Link Post for July 12th through July 16th

This is the A2SM Link Post for July 12th through July 16th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • DA Withdraws iPhone 4 Warrant, Returns Gizmodo Editor Jason Chen’s Possessions – The iPhone 4 may be available to the general public, but the police investigation into the leaked device that Gizmodo purchased last spring is still going strong. Now there’s been a new development: the EFF reports that the San Mateo District Attorney has withdrawn the warrant it used to search Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s house last April, when it confiscated multiple computers, hard drives, and other electronics.
  • U.S. Authorities Shut Down WordPress Host With 73,000 Blogs | TorrentFreak – After the U.S. Government took action against several sites connected to movie streaming recently, nerves are jangling over the possibility that this is just the beginning of a wider crackdown. Now it appears that a free blogging platform has been taken down by its hosting provider on orders from the U.S. authorities on grounds of “a history of abuse”. More than 73,000 blogs are out of action as a result.
  • How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made – How do you take the social web by storm in a day, winning over even the coldest of hearts and gaining international acclaim – with commercials?
  • Man Claims Ownership of Facebook – WSJ.com – A New York judge has issued a temporary restraining order restricting the transfer of Facebook Inc.'s assets, following a suit by a New York man who claims to own an 84% stake in the social-networking company.
  • Two Guys Conquer YouTube For Profit And Glory – I call them the YouTube cowboys: two guys who are rough around the edges, not obeying anyone’s rules, and steadfastly doing well by doing their own thing; they are crushing it. These relatively new YouTube channel owners are not just dominating their genre, they are often spanking the biggest brands in the world, bringing in hundreds of thousands of views to their content every day.
  • Make Your Own Rechargeable, Water-Powered Battery – We've covered how to make a beer battery before, but if you've yet to get into the home brewing scene, you can make a smaller battery with a copper rod and a bit of water or vinegar.

Link Post for March 31st through April 1st

This is the A2SM Link Post for March 31st through April 1st. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • Six ways Gmail revolutionized e-mail – CNN.com – Thursday marks the sixth birthday of Google's pioneering e-mail service: Gmail.
  • Our Choice: The Funniest April Fools Jokes – It’s that date again, folks. If you’ve seen an amazing new service or something that sounds too good to be true, it probably is — very few companies take April 1 seriously. Reports of April Fools jokes are pouring in; as we do every year, we’ll mention the ones that are either very funny or amazingly clever.
  • April Fools 2010 From Google & Others – Today is a worst/best day for journalists or bloggers, depending on your worldview: April Fools Day. Many technology companies come out and try to fool people with fake or funny news. Below is a collection of, what appears to be, April Fools Day hoaxes from Google and other search related companies for the day. I do hope to continue to update it throughout the day.
  • Q&A: Personal vs. Professional Branding in Social MEdia – Dan Schwabel is not only a personal branding expert, he’s someone I’ve come to know and respect over the years…and definitely someone I consider a friend. We recently sat down to discuss Engage and the resulting interaction culminated in a wonderful discussion that explored the state of professional and personal branding in the era of new media.
  • TweetDeck Taps TwitVid For Video Sharing, Replacing 12seconds – TweetDeck is switching its default video Tweeting platform today, from 12seconds to TwitVid. TwitVid.com will serve as the video service across all existing TweetDeck products, as well as all new products released by TweetDeck in 2010
  • Unvarnished: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place For Defamation – Today, Unvarnished makes its beta debut. It’s essentially Yelp for LinkedIn: any user can create an online profile for a professional and submit anonymous reviews. You can claim your profile, but unlike LinkedIn, you have to accept every post, warts and all. And once the profile is up there’s no taking it down.
  • YouTube Blog: Latest Changes to Video Page: New Playlist Experience, Integrated Comments & More – The video page overhaul that's underway now is one of the biggest redesigns in YouTube history. It's been a month since we offered a sneak peek of the new look and functionality, and in that time we've been gathering your feedback, looking at data, and tweaking elements to ensure that the page is as clean and useful as it can be.
  • YouTube Blog: The Video Page Gets a Makeover – From the Queen of England to the queen of your 'hood, from aspiring filmmakers to Hollywood studios, from high school graduation videos to citizen reports of revolutionary moments in Iran, it all has a home on YouTube. This creates a really big challenge: how do we design a site that reflects so many different users, experiences and videos? This is a question we've thought about a lot since we launched in 2005. The result of some of this thinking (some might say over-thinking) is a video page chock-full of features that reflect a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but can feel cluttered and a little overwhelming. We've spent a lot of time over the last 10 months asking ourselves some tough questions about this page and posing some of those questions to you in blog posts, roundtable discussions, one-on-one conversations with the community and even on forums like our Product Ideas for YouTube page
  • YouTube To Roll Out New Design For All Video Pages Today – A YouTube partner just forwarded us an e-mail he received from the Google company, stating that all videos will be transitioned to the newly designed page some time today.
  • Less Than One Third Of Tweets Come From The United States, Study Says – Paris-based Semiocast, which helps brands understand and interact with real-time Web services, has again done a study on Twitter usage. After finding that only 50% of tweets are in English, based on an analysis of 2.8 million tweets, the company has now looked at nearly five times as many Twitter messages in order to gain more insight on the increased international presence of the popular micro-sharing service.

