Curated Stories May 13, 2010

Social media, blogs, enewsletters, websites and other forms of online marketing are evolving faster than you can say “Tweet me.”
Evolving right alongside them are the tools developed to help online users ge…

Within the sixteen patent applications that were published by the US Patent Trademark Office for Apple Inc. today…

One of the bad and good things about spending a couple years writing a book is the process requires writing and then deleting a huge amount of text. This morning, I was reading through some of the scraps from…

So, Facebook is calling an all hands meeting today to try and deal with this privacy firestorm that their megalomaniac of leader has gotten them into – think it will do any good?
Personally, I doubt it. Su…

I have something to tell you. You’ve heard it before. You know it’s beneficial to every blog. The great bloggers write about this regularly and practice what they preach.
Attention-grabbing headlines. Ther…

As I have written numerous times before: “finding” (ie search and filtering) becomes exponentially more difficult as inventory grows. Apple’s app gallery faces this problem (as do giants like eBay, Amazon…

Geoff Livingston co-founded Zoetica to focus on cause-related work, and released an award-winning book on new media Now is Gone in 2007.Throughout the non-profit world, organizations struggle with social media…

A week ago we posted two excerpts from Fortune columnist David Kirkpatrick’s new book The Facebook Effect. We’re big fans of Kirkpatrick and have been following his book progress since last year. When Fortu…

Social media has evolved to a point that companies need to put some thought into selection of the right social media format rather than picking a medium just because everyone is using it. Take blo…

Don’t count Gowalla out of the “check-in” wars just yet.
Earlier today, location-based social network Gowalla announced a partnership with National Geographic and The Washington Post promoting a new feature for…

It’s clear you are having some PR issues with the changes you’ve made to Facebook.
Folks like Leo Laporte deleted their accounts. Jason Calacanis is making page view budgets because of these problems. Jef…

For far too long, we have been asleep — silently accepting the reality presented to us.
In this illusion, we are powerless. Conformity and convention have manipulated us into feeling alienated, afraid, and fu…

Who are your kids friending on Facebook? What are they really texting to their classmates? How much online time is too much?Too often, parents who are misinformed about the social web (willfully or otherwise)…

Facing a growing firestorm over its privacy policies in the wake of its plans to work its identity system into the underlying fabric of the Internet, Facebook responds the way it always does: by releasing new…

Chrome: While the official Delicious bookmarks extension for Chrome is perfectly serviceable it’s quite spartan. Felicious enhances the Delicious experience wi…

This post is part of the IT Innovation series, sponsored by Oracle Intel. Read more at ITInnovation.com.
Visit the Resource Center for the latest in whitepapers, tools and webcasts.
Of course, the content of…

What’s Google’s Native Client SDK? A way to develop web apps that use native code like C or C++. This, plus OpenGL-powered hardware graphics acceleration? Goo…

So, an incident recently happened to me in the writing world I feel compelled to talk about. Mostly because I’m annoyed (angry?) and partly because I’m the “first impressions” repre…

When I first published this in Direct Marketing Magazine many years ago, it ignited a firestorm of hate mail from designers and agency creatives all over the country. It must have struck a nerve. That’s what…

OK, so you’ve got your site set-up and configured in Google Webmaster tools. Now it’s time to start looking at the data.
Your Site on the Web
Google Webmaster Tools allows you to view some basic stats and…

… said brands should take a holistic, goal-oriented, authentic approach to social media marketing, rather than focusing on any one platform or method. …

We share dozens of links online: via social bookmarking tools, Twitter and many more social sharing sites. And naturally we have many tools that make that sharing easier and more fun.
Sharetivity can be a nice…

A lot of companies still don’t have a website and have not realised that the cost of not having a website can be measured in reduced inquiries, leads and hence lost sales.
The other side to this is that ther…

One of the first things we look at in our analysis process of a site is the conversion funnel, whether it be a lead generation form, a shopping cart checkout, or otherwise. This is the point at which the visi…

About a year ago, I posted this graphic about “The Next 50 Years of Public Relations.”

At that point, my focus was primarily on the waning (but never unimportant) emphasis on “Media Relations.” In th…

If you’re a local merchant with a bricks-and-mortar presence, it’s time to kiss the yellow pages goodbye. There’s no longer any excuse for not having a web presence or for ignoring digital marketing. Eighty…

Christopher Breen details how the social networking service’s shifting privacy policies caused him to deactivate his account.

