Home � Mashable � Mashable: Latest 26 News Updates - including “The Colors of the Web’s Superbrands [INFOGRAPHIC]”

Mashable: Latest 26 News Updates - including “The Colors of the Web’s Superbrands [INFOGRAPHIC]”

Posted by Ashim Adhikari on 5:47 AM // 0 comments

Latest 26 News Updates - including “The Colors of the Web’s Superbrands [INFOGRAPHIC]”

The Colors of the Web’s Superbrands [INFOGRAPHIC]

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 01:33 AM PDT

Which colors do the web’s most powerful brands use to distinguish themselves from others? The folks from COLOURlovers have decided to find out, producing the beautiful infographic below as the result.
As it turns out, web brands love color; only a few of them are predominantly grey or black and white. The most popular color is blue (nearly all big social networks use it), followed by a variety of reds and oranges. Also, many of the web’s top brands, such as Google and MSN, have a multicolored logo.
COLOURlovers have used data from Alexa, Compete and Nielsen to compile the list of the top 100 brands on the web, and while one can always question their methodology, the infographic definitely paints an interesting picture as far as color usage goes in some of the most popular brands on the web.

More About: colors, infographic, web

Facebook Job Search App Gets $6M in Funding

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 11:58 PM PDT

Name: BranchOut
Quick Pitch: BranchOut brings career networking onto Facebook.
Genius Idea: Facebook isn’t all party pics and FarmVille; some of us do serious career networking on the site.
BranchOut caters to the professionally oriented Facebook user. This relatively new application transforms Facebook into your personal career center. You can search through your friends by company to see which social connections can help you professionally, too.
You can use the app to discover new contacts and business opportunities on Facebook, as well. There’s a friends-of-friends feature that will help you find connections at specific companies you’re interested in, and you can use the app to post and find job openings.
All in all, BranchOut is useful enough that we wonder why Facebook isn’t doing more internally on the career and job-search end. Here’s a brief demo video:

The big question most would ask about this app is obvious: Why would you use a Facebook app when LinkedIn already exists to cover the same space of social/professional networking? And isn’t it risky to build your business on a pure-play app atop someone else’s platform?
LinkedIn has quite a few challengers these days, but none have the momentum or userbase of Facebook. Yet Facebook itself isn’t a direct competitor. We think building a career networking app on top of Facebook’s social network is actually brilliant because it taps into very real and vibrant connections within a social graph, not just the sometimes-stale professional Rolodex stored in a LinkedIn profile.
Facebook is also a network that many users check into every day, so if you’re job-hunting or trying to connect with specific people, your chances might be better than on other career sites, where the folks who check in daily are more likely to be other job seekers than your desired contacts.
As for the pure-play aspect, in most cases, we’d be extremely cautious and not so optimistic. In the event that Facebook decides to devote serious time and effort to career networking and job-search features, BranchOut’s goose may be cooked. But for the time being, there could be some interesting, creative and potentially lucrative things coming out of this startup.
And apparently we’re not the only ones who see promise in the BranchOut model; the startup, which just launched in July, has raised a healthy $6 million dollar Series A from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Accel Partners.
What do you think of BranchOut? Do you or have you ever used Facebook to find a job, help someone else get a job or do general professional networking?

Check out the column at CNN.com >>

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, PeskyMonkey
More About: cnn, netiquette, Stuff Hipsters Hate

SocialSmack Gives You Props for Talking Smack About Brands

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 08:49 PM PDT

A new startup from this week’s DEMO conference today tackles the problem of figuring out which brands to trust.
SocialSmack, founded earlier this year, is part information network, part consumer reviews website, and part game. Users vote on whether a specific brand deserves a thumbs-up (“Props”) or a thumbs-down (“Drops”). For example, Nike now has 16 props and just 1 drop, while AT&T Wireless has 14 props and (not surprisingly) 70 drops. You can even vote comments on specific brands up or down, much like Reddit.
Because SocialSmack is an information network, users can share their thoughts on specific companies with their friends and the general community at large. It also doubles as a review site where users can browse comments and quickly find out whether a company is trustworthy or not.
The site’s gaming elements are what make SocialSmack interesting and potentially addictive. Like Foursquare, SocialSmack includes points and badges. You earn points for doing things like giving props, sharing your comments on Facebook and Twitter, and voting on other commenters. In fact, SocialSmack takes its gaming elements seriously enough to call its users “players.” There is even a leaderboard where the overall leader is known as “The Sultan of Smack.” The gaming element is definitely a core element of the entire website.

There are plenty of websites where consumers can review companies and businesses (Yelp immediately comes to mind), but we haven’t seen any with so many gaming elements. If SocialSmack can build out more points of engagement for users while keeping comments and reviews useful for casual users, then it has a chance to capture a market. That’s a very tall order, though; the company has its work cut out for it.
What do you think of SocialSmack? Is it something you could see yourself using?

