Mashable: Latest 25 News Updates - including “Financial Times Names Steve Jobs Person of the Year” |
- Financial Times Names Steve Jobs Person of the Year
- CityVille Is Now Bigger than FarmVille
- Track Santa With NORAD and Google
- The Anatomy of the Facebook Status Update [STATS]
- Now Facebook Admins Can Unmerge Their Pages from Places
- HOW TO: Make the Most of TextMate
- Path Adds 10-Second Video to its Anti-Social Network
- Skype Is Back, But Some Features Are Still Broken
- Hulu Playlists Enable Viewers to Become Curators
- The 10 Hottest Private Companies in Tech [REPORT]
- Top 10 Digital Advertising Innovations of 2010
- Vevo Homepage Gets a Facelift
- What’s Hot in Social Media This Week
- Google Maps Dresses Up Pegman for Christmas
- 5 Predictions for the Public Relations Industry in 2011
- How Did Americans Use Their Phones in the 2010 Midterm Election? [STATS]
- Interactive Google Doodle Commemorates the Holidays
- 75 Essential Small Business Resources From 2010
- Mull Over 2010 With This Interactive Shooting Range Game
- HOW TO: Build the Ultimate Home Theater
- Crowd-Sourced Johnny Cash Video Scores Grammy Nomination
- Skype Slowly Recovering, Still Down For Many Users
- 4 Predictions for Connected Devices in 2011
- Skype Outage, Foursquare Update & Google Purchase: This Morning’s Top Stories
- Confirmed: Google Buys Prestigious Manhattan Building
- 5 Free Annotation and Collaboration Tools for Web Projects
| Financial Times Names Steve Jobs Person of the Year Posted: 24 Dec 2010 03:39 AM PST      For Time magazine, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is the person of the year. Financial Times, however, decided that in 2010, Apple CEO Steve Jobs was more worthy of that title. It’s hard to argue against FT’s logic: Apple had a phenomenal year, with back-to-back record quarters at a time when the U.S. is still emerging out of a deep recession. Under the leadership of Steve Jobs, Apple also managed to create another breakthrough product: the iPad. Finally, the iPhone 4 launch, although initially marred with antenna issues, turned out to be one of the most successful product launches in Apple history. Financial Times touches on other possible candidates for the “person of the year” title. “When Steven Paul Jobs first hit the headlines, he was younger even than Mark Zuckerberg is now. (…) Now, three decades on, he has secured his place in the foremost ranks of the West Coast tech titans who have done so much to shape the world around the turn of the millennium. Long-time nemesis Bill Gates may be richer and, at his peak, arguably exerted greater sway, thanks to his monopoly over the world’s PC software. But the Microsoft co-founder has left the stage to devote his life and fortune to good works. It is Mr Jobs who now holds the spotlight,” explains FT. Do you agree with FT’s choice? From the business perspective, who was more successful: Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs? Share your opinions in the comments. More About: apple, Financial Times, ipad, person of the year, steve jobs For more Business coverage:
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| CityVille Is Now Bigger than FarmVille Posted: 24 Dec 2010 01:33 AM PST   Facebook game developer Zynga has proved once again that it knows exactly what it needs to do to keep millions of Facebook users happy and occupied. In less than a month, its latest game CityVille has become the most popular Facebook application, and has surpassed Zynga’s previous major hit FarmVille in all areas. According to AppData, CityVille now has 16.8 million daily active users, compared to FarmVille’s 16.4 million. Looking at monthly active users, CityVille is also ahead with 61.7 million users, while FarmVille trails behind quite a bit with 56.8 million users. Zynga also holds two more places in the top five with FrontierVille and Texas HoldEm Poker: put those four apps together (we’ll disregard the fact that many of those users overlap for a second) and you have a very impressive number: 184 million active users across four games. The only non-Zynga app in the top 5 list is Phrases, which at one point threatened to take the top place but is now overshadowed by both CityVille and FarmVille. CityVille’s future success wasn’t hard to predict after an amazingly good start at the beginning of December, but it’s still impressive to see Zynga amassing tens of millions of users in a matter of days, proving that all that venture capital that went into the company isn’t there by accident.  [via All Things Digital] More About: cityville, facebook, farmville, games, social games, social gaming, Zynga For more Social Media coverage:
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| Track Santa With NORAD and Google Posted: 24 Dec 2010 12:16 AM PST   Google and NORAD (North American Aerospace Defence Command) have teamed up once again to help you follow Santa as he travels around the world, jumping chimneys, delivering presents, and generally being very jolly. Right now, Santa is still preparing his route, muttering to his reindeer and killing time with some basketball, but soon he’ll start flying, and you won’t miss a thing if you tune into www.noradsanta.org. There you can see Santa’s current location and his next stop on a Google Map; you can also watch the “Santa Cam” videos and learn more about each city Santa visits by clicking on the gift icons. If you’re the 3D-loving type, you can switch over to the (much more attractive) Google Earth view with the Google Earth plugin which you can install here. Mobile access is also supported; just visit m.noradsanta.org on your mobile phone’s browser, or search for “santa” in Google Maps for mobile. Finally, you can track Santa via Facebook and Twitter over at @noradsanta. For some slightly more advanced tips on how to track Santa this year, check out this page.  More About: Christmas, Google, norad, Santa For more Tech coverage:
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| The Anatomy of the Facebook Status Update [STATS] Posted: 23 Dec 2010 09:14 PM PST   Facebook’s users are updating their status millions of times per day. We know what those users were chatting about the most, but what do teenagers talk about most? What about users with more Facebook friends? How does time of day affect status updates? To find out, Facebook’s computers analyzed approximately one million status updates from U.S. English speakers. It then broke down those updates based on context, demographics and content to figure out just what its users are buzzing about. The social network first analyzed the correlation between the use of specific words and age. Unsurprisingly, they found that there’s a positive correlation between age and religious words, family, and positive emotions, while there was a negative correlation between sex, sleeping, first person pronouns, school, swear words and negative emotions. In other words, the younger you are, the angrier you are. Facebook also analyzed the correlation between word choice and friend count. While the correlation is not as strong as age’s correlation to word choice, Facebook’s data team did find that there’s a positive correlation between friend count and second person pronouns, total word count, communication, religion, swear words and sex. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s a negative correlation between friend count and past and present tense verbs, family and emotions.  Another interesting finding is the impact of the time of day on word choice. Not only do Facebook’s users tend to talk about sleeping the most at around 4 AM ET, but they tend to talk about their work right before they head into the office. Positive and negative emotions are also affected by the time of day: negative emotions tend to peak at around 1 AM ET, while positive emotions tend to peak at about 7 AM ET. More importantly, negative emotions tend to increase as the day progresses at the expense of positive emotions. What type of status updates tend to get the most attention? Facebook dug into this data as well and found that positive status updates tend to get more likes while negative status updates tend to get more comments. Check out this image for the breakdown:  What do you think of the data Facebook has collected? Do any of these correlations surprise you? We want to hear your thoughts in the comments. Reviews: Facebook More About: data, facebook, stats, status update, trending For more Tech coverage:
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| Now Facebook Admins Can Unmerge Their Pages from Places Posted: 23 Dec 2010 06:43 PM PST   Responding to the requests of page admins, Facebook has finally given Facebook Page admins the ability to unmerge their business’ Facebook Page with their Facebook Place Page. The option was first noticed by several unhappy Facebook Page admins and reported by Inside Facebook. The “Unmerge all merged Places” option now appears at the bottom of the left-hand Page admin menu. It hasn’t fully rolled out yet, but soon any admin who regrets merging his Pages can reverse the process. Facebook first offered the merge feature in August, allowing a business to have a single Page represent their brand instead of having both a Facebook Page and a Places Page. Some businesses were unhappy when they enacted the merger because merged Pages don’t allow for default landing tabs, an important feature to many Page admins. Giving Page admins the ability to reverse the merging process was a no-brainer. It’s a bit surprising it took this long for the social network to roll out the unmerging option, but we’re just happy that thousands of businesses can finally fix their Pages.  Image courtesy of Inside Facebook. Reviews: Facebook, pages More About: facebook, facebook page, facebook pages, Facebook Place Pages, Facebook Places For more Social Media coverage:
