Curated Stories March 16, 2011

How do you measure engagement on Facebook? New York startup Fangager has formed a whole business based on that particular metric.

Fangager supplied Wired News with a preview of the 15 most engaging pages on Fa…

Public Job as Only Route to Middle Class. ‘While that might not seem like much, jobs’ ‘with benefits and higher-than-minimum wages, are considered plum in’ the town of Gallipolis a ‘depressed corner of southern…

Facebook and Groupon ratcheted up a turf battle Wednesday as the former expanded Facebook Deals, the social network’s new location-based discounts program, and the latter prepared an ad blitz on Facebook.F…

Facebook Places pages are suggesting others located nearby, with pictures of friends who checked in there and like buttons.

This development comes just in time for Facebook’s expansion of the Deals service,…

“JavaScript Garden is a growing collection of documentation about the most quirky parts of the JavaScript programming language,” reads the introduction of the JavaScript Garden website. “It gives advice to avo…

Last year’s South By Southwest (SXSW) festival was a tipping point for location-based check-in services. I wrote about companies like FourSquare and GoWalla and the idea of “check-ins” in the article “Mobile…

Loudcrow Interactive Inc. is taking a new direction in their interactive children’s books with The Going to Bed Book by Sandra Boynton (US $2.99 for the iPad Version or $1.99 for the iPhone). Instead of their…

Google’s motto may be “do no evil,” but that hasn’t fooled an organization that rates the most ethical companies in the world.
This year, the Ethisphere Institute named Microsoft to its list of its 110 most eth…

If 2010 was the year of location-based services, then 2011 is certainly the year of group messaging. With a slew of new group messaging apps dominating this year’s SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, the big ques…

Felix Salmon submits: I enjoyed moderating my SXSW panel yesterday on whether and how Internet startups are disrupting the banking system. There was a good range of small, tech-savvy panelists, and they’re…

It was reported yesterday that Netflix bid on and is close to acquiring its first original television series. Netflix is bidding for a TV series titled House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey, reportedly competing…

A teen in St. Paul, Minnesota used Facebook in an unusual way: to get help from the police. He posted a message for someone to call 911 as his mother was being attacked by her boyfriend, 31-year-old Reggie LeA…

The last time so few new permits were issued for housing construction, it was 1961 — when American economists first began keeping records of the numbers of housing permits as an economic indicator.
There are…

As much as the title is vastly overstated, these questions will at the very least help you ponder SEO in a way you hadn’t pondered before. At least that’s my theory.

Question 11. How much time should I spe…

As we build technology into everything, creating entertainment, recommendation services and other applications that can deliver whatever we need at the moment we ask for it, a new breed of application is being…

By default, WordPress websites are a lot like young athletes—skillful and full of promise, yet highly unrefined.
In order to help your site reach its potential, you must provide coaching and assistance in ce…

For one hour on March 26, millions of people will turn off their lights and sit in relative darkness. It may seem like a random way to support environmentally sustainable action, but Earth Hour — a global…

Last night, TechCrunch reported that Facebook announced the forthcoming launch of Facebook Deals. Facebook’s clear push is around finding activities and local businesses that can be enjoyed among friends… w…

[Video Link] I wasn’t expecting David Brooks’ talk at TED2011, about the failures of politicians to make good policy decisions, to be as funny and insightful as it was. After all, as one commenter at TED.com…

What’s that — a new feature? But I thought RSS was frozen.
Yeah it’s frozen, but a new feature is still always only a namespace away.
I wrote about the microblog namespace in Twitter Posts Don’t Have T…

Fred Wilson: “Here’s the story of how we missed Airbnb, one of the best startups to come our way in the past few years.”Join the conversation about this story »

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.The instant popularity of Instag…

As part of The Future of Facebook Project, we’ve been tapping the wisdom of crowds to explore the opportunities and pitfalls for this company and its userbase. We asked the experts 15 questions, and have p…

As America and the Entire Industrialized World dips into the second act of our 21st Century Greatest Depression, workers and employers are developing new skills to cope with the complete lack of money. In the L…

As of June of 2010, the total U.S. consumer debt was $2.40 trillion. As much as 98% of the revolving debt in the U.S. is credit card debt, and the average household carries about $8000 in credit card debt. As…

The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, an award-winning agency specializing in search marketing, social media and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Download Oneupweb…

Look, I have been dreaming about a Verizon iPhone since the original announcement was made in 2007. I’ve always admired Verizon’s insanely solid and reliable wireless network, even before it was Verizon (…

New startups are popping up daily. With so much competition, older companies are struggling to stay relevant.
Bill Taylor, the cofounder of Fast Company and author of Practically Radical, studied businesses tha…

