Curated Stories May 7, 2010

I really like The Atlantic and think they do pretty good work. I also tend to like Megan McArdle’s work, which is usually pretty thought provoking. So I was profoundly disappointed with her recent article, Th…

In the wake UC Davis’ announcement that the school was forgoing Gmail as its email system because of privacy concerns, Google is celebrating a milestone. As of today, 8 million students, faculty and staff at ed…

Maybe the Tablet PC isn’t dead. Maybe it’s just resting.
If the marketplace is your yardstick, the machine Bill Gates once predicted would become the world’s dominant computing device by 2006 definitively…

Google Reader has released a slew of new updates today, the most prominent being support for HTML5-powered videos and audio.As HTML5 gains steam, partially due to Apple’s war against Adobe Flash, more and mo…

Okay, well not everyone. Actually, just three people in recent memory are leaving Facebook behind:

Matt Cutts, Google’s search spam guy, has quit, according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek reporter Doug MacMillan.
P…

Facebook is a great service. I have a profile, and so does nearly everyone I know under the age of 60.
However, Facebook hasn’t always managed its users’ data well. In the beginning, it restricted the visibilit…

Hugh MacLeod is not only a friend, but also someone whose work I admire, follow, and respect. When he asked me to contribute a post for his evocative “Remember Who You Are” series, I responded posthaste.
T…

Twitter is increasingly competing with the third-party developers that helped make it famous.
For instance, just last month,Twitter acquired Tweetie, the popular iPhone/Mac Twitter app, AND released an offici…

Today’s post is an answer to a question from Don:
How to best handle pagantion, use the same description meta tags? Use the same title tags just add page 2
First off, I’m going to answer this as user: avo…

Did you know that if Facebook was a country, it would now be the third largest country in the world? It passed the U.S. earlier this year and is now eclipsed only by China and India in terms of raw population….

A great discussion about opportunities for mobile startups kicked off in the first session of today’s RWW Mobile Summit in Mountain View, California. The challenge was proposed to brainstorm possible markets fo…

While in San Franciso this week, I engaged in a li’l experiment. I purchased 50 mini-cupcakes from a gourmet bakery and called the staff in to an impromptu meeting. Revealing the delicious treats to my appr…

If 2009 was the year of social media experimentation, 2010 is marking a year of maturation. This is becoming increasingly evident in the collective conversation around “influencers.” I…

Here’s something cool – Mickey Mouse is finding his voice*. Literally. According to the official Disney Parks Blog, they’re ‘playtesting’ a new Mickey Mouse that will be able to interact with guests…

Social media marketing is continuing to morph and evolve so keeping up to date with the latest trends and seeing what other businesses are planning to do in the future is essential to stay ahead of the game. La…

Fast Company, May 1, 2010 — Major consumer brands still have a lot to learn as social tools continue to proliferate. How to stand out and profit in an @anywhere world. You can’t just request it. As compan…

In the world of customer stories, legal just might be our arch nemesis.
Where marketers look for strong, absolute endorsement statements from customers, legal reviewers at vendor and customer companies prefer…

Social media carries with it the potential for reciprocation and replies, for conversation and connection. That potential lies fallow, waiting to be used …

Though the page was a hoax, the response it earned reflects a growing apprehension about the increasing significance of social media in the college …

One of the most frequent demands business executives have of marketing is to provide normalized and predictable results. You do xyz per number of times or per volume and you get abc as a result. My observa…

Regarding yesterday’s stock market panic, Mark Cuban suggests a 25-cent-per-share trading tax, which would mostly affect traders (who buy and sell constantly), rather than investors (who buy and hold stocks f…

So you’re in the business of creating or delivering content and services on the web. Maybe you publish a website, or maybe you’re in the business of hosting websites for your customers Maybe you host an app…

After several months of anticipation, Facebook will begin rolling out location-based status updates sometime this month, according to reports from Advertising Age.

