Link Post for April 16th through April 18th

This is the A2SM Link Post for April 16th through April 18th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • 12 Chatroulette Clones You Should Try – Chatroulette has been giving journalists reporting fodder for slow news days for a few months now — enough time, apparently, to spawn a number of clones.
  • 5 Tips for Creating the Perfect Profile Pic – No matter how much quality information or witty repartee we send out into our social networks, first impressions are almost always visual. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that the first thing we see when checking out a new Twitter (Twitter) follower, Facebook (Facebook) friend, or LinkedIn (LinkedIn) connection is a profile photo. And in a world of quick clicks and divergent attention, if the photo you present isn’t eye-catching, or illustrative of your personal brand, you may miss your shot at making a positive first impression.
  • HOW TO: Maximize Your Content’s Reach on the Social Web – We have all heard that “content is king” — Sumner Redstone deemed it so, then Rupert Murdoch upped the ante, calling it “emperor.” But how do we make sure content is delivered to the right places, at the right times? How can we measure the effectiveness of this content and its distribution?
  • Spam Suspect Uses Google Docs; FBI Happy | Threat Level | Wired.com – FBI agents targeting alleged criminal spammers last year obtained a trove of incriminating documents from a suspect’s Google Docs account, in what appears to be the first publicly acknowledged search warrant benefiting from a suspect’s reliance on cloud computing.
  • Study: Young adults do care about online privacy – Yahoo! News – But it's not quite true, a new study finds. Despite mounds of anecdotes about college students sharing booze-chugging party photos, posting raunchy messages and badmouthing potential employers online, young adults generally care as much about privacy as older Americans.
  • DOJ abandons warrantless attempt to read Yahoo e-mail | Politics and Law – CNET News – The U.S. Justice Department has abruptly abandoned what had become a high-profile court fight to read Yahoo users' e-mail messages without obtaining a search warrant first. (via Matt Cutts)
  • Good Enough For A Pulitzer, But Not Good Enough For Apple | Techdirt – Just as online content only begins to get some recognition as being Pulitzer worthy, it looks like those content creators still have a major hurdle to overcome: namely, Apple's incredibly screwed up application approval process. Cartoonist Mark Fiore made Internet and journalism history this week as the first online-only journalist to win a Pulitzer prize for his work over at the San Francisco Chronicle. Much more difficult? Getting his iPhone cartoon application past Apple's application store guardians. Fiore says his application was rejected last December because, as an Apple letter phrased it, his satirical cartoons "ridicule public figures," a violation of Apple's iPhone Developer Program License Agreement.

Link Post for April 12th through April 14th

This is the A2SM Link Post for April 12th through April 14th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • It’s Official: Cats Love iPads [VIDEO] – Love it or hate it, the iPad is definitely the kind of device that opens up new possibilities, ones you probably didn’t think of when it was first launched. Now that it’s present in several hundred thousand homes, it reached a new and unexpected user base: cats.
  • How Texting and Driving Could Destroy Your Business [With Legal Analysis] | Search Engine Journal – Did the title of my post get your attention? Believe me, I wish texting and driving couldn’t destroy your business, but it unfortunately has the potential to. In this month’s post, I’m taking a break from writing about technical SEO, Paid Search, Social Media Marketing, etc. to talk about something that can make even your worst search-related problem look like a walk in the park.
  • Bit.ly Links Get Clicked 3.4 Billion Times A Month, New Features Coming – The default link shortener on Twitter, bit.ly, just keeps getting bigger. In March, 3.4 billion bit.ly-shortened links were clicked on, up from 2.7 billion in February and only 87 million a year ago. Yesterday was a record day for bit.ly, with 147 million clicks (see chart).
  • TweetUp to Tweak Twitter Searches, Generate Ad Revenue – Website Magazine – Website Magazine – TweetUp, a new patent-pending platform that combines the popularity, relevance and influence of tweets and tweeters with a bid-based marketplace, is bringing search advertising to Twitter. An auction-based system that will allow advertisers to bid to have their tweets displayed when users search for keywords, TweetUp gives the most important tweets the distinction they deserve.
  • Yahoo! Firehose Released – Website Magazine – Website Magazine – The Yahoo! Developer Network announced the release of the Yahoo! Updates Firehose service, a web service for accessing and searching the full, real-time index of Yahoo! updates and a stream of activity from various Web services like Flickr.
  • Google CEO Disses Blogging – Eric Schmidt – Gawker – Eric Schmidt runs the biggest single blog network in the world, which makes it all the more bizarre that the Google CEO was insulting bloggers at a newspaper conference today. Was it something we said, Eric?

