Curated Stories July 7, 2010

Important information to understand – #UX – The UX maturity model – building a team: http://bit.ly/9n2TIp (via @AdaptivePath)

In our post yesterday, Amazon’s IT Director Jen Boden said that the company would never have considered using Amazon Web Services (AWS) did not provide a virtual private network. She further added that Amazon W…

WebMD discusses what to expect from spin classes.

by Brett Einerson and Iltifat Husain
Health care professionals and students using Android are probably wondering what free Android apps may be helpful in the health care setting.
Android develo…

Today, it’s easier than ever for individuals to build and promote the personal brands for free, long before writing and publishing a book.
The Internet offers you numerous free ways to demons…

PC World – Its tempting to imagine ATT is intentionally slowing iPhone 4 uploads due to network issues, but the carrier insists that a bug is to blame. ATT says gear from Alcatel-Lucent is malfunctioning and sl…

Who is the most influential person online? That is the tantalizing question behind the Influencer Project, a brilliantly conceived marketing campaign from Fast Company magazine dedicated to getting people to…

Stuart sends over a column from a Chicago Sun-Times columnist, Terry Savage, that I could have sworn was satire until someone convinced me that it’s not. Savage is apparently a “financial” columnist, who appar…

I’m not gonna lie — most of the venues I check-in to on apps like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt are bars. Most of the time I’m not there to have dinner either. Instead, I’m there to enjoy an adult beve…

YouTube is launching a new version of its mobile site today for HTML5-capable smartphones such as the iPhone and Android handsets. I saw a demonstration at a press briefing this morning, and it looked like the…

Google is preparing another attempt to crack the social networking world owned by Facebook, and to a lesser extent, Twitter.
Why is Google traveling down this path once again? Aren’t the failures of Dodgeball,…

Editor’s note: The following analysis is written by Robert J. Moore, the CEO and co-founder of RJMetrics, an on-demand database analytics and business intelligence startup. Robert blogs at The Metric System…

This series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. Learn more about Rackspace’s hosting solutions here.TextMate is one of the most used and well-loved applications for Mac OS X-based designe…

I went looking for the latest updates to Twitter’s ongoing global growth by trying to find the latest facts and figures.
The Google search engine results delivered no significant updates that I could discov…

Someone pinged me today asking about how to find an old hashtag conversation on Twitter. Awhile back I would have had to say they were out of luck. But thanks to a deal with Google that was penned earlier this…

Want to know how to export mail from Gmail? Or delete your Facebook account? Or send giant files via email?

Well, the new Web Applications Stack Exchange is for you. It’s a part of the Stack Exchange network…

Android (2.2) with Chrome/Firefox: For certain web searches, your desktop is better than Android, but you still want that data on your phone. Install Chrome to…

Google wants you to skip the YouTube app on the iPhone, which is controlled by Apple, and go straight to its new YouTube mobile site on the Web.

Anyone over the age of 30 who spends any amount of time online has to be aware of the gradual erosion of online privacy and how we are slowly moving to a point where our online life has become opted-in by defa…

Despite all the new and more or less established collaboration and sharing tools, the one I use most of all is Google Docs. Yes, it is still buggy but I have found it to be the fastest and the most reliable. Be…

Your Social Security number is one of the most sensitive pieces of identifying information you have; in the wrong hands, it’s a one-way ticket to identity thef…

When governments think about using crowdsourcing instruments like the participatory budget model of Freiburg or platforms like Manorlabs one of the biggest concern is: How can we prevent that lobby groups or th…

QA web site Web Apps brings the novel forum-meets-social-news setup of the very popular programmer site Stack Overflow to the web application arena, providing…

Business and social media are becoming more and more inseparable. Most businesses, from big brands to startups, are expected to have an efficient, developed social media presence.The good news is that you don�…

Former workers of Apple have offered a peek inside the company’s secretive corporate culture, with a glimpse at employee mentality, security, and the difference between a project in which Steve Jobs is involved…

It’s an ill tide that … Spirit Airlines latched on to The BP Oil Spill as a way to divert attention from its own PR fiasco of charging for carry-on bags. So they launched a campaign with bikini-clad women…

What is the best day to send a press release? That is one of the most popular questions people ask PR pros – especially from the people that think PR is just writing and sending releases.
Yo…

Had an outstanding conversation with Mark Levy yesterday (who among other things is author of Accidental Genius).

