Curated Stories October 6, 2010

Consider the following findings from the Hay Group:

Research conducted worldwide shows that leadership contributes to 70% of corporate atmosphere, while corporate atmosphere contributes to 30% of corporate p…

Kiss’ Gene Simmons apparently was bored of not getting enough coverage in the blogworld lately, and so he’s cooked up another “controversy.” He does this every year or so, making a big stink about “piracy” or…

People use Facebook a lot already, but the addition of the new Groups feature today will lead them to use it even more.

Facebook’s addition of a far more sophisticated Groups feature than was previously availa…

Guerrilla marketing “works because it’s simple to understand, easy to implement and outrageously inexpensive,” says Jay Conrad Levinson, the man who coined the phrase.Consumers have grown immune to big bu…

As we mentioned earlier today, if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest country in the world. Which means — to put it plainly — Facebook is huge, and it’s only getting bigger. Hence the i…

One feature strangely absent form Facebook has always been the ability to back up your pictures, videos, messages, and other information to your hard drive. To…

Last night, we noted that after a two-month “lockdown” Facebook was emerging with the fruits of their labor today. We heard that the likely result would be a site redesign, but obviously, that didn’t com…

Facebook has just revealed a new version of Groups at its live press conference in Palo Alto, California. Facebook Groups are a shared space where members can participate in communal activities like group chat,…

The Better Profiles Series is supported by Gillette. Learn more about Gillette and its products at Gillette.com.Last month, Twitter unveiled a total site redesign. The new Twitter homepage is robust, more lik…

rheotaxis writes “Many professional web developers have spent years building dynamic, database-driven web applications, but some of us, like myself, want to make the user experience more interactive and instant…

Today during their event, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg talked about “the biggest problem in social networking“. What he means by this is social sharing. You need to be able to map out all of the real world…

We’ve all been there: you try to remove a sticker from something, and end up with a gluey mess even more annoying than the sticker itself. Luckily, you can was…

by Michele R. Berman, MDThe following list is from a cancer survivor, Judy Engibous, posted on Hester Hill Schnipper’s blog Living with Breast Cancer.We first published it back in March of 2009 but are “rel…

In response to Jean-Louis Glassee’s article “The OS Doesn’t Matter…” I wrote quite simply: the future of the browser wars is he who integrates with the OS best. This phrase came from my article lambasting Mic…

Let me tell you, when what you teach and develop every day has the title “Innovation” attached to it, you reach a point where you tire of hearing about Apple. Without question, nearly everyone believes the equa…

Boy, am I glad the ridiculousness of smartphone patent wars hasn’t carried over to web search, because Google’s testing of full page previews illustrates everything that’s great about stealing another com…

San Francisco Giants player Tim Lincecum and his sponsor Red Bull are using Facebook Places in a new promotion on the streets of San Francisco.

The scavenger hunt has already been running for a few days and th…

Foursquare has already given the technical reason why they keep going down (uneven database shards), but there must be some other reason why this is coming up right now, right? Well, it may have something to d…

As the popularity of e-books and e-readers continues to increase, e-book piracy is also growing rapidly. According to Attributor, a company that develops anti-piracy and content monitoring solutions, the daily…

Some writers shame and immobilize me with their brilliance, while others, like Twain, de Vries and Spark,[1] dwarf my own efforts but inspire me to keep on.
It’s hard to pinpoint what separates the two group…

Whoah. Until now there hasn’t been a way to download info off of Facebook, but at today’s Facebook event in Palo Alto, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a feature that allows users to port their data…

The mysterious Facebook event is going to start in a few minutes. Part of this would seem to be a redesign of the site itself, with all major aspects getting a new coat of paint. But a last-minute tip coming i…

Today, at Facebook’s product announcement, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a new dashboard for users that will allow Facebook members to see how many sites and applications they’ve allowed to acce…

What drove you bonkers this morning, so far? A stale three-dollar bagel with half-defrosted cream cheese? Not having a job at all? Did the cretins next door — the ones with the tattoos around their mouths and…

Q: A lot of people were asking things like what advice you have for somebody who wants to get started in programming. How would you respond to that?