Link Post for April 6th through April 7th

This is the A2SM Link Post for April 6th through April 7th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

Link Post for March 30th through March 31st

This is the A2SM Link Post for March 30th through March 31st. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • Mobile Firefox Comes to Android (Sort of) – Fennec, the mobile version of the Firefox web browser, is now available in an early build designed for Android handsets thanks to a fan-compiled download posted on an Android developers forum. And by early, we mean unofficial, pre-alpha, device-specific and downright buggy. But for anyone interested in mobile browser developments, this port is an interesting sneak peek into the future of Firefox's mobile plans.
  • Global Pulse 2010 Wants Your Solutions to Global Challenges – Global Pulse 2010 is a completely online virtual event running through tomorrow where you can participate in a global conversation whose stated goal is to “create innovative solutions to the most pressing social issues of our time.” Sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Global Pulse 2010 is also being supported by the U.S. Departments of State, Education, Commerce, and Health and Human Services.
  • Judge: Isohunt Must Remove Infringing Content – One of the largest BitTorrent search engines in the world, Isohunt, has been ordered by a US judge to remove all infringing content from the site. The ruling follows similar ruling against torrent tracker Mininova which has lost a great amount of traffic after complying with the order to remove copyright-infringing links from the site.
  • Board Games on the iPad: Oh Yes, This is Going to be Big – TUAW has a preview of an iPad application called Game Table. It costs 99 cents, and it lets you play classic board games, such as Chess, Poker or Checkers, on the iPad.<br />
    <br />
    The beauty of its approach is the fact that it’s not really a game – it just gives you the necessary components and the mechanics to play a variety of games. And, when you think of it, for many users this app (or similar apps like it) might be the killer app that makes the Apple iPad worth purchasing.
  • 10 Amazing YouTube Magic Trick Videos – Who doesn’t love magic? Whether you’re obsessed with finding out “how they did that,” or you just like to gaze with child-like wonder at a good trick, YouTube has become a wealthy repository of illusion.
  • Google Earth Helps Deputy Make Arrest – Google became true-blue crime-fighting tool for one Florida Panhandle deputy this week. The law man, Deputy Gregory Barnes, recently made use of Google Earth to arrest a man charged with illegally dumping his one-ton boat.
  • iPad, Meet "Star Trek" – In Star Trek, members of the crew are carrying a tablet-like device called the PADD, or Personal Access Display Device. It comes in many shapes and flavors — there’s even a horizontal one. And, circa 2151, the device that was in common use looked pretty much like the thing we’ll be frantically testing this weekend: the Apple iPad.
  • Gmail Adds OAuth Support for Safer 3rd Party Sign-ins – Google announced the addition of OAuth support in Gmail in a blog post today, which is a highly positive move that allows you to give third party applications access to the contents on your email without having to give them your password. You may be familiar with the term from Twitter, who added OAuth support back in April of last year.
  • Automattic Announces VaultPress Security Plugin – (Via @glenngabe)
  • Facebook Squeezes Digg Into A New Business Model – While I personally love using Digg to find my news content, the majority of the internet is perfectly satisfied finding content through their friends. While Digg is in the process of rolling out a new version of their site, Facebook’s decision to release a “like button for the internet” could significantly impact Digg. Combine that with their previously released share analytics and share button, and you can see how Digg is getting squeezed into a new business model.