Erik Sherman / Wired In Blog| BNET:
New Facebook Patent: the Huge Implications of Curated Search — For some time, Facebook has been interested in semantic search — using its social graph and immense a…

When Apple launched iAds, Steve Jobs said that the foray into advertising was about more than just exploiting an obvious opportunity. “We want to
change the quality of the advertising,” he said.
But while Appl…

In a bid to make Google Docs more appealing to workers and consumers, Google is rolling out a new feature that lets users of its productivity service discuss shared documents in real-time. The upgrade is a…

Wi-Fi provides a convenient way to connect the computers in your home without dealing with the hassle of wires, but Wi-Fi is also slow and unreliable compared…

Facebook appears to have removed the blue button for posting comments on items in the news feed and elsewhere on the site, prompting people to hit the enter key instead.

Now, if you click on the linked word co…

Google Docs has always been an easy way to collaborate over a documents because many users can access the documents at the same time. But today, Google is stepping up the collaboration factor with more structu…

For the the vast majority of people who read these blog posts (especially those who read them on Facebook or LinkedIn) who aren’t obsessed with tech startups, let me start by saying that Fred Wilson, who I…

As the old saying goes in newsrooms, every night is election night on the sports desk. The late-night deadline stress is enormous — especially when you’re trying to cover 162 baseball games in a six-month…

Look at the evolution of the enterprise and a pattern emerges. On-premise systems evolved to meet business demands. Today, there is the option to move services off the enterprise into the cloud.

This execut…

Anyone who thought that social media was going to usher in a utopian era of communication without borders is going to have their faith badly shaken by a new study from Cornell University. On Twitter, it see…

See a photo of Brendan, his bio, Part 1 of this QA, and Part 2.

QA with Brendan Nolan, Question 3:

Q: The storytelling movement seems to be growing explosively. Why now? What is it about this moment in hu…

Remember that ditty from english class or writing lessons? Show don’t tell. Show the action. Don’t tell people that someone has done something. That’s what struck me when I saw Jessica Levin’s great pie…

eBay monitors the PayPal accounts of its biggest sellers to see how much off-eBay business they’re doing and thereby reward or punish them on their platform. That’s at least the allegation made by Daniel Leffel…

One of the first moves that President Obama made upon taking office was to tell federal agencies to default to “allow” when it came to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and only deny in specific situa…

This post is part of the Marketing White Belt series.The 4 Ps of MarketingThe SWOT AnalysisMarketing Funnels
If there’s a more time-honored concept in marketing than the funnel, I don’t know what it is. The…

If you read any email newsletters (like the one we send out every day), you may have realized they’re difficult to send to services like Instapaper or Read it…

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.Whether we’re choosing a train…

Every large publisher has a Special Sales department. This is a group charged with selling books in volume to groups and corporations.
Stories of successful special sales are legendary. One personal finance aut…

Visa announced Wednesday a personal payments service that will allow U.S. customers to send and receive funds to any eligible Visa credit, debit or prepaid account anywhere in the world.To be able to offer t…

Craig Venter, who is no stranger to advocating stronger and stronger IP laws — especially in the area of “synthetic life” — apparently learned recently how those laws can reach ridiculous levels. In a recen…

We had breakfast with the head of a major TV company recently.
He shared some inside secrets of the local TV business.
Among other fun facts, for example, he said the following:
In the local TV news business, i…

There was a time when there were only two types of thoughts: those that you shared and those that you kept to yourself. Call it discretion, or social etiquette … but learning to interact in any culture mostly…

I just returned from South by Southwest (sxsw) Interactive. It seemed everyone wanted to know the next big thing–what new site, app or technology would rise above the din of startups in Austin and get launch…

I ask this question at every client and prospect meeting and at every conference I speak at. The answer from the audience never changes. It’s a two-part question:
“If I told you that many of your custom…

I met a young blogger the other day who reported to me that one of his posts had been used in the promotional newsletter of one of the A-List bloggers, in fact probably the most famous blogger around. He was t…

A few days ago I posted a blog titled Are You Getting The Right Message Across? talking about how what we Tweet, Blog and Facebook may not always come across how we think, and prompting you to…

Relationship capital is what’s generated when you put down your jargon filled customer service manual and talk to your customers like they are people. You talk the talk and walk the walk.
Companies are valued…

5 Ways to Benefit from Real Time DataThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Every businessperson knows that good data makes you smarter. Well, a truer statement might be that an accurate analysis of the right d…

The Death Of Salvador Dali [18m23s] is a 2005 short film surrealistically depicting an imaginary visit to Sigmund Freud by the legendary artist. (Alternate Yahoo Video link) But what about the real Dali? You…

Google’s flagship native app for the iPhone has always been a little odd. First of all, it was called “Google Mobile App”, which seemed a bit redundant. More importantly, it just wasn’t really worth usi…