Social Media

Journalists and engineers could come together to shape the future of news thanks to a new joint Columbia-Stanford media innovation institute funded by Cosmopolitan Editor Helen Gurley Brown.

The David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation will be an East Coast/West Coast collaboration. Housed at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City and Stanford's Engineering School in Palo Alto, Calif., the institute is thought to be a first of its kind initiative aimed at helping the foster a new era of communication between the editorial and technical sides of news organizations.

The … Read more

While everyone has already worked up a lather about the Ferris Bueller Honda Super Bowl ad, those interested in starting their own companies might have reason to get a little more excited about an altogether different ad during the big game.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation said today that it plans to run a 30-second spot (see video below) during the Feb. 5 Super Bowl between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots that will celebrate entrepreneurs, the "star athletes of the economy." The ad is intended to inspire "the next great entrepreneurs to take … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--When you're a startup trying to upend a business dominated by a powerhouse like YouTube, and adding users far faster than Twitter did during its first serious growth spurts, it's essential that you take care of the famous people who want to come along for the ride.

For Gardner Loulan, the director of community and content at Tout, a company that's pioneering the way people use mobile devices to create short, sharable, and interactive video, catering to the needs of celebrities is something that can happen at any time.

That's why, in the middle of … Read more

John Doerr has been called the "world's wealthiest and most well-connected venture capitalist" by Forbes. The Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner has been an early-stage investor in some of the best-known companies in the tech industry, including Google, Amazon, Sun, and Zynga, and he has 109,000 Twitter followers.

I'm a fairly prolific professional journalist writing for a national publication and covering a wide range of topics from startups to Lego to aviation to NASA and more. I have 6,250 followers on Twitter.

I'm happy with my place in life and how my … Read more

There's no doubt that there will someday be another round of superstar entrepreneurs on the order of Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Steve Jobs. But can a group of judges in an arbitrarily cobbled together "American Idol" for startups be the ones to identify them?

With its Startup World competition, which it announced today, The Next Web clearly thinks that the answer is yes.

"It's inevitable there will be the next Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Google, or Facebook," The Next Web wrote this morning in its announcement of Startup World. "… Read more

For nearly three years, "Star Wars" fans everywhere have been coming up with their own takes on the beloved film's many famous scenes--15 seconds at a time.

This is "Star Wars Uncut," a project to remake George Lucas' 1977 classic, entirely from fan-made scenes. And while the in-progress results have been available all along for all to see, the project's developers had never publicly released their finished product. Until now.

Today, as Laughing Squid wrote, Casey Pugh, who conceived of the "Star Wars Uncut" project, finally released his director's cut of … Read more

If you're a storyteller, wouldn't you want the chance to have "Gladiator" and "Blade Runner" auteur Ridley Scott help you with a project? And wouldn't it be great to have half a million dollars to spend on it?

That could be your future if you're the winner of YouTube's Your Film Festival, a competition to unearth the world's best storyteller that Google's video sharing site announced today.

Beginning February 2, YouTube will open up the film festival to anyone in the world who's 18 or older and has … Read more

If you're active on Twitter, it's almost impossible to imagine that you got through today without being bombarded by mentions of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or the Protect IP Act (PIPA), two controversial antipiracy bills under consideration in Congress.

But with today being the day that Web sites like Wikipedia, BoingBoing, Reddit, and many others went dark--not to mention Google and others that featured less drastic forms of anti-legislation protest--it was striking to see just how much issue dominated the conversation on Twitter.

On Tuesday, for example, there were approximately 106,500 mentions of the term &… Read more

With sites like Reddit, BoingBoing, PostSecret, and I Can Has Cheezburger blacked out today in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, you might think this would be a peaceful, relaxed Wednesday for the people who run them. You'd be wrong.

All across the Internet, sites like those and many others stood up to register their opposition to SOPA and PIPA. But for some of those who have gotten the most attention for their activism, today has actually been crazier than usual, despite not having to constantly update their publications all day.

"Today … Read more