Business

Social media count shows how active the social web is

Gary Hayes little flash application shows how active the social web is. Hayes built the application based on data he pulled from a range of social media sources, which he compiled at the end of September 2009.  You can download his Social Media Count here.

New perspectives on the work/(life) conundrum

My mom always told me “Make your passion your profession, and you’ll be a happy man.” She was right, and I am glad I followed her advice. Yet I appear to be part of a minority. In an article about growing disenchantment at work (“Hating What You Do”), this week’s Economist cites a survey conducted by the Center for Work-Life Policy, an American consultancy. It found that between June 2007 and December 2008 the proportion of workers who professed loyalty to their employers slumped from 95% to 39%, and the number voicing trust in them fell from 79% … Read more

Google's happy days are here again

Google CEO Eric Schmidt feels like a man with a glimpse of open highway after being stuck in traffic for hours.

Google is ready to once again hit the gas, with plans to invest in people, products, and companies over the next several months now that it feels much more confident about its business and the economy. When the last recession hit in 2001, Google was still a small growing company, but a year ago the crumbling economy spooked executives into caution mode as they tried to anticipate just how bad things might get.

Now they know. "The worst … Read more

Google's Postini suffers prolonged e-mail delays

Some customers of Google's Postini e-mail security product experienced significant problems Tuesday, with reports of hours-long delays in e-mail delivery that are still affecting some customers.

Threads throughout Google's Postini forums spread involving the issue, which seemed to begin overnight on System 7--one of several systems used by the service--and was still affecting some customers as of Tuesday afternoon, although e-mail delivery had resumed for others. Users also reported problems accessing the management consoles used to log into the Postini service, preventing them from understanding exactly what was happening.

Postini, acquired by Google in 2007, offers e-mail security … Read more

NPR hosts unique Digital Think-In with Silicon Valley thought leaders

Forgive me but I have to plug something my company (Frog Design) is involved in. I'm only doing this because it is such a neat event: In collaboration with Frog, NPR will host a unique Digital Think In this Friday in our offices in San Francisco, bringing together 60 thought leaders at the intersection of media and technology to explore new approaches to content creation, distribution, and funding for NPR and NPR member stations.

Hosted by NPR CEO and President Vivian Schiller and Digital Media SVP and General Manager Kinsey Wilson, the Think In will harness the collective expertise … Read more

Goodness on Twitter: from attention-sharing to tweet fund drives to good mobs

Twitter’s “suggested users” list is a Who’s Who of Twitter celebrities, featuring the likes of Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, Ashton Kutcher, John McCain, Martha Stewart, and others with millions of followers. The New York Times claimed that a spot on the list would guarantee 500,000 additional followers and reported that social media guru Jason Calacanis had offered $250,000 to be listed.

Last Friday, Twitter did something remarkable. It added a number of well-known social entrepreneurs and innovators to this list, among them Social Edge, Skoll Foundation, Kiva, Matt Flannery (Kiva co-founder), Acumen Fund, Jacqueline Novogratz (Acumen … Read more

Brands in Public: the end of the conversation?

It was just a matter of time: "With brands turning into curators of conversations about them and brand value increasingly determined by the value of aggregated content, third parties might be inspired to hijack these very brands by offering curated conversations on their behalf," I wrote in early July.

And now Seth Godin and BzzAgent have done exactly this. The marketing guru and the marketing agency have launched a portal that aggregates conversations about brands and presents them in a unified public-facing dashboard that gives brands the chance to lead the discussion. Brands in Public translates the Get Satisfaction … Read more

Google adjusts to life with trustbusters

Google's greatest challenge as it heads into its second decade may very well be innovating without ticking off Uncle Sam.

The position taken by the Department of Justice two weeks ago on the Google Books search settlement marked the second time in about a year the U.S. government has taken an active step to rein in one of the tech industry's signature companies. Google now is in the process of renegotiating a deal it once called "a historic settlement," one that gave it sweeping and exclusive rights to digitize certain kinds of books that competitors … Read more

Are writers selling out to marketers? Alain de Botton's "Heathrow Diary"

For one week, Swiss author Alain de Botton was living the life I've always wanted to live. As the first-ever writer-in-residence of London's Heathrow Airport, he was working on his new book on site, observing, documenting, and philosophically charging the emotions and motions of the two arguably most interesting things in life--people and planes--in transit, in situ.

My own fascination with airports started at an early age thanks to the location of my parents' house. I grew up with planes taking off and landing at the nearby airport, and as a student I spent one summer vacation working … Read more