Internet Explorer 9 Beta 1 Walkthrough [VIDEO]

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 07:34 PM PDT

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9 beta 1, and this is the software giant’s best effort in years at reclaiming mindshare from developers, designers and users alike.
IE 9 is a big release. It’s a complete overhaul of what Internet Explorer was, and Microsoft is very focused on beautifying the web. IE 9 is faster, has better support for HTML5 and CSS3, and seems better-tuned to the needs of the user than previous versions did.

There’s a lot to like about IE 9. Taking UI cues from Google Chrome, Microsoft has streamlined the interface, making the browser less apparent and allowing the user to focus more on content. Likewise, the addition of pinned websites makes accessing frequently accessed bookmarks faster and adds some great features by way of jump lists.
Having said that, IE 9 is still very much a beta product. Although the browser performs well for the most part, we ran into a number of crashes and other issues, especially while accessing (or attempting to access) media on our various test setups. In our walkthrough video below, you’ll see that the browser crashes and stops responding at times. As hard as we tried, we couldn’t do a single take without that happening.
Crashes and irregularities aside, IE 9 is a great direction for Microsoft and its one we hope it is a path the company continues to walk down.
Check out this video that highlights some of the newest features and pits IE 9 against Firefox and Google Chrome.

What are you impressions of IE 9? Let us know in the comments.

What Digg Must Do to Survive

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 07:14 PM PDT

The Social Analyst is a column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.
I’m pretty sure Digg founder Kevin Rose wishes he had a time machine right about now. While I bet he’d love to revisit the New Digg’s rather rocky launch, he might use the time machine to go back to July 2008, when Google was a breath away from acquiring Digg.
Unfortunately for Rose, Google eventually decided that Digg wasn’t worth its supposed $200 million price tag at the time. Ever since then, the company just hasn’t been the same. Each change, successful product, delayed launch, controversy and failed sale has led to this pivotal moment in Digg’s history.
The past two months have certainly been some of the toughest the company has ever had to endure. While Rose and the Digg executive team can’t change the past, they still have the opportunity to make Digg into a mainstream powerhouse of social news that could eventually give it an exit equal to, or greater than the one Google offered the company over two years ago.
But first, Digg has a couple of big problems to solve before it’s too late.

How Digg Got to This Point

Digg Version 3, the previous iteration of the popular social news website, launched more than four years ago. Yes, it’s been that long since Digg’s last major overhaul.
Things were (relatively) good back then. While Digg had to deal with a few controversies, it claimed more than 700,000 users and growing. At the time, some even pinned the social news site’s worth at around $250 million, more than the $200 million Google offer in 2008.
But while Digg grew, its revenue did not. In the first three quarters of 2008, Digg lost $4 million on $6.4 million in revenue. That wouldn’t have been a problem though if Google or Microsoft (which had a substantial ad deal with Digg at the time) had acquired the company in 2008.
It didn’t happen though, so Digg had to make changes. In January 2009, the company cut its staff in an effort to become profitable. In April 2009, it ended its ad deal with Microsoft. In June 2009, the company introduced Digg Ads, where users control how much advertisers pay based on user diggs and buries.
Digg ads were a hit, but it came at the cost of Digg’s accelerating growth. According to comScore, Digg’s traffic dropped from 14.3 million uniques in January 2010 to just 8.8 million in July. As Rose recently told AllThingsD, the company panicked when the economy collapsed and focused entirely on revenue rather than new features. As a result, Digg wasn’t gaining the large mainstream audiences that Facebook and Twitter enjoyed, and was threatened with obscurity.
The New Version of Digg, announced in March, was designed to address the traffic problem. Instead, tensions between Rose and CEO Jay Adelson bubbled up over the direction of the product and the company in general. Eventually Adelsen stepped aside and Rose took over as CEO of Digg.

What Digg Got Right and Where Digg Blew It

Let’s be clear: Digg had to do something to ratchet up traffic and bring in more mainstream users, and many of the company’s goals with The New Digg, a.k.a Digg version 4, make sense. Letting publishers auto-submit their own stories took power out of the hands of a few “power diggers” and would put an end to “gaming” the site. A personalized homepage for every user would deliver unique content based on personal interests and the recommendations of friends. The personalized homepage would also end the guessing game behind whether a publisher would get 100 or 100,000 hits from the front page.
At least, that was the goal. Clearly, things haven’t gone according to plan. Digg’s users revolted and the site has experienced extended downtime and multiple bugs. The result: Reddit’s numbers are way up and Digg fired its VP of Engineering.
Digg version 4 was a smart, even necessary idea, though. They had admirable intentions like focusing on a mainstream audience, nerfing power diggers, and adding personalization. They prepared users months in advance for the switch, and they even had an extended testing period to weed out bugs and gather user feedback.
It didn’t matter though, because people are already getting their news elsewhere. There are simply more choices, from Facebook to Twitter. There is a reason Digg emulated many of Twitter’s features in its overhaul; they want to become the Twitter of news.
While Digg could have done a lot of things better with the launch of Digg v4 (specifically, they should not have launched with the controversial suggested user list), here are what I believe to be the company’s two biggest follies in this whole affair:

