Curated Stories Mar. 3, 2010

Mr. Softy may be taking a hard look at Twitter. Is now the time to buy?

New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. plans to start charging readers for access to more than an as-yet-undetermined number of articles per month on NYTimes.com starting next year.
At the Financial T…

Impressive advances in e-commerce websites — and consumer web proficiency — have changed the business of online shopping. But while retailers may have started to downplay the importance of catalogs a few ye…

Finding a good proxy is difficult. You either have to run it yourself from your home computer or web server, or you’re left scavenging about for free proxies online. Instead, you can run one for free through th…

“With the latest releases of Opera, Google Chrome and Firefox continuing to push the boundaries of the web, the once-dominant Internet Explorer is looking less and less relevant every day. But we should expect…

A recent Pew survey revealed that the popularity of blogging among teens and young adults has declined dramatically from 28 percent to 14 percent from 2006 to 2009. While this wasn’t an exhaustive scientific…

It’s a little ironic that I’m writing this post about iPhone apps using WordPress on a Motorola Droid (Devour actually), but it allows me a chance to experience how hard it is to blog, using a tiny tiny t…

Anyone who has bought a textbook, whether during college or graduate school, understands how expensive they can be. College textbook rental startup BookRenter is trying to make the process of buying textbooks…

Juniper Research has come out with more analysis that shows just how big the mobile enterprise market will be for cloud computing.

According to Juniper, the advent of collaboration tools will mean that 130 mil…

Even the most prolific users say Twitter has become more useful as a way to tap in to the discussions of the day than to broadcast their own thoughts.

More than anything, Sony’s lost its spirit, spending too much time telling us it’s the greatest electronics company in the world and not nearly enough showing us.Proprietary Formats
Sony’s last huge format hit…

After recalling 8.5 million cars and sending its CEO around the world to apologize, automaker Toyota is in crisis mode. But the company is hoping that a few tweets will help repair some of the damage to its bra…

Note: This article was originally published on OPEN Forum.
Read the rest of this story »See Also:Is Your Target Audience On Twitter, Facebook, Or LinkedIn?The 6 People You’ll Meet On TwitterThe 10 Social Med…

Im a huge believer in buyer persona based marketing: When you create information on the Web to help solve the problems of your buyer personas (rather than just prattling on about your products and services)….

**Correction: Actually, we forecast that direct mail will be at about $67 billion by 2012. So to my comment below, the astronomical forecast of mobile at $20 billion would be closer to a third, not a half of…

Health care sure isn’t what it used to be. Here’s what you need to know.

Socialtext is one of the smarter companies we cover in the enterprise space. The people there have an intellectual bent. Co-Founder Ross Mayfield is a thought leader and one of the original pioneers of the soci…

It’s been many years since we first wrote about the scammy services set up by the major credit reporting agencies to pretend to give you your federally guaranteed free credit report. The worst of the bunch has…

Consumer-advocate blog Consumerist is always looking to help you keep tabs on Big Brother and any of your personal information He’s tracking. Toward that end, their comprehensive list of online background-check…

A new scam targeting Facebook users keen to try out Apple’s new iPad aims to get your mobile phone details.

Most of us tend to focus on getting a spot as close as possible to the door of a store to save time, but focusing on leaving the store can help you pick a better spot.Photo by alex92287.
Over at the productivit…

I love competition. I compete against just about anyone, at just about anything. For the last few years, competitive webmastering has been my focus. I like to start a site in a small to medium sized niche,…

Which magazines do other magazine editors think have a head start in the transition to digital?
A number of titles were recently recognized by the American Society of Magazine Editors for everything from the u…

Service could revolutionize how hospitality industry engages with online review and social media sites such as Twitter, Expedia, Facebook and TripAdvisor. …

My content marketing friends, Igor Savic and Primoz Inkret from Poslovni Mediji (Business Media) in Slovenia, were nice enough to give me a branded Moleskine notebook on my arrival to their beautiful coun…

Many of you probably never heard of the Ellerdale project until this week, when Twitter announced it was one of the company’s new partners in receiving the “firehose” of Twitter data, a full feed stream of twee…

Headquarters is an iPhone app that bills itself as the Basecamp app for people who get things done. Dashboard, to-do lists, and comments are all included. Plus you can manage multiple accounts and merge them in…

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.As a business owner, you know your…

This is a continuation of the Big Change in the Tech World thread, February 25.
We may look back at these as the Good Old Days before the tech guys clamped down and closed off all the loopholes that allowed us…

Last year, I wrote a post about being a director of community. It was a bit of a drilldown on what a job like mine entails, some of my functional areas of responsibility, and a bit about the time commitments th…

#AIIM @noelrath @jmancini77 via @dhinchcliffe @skemsley .