Link Post for March 29th

This is the A2SM Link Post for March 29th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed

  • How Facebook May Save Elevation Partners – Things are not going great at Elevation Partners. Its initial $1.8 billion fund – that was met with great fanfare when it was raised by rockstar investor Roger McNamee, rockstar gaming executive John Riccitiello and actual rockstar Bono – is about 70% invested and the two biggest deals are duds. Elevation invested some $300 million in Forbes and a whopping $460 million in Palm—a company with a stock hovering around $4 per share, down some 75% since October.
  • Google Buzz Getting Smoked In The Sharing Race By A Dead Man – I’m reminded of this while looking over the traffic logs for TechCrunch, because it appears that someone else is losing to a dead rival: Google Buzz. According to our data, in the past month, Google Buzz has been sending less traffic to TechCrunch than FriendFeed — the service which is essentially the same as Buzz, only better, and ever since the acquisition by Facebook has been a ghost town.
  • Hulu Versus TV Everywhere: What Happens After The Comcast-NBC Merger Is Complete? – The pending $30 billion merger of Comcast and NBC-Universal is going to complicate things for Hulu, the second most popular online video site after YouTube. Hulu is a joint venture between NBC, News Corp/Fox, and (since last year) Disney/ABC. It was created by the TV networks as a counterweight to YouTube, a safe place where they could run their full-length TV shows online with their own ads.
  • Don’t share anything important or of value via Linkedin … they will own it! « scalability.org
  • The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators – I keep hearing people throw around the word “curation” at various conferences, most recently at SXSW. The thing is most of the time when I dig into what they are saying they usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world.
  • 10 Must-See Google Street View Sightings – While we brought you 15 amusing Google Street View sightings when the service launched back in 2007, in the last few years Google has expanded its coverage around the globe, which also means expanding the chances of humorous photo captures.

Link Post for March 18th through March 19th

This is the A2SM Link Post for March 18th through March 19th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • PETA and Meat Company Battle to Score Sex.com – Sex.com is the most valuable domain name in the world (for obvious reasons). Right now it’s up for sale, and two of the prospective buyers might surprise you: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and a California meat company called BullWhip.
  • 4 Easy Ways to Engage Your Facebook Fans – While more than three million businesses, brands and celebrities have created Facebook Pages, many are struggling to figure out how best to use them. Companies are finding that even when they keep their pages updated with fresh content, they still aren’t seeing steady growth in their fan base.
  • Google May Leave China on April 10 – Google’s decision to cease its operation in China is edging closer to reality after months of negotiations. China Business News reports that Google plans to leave China on April 10.
  • ExecutiveBiz Blog» Blog Archive » FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski: “Consumers Need to Make the Internet Work.” – In an interview with Steve Grove, YouTube’s head of news and politics, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski discussed his goals in implementing the FCC’s National Broadband Plan. Genachowski’s priorities include serving all Americans with broadband coverage while increasing private-sector competition and improving information available to consumers.
  • What Social Media Users Want [STATS] – Twitterers mostly consume news, MySpace users want games and entertainment, Facebookers are into both news and community and Digg’s audience has a mixed bag of interests.