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| HOW TO: Make the Most of TextMate Posted: 23 Dec 2010 04:38 PM PST
One of the most popular text editors for Mac OS X among coders is TextMate. Despite not receiving many major updates since 2007, TextMate is still a favorite amongst developers, front-end coders and even writers (a few of Mashable’s bloggers use TextMate to compose first drafts of blog posts). On its own, TextMate is a good program. With the right add-ons and modifications, however, TextMate it can be a dream come true. Even if we never see a TextMate 2, here are some tips to making the most out of your TextMate installation. Install Some ThemesOut of the box, TextMate comes with a handful of themes, but there are many more options for your text editing enjoyment. In a previous post, I compiled some of my favorite TextMate themes from over the years and put them together in a handy package on GitHub. To install a theme, just double click it. TextMate, like other text editors, is designed for monospaced fonts. Mac OS X comes with several choices, including Menlo, which made its appearance in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. If you want to further explore your programming font choices, check out this article, written by my friend Dan Benjamin, which provides a great overview of some of the most popular choices. Add Some Plugins Despite not receiving any major updates for well, years, TextMate remains a favorite amongst old and new developers. If I had to pick a single reason, it would be the extensible nature of the program. Simply put, TextMate can be extended and improved via the use of plugins and bundles. Plugins can impact the program as a whole, whereas bundles are specific collections of commands, snippets and shortcuts. Some of my favorite TextMate plugins include:
What’s even better than just downloading the plugins is downloading the plugins and a set of UI modifications. One of my favorite TextMate “packages” is Green Moleskine, which has recently been updated to version 1.2. The new version includes Snow Leopard support for some of the UI modifications. Green Moleskine also includes SVNMate, WebMate and MissingDrawer, but the link to MissingDrawer on GitHub has an updated version of that plugin. For new TextMate installations, I usually just start with Green Moleskine and then build out. Get GetBundles Without a doubt, bundles are my favorite part of TextMate. I never thought I would be the type of person who got religious about my text editor, but the bundles feature in TextMate has made me a disciple. Over the years, TextMate bundles have been created for practically every web framework and task you can imagine. You can find these bundles online and double click the *.tmbundle file to install. But what if there was a better way to discover and install bundles, within TextMate itself? There is, and it is called GetBundles. GetBundles has a graphical interface that allows you to search the official TextMate bundle repository, the review queue and GitHub. The GitHub support is really slick, because these days, that’s where most of the updates and new code ends up being released. The easiest way to install GetBundles is to pop open Terminal in Mac OS X and paste in the lines that Trey Piepmier thoughtfully setup on his blog. Once GetBundles is installed, you can search the various repositories and click on a bundle to install it — and also check for updates to the bundles you already use. Bundle Bonanza Once GetBundles is installed, the final step to an awesome TextMate experience is track down some bundles. These are a few of my favorites:
How have you tricked out your TextMate install? Let us know in the comments. More Dev & Design Resources from Mashable:
Reviews: Mashable, TextMate More About: IDEs, mac apps, mac software, software, text editors, textmate, web development series For more Dev & Design coverage:
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| Path Adds 10-Second Video to its Anti-Social Network Posted: 23 Dec 2010 03:34 PM PST   Path’s “Personal Network” approach to mobile photo sharing is punctuated with intentional limitations. Staying the course, the startup has released an update to its iPhone app that includes support for video, but it comes with a strict 10-second time limit. The video update means users can now share their personal and private moments in short video form with up to 50 of their closest friends and family members. “At Path, we are obsessed with the moment. We want to give you the best ways to capture and share the moments of your life with close friends and family wherever you are,” writes co-founder Dave Morin. “Today your moments come alive.” The team has neatly integrated video into the Path experience in such a way that it feels native to the app’s original design and function. The in-app video option mirrors that of the iPhone’s camera app, so users can simply toggle between photo and video in a familiar fashion. And yet, just as is the case with a number of Path’s product decisions, it’s difficult to find the mainstream appeal in 10-second video. Case in point: 12seconds, a 12-second video social network that shut down earlier this year. Ultimately, Path appears to value style over function with an overwrought and contrarian approach to social networking. For a service that intends to be deeply intimate in purpose, it’s an approach that so far feels cold and unwelcoming. Of course, it’s too soon to tell whether Path is destined for success or doomed for failure. The pedigree of its founders and investors assures us, however, that we will certainly hear a lot more from this startup in the year ahead. Reviews: Path More About: Path, startup, video For more Startups coverage:
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| Skype Is Back, But Some Features Are Still Broken Posted: 23 Dec 2010 03:30 PM PST   Skype has finally recovered from yesterday’s extended crash, according to the company’s CEO, but several features remain offline. “We’ve been able to successfully stabilize Skype due to the dedicated supernodes deployed by Skype’s engineering team. We’re at roughly 90 percent of normal user volumes,” Skype CEO Tony Bates announced in a blog post. But while Skype’s video, audio and IM capabilities are fully operational, its Group Video Calling and offline IM features are still down for the count. Skype didn’t lay out a time frame for their return. Bates says that the company now knows what caused Skype to kick the bucket for over 24 hours. He didn’t elaborate on the specific cause (it promises to post an analysis of what happened soon), but states that it was not caused by a malicious attack. To make up for the extended downtime, Skype will be issuing vouchers for 30 free minutes of landline calling to all of its Pay As You Go and Pre-Pay users. It’s the company’s first step in what will likely be an arduous process to regain user trust. More About: Skype, Skype Down For more Tech coverage:
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| Hulu Playlists Enable Viewers to Become Curators Posted: 23 Dec 2010 02:36 PM PST   Hulu unveiled a new feature Thursday that enables users to create and browse playlists with videos hosted on the platform. Users can now craft and share playlists highlighting, for example, their favorite moments from The Daily Show, or put together a sequence of music videos to play in the background. It gives casual viewers an opportunity to become more engaged with the content they consume, enabling them to become not just reviewers, but also curators of that content. To create a playlist, simply click the “+” symbol near any video on Hulu and select the “Add to playlist” option. You can then opt to create a new playlist or add to one created previously. To edit and add descriptions to your list, visit the “Playlists” tab in your profile. Right now, a user can only follow the activities of another user if his or her friendship request is accepted. We think it would be wise for Hulu to allow users to follow other users instead, thereby allowing consumers to discover more playlists they like from the same sources, and likewise providing an incentive for playlist creators to produce even more playlists to build up their followings. Reviews: Hulu More About: hulu For more Web Video coverage:
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| The 10 Hottest Private Companies in Tech [REPORT] Posted: 23 Dec 2010 12:33 PM PST   SecondMarket, a firm that facilitates alternative investments, has shared with Mashable a list of private companies its buyers and potential buyers were most interested in this year. The list is based on the percentage who indicated they were interested in each company.
