Curated Stories June 23, 2010

The world wide web removed a sense of space from our lives by connecting everyone on the globe to the same content — totalitarian regimes excepted. But the web’s most promising developments of late indicat…

Although you may be familiar with the idea of writing a book a little at a time, as a series of blog posts, you may not have thought about leveraging books into blog posts – -and creating new…

Bing may not have a large share of the search market, but Microsoft’s search engine has been quietly picking up useful features in small verticals to pick up new users. Starting this week, the engine has new fe…

It was years ago and my children would spend hours either on MySpace or instant messaging and I wondered why they would want to spend so much time on the computer communicating on social media channels. Five ye…

Since Safari 5 came out, a few people have complained of the application crashing. A couple of weeks ago we wrote an article outlining some of the steps to take if the application crashes at launch, but other t…

AddictiveTips, a tech blog with a small but growing profile online, has published what it says is leaked information from an anonymous employee at Apple alleging that the new iOS will, among other things, detec…

Zynga’s hugely popular Farmville game will be launching for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch starting Thursday, the company will announce tomorrow.
The game is already in the New Zealand iTunes store, but isn’t…

If you’re a do-it-yourselfer and want to learn how to build and manage sites/blogs built on WordPress, you’re in luck. Several of my colleagues have created comprephensive and excellent training programs tha…

This series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. Learn more about Rackspace’s hosting solutions here.WordPress 3.0, the latest and greatest version of the popular open source content mana…

Well this is a pleasant surprise. Like many others, I had assumed that the court reviewing the Viacom/YouTube lawsuit would not accept either side’s position for summary judgment and the case would go to a ful…

Cato Institute Vice President Gene Healy writes in the Washington Examiner today that the U.S. needs a fat president. Finally someone says what we’ve all been thinking. This oil spill mess and wars on Islam c…

Twitter has announced that it is launching major upgrades to its Facebook and LinkedIn applications, bringing added functionality and integration between Twitter and two of the world’s largest social network…

As we noted last night, a lot of people are using the Twitter app on Facebook. In fact, there are nearly 7 million users who do, making it a top 40 application on Facebook. Naturally, with that many people usin…

Windows Live Essentials, a suite of online and desktop services that includes hotmail, messenger, sync, movie maker and photo gallery – will go live for everyone tomorrow. Until now the service has only been…

Apple’s FaceTime video calling feature is the beginning of Apple’s end-run around phone carriers, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber writes. Good point.Join the conversation about this story »

Well this is interesting. No sooner do we post about Twitter’s new ability to look up friends on Facebook, does Facebook block the app. It’s not yet clear if this block is intentional or if it was simply g…

Confession: I love newspapers. We still subscribe to our local paper, and we’ve taught our kids to read the paper every morning before school. My post-college career began at a newspaper (the Los Angeles Dail…

If you’re tired of the hype surrounding Foursquare and sick of all the check-ins and mayor-crowning updates crowding your Twitter feed and Facebook page (or both), a new app might amuse you.
Based on Foursqu…

A note on the FedEx tracking website notes that “Package deliveries are proceeding as normal, however tracking updates are temporarily being delayed. Please try back later.” Why? Because you people keep re…

Brian Sawyer is an editor for O’Reilly Media’s Head First division and the co-author of Best Android Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders. The following is based in part on content from the book…

nGenera has been thinking about, writing about, and doing primary research about collaboration long enough to understand that “collaborate” is not a command, it’s a culture, a climate inside an organizati…

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to attend the Augmented Reality Event in Santa Clara, California, and it was there that I discovered some amazing uses being developed using AR technology. I’ve already…

For the most part, Mashable’s commenters are tech-savvy and full of wit, but we’re well aware of the lure some Internet lurkers feel when to comes to entering the realm of trolldom. When a story’s subjec…

Business cards: not completely obsolete yet.
[The Next Web via Digg]

AP – To a nation frustrated by the Gulf oil spill, BP’s attempts at damage control have sometimes been infuriatingly vague. But from a legal standpoint, that’s exactly the point.

Hands up if you like big oil?

