Curated Stories October 17, 2010

One possible answer: The Enterprise.
No, no. Not the Star Trek kind of Enterprise (although that would be pretty cool). I mean using social media technologies internally, within the large company kind o…

Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Fortune:
300,000 Apple apps? Not so fast! — The iOS App Store is large and dynamic market place, and measuring its size can be tricky — On Sept. 1, Steve Jobs announced tha…

There are 277 million cellphones in the USA; about one quarter of US households do not have a landline. Most modern political polling is done via telephone, but without calling cellphones; the result appears to…

Yes, you’re beautiful exactly the way you are. But that was true when you woke up this morning, and it likely didn’t stop you from showering, brushing your teeth, and otherwise spiffing up a bit.Why not spr…

Recent breakthroughs in brain science are giving us unprecedented information about how our brains are wired, and how they long to connect. We’re not the rational human beings we thought…

Something significant and potentially game-changing happened this past week. Maybe you have seen the news. In case you missed it, Shel Israel wrote about it in a recent post on braided journalism, a term he c…

Episode #224 of Six Pixels of Separation – The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to.

If you are a small to medium-sized business owner (aka a SMB), then you should be following John J…

The web is flooded these days with various constellations calling themselves storytelling with an exclamation mark. For the purpose of catching our attention or preferable positioning you’ll find them wrappin…

Chicago-based Groupon is certainly one heck of a startup. Like Zynga it sort of came out of nowhere in 2009. Even last December I was sort of only vaguely aware of how fast it was growing.
But it was clear by…

The discussion around NoSQL seems to have evolved from one about abolishing SQL databases to one about coexisting with SQL databases, and then to one where SQL is actually regaining the momentum. Is SQL regaini…

Obama is preaching patience in an impatient age. Peter Baker, “The Education of a President,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2010When I started this blog three years ago, I named it Medinnovation. I…

Mark J. Perry submits: The overall job market might be struggling to recover from the recession, but there’s one sector of the labor market that’s doing quite well: temporary, freelance and contract e…

How can the open innovation process be made more transparent? How can information be more shareable and useable for others? How easy can we make it to modify, reshape, and build upon experimental frameworks an…

As part of the ongoing Mashable Awards, we’re taking a closer look at each of the nomination categories. This is “Best Gadget.” Be sure to nominate your favorites and join us for the Gala in Las Vegas! Sp…

by Keith Humphreys, PhDWhen my friend Paul Costello left the Carter Administration, he wrote a funny New York Times article suggesting a special course for departing staffers:There ought to be an “outward bou…

A look at how well the company serves its four main stakeholders.

As a writer, you know how hard it can be to get inspired and write something you’re happy with. You’re constantly running into mental blocks, and things keep popping up that break your flow. It’s hard,…

I had heard the term NaNoWriMo before last year, but didn’t really know what it meant. Last year, though, my cousin, Alex Lucas, posted a number of status updates/tweets that he was participating in NaNoWriMo…

We need to be ready to take steps no one has in their life, go beyond the norm, stand up and change the world #writechat

As the FCC promotes the National Broadband Plan, it appears it’s convinced making 100 Mbps Internet access speed available to 100 million households within 10 years will bring transformative change to the U….

In Lane Smith’s new picture book, three friends discover something that doesn’t text, tweet or toot.

They may not be “smart,” but ordinary magnetic-stripe credit cards don’t need a brain of their own. Their network provides it.

What you tell your best friend may not be what you would tell your boss. Online social networks are finally realizing that.

Microsoft is expanding its efforts to prevent governments from using software piracy inquiries to silence people.

An anonymous reader writes “The Business Software Alliance is trying to kill open standards. Free Software Foundation Europe has gotten hold of a letter in which the BSA tries to bully the European Commission i…

Just a thought that crossed my mind while reading the wild world social media this morning. Good morning everybody.

At YCombinator’s Startup School event at Stanford University, Groupon founder and CEO Andrew Mason revealed his six tips for creating a successful startup, or in his words, “polishing your turds and getting…

I’ve had an interesting few days trying to track down exactly what is and isn’t going on with Yahoo and Groupon.
One source earlier this week said that a $1.7 billion acquisition was all but done, but Grou…

About 300 to 500 jobs are posted on Twitter per minute, according to Carmen Hudson, CEO and co-founder of Tweetajob. With that many shared opportunities, the task of filtering information becomes daunting — t…

The best blog post I read today was on TechCrunch, written by Naval Ravikant, an early investor in Twitter, and Adam Rifkin, who I once knew, a long time ago, when he was starting a wonderfully-named company ca…