1. Digg took way too long to react to the changing landscape of social news. Twitter ate the company’s lunch. Publishers started focusing on their Twitter followings and, later on, their Facebook presence. Digg, while it can still generate a nice traffic spike, wasn’t the future of publishing. The company didn’t take any bold steps for four years, and the results are apparent.
2. Digg chose dramatic overhaul over gradual changes. If we’ve learned anything from Facebook’s many redesign and privacy fiascoes, it’s that major overhauls of large websites don’t go over well. The company tried to launch way too many things all at once, and the result was a buggy platform that frightened users.
There’s a reason there isn’t Twitter version 4. or Facebook version 4; they make changes to their websites with gradual phases and staggered rollouts, making it all seem like the same platform, when in reality everything has been overhauled at least a dozen times.
I understand that Digg version 3 just couldn’t scale, and that’s why it needed to switch to Cassandra. But hyping up the switch as the new version of Digg just didn’t help their cause.

This Is Digg’s “Do or Die” Moment

I was fascinated by Kevin Rose’s attempt to address the controversy on Diggnation. He tackled it head-on, and I’ll summarize it with these five points:

1. We couldn’t scale with Digg version 3.
2. We’ve listened to the users and brought back some key features.
3. The Suggested User List was a really bad idea.
4. We’re bringing new features, specifically gaming elements, to Digg.
5. We have to take risks to survive.

On all five counts, Rose is right. The launch went south, mostly because of the Suggested User List giving a few key publishers domination of the Digg homepage. But that’s the past; the question is, what should Digg do now?
Digg needs to go on the offensive quickly to restart momentum. As long as the company is on defense by trying to appease its hardcore users, Digg will not move forward. Yes, Digg needs to cater to these users; they are the blood in Digg’s veins. However, the company should win them over with new features that will delight and surprise them. Adding gaming elements like leaderboards and rankings could create a whole new generation of passionate Diggers, and that’s only the beginning.
As Mashable’s Pete Cashmore said when the new Digg first launched, this is Digg’s “do or die” moment. Instead of fading into obscurity, Digg decided to roll the dice. Sometimes when you gamble though, you pay a heavy price.
Digg’s not dead yet, though. It has enough chips to get back in the game. Digg needs to concentrate on quickly launching a stream of new features though, rather than dwell on the past or wait until another big upgrade or redesign to adapt to the rapidly-changing social landscape.
Your move, Digg.

More Social Media Resources from Mashable:

- A Brief History of Digg
- How News Consumption is Shifting to the Personalized Social News Stream
- 21 Creative Blogger Bio Pages
- Top 10 Twitter Tips for Bands, By Bands
- 5 Winning Social Media Campaigns to Learn From

Why Designers and Developers Should Care About Internet Explorer 9

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 06:19 PM PDT

This series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. Learn more about Rackspace’s hosting solutions here.

Today, Microsoft is releasing the first public beta of of its next-generation web browser, Internet Explorer 9.
With the release of IE 9, Microsoft is aiming at a total reboot of its venerable (and often derided) web browser. We’re talking renewed emphasis on performance and an investment in web standards.
Still, for many web developers and designers, IE is viewed as a necessary evil. You support it and test around it because of its large userbase (a userbase that has been in steady decline over the last six years), but it isn’t taken very seriously.
With IE 9, Microsoft is hoping to change that. Here are some of the big reasons that designers and developers should care about the latest version of Internet Explorer.

1. Standards, Standards, Standards

In the early days of the web, Microsoft was actually a pretty involved party when it came down to drafting and implementing web standards. Microsoft is a member of the W3C, but over the last decade or so, standards and IE have rarely worked well together.
This is frustrating because it means that designers and developers have to designate little work-arounds to make a web page work with IE. With Internet Explorer 9, it looks like fewer and fewer work-arounds will be necessary.
IE 9 boasts support for lots of the features that are in the HTML5 spec, including:

HTML5 audio and video elements
The new WOFF web font format
SVG
HTML5’s Canvas bitmap
ECMAScript 5

IE 9 also offers much more robust and true CSS3 support. In other words, more and more of the sites and features you build for Firefox 4, Opera, Chrome or Safari are going to work without IE 9 the same way. This is great news for designers and developers alike.

2. Performance Gains

The new IE 9 is faster and more efficient. In the modern browser wars, JavaScript is becoming the new battleground for speed supremacy. Right now, Google is really taking charge with its V8 JavaScript engine, but Microsoft isn’t backing down with its new engine, dubbed Chakra.
Chakra is similar to V8 in that it can run JavaScript directly from the processor, rather than through some sort of layer. That means that animations and scripts can run faster and with less overhead.
Charka has also been optimized for modern hardware, so if you’re running IE 9 on a multi-core Windows 7 machine, you can really see a big difference in performance, especially when several highly intensive web apps are open at one time.
As we’ve discussed before, Microsoft is also taking charge on making sure IE 9 has support for GPU acceleration. By using the graphics card rather than the CPU to offload things like animations, you can get higher frame rates, more detail and use less processor resources.
Microsoft showed off some of this GPU acceleration support back in June and the results were impressive.