Mark gave me a crash course in something called free writing. Free writing, also c…

More U.S. adults—particularly African Americans and Hispanics—are using smartphones to e-mail, network, surf, and send video, says Pew Research

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 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.Th…

Ford Motor Company has announced a round of updates to its SYNC technology that promotes safer alternatives to texting while driving.New MyFord Touch-equipped cars will let drivers block incoming calls and text…

Diehard Apple fans remember what happened last time:

Apple invented an amazing new product (the Mac) that revolutionized the PC industry

Developers and consumers went bananas

Everyone concluded that Apple…

Infographic by Column Five Media

Where to go when you need a regularly scheduled “chat about Mac” experience? The Apple Friend Bar, of course! The venerable Onion News Network uncovers the key…

iPhone/iPod touch: QuickCal, a smart appointment-making app that understands exactly what “Lunch at noon tomorrow at Swifty’s for 45 minutes” means, is now ava…

As a marketer, half of our job is analytical – figuring out what works and optimizing our methods for better results.
Half of our job is also creative – coming up with new ways to create demand for our idea…

How quickly we forget.
We seem to think that some of the struggles we’re having in the dawn of a new media era are, well, new. And they simply aren’t. We’re reacting to issues that have ebbed and flowed f…

More and more, we’re logging into websites using our credentials from sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google or Yahoo. But which one is leading in the battle of the third-party login? What login do we chose when…

Twitter handles 800 million search queries per day, up 33% from April.Join the conversation about this story »

In each of the past three months, more employees quit their jobs than were terminated, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is good news for the economy but bad for individual businesses: when…

Want to know how popular Facebook likes are? According to new statistics we’ve collected (and will be rolling out shortly in an upgraded version of our statistics tools) just under 65 million Facebook users…

On Friday, the Obama administration re-launched USA.gov, the online portal that connects citizens to government agencies, departments and resources. The newly re-launched site features cosmetic and navigational…

Yesterday a presentation from the research lead for Google’s social team, Paul Adams, began spreading around the web. The presentation provides deeper insight into Google’s existing concept of “social”…

We all want to create a passive online business that allows us to travel the world, sip drinks on the beach and enjoy life to its fullest. But does that reality exist? Is it possible to create a successful onl…

Chances are that if you’ve been using Twitter much lately, you’ve become more familiar the popular microblog’s secondary mascot, the fail whale, who likes to show up and let you know when Twitter is over capaci…

Treegger has launched a service allowing Twitter users to chat in real time using an XMPP client such as Miranda, Pigdim, Adium, iChat (see the list here).
Messages exchanged during conversation are not stored…

People are using the Internet to connect to information, but more importantly, to connect with people. And yet so many people seem totally confused and overwhelmed about the right way to connect through social…

Anyone who has read my blog for long knows that I am passionate about two things in web analytics: process and people. Process is the glue that holds all the hard work we do as analysts together and allows our…

The answer is yes, sorta, and no.

People are not tiring of the chance to publish and communicate on the internet easily and at almost no cost. Experimentation has brought innovations, such as comment threads,…

Comprehensive article looking at information architecture from an #SEO perspective – http://bit.ly/97HRnU (via @SEJournal)

If you haven’t had an opportunity to visit an Apple Store, I strongly recommend doing so. My last visit was a week ago when I picked up my new iPhone 4 and, though I’ve visited the stores plenty of times be…

In the age of Facebook, Twitter and blogs, one might think that social
media is a far more important to startup success than, say, email. But
a new generation of startups, many of which are lean and achieve
pro…

Except your customers. I literally just submitted a talk abstract for the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston, Oct 67 about this topic. Yesterday also saw the launch of an initiative by ThoughtLead, the sho…

LinkedIn has become the defacto standard in business social networking. It has over 70 million members from over 200 countries including the Fortune list of enterprises. Unlike Facebook and Twi…

B2B organizations that are active on social media are actually pretty similar to many of the customers they attempt to reach. Similar to the strategic measures companies take to socially define and brand themse…

Mobile Payments As Marketing StrategyThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing
The mobile device continues to evolve and one trend that’s finally picking up steam in the US is the act of making and accepting pay…

If youve participated in any LinkedIn Groups lately, you know theyve undergone quite a facelift. This video outlines the changes:

It doesnt appear that the changes have been rolled out unilaterally. In at…

Everything about this is excellent. And it just gets bigger better . . .

