Curated Stories May 26, 2010

Last month we wrote a short post about using Google Wave for live blogging. Today, during Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook privacy press conference, we decided to put this theory into practice and live blogged the ev…

The same day on which Facebook has rolled back changes to its default privacy settings, Pew Research has released a report on privacy and reputation among young adults that has some interesting results. Though…

Chris Treadaway is founder and CEO of Lasso, a hyper-local advertising platform for media outlets and small businesses. He is also the author of the book Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day. He blogs at treadaw…

Ive now downloaded and spent some time with the new WIRED app on the iPad, and I think it points the way to the future of publishing.
Will people pay $4.99 a month for it? Im not sure but some people will -…

Red-hot NYC mobile startup Foursquare just made a big hire: Ex-Google/Blogger.com product manager Siobhan Quinn will be moving to New York to join Foursquare as its first product manager, Louis Gray reports.
Fo…

Let’s be clear on one thing. The majority of users on Facebook haven’t, and won’t, really have notice much to do with the recent privacy brouhaha the service has been involved in. Even people who I have…

Google Mobile Blog:
Where Have I Been? Get Your Answer with the Google Location History Dashboard — Labels: google latitude, google location history — When I was young, I used to imagine that th…

TargetSpot cofounder/CEO Doug Perlson is back with a new startup: RealDirect, an online sales platform for real estate. Investors include Greenhill SAVP and About.com founder Scott Kurnit.Join the conversation…

When Jeff Howe coined the term “crowdsourcing” in a 2006 Wired article his examples were mainly “labor markets for specialized talents,” like iStockphoto, iFilm, and InnoCentive. But the business model…

Where have you been? Google knows… — Introducing a new location service from Google that’s basically digital breadcrumbs. Potentially very cool, potentially a little creepy.Join the conversation about this…

As technology becomes more a part of our day-to-day lives, some are worried that it is stunting the education of children by taking away time from activities like reading. A startling discovery from the London-…

Google made a number of announcements in the past week that are of interest to educators: opening Google Wave to the public and extending Google Voice accounts to students. But one announcement that didn’t rece…

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is getting a lot of attention for his latest venture. Square, his mobile payments platform, is already the darling of the startup world. The company was valued at $40 million before…

BankSimple sounds promising…I hope they are able to deliver.

BankSimple is an easy, intuitive, and social bank for people who appreciate simple online services. Unlike other banks, we don’t trap you with con…

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg just led a phone call for the press announcing a number of substantial changes to Facebook’s fluid and controversial privacy policy. Today’s changes were good for users concerne…

This morning Facebook announced a new set of privacy settings that they hope will be sufficient enough to make them essentially permanent, as Mark Zuckerberg described during his presentation. For many users,…

Would you be interested in using your phone as a hotel room key? If trials at two Holiday Inn locations in Chicago and Houston go well, it could become a standard option before too long.USA Today reports that…

At TechCrunch Disrupt on Wednesday, The Future of the Market Is Social panel was stocked with executives from new media commerce companies that have seen impressive growth in the past few years. Rather than tra…

Google has released an add-on for Web browsers that blocks information from being sent to its Analytics service.

Daniel Eran Dilger
Apple is a company with thick skin. It takes an awful lot of prodding to rile the company or even provoke a response from its executives. Those jerking the company’s chain better hope this…

Demand Media is the robotic online content mill that pays freelancers paltry sums to churn out stories based on “what’s hot” search algorithms. Guess who’s about to start “creating articles” for your local n…

As we wait several weeks or months before Apple announces an iPhone for Verizon Wireless, there have been several arguments brought up as to why Apple won’t necessarily do it.
The reasons range from politics to…

There’s lots of good stuff in this long James Fallows article about Google’s now-intense interest in the health of journalism. In short, Google feels obligated from a business perspective to help serious news o…

I’m sick and tired of hearing about how you should be producing “content” to attract a web following. Treating content as a category on its own is missing the point entirely. Nobody cares about content. N…

Firefox/Chrome/Internet Explorer: With a browser extension, users can control their privacy and stop their data from being sent to Google Analytics, a Google service which monitors and tracks tra…