3. More Modern, Easier to Use

Designers and developers often build and test around what browsers and versions their users use. Firefox and increasingly Google Chrome are starting to become the de facto browsers that even less tech savvy users reach for.
Chrome in particular is really gaining popularity because it has a clean interface, focuses on speed and knows how to get out of your way.
Microsoft has taken a lot of cues from Chrome’s playbook, and the UI in IE 9 makes the browser decidedly less prominent. The focus is instead on the website.
Because of these enhancements, as well as the better performance and better support for modern standards, we expect that more and more Windows users will give IE 9 a chance and consider using it as their default browser.
That means that even Mac designers and developers (like myself) need to be prepared to open up a virtual machine and run their sites through IE 9.

Your Thoughts

IE 9 is a huge step for Microsoft and we think that the current beta shows a lot of potential. For the first time in a while, Microsoft might actually help push innovation forward instead of holding it back in the browsing space.
Designers and developers, let us know your thoughts on IE 9 in the comments. Do you think this is a chance for IE to become relevant to the developer community again?

Series supported by Rackspace

Rackspace is the better way to do hosting. No more worrying about web hosting uptime. No more spending your time, energy and resources trying to stay on top of things like patching, updating, monitoring, backing up data and the like. Learn why.

More Dev & Design Resources from Mashable:

- HOW TO: Implement Google Font API on Your Website
- Top 10 Accessories for Typography Nuts [PICS]
- 40+ Web Design and Development Resources for Beginners
- 10 Tools for Getting Web Design Feedback
- 10 Free Wireframing Tools for Designers

Google’s Music Service to Include Cloud-Based Locker [REPORT]

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 04:43 PM PDT

Google’s much anticipated music offering is said to be launching by Christmas, and new information from Billboard suggests that it will be both a digital download store and a cloud-based subscription service costing $25 per year.
Billboard’s sources referred to the cloud service as a locker, a place where subscribers will be able to store and access their music files and downloads, stream full tracks once prior to purchase, and share playlists with friends who would also be allowed to stream full tracks, free of charge, on their first listen.
Locker users would be able to add all their music files — as long as the track is licensed by Google — to their online locker for future streaming or downloading purposes.
“Such tracks could include those purchased at the Google download store or another download retailer, tracks ripped from a CD and even music files downloaded from peer-to-peer networks,” per the report.
Of course, everything — especially the full track-streaming functionality and the storing of peer-to-peer exchanged tracks — is dependent on Google securing the support from the major record labels.
The company is said to be showing label executives a term sheet with these proposals. It designs to get the labels to sign an initial three-year licensing agreement, with a 50/50 split on subscription revenue going to the master right holders. Google is also proposing a 10.5% cut for music publishers, according to Billboard.
With Christmas right around the corner, Google will need to aggressively push to make these deals happen in time for the holiday season. Previous reports on the subject suggest that Google may launch the Android-friendly download service first, with the online subscription portion to follow at a later date. From the sound of it, the cloud-based locker offering has the most potential to be disruptive, and should help Google differentiate its music offering from Apple’s longstanding iTunes store.
Image courtesy of Flickr, advertisingelyse

Score a Celebrity Twitter Follower by Donating to Charity

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 03:59 PM PDT

If it’s your dream to have your favorite celeb commune with you via Twitter, you’re in luck — a rather innovative charity auction launched today, allowing you to bid on the famous for a chance to have them Twit-talk to you.

TwitChange bills itself as “the first-ever celebrity Twitter auction,” and offers up a pretty hefty list of heavy hitters, from Simon Pegg to Pete Wentz (with more being added every hour). Basically, you donate money for the chance to have these Twitterers follow you, retweet you or mention you in a tweet.
All money goes to aHomeInHaiti.org, which will then be able to ﬁnish rebuilding the Miriam Center, a home for children with cerebral palsy, severe autism and other disabilities.
The eBay auction goes until September 25, and the competition is already heating up. The Justin Bieber Mega Package, described thusly, “Justin Bieber will follow you on Twitter for a minimum of 90 days, will retweet one of your tweets and will send out a tweet including your @twitterhandle,” is already up to $2,325.00 and 62 bids.
The campaign offers folks a commodity that many among the social media-inclined set covet. As we have seen in the past, celeb interaction on Twitter can really up your cred, which is a boon for small businesses and personalities. Remember when Michael Ian Black was roasting folks on Twitter for charity? I volunteered to be humiliated, and reaped a ton of followers in the process (you may also remember the girl that Conan briefly made Twitter famous).
Good cause + Celebs + Self promotion = Everyone wins. (You can also donate sans Twitter if you don’t care for all that jazz.)
If you decide to join in, what celebrity will you bid on?

