Social

Influencers in the arts can drive real profits, even with small moves. A single Instagram post by Beyoncé, for example, […]

In 2006 Google’s acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion, and Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion in 2012.   Many dismissed these purchases […]

When you go online, where do you set our boundaries? If you’re like many social media users, you simply may […]

If you’re a human being (read: not spambot) and you’re on Facebook, you’ve probably wondered who looks at your profile. Facebook’s voyeur-identifying techniques are stealth, allowing you to be a voyeur without really feeling like a stalker. Here are some of the ways you can bypass Facebook’s secret algorithmic ways and find out who’s looking at you…

The debate about companies’ use of location data has gained a lot of traction this year. However, that shouldn’t make […]

Social media needs a surgeon general’s warning. No, that isn’t hyperbole. We know social media is highly addictive. We know […]

The most connected, tech-savvy generation in history does not know how to mail a letter.

If you want to make a career in web development or it is merely your area of interest, it can […]

What to do if you can’t canoe.

Facebook is an accepted means of communication. It is a never-ending virtual social gathering filled with adopted puppies, cute LOL kitties, baby announcements, viral articles and videos, events, groups, organizations and fan pages. But why do people really use it?

A new study entitled “Why do people use Facebook?” from Boston University’s…

How and why has humanity created a pandemic? Have inexorable protection mechanisms have been triggered to create what is now […]

Social ads have social consequences. Josh Kopelman, Managing Director of VC firm First Round Capital, recently found that out. Kopelman, a very savvy web 2.0 investor who got in early with StumbleUpon, Odeo, LinkedIn, and others, tried an experiment with Facebook’s controversial SocialAds advertising system. He spent $50 to test the platform…

A new survey from Gartner Research delivers some bad news regarding our online security practices: two-thirds of U.S. consumers use the same one or two passwords for all the websites they access. And they like it that way. Although people claim they’re concerned about security, they still tend to use unsafe password management techniques rather…

And why does a vegetarian “like” McDonald’s, while a guy who has never owned a car “likes” Subaru? The weird side of Facebook likes. 

Did you know that your tweets have an expiration date on them? While they never really disappear from your own Twitter stream, they become unsearchable in only a matter of days. At first, Twitter held onto your tweets for around a month, but as the service grew more popular, this “date limit” has dramatically shortened. According to Twitter’s…

The dangers of Instagram spam, and how to fight back.

Not all Twitter usernames are worth $50,000, but when they are, hackers want them.

There are a slew of social media aggregation sites willing, waiting, and wanting to pull your updates, videos, photos, links, music, “shares,” “likes,” and other content from all around the web. A few of them work well, some have really cool features, and others have critical mass.

But none of them are as drop-dead good-looking – or as…

Each Facebook Timeline profile now has a tiny clock icon in the status window update, allowing you to place items on your wall in the past. This is a pretty significant Facebook update considering that, initially, Timeline defaulted to publishing posts in the present only. Now the decision to travel back in time is yours. This new feature mimics…

Jon Udell is getting very excited about a new weblog product called Syncato, which is described here: “Syncato is a weblog system designed to extract the maximum potential from the content of your posts. All posts in Syncato are stored as XML within a native XML database and are searchable using XPath queries. This includes the ability to…

Don Park has come up with some promising ideas on how to link weblogs with wikis. One of his ideas is for weblog comments to be cross-posted to Wiki pages, via some scripting that “can create or find” a matching Wiki page for each comment. For this to work, comments on a weblog post will need to…

I’ve been wondering whether to get myself a FOAF file. FOAF stands for “friend of a friend” and it is a method of publishing personal information about yourself in a machine-readable format. Or as the FOAF Wiki puts it: “If you’re familiar with ‘blogging and providing RSS syndication of the content of your ‘blog, then one way to view FOAF is as…

Dave Winer links to an essay he wrote 4 years ago about decentralized syndication: “In our [UserLand’s] system, each story has a *single* location, the site where it originated. We think this is the way the web was meant to work. Stories can live and grow while new information is obtained. Comments from readers can add new facts and ideas and link…

Weblogs and Wikis are authoring tools that enable everyday people to write to the Web. However one part of the Writeable Web is often overlooked: weblog comments. Often some of the best nuggets of content can be found buried in a comment attached to a weblog post. I’ve even coined a phrase for this: Microcontent Wiki, which is defined as…

Soon I’m going to shut up and do some actual work on my Web of Ideas application. But I have to note a few interesting things that have surfaced recently on the topics of ideas and microcontent. Firstly, Erik Benson has just released his own Ideas Database. As to be expected from Erik, who created All Consuming, it’s a nifty piece of work. The…

Yesterday I wrote about Sparrow Web, a 90’s web application developed by Xerox Parc. I discovered that Sparrow Web was like a Microcontent authoring tool. It divvies up information on a webpage into discrete chunks. So when you edit content in Sparrow Web, you’re editing a part of a webpage not the whole webpage (as in a…

I’m doing some research into an Ideas Database web application, prompted by my recent Web of Ideas post (and its sequel). I have a Movable Type sandbox blog set up as a base for development. I’m planning on using XTM (XML Topic Maps) and/or ENT (Easy News Topics) as the engine for ideas, with MT as the frontend and perhaps MySQL as the…

The problem with blogging is it’s easy to get distracted by ideas you can’t do anything about. My previous post illustrates this. In it I railed against Microsoft for wanting to build its own proprietory platform for Web applications. I wrote about it because I’m concerned about the future of the World Wide Web, in…

The subject of topics for weblogs is getting some traction in the blogosphere. There are some promising apps for topics, including k-collector and Topic Exchange. Recently I wrote a post, in response to one by Clay Shirky, to say that weblog posts should be organized by topics in the blogosphere rather than organized by…