As has been said time and again, this move p…

The Facebook OpenGraph Search API is experiencing an outage that began last night somewhere between 7 PM EST and 8 PM EST, as best we can tell. After receiving a tip from a Facebook developer who noticed that h…

No longer a fan of something? Facebook just made it easier to “unlike” your favorite Facebook Pages through the embedded fan box widgets. While many users have actually requested that Facebook a full func…

McDonald’s announced it will be among the early partners of an upcoming location-based feature for Facebook, as noted in today’s lead story in SmartBrief on Social Media.
The feature, whi…

comScore released a report today detailing U.S. mobile market share for the first three months of 2010. The report focuses on the leading mobile OEMs (original equipment manufacturers, or phone makers) and U.S…

Longtime readers know that as each conference I host draws near, I invite you all to help me interview the luminaries who grace our stages. We’re one month out from this year’s CM Summit, and the lineup is inc…

I’ve been meaning to pull together a post to highlight a few sites out there that I think do a nice job informing, inspiring, questioning reality, pushing the envelope, and calling for a brighter, better, mo…

To the surprise of no one, Facebook is about to launch location-aware status updates.
The conventional wisdom is that this is very bad news for location-based social networks like Foursquare, Loopt, and Gowalla…

I am often puzzled by the way organizations and agencies tackle social media, as if conversational marketing and Enterprise 2.0 were living in separate worlds, addressing totally different issues, p…

See a photo of David, his bio, Part 1 of this QA, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

QA with David Kennedy, Question 6:

Q: You write in a blog entry listing three ways storytelling and social media are alike: …

Editor’s note: Michael Seibel is the CEO of Justin.tv, the largest live video site on the Web. In this guest post, he addresses the challenges of live video on the Web and how to set it free (hint: it’s…

Last month, I posted about Roadrunners Internationale, a small group of Area 51 vets who were now able to speak about their experiences at Area 51, the shadowy military base in southern Nevada that’s a hotbed f…

It was almost exactly a year ago when OneRiot launched its realtime search engine. At the time, the playing field was much different. “Realtime” was just emerging as a hot buzz word, and Twitter had about h…

Yahoo plans to spend $80 million on the next leg of its big ad campaign. If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. It’s almost double the amount Yahoo spent on advertising last year and 40…

Next up on the hit list of amazing conversations at CM Summit is Tony Hsieh, Founder of Zappos, now a division of Amazon. Tony is also an author, and everyone who comes to the conference will get a copy of hi…

Search engine marketing software startup WordStream has raised $6 million in Series B financing, a little birdie informs us, with an announcement supposedly forthcoming early next week.
Investors are said to i…

The past couple weeks have been difficult for Facebook who has come under increasing pressure for various privacy related settings. On Wednesday, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a formal…

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.LinkedIn recently launched a numbe…

We often talk about social media ROI being measured differently. These are different behaviors and we should be applying new and different measurement standards, right? One of my favorite demonst…

Yesterday I threw out a tweet about 125 twitter chats worth checking out on Google Docs. I thought I might condense it a bit and focus not only on Tweetchats that I was familiar with, but also tho…

Styleite.com, a popular fashion beauty website, reported on the airing of a commercial showing Trump’s hair being blown off of his head in an article they titled, “Donald Trump’s Toupée Is Too Sensi…

Mitchell Harper is co-founder of BigCommerce, a leading provider of shopping cart software used by more than 40,000 organizations worldwide. Mitchell has written and published over 300 articles relating to so…

Apple is planning to make MobileMe free, according to…

“Google Latitude Has 3 Million Active Users, Check-Ins Likely On The Way” via TechCrunch: Location is getting interesting. If Google does put out a native iPhone app for Latitude, I’d be much more inclined…

Author: Calle Sjoenell, Executive Creative Director, BBH New York

Over the last two weeks I have noticed an interesting phenomenon around people with iPads. Maybe it’s because I haven’t got one yet (I’m…

How to Drive Traffic from Twitter using @Anywhere
How to Drive Traffic from Twitter using @Anywhere
@Anywhere is a new set of widgets (or plugins) from Twitter that allows you to add Twitter Features to your…

What drives you to write?
To earn some green-backs and keep the wolves from the door? To earn praise? Create a community?
Or maybe you’re convinced your story will help someone else? Or that you can help…

The vast majority of Google’s revenues come from search advertising. As this market matures, Google desperately needs to find a new big market to dominate to keep growing.
Google knows this, and they’ve di…

I find it ironic when pundits, developers, partners and even customers cry out in seeming anguish when a company gains a successful foothold in any given marketplace — especially when those same people are th…

There are so many iPhone apps available (and perhaps so few iPad apps yet) that few geeky things can bring people together like sharing their favorites. My favorite way to do that is through Appsfire, a servic…