Any knowledgeable technician should be willing to admit the following three advantages that Apple’s Mac OS X enjoys over Microsoft’s Windows…

A patient apologized to me for asking so many questions. “There’s no need to apologize,” I said to the patient, “It’s wonderful that you have so many questions concerning your healthcare.” I mentio…

Facebook scrambles to respond to critics. Facebook has faced user uproar in the past, but nothing as deafening as in the past week. Ever since the social network automatically enrolled all of its users in its “…

A social brand is one that is able to stay true to three core principles; it actively listens, it has appropriate social behaviour and it builds win/win relationships with its stakeholders.
…

Check out Anita Hart’s awesome sketchnotes from my Web 2.0 Expo talk on aesthetics in software.

Thanks for taking such “expressive” notes Anita!

Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of internet articles related to writers and blogging.
Since marketing a book is largely being left up to its author these days, fiction writers are becoming more and more curio…

Note: I haven’t done a guest post in well over a year, but John Jantsch is a good friend, a fellow Third Triber, and his ideas are 100% spot on. I hope you enjoy!
The content from this guest post appears in c…

Thanks to my assistant being on vacation, I managed to show up at the airport five hours early for my flight this morning. With time to kill, I started walking around, and came across a Wendy’s. Knowing my bu…

The Hotlist, a social aggregator that enables you to find out what’s going on amongst your friends, within your neighborhood, and around the world, this morning announced that the company closed $800,000 in a…

Note: This post was originally published on OPEN Forum.
At first glance, taking on a partner seems like a great idea. You’ll be combining forces with a colleague who probably has complementary strengths and…

Years ago, I had a golden retriever named Louie who loved pillaging trash cans.
I tried yelling at him whenever he stuck his nose in the can. I tried different models of trash cans with hard-to-open lids. I tr…

Wow. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison — who oversaw his company’s acquisition of hardware-maker Sun in 2009 — just pointed a bazooka at former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz…and then pulled the trigger.
In a detailed Re…

A common dilemma for many solo entrepreneurs and freelancers is how to justify turning away paid work from one-on-one clients in order to create or explore new revenue streams.

When you first start your b…

In the court of public opinion, I doubt Adobe has much to worry about. They make products that are synonymous with image editing – after all nobody ever “MS Paints” Emma Watson’s head onto a nude body,…

I check KnowEm, a site to track the availability of user names across social media applications, frequently to see how many social media websites they tout. The current number is “more than 350.” A …

Just days after we covered a new Facebook Page scam that automatically invites your friends to a misleading Facebook Page, comes a new copycat. While your personal information isn’t at risk, the new exploit…

There’s a tough side to community management. Sometimes, you’ve got to take it on the chin more often than you’d like to, and strike a delicate balance between who you are and the company you represent.
T…

At the end of April, Apple CEO Steve Jobs uncorked a long, highly detailed essay on why he was not going to allow Adobe’s Flash format to appear on Apple devices running the iPhone operating system, such as the…

Todd Hoskins Reviews Tools for Small Business

Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools and products that could belong in a small business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks who would be t…

For all their buzz and value, location-based social networks haven’t really gone mainstream yet. Only 7% of Americans are aware of location-based social networks, according to data from Edison Research.Part…

Did you know that the second most popular Facebook Page is that of Homer Simpson, right behind Michael Jackson? Or that the overall amount of time spent on Facebook each month is 8.3 billion hours? (We shudder…

If Facebook were smart and open and meant what it said about the benefits of publicness and transparency that it now expects of the rest of us, then:
* Today’s company all-hands meeting about privacy would be…

The highly buzzed (and highly leaked) iPhone that is expected to be released next month may have Facebook integrated into the operating system according to Dan Frommer of BusinessInsider. There are a number of…

Having a new UK government has presented some challenges for No. 10 from a social media perspective. Principally, how to maintain the continuity that is attached to the office of Prime Minister, but sweep awa…

Microsoft Office 2010 is about to be released, and you aren’t sure if you should upgrade or switch to Google Docs. But have you considered using the best featu…

Much of the talk over the past few months in the social networking world has been about location.
First, everyone talked about the battle between Foursquare and Gowalla to rule check-ins. Then, there were rumo…

