Curated Stories July 2, 2010

Apple has has another apparently widespread problem with the iPhone 4: cut-off calls if you press the screen to your cheek.

Apple’s App Store is not only attracting more paid apps than Android but higher priced ones as well, Distimo found today. The iPad and iPhone stores have about 73 to 80 percent of paid apps, but Google’s store…

Six Thinking Hats is a thinking methodology based on the premise that the human brain thinks and processes information in six distinct ways: via questions, emo…

crimeandpunishment writes
“The US government is making colleges and universities join in the fight against digital piracy by threatening to pull federal funding. Beginning this month, a provision of the Higher…

Perhaps you heard, Microsoft has killed the Kin, its mobile device that was all of six weeks old. Some people were upset by this. Now they have a place to let our their grief, and pay their respects: KinRIP.com…

Since our piece on Wednesday, we’ve had more trusted sources step forward to fill in some blanks and clarify the story behind the amazingly swift fall from grace that Microsoft’s Kin phones have experienced si…

More people are browsing the Web via an iPad than on an Android-powered device, according to new monthly browser usage data from one analytics firm.

Jesus Diaz / Gizmodo:
Why Apple’s iPhone 4 Update Won’t Fix Your Reception Problem — This graphic shows why some people experience the iPhone 4 signal drop problems while others havent been able to repr…

Facebook just announced the availability of a new feature for users creating accounts on the social network: Suggested Interests. Facebook will now recommend that new users sign up for updates from (“Like”) pu…

10 key questions answers to help improve your #faceboook marketing – http://bit.ly/a3yPuN (via @hubspot)

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…

Unemployment at a record high
People coming, people going, people born to die
Don’t ask me, because I don’t know why
But it’s like that, and that’s the way it is
–Run DMC
My single biggest personal…

Most experts agree: The Internet improves social relations and will continue to do so over the next decade. And you thought the machines were going to rise up and murder us all.The Pew Research Center’s Inter…

Last night Facebook made a relatively big announcement for developers: the company will be removing publisher attachments. The idea behind it was that applications could create custom attachments that would sh…

A study which was recently completed by Mulley Communications found that Facebook users spend more time looking at advertisements on profile pages than on the homepage. More specifically, “71% of users looke…

Today’s New York Times has an article that gives more credence to rumors that Apple is planning a major overhaul of its Apple TV product, only this time basing its living room approach on iOS.While the initia…

Dan Klamm is the Outreach Marketing Coordinator at Syracuse University Career Services. This post was co-authored by Alana Edmunds who is an IT Project Manager and Social Strategist for Recruiting Staffing…

Keith Chambers is the founder and president of The Chambers Group, where he has worked with brands like Clorox, Del Monte, Arm
Hammer, Scotch-Brite and Equal to launch new products for 30 years.
He has spend…

Yesterday I was invited along to Curious 01 in London. Any event with ‘curious’ in the title sounds like it might be interesting and this was. Curated by Paul Bay, a group of good nice people turned up,…

Here’s my latest post at Practical Ecommerce…

The more time I spend looking under the hood of social media marketing as it relates to ecommerce, studying trends, seeing what’s developing, the more I’m convin…

In the ad world, anything is still possible. Dancing hamsters can sell cheap cars.

I love journalism. I love it with a passion. I love good journalism. Well executed journalism. Well researched journalism.
I care less about the AP Style Guide and more about engaging content. I care less about…

The FTC is struggling to find a realistic model to ‘protect’ newspapers from the Internet.
So far the proposals have included tax incentives to allow papers to buy each other and save each other and imposing ta…

Each one of us has gotten ourselves wherever we are. Yes, you’re responsible for every action you take. Yes, you’re responsible for every reaction you have. And yes, your success (or lack thereof) is yours…

In The Myth Of Great Content Marketing Itself, Darren said that:
The reality is that many blogs produce quality content that doesn’t get read. The reason isn’t that the blog’s not worth reading – but in…

THIS week The Economist publishes a leader on fairness. Or, strictly speaking, “fairness”, for it concerns not so much the substance of what is or isn’t fair but rather how the word is abused in contemporary Br…