Do you agree with SecondMarket’s users? What companies would you add to this list? Tell us in the comments below. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, AlexKalina Reviews: Craigslist, Facebook, Foursquare, Google, LinkedIn, Mashable, Pandora, Twitter, Yelp, iStockphoto More About: craigslist, facebook, groupon, linkedin, pandora, playground, SecondMarket, twitter, venture capital, Zynga For more Business coverage:
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| Top 10 Digital Advertising Innovations of 2010 Posted: 23 Dec 2010 11:05 AM PST As Mashable contributor Jesse Thomas recently noted, Silicon Valley is quickly becoming the new Madison Avenue. Looking back over the past year’s advertising landscape, it’s not the individual campaigns that stick in the mind as much as the use and pioneering of new technology. This year was a transitional year in which much-hyped mobile advertising began to be a serious player, Apple once again changed the business and brands began fostering real, two-way conversations with consumers. Here’s a look at some of the top new technologies that redefined advertising in 2010. 1. Old Spice’s Response Videos   Old Spice, a perennially troubled brand at Procter & Gamble, had watched Unilever’s Axe steal its thunder for most of the past decade. Miraculously, the brand was able to become relevant to a new generation of male consumers thanks to a clever ad campaign. The “Smell like a man, man,” ads featured an over-the-top confident Isaiah Mustafa, who somehow was able to make men insecure and be likable at the same time. If this was 1999, that would be the end of it, but agency Wieden + Kennedy offered a nice interactive twist: The agency and Mustafa shot more than 180 videos responding to consumers’ inquiries. Talk about breaking the fourth wall: For those raised on traditional TV advertising, it was like Mustafa was re-enacting Jeff Daniels’ role in The Purple Rose of Cairo — a matinee idol who popped out of the screen and into real life. 2. Bar Code Scanning Marketers and mobile advertising firms had been trying for a while to foster the use of QR codes — logos that consumers could scan with their phones to access online content. But for makers of packaged goods, such codes take up valuable real estate on packaging. Stickybits and another firm called CauseWorld addressed this issue with new technologies that read bar codes. The former struck deals with both Coca-Cola and Pepsi as well as Campbell’s Soup. The latter worked with Procter & Gamble and Kraft on a program in which consumers could amass “karma points” for scanning the codes, which earned contributions to consumers’ favorite causes. Truth be told, the bar code readers don’t always work that well and it’s unclear how many consumers will take the time, but, by using bar codes, the two companies provided another big step toward mobile-enhanced interactive shopping. 3. Location-Based Advertising Marketers were eager to catch on to the popularity of services like Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places, but successful programs were few and far between. Starbucks’ was a notable failure. The company rushed in with a program that offered $1 off any size Frappuccino for its mayors. The program resulted in a 50% increase in checkins at Starbucks locations, according to Foursquare, but many Starbucks locations appeared unaware of the campaign. Similarly, the first big promotion for Facebook Places, a jeans giveaway from Gap for the first 10,000 customers to check in to the program at a Gap location, encountered similar problems. On the other hand, SCVNGR may have found a winning formula with a more game-oriented approach that drew the likes of American Apparel, AT&T and Coca-Cola. The combination of new, perhaps slightly arrogant tech companies and inconsistent messaging at retail, however, is likely a short-term problem. Look for much more location-based marketing campaigns in 2011. 4. iAds With its untouchable veneer of cool and its domination of the market of high-end, consumer-friendly, cutting edge gadgets, marketers are positively salivating about the idea of getting on any Apple platform. With the introduction of the iPad and the iPhone 4, Apple obliged with a new, full-screen rich media environment that CEO Steve Jobs described as “mobile ads with emotion” and positioned as a format for ads that consumers would want to watch. With an eye on quality control, Apple set the bar high: Advertisers reportedly had to spend at least $1 million and as much as $10 million to run an iAd. But, the company may be relaxing a bit. This month, Apple opened iAd development with iAd Producer, which let marketers and their agencies create iAds even if they didn’t know HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. 5. Promoted Tweets As Twitter established itself as the third of the social media Holy Trinity (along with Facebook and LinkedIn), the company set its sights on a business model. With great fanfare, Twitter introduced Promoted Tweets in April. Taking a page from Google, the idea was that people searching for various terms on Twitter would see the sponsored terms along with organic results. Marketers like Coca-Cola and Virgin America experimented with the program, with laudable results. (Coke reported a 6% engagement rate for its campaign, while Virgin America posted its fifth-highest sales day ever thanks to Promoted Tweets.) By year’s end, like Apple, Twitter appeared to be democratizing the program. This month, a form for prospective advertisers appeared on Twitter’s site. The company is expected to start implementing that turnkey solution in earnest early next year. 6. Group Buying Not for nothing did Google offer to shell out upwards of $6 billion for Groupon. The two-year-old company is profitable, popular and on to a winning formula that can be executed on a large scale. Groupon, which offers deals if a certain amount of consumers take part, proved the latter in August through its first national deal, with Gap to sell $50 worth of apparel and accessories for $25. While previously, the site was known for local daily deals with small businesses, the Gap program was a huge success. In one day, the company sold 441,000 Groupons, netting about $11 million. At the moment, Groupon is the biggest player in this emerging space by far, but the interest from Google will no doubt spur deep-pocketed competitors to file in. 7. Personalized Video Though not traditional advertising, a video from the band Arcade Fire opened new possibilities this summer. Working with Google, the band’s video for “The Wilderness Downtown” could be personalized by typing in the address of your childhood home. If Google Maps has enough footage, the site conjures up a highly personalized video about the end of childhood. Taking a similar tack, a company called Brave New Films, on behalf of the Service Employees International Union and MoveOn, released a Facebook-based app in March that let users plug in their personal info for a highly entertaining video of Glenn Beck ranting about…you. After using the app, Beck’s chalkboard was filled with pictures of you and your friends along with their names and other personal data. The point: Glenn Beck could just as easily be attacking you. 8. CAPTCHA Advertising Everyone at one point or another has used a Captcha (an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”) to prove they are human and not a bot. But who would think to turn a Captcha into an ad? Solve Media, for one. The company worked with Toyota, Microsoft and Dr. Pepper, among others, on the type of ad that consumers just couldn’t ignore. For Dr Pepper, for instance, users were prompted to type in “There’s nothing like a Pepper” instead of the usual gibberish. Later, Solve incorporated video for a campaign for Universal’s film Devil. 9. Error Message Advertising Taking a similar idea, Digg launched a program in March with Burger King to turn those annoying error messages into advertising as well. For a time, typos on Digg were countered with the message, “No results for ‘X’ were found. Looks like your search had a typo. Blame it on your tiny hands. The beefy $1 Burger King Double Cheeseburger gives tiny hands some trouble, too,” which led to a link to a Burger King ad featuring a man with tiny hands. 10. Chatroulette Always on the lookout for the next big thing, marketers set their sights for a time on Chatroulette, an app that combined roulette and video chat with often unsettling results (the site quickly became known for the flashing of penises). The implication for marketers was unclear until Travelocity dropped its gnome mascot into the mix, just in time for April Fool’s Day. While Chatroulette doesn’t look to be the next Facebook for marketers, Travelocity showed that innovative thinking can transcend the limitations of any digital format. More Marketing Resources from Mashable:
