Curated Stories May 12, 2010

Yesterday there was a substantial amount of buzz about a new Facebook alternative being developed by four NYU students. Traditionally, such alternatives wouldn’t even have a shot, but due to the increasing p…

There are a lot of sites out there on the web that chronicle the secret hopes and desires we all have. PostSecret is probably the best known of these with many imitators but I came across one today that uniqu…

Cincinnati-based start-up Share Some Sugar created a Web platform to link up neighbors who need to borrow things, and the people who don’t mind loaning them. I haven’t tried it, but I very much like the idea of…

Jimmy Wales worked for a futures and options trading firm before he started Wikipedia.
So why did this business-minded entrepreneur choose to found a company as a non-profit?
Wikipedia have grown to be become t…

Facing increasing pressure from the media and users, Facebook has called an all hands meeting tomorrow afternoon, at 4 PM Pacific, to discuss the company’s overall privacy strategy according to sources inside…

Joe Raby is a co-founder of Sunshine Suites, a community-based shared office space with two locations in Manhattan, NY.Being the owner of a small business often means spending your time working on projects out…

Real-time comment and reaction platform Echo announced its next group of major partnerships today. These new clients — which include The Washington Post, Time, Forbes, Sports Illustrated and Slate — are pa…

Man, we hedge our bets a great deal. It’s especially obvious online.
I’m not sure when or how we decided that we had to disclaim everything we say personally. Perhaps it’s the litigious world we’ve come…

As we noted yesterday, Twitter isn’t so much a social network as a broadcast medium. For most Twitter users, broadcasting information mostly means sharing links. Whenever you share a link, however, there is alw…

Social media management company Vitrue has released a free tool today, the Social Page Evaluator, designed to help marketers get a better understanding of a Facebook Page’s value.Just submit a Facebook Page…

Think your cable bill is expensive?
Marc Andreessen, creator of Netscape and investor in a zillion other Internet ventures — including this site — just revealed how much he spends for Internet access at home:…

Back in January, we wrote about the story of a guy in the UK who was arrested and banned from his local airport after making a (bad) joke on Twitter about blowing the place up. His tweet was:

“Robin Hood airp…

Almost a year ago, Allison Fine and I finished a reflection paper on the lessons learned from the first America’s Giving Challenge from the Case Foundation. This year, we are experimenting with inc…

Gordon MacMillan has posted a good piece on Brand Republic entitled, “Followers Ddon’t Equal Influence on Twitter” that summarizes an excellent piece of research done by M. Cha, H. Haddadi, F. Benev…

People who regularly work overtime, putting in 10 or 11 hours a day, increase their risk of heart disease by nearly two-thirds, according to a study published in the European Heart Journal — worrying news for…

I know Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are growing so fast that the numbers are a blurrrrrrr…….
If you want to look up something to buy or research you will Google.
What if you are passionate about technology…

In 2010, businesses are getting way more comfortable with social media. They’re losing their fear, they’re engaging more, and they’re genuinely seeking out real relationships with customers. However, th…

I haven’t written a blog post in a week. I traveled for a couple of days for work and decided to get some sleep on those days rather than staying up into the wee hours as I often do when I travel. I close…

Note: In another of our periodic visits to various public relations firms and agencies, I asked Don Bartholomew, vice president, digital research at Fleishman Hillard, to share some of his thou…

It seems to be a well kept secret that WordPress runs on a SQL Server or SQL Azure database. At least it was well kept from me until recently. (Perhaps that says something about my ability to follow current new…

This post first appeared as an agency guest post on Jason Fall’s Social Media Explorer blog. You can see it here.