Online users are taking a more active interest in reputation management, a new report from the Pew Internet American Life Project found.Findings suggest that users increasingly change privacy settings, delete…

Zappos and 6pm.com make a $1.6 million mistake. Get lots of PR in return and social media cuddles.
Zappos, the Twitter wunderkinds, made a big boo boo. Their pricing engine set a maximum price of $…

If like me you have heard the term Web 3.0 and the semantic web, but aren’t really sure what it means then watch the video I have embedded below. It is around 15 minutes, but is well worth the time …

Facebook just made it a whole lot easier to put your account on a total privacy lockdown.
Here’s how to do it in 13 steps. (Previously, it took over 30!)Go to Facebook.com and drag the “account” menut on the to…

PALO ALTO, California — Responding to an avalanche of bad press and upset users, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced a new set of simplified privacy controls Wednesday that the company hopes will make it…

There are a lot of people actively using Google Latitude — 3 million, in fact. But maybe “active” isn’t really a good word for how they use it, since Latitude is a location-based service that’s passi…

At TechCrunch Disrupt today, web analytics company comScore announced the free availability of its platform for startups.
The company is making Tagging completely free. “Tagging” means putting a comScore t…

Trefis submits:
Verizon (VZ) will benefit as Google’s (GOOG) Android mobile OS continues to win smartphone share at the expense of Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry and other…

While Mark Zuckerberg may have a plan for simplifying Facebook’s privacy controls, apparently the social networking site has still not decided how it’s going to implement location-based features.During a Q…

Photographer Eric Fischer created stunning maps of the places that pictures are taken in fifty cities worldwide. New York. London. Paris. San Francisco. Fischer took geographical data from Flickr and Picasa s…

Mobile advertising network AdMob has released its mobile metrics report for April 2010, which takes a closer look at the geographic distribution of unique iPhone and Android devices. The report also looks at t…

What if the average patient (person) knew what healthcare insiders, providers and expert patients know?
Take the process of looking for a new personal physician. Conventional wisdom tells people that when looki…

Vague justifications about under-performance of Windows Mobile or cancelled Courier…

With 5,000 barrels of oil being leaked into the Gulf of Mexico every day, we have a disaster on our hands. We’re watching our waters being contaminated, our coastline destroyed and BP has the daunting respon…

Facebook is one of the major tools recommended for brokers and small businesses to market themselves using social media. …

In a sign of just how mainstream social networking has become, Republicans have now taken to bragging that they out-tweet the Democrats—and have more Facebook friends, too.

Yesterday, Co…

Next month will see our cloud computing conference, Structure, return for its third year, which got me thinking about the impact of cloud computing on my web working.

Coupled with the increase in Internet band…

Table of contents for Marketing PlanningMarketing Planning Part II: Give Them What They WantBuilding Your Marketing Plan: Who’s Your Ideal Client? Give ‘Em What They Want, When They Want It
Now that you…

After getting frustrated working with Keynote on the iPad for the last month, and giving and planning a few talks, I’ve come up with some presentation tips I want to share with you. Used properly, and in a si…

Digitimes has a monster of a story looking at the iPhone today, including a series of tasty nuggets, at least one factual inaccuracy and some pure speculation, for example:The story reveals Apple to have two i…

Android has more features than iPhone OS, this much we know. But all isn’t perfect in Mountain View. There are several things that the Android team can learn from the iPhone OS. I outlined some of them in Mar…

Gregg Morris, of whom I learned probably in the last six months or so, has a blog, What’s Your Story?, that is — gasp — a bit of a “competitor” to A Storied Career. We both focus on applied storytelli…

As digital tools create communities, how will they meet society and the larger world? That’s the question that an interesting trio tried to answer at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference.
This is what Scott Hei…

After wrapping up Tuesday’s panel on the future of mobile with Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley and Facebook’s Chris Cox, Google’s Vice-President of Engineering Vic Gundotra joined us backstage for a brief v…

Facebook’s imbroglio over privacy reveals what may be a fatal business model. I know because my students at Parsons The New School For Design tell me so. They live on Facebook and they are furious at it. T…

Back in 2005, Etsy changed the online market for small-scale artisans, offering a new place on the web to showcase and sell handcrafted goods, with more upmarket and boutique-style options than eBay.Fast forwa…

Mfyall / AdMob Metrics:
April 2010 Mobile Metrics Report — The iPhone and Android ecosystems are growing rapidly, with Gartner estimating the two platforms combined to sell 25% of smartphones worldwide…

Domino’s UK is starting a nationwide Foursquare promotion that rewards mayors with free pizza once a week, a deal similar to the one Starbucks announced last week. Those who merely check in on Foursquare wil…

Electric Pocket’s BookLover lets you keep tabs on the books you’ve already read and the ones you’d like to read.

