Curated Stories October 12, 2010

Real-time data is becoming a fundamental part of the web, and social gaming is at the forefront of that wave. Market leader Zynga, for example, tracks hundreds of different metrics about its games in real-time…

Comments on your blog let you know that someone is out there reading your posts, it lets you know that they are reading and finding the content occasionally interesting enough to make a statement.
If it wasn’t…

Marissa Mayer, Google’s current VP of Search Product and User Experience, has the geolocation bug. Mayer is set to change roles and oversee the location and local services within the company, according to a r…

If you had to make a list of the most public figures at Google, there’s a good chance that Marissa Mayer would be at the top. Mayer joined Google in 1999 as a very early employee and has been heading its all-…

Incognito, a new browser extension from Orbicule, blocks tracking by Google, Facebook, and YouTube.

The Amazon iPhone App (doesn’t work on anything but iPhone 3GS or 4) got a little update today that will let users scan barcodes and instantly compare prices at Amazon. For instance, you are at a store buyi…

Since the beginning of Twitter time, the company has used sequential IDs for tweets. This has helped some third party services come up with rough estimates as to the total number of tweets there were on Twitter…

Online advertising is thriving in the U.S., according to figures released in the latest IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report.Businesses and individuals spent approximately $12.1 billion on online advertising…

This guest post is by Jiyan Wei, director of product management for PRWeb.
Creating content on a blog is just one aspect of being a productive blogger—you’ve written the content, but now what? How are you…

With smartphones, computers and tablets bombarding us with more data than we could ever ask for, it’s difficult to get a clear vision of what the future portends. But maybe we’re already living there.
That…

Tomorrow morning, Bing and Facebook will be making an announcement regarding new search offerings that make search more social. The exact details of the announcement have not yet been revealed, however we’re…

Over at Techland, I’m continuing to muse on the implications of not belonging to Facebook. Today, it’s eminently doable, but at what point does it become a weird, obstinate refusal to be part of society?…

Old Spice won an Emmy, doubled sales, and launched a film and TV career for its star with Wieden + Kennedy’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” marketing campaign. It was even imitated by Cisco, Conan an…

Posterous, the minimalist blogging platform, may have allowed users to post to their blogs via email, or even the specially-formatted Posterous for mobile devices, but now it’s gone that one extra step. Postero…

Ben Patterson – Would you be willing to start watching TV commercials again if you could save $10 a month on your cable bill?

Part of its “Game Changers” franchise, at 9:00 pm ET Thursday, October 14th Bloomberg will profile Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs.

How did this college dropout create what has been called the most…

Thanks to your support we reached over $3800 in contributions this week! We’re very excited about the possibility of reaching our first fundraising goal of $5000. In the meantime we’ve been too busy conduct…

Doug Short submits: The latest issue of the NFIB Small Business Economic Trends is out today (download PDF). The heavily watched Small Business Optimism Index rose fractionally from 88.8 to 89.0. Here’s a com…

You know the drill, the minute something becomes popular, some report comes out making claims about how much money is being pulled out of the economy because we’re wasting our time on it.

Social media is no d…

The problem with the economy is clear, but it’s been obfuscated out of most people’s minds. So, to put it simply: Financial institutions loaned out a huge amount of money against assets that are now worth f…

Integration is the New Killer AppThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing
All around us companies are innovating. New web-based applications are cropping up faster than you can count. These applications, when use…

Don’t talk to all your employees, all your users or all your prospects the same way, because they’re not the same.
The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition posits that there are five stages people go through:
1…

It looks like Amazon is extending its e-reading platform to include short works and digital pamphlets. Today, Amazon is launching Kindle Singles, which are Kindle books that are in the company’s words, “twi…

Location-based game SCVNGR is continuing to ramp up its efforts to appeal to local businesses, larger brands, and universities. Since June SCVNGR has offered profiles to normal users (in other words, consumers…

You may have seen recently that we merged StudioPress, creator of the powerful Genesis theme framework, into Copyblogger Media. Why did we do it?
I can sum it up for you in a single phrase: because we’re con…

Today’s my last day at Sun. I’ll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku.
Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/ CEO no more.

