted that SEO has evolved from simplistic initiatives such as keyword density and frequency within a page of content. Search algorithms are continually evolving to understand context and attitu…

We’ve collected 10 hilarious Old Spice Guy video responses right here to celebrate one of the most popular social media campaigns of all time. Among the fantastic responses: a marriage proposal, an attempt t…

If you speak, write books, or blog, you will get criticism. It is inevitable. I have certainly had my share. I’d like to say that my skin has gotten thicker with age, but it hasn’t. Criticism still stings….

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.One of the keys to being a successf…

Very excited about the upcoming week here on HLB. In addition to part three of the SEO/hyperlocal blog series, I’m expecting to publish an excellent guest post on Wednesday. And if all goes well, an article a…

In an effort to encourage more business owners to take advantage of its Tags advertising program, Google Places is offering a 30-day trial to users who sign up by July 23.

The Tags program was one of a hand…