Experts tell WebMD what some doctors may hesitate to tell you.

Jack Nicklaus says that if

Nothing can stand in for a good night’s sleep. Today we’re not going to show you how to scrape by with less sleep; instead, we’re going to help you reboot your…

For weeks now, I’ve been struggling with offering social media marketing services to clients and being charged with coming up with some rational, defensible measurement system, so that someone, somewhere can…

It’s the last day of the first edition of the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, and our awesome program continues to be, well, awesome.
Earlier this morning, we had Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey do a demo of Sq…

New from IZEA, the company that wants to monetize everything from blog posts to tweets, is WeReward, a mobile social networking application that promises to pay you for checking in to local businesses via your…

This is my second post in my product leadership series. Today I’m chatting with Ben Foster, VP product at Opower. For those who don’t know the company, Opower is a fast growing energy efficiency software…

More people are not only using Facebook but becoming actively involved reading, engaging, and voicing opinions over user policy changes daily. The level of participation has exponentially grown and often Face…

Today, at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington sat down to chat with Nikesh Arora, President, Global Sales Operations and Business Development, for Google. Michael started the con…

Today, SalesForce partners FinancialForce, the first native accounting package for SalesForce.com, and CloudApps, a new breed of carbon management solution, announce their products integrate to enable carbon cr…

With millions of users logging into Twitter and Facebook on a daily basis, many marketers are looking to start utilizing social media platforms in their …

Over the last week I’ve been trialling the Wibiya Toolbar on my photography blog.
For those of you unfamiliar with it it is a little toolbar that appears at the bottom of the browser of those who visit your b…

(This is a guest post from Ed Walker, a journalist with Media Wales in Cardiff, Wales, UK who setup and still runs the community news site, Blog Preston, for Preston, Lancashire, UK.)
Hyperlocal blogs are all a…

The Better Business Bureau of Minnesota and North Dakota and the Minnesota Cyber Crime Task Force are urging all small businesses with outdated or lacking online security software to be aware of foreign hackers…

From Entrepreneur:
Baseball legend “Shoeless” Joe Jackson said “if you build it, he will come”–a quote made famous by the Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams.
A lot of companies take this approach when it come…

Ideas vs execution
It’s well understood that ideas are one thing but execution is everything.
The execution part is pretty comprehensive as we all know. It’s about obsessing on the user experience, team…

One of my constant criticisms of bloggers and the blogosphere in general is the sacrifice of keyword focus and the traffic it could bring when bloggers are more lyrical with their prose than they need to be.
I…

Last week I came across a great post outlining the impact of pagination on SEO, so today I am sharing some WordPress plugins to help you tweak your WordPress blog pagination:
1. WordPress SEO Pager
Summary:…

On Search Engine Land, Dixon Jones’ blog and other sites, there’s a bit of fancy code that instantly refreshes the URL you’re seeing to add in referrer tracking parameters. This is usually used for conver…

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, Square co-founder (and Twitter creator) Jack Dorsey took the stage to demonstrate Square working on the iPhone. He also sat down with our own Michael Arrington and Eric…

The books for me to review has piled up yet again, and it’s a good time to talk about some summer reading, so I put together a little video review of five offerings worth paying for. A couple…

The iPhone and iPad don’t support Flash, and as much as it may irk users, it doesn’t come near to how much it annoys Flash developers or website owners. McCann creative Mat Bisher has built his site in Fla…

The Web is no longer static pages of text and still images. It’s alive with tweets, tweetups, live video conferences, uStreams, live-blogged product launches, webinars, live auctions, virtual world meetups and…