On February 4, 2010, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz logged on…

Facebook Groups have been called “Google Wave for Humans” by some and “spam” by others. They have the potential to benefit your business, brand, and organization in ways that are probably slightly ahead of our…

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.For its 40th anniversary, political non-profit Common Cause re-examined it…

In the last month or so, a new storytelling platform, Storify, has emerged and is in beta preview. The platform is quite intriguing and promising; in its own words, “Storify is a way to tell stories using soc…

Restaurant.com, a popular search engine and gift certificate seller for thousands of restaurants across the United States, two weeks ago decided to dip its toes into the group-buying / daily deal waters. The c…

HubSpot is a fast growing company and has some very smart people working for them such as Dan Zarrella (who I have interviewed) and Kipp Bodnar (who I recently liveblogged during a recent conference). Overall…

Once again, rumors — sparked by stories that don’t actually cite anyone other than sources briefed on the matter, all of whom remain anonymous — that Verizon will offer the iPhone by early next year are k…

iTunes 10 allows you to hide your Ping sidebar, but not the drop-down menu for its “social network for music” that shows up next to every song you click. Here’…

Aaron Sorkin’s Zuckerberg as played by Jesse Eisenberg“Accuracy is now a secondary issue.” David Denby on The Social NetworkIn the 2009 film Young Victoria, basically a romance between Queen Victoria and her…

Twitter Co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams shared the stage today in a rare joint appearance where they addressed criticism about Twitter’s usefulness in activism, its impact on news and its overarching…

I love me some Netflix. Well, at least I used to. But lately I’ve been thinking it might be time to cancel my subscription. Here’s why.
First and foremost, there’s nothing I want to watch. I have…

The Social Analyst is a column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.There’s no disputing that Facebook is the poster child f…

Mobile users spend 1.4 times as many hours using social networking sites than reading and responding to e-mail, according to a recent study by research company TNS. On average, users spend 3.1 hours per week on…

The Facebook API is a great thing. Since Facebook’s launch of its API, we’ve seen some incredible applications and tools developed that help us connect and socialize. Likewise, we’ve seen a growing number…

Sometimes agents and publishers list “literary” fiction as something they handle:
Fiction areas of interest: Action/Adventure, Experimental, Family Saga, Glitz, Historical, Humor, Literary, Mainstream, Myst…

Justin Levine points us to a column in the New York Review of Books by Harvard’s Robert Darnton (based on a speech he gave) questioning why there is no work on a national digital library in the US. There is, o…

The 2010 holiday season may be remembered for the distributed nature of the shopping experience more than anything else. Mobile technologies are on the rise and application platforms are serving as hothouses fo…

A common theme of our product innovation series has been exploring applications that take advantage of new devices – and the user experience patterns that evolve out of that. Instapaper is perfect example of th…

You are familiar with the traditional marketing process — businesses buy time on media to sell people something. People have been willing to give marketers time in exchange for entertainment or free informati…

Think about where the world of business is. Think about how much Marketing has changed. Think about how much of that change is due to technology.

When my agency, Twist Image, got started in 2000, there was an…

It is easy to take relationships for granted. This is in business or life, when something becomes so familiar it can fall into the back ground and its value becomes easy to forget. Last year Tropicana launched…

Measurement and ROI are constant themes in the social media world. How do you PROVE the value of Twitter? Like most questions in business, the answer is, “it depends,” but I’d like to offer a coupl…

The social mediasphere can be a cruel place for brands when they make a mistake. American clothing retailer Gap learned that the hard way when it unveiled a new logo on gap.com earlier this week.
The new logo d…

In case you don’t feel you’ve sufficiently waived your right to privacy, sign up for FriendShuffle. Once you connect this tool to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, your so-called friends…

Mark Hansen / Gap:
GAP LISTENS TO CUSTOMERS AND WILL KEEP CLASSIC BLUE BOX LOGO — “Since we rolled out an updated version of our logo last week on our website, weve seen an outpouring of comments from…

Forget about Photoshop. This video demonstration is so amazing that it defies belief. It can take any video, identify the people in it, and change their physi…

With Twitter’s ad-based business model now evolving on what seems like an almost daily basis, the company has revealed plans for a big new target: small businesses.In an article published by The New York Time…

It’s been a rough day for Chargify, a service that makes it very easy for startups to incorporate support for subscription payments into their products. Chargify launched a year ago, catering to Web 2.0 and S…

The conventional wisdom among developers is to target the largest available platform.
According to that wisdom, developing apps for Windows Phone 7 is at best a “wait and see” prospect, and at worst a total was…