Remember when you had to have an @edu email address to gain entry into Facebook’s once-closed social network? Those days are no more, but a new social network pitching itself as a “Facebook alternative” wants t…

There are times when it is difficult to come up with content… period. When I scour the pages and pages of data on the Internet… trying to search for a new idea… I slowly realize that, fra…

A group of employees at Google’s offices in London have taken their time (working at Google really seems the best job in the world when you’ve got time for stunts like this) to create a Google logo out of…

Yesterday, my contractor tore through old dry wall in the family room and removed plumbing in a closet to cap off a wet bar. The plan was to make this room, built on a slab adjacent to a garage…

I’ve previously written about Twitter Pro, the long-awaited premium version of Twitter for users that want more powerful features. Yet it remains out of sight, despite the noises made from the company that su…

If you’re reading Engadget today (and let’s be honest, you’re reading it right now), then you might have noticed that Adobe has launched a pretty full-force campaign to call out Apple on its anti-Flash mission…

Nobody likes a cheater. And now there is evidence that our brains may have a very specific adaptation to identify cheating in social situations. Humans’ propensity to exchange goods and…

Ron Casalotti, Social Media Lead of Bloomberg L.P. presented a case study of the Business Week Business Exchange site at the Marketing Profs B2B Forum. This video is a recap of his presentation, which was part…

You probably will agree with me that getting the word out about an initiative, an event, a program, a product has gotten much easier. Look at the array of media available to the average person. You can twe…

Spotlight on Search Interview with Alex Bennert, Chief Search Strategist at The Wall Street Journal
Spotlight on Search is an interview series that shines a light on search marketing professionals to learn mor…

Facebook isn’t just popular with its 500 million or so users.
According to our early copy of The Facebook Effect, Fortune editor David Kirkpatrick’s brilliantly-reported new book about the company’s founding (B…

The New York Times does the heavy lifting of actually plotting out Facebook’s headache-inducing privacy options, helping some of us to navigate 50 settings wit…

is that it’s possible.Mike sent me a great story about an ultra-lightweight backpacker:”Wolf was carrying a super-small pack which weighed 14 pounds including food and water. When asked how he got his pack weig…

Larry Downes has written up a long, but quite interesting, look at the FCC’s proposed broadband plan by putting it into context when compared to previous major US infrastructure projects, starting with what he…

Now that many corporations have mastered the tricky art of signing up for a Twitter or Facebook account, the next step is leveraging social media tools in a me…

Wikipedia is easily one of the most visited sites in the world, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change anytime soon. This morning, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a number of changes it has made…

It can get a bit confusing when you start to unravel what Sharepoint 2010 looks like as a cloud offering.

Perhaps it’s due to the fact that Sharepoint 2010 is not cloud ready.

As Information Week pointed out…

Whenever a service rises to popularity, an “open” alternative is usually close behind. The problem is that most of these alternatives never go anywhere, let along get close to the service they’re trying t…

Although being overwhelmed by email is a fairly common complaint, entrepreneurs would be wise to take note when two renowned VCs – recipients perhaps, of your email pitches – speak out about their struggles wit…

Tired of receiving generic, automated spam on Facebook and Twitter? It’s time to start educating.

I admit when I first started my company’s social media marketing campaign I didn’t really …

There’s an interesting post over at the Canadian Marketing Association blog today called “Measuring Social Media”, written by Jim Estill, who’s on the board of BlackBerry makers RIM.

It sugge…

This post is part of the Entrepreneurship series – sponsored by AcceptPay from American Express, a new online solution that lets you electronically invoice customers and accept online payments-all in one place…

Today, SCVNGR (scavenger), a location-centric social game that initially gained traction in the enterprise and at universities, is coming to the public by way of mobile apps for iPhone and Android. Backed by G…

It was only a matter of time. Since last summer, we’ve been tracking the progress of SCVNGR, a location-based gaming platform that allows users to build engaging, real-world scavenger hunts that use their mo…

Apple has just unleashed its latest iPad commercial upon the world.“What is iPad?” a man’s voice intones. “iPad is thin. iPad is beautiful.” At this point, iPad is sounding like some kind of Scandina…

Google Moderator is the sort of tool that deserves an API. The platform to collect audience ideas and gauge interest is used widely internally at Google, as well as being available to anyone. It is no longer li…