Reviews: Digg, Facebook, Foursquare, Google, Gowalla, LinkedIn, Twitter, foursquare More About: advertising, apple, business, foursquare, gowalla, groupon, iads, List, Lists, MARKETING, old spice, Promoted Tweets, social media, social media marketing, tech, trending For more Business coverage:
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| Posted: 23 Dec 2010 10:12 AM PST   Music video site Vevo is closing out its first year in style with the launch of a redesigned, more optimized homepage. The changes to the new Vevo.com aren’t drastic, but they do make the site easier to navigate and faster to load, while also highlighting some of Vevo’s exclusive content. Not surprisingly, the new design complements the excellent Vevo iPad app that was released last week. When we spoke to Vevo CEO Rio Caraeff about the iPad app, he told us that a new homepage was in the works and that the focus would be on user experience. Caraeff reiterated that goal in his blog post announcing the new Vevo.com. As you can see from the image below, the site has a very clean, segmented layout. What’s interesting about the new homepage is the lack of traditional advertisements. Artist, playlist and video pages still have banner advertisements or other skins, but the homepage itself is just content.  We’ve put together a little call-out image showcasing the new elements on the homepage:
The homepage’s focus on original content, curated channels and additional viewing platforms is representative of Vevo’s goals going into 2011. What do you think of the new homepage? Do you watch music videos on Vevo.com or its apps? Reviews: Boxee, iPhone More About: music, music videos, vevo, video For more Entertainment coverage:
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| What’s Hot in Social Media This Week Posted: 23 Dec 2010 09:38 AM PST   Welcome to this week's edition of "What's Hot in Social Media," a series in which we revisit the week’s most popular stories concerning social networks. We're keeping our eye on six interesting developments this Thursday. Facebook Begins Rolling Out New News Feed Filters Facebook has started rolling out new News Feed filters, allowing users to quickly navigate between recent stories related to games, status updates, photos, links and Pages. Users can also filter stories by Group and adjust the amount of news they receive from individual friends. Foursquare Adds Photos & Comments Location-based social network Foursquare released new versions of both its iPhone and Android apps this week. Users can now attach photos to checkins, venues and tips, and comment on their friends’ checkins. Craigslist Adult Services Shuts Down Worldwide Craigslist's Adult Services section, an online red light district that has been the subject of a great deal of controversy over the past few years, has been shut down worldwide, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal confirmed to the AP Tuesday. Skype Down for 24 Hours (And Counting) Skype went offline for many users beginning Wednesday morning. Although the service is now back up for an estimated 10 million users, many are still unable to access their calling accounts. Bank of American Blocks WikiLeaks Payments Financial giant Bank of America has added its name to the list of institutions dropping support for WikiLeaks by announcing that it has stopped handling any payments to or from the whistle-blowing website. Twitter Users Capture the Lunar Eclipse Observers of Monday night’s lunar eclipse took to Twitter to share photos of the event, which coincided with the winter solstice for the first time since 1638. Tumblr Launches Curated Topic Pages Tumblr launched three curated topic pages this week to help address the problem of discovery on the platform. The available pages, which are still in beta, include News, Fashion and Long-Reads. Reviews: Android, Craigslist, Facebook, Skype, Tumblr, Twitter, Wikileaks, foursquare, iPhone, pages More About: craigslist, facebook, foursquare, social media, twitter For more Social Media coverage:
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| Google Maps Dresses Up Pegman for Christmas Posted: 23 Dec 2010 09:28 AM PST   Pegman will bear the brunt of Google Maps’ holiday spirit this Christmas. Yes, that little orange guy that you can drag into maps to enter Street View is getting a Santa hat tomorrow. While Google’s home page has been having all sorts of seasonal fun since 1998, before Pegman came along two years ago, Google Maps’ halls were a bit harder to deck. The drag-and-drop icon has become something of a mascot for the site. During past winter holiday seasons, he’s dressed up as a snowman. He's also gotten costume changes in support of gay pride in San Francisco, ridden a bike in the Tour de France and been dressed as a hippie, a witch and Uncle Sam.  More About: Christmas, Google, Google Maps, Holiday, pegman For more Entertainment coverage:
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| 5 Predictions for the Public Relations Industry in 2011 Posted: 23 Dec 2010 09:02 AM PST   Leyl Master Black is a managing director at Sparkpr, one of the world’s top independent PR agencies. Leyl has more than 15 years experience driving high-impact communications programs for emerging technology companies. The past decade has been rough on the media industry. As media consumption has shifted online, many print publications have struggled to adjust their editorial approach, advertising infrastructure and revenue models to accommodate a rapidly changing readership. During this time, quite a few online-only news sites also entered the market. With no legacy advertising infrastructure to deal with, lower overhead costs and startup agility, these new competitors began to attract viewers — and ad dollars — from traditional publications. Many publications have had to downsize, and reporters must now cover more beats and file more stories than ever before. The recent social revolution changed the game again. Our social networks have taken on the role of crowdsourced news editors. Instead of going directly to websites to scan for news, we frequently only see bite-sized news headlines that have been posted or retweeted by our trusted sources. When we do go directly to a site, we’re now relying more on news aggregators such as TechMeme, or getting the scoop on what’s trending from sites such as Tweetbeat. Today, mobile devices are sparking another big shift in media infrastructure, with the iPad in particular set to become the centerpiece of media strategies for top print publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. As the media changes, so too must the practice of public relations. In light of these evolving dynamics, what should savvy PR practitioners be thinking about as they’re building plans for 2011? Here are a few trends to watch in the coming year. 1. Social Sharing of NewsIn a recent article on Forbes.com, entrepreneur Dan Greenberg asserted that the web has evolved from a network of sites to a network of people. And because you can’t put ads on people, you must now focus on creating content that people will want to consume and share. The same holds true for PR, and next year, we will see more PR strategies that put social sharing at the forefront. News releases will have more attention-grabbing or controversial headlines to drive more retweets. We’ll see more pitches that seek to seed a contrarian view or spark controversy, both of which will have a better chance of being shared than straight news. There will be more aggressive outreach to influencers on Twitter to ask them to tweet about news, and more strategies to provide incentives to tweet or post to Facebook. And PR professionals will be under more pressure to measure program success using social sharing metrics. 2. Increase in “Direct Editorial”As media companies overhaul their revenue models, many have moved beyond straightforward banner-style advertising to offer new types of content-driven ad experiences, sponsored content and creative syndication partnerships. This means that the need for content has never been greater. But with staffing levels still low, there will be even more opportunities in the coming year for company execs to contribute their own thought leadership pieces and educational articles to prominent publications. We can also expect to see more corporate blogging in 2011. While just a few years ago, many companies shied away from blogging because it was so difficult to promote the content and actually get people to read it, it’s now easier than ever to promote blog content to a targeted audience through social media. And, the shake-up in the media industry has produced a large number of talented freelance writers to support these efforts. 