Link Post for February 20th through February 22nd

This is the A2SM Link Post for February 20th through February 22nd. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • Twitter and Digicel Eliminate SMS Charges for Haiti – Twitter, as a platform, played a big role in the instantaneous spread of information following the earthquake that devastated Haiti in January. Today the microblogging site is officially supporting the exchange of real-time information and offering free SMS tweets for Digicel Haiti customers.
  • Guinness World Records Buys Video Site for Zany Challenges – Guinness World Records has purchased Bragster, a video-sharing site where you can “dare your friends and brag about it.”

    On Bragster, users post dares — for example, “I dare everyone to drink five raw eggs” or “I dare everyone to make as many spins in an office chair as possible (in 1 min)” — and other users respond by posting videos of themselves fulfilling the task. Selected winners get bragging rights points and compete in a site-wide leaderboard. Each initial dare also gets voted up or down, so you can weed through the news for the most interesting dares.

  • Denny’s Menu Misprint Leads to Twitter Mess – Denny’s dine-in menu invites customers to “Join the conversation!” and follow @Dennys on Twitter. The problem is that the account in question belongs to a Taiwanese Twitterer — Dennys Hsieh — and not the American restaurant chain, which manages two official accounts: DennysAllNightr and DennysGrandSlam.
  • Walmart Acquires Online Movie Service Vudu – Walmart is set to make a play for your living room. The company has acquired online movie service Vudu, just over a month after rumors about a deal first surfaced.
  • A Beginner’s Guide to Made-for-Internet TV – Web video is expanding right now, and though a lot of attention is paid to episodes of network TV shows like Lost or The Office that you can stream online, there’s an emerging wealth of content made just for the web. There’s going to be even more of it in the future, so this is a great time to get in at the ground level and experience an emerging art form.
  • Facebook Acquires a Third Startup, Shuts it Down

Link Post for February 18th through February 19th

This is the A2SM Link Post for February 18th through February 19th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • FarmVille Wins Social Networking Game of the Year Award – The 13th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards ceremony was held last night as part of the video game industry’s Dice Summit conference in Las Vegas, NV. Games.com reports that the top honor in the “Social Networking Game of the Year” category went to Zynga’s massively popular Facebook game FarmVille.
  • Couple Says "iDo" at Apple Store Wedding [VIDEO] – Talk about a destination wedding — this Valentine’s Day, an Apple-obsessed couple tied the knot at New York’s Fifth Avenue Apple Store in a ceremony that referenced Steve Jobs, boasted a first generation iPod as a ring bearer and was officiated by a priest decked out like Jobs himself.
  • William Shatner to Star in "Sh*t My Dad Says" TV Pilot – Justin Halpern’s immensely popular Twitter account “Sh*t My Dad Says” is in the process of being turned into a sitcom, and there’s a powerhouse of industry veterans attached to the project. Today we can add William Shatner to the list, as he’s primed to star as the dad-that-speaks-his-mind in the pilot episode.
  • Hollrr: Foursquare for Product Reviews
  • Tiger Woods Press Conference Draws 683,000 Views on Ustream – The web took a collective 15 minute pause this morning as Tiger Woods made his first public statement since becoming engulfed in scandal back in November. Ustream is the first in with numbers from the event, as they tell us that their live stream drew 683,000 views.
  • Is Your Target Audience On Twitter, Facebook, Or LinkedIn?
  • WordPress.com Outage Takes Us And 10,199,999 Other Blogs Down – TechCrunch is one of the millions of blogs hosted on WordPress.com (not to be confused with sites that run the WordPress software but are hosted elsewhere). All told, some 10.2 million blogs went down — wiping out some 5.5 million pageviews, WordPress estimates. This was their worst outage in 4 years.
  • Austin Pilot Joseph Andrew Stack Left Disturbing Online Manifesto – If you’ve been following the news, you know that a plane intentionally crashed into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. While details surrounding this tragedy are still being discovered, it appears that the man who owned the plane, Joseph Andrew Stack, left an online manifesto detailing his decision. Stack also set his house on fire before crashing his plane.