Here’s my talk to the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference in Frankfurt before the Book Fair there, in which I argue that books are tools for making publics and now that we all have presses publishers must a…

Thanks so much, Elizabeth, for having me on your blog today. When you agreed to host a stop on the tour, you asked for a guest post, offering several suggestions for topics; and I settled on the one about ‘h…

This week we had 22 new APIs added to our API directory including a desktop notification service, personal information management service, stock index information service, web hosting service and television inf…

Sure it may still be a little early, but this year’s Heisman race really seemed to be between a bunch of QB’s. Of course that was until today when nearly all of the front runners took themselves right out…

Many marketers are able to sell their wares by making us dissatisfied with what we already have.It’s not that far from, “This will make you happy!” to “You’re unhappy/ugly/lonely/using obsolete technology, bett…

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Rednod, GigaOM, Human 2.0, the author of Complete…

Customer Service Is Everyone’s JobThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing
The International Business Series is brought to you by UPS. Discover the new logistics. It levels playing fields and lets you act local…

Oftentimes when you hear a startup CEO speak about their competitors, there’s a lot of talk about “validation of the market” and how there’s room for multiple winners. That may be true in some cases, b…

The possibilities for social media tools in the classroom are vast. In the hands of the right teacher, they can be used to engage students in creative ways, encourage collaboration and inspire discussion among…

Back in August, we got word that a startup called PlaceBook was being bullied by Facebook into changing their name. Obviously, a lot of companies are trying to ride on the coattails of Facebook now given the so…

Lots of abbreviations in the title and URL, but with an audience like TechCrunch’s I’m not too worried about the point coming across or not. At this week’s Opera press event held in Oslo, Norway, I had a…

If you want someone to model yourself after as a storyteller, go to Robert Louis Stevenson. Now that guy could tell stories. Many writers, like myself, make the mistake of writing. I’ve done that and still fi…

Before I will work with a company on their marketing strategy, I need to make sure that they are of the right mindset. Unfortunately too many business owners have taken to believing certain crazy myths about…

Last week’s Saturday Night Live episode included not one, but two, Facebook parodies. Mark Zuckerberg even appeared on a recent episode of The Simpsons. With Facebook as hot as ever, you would think Faceboo…

Foursquare signed up its 4 millionth user this morning, a little more than a month and a half after crossing the 3 million mark.
A testament to Foursquare’s reach: user number 4 million is ‘Wijono S.’ of Jakart…

Over the last 7 years, I have been involved in more startups than most entrepreneurs will in their lifetime. That’s not to say that I’m an “expert” in entrepreneurship (or an expert in anything for that…

Microsoft’s Windows Phone won’t hit the shelves until next month, but the OS is already drawing accolades from many. If the operating system really does restore Microsoft’s lost relevance in mobile, which h…

Holed up in yurts in a field in Cardigan Bay, Wales, a couple of week ago was an impressive collection of some of the most intensely motivated, high-achieving individuals ever assembled — oh, and me!
Beyon…

In this week’s super duper app round up:
Trains, made exciting!
Excellent New York pizza, catalogued!
Basketball, played in space!
The New York Times, expanded on the iPad!
Sonic the Hedgehog, spin dashing al…

I’m giving a webinar on Monday, October 18th, at 7PM Eastern Time on Blogging for Small Business. After asking people who subscribe to the Human Business Works Newsletter, this was the number one topic.
This…

It was the first time in his life Isaac didn’t want to go to Vegas. More »

I was leafing through some emails this afternoon and came upon one with an extremely attractive signature block. So attractive, in fact, that I promptly stopped doing the writing I was working on and decided to…

This afternoon at Microsoft, I had my first hands-on demo of real phones running Windows Phone 7.

I spent the most time playing with the Samsung Focus, which is a pretty standard-feeling glass-encased phone li…

Quote from the conclusion of a wonkish, but fascinating, paper by a three-professor team who first explored “the long tail” of Amazon in 2003 using data from 2000. This paper explores data from 2008 and co…

Editor’s note: In this guest post, Naval Ravikant and Adam Rifkin argue why Twitter is undervalued. Naval was an early investor in Twitter and owns Twitter shares; Adam does not. They have not discussed th…

Here are writing links that I’ve posted to Twitter for the past week. I’m doing a special Saturday version of Twitterific since I’ll be hosting a guest tomorrow—Marvin Wilson. If you’re looking fo…

Google has put Marissa Mayer in charge of location services, which suggests that Google is finally taking location seriously.
That’s good.
Now Google needs to write a check for Foursquare, before it’s too late….