This post was brought to you by the groundbreaking Social Good Summit. On September 20, as global leaders head to New York for United Nations Week — including a historic summit on global issues known as the "Millennium Development Goals" (MDGs) and the annual General Assembly — Mashable, 92nd Street Y and the UN Foundation will bring together leaders from the digital industry, policy and media worlds to focus on how technology and social networks can play a leading role in addressing the world's most intractable problems.

Date: Monday, September 20, 2010
Time: 1:00 to 6:00 p.m. ET
Location: 92nd Street Y, New York City
Tickets: On sale through Eventbrite

iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch to Get Wireless Printing with iOS 4.2

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 03:41 PM PDT

Apple has announced that the latest beta of its iOS 4.2 software comes with printer support. The AirPrint feature allows users of the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch to print wirelessly over Wi-Fi, without needing to install drivers or software.
Although the software is currently only available through Apple’s iOS developer program, Apple says iOS 4.2 will be ready for the masses in November. The first devices to support AirPrint will be HP’s line of ePrint enabled printers.
AirPrint is said to support a full range of print functions through iOS, including page range selection as well as single-sided and double-sided printing. It will also feature a Print Center that coordinates your print queue, so you can keep track of the progress from across the office if you’re so inclined.
More About: AirPrint, apple, HP, iOS, ipad, iphone, ipod

You Can Now Audition for “American Idol” via MySpace

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 03:20 PM PDT

American Idol hopefuls have a new way to audition, and they might not even have to leave their houses to do so, because this season the show will allow aspiring singers to submit audition videos via MySpace.
Singers interested in going on the show will have to perform a song, a capella, from an approved online list. Participants can only submit one video each, and the video can't be longer than 40 seconds (submissions are due by October 6).
These web auditions will be judged in a manner similar to the usual tryouts. Aspiring musicians with successful audition videos will be called back to the next round in Los Angeles. Viewers will be able to share the videos, and they will also be able to watch highlights on Idol’s MySpace page.
This isn't the first time Idol has turned to the web to look for talent. In 2007, the show held an online contest for songwriters. And last year, fans were able to vote for their favorite contestants via a Facebook application.
This also isn't the first time FOX and MySpace — both owned by News Corp. — have teamed up to find talent for a TV show. Earlier this year, MySpace held an online casting call for FOX's hit show Glee. Nearly 28,000 auditioned by the time the call's initial deadline had passed.
We've embedded American Idol host Ryan Seacrest's call for online auditions below. What do you think of the show's new approach to tryouts?

5 Trends Shaping the Future of Social Good

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 02:13 PM PDT

Social media has had a profound effect on the way social good organizations approach global problems. From the Red Cross, which used text messages to raise $5 million in relief funds for Haiti, to organizations like micro-lender Kiva, which wouldn't even exist without the concept of social networking, altruistic organizations and individuals are finding new ways to embrace social media.
In preparation for our Social Good Summit next week, we asked social good experts about trends that will shape the way we use social media for positive change in the future. Here’s what they had to say.

1. Crowdsourcing

In preparation for the United Nation's climate change conference last December, an organization called 350.org (350 refers to the safe upper limit for parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere) decided to organize a demonstration. But instead of printing up picket signs and posting flyers on telephone polls, they posted a simple call to action on their website and spread the word through social media. They asked people all over the world to create their own events on October 24 that centered around the number 350.
350.org's social network responded by organizing more than 5,200 demonstrations and rallies in more than 180 countries. Climbers planned to post 350 banners on Mt. Everest. Activists around the shore of the Dead Sea collaborated to post a giant “3″ in Israel, a “5″ in Palestine, and a “0″ in Jordan.
More and more organizations are striving to create movements through a similar crowdsourcing model.
"Crowdsourcing is literally and simply empowering your community to do specific tasks without the organization, but on behalf of the organization, through active management," says Geoff Livingston, the co-founder of social media communications agency Zoetica, which works primarily with non-profits.
Livingston, who regularly contributes articles about social good for Mashable, embarked on his own crowdsourcing effort after the April 20th Deepwater Horizon explosion. He and Zoetica teamed up with other organizations like Citizen Effect and Live Your Talk to organize a national day of action on August 25th. They named the project CitizenGulf, after a Twitter hashtag.
Twenty cities participated by hosting events, and the cumulative $10 entry fees amounted to almost $11,000 that was used to send eight children of fishermen affected by the oil spill to an after-school program for a year.
"What was really special about that is that these 20 cities got together, they met face to face, they did their own event, they created it, and they were free to crowdsource and innovate," Livingston says. "And I think when people are empowered to become a part of something — not told what to do, but literally, make it their own, make it part of their life, make it feel like their $10 and two hours of time means something — wow, that's powerful."
Beth Kanter, the co-author of The Networked Nonprofit and the CEO of Zoetica, says the Humane Society's 2007 campaign to protest Wendy's "frosty treatment of animals" by making and submitting your own sign is the first example she remembers of seeing these personal calls to action. Other successful implementations of crowdsourcing since then include LIVESTRONG'S grassroots fundraising events and awareness day, which is similar to the 350.org concept.
But according to Livingston, non-profits have a long way to go before they can leverage the full potential of crowdsourcing. "I think crowdsourcing is a hot buzz word in the non-profit space, but people just don't get it. Nobody's really figured it out yet," Livingston says. "I don't really see any universal theory that is working for me."