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The serie…

After 9 suicides in 5 months, and reports of brutal working conditions, Apple and Dell say they are investigating the working conditions at Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturer that builds iPads, iPhones and other…

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there r…

“Business leaders understand the influence that social media can have on brands and reputations,” said Warren Cable, Vice President FPinfomart, …

Earlier this month, I led the Hot Seat Lab on Better Blogging for Business at MarketingProfs’ B2B Forum in Boston. In it, three brave B2B marketers volunteered to have their corporate blogs critiqued in front…

Stitching tools makes creating big, detailed panoramas from a series of photos easy. Here’s how to shoot for the best results.

Japan’s consumer electronics giant, Sony has a plan to take on the Apple iPad, the company has confirmed in talks with the Wall Street Journal.Sony Chief Financial Officer Nobuyuki Oneda said Sony “has to de…

From the outside, it probably looks like I sit around and tweet all day. Yes, I am quite prolific there. What you might not see as clearly is the business I’m doing. It’s mixed in there, you know. It’s p…

If you haven’t experienced it, you’ve seen it.
Whether you’re a blogger or a marketer — or both — you’ve seen an audience rise up in revolt the moment someone tries to make a buck.
You’ve sold ou…

Google has added a neat new Labs feature to Gmail that shifts the position of the icon column in your inbox to the left-hand side of the screen. The icon column is used to indicate emails with attachments, cale…

I’ve recently noticed Twitter’s search is finding keyword matches in shortened URLs. So if http://kottke.org/tag/Pixar is hidden behind something like http://bit.ly/r3H8Aq in a tweet, a search for “pixar” will…

A couple of days ago my Facebook friend Catherine turned up some footage on YouTube of the Paris Exposition of 1900. We would call this sort of event a World’s Fair. The Exposition lasted seven months and att…

Paul Boutin / VentureBeat:
30 percent of netbook shoppers bought an iPad instead, survey says — Nearly one in three buyers who had been considering a netbook waited for, and then bought, an Apple iPad t…

In some ways it seemed inevitable, but in other ways, it’s still an awesome idea. InfoWorld reports that Google is building speech recognition technologies for…

Photo uploads are coming to Foursquare, CEO Dennis Crowley tells us.
(Foursquare is the mobile app that makes a game out of telling your friends where you’re hanging out.)
Dennis didn’t tell us when to expect t…

With the first round of health reform under our belts, it’s time to shift attention from access to the real issue plaguing the American health system: cost. The cost issue is complex, spanning payment models,…

Yesterday MasterCard announced a definitive plan to open up its credit cards payments platform to developers to build innovative online and mobile apps. Of course, this has been the territory that PayPal has ba…

Windows: Want to create PDF files from plain documents, annotate and fill in existing PDFs, extract images, and leave notes for any PDF reader? Nitro PDF Reade…

Posted by Dennis SellersHard to believe but even with new digital handheld gadgets, smart phones, pads, and laptops glued to every college student’s hand, 74% still prefer to use a printed textbook when takin…

What happens when Web 2.0 startups founded on principles of openness
and freedom grow up? If we’re referring to Facebook and Twitter, the
answer is obvious: get a business model.

Unfortunately, finding a busin…

I initially had the title of this post set to “what you’re missing”. Conferences and events give you the opportunity to shape your own experience. A long time ago I wrote that the answer to how is yes — an…

There are hidden opportunities waiting to be accessed in everyone if you just tell them where you’re headed and what you want to achieve. In that vein, today I’d like to share ten networkin…

According to new data from consumer electronics company Retrevo, iPads might be putting a significant dent in netbook sales.Tablets in general are newer, sexier and sleeker than netbooks, their hardworking if…

Over the past couple months a lot of buzz has been generated regarding unethical business practices in the search marketing industry. We all know the deal – if it’s not spammers claiming the age old claim…

Hallelujah! Google has finally come to its senses and decided that it will review all community edits in Google Maps before they appear on business/place listings.
We’re taking this step to ensure that chang…

According to Sean Parker, the former president of Facebook, Facebook should have never made it if it wasn’t for very poor management of MySpace. Don’t believe me, watch the video.
…

If like me you have heard the term Web 3.0 and the semantic web, but aren’t really sure what it means then watch the video I have embedded below. It is around 15 minutes, but is well worth the time …

Great social media campaigns provide quality and engaging experiences for audiences on an ongoing basis. This is different from just shoving out (whatever) messages to as many people as possible…

The old economy demanded a flurry of hard work, obsessive focus, and a charrette before launch. Launches were expensive and rare, and managers and co-workers would push to get everything just right before hitti…

This is part of a short series that we’re calling Thoughtwrestler Toolkit. We’re going to describe a series of tools that you can use to help wrestle your thoughts to the ground, solve pro…

The BBC’s video on demand service, iPlayer is introducing social networking features which should further boost the uptale of Twitter and Facebook in the UK – as if they needed any boosting. The new iPlayer Bet…

When the vision is sinking, it’s time for another reorganization. But it appears that Microsoft isn’t ready to admit that Apple’s success with the iPad has put the final torpedo into Redmond’s expensive…

Social media sites offer new ways to share your content, grow your audience and build customer relationships. In tandem with e-mail, they create a powerful …

Lately I find myself engaged in conversations about people’s desire for a more balanced, nourishing, or purposeful life.
With friends, family or even professional colleagues, certain topics k…

Today, I spoke to Scott Stratten, who is the president of UnMarketing, and author of the upcoming book, UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging, which comes out in the fall. In this interv…

Social Media is transforming the way organisations engage internally with their employees as well as externally with their customers.
Best Buy, which is a large multi-channel home electronics retailer with…

An often quoted stat about the new reality we lives in today points out that 20 years ago the average American had less than 25 friends. Today the average American has more than 200. Of course, we all realiz…

This is a video interview that my friend Mike Stelzner of Social Media Examiner did with me a few weeks ago. Other than the extraordinarily unflattering camera angle, it turned out pretty well (especially the s…

I was inspired to write this post by a recent tweet I saw in reference to the iPad launch email stating that it was the “best email marketing ever,” when the email was in fact pretty mediocre.
Then when I lo…

A cheaper tablet on the horizon. It will run Google’s Android operating system and it will likely be sold by a Chinese computer company. That’s the gist of reports in Bloomberg and The New York Times about tabl…

When people get married, they always hope for ldquo;happily ever after,rdquo; but the sad fact is that 52 percent of all first marriages and 70 percent of second and third marriages end in divorce. Although div…

Using networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to brand yourself or your company is becoming very popular these days. Tons of consultancies have sprung up, offering to help you do it effectively. News sto…

Google today issued a report (pdf) that claims $54 billion is a “conservative estimate of Google’s economic impact on businesses across the U.S.” The report breaks down how they arrived at those number…

In Part I of our insider look at the earliest days of Foursquare, we saw everything go downhill in a flurry of technical catastrophes. But we also caught a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel. In this s…

It’s been no secret that LinkedIn has been steadily trying to make its platform more social and interactive with users. LinkedIn integrated with Twitter last fall, allowing users to Tweet from the platform a…

New stats we’ve just been shown by video measurement company TubeMogul show that Twitter is quickly growing as a top referrer for web video traffic, far outpacing Facebook, Yahoo, Google and Bing.Further, wh…

Today Google announced that it had generated $54 billion worth of economic activity in the US in 2009. The report, which shows state by state economic contribution, bases Googles total value on three factors:…

Courtesy Carbon Arc

I laughed uncontrollably when I watched the movie Wedding Crashers.
And Superbad had me laughing so hard, my dog started barking. She didn’t know what was wr…

LinkedIn already syncs status updates with Twitter, but now the business social network is taking its Twitter integration to the next level to help users better track and follow their connections.LinkedIn’s…

I’m constantly reworking the way I, well, work. And one of the things I do well is relentless execution.
Changing roles, projects, and priorities requires reevaluating the system sometimes. But I’m constant…

Trader Mark submits:Not one year ago [Jun 5, 2009: 1 in 6 Dollars of Income Now Via Government; Highest Since 1929] I outlined how the government ATM had been churning out monies at a level not seen in 80 years…