3. Greater Demand for ExclusivesWith breaking news now posting almost instantaneously online, straight news coverage has become a commodity. When Facebook announces a redesign, you can expect to read similar stories about it on dozens of news sites the minute it hits. Many publications, as well as journalists, are now grappling with how to differentiate their coverage in this environment. Watch closely for publications shifting their editorial approach to find the right niche next year, and adjust your engagement accordingly. Also look for increasing value being placed on exclusives as a way for journalists to offer a differentiated and unique news product. As more publications request (and even require) exclusive content, reporters will be able to invest more time in doing a “deep dive” for stories, and we’ll likely see an increase in longer, more insightful pieces. 4. Growth in Multimedia Another point of differentiation for publications will be the use of use podcasts and video interviews to complement their print and online stories. Where appropriate, PR professionals should begin to build ideas for podcasts into their pitches to paint a more complete picture of how a story could be rolled out. Video is also becoming a critical part of many news sites and an important asset for PR to provide to busy reporters, particularly as publications focus on creating visually rich content for devices such as the iPad. In 2011, expect to see more stories that include individual videos or even curated video in a slideshow or mosaic layout, such as this New York Times story about Tufts University applicants submitting YouTube videos as part of the application process. 5. Data, Graphics and Apps Relevant stats have always been critical for validating trend stories, and with online survey tools making data gathering easier than ever, many PR pitches are now already accompanied by original research. In 2011, with news outlets hungry for visuals but short on resources, look for the presentation of this data to become more sophisticated, with PR teams working to develop infographics and other visuals to make their data pop. And in our app-happy world, also expect to see a slew of interactive applications to supplement stories, such as this texting and driving game that accompanied a New York Times article on the topic. More Marketing Resources from Mashable:
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Yuri_Arcurs Reviews: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, iStockphoto, news, video More About: business, facebook, List, Lists, MARKETING, media, pr, predictions-2011, PUBLIC RELATIONS, social media, twitter For more Business coverage:
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| How Did Americans Use Their Phones in the 2010 Midterm Election? [STATS] Posted: 23 Dec 2010 08:40 AM PST   Politics, like just about everything else, is going mobile. More than a quarter of American adults used their cellphones to learn about or participate in the 2010 U.S. midterm election, according to a survey from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. The survey, which polled 2,257 adults from November 3 to November 24, found that the people who use their phones for politics are most often between the ages of 18 and 29 and more likely to own high-tech electronics and use social networking sites than other voters. The percentage of Republican and Democratic voters in this group is similar to that of the general population. The survey counted communicating about voting, sharing and reading election news, and contributing money to campaigns as political participation. Fourteen percent of respondents said that they used their cellphones to tell others that they had voted; 6% said they used them to let others know about conditions at local voting stations; 10% sent text messages about the election; 3% used their cells to shoot and share photos or videos related to the election; 12% kept up with election news using their phones; and 4% used their mobiles to monitor results. Only 1% used their mobile devices to either contribute money by text message or to download an app that provided updates from a candidate or group about election news, respectively. Interestingly, 21% of those who used their cellphones to learn about or participate in the election said that they didn’t vote, although that figure is substantially less than the national average of 38%.  Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ABDESIGN Reviews: Internet, iStockphoto More About: mobile phones, politics, stats, vote For more Mobile coverage:
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| Interactive Google Doodle Commemorates the Holidays Posted: 23 Dec 2010 08:40 AM PST   Google’s officially celebrating the holidays with the launch of its latest Google Doodle, an interactive holiday card that features 17 holiday scenes from around the world. Santa Claus on a rooftop, Indian classical dancers and colorful Moroccan henna lamps are among the international illustrations found in the Doodle, which can be seen above. Users can hover over the images to get a slightly blown-up view of each picture, and clicking on one will lead them to search results pertinent to a specific country or the particular items featured in a scene. As the Wall Street Journal reports, this Doodle, which went up at 9 a.m. ET today, is the brainchild of designer Micheal Lopez. It took roughly 250 hours for five artists to carry out the concept, and the final piece will remain on the Google homepage until Christmas is over. Though Lopez originally planned to post the Doodle in installments over the course of three days, executives who got a look at the work-in-progress last week decided it needed to go up in one shot. After six months of planning and working on the Doodle, Lopez and his team raced to get it done. It’s been a creative year for Google Doodles — the first video Doodle celebrated what would have been John Lennon’s 70th birthday, and a playable version of Pacman marked the game’s 30th anniversary. Of course, Doodles were also used to celebrate other events and figures in history, such as children’s author Hans Christian Andersen and American civil rights activist Rosa Parks. We’ll soon have a chance to see what Google has in store for 2011. Reviews: Google More About: Google, google doodle, Holidays, interactive For more Entertainment coverage:
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| 75 Essential Small Business Resources From 2010 Posted: 23 Dec 2010 08:28 AM PST   Want to take your small business to the next level? Or maybe start your own business? We’ve researched dozens of ways for you to do just that by leveraging social media and technology. And here you’ll find a comprehensive list of those resources, whether you’re looking to incorporate new technologies like mobile credit card scanners or you want to update your business’s website. You’ll find all of the small business resources we’ve produced in the past year broken down into categories like social media, productivity, marketing, tech and tools, geo-location and deals, HR and hiring, success stories and getting started. Social MediaTake your social media presence beyond a simple Facebook Page or company blog. Here are some ideas to inspire your business’s use of social media in 2011.
ProductivityThese posts will help you find new ways to stay on track, and be as efficient and effective as possible while working with contractors like designers.
MarketingSee what trends were popular in the past year and get a little inspiration for new marketing strategies your company might pursue in the new year.
Tech and ToolsThe web is full of tools that will help you get the job done — and many of those tools are free. Here’s a look at what mobile, web-based and other technologies are available for your small business.
Geo-location and DealsGeo-location services and deals were a big hit in 2010. Maybe you’ve been thinking about incorporating them in your business? Here’s a guide to what works, what doesn’t, and tips to employing these new services.
Human Resources and HiringStaffing decisions can make or break a business. Here is a list of resources to help you make the right decisions, tools that can help you find ideal candidates, and ways of dealing with employee issues.
Advice From ExpertsPerhaps no one knows better how to successfully run a business than those who have done it before. Here’s a list of resources with tips from the experts, as well as examples of successful uses of new technology.
Getting StartedWondering where to begin? Or where to get funding for your big idea? Here are some resources to set you on the right path.