2. Location, Mobile Apps and Other Experiments

Non-profits have started to experiment with location-based games like Foursquare and other mobile apps, but they're behind their commercial counterparts.
"I think to really leverage those networks, you need to employ a developer. You really need to get into the API and pull out the data and leverage it successfully," Livingston says. "And I don't think non-profits are technically savvy enough to think like that or deploy resources for it … The barrier to entry is so specific that they run away from it."
There are, however, promising examples that early adapters have implemented. The Brooklyn Museum, for instance, gives perks like free entry to its mayor. The museum also posts Foursquare tips and photos of its past mayors on a community page.
“[The Brooklyn Museum] is a great example because it's not just the marketing and communications department using social media, it's literally almost everybody in the organization," Kanter says. "When they were testing Foresquare, they did things like have the staff go out with their smartphones and check in to different places in the neighborhood and suggest … a great place to go to lunch before going to the Brooklyn museum."
While the Brooklyn Museum is making Foursquare work for them, they have the advantage of being a geographic organization. For most non-profits, says co-author of Social by Social Amy Sample Ward, experimenting with location-based apps isn’t yet a feasible way to activate change.
"If no actual people in your region are using Foresquare, it doesn't really matter that you did it," she says. "You won't get bonus points for being first because you're still not getting any action. You're not engaging people, you’re not furthering your mission. Unless being an early adopter is part of your organization's mission, it's not necessarily right."
Ward has a similar outlook for non-profit apps. "It's one thing, in my mind, if you are a museum and you create an app that brings in people because they don't have to buy an audio guide and they feel like they can walk around and own the museum in their own way,” she says. "For an organization that doesn't have a physical place of interest that you would come to repeatedly, having an app that just sits there, you don't see a lot of action from those." She says the way app donations are set up also make them ineffective fund raising tools.
On the other hand, Ward has noticed that social good organizations that have experimented with video to create a call to action are often successful.
"I think there's a lot going on with video in a way that wasn't happening before. Recognizing the power of video not just as a storytelling aide — videos are so much more compelling and interesting than blog posts — but now people are realizing that videos are a place where you can sync the action that you want people to take with that compelling story that was just told."
This was recently the case for a video widget that promoted The Cove, a documentary about dolphin capture in Japan. Call2Action, the company that made the widget, says that an average 59% of people who viewed the widget interacted with it. "Interaction" includes any click on the video, including options to share, sign a petition, or learn more. Considering interaction rates for advertisements for video are about 2% to 6%, Ward sees videos with call to action as a promising trend for social good organizations.

3. Mobilizing Actions

There was a time when social good organizations used social media to engage and inform communities about their goals. More and more organizations are now also using social media as a platform from which to accomplish those goals or to mobilize people to work toward those goals.
For-profit social network The Extraordinaries, for instance, connects "micro-volunteers" with social good projects that can usually be accomplished in about ten minutes. For instance, one example project is “Can you critique these logo designs?” Volunteers find a "challenge" that matches their skills and post their answers to the website or through the iPhone app.
Other organizations have found social media’s ability to mobilize actions particularly useful during times of disaster, and it’s likely that they will only find it more so in the future.
The best known example of this is when the Red Cross mobilized its social network to respond to the earthquake in Haiti by donating $10 through a text message. The organization successfully raised $5 million in relief funds.
CrisisCommons also mobilized volunteers after the earthquatke, but it brought them together in person at “CrisisCamps" around the country to develop technological solutions. CrisisCamps in Washington, Los Angeles, California and other cities contributed a digital map and other mobile apps to help relief groups in Haiti coordinate their efforts.
Because GlobalGiving, an organization that links grassroots projects with donors, already had an established network of grassroots organizations around the world, it was easy for them to work with Haitian organizations to provide relief. “Social media was crucial to spreading news about the disasters, as well as learning news,” wrote GlobalGiving Online Marketing Manager Alison McQuade in an e-mail. “We were able to send updates as they were happening and provide giving opportunities immediately.”
Ward says social media has replaced physically knocking on people’s doors to ask for help with a method that can be just as personal but is also quicker and has a further reach. "Whether it's actual political campaigning, or if it's 'we're going to go fix the park,’ they can use these online tools to figure out who's going to be there and who has plants and who has a shovel," she says.

4. Benefiting From Cause Marketing

Target did it. Pepsi did it. Chase did it. Companies are discovering that setting up contests to reward social good organizations based on how many "votes" they can rally from their social networks is an excellent way to advertise.
For non-profits, it's also become an excellent way to raise funds.
"There's actually gotten to be so many of them that non-profits need to think about whether or not they should answer the contest," says Kanter, who in 2007 was the first person to use Twitter to solicit donations. "It's sort of a new category of fund raising that they need to consider."
Unfortunately this funding source doesn't come without risk.
"[Organizations] have to think about whether or not the sponsor of the contest is aligned with your goals, says Kanter. “They need to think about whether or not they have really built up their network and have a capacity to participate.”
She cites the cautionary tale of The American Cancer Society and KFC, which aligned to fight breast cancer one giant pink bucket of friend chicken at a time, only to generate backlash from those who pointed out that fatty foods may increase the risk of breast cancer.