Link Post for March 22nd

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

Link Post for March 19th through March 21st

This is the A2SM Link Post for March 19th through March 21st. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • Sprint Makes Your iPhone 4G [VIDEO] – The iPhone 4G (next generation iPhone) is yet to be released, but Sprint is cleverly advertising “4G speeds” on your iPhone thanks to its Sierra Wireless Overdrive 4G WiFi hotspot.
  • Yelp for Business: 4 Steps for Success – For local small businesses, Yelp (Yelp) isn’t just an option — it’s a necessity. People in urban centers use it to choose where to go to dinner, where to buy clothes, and where to be entertained. Users decide where and how to spend their money using Yelp, so if your business is local, you need to curate your Yelp page.
  • 4 Ways Non-Profits Can Use Google Buzz – When a green field lies before you, so does opportunity. Some non-profits stand to gain from being part of the early Buzz adopter community. Whether a cause needs to further the dialogue with a tech-savvy crowd, or is attracted to the functionality of Gmail (Gmail) integration, Buzz does bring some new capabilities to bear.
  • Ben Folds Plays Chatroulette Live in Concert [VIDEO] – Singer-songwriter Ben Folds visited the random video chat site Chatroulette during a recent live concert in Charlotte, North Carolina, playing improv piano tunes about the people he was connected with.
  • New Twitter Phishing Attack: “You’re On Here?” [WARNING] – Twitter users are reporting a new attempt to extract their usernames and passwords — a Direct Message attack that asks “You’re on here?” with a link. Others report DMs linking to a site called “mhansenhome” with the message “’someone posted on their blog about you”.
  • Happy Birthday Twitter! – Sunday, March 21st (a few hours from now on the West Coast) marks Twitter’s 4th birthday — exactly four years since Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sent his first Tweet and, along with Evan Williams and Biz Stone, started a phenomenon.
  • In choosing its battle names, the military must know its target audience – washingtonpost.com – Names are important, especially in war. Like a good advertising jingle, war names must be catchy and concise. But above all else, they have to sell — all sorts of things, to all sorts of people: inspiration to the troops, righteousness to Americans at home, partnership to allied countries, peace and promise to non-combatant civilians.
  • Social Media & Scott Monty @ Ford Motor Company – Online Marketing Blog – When you think of successful consumer brands in the social media space, names like Dell, Zappos and Pepsi come to mind. Another is Ford. Last year the Ford Fiesta movement generated a tremendous amount of awareness (and pre-orders) for a vehicle that wasn’t available to the public yet. (Great summary on Jeff Bullas’s blog) At the same time, it inspired a community to engage, create content and continue discussions about the Fiesta with over 7 million video views.
  • Social Media Optimization Tools – Online Marketing Blog – Plenty of bloggers are talking about the inevitable intersection of social media marketing and search engine optimization. Heck, we’ve been blogging about SMO since 2006! Keyword optimized social content and channels of promotion provide abundant signals to search engines for improved visibility on standard, social and real-time search.
  • Responsibilities of Community Managers » Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg – Every time I tell someone I’m a Community Manager, I get a varied response. But the response doesn’t vary enough. The response is usually something along the lines of “Wow! So you tweet and facebook for a living! Kewlz!” or “So do you blog on the interwebs all day, or sumthin?” Another favorite is “What’s that?” That last one might be the most honest of the three, since asking a Community Manager whether they tweet for a living is like asking a construction worker if they cat-call for a living, or a doctor if he asks people to say “ah!” for a living.

Link Post for March 17th

This is the A2SM Link Post for March 17th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed

  • Facebook’s Beacon Lawsuit Settlement Approved – The 2008 ‘Beacon’ class action lawsuit against Facebook that claimed violation of consumer privacy has now been settled by a federal judge. The Beacon program, which Facebook terminated in late 2009, publish information about consumer purchases — such as movie rentals, which is contrary to law — to the Facebook Wall of the purchaser and to their friends’ feeds. In one instance, a to-be-surprise gift of jewelry was broadcast to one user’s Facebook network, obviously ruining the surprise for his wife.
  • ALERT: Facebook Password Reset Confirmation Is Fake – Facebook users are currently reporting that they’ve been receiving an email that states “Facebook Password Reset Confirmation” but as usual, this email is completely fake. In fact, it’s not only fake but it also contains a virus. Facebook is currently letting users know that the email -Error Icon-is fake but they need help in spreading the word, so be sure to let your friends know!
  • Posterous Now Lets You Schedule Posts for Later – Posterous — the e-mail-to-blog-to-everywhere platform — has just introduced a new feature that will let users schedule posts to be published in the future via e-mail, web or bookmarklet.
  • YouTube Is Huge: 24 Hours of Video Now Uploaded Every Minute – YouTube has just announced that it has surpassed yet another milestone, and this one’s a doozy: 24 hours of video is now uploaded to the social video site every sixty seconds. Every second you are browsing YouTube, a full 24 minutes of video is uploaded to the site.
  • Mobile App Market to Surge to $17.5 Billion by 2012 [STUDY] – Lithuanian-based GetJar, an independent mobile phone application store with more than 60,000 mobile applications for major mobile platforms such as Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile, commissioned a study that predicts a huge surge in the number of mobile app downloads and the overall size of the mobile app market.
  • Our Social Media Obsession by the Numbers [STATS] – From the time we wake up in the morning to the moment we call it a day, and every moment in between (think bedroom, bathroom and dinner table), we’re checking in on our favorite social media sites.
  • 10 Features I Want to See in TweetDeck – I have a love/hate relationship with TweetDeck. While TweetDeck is a great tool that does so many things so well (the Love), it doesn’t do everything I want and need it to do and it still suffers from some pretty annoying technical issues (the Hate).