More About: business, deals, geo-location, hiring, human resources, List, Lists, MARKETING, resources, small business, social media, tools For more Business coverage:
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| Mull Over 2010 With This Interactive Shooting Range Game Posted: 23 Dec 2010 07:51 AM PST Anyone else still in the office? Well, you’re probably being super productive (yeah, right), so why not play a game? YouTube maestros The Fine Brothers are out with a brand-new interactive video diversion that will get you all nostalgic for the year behind us: The 2010 Year in Review Shooting Range Game. Featuring such important historical milestones as “Bed Intruder,” the Chilean Miners, the World Cup, Lost and the BP oil spill, this carnavalesque game should eat up at least an hour or so of your listless afternoon. Play on, and get your game face on for 2011. Reviews: YouTube More About: bed intruder, BP Oil Spill, chilean miners, game, humor, lost, the-fine-brother, video, youtube For more Web Video coverage:
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| HOW TO: Build the Ultimate Home Theater Posted: 23 Dec 2010 07:35 AM PST   This post is part of the Mashable 10, Mashable’s gift guide of the 10 hottest gadgets that our editors think should be on everyone’s wish lists this holiday season. If you were lucky enough to receive one of those gifts, our handy quick start guides should get you up and running. To view the entire gift guide, click here.  There you are, sitting pretty with your new home theater gear you got for the holidays. It’s looking good, isn’t it? Want to improve it even more? Here’s a checklist of the nine essential ingredients you’ll need for the ultimate home theater. You might already have many of these items, or different brands or models you’d recommend. Did we leave something out? We’d like to hear from you — let us know about it in the comments. 1. Big Screen
Let’s start with the centerpiece of your home theater: a big screen, and the bigger the better. That 55-inch Vizio XVT3SV HDTV we recommended will do nicely, but if your viewing room is large, you might want to go to 65 inches. My favorite? The Panasonic TC-P65S2 plasma display, 65 inches of crisp goodness that delivers the blackest of blacks, super contrast ratio and ultra-sharp 1080p video. The best part is its price. I found it for less than $1800 including shipping, about the best value in HDTV you can get right now. 2. Network Connection It might be a pain to run Ethernet cables to your TV-watching area, but the speed and reliability of hardwired connectivity is hard to beat. Short of that, at least get yourself one of the latest wireless N routers. I’d recommend our pick for the holiday season, the $150 Netgear WNDR3700, the best I’ve ever tested. 3. Universal Remote
It’s been around for ages (read: one year), but your best bet is still the $200 Logitech Harmony One, or its more expensive brandmate, the $400 Logitech Harmony 900 that controls components through walls or cabinets using radio frequency (RF). The easiest remotes in the world to use (albeit not so easy to program), you touch the icon for your desired activity, such as Watch TV, Watch Blu-ray, or Watch TiVo. It couldn’t be easier with their colorful touchscreens. My only complaint? They’re both a bit slow to react. 4. Netflix Subscription
Netflix just rolled out its cheapest plan yet, an all-streaming $7.99-per-month deal that lets you use the company’s Watch Instantly library until the cows come home. It’s unlimited, but you’ll run out of movies you want to watch fairly quickly, especially if you’re a film buff. If that happens, go for the “one DVD out at-a-time” subscription where you can have one Blu-ray disc plus unlimited instant watching for $11.99 per month. Even though the prices just went up, it’s still worth it. 5. Blu-ray Player
Speaking of Blu-ray, these have almost become a commodity, so pick one that’s on sale, and then you’ll have access to the prettiest, cleanest video available today. I’d recommend the Samsung BDC6500, available for $157 if you look hard enough. Enjoy Blu-ray while it’s still hot/lukewarm, because I think its days are numbered as downloading and streaming video becomes more practical. 6. Roku XD|S
The Roku XD|S gives you a lot of streaming video for your $100. Its centerpiece is Netflix Watch Instantly, but you can also grab Amazon videos and lots of other channels, as well as my music favorite, Pandora. If $100 is too rich for you, go a notch down to the midrange Roku box, the $80 HD XR, which recently got a firmware update that lets it play 1080p video, but sacrifices the dual-band Wireless N Wi-Fi. 7. New Graphics Card for Your Old Computer
Here’s a novel idea: Forgo all those set-top boxes from Roku and Boxee, and drag that old three-year-old desktop PC out of the basement. I recommend at least a dual-core processor, but the key here is to swap out the graphics card, and for $50, I’d recommend this Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4550 with its HDMI port that connects to your HDTV. With a proper computer, you can watch Netflix, Hulu, downloaded 1080p videos — anything you want from the Internet. And I mean the whole Internet, regardless of the vagaries of television networks and their restrictive practices. 8. Wireless Keyboard and Mouse
If you heed my computer/graphics card suggestion, you’ll need a way to control it, and there’s no better home theater keyboard than the Logitech K800 Wireless Illuminated Keyboard. It looks a lot like that Logitech Solar Keyboard we reviewed last month, but the $80 Logitech K800 has backlit keys for that darkened home-theater environment, exquisite design, and its batteries last a long, long time. For a mouse, I’d also recommend any of the Logitech wireless mice, with the new Performance Mouse MX with its Darkfield laser tracking leading the way. 9. Surround Sound
Don’t forget about the sound. You might not be able to hear the difference between 5.1 and 7.1 surround, but you will be able to hear the difference between surround sound and stereo. Books have been written about which components will give you the best sound, so ask a local audiophile. Here’s a great place to start looking for speakers, and check this out for some astute home theater receiver tips. More Tech Resources from Mashable:
Reviews: Blu, Boxee, Hulu, Internet, Netflix Watch Instantly, Pandora More About: ATI Radeon, blu-ray, gadgets, home theater, List, Lists, Logitech Keyboard, mashable 10, mashable 10 quick start, mouse, netflix, netgear, roku, samsung, Sapphire, speakers, Surround, tech For more Tech coverage:
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| Crowd-Sourced Johnny Cash Video Scores Grammy Nomination Posted: 23 Dec 2010 07:25 AM PST This year, a dark horse has entered into the Grammy race, an ever-changing, crowd-sourced, interactive music video featuring a musician who is no longer among the living: The Johnny Cash Project. Facing off against wildly popular adversaries, such as Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” (more than 300 million YouTube views), Cee-lo Green’s “F**k You” (32 million YouTube views) and Eminem & Rihanna’s “Love The Way You Lie” (around 200 million views), The Johnny Cash Project’s “Ain’t No Grave” has been nominated for Best Short Form Music Video in the 53rd annual Grammy Awards. Pretty impressive for a vid that, 1). Is created anew daily by fans from around the world, 2). Features a singer who passed away in 2003. According to video director Chris Milk, The Johnny Cash Project — produced by Radical Media — came together in a rather fortuitous way. Milk was in Portugal at an art and technology conference back in 2009, where he met Aaron Koblin, who currently heads up Google Creative Lab’s Data Arts Team. The two got to talking about their work — Milk has directed music videos for the likes of Gnarls Barkley and Kanye West, Koblin was working with crowd sourcing (Koblin has done a ton of crowd-sourced art projects, such as “Sheep Market,” a collection of sheep drawings done by workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk). “It was like ‘you got your chocolate in my peanut butter, you got your crowd sourcing in my music video,’” Milk says of the conversation. “We started talking about how those two things could work together.” Koblin and Milk also collaborated on “The Wilderness Downtown,” an HTML5 masterpiece of a music video done for Arcade Fire. “We knew that we would need an artist that had a certain level of universal love for them already existing, and that’s a difficult thing on the Internet nowadays because you only have to go a couple of pages deep to find millions of haters of everything,” Milk says. “So I left Portugal knowing what I had to find in an artist and totally unsure of who that could possibly be, because an artist like that is one who has passed away, in most instances, and those artists are usually not coming out with new albums.” Lucky for Milk, music producer Rick Rubin had the golden ticket. A month after Milk got home, he and Rubin got to talking about doing another project. They had previously worked on a video for Green Day and U2. “I do have this one idea, but it really requires a unique and special artist that I don’t know exists in the current musical landscape,” Milk