Dion and Sandy retweeted a list of 8 Ways to Make Sure That Collaboration Adds Business Value on John Mancini’s blog, possibly authored by Noel Rath of…

NOTE: This post was originally published on the AMEX Open Forum website, where I write a weekly piece on marketing advice for small business owners.
Whether you believe in karma or not, using soc…

Lots of folks have been sending in the “news” about news consumption from a new Pew study. A lot of the attention being paid to the study focuses on how more people are using the internet for news than newspap…

Human nature is a fascinating thing to watch and yet when it comes to Social Media there seems to be a total lack of understanding about human nature. As much as the Web 2.0 proponents want to desperately …

Continuing my series of Facebook sharing data (if you’re curious about my methodology, read the first post), I looked at articles that had the word “video” in their titles.

It turns out that those storie…

Since Google introduced its Book Search program, we have been fielding questions from authors and agents. They are concerned that Google has scanned their books and the results are showing up in Google search….

Why is social media of interest to businesses right now? The answer is simple: it’s what the people are doing. Who benefits the most from connecting with people via these channels? Companies who adapt to the…

This post is the beginning of a series of posts about content.
As it is the beginning, I thought I’d start with a complex and indiscernible examination of the nature and meaning of content, maybe somethin…

There are two kinds of people on the Internet: the greedy and the generous.
The greedy want you to pay for everything. Every link is an affiliate link. Every recommendation has a profit motive. The really good…

Blogs have almost become as ubiquitous as the internet itsself. With powerful CMS tools like Wordpress and Blogger it’s never been easier to start a blog. In past articles I’ve spoken about the need to hi…

Three things have to happen in concert to heal the ailing American democratic capitalist system:Senior executives have to be helped out of a conflicted state in which they know they are living inauthentic busin…

*The following is the guest post by Duncan*
External hyperlinks are great for SEO, but it’s the internal variety that you can manipulate to your heart’s content and optimise for search engines. Given this l…

In the continuing effort to stop the bleeding, newspapers continue to try new ways to recover some losses and stop giving away all of their content for free. As online advertising has not proven sufficient to f…

Am I the only one struggling with a consistent and coherent definition for the term “social media?” What is social media, who came up with the term, and who defines it now?

In my quest to better understand…

Socialtext, the enterprise social network, collaborative workspace and microblogging tool (see our previous coverage) today announced the launch of Socialtext 4.0. The major updates in this release are centered…

Jay Parkinson has recently found a nice service that is in beta version now. It’s called Groundcrew and lets you organize people in real time by combining the power of Google Maps with your online communities…

When our community went live for ATT U-Verse, we jumped right on the opportunity to get a service with advanced voice, data and TV on the same line. Unfortunately, we found out that U-Verse requires you use t…

This blog has been inspired by Jan who contacted me through Twitter saying, “Would I think about doing an article on “Blogging For Dummies”.
Jan has just started a blog and she said in her first post on…

This may seem obvious to some but I come across many brands (big and small) who have yet to optimize their content distribution network. A content distribution network is sometimes referred to as the “hub and…

I have a “virtual” company. Well, it’s a real company, but I don’t have a building and employees and all that traditional stuff. I work with a posse of freelancers who might be spread out all over the…

It’s probably the right move: ExactTarget decided it would be better off buying an enterprise-focused Twitter startup instead of building a social media …

Is there a future for agencies in a social media world?
Yesterday, I gave a presentation in Tempe, AZ to Agencyside, a conference of advertising and PR agency owners. I emphasized that to remain relevant, agenc…

“If you don’t understand business and the whole idea of economics and ecology, and sociology, you cannot be an entrepreneur.” [quote adapted from Hartmut Esslinger interview about design]You should pay attentio…

It had nothing to do with who was behind them, but rather the core concepts; the average Web user simply doesn’t use enough social-media services to have …

The convention for creating financial opportunities is evolving and changing the way we seed prospects, promote our expertise and prowess, and connect with those who can help us learn and advance through the f…

As the Wednesday columnist for Personal Branding Blog, I’m excited to announce my team and I just officially launched Brand-Yourself.com, a new platform that demystifies the process of building your personal…

… Facebook ad campaign metrics alongside other media channels and increase their ad spend on the social network using tools they’re already familiar with. …

The string of numbers on you credit card houses a batch of information. For instance, the first number tells you what kind of card it is—4 for Visa, 5 for MasterCard, and so on. Visa cards are always 16 digit…

Microsoft Vice President for Trustworthy Computing Scott Charney today at the RSA conference in San Francisco proposed an Internet usage tax to fight malware infections and the effects of botnets. But do users…

New York, NY – Yes, there’s money to be made in the App Store and everyone wants in on the action. More than 40 million iPhone and iPod touch users have downloaded more than 1 billion apps through Apple’s…

Yahoo is celebrating its 15th birthday this week, and a lot has changed since 1995. The company once known for its search business has ceded control of that area to Microsoft in a deal that is still waiting for…

Being young, being childless, and, for women, not living with two parents at age 14 all predict lower odds of a marriage surviving 10 years, the CDC reports.

The Register:

Start-up airline Virgin America has decided HTML is “good enough”
for animating online content on its brand-new website, which went
live Monday, dumping Flash. […] Virgin picked HTML…

Regarding companies’ presence on social media sites, large companies are more likely to have a presence on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and MySpace while …