A: Pay attention to that need of really doing something th…

In a post entitled “Quite the way to celebrate our 200 millionth check-in“, Foursquare is once again apologizing this morning for downtime yesterday. It was only yesterday that a long, fairly technical expl…

We are on the verge of a blog outreach campaign, to support our PR, affiliate marketing, linkbuilding and brand goals. We want to share the love where possible, and to hopefully receive a bit back.
Cultivating…

It’s obvious why Apple fans are starting to root for a Microsoft comeback…

“Our findings provide genetic evidence of an increased rate of large CNVs in individuals with ADHD and suggest that ADHD is not purely a social construct.” (abstract) Researchers find a genetic basis for ADHD,…

We’ve all visited a social media channel for a company or organization we like, and all we get is the sound of crickets. There’s nobody there except friends, fans and followers who are either posting into a…

In recent years, a series of situations have come to light where, thanks to compensation structures, perverse incentives were created, and terrible consequences ensued. At the heart of the 2008 financial crisis…

If you have a successful mobile application that’s reliant on advertising, then you obviously want to do everything you can to maximize how much revenue each ad unit is generating. One way to do that is to se…

Even if you hold your laptop up to your face like a flip phone, talking into your computer is lame. You want to use Google Voice like a real phone—with butto…

ESPN’s hugely popular columnist, “Sports Guy” Bill Simmons, accidentally tweeted “moss vikings” Tuesday afternoon, hours before NFL beat reporters ever released word of this morning’s Randy Moss trade.
This is…

I obviously don’t speak for all investors. But in my experience as an entrepreneur, and now spending my time amongst investors, I can generalize that almost all VC investments in early stage technology In…

With the U.S. slipping dangerously in the science rankings, it’s clear schools are not inspiring children. Inventor and billionaire James Dyson says they can start by dropping standardized tests, which dam…

People love to cite that all-interesting factoid: If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world. Well, now — thanks to geeky-yet-popular web comic XKCD — you can unlock a whole lot…

Three nice resources for story fans:

Nicholine Hayward offers a downloadable Word .doc, The Storytelling CEO, in which she has “looked at how the most successful CEOs are also the best storytellers. Hayward…

If you’ve ever wondered what happened to a tweet, Tweet Library could be just the tool to help you organize and archive your posts.

We had already covered Guardian columnist Helienne Lindvall’s absolutely ridiculous and logically tortured attack on people who recognize the value of “free,” by mocking them for charging people to speak at the…

I’ve never appreciated classic literature.
I read Hawthorne and I get bored. I read Austen and I fall asleep. My wife likes Dickens, but I can’t stand it. Ask me who Tiny Tim is, and nine times out of ten…

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If you’re unhappy with your website’s performance, you’re not alone.
Everyone expects a certain level of performance from their website — bloggers want bigger lists, businesses want more sales,…

Have you been loosing sleep trying to figure out why you got unfriended on Facebook? I hope not! But if you have been unfriended recently, you might still be curious to know the reason behind this distasteful a…

It may be contrarian, or just plain paranoid, but there are no five words that worry me more than, “we had a great meeting.”

Why? Because rarely is the purpose of a meeting the meeting itself. And often the m…

A guest post by Nathalie Lussier, who blogs as The Raw Foods Witch.
Is your blog getting the attention you know it deserves? Maybe you haven’t started your blog yet because you can’t settle on the right nam…

Well, we’ve made it, folks. It’s day 3 of SMX and I have the reddest eyes in all of the land. But that won’t stop me! We have four awesome sessions to make it through today and we shall be victorious! …

Interesting way of re-imagining the hierarchy of needs – http://bit.ly/cACtLu (via @frogdesign)

Where Young College Grads are Finding Jobs. Government has been the main hirer of young college grads over the past year . And why not? Government jobs are safer, they pay well, and have better benefits than t…

Yesterday, we rounded up some handsome, business-friendly WordPress themes for small business sites. Regardless of which design you go with, you’re going to want to bolt some plugins on to your installatio…

Over the last two days, the popular location based service and king of check-ins, Foursquare, has been suffering from intermittent outages related to database overload and storage troubles. And this is wonderfu…

WordPress.com has announced an admirable new feature for customers who want to leave its hosting service: for a fee, they will redirect all incoming visitors to your new site, preserving links to all your exis…

The assembly-line mindset is a natural defense mechanism for the work we’re asked to do all day.One more form to fill out. Six more articles to write. Yet another soundcheck for yet another band playing at the…

If we were to go by its moniker, “Social Media” should present itself as a communication channel rooted in human interaction – people from around the world using accessible publishing tool…

When asked which entrepreneur teenagers admire most, Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs reigns supreme according to the 2010 Junior Achievement Teens and Entrepreneurship survey (PDF), leaving Facebook founde…

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A little over a year and a half ago, I decided to take charge of my health. Honestly, I decided to take charge of my weight gain and that blossomed into taking charge of my health. Although I had exer…

To switch, or not to switch?
It took me a long time to build up the courage to get rid of my iPhone and buy an HTC Droid Incredible. The iPhone is an amazing accomplishment, and I had a great few years with it….

[Download the printable version here etc.]
Rackspace likes to describe their customer support as “Fanatical” [Its right there on their homepage. Go see.].
Which got me thinking, what does being “fanatica…

Zingaya, the UK-based VoIP startup, has launched a fun new service today that makes it easy for your Twitter followers to call you. I’m calling it tweet-to-call in reference to the company’s main offering, its…

I first heard about DVDs in late March 1997, sitting in the back seat of a friend’s car as her now-husband explained this new video format that had just gone on sale weeks earlier. Having just gotten my VCR, it…

COMPUTERWORLD: A note to all the folk out there complaining that Apple isn’t paying any attention to Mac sales– you’re wrong. Just look at the data. Cast your mind back to 2007, perhaps call it up by atte…

Investment research firm Piper Jaffray recently completed its 20th bi-annual teen survey…

An email with a subject line of “You Made Me Cry” gets my attention!
And that is exactly what Jamie Lee Wallace wrote to me last week after reading the post “Social Media and the Big Conversation Fail….

Ok, so it’s not exactly a fully fledged CRM system (yet) but when you compare the information you have on a client or lead in Salesforce with the information that Facebook has on the same person the differen…

As a blogger with a good amount of followers (thank you all – I don’t want that to sound smug!) I often get approached by people to review their products or services. I have no problems doi…

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Content Marketing – Give Them Something to Talk About
If customers and prospects are already chattering about your brand on the social Web, your social media initiative can focus primarily on becoming a…

Any time people start talking about social media for B2B companies, the question always comes up about how do you measure the ROI, or return on investment, of it. There are lots of opinions of the value of this…

I was reading a book last night with my two boys right before bedtime. In the story was a girl named Jan. Jan was new at school and was trying to make friends with the other children.
Unfortunately, no one wa…

Jolie O’Dell reports that Internet Explorer’s share of the internet browser market has fallen below 50% for the first time in a very long time. Meanwhile Firefox’s share grew by half a percent during Se…

Tumblr fans, your benevolent overlords have just bestowed upon you a gift the likes of which you can never hope to repay.In a nutshell, Tumblr queues are no longer the headache-inducing deathtraps they once wer…

OMG, I’m exhausted! I need to go lie down. Oh….wait…you’re still here. Just kidding! Look how peppy and alert I am! Isn’t it amazing. You totally can’t tell I’ve been blogging for 27 hours tod…

Ryan Tate / Gawker:
Bar Spy: Apple Trying To Hire a Blogger? — Apples PR staff would be well advised to reach out more to bloggers, or even blog on their own. So the mysterious overture Apple made to…

Eran Shir / eran’s posterous:
Why Did we sell Dapper to Yahoo? — A few hours ago we signed an agreement to sell Dapper, my four year old baby, to Yahoo! for an undisclosed sum that someone will probably…

Want to learn about the billion dollar companies who’s survival depends on the exchange of virtual goods? How about the new economy that is being built with Facebook Credits? You can learn all about these t…

As you may have noticed yesterday, Foursquare was down. Very down. In fact, that service says that total downtime was around 11 hours all told. That’s not good. And they know it. So they wrote a post on their…