At a conference in France last month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the site will reach 1 billion users sometime next year.
When we reported this news, a reader challenged it, writing, “Two thirds of those…

Steve Radick is a communications consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton, a global technology and strategy consulting firm. He has worked with clients from across the U.S. government to develop and implement strat…

Here’s an awesome Americana-inspired opportunity to think about as we head into the 4th of July weekend …

In a project called Exploring My America, Sears Auto Center is sponsoring 21 road trips along nine…

Before we try to expand it, we need to first define it. What is influence? What does it mean to you?Dictionary.com says influence is:(Noun) The capacity or power of persons or things to be a compelling force on…

Andy Grove / Bloomberg:
How to Make an American Job Before It’s Too Late — Recently an acquaintance at the next table in a Palo Alto, California, restaurant introduced me to his companions: three young…

We’ve written about Allvoices, a citizen journalism platform that is seeing fast growth internationally. In fact, the site, which was launched in 2008, is even approaching CNN’s iReport in terms of worldwid…

How much control should national and corporate sponsors have over athletes’ behavior both on and off the field? It’s a question that is on the minds of many as they watch the World Cup, especially after the con…

A Guest Post by Alexis Bonari

If a blog is suffering from low readership, repetitive posts, or a general lack of innovation, chances are that it also lacks collaborative strategies. Some bloggers may be he…

“Once we emerge from the immediate crisis, the long-term economic gains to communities that have been left behind in the digital age will be immeasurable.”
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Barack Obama announced o…

We love a good DIY project, but in every DIYers life, you still—every now and then—need to call a professional. Get the work done without getting hosed wit…

It’s tough out there. No jobs. Home values plummeting. And Americans are reacting by heading to bankruptcy court.

Vertical search is already a big focus in the search
market, and Google has its sights set on the skies. And we’re not talking about the infamous Google party plane.

Yesterday, Google announced that it is buyi…

PetPlace had a familiar problem last year. The pet information site had a popular newsletter that resonated well with advertisers and readers. Like every content creator, they wanted more viewers. But they didn…

There was a time when I was the family “tech guy.” Assembling sounds systems and debugging computers was my household contribution. These days, however, I’m no…

Roadmap to fandom
Microsoft watcher Mary Branscombe has an excellent ZDNet post on Why do we (love to) hate Microsoft, and asks:…

There are thousands of apps available for the iPad, some
free, some reasonably priced, and some shockingly expensive – but which
is best? Does price tag indicate quality, or can you get great tools
free of…

The internet is a big place, and marketers need to choose the correct channels to generate awareness and love for their products. It has never been more important to do this. Traditional marketing channels are…

How to have a personal brand-building background image on your Twitter profile that looks like it came from a professional graphic designer… almost.
Although there are many websites that le…

These Jobs Ain’t Coming BackThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing
A great deal of tension seemed to surround today’s jobs numbers and for some reason it feels like people are holding their breath wondering…

I have spent the past two years working in what was Europe’s largest independent digital marketing agency. An agency that won countless awards, conducted some ground breaking online display work, was the first…

Apple’s iPhone 4 video calling stands a good chance at becoming a widely adopted system. But it’ll rely on a catalyst, and I believe it’s the PC.
I’ll just wait for the day I get asked to do a video…

After initially dismissing the reports about the iPhone 4 antenna reception issue, Apple has officially admitted it exists, promising a software fix in a couple of weeks. There’s a catch, though.Apple’s pro…

Remember when Google was going to buy social news site Digg?
It never happened, supposedly because back during the Web 2.0 heydays, the people running Digg thought it was worth much more than the $200 million o…

Svetlana Geier and her five elephantsW.S. Merwin, the newly named 82-year-old poet laureate of the USA, likes to tell of visiting the great Ezra Pound when he, Merwin, was a young poet in search of a voice. Pou…

Google Voice is packed with more features than you can shake a stick at. Here’s what you need to know to get started with the free phone service.

Cleaning up a Word document with too many formats.

Apple is exploring new alternatives to get content into the living room, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.

