Curated Stories July 29, 2010

If a word in the dictionary was misspelled, how would we know?
–Steven Wright
You don’t have to worry about the word contentrepreneur, it’s too new to be in dictionaries. But to build a career in a digita…

Should Microsoft build a phone of its own? Over at Ars Technica, Peter Bright is arguing that it should. The case is pretty straightforward: The iPhone is as good as it is in large part because Apple designed (…

The Wall Street Journal offers a look at sites that offer free software tools for managing a business and gives a shoutout to Backpack.

Backpack helps small businesses, agencies and entrepreneurs keep and trac…

RIM is expected to announce details of the iPhone-esque BlackBerry 9800 next week. Tony Bradley of PCWorld looks at what the new smartphone could mean for RIM

Extensions have now gone public with the newly released Safari 5.0.1. Here’s a list of seven extensions you should install right away. Also, be sure to read our previous list of 25 extensions worth checking o…

Remember that torrent yesterday that contained the personal information off of 100 million scraped Facebook profiles? I thought it was strange that the guy did…

A great anecdote from Daniel Ellsberg about what he told first-time government employee Henry Kissinger about the power and limitations of the security clearances he was about to receive.

First, you’ll be exhi…

Foursquare’s male-female ratio approaching 60/40″ via @alexJoin the conversation about this story »

I spent the month of May working with Albert Wenger out of the Union Square Ventures offices and had the chance to dive deep into the New York Consumer Internet scene in the past few weeks.
What I am seeing le…

This series is supported by Gillette. Learn more about Gillette and its products at Gillette.com.Video is a tricky spot for most blogs and personal sites, especially when that video is meant to represent you….

While driving home this afternoon, my wife’s car was rear-ended. The car that she was following stopped suddenly, forcing her to stop suddenly. The next driver in the chain wasn’t quite able to stop in ti…

You know the drill: blurry shots of phone get leaked… user’s manual gets leaked… excited would-be buyers voraciously consume manual’s contents… phone finally gets released. Indeed, that’s precisely the s…

When I was 12, using a Performa 600CD, my parents gave me an external trackpad accessory that connected via ADB (a moment of silence for Apple Desktop Bus, please… thank you) for my bir…

We’re not certain that this date is going to hold — things like this have an uncanny tendency to slip at the last possible moment — but we’re at least hopeful to see some internal Sprint communication that t…

Twitter rolled out User Streams to its users for the first time this week, through limited beta offerings by third-party applications TweetDeck and Echofon for Mac. This new, streaming API has been long in the…

School is starting in late August and already a few universities are touting their decision to make the iPad a part of the classroom, as an important tool in teaching.
Institutions such as George Fox University…

Given that Quora is filled with a ton of great content and practically every other online publication is quoting the answers on the site, I figured that it would be a good idea to start posting Quora questions…

Jesus. Maybe literally.
Fox News has a long and illustrious history of saying some fairly outrageous things. A story today on FoxNews.com may be one of the best yet — certainly from a tech perspective.
The po…

Phone Scoop yesterday discovered new regulatory filings posted by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission showing a new Sprint-branded 3G mobile hotspot device manufactured by ZTE that appears to be in the…

The company is still growing. But its core business is slowing, its stock is down, and competition is fierce. Can Google find its footing in this brave new world?

As part of its annual Financial Analyst Meeting today, Microsoft is touting its cloud momentum and announcing several new high-profile customers whove selected the companys cloud computing services: Dow Chemic…

Facebook can be a great tool for the journalist. It will allow you to get inside news by following the correct pages. It can provide tips for a future story,keep you in touch with the news, and the world in gen…

This morning as I was running, I listened to Episode 99 [iTunes link] of the Catalyst Podcast. It was an interview that Brad Lomenick did with Charlene Li, author of the new book, Open Leadership.

One thing in…

Microsoft Research demonstrated a new street-level image viewing option that knocks the socks off of Google Maps Street View this week at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles. Called Street Slide, the techno…

Do you remember the game Colossal Cave? How about
YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING.
AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND
DOWN A GULLY.