BIG BANG BIG BOOM – the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
direction and animation by BLU
blublu.org
production and…

No time to write anything new today, so here’s something from the archives that might be worth another look:
Now that we’re hopefully beyond the “what is social media and why does my company need to und…

The recession had a strong impact on how small business spend money on online marketing and advertising, and pretty much on everything else that has anything to do with online visibility. Many businesses resort…

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about a model for UX Leadership.
Turns out that Will Evans’s model (which I flagrantly appropriated) actually took a lot of inspiration from another model—one created by David…

See a photo of Kindra, her bio, Part 1 of this QA, and Part 2.

QA with Kindra Hall, Questions 4 and 5:

Q: Are there any current uses of storytelling that repel you or that you feel are inappropriate?…

When designing and testing a WordPress Theme, or any web page design, it helps to put the design through the maximum amount of testing. In other words, you have to test all the code that might appear on a web p…

Something tells me that Fast Company’s Comscore numbers are going to shoot way up in July. I’ve seen some audacious things before, but this is the most ingenious link bait pyramid scheme I’ve come across…

Young women are becoming more and more dependent on social media and checking on their social networks, according to a new study released earlier today by Oxygen Media and Lightspeed Research. In fact, as many…

The days of having a separate login and password for each online service we use are behind us. Now, you can log into most sites and services using your social network’s ID.The most popular social identities a…

Perhaps you may have heard the adage, “what gets measured gets improved.” I would propose a parallel principal: “what gets tracked, gets done.” This is especially true when it comes to delegation.

Pho…

(Its vacation week here at 3:17 a.m. While were away, weve been running five of Kazes favorite posts from our early months. Well do the same with Ras when we take our second vacation this fall. Ten New Writers…

There is a set of ten guidelines that you can use to organize your thinking via mind maps. We’ve introduced mind maps here at Thoughtwrestling in previous posts. Now we’re going to shar…

Short version – a false report about renowned Dutch DJ Tiësto dying in a car accident spread via Twitter, was talked about so much that it ended up in trending topics, and was ultimately denied by the man h…

For twenty years, the Billboard charts were easy to manipulate. By paying radio stations and some retailers, record labels could push an act to the top 40, which would increase sales. People liked buying what t…

Clayton Morris reports on an official Apple statement in regards to the impact of July 4th’s supposed iTunes “hacking.” As we reported that day, Thuat Nguyen under his development company, “mycompany” compromis…

Twitter rose to fame in 2007 as a hip, 140-character “microblogging” network. The free service has a multitude of uses, including social/professional networking, live blogging, news sourcin…

If you have not yet read about Whrrl’s interesting post check in experience yet, now would be a good time. If you have or you just want to march to the beat of a different drum, read on.
Whrrl has 3 primary…

Social Media (or any other form of Marketing and Communications) won’t save a bad product, brand or service.

This may seem like an obvious statement out of the gates, but it is something that many brand manage…

Foursquare is getting a leg up in the geo-location wars. And I’m not talking about its recent cash infusion of $20 million — though that certainly won’t hurt. Today, the company announced a partnership with t…

So this past 4th of July weekend, I decided to take my wife and daughters to Santa Monica for a short vacation. We stayed at the Sheraton Delfina for four nights and it was very pleasant. The hotel staff was…

Content may well be king, but the internet offers a unique
opportunity for anyone to attain royal status, something which could
finally, fatally undermine Rupert Murdoch’s place at the top of the
media foo…

Guest post by Katie Van Domelen, the social media manager at Off Madison Ave in Tempe, Arizona. She specializes in social media strategies that lead to actionable plans to achieve real world objectives. I’ve…

A CMS is just
about content so it doesn’t need much attention, right? Wrong. In an e-commerce
environment CMS means so much more than being able to edit and publish content.

E-commerce pages have dynamic co…

A survey by AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) found that although Microsoft SharePoint is being rapidly adopted by the enterprise, at least half of the enterprises polled that are impleme…

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.
–Mitch Ratliffe
Your computer ends the physical drudgery of writing. But it ca…