5. Cooperation Between Non-profits and Individuals

At a non-profits and technology conference Kanter attended in April, 29-year-old Shawn Ahmed, who withdrew from grad school to found the Uncultured Project (accumulating a huge YouTube and Twitter following in the process), jumped on stage and pointed to the representative from the Red Cross. According to a blog post for The Chronicle of Philanthropy that Kanter wrote about the incident, he said:
"The problem isn't social media, the problem is that you are the fortress. Social media is not my problem: I have over a quarter million followers on Twitter, 10,800 subscribers on YouTube, and 2.1 million views. Yet despite that, I have a hard time having you guys take me seriously. I get dismissed as ‘just a guy on YouTube.'"
Ahmed is what Kanter calls a "a free agent" — an individual who isn't part of a staff or a traditional volunteer, but who is aligned with a cause and has a social media following. In this case, Ahmed was frustrated because he wanted to mobilize his social network to help the Red Cross’s Haiti relief efforts, but felt shut out.
"Some of these non-profits just don't let people in," Kanter says. "They can't control them. They can't slap their logos on them and brand them."
The Red Cross, which is one of Kanter's clients, was able to follow up with Ahmed to discuss ways he and other free agents could participate. Kanter says that she sees more organizations willing to work with and embrace their “free agents.”
"I look at free agents as influencers," Livingston says. “Really big influencers that can create a splash. And I think understanding who the influencers are in your market and your segment is just common sense. You absolutely, positively want to have your influencers in your camp."
Whether they call them "free agents" or "influencers," working toward inclusion is a trend that social good organizations are starting to take more seriously.
"Social change issues have become so much more complex that they've outstripped the capacity of any single organization to solve those problems," Kanter says. "And that's why it's really important that non-profits stop looking at themselves as a single institution and more like networks.”

Social Media to Connect “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” Fans with Cast During Show

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 01:49 PM PDT

Sardonic misanthropes rejoice: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia returns to TV tomorrow for its sixth season, and with it comes a multi-platform social media campaign designed to rally fans around the popular show.
Sunny Tweets is an app that lives on the FX website and boasts two tabs: one leading to Facebook and one to Twitter. Here you can post your thoughts about the show directly to the Sunny Facebook Page, as well as to your Twitter stream with the hashtag #sunnyfx (which can be confusing to your followers — one of mine just tweeted back, “it’s a beautiful day!”).
There’s also a box on the side of the page featuring that week’s designated cast Twitterer who will tweet via the app during the show every Thursday. We’re into that feature, as it allows users to get engaged with the cast and offers the incentive of seeing one’s Twitter name right there in pixels and pings if said cast member chooses to @-reply.

Still, while we commend the network for adding a social aspect to such an anti-social show (I say this with love, as this is one of my favorite shows), the app itself leaves something to be desired. For one, the Facebook updates appear as merely a stream of comments — you can’t comment on or “like” the sentiments of others. That rather cuts down on the conversational aspect. The Twitter section, however, allows you to respond to and retweet fellow users, which is pretty cool.
We’ve seen a lot of innovative uses of social media in the TV realm of late — the MTV VMA Twitter Tracker as well as Bridezillas’s partnership with entertainment checkin service Miso spring to mind — so we would have liked to see Sunny thinking a little further outside the box this time around.
Tomorrow night, rather than logging into the app, I’ll probably just stick to tweeting directly at @TheCharlieDay about my weird, weird crush on his eponymous character.

Reviews: Facebook, Twitter
More About: facebook, its-always-sunny-in-philadelphia, social media, television, twitter

For more Entertainment coverage:

Follow Mashable Entertainment on Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Entertainment channel
Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

Outsourcing Our Love Lives: How Online Dating Works [VIDEO]

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 01:21 PM PDT

Though the exact numbers are unclear, more people than ever are outsourcing their love lives to dating websites. But have you ever wondered how these sites actually help people find their matches?
We wanted to get an inside look at the world of online dating. First, we spoke with Dr. Gian Gonzaga, the senior research director at E-Harmony. Then, we sat down with Sam Yagan, a founder of OKCupid. These sites are our new digital matchmakers — the surveys and algorithms that help us find one another online. But how do they stack up against good old-fashion in-person chemistry and connections? Janis Spindel, a professional matchmaker, also weighs in on how times have changed.
What does it mean when we outsource romance to the Internet? Has the web forever changed the way we date?
Add your thoughts in the comments section below.