told Rubin. “For instance, if you had a Johnny Cash single that was left over that you were going to use for a benefit album or something, this could be a perfect project for that single.” Rubin just smiled and said, “This is fate, because I’m finishing the final Johnny Cash album right now and I’m at a loss what to do for a visual component to it.” “When Rick played the song for me, everything really lined up in that moment,” Milk says of the single “Ain’t No Grave.” “Johnny is really singing about his own mortality, and resurrection and eternal life. And this is a concept where Johnny’s fans, through their own love and creativity, are giving him that eternal life that he’s singing about. The video is really a visual manifestation of all of that love for Johnny coming together into something tangible and permanent.” The video(s) in question is The Johnny Cash Project, a dedicated website where fans can use a specialized drawing tool to redraw a frame of footage of the country legend. “It was important to me that we built our own drawing tool to democratize the submissions,” Koblin says. “We really didn’t want people opening $50,000 CG software and competing with folks drawing on napkins.” Consequently, fans all work on their submissions via The Johnny Cash Project website, where their work is added to videos that all alter twice a day. “We call it ‘a living portrait,’ because it’s a portrait of a man that just keeps growing and changing and evolving, and it’s all through the love of his fans and the effort and creativity that they put into it,” Milk says. “It’s never the same video twice.” When Milk and Co. were called upon to send a cut to stations for traditional broadcast, they created the video at the top of this page, which is prefaced by a short documentary featuring people who contributed to the director’s cut of the vid. “It’s nice to see the faces behind it and the humanity that’s behind every single frame of the piece,” Milk says. And that’s what’s so singular about The Johnny Cash Project — behind every frame is a real person, a fan. Over the last few years, we’ve seen web video becoming less of a passive experience — it’s an inevitable transition, given that we’re watching these videos on our computers instead of passively from the couch. “It’s a whole new canvas with a whole new set of paints,” Milk says. “And you can create things that you never could before.” “I don’t know if [the web] will ever resolve and become the defined art form that cinema has become,” he adds. “Maybe the web is so ever-changing and growing that the art form will also be ever-changing and growing. But for me, as a director, as a maker of images that move, it’s an amazing, awesome time to be making stuff. Reviews: Internet, The Johnny Cash Project, YouTube More About: chris-milk, Flash, grammys, HTML5, johnny-cash-project, music, trending, video For more Entertainment coverage:
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| Skype Slowly Recovering, Still Down For Many Users Posted: 23 Dec 2010 06:58 AM PST   Skype has started to recover from the outage that started Wednesday and lasted throughout the night, but its problems are still far from resolved. In a blog post, Skype explained that the problem originates from Skype’s supernodes, which are crucial for the way Skype users connect with each other. Yesterday, a number of supernodes failed due to a software issue, and Skype’s engineers are still working to resolve the problem. According to Skype’s estimates, the service currently works for some 10 million people, which is still less than the usual number of Skype users at this time of day. Earlier this morning, Skype said that around 5 million people were online, which meant that 30% of Skype’s userbase can access the service. However, even if you can access Skype, it doesn’t mean it’s working perfectly. Skype says that many features, such as instant messaging and online status updates, might be delivered slower than usual. Furthermore, Skype says that group video calling will take “longer to return to normal.” Skype says that its enterprise product, Skype Connect, is working normally. Reviews: Skype More About: chat, downtime, outage, Skype, voip For more Tech coverage:
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| 4 Predictions for Connected Devices in 2011 Posted: 23 Dec 2010 06:32 AM PST   Brian David Johnson is a futurist and the director of Future Casting at the Intel Corporation. He is also the author of Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment, Computing and the Devices We Love, out in paperback January 2011. As a futurist at Intel, it's my job to come up with an actionable vision for computing in the year 2020. Now, that might sound like science fiction, but really it's pretty pragmatic. To make the chips that power all of these really cool connected devices takes about five to ten years. I’m tasked with figuring out what people will want to do and what they will be able to do with connected devices in the future, so that we can begin building those capabilities into the microprocessors today. After a talk I gave in Stockholm to a gathering of broadcasters and service providers, a woman came up to me with a perplexed look on her face. She asked, "You live in the future don't you?" "I spend most of my time thinking and talking to people about the future," I replied. "So, yeah, I guess I do." Pulling together some predictions for 2011 feels a bit like looking backward from 2020, but here goes. 1. It’s All About Screen, Screens, ScreensThis is an easy one. For the last five years or so we have seen the emergence of the screen. We have thinner and thinner laptops, smarter and smarter phones and TVs, more connected PCs, and super cool tablets. And now all of these devices can also be connected to the Internet. Because of all of these devices and gadgets, consumers are beginning to simply see all of our devices as just screens. It's not about what device will win over all the other devices; it's about the device and screen that you have handy — it's the screen that best fits what we want to do and where we are. 2. The Next Computing Environment: The BedWith the evolution of the smartphone into a powerful and personal computing device, we have become comfortable with the smartphone as a computing device that we carry in our pockets. You can also see tablets as mobile computing devices that people are growing comfortable with carrying in their handbags and backpacks. In fact, the tablet form factor is beginning to boldly go where few computers have comfortably and intuitively gone before — the bed. Some of you might find this shocking, while others may find it laughable, but it's true. Our ethnographers and social scientists have begun to see an interesting habit emerging: the mobile computing device you take to bed. Let's face it, tablets really are a great way to watch TV in bed or play games and not disturb the person sleeping next to you. 3. Cars: The Mobile Device That Carries YouNow that people are comfortable with connected devices they can take to bed and mobile devices they can carry with them, in 2011 we'll see the continued growth of the car as a mobile device that carries you. Cars will only get smarter, more connected, easier to use and just generally much more awesome, as computational devices make our days easier and our rides to work or the supermarket more safe. 4. People Will Still Love TVWell, people don't just love TV. They love TV, movies, games, books, comics, apps and music. Everything that's old is new again. These traditional forms of entertainment aren't going anywhere. They are one of the main reasons we buy all these new zippy connected devices. And the main reason they won't be going anywhere is because we all love them and we don't want them to go away. Now certainly 2011 will see the continued evolution of how entertainment is delivered and paid for, but with all of this talk of change and innovation, we should remember that it's really all about us — the consumers — and what we love. Regardless of what changes in 2011, the things we really love aren't going anywhere. More Tech Resources from Mashable:
Reviews: Internet More About: connected car, connected devices, connected tv, gadgets, List, Lists, Mobile 2.0, predictions-2011, tablets, tech For more Tech coverage:
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| Skype Outage, Foursquare Update & Google Purchase: This Morning’s Top Stories Posted: 23 Dec 2010 06:31 AM PST   Welcome to this morning's edition of "First To Know," a series in which we keep you in the know on what's happening in the digital world. We're keeping our eyes on three particular stories of interest today. Skype Slowly Recovering, Still Down For Many Users Skype is beginning to recover from the outage that started Wednesday morning and lasted throughout the night, but the problems are still far from resolved. Foursquare for Android Gets Photos, Comments & Widgets On Monday, Foursquare released a completely overhauled version of its iPhone app with photos and comments. Those same features, along with two new home screen widgets, were rolled out to Android device owners late Wednesday. Confirmed: Google Buys Sizable Manhattan Property Google has bought the former Port Authority building at New York's 111 Eighth Avenue for an undisclosed price, the company announced The purchase was first reported by the Wall Street Journal in early December for a rumored $1.9 billion. Further News