It’s almost scary how much power Apple seems to have these days. Heck, during the Gizmodo iPhone 4G saga, they apparently even had control over the police!
One thing is sure – Steve Jobs has been pretty ser…

Apple’s new iPhone is on its way: On June 7, a month from today, Apple is expected to unveil a new iPhone at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.
What does it mean for you? Plenty, from when yo…

In my post Publish or perish: the lessons of Scheherazade I listed six lessons, the last of which was, “Perfect gets you killed.” I don’t think I explained what I meant very well so let me try now.
Most c…

A little while back I was invited to keynote at a young professionals’ event in Hamilton, on the topic of personal branding. I presented at the event this morning, and thought I’d post it h…

In this era of social media and sharing, there have been so many cases of just blatant ignorance. What do you think will happen if you put inappropriate …

At Genuine Interactive, I often ask clients one simple question early on in the process of working with them to develop their social media strategies: Are …

This is a guest post by Mary DeMuth. She is an author, speaker and book mentor with eight published books, including her most recent, Thin Places. Mary also mentors writers on her Wanna Be Published blog. She i…

Saul Bellow (1915-2005) was one of the giants of 20th century American fiction. Several weeks back the New Yorker provided a service to writers the world over by publishing a selection of Bellow’s letters to…

We live in the era of OpenID and Mark Zuckerberg’s statement that, “the age of privacy is over.” But your financial information, social security numbers and even social networking logins a…

I was so glad to be the featured speaker at an event in Memphis put on by Amy Howell in Memphis, Tennessee. She is an energetic, driven woman with a great business in helping companies ramp up into social medi…

Our fearless leader, Pete Cashmore, swung by the Bloomberg studios earlier this week to discuss what’s happening in technology, the debate around open vs. closed web, and Facebook’s new Open Graph initiati…

“When it comes to specific social networks, Twitter and Facebook both had increases in mobile browser usage in the triple digits. Twitter usage via mobile browsers was up 347% while Facebook mobile br…

Jett Winter submits: Ever wonder who’s really winning in the war of Apple (AAPL) vs. Google (GOOG)? If you look at the facts it is really quite confusing. Apple has a $221 Billion market cap, while Google’…

We recently noted how the Library Of Congress and Twitter made a big deal of the fact that the LOC would now be archiving Twitter conversations. The idea is that researchers may find a mountain of largely-incoh…

I had the good luck to spend a little time with Tony Robbins, who you’d think of as a motivational speaker, but who I know to be an inspirational thinker and accomplished business man. But, after doing a pro…

According to the 2010 Display Advertising Study conducted by Advertiser Perceptions on behalf of Collective Media, the number of advertisers planning to increase their spend this year on site-specific ad buys i…

Facebook pages can be a huge way to connect to audiences. Facebook statistics tell us that the average user (at the time of this writing) is connected to 60 pages, groups and events. This means that aside from…

Geo-Marketing (or Geographic Marketing) is a new method of marketing a business and its website through web searches, mobile searches and social media. As you can see, the geo-marketing tools being used ar…

Despite “collaboration” becoming increasingly accepted and valued in business, there are still those that remain hesitant about sharing information or resources and about working with others. It’s still common…

I have been doing a lot of thinking about conversations.
As I reflect on my marketing successes over the years, I realized that all of my sales happened as a result of conversations.

Mine…

Once again, I’m posting writing links that I previously posted to Twitter. The idea of doing this isn’t to overwhelm anyone. But I thought that if I kept track of these writing links in a searchable da…

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced his resignation on Twitter, in a Haiku, becoming the first Fortune 200 head to do so, according to the New York Times. (I wonder, if there is any in Fortune 500 tha…

To be an interesting third-party Twitter client these days you have to do something that really sets yourself apart. After all, there are no shortage of Twitter clients — and there’s no guarantee that Twi…

Jae Jun submits: After seeing the discussion regarding Books-A-Million (BAMM), I figured I should add my report about Barnes Noble (BKS: 19.92) which I believe is also undervalued. Looking at Barnes Nob…

How much support does someone need (or get, or deserve, you pick) before they ship their art?The fearful lizard brain demands reassurance and coaching and even a push before it is quiet enough to permit us to d…

There are many words you can use to describe great Marketing.