Lately, in part due to Apple’s rejection of Flash on its mobile devices, we’re hearing a lot about HTML5 and CSS3. These new web standards promise video and audio support and many graphical improvements in…

Google added a plastic desert sculpture of a frozen yogurt outside of their Android building today (here’s Eclair, the last version), indicating the imminent arrival of the next version of the Android operat…

In Jim Sheridan’s 2009 film Brothers, Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire play two siblings that are opposites. Maguire’s Sam is an Army captain, a straight-laced hard worker, and a family man. Gyllenhaal’s…

What happens when the creative problem that we have isn’t coming up with ideas but coming up with too many ideas? What do we do then?
We tend to gravitate toward the problem of being stuck an…

Good morning! Here’s what you need to know:

Foursquare! The company now has 500 apps built on top of its API, but after news of Facebook coming out with a rival product, now it’s a Google-backed startup that’…

… said brands should take a holistic, goal-oriented, authentic approach to social media marketing, rather than focusing on any one platform or method. …

I recently heard about the Slingshot Fund’s use of video to share knowledge, and I reached out to Will Schneider, Slingshot’s Executive Director, to ask about why and how Slingshot chose video as a story sharin…

“How do I increase my influence on Twitter?”
A business colleague asked me this question and I figured if it was on his mind, it might be on yours too. While it remains to be seen if I have actual influe…

In my ongoing quest to have chicken served in every conceivable way, courtesy of banquet chefs at events from sea to shining sea, I’ve fallen into the habit of repeating myself.While my social media speaking…

The city seems to be buzzing with social media events and activities at the moment. More on that below. But first, a roundup of the local news. …

When JetBlue wanted to celebrate its 10th anniversary, it decided to
sell a limited number of tickets for $10. That’s a tall order, so for
help with the difficult task of convincing consumers to buy $10 airline…

Comprehensive look at Facebook’s privacy options from The New York Times.

Facebook’s 2010 privacy policy is longer than that of other social
networks, even exceeding the United States Constitution, wi…

Created, of course, using HTML5.

As the school year draws to a close, college graduates will making a move to the next stage of their lives. Will college have encouraged or discouraged them from making that next stage involve entrepreneurship…

What you’re looking at is a tidy visualization of what Facebook’s default privacy settings looked like back in 2005. What follows is that same image, recalibra…

Speakers at the Smash Summit in San Francisco today said brands should take a holistic, goal-oriented, authentic approach to social media marketing, rather than focusing on any one platform or method. Analyst a…

So, since you’re stuck paying $10 extra per month for “premium data services” (not that bad of a 4G tax, if you ask us), what wonders await you on the HTC EVO 4G, fueled by Sprint’s next-gen network? Well, if…

Facebook’s new privacy policy requires users to go through a complex opt-out procedure if they wish to keep their information private.

On Facebook, fans and likes are all well and good. But this summer, the social network will have a new feature that may actually help publishers get sales. Synapse, a Time Inc division that sells subscriptions…

Trust Congress?
Sorry, that institution got among the lowest ratings in a Pew Research Center study that was recently released. The Pew Center polled Americans to determine who they trusted least and who they…

Advertisements on mobile devices are both welcome and effective, a recent study from mobile audience media company JiWire revealed.This is especially true of advertisements that appear in apps. Of the roughly…

Today, Vanity Fair for the iPad appeared in Apple’s App Store. This summer, the title — and many others — may be available directly in your Facebook newsfeed.Synapse, a subscription marketing agency that…

When JS-Kit first announced their Echo platform, declaring the death of comments, many thought it to be hyperbole. But as we have seen with a metamorphosis of the way people react to content around the Web, sha…

Amidst all the debate around Gizmodo’s revelations around Apple’s next generation iPhone and the methods by which they obtained access to the device, little was said about whether the device itself warranted th…

Google’s not making a big deal of it yet, but there are signs the company is interested in video games. Last month, Google hired games industry veteran Mark DeLoura to be its “Developer Advocate” for game…

You may have seen me mention that we’re going to be opening up the Remarkable Marketing Blueprint again.
It feels like I’ve been on a very cool and very all-encompassing rollercoaster these past months. It…

At its core, Apple’s iPad is an entertainment device — one that certainly has the power to make air travel much more enjoyable. Enter Bluebox Avionics, which is introducing a customized iPad for airlines d…