Link Post for March 4th through March 5th

This is the A2SM Link Post for March 4th through March 5th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • Social Media Today | Chaos is not a strategy – To be strategic ultimately means that you know what keeps your CEO and the members of her team awake at night so you can tailor communications that will help them all sleep better. That is, you know the business goals the company’s leaders are expected to achieve and you’re able to implement communications that move the needle in the right direction.
  • LEAKED: More Juicy Microsoft Courier Details and Pics – The Courier is a hinged device that combines elements of a tablet, an e-reader, and a netbook (sans physical keyboard). It’s reported to be less an inch thick, slightly heavier than a pound and slightly larger than a 5×7 print when folded. Instead of running Windows 7, the Courier will run the mobile OS Windows Mobile 7 Series, with an NVIDIA Tegra 2 chip under the hood.
  • Conan Pledges to Change One Woman’s Life… on Twitter – Conan, who up until minutes ago wasn’t following a single person, decided to change Sarah Killin’s life by following her and her alone. Conan announced the news via Twitter — likely with the help of his Twitter army.
  • The Top 10 Most Watched Web Series, February 2010 – Each month Visible Measures compiles a list of the top ten most popular web video series, and we share those results with you and provide analysis. Visible Measures tracks views, comments and other data on web video, and has just made available a free public beta of a tool to benchmark online video ad campaign and content performance.
  • Apple iPad Coming to U.S. on April 3 – Apple finally announced the exact date of iPad availability in the U.S.: It’s Saturday, April 3, for Wi-Fi models, while models with both Wi-Fi and 3G will be available in late April
  • Using Twitter Search for Business – [T]here are lots of ways to use it. Do you need to find more case studies? Here’s a simple search for case studies: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=”case+study”+filter:links
  • Clicker – What’s On Online – Clicker is… the TV Guide of Internet Television
  • Can We Kick Our Keyboard Addiction by 2013? – This morning, everyone is looking agog at the words of Google Europe boss John Herlihy, who's quoted in the Silicon Republic predicting the demise of the desktop computer.
  • Google Index to Go Real Time – Google is developing a system that will enable web publishers of any size to automatically submit new content to Google for indexing within seconds of that content being published. Search industry analyst Danny Sullivan told us today that this could be "the next chapter" for Google.

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 February 8th

This is the A2SM Link Post for February 8th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed

  • StopTweet: A Customizable Spam Blocker for Twitter – We've just found a new, completely free app that will zap those bots and bad users in just one click. It's fully customizable, so you can tell the blocker what you personally consider to be a spam account. And you can choose to simply unfollow those users, block them or report the accounts to Twitter, as well – again all with just one click. StopTweet is definitely one of the more useful apps we've seen lately, and it also helps us all do our part to clean up the Twitter universe.
  • 5 Insightful TED Talks on Social Media – As social media has become a game changer for industries across the board, you can bet the experts at this year’s TED conference will have their sights set on peeling back the hype and getting at the core of what social technology has in store for this year and beyond.
  • Multitouch Update Coming to the Droid Soon – There’s some good news and some bad news. First, the good news: sources tell Engadget that multitouch browsing will be added to the Motorola Droid in its next software update.
    Multitouch was one of the most requested features on Android (Android), at least until the Nexus One gained multitouch browsing last week.
  • 5 Levels of Effective Communication in the Social Media Age – In the era of social media, our networks are much larger than they have ever been, and we have more ways to communicate with those in them. Even if you are not very active on Facebook or Twitter, my guess is that your sphere of communication has expanded significantly in recent years. Who you communicate with and how you communicate has changed radically. This new connected era brings both opportunities and challenges.
  • HUGE: Google Set to Make Gmail Social With Status Update Features – Gmail is set to become Google’s next major push into social media. According to The Wall Street Journal, the popular webmail service will soon launch a new feature for sharing content and status updates with friends.
  • Super Bowl Ads 2010 [VIDEOS] – YouTube delivered on its promise to upload all the Super Bowl Ads as soon as they aired today, with users voting to choose which one will adorn the YouTube front page on Thursday.
  • Don’t Have Money for a Real iPad? Cut One Out of Paper