The field of public relations has undergone two major revolutions in the past 15 years or…

Foursquare is a startup that is likely subject to the same kind of technical growing pains that Twitter has experienced over the last two years, so that’s not terribly surprising. What struck me as interesting…

More than three years ago I had the gall of writing a post that suggested that blogs were simply a medium and that the important part would always be the content, which is the way it has always been…

This might be one of the trickiest questions to face businesses and individuals getting engaged with social media platforms – after all, although raising profile, increasing online awareness, and po…

Gmail’s getting more like a desktop email client every day. The Gmail team recently added the ability to drag and drop files into emails to add them as attachments, and today they announced that you can now d…

However hamfistedly, Google is looking hard for someone to be its “head of social.”
Problem is, according to a person familiar with the search, Google doesnt know what it wants – from its new executive or fro…

It’s laughably easy to find someone to critique a sentence, to find a missing apostrophe or worry about your noun-verb agreement.Sometimes, you’re lucky enough to find someone who can tell you that a paragraph…

A Weekly Series by Teresa Morrow
I’m Teresa Morrow, Founder of Key Business Partners, LLC and I work with authors and writers to manage their online promotion efforts. As part of my job I read a lot of books…

Blogging for me has definitely become an art that deserves to be mastered and fueled by my passion for producing valuable content for the web at large. I’m sure we can all remember when we first s…

Mollie Vandor is the Product Manager for Ranker.com and Media Director for Girls in Tech LA. You can find her on Twitter and on her blog, where she writes about the web, the world and what it’s like to be a…

I am not usually one to rant, or start off on a negative foot. That is unless I have a strong opinion on something and my end goal is positive.

This is going to be short and sweet. Take it…

Social recruiting is all the rage right now when it comes to finding new employees to hire. Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti recently told me about a simple but effective way his company is using Facebook ads to hi…

One of the big fights in technology right now is about how you will watch videos, animations, ads, games, and other stuff on the web in the future.
The incumbent technology for a lot of these things is called “…

If social networking around where and how you spend your money isn’t your bag, then Swipely will likely make as little sense to you as Blippy, but it appears to make a lot of sense to some big names in the worl…

Gary Wolf writes in The New York Times about self-measurement, the desire of some people to measure what they do, say, think, eat, and more, sometimes just for the sake of doing it and other times for a specifi…

Here is a good recent TEDx Talk that was delivered simply and effectively with nothing but a flip chart and a pen for visuals. The idea that the presenter Simon Sinek was talking about is very simple and not…

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

QA with Cathryn Wellner, Question 2:

Q: How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling/narrative? What attracted you to this field? W…

Remember when Facebook really was a private club? In the days before we called anything a “social network?” When “sharing” and “connecting” wasn’t bait for the switch of “monetizing” the stuf…

Ever since this whole blog thing started to take off, marketers have been trying to horn their way into the conversation. It started out as crude pay-per-post schemes, and then evolved into more subtle “spo…

Not one day after General Motors said they’d found a mysterious technology partner to help extend the Chevy Volt’s futuristic OnStar functionality do anonymous sources step in (as usual) to ruin the surprise….

With social media now almost a given for marketing purposes, the question for digital marketing professionals has become not if they use it, …

Forrester analyst Augie Ray posted a list of seven things he recommends organizations do to avoid the recent problems of Nestle and United Airlines. The list makes for interesting reading:

You…

The physical and technological intimacy, coupled with the immediacy of social media, makes it an ideal platform for expressing enthusiasm. When I am positively excited about something, I want to share that th…

Just as college students are using social media websites like Facebook and Twitter to share their social lives online, new social media tools are a way …

Finding iPhoto a bit sluggish for your tastes? Here are five ways that you can turn Apple’s photo program from a tortoise into a hare.

LinkedIn has been making its platform much more social recently, adding a following feature, integrating with Twitter, launching a URL shortener and adding additional sharing features. Today, LinkedIn is makin…

If you’re new to Twitter, you probably have no real concept of retweeting (commonly seen as RT) and what that can mean for your success and fun on Twitter. I’ve seen it go two ways with my clients who are n…

I like Jesse Stay (and am a reader of his blog) and wasn’t initially going to blog this. But thinking about it further, and as someone who works both on social media and SEO clients/projects, I felt a need…

You need to get the attention of a powerful internet marketer, A-list blogger, or busy CEO.
Maybe you’ve got a brilliant idea for a joint venture that would make you both scads of money.
Or maybe you just…

WordPress is the most popular blogging software available today, whether its used on WordPress.com or a hosted WordPress.org solution, being used for personal blogs, professional blogs, informational sites, an…

We already know how 404 errors ruin your SEO and usability. And long ago I shared some ways to keep track of 404 pages that may occur on the site. Today I am adding two tools to your arsenal: for those who use…

Getting discouraged is easy. There are negative people all around us, and it’s hard to pick out which ones are being constructive and honest versus those who are being jerks. What I find interesting is just…

Berkeley, California – The first children’s 3D e-book iPad app, “3D Storybook – The Wrong Side of the Bed 3D!” has consistently ranked in the top 20 iPad Books category in the U.S. for the month of Ap…

Cloud vendor goes on elephant crusade
A senior EMEA director at Salesforce.com has claimed Microsoft Office “sucks productivity” just as the software giant gears up for the launch of its latest version this aft…

I’m enjoying the book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman. It focuses on how social media transforms the way we live and do business. And, I agree. Social media is just another form of commu…

Age of Conversation is back. Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton have again rounded up over 170 marketing experts to take a deep dive (or 171 quick dives) into the changing nature of social media, branding a…

Today’s small-business owner needs to use every available tool to drive sales, and that includes social media. …

Have you ever wanted something so much that you spent all your waking hours working towards it and your dreams uncovering new avenues to pursue it? I’ve always been very interested in achieving our potential…

Social media has implications for all aspects of B2B companies, but one that many people don’t think much about is product development. The social web is a great source for information about products and serv…

Social Media is often misconstrued as a medium for business-to-consumer or B2C engagement and discounted as a viable communications network for those companies focused on business-to-business transactions. How…

The Confusing Opportunity of ReferralThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing
One of the reasons I wrote The Referral Engine is because some opinions and perceptions from business owners and marketers about refer…

Writers are supposed to write drunk, then edit sober, according to the late Ernest Hemmingway. Hemmingway knew a lot about writing and drinking, so he must be right.
But what does the phrase m…

The most basic business lesson taught by World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft’s Auction House is the in-game marketplace, the bazaar where players can sell virtual stuff to other players. Magical potions, plat…

As magical as Apple’s iPad maybe, it’s unlikely to go mass market anytime soon. That’s according to research carried out in the UK, which concludes that consumers struggle to see how the device could fit into t…

Macala Wright Lee is the Founder of FashionablyMarketing.Me, one of the web’s leading digital marketing blogs for fashion, luxury and lifestyle industries. You can follower her on twitter at @FashMarketing o…

One of the things that gave me pause when considering the move to Chrome from Firefox was having to give up the wide range of add-ons that the Mozilla service provides. But while Chrome can’t yet match Firefo…

Chrome’s history menu lists your most visited sites and recently closed tabs, which is different from most other browsers. Extension Recent History gives you t…

James Fallows writes an important cover story for The Atlantic on how Google wants to help save the news. It doesn’t break a single new nugget of news. It’s the piece’s attitude that makes it must reading…

Did you know that there is in the United States a single site that you can go to and search cellphone numbers and who belongs to them?
Me neither, at least until I was searching for something on a related post…

Facebook pulled ahead of Yahoo in the first quarter of 2010 to become the single biggest publisher of display ads on the web, The Wall Street Journal’s Jessica Vascellaro reports.
According to comScore, Faceboo…

There have already been plenty of questions over who “owns” the ebooks you’ve bought, with stories of remotely deactivated books and remotely deactivated features — neither of which happens when you have a rea…

This is a guest post by Dennis Price. He does not profess to know much about social media but does, however, know quite a bit about how businesses get real results at the retail coalface. He is the CEO of Gan…

Do you want everyone on Facebook to see your status? Your information may already be getting shared via another area deep in privacy settings called “Application and Websites.” Many users aren’t aware…

This week, Microsoft is launching the latest version of its Office suite. These 3 year release cycles seem alien to us given that our apps are typically updated at least once a month. In case you are consider…

Cloud Sherpas offers additional IT administrative tools that help make it easy to manage the increasingly popular Google Apps platform. The company is riding the momentum of growth today announced over 300,000…

According to one study, adults ages 35 and older hear more bad news about Facebook than good. Between bugs, changes and privacy fear, uncertainty and doubt in the media, these mature folks have heard significa…

Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy at Facebook, responded to questions from concerned users about recent changes to Facebook’s privacy settings in a post at The New York Times.
Privacy advocates…

ThinkProgress has a leaked copy of a telcoms industry PowerPoint presentation laying out their plans to use astroturf to kill Network Neutrality. The industry is hiring the same turfers who work with the Tea Pa…

I was at my son’s middle school last week, picking him up early for an appointment. I sat in the office with a clear view of the hall. Whenever I’m able to see a middle school day in progress, I watch in…

A number of high-profile web industry leaders have quit Facebook this week, a turn of events that’s sure to heat up conversation about the social network’s perceived transgressions. Tonight leading video podca…

We’ve been making this point for years (and living it with our Insight Community offering), but it appears that other media providers are finally recognizing that there really are other business models than “ad…

While I occasionally rag on Google Apps for downtime, the fact of the matter is that some of them are getting pretty amazing. The crown jewel is still, of course, Gmail. It’s so good that I haven’t regular…

If APIs are “crack cocaine for developers,” as Mashery CEO Oren Michels said to us, then Michels is a dealer. His company specializes in creating and managing APIs for companies from Netflix and MTV Networ…

Chip Krakoff submits:One could argue that true genius in business is more about giving consumers things they don’t even know they want than about giving them what they want or say they want. I remember the…

There’s a saying I love: “a camel is a horse designed by committee.” A variation is “a volvo is a porsche designed by committee.” Some of the best product advice I’ve ever heard goes something like…

Over the past few months, I have been doing a lot of thinking about reading—particularly about reading books. This was brought to my attention again last week when I interviewed Dr. Ben Carson for a series of…

On Friday, Adobe evangelist Ryan Stewart demoed FlashPlayer 10.1 for Android at a Seattle conference. It crashed repeatedly and couldn’t deal with one site (Hulu) that an audience member asked to see. Given F…

As the FTC and other government organizations consider whether or not they want to launch an anti-trust probe into Apple’s iPhone OS development rules, the market is left wondering what will come of it. For now…

Social Media is here to stay. If you haven’t at least heard of Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube in the past year, I don’t know where you’ve been. …

A news article caught my eye the other day about a French Fashion Blogger who had been flown half way around the world to to unveil a collection of fashion illustrations.
A fashion critic was heard to say, that…

On the flip side it was suggested that companies using social media profitably are more likely to: Not all strategies are created equal. …

While social media applications for consumers get a lot of attention, there are also some great things happening with …

You dont control your homepage… Google does.

Avinash Kaushik (Analytics Evangelist at Google, author of Web Analytics – An Hour A Day and Web Analytics 2.0, and Blogger over at Occam’s Razor) said this to me…

Facebook’s recent ‘instant personalization’ has the blogosphere buzzing, and the privacy implications haven’t gone unnoticed. Some believe that privacy is effectively dead online, and that individuals simply ne…

My idea of SSLAs (social service level agreements) would take the concept of the SLA and just apply it to the social web but hopefully in a much simpler way. I’m not stuck on the term here and perhaps SSL…

Whilst social media tends to attract much attention at the moment, the savvy marketing professional understands that success lies in using the best digital marketing mix and not over focusing on one channel.
E…