Anyth…

Dogs are great people trainers.
Those of you that have dogs know this already, but my girlfriend and I have been learning it over the past few weeks with a new Whippet/Lab mix. It’s amazing.
A dog will try t…

After a few years of teasing and smoke blowing, the HomePlug Powerline Alliance has finally released the skinny on major enhancements we can expect to see integrated into the HomePlug AV2 powerline networking…

["Never Pick A Fight" print here.]
OK, now this is interesting…
Of the forty of so entries to the Cube Grenade competition, about one third of them are for businesses and starts ups, and about two thirds of…

Google’s mobile ads are becoming more location-aware. Today, Google is introducing mobile display ads for both the iPhone and Android phones which can be geo-targeted. Advertisers will be able to check a �…

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series…

Local deal goliath Groupon is launching a major new feature today: deal personalization, giving the site the ability to send you the deals it thinks you’ll be most interested in. Before now, Groupon has al…

Amazon’s Kindle has always been an interesting device to me. When I first heard about it in late 2007, I was sure I wouldn’t want one. It was awkward looking and at $399, way too expensive. But when the sec…

Android users, rejoice! Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg will now be forced to feel your pain.The Android app for Facebook could be charitably described as less functional than the iPhone app. We’r…

The wifi Kindle, $139. Drop the first digit and you’re on to something. And it only took them six weeks!

Kim Hart / The Politico:
Facebook CEO talks privacy on Hill — Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made his first visit to Washington Wednesday, meeting privately with members of Congress about online priva…

Apple’s iAd mobile advertising program continues its rollout: The newest feature, iAd for Developers, will allow iPhone developers to buy iAds to promote their apps within other apps.
Until now, Apple has focus…

You probably have a good idea of how many page views and unique visitors your company’s website gets, but how many people are truly interacting with your brand? How successful are your digital marketing eff…

This is an interesting one, which I tend to see in younger writers, perhaps just out of school or college or uni, and therefore maybe fresh from writing essays.Articles are not essays, clearly. One of the key d…

The other day I received a pretty bad pitch from Warner Bros. In fact, it was so clueless I forwarded it to A-list technology blog Techdirt. Mike Masnick been doing a great job of covering the entertainment i…

With all of the buzz lately around the fantastically successful Old Spice campaign, some numbers are finally starting to trickle in about whether or not the campaign actually translated into more sales of the b…

Interesting investment by Google Ventures in a company called Recorded Future, a wonderful play on verb tenses and words. The company is a “temporal and predictive analysis engine.” That just sounds cool.
Goog…

It is over for Google, says Fortune, which notes the company is transitioning from a growth company to — and there is no kind way to put it — a cash cow. Join the conversation about this story »

Flipboard is a beautiful iPad app that looks at the content your friends are sharing on Twitter and Facebook and reformats it into a digital, interactive magazine.
The consumer reaction to the app since its la…

Note: This post was originally published on OPEN Forum.
Companies large and small have started using Twitter as a way to promote themselves, interact with customers, and handle customer service.
Some do it bett…

“All I’ve done is compile public information into a nice format for statistical analysis.” So says the man who is being called the Facebook hacker. Ron Bowes, a security consultant who’s also an nmap de…

Facebook just released its long-awaited Questions feature to the masses.
Question and answer sites are getting tons of attention right now. Quora, in particular, has been one of the hottest things in tech for a…

Since I moved to Austin, I have been very coy about what I’ve been up to. There’s a reason for that and today I can tell you all about it. Especially since my good friend Marshall over at ReadWriteWeb alrea…

Or Google Maps or any review site. I wish I knew which Wendy’s it is so I could vote for this review.

David Boje is one of the leading scholars of organizational storytelling. I encountered large bodies of his work while in my PhD program, and I must admit it takes me an enormous amount of effort and brain powe…

“In Google we trust.” That may very well be the motto of today’s young online users, a demographic group often dubbed the “digital natives” due their apparent tech-savvy. Having been born into a world where per…

Groupon’s model has always been to serve to up a single daily deal per city, per day. Yesterday, the company nearly reinvented itself when it kicked off its Personalized Deals initiative.With Personalized Dea…

How’s this for absolutely dominating an increasingly lucrative and fast-growing segment?
Google currently boasts a mobile search market share of 98.29%, with it closest competitor Yahoo taking up just over 0….