Anyone… anyone… Bueller… Bueller…? Was it the explosion of an oil rig that set you off ? Was it the lost lives of the hard-working individuals on that rig that is upsetti…

Let’s face it, you’ve wondered if your business is going to succeed or not. You keep on pouring your heart and soul into your business but for some reason you aren’t making a ton of money.
Well the sad p…

From time to time, Socialmedia.biz will post guest entries from our friends at SEOmoz, the top site on the Web to help sites achieve better search engine rankings. Here’s the first.
Guest po…

A number of people who have upgraded their iPhones to iOS 4 have found that previously stored pictures will appear grainy, as if a lower-quality version is being used.

For those people with a few hours to kill either waiting for a pre-ordered iPhone 4 to arrive or camping out to purchase one tomorrow, Apple has posted the user guide (PDF link) for iPhone 4 and iOS 4 for your…

While Facebook has never been known for their powerful search functionality, the Open Graph may quickly be changing all of that. Thanks to integration with Facebook’s new Open Graph protocol, sites like Trip…

Caroline McCarthy / The Social:
Why Twitter still has to get its game on—fast — In March, Twitter CEO Evan Williams first unveiled @Anywhere, a new platform aimed at media outlets to knit Twitter more…

I recently led a webinar for ATT Small Business Insite about small biz technology and received a question from photographer Lemuel Fillyaw about managing social media marketing efforts:

I’m a tech addict. Ho…

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

QA with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Question 3:

Q: How important is it to you and your work to function within the framework of a particular defin…

American philosopher John Haugeland has died. In dramatic fashion, he suffered a massive heart attack in the middle of a conference dedicated to his work on the occasion of his retirement. He made enormous co…

Android cofounder and Google vice president Andy Rubin just announced at the Droid X event that 160,000 Android devices are being sold per day. That’s up sharply from last month when Google announced that 100…

Have kids? Have a computer? Then you’ve likely installed or have at least considered installing some form of Internet protection software, like the parental control software from Net Nanny or CyberPatrol. But i…

Nimbula emerged from stealth today, and as you might expect with co-founders who developed the Amazon EC2 cloud service, it’s poised to be a pretty dig deal. The new project of Chris Pinkham and Willem van Bil…

After a month-long test run running completely without it, PC Magazine writer Larry Seltzer has come to an interesting conclusion: “Java as a client-side platform is pretty clearly a failure, and all that remai…

I heart Evernote. I’ve mentioned that more than once, and because of my unnatural affection for an application, I presume that everyone has discovered its wonderful-ness. But not so, it seems, because a tweet…

A couple of weeks ago I had this interesting question from Arlene Crespo from lifeplanweb.com.
I have been blogging since November of 2009 and I really enjoy writing especially about my experiences with life.
M…

While a lot of the attention on ATT and Apple in the past few weeks has been focused on the release of the iPad and new iPhone, the elimination of unlimited data plans is an equally important development, es…

By Cara Brooke Schultz How many commercials leave a lasting impression, so much so, that they play out in your head while you are shopping at your local grocery store? Soon those commercials maybe viewable whil…

Carrier Beefs Up Staff to Monitor Facebook, Twitter, Spreads Word About Strategy
Advertising Age, June 23, 2010 — Few brands engender as much social-media fury as the iPhones exclusive carrier. Facebookers…

This is the second excerpt from my book, The Digital Handshake, published by Wiley. It comes in response to a question I received via Twitter about the use of PRWeb and Pitch Engine. — Paul ChaneyI want you to…

I am speaking this morning at Edelman’s fourth New Media Academic Summit, jointly hosted by New York University and Syracuse University, attended by more than 100 professors from 10 countries. My bold asserti…

iOS 4 brings an entirely new way to organize apps on the iPod touch and iPhone. Previously, the only organization available was to separate the apps on different pages and flick between them. After a few page…

Are you noticing an awful lot of launches nowadays?
Well, it’s not just you.
As many bloggers jump off the Adsense bandwagon, they’re getting into the launch game, with a neverending stream of premium eB…

A recent survey of 2,733 mobile application developers has shed new light on the so-called Apple vs. Google battle that’s taking place in the smartphone industry, pitting Apple’s dominant iPhone/iPad operating…

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.A Quick Response (QR) code is a tw…

I laughed at first, but then I remembered that sometimes I tell the driver of the car to “scroll up” if I want to see something out of view.
[via Neatorama]

Today, yet another automated sentiment analysis tool was introduced by Lewis PR. Called
Chatterscope it purports to let you know, FOR FREE!, what the market place is saying about you.
So when I retweeted Paul…

After offering it as an experimental service, Google has now formally added optical character recognition capabilities and PDF import to its online Docs service.