Seth Godin asks brands to figure out their Purple Cow (or, to be remarkable). Ive made the case (time and time again) for brands to be interesting…

If you’re looking for some cool Social Media stats to bulk up a presentation or bring this new media channel to the attention of your superiors, look no further.

Yesterday, Erik Qualman (the author Socialnomic…

Over time, new offerings have emerged but, more importantly, we have all come to better understand the mindset and use patterns in social media and have …

Two words are increasingly surfacing in discussions of an internet that becomes more and more social each day: ‘privacy’ and ‘security’. The reason: the
social web seems to be increasingly eroding personal priv…

Can using irregular shapes for calls to action on e-commerce sites improve conversion rates?
This question has been raised by Linda Bustos on the Get Elastic blog, and it is perhaps something that etailers s…

Daniel Eran Dilger
For some time, it’s been obvious that Palm desperately needed a deep pocketed partner in order for its fledgling webOS to remain a viable competitor in the smartphone area. It was less obvi…

The tension between Facebook and its users — and governments, and advocacy groups — over privacy is one of the biggest thorns in the company’s side right now, as it tries to balance the demands of the n…

If you travel for business frequently, take this quiz:

Think of the hotels you’ve stayed at this year. Can you name even one employee by name?

I can. Felix from the San Mateo Marriott. I stayed there a few w…

You’ve seen the statistics and glowing success stories and you’re interested in writing your first iPhone app. Good for you! If you’ve never developed content for a mobile device, or if you’re new to…

Still, the lesson to be learned from this bizarre analogy is that dealing with social media is more like disaster preparedness than you would think. …

The company said that it has been a subject of wrong reporting from the social media. Because of few parents reporting against newly-launched Dry Max …

Major market indices fell almost 10% this afternoon before recovering half of that value. Some blame the failing Greek economy and the related loss of confidence in the Eurozone. But a lot of attention is being…

There’s been a lot of anxiety provoked (and money made) predicting a “parade of terribles” in the workplace as a result of social networking sites and employee blogs. While there is no doubt that these sites p…

Ever witnessed ‘death by PowerPoint’? This is the phrase coined by the US military for the mind numbingly dull 30+ slide briefings they have to sit through.
But it’s not just the length…

Apple has been the subject of some bashing lately, I’ve noticed, which is not surprising…

Bonin Bough, PepsiCo’s global director of digital and social media, says his company has been experimenting with Foursquare. Pepsi teamed up with the social …

With all of the interest in local and mobile advertising going on right now, Facebook has been quickly preparing its own location-based check-in feature. And now it looks like the social network could be close…

In Part 1 of our Guide to Creating a Marketing Plan, we described the process of designing and conducting market research to collect important data for your marketing plan. In this section, we will talk about h…

You hear that? It’s the sound of Foursquares valuation dropping.
What’s causing it? The news that Facebook is about to release its location product.
If Foursquare hasn’t made a decision yet about selling to Y…

Information has leaked that Facebook is set to roll out location-based features for users and brands as soon as this month. According to Advertising Age, users could see location options any day now.These feat…

“Hey Foursquare and MyTown, suck it.”
Okay, Google’s Steve Lee didn’t actually say that during the location panel at the Web 2.0 Expo today, but he may as well have. While Foursquare may have just cross…

Yahoo is out with interesting findings concerning the demographics of iPad owners.The service analyzed the behaviors of Yahoo iPad users and found that men outnumber women two to one, Flickr usage is 143% hig…

Facebook is a big part of millions and millions of peoples’ lives, but what happens when you pull the plug? Last night I met a man who walked to the edge of the cliff and nearly deactivated his Facebook accoun…

Google warns Android developers: Here’s one way to REALLY screw up your app.Join the conversation about this story »

Jennifer Leggio (@mediaphyter) is passionate about all things social media, especially enterprise, security, privacy and reputation issues, which is why she …

Two weeks ago, Facebook has announced a major new initiative called Facebook Open Graph. This is an attempt to not only re-imagine Facebook, but in a lot of ways, an attempt to re-define how the Web works. We w…

A recent survey [PDF] of cellphone users revealed that more than half of Verizon’s customer base would abandon their current phones for an iPhone if given the opportunity.Market research firm ChangeWave poll…

D.T. Max on the Secrets of Sleep for National Geographic.

An animal must lie still for a great stretch of time, during which it is easy prey for predators. What can possibly be the payback for such risk? “If s…