Amazon announced the Kindle 3 last night, and it doesn’t look too shabby at all. The most important part is the inclusion of the next-generation E-Ink display, previously only found in the too-big-for-casual…

I need to be very clear. I believe Amazon is positioned to be the winner in the content delivery war. Have you really looked around Amazon.com lately? You can buy a jar of peanut butter, a set of spark plugs,…

Mike Senese shows you how to pirate vinyl by casting it in silicone. [Mike via Make]

I apologize for posting hurriedly and therefore without much context / commentary… nevertheless, the Altimeter group release this report, “The 8 Success Criteria for Facebook Page Marketing.”
As if often…

Atul Gawande’s articles on healthcare for the New Yorker are all top-shelf, but his most recent piece on modern medicine’s difficulty in dealing with patients who are likely to die is a doozy and a must-read….

A questionable Android mobile wallpaper app that collects your personal data and sends it to a mysterious site in China, has been downloaded millions of times, according to data unearthed by mobile security fir…

Foxnews this morning has a doozy:
In a research paper published this month by two professors at Texas AM University, the authors argue that the only way to understand the slavish adoration and over-the top…

When I reviewed Apple’s new iPhone 4 last month, I said that, overall, it was still the best of the super-smartphones…

“Social Commerce” is a big buzz word these days. As many continue to talk about merging social media and e-commerce, there is no clear consensus as to what the main driver of social commerce will end up bei…

The world is indeed becoming a small place and we all know that social media is a major reason why. As Facebook celebrated 500 million users on July 22, 2010 we can see how the world is beco…

As a new business owner, it’s easy to rush through publicity efforts in order to concentrate or core business activities and priorities. But before you contact the media or post a press release, ask yourself…

You know how an analyst can tell when shes hit on a hot topic? When it generates this much conversation.
We published a report about location-based social networks (LBSNs) earlier this week, and its spurred qu…

I’m pleased to offer this entertaining guest post from {grow} community member John White, a marketing communications writer for technology companies. I think you’re going to love this romp from John’s o…

by Josh Bernoff and Ted SchadlerIs this you?You run an annual event for the public, and you want to expose them to new ideas. For example, ways to run a business and empower workers. Or, how technology changes…

Why Is Simple So HardThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing
The other I posed this somewhat trick laden question on Twitter – “Is making something easier to understand dumming it down or smartening it up?�…

Despite all the buzz surrounding social media marketing, its promise to better enable conversations between businesses and their customers, a recent essay in the Harvard Business Review by Matt Dixon and Lara P…

Security specialist Ron Bowes has once again proven how easy it is to glean valuable user information from Facebook, by spidering Facebook’s online directory and compiling it all into one neat little torrent…

People put a lot of thought and work into having a universal login for the web, whether it’s from a single provider or something more decentralized like OpenID. But we don’t just authenticate ourselves on w…

In theory, Facebook’s new question and answer feature has a million possibilities for users, app developers, advertisers and search engine marketers. But the feature’s significance will largely depend on what t…

Take one look at the newly launched Facebook Questions feature and it’s clear that things are about to change dramatically on the world’s largest social network. Take a second look and it’s also clear that the…

BP may have been able to cap the oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, but cleanup efforts are really just beginning. In an interesting intersection between technology and social activism, QR codes could prove i…

Composing an e-mail is kind of like making out: Everyone assumes they know what they’re doing, but in reality plenty of people could use some pointers.We’re all pretty much constantly sending missives aroun…

I often hear from physicians that they would do a better job communicating with patients if they were adequately reimbursed for the time it took to do so. Given that certain types of physician-patient communic…

Today, I spoke to Jeffrey Hayzlett, who is the author of The Mirror Test, and the former Chief Marketing Officer at Kodak. In this interview, Jeffrey talks about his experience with Kodak, what…

Facebook has now passed 500 million users and it is a social media platform that cannot be ignored. Many companies are struggling with their efforts to use it effectively. There is also a lack of research on …

Dismayed by the massive war-documents leak, intelligence experts are raising alarms that post-Sept. 11 changes promoting information sharing have made it too easy to lose control of the nations secre…

Apple is investigating reports that the latest iPhone operating system causes problems for users…

T.A. McCann serves as founder and CEO of Gist. His past experience includes Vulcan Capital, Polaris Venture Partners, where he was an entrepreneur-in-residence. Prior to Polaris, he held senior positions at Mic…

If you’re developing mobile websites or native apps, you’d better take a closer look at the fine print. Some APIs, including one from Amazon, specifically exclude mobile applications. And there’s not much…