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, DNY59 Reviews: Android, Android Market, Google, Skype, Twitter, foursquare, iStockphoto More About: first to know series, foursquare, Google, Skype For more Tech coverage:
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| Confirmed: Google Buys Prestigious Manhattan Building Posted: 23 Dec 2010 06:03 AM PST   Google has bought the former Port Authority building at New York's 111 Eighth Avenue for an undisclosed price, the company announced. The purchase was first reported by the Wall Street Journal in early December, and the rumored price that Google had paid for the property is $1.9 billion. The massive, 2.9-million-square-foot building already houses Google’s offices, as well as several major data centers. If the rumored price is true, then it is the largest real estate deal for a single building in the U.S. in 2010. 1.9 billion dollars is no picnic, even for a giant like Google, which calls it “investing in New York.” According to some estimates, despite the huge price it might turn out to be a great deal for Google, both financially and strategically. Image courtesy of Google Maps Reviews: Google, Google Maps More About: 111 Eighth Avenue, building, Google, manhattan, real estate For more Business coverage:
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| 5 Free Annotation and Collaboration Tools for Web Projects Posted: 23 Dec 2010 05:36 AM PST   This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. Specific, contextual feedback is crucial for teams collaborating online, which is why it’s so important to make receiving it as fast, efficient and easy as possible. Asking for feedback can be tedious and is often done out of context, for example, via e-mail. However there are numerous tools available to make the task of gathering and giving feedback for web projects simpler and swifter. This article is interested in those that focus on annotation and are available freely to the widest possible audience. Here are five of the best free tools to annotate and collaborate on the web. If you're partial to a particular tool available, let us know in the comments. 1. MarkUp.io MarkUp lets you express your thoughts and ideas quickly and easily on any webpage. Because it’s browser based, it doesn’t require any download or installation. You can just drag the Get MarkUp icon into your bookmarks or favorites bar. When you visit a website, just click the MarkUp bookmarklet to load the toolbar, so you can begin annotation. When you click the publish button and slide to confirm, you will receive a unique URL with the image and notes captured, making it easy to share with anyone, seeking feedback where necessary. For those visiting a MarkUp URL, you will see a respond button. When you press this, you can either keep the old annotations or start afresh with just the original image. The MarkUp toolbar is simple and effective with five different drawing tools to choose from, and should the toolbar happen to get in the way, you can just drag it over using one of the two buttons located on each end of it. A neat feature is the ability to use Ctrl + Z to undo your previous action if you make a mistake, and the backspace key will remove the element from the page. 2. Bounce App Bounce is a lightweight application for giving quick feedback on a web page. You enter the URL you want to annotate, add your notes, and then share your feedback with anyone you want. It’s free for everyone, has no logins or accounts, has no limit on who you share your feedback with and doesn’t require any software to be installed. It’s actually the lightweight version of ZURB's Notable app. Just input the URL of the webpage that requires feedback and hit the grab screenshot button. A rather fun bouncing ball appears as the screenshot is processed. The screenshot of the webpage is then displayed with the controls at the top. It’s a good idea to enter your name before you begin, so all the comments are labeled in your name. Then click on the specific portion of the screenshot where you’d like to leave feedback and click and drag the mouse over this. A box will then appear where you can add your comment and click OK. All comments are numbered sequentially, so knowing the order of priority is simple. You can add a name to the screenshot and click save to get a public URL, which you can distribute to anyone. There are also the neat options of sending the link directly to Facebook and Twitter. The people you’ve shared your page with can make their own notes, save them and bounce them back. It’s also worth noting that TinyBounce, the smaller, sleeker little brother to Bounce was created for the 10K EventApart competition and received a Notable Mention. 3. SharedCopy SharedCopy is a bookmarklet that allows you to share and mark up webpages. Once you drag the SharedCopy icon to your bookmarks toolbar, you can then click this bookmark whenever you need to make an annotated copy of a page. You can add text notes, simple lines and shapes, and highlights to the page. When you’re done, click save and grab the unique URL for your SharedCopy page and share it with anyone for a simple way to collaborate. Saving essentially creates a ’separate copy’ of the webpage with its own URL, containing your annotations. You can set your pages to be published (public) or private – a person must then know the URL to access it. Anyone can immediately use SharedCopy as a guest without any registration, although you can create an account, which gives you access to further features such as:
With several API’s available, it’s also possible to integrate SharedCopy into your own services. 4. WebKlipper WebKlipper allows you to easily annotate web pages with virtual post-it notes and a highlighter. Once you enter the page URL, WebKlipper will open the site with a menu bar displayed at the bottom. It then generates a unique URL that you can share with the rest of your team members. Once they open this URL, they will see the page with your annotations. When you’ve created your Klip, you’re also able to edit both its title and its unique URL. By selecting a piece of text and clicking ‘Highlight,’ it gives the selected text a yellow background. Once created, comments can be resized and repositioned. By clicking ‘Share,’ you can share the URL of the annotated page via e-mail or directly through Twitter and Facebook. In the menu bar is the link to Notifications, which are a quick and easy way of keeping track of updates on a Klip. Once you add yourself to the notification list for the selected Klip, you’ll start getting e-mails from the creator and modifiers of it. You are also able to view the original page and the different versions of the Klip for quick access to its version history. WebKlipper also allows you to annotate images and PDFs by uploading these to its website. 5. Diigo An abbreviation for the "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff," Diigo is a social annotation service that lets users add highlights and notes in situ to any web page. Any annotation can be made either public or private, with other Diigo users able to read public comments and reply/interact to comments. Diigo combines aspects of social bookmarking, annotation, full-text search, tagging, and sharing. You can also upload images that can be tagged and shared with your group. A browser add-on allows you to share your annotations with others or send directly to Twitter, Facebook, Delicious or your blog. It has an impressive suite of tools, which are worth checking out, from browser extensions to a Diigo API. The groups feature is an excellent collaborative research and learning tool that allows any group of people to pool their findings through group bookmarks, highlights, sticky notes and a forum. With group sticky notes, group members can interact and discuss important points right on the web page, preserving the original context. You can choose to make your group public, private or semi-private. Tags and lists provide two different ways to organize information. Tags are best for diverse and disparate information, while lists are best for focused information. You can use lists to organize, share and display a specific collection of bookmarks. Another neat feature is the ability to play, browse and annotate any list of URLs as an interactive slideshow. Are you currently using any of these tools? If so, please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below. More Dev & Design Resources from Mashable:
Image courtesy of Flickr, Mykl Roventine Reviews: Basecamp, Delicious, Diigo, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, Tumblr, Twitter More About: annotation, annotations, bounce app, collaboration, collaborations, collaborative tools, design, development, diigo, List, Lists, markup, sharedcopy, web apps, web design, webklipper For more Dev & Design coverage:
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For web developers, a key part of the toolkit is a solid text editor. Vi and Emacs wars aside, there are lots of good choices for web developers, ranging from the ultra-sparse to the 
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