Link Post for January 29th through January 31st

This is the A2SM Link Post for January 29th through January 31st. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

Link Post for January 6th through January 7th

This is the A2SM Link Post for January 6th through January 7th:

  • HootSuite Now Lets You Update Your WordPress Blog – HootSuite, the popular Twitter app geared towards businesses and power users, has just issued yet another update to their web-based client, featuring the ability to post to the WordPress.com blogging platform, URL and content previews, and trending topic explanations.
  • iTunes Browser Previews Now With Actual Music – Back in November of 2009, Apple finally rolled out a web browser preview for music in the iTunes catalog. It let you view the albums page, see all the songs included on the album, their length, as well as price for individual tracks.
  • Graphic.ly Creates the Digital Comic Book Store – During Microsoft’s keynote at CES 2010 this evening, Steve Ballmer showed off a very cool mobile and web application called Graphic.ly, a platform that aims to be the ultimate digital content delivery system for the publishing world.
  • 2010 Census Turns to Facebook to Maximize Impact, Reach Young Adults – As the year 2010 gets underway, so does the federal Census in the United States — only this time around it has gone somewhat digital, incorporating Facebook and other digital media to spread the word about being counted.
  • HOW TO: Erase Your Online Past [HUMOR] – These days, it’s getting tougher and tougher to keep a good name unbesmirched. Surveys indicate that as many as half of hiring managers use search engines to screen job applicants, and 1 in 10 have rejected potential employees because of damaging information on the web. Even if there’s no one out to get you, it’s likely that you’ve left your own e-trail of embarrassment: FacebookFacebookFacebook photos, blog comments, cached web pages, YouTubeYouTubeYouTube videos — all these things can provide the world with evidence of your previous poor judgement and wrongdoing.
  • Echofon 3.0 Gets With the Twitter Times – You have plenty of options when it comes to using Twitter on your iPhone. But Echofon just made a big move for your attention by releasing version 3.0.
  • Video: Google’s “F*ck You iPhone” Phone. The REAL Google Phone (Satire, NSFW) – As we’re all well aware, Google released the Nexus One yesterday, the first supposed “Google Phone.” But it’s hardly an iPhone killer. For that role, Google has something much more sinister in mind. Meet the “Fuck You iPhone” Phone.

Link Post for December 20th

This is the A2SM Link Post for December 20th:

  • Justin.tv To Launch Pay-Per-View Channels – The live video streaming site Justin.tv is set to launch a pay-per-view service next month, allowing content providers to charge fees to those tuning in online.
  • NBA Player Fined $7,500 for a Tweet – Last weekend Jennings tweeted 15 minutes after the Bucks game against the Trailblazers ended. That’s a big no-no in the NBA, as the league’s social media policy spells out that players aren’t allowed to tweet post-game until the team has finished talking to the media. The cost for Jennings’ Twitter hiccup? A hefty $7,500.
  • Bing! Ballmer Says You’re Fired [VIDEO] – Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is known for his antics, but — if a video recently uploaded to YouTube is to be believed — this incident takes the cake. Apparently, Ballmer fired a Microsoft employee for not being enthusiastic enough about Bing.
  • Don’t Like Your Facebook Friends? Blow Them Up with the Star Wars Death Star – If you’re Adidas and you’ve got a Star Wars-inspired collection rolling out in January, what better way to promote it than by using social media? Adidas, however, has taken its online marketing initiative one step further integrating Facebook and Google Maps to create the Star Wars Death Star Superlaser.
  • HOW TO: Use Facebook Privacy Controls on Your Fan Page – Lately it seems like Facebook changes its privacy options more often than most people change their statuses. Late last week, Facebook rolled out yet another set of new privacy settings, replacing regional networks with concentric circles of connections. Before, Facebook’s default privacy settings were largely location-based — people who lived near you, or went to the same college as you, were able to see more information about you. Now, access is all about who you know and who knows them.

Link Post for December 18th through December 20th

This is the A2SM Link Post for December 18th through December 20th: