Curated Stories Mar. 20 & 21, 2010

I submit to your interest two speeches that challenge acceptance of status quos by which our collective frogs are slowly boiling.
First is Freedom in the Cloud, by Eben Moglen, given at the Internet Society in…

Filed under: Apple, iPad

Apple’s “Meet iPad” ad, which debuted during the Oscars, became the second-most viewed viral video ad last week. Michael Learmonth, writing for AdAge, points out that “Apple has had a…

Some weeks, writing this column is easy. All it takes is for an influential person – a politician, a business person, perhaps even a fellow columnist – to say something dumb and I get to spend a thousand wo…

Today’s multi-faceted marketing campaigns are design projects.
Forbes, March 15, 2010 — Over the past year in the business world, there has been rising interest in a relatively new concept known as design…

A Guest Post by Kosmo from The Casual Observer.
I am the founder and editor-in-chief of The Casual Observer, a site that has the goal of bringing an eclectic mix of fresh content to its readers every day. We…

Well, I managed to miss World Storytelling Day yesterday, and I’m not going to make humanists any happier today by talking about storytelling by an inanimate object today.

Of course, there really is a person…

The other growing problem with social media has been virtual or cyber bullying. “I’ve had problems with threats on MySpace (and Facebook),” Licking Valley …

I don’t know whether you have started to notice that a lot of people are wanting help with their cows and ducks on Facebook (and I am finding it a touch annoying as I am not fond of cows) and is due to a v…

That Blurry Line Traditionally, we see fiction as made up, invented, and nonfiction as somehow true, fact-based. In this essay David Shields, our favorite bomb-thrower and author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto,…

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.For local small businesses, Yelp i…

The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is a free, open source program developed at Tufts University. It lets you create concept (mind) maps and analyze them in various ways. One very useful thing it can d…

The question of how you deploy social media within a large multi-brand company, really comes down to budget, which department is going to pay for the resources to set up a social media program? D…

Part 1 of this series on getting started with CRM addresses factors to consider when deciding whether the time is right to take the plunge. Part 2 offers advice on how to choose the right CRM tool. Part 3 provi…

By MAGGIE MAHAR Even as we set out to reform U.S. health care, we continue to train medical students as if they were going to work in the old, broken system. Today, everything about medical education needs to b…

NewsFactor – First, Facebook dethroned Google as the most trafficked web site in the United States, and now the social networking community has proven to have an extremely loyal following among news readers, po…

[This post is by Ben Horowitz.]

Fred Wilson wrote a counter post to my The Case for the Fat
Startup that you can find here. Before countering his counter, I’d like to say
that Fred is one of my favorite VC…

If Marketers could take one hour to re-think who they are and what they mean to consumers, this is the type of conversation they should have…

In the past little while, it’s becoming abundantly clear that the…

One of the most suggested means of getting traffic to a site is to get involved in forum discussions (or bulletin boards as they are also called) on your topic of choice. You can find highly target…

The Next Economic Paradigm is arriving and the first entries include Foursquare. Few people understand the significance of this new class of social media applications. Foursquare contains many (but …

With shows like Most Haunted and Paranormal State the whole ghost business is pretty hot stuff with everyone and their brother it seems wanting to get a piece of the ghost action. This however is nothing new a…

We know you’re busy. Even with every social media, web, and RSS tool at your disposal, you can occasionally miss out on some of the week’s most insightful content.Never fear. We’ve taken a moment to ro…

An intense debate about business models, bubbles, capitalism, quality of life, market share vs. profit share, running a business vs. selling a business, and a variety of other related topics from episode 46 of…

An incident from 2008, brought to light recently by the Washington Post, reveals just how discombobulated our nation’s cybersecurity efforts actually are. A te…

Social media marketing has gone from experimental to must-have. Close to 80 percent of marketers say they are planning to use social media in 2010.
However, it appears that we are still at the ‘figure it o…

Image Credit: Chiara Marra

Mitch Joel’s post about the Death of Social Media suggests that when we treat social media like a traditional marketing channel we’re killing the medium. I agree.
“The…

Often, businesses hire freelancers (writers, photographers, process consultants, trainers) to solve a specific problem for the lowest possible cost. And a good freelancer at the right price is often the right a…

Just a few years ago there were no virtual social networks, no synchronized address books, and no smartphones. But people had social networks and phones, and t…

Recently, my wife and I went away for a weekend. I can’t remember the last time we packed our bags and left the children with their grandparents for two whole nights. Frankly, our preference is always to do…

All those so-called social media gurus or experts out there who do nothing more than get companies all jacked about the idea that followers and friends are …

The minute we (as a community) allow and accept traditional mass media tactics to pollute Social Media, is the minute that all is lost.

In one of the most depressing articles titled, The Ghost Speaks, publishe…

The system of financing college educations with debt is deeply flawed, says Chris Farrell. How about an equity solution?

Saturday: Social media Web sites provide elected officials and government agencies a means to speak directly to the people. In a matter of months, …

Contrary to what you may have read, or whats been scientifically calculated to the hundredth decimal point or plotted on a consultant-approved four-quadrant graph, there is no best software product. Leaders-and…

Estate planning is one of those things everyone dreads and tries to avoid, but without it, your business could suffer, or even fail, if something were to happen to you unexpectedly. For that reason, its never t…

The a growing sense that amount of serious attention—and dollars—companies commit to social media is grossly inadequate when compared to the amount of time customer, prospects, and influencers spend using s…

Kevin Nakao is VP of Mobile Business Search for WhitePages, a Top 40 Web and Mobile Publisher. You can find him on Twitter, and on the Whitepages Blog where he writes about mobile, local, and social media.Whi…

Several months ago a friend and colleague with a popular freelance writing blog sent me a letter saying how upset she was that I left a nasty anonymous comment under one of her blog posts. The next day, it hap…

There are businesses out there, right now, that are chugging along and producing double – even triple-digit revenue growth.
How are they doing it? And, more importantly, how can you learn from them so you c…

From GigaOm: The first time you walk into an Apple Store and pick up an iPad, you’ll understand the hype: Apple has managed to create a beautiful, thoughtfully designed, compelling product in a space where me…