The tools couldnt be simp…

snydeq writes InfoWorlds Peter Wayner looks beyond the codec and plug-in wars to examine nine areas where HTML5 will have a significant impact on Web development. From enabling more interactive graphics, to tap…

The iPhone App Store scam continues. Following wart removing, hair growing, fat burning, and anti-smoking apps that use the iPhone to perform their miracles, n…

Automatically Add Blog Posts to Your Facebook Fan Page WallThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Update: After I posted this Notes started acting odd, so you might also looked at the NetworkedBlogs app to acco…

In business, we learn through everything we do and it influences all that we try and repeat. When something new comes along, we tend to view it with either enthusiasm or skepticism, or in some cases a bit of b…

No professional athlete is immune to the need for crisis communications planning. Just ask Tiger Woods, Ben Rothlisberger, Michael Phelps, Michael Vick, or Kobe Bryant, to name a few. No mat…

Where there are social networks, there will be people be who abuse them ­— and you certainly don’t have to go far to find them. Just rewind back to Friday morning for example: Utah Attorn…

I’ve been working with a PR agency for a while (best part of a year) and one key concept is that Public Relations is about managing multiple Publics. If you have the relationship with the com…

At the beginning of this month, I wrote about Influencers, and what they looked like online and off. Every social network has influencers. The reason why influencers are so important is because…

“Report: A fifth of Android apps expose private data” via CNET News: About 20 percent of the 48,000 apps in the Android marketplace allow a third-party application access to sensitive or private information,…

Social technologies have impacted every industry, and most in a disruptive nature as middle men (and women) have been cut out, consumers turn to each other, and the lines of communication have become direct. T…

Steve Jobs sees things that nobody else does…

Editor’s note: Today the DataPortability Project announces PortabilityPolicy.org – the result of a 16 month effort that it hopes the industry will embrace. This guest post explains what a Portability Policy…

LinkedIn is going to buy companies in the mobile space, says CEO Jeff WeinerJoin the conversation about this story »

Facebook Ads Are Interesting… and Profitable
Combine AdWords’ copywriting and analytics with image-oriented linkbait, and you’ve got Facebook ads.
And it’s a new system to figure out how to compete in….

I’m currently reading a fascinating book: The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. You’re already familiar with the invisible gorilla experiment if you’ve watched the popular…

You don’t get very far in talking about social media for business without running into a discussion about content. Companies need to provide informative, entertaining and engaging content to t…

Eightfold Logic, formerly Enquisite, will today announce the availability of Linker, which it has dubbed a social marketplace for link building.
Think of it as a Match.com for SEO people, where instead of peo…

With the latest iTunes update, PDF files can be added to your iBooks reading collection through an iTunes sync. As the Simple Help blog points out, though, you…

In all my years of blogging, I’ve put together what serves as a very simple formula for what I think about when I sit down to the keyboard to type. This might not serve everyone, but it might be a great star…

Resonate Networks, a US-based online ad targeting company, has secured $5 million in Series A funding, led by Greycroft Partners and iNovia Capital. Greycroft partner Ian Sigalow has joined Resonate’s Board…

Do you you do this? I regularly pass on to other people many of my business and marketing books — mostly bought, some received as courtesy copies from publishers and authors.

While I still prefer to rea…

The social media policy I followed to drive over 36 million pageviews to web properties worldwide, is based on a social media analysis model I call The Social Trinity. The 3-part methodology instructs one to fi…

I’m a shy person. People don’t believe me when I say that – but it’s 100% true.
Shyness is the tendency to withdraw out of fear. The key word there is “tendency”. Outgoingness is ab…

Tomorrow at the 2010 Semantic Technology Conference, Primal will launch a new publishing platform. Its grandly described as a semantic synthesis platform, but simply put its a publishing platform that automates…

This evening Facebook began testing a new feature that displays featured images for those users who “have very few friends” as a way to get them engaged. The feature, which was first spotted by hotlou.com,…

Yahoo has added to its suite of useful geographic tools with a brand new geocoder called PlaceFinder. This replaces Yahoo’s old geocoding API and joins another 7 Yahoo mapping APIs in our directory for a tota…

Inside Network’s AppData is a goldmine of information about third-party applications on Facebook. With it, you can see stats like: FarmVille has 63.9 million monthly active users — making it well over twice…

I’ve written from time to time about something I call writer’s high—that marvelous feeling a writer gets when things are flowing. And I’ve written a little bit about the times when they aren’t, and in p…

Twitter for iPhone – a piece of software formerly known as Tweetie – has a new version out, and it brings support for iOS4 multitasking as well as the iPhone 4’s Retina Display.Although we assume most ap…

It’s never a good idea to criticize your boss in public. It’s an even worse idea to talk about him or her to the media. If you do, don’t be surprised if you get fired. You were asking for it.