One of the things that could make casual, social QA sites even more fun is “multiplayer” features that allow you to interact with groups of more than one person at a time.Formspring has just added such a fe…

The novel form to which I have devoted so much time, and still attempt, is no mere story (favored word of newscasters), nor dialogue among scene settings, nor anything “well made,” nor a page turner, so called,…

Anyone used to be able to send a postcard to a U.S. service member by addressing it to “Any Service Member.” Now a name is required to send a physical letter. That’s where the Gratefulapp mashup comes in….

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….

This week we’ve been exploring the emergence of the Semantic Web among companies like Best Buy and Google. It’s all thanks to RDFa, code that is inserted into the HTML of web pages to add extra meaning. The inc…

Blogger, Google’s blog publishing platform, has just been given a useful new feature many a Blogger user will appreciate: near real-time statistics (via Louis Gray).
Dubbed Blogger Stats, the feature is ava…

If you choose to manage a project, it’s pretty safe. As the manager, you report. You report on what’s happening, you chronicle the results, you are the middleman.If you choose to run a project, on the other han…

When retailers send out emails to their mailing lists, they might hope to see a jump in online sales. But according to a study conducted by Lightspeed Research on behalf of email marketer e-Dialog, they should…

Do you sit around reminiscing about the good old days?

As much fun as that may sound, I personally always held a high level of contempt for those who spent a lot of time living in their past. The kind of peopl…

A Verizon Wireless version of the iPhone will create a boom in sales of downloadable apps, strengthening Apple’s ties to developers

Former Intel chief Andy Grove says “job-centric” leadership and incentives are needed to expand U.S. domestic employment again

Lessons from a Jobsian battle
The desktop market was won by Microsoft in large part because of its appeal to the broadest segment of the developer population — cue the Steve Ballmer fight song, complete with…

Last month, I participated in Web Content 2010 (here is the presentation on higher purpose content marketing).

Someone (who asked not to be named) sent me a number of tweets from that event that they fo…

As a mobile developer / publisher, the Apple App Store is as a much a distribution floodgate as it is an enigma. Being featured within the app store guarantees massive distribution and consequently begins a vir…

Tomorrow HISTORY — otherwise known as the epoch-chronicling network, the History Channel — will start promoting its Foursquare presence with a new spot. The ad in question puts Foursquare front-and-center a…

You may feel like all the tech press has talked about this week is Apple’s new iPhone 4. If you thought that was literally the case, though, you’d be wrong. We did some counting and dividing and looked at the…

When we started our little company, Katie, Liz and I would sit at my neighborhood Starbucks and co-work. That was four years ago. That experience prompted us to start WebWorkerDaily, our blog that is about the…

The iOS 4-compatible apps continue to roll-in. The latest is Foursquare which now includes fast app switching and high resolution artwork for the iPhone 4′s retina display. And this latest version, 1.9, inclu…

As a high schooler I was enrolled in honors and AP classes, taking fine art lessons in my spare time. I chose to go to art school, and quickly identified with design as a satisfying outlet for my right brain cr…

Brian Maupin is my hero, he had the balls to take on Apple’s iPhone 4 with a very convincing, yet funny video about why customers should buy the EVO and not the iPhone 4. Unfortunately he’s not Best Buy’…

While the social, real-time Web is hogging all the buzz as of lately, it’s still important to keep an eye on good old fashioned search engine optimization for your company’s site. SEO can be an expensive endea…

Say what you will about the iPhone 4, but mine’s a lemon. Reviewers have called it “the best smartphone,” “worth upgrading” and “game changing,” but they’re all bogus superlatives that don’t a…

Social media marketing is the latest hyped business marketing method and it is proving to be a very effective way of marketing your business when done correctly.
Most chief marketing officers know that e-mail m…

One Illinois school district will have teachers and students using iPod Touch devices in classrooms this fall. District staff received 15 hours of training on using the devices for individualizing lessons and h…

Looks like the folks over at TechCrunch somehow got their hands onto an unreleased version of a Google Voice desktop app. It’s apparently called “Gizmo5 by Goo…

Congratulations Crowley and crew. You’ve got yourself another $20 million smackers to coast along on until your ship really comes in.
I have to admit though that even while I was laughing my ass off at the…