For the las…

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg may no longer be worried about Twitter and its impressive growth rate – and he shouldn’t be – but that won’t keep the micro-sharing service from continuing to boast impress…

Creativity is a team sport. No really, it is.
I didn’t always think this way. I thought, in order to find my creative vibe, I had to go off on my own, have complete peace and quiet, and sit,…

Location Services allow applications to use information from Wi-Fi networks to determine your approximate location. In order to use Location Services, you must have an AirPort connection that can scan for nearb…

“Bill Gates’ very full life after Microsoft” via Fortune: A little fluffy, but a good profile on Bill Gates.

(via Instapaper)

Lifehacker’s new editorial policy: “If you send us a tip (which you can do any time at tips at lifehacker.com) that you don’t want published, remember to explicitly say so in your email. Likewise, let us kno…

David Rothman writing on James Fallows’ blog says we need an iPad stimulus plan. Fallows: “In this essay, (Rothman) proposes ways that radically speeded-up adoption of the iPad-style devices could serve econ…

Something very cool has happened.The folks at Harvard Business Review have accepted and published our article about the concepts in Empowered.This article is a great introduction to the ideas in Empowered. It…

Paythru provides mobile payments for a range of clients, including charities and local authorities, as well as retailers getting into mobile commerce.
I’ve been speaking to Paythru MD Keith Brown about the co…

Guest post by Clinton Bonner, Director of Sales at Chaordix, specializing in the technology and services of managed crowds for open innovation and social research.What is the next generation of crowdsourcing?Cr…

For
those working in affiliate marketing it genuinely feels after a handful
of false dawns that our £4bn industry is at a crossroads, poised to
develop genuinely more intelligent and intuitive commission model…

The last eighteen months have witnessed
a huge shift in the way that customers seek help for their customer service
queries, problems and complaints.
The continued mainstreaming of
social media has been cataly…

Lots of the questions I get on Twitter and Facebook relate to blogging and SEO, and as I was typing up a quick and dirty guide to SEO Blogging for a client, I mentioned it to someone else and t…

It seems everyone is jumping on the content marketing bandwagon these days. Even though we are indeed all publishers today, and that content marketing is now a core and growing part of the marketing toolk…

Recently, Forrester updated our Social Technographics ladder to include an interesting behavioral segment called Conversationalists. These are the chatty folks, officially defined as people who update their…

Smart/ Insightful post – using stories for design ideas – #UX – http://bit.ly/dlceTv (via @johnnyholland)

For those who doubt the draw of a customer case study online, here’s your proof.
One Microsoft case study, posted online just four months ago, has racked up 86,552 total views.
Listed among its most viewe…

I recently spoke and presented to some of my customers to increase their awareness of social media and all things digital and online. The purpose was to raise their understanding and provide them with a vision…

Berkeley, California – The Brainstormer 1.2 is a unique idea generator app based on a physical idea wheel constructed in 2004 by concept artist Andrew Bosley. The Brainstormer’s distinctive visual design an…

Earlier last week we asked you to share your favorite blogging platform, we tallied up the nominees for a Hive Five, and now we’re back to highlight the winner…

Walt Mossberg’s iPhone 4 review just went up at WSJ.com.
No surprise, but hes very positive on the device, and negative on ATTs service.
“Apple has built a beautiful smartphone that works well, adds impressive…

Facebook is testing a version of its News Feed customized for users with very few friends. Reader Erik Eliason spotted the test and took a screen grab that we’ve pasted below. Check out the sexy skybox.
Reached…

Andrew Oplinger / Google Mobile Blog:
Google Maps for Android Helps You Find the Right Place, Catch a Train, and Add Latitude Friends — Labels: android, google latitude, google maps for mobile, transit…