Bing to Get a Major HTML5 Makeover

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 12:58 PM PDT

At the Internet Explorer 9 Beta launch event, Bing debuted an array of new HTML5 features, including moving backgrounds, hovering windows and search results that move with you as you scroll.
The search engine took the stage in order to demonstrate IE9’s new HTML5 capabilities, but also announced that Bing will start integrating deep HTML5 features next month in the form of a preview.
The Bing team first showed off moving backgrounds on the Bing homepage. The search engine is known for its daily front-page photography, but in a month that photo of a beach could suddenly come to life, waves and all. You will also soon be able to zoom out of pictures for a more expansive view.
Beyond the cosmetic changes though, Bing will also be using HTML5 to enhance its search engine results page. For example, the top navigation (Images, News, etc.) will remain at the top of your browser screen even while you scroll through search results. In addition, search engine results will stick to the top of the screen until you scroll into the next one; it’s a cool effect that saves screen real estate.
Finally, Bing is bringing HTML5 to images to create some nifty slideshows. You can use Bing to automatically generate slideshows from your search queries.
While we expect these features to work with any HTML5-compatible browser, we expect this experience to be optimized for IE9, so you may not get all of that hardware-accelerated goodness in your Chrome or Safari browser. One thing Microsoft doesn’t seem to be worried about right now, though, is making Bing’s search results instantaneous.

Reviews: Bing, Chrome, Safari, news
More About: bing, microsoft

Direct Mail Coupon Giant Valpak Launches Daily Deals Site

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 12:23 PM PDT

If you’ve ever received coupons in the mail, then you’re probably familiar with Valpak, the Cox Target Media-owned company that has made its name delivering branded blue envelop coupon packs to 40 million households in the U.S. and Canada every year. Valpak has announced today that it will bringing its coupon prowess to the web by launching a daily deals site of its own.
The deals site will go by the name ValpakDeals and launch this November in a handful of U.S locations including Long Island, Las Vegas and Omaha. In 2011, the company will roll out daily deals to the rest of the cities in its nationwide network.
ValpakDeals promises to present consumers with deals — unique from their mail-delivered coupons — on a daily basis at a 45% or greater discount. Valpak has yet to disclose specific deals, but a statement on the launch hints at a group buying initiative for spa deals, top-notch restaurant offerings, deeply discounted beauty items and cheap car service.
Valpak currently supplies coupons from 180 different merchants and franchises, and already offers coupons on the web and via mobile applications. Those relationships will likely prove fruitful as they expand their service to include daily deals.
When the coupon provider enters the market later this year, it will face stiff competition from Groupon and its hundreds of clones. Valpak has the potential to stand out from the rest thanks to its pre-existing reach to millions of households. At launch, Valpak will be a standalone offering, although COO Jim Sampey suggests that there will be future integration with its mobile and direct mail services.
More About: coupons, daily deals, groupon, valpak

Mashable Invites You To See “The Social Network”

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 12:02 PM PDT

The Social Network before all your friends, along with talent from the movie? You’re in luck. Mashable invites you to a private screening of the upcoming movie on Monday, September 27 in NYC, just days before it arrives in theaters. We’re giving away 180 tickets to the first readers to RSVP on our Eventbrite page.
The screening will include talent from the film as well as a panel about the changing landscape of entrepreneurship, moderated by Mashable's Adam Ostrow and featuring several prominent tech and social media entrepreneurs.
The movie chronicles the story of hacker-turned-billionaire Mark Zuckerberg. In 2003, as a Harvard undergrad, Zuckerberg sat down at his computer to program what would become a global social network and a revolution in social media. Six years later. Facebook has surpassed 500 million users, and Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in history.
Date: Monday, September 27 at 7:30 p.m.
Location: Chelsea Clearview Cinema, 260 W 23rd St, New York, NY
Tickets: Available through our Eventbrite page. Bring your Eventbrite ticket to the screening. One per person.
The Event: Screening of The Social Network and a panel discussion.
Socialize: Facebook, Twitter #mashTSN and “Mashable’s Movie Night” on Foursquare.

Come and enjoy the new movie and stay for a panel of entrepreneurs and programmers discussing the changing field of entrepreneurship and technology. Check out the full-length trailer below:

Reviews: Facebook, Foursquare, Mashable, Twitter
More About: Events, facebook, facebook movie, mark zuckerberg, mashable, movie screening, the social network

For m

Nokia to Release Foursquare App Next Week

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 11:21 AM PDT

Nokia has just announced that it will be releasing a Foursquare application for Symbian^3 devices. The application was unveiled at Nokia World in London earlier today and will make its way to the revamped Ovi Store as a featured application some time next week.
Foursquare for Nokia is similar in style and function to the Foursquare apps available on other smartphones. The similarities are in no small part due to a collaboration with the startup’s team on the design front.
Nokia World attendees got an advance look at the application. UK technology blog Electricpig posted a few photos of it, and describes the new offering — which was running on the new Nokia N8 — as, “crisp, fluid and functional, while managing to keep in line with Nokia's typical UI and font design.”
It is is also tightly integrated with Ovi Maps, and includes a homescreen widget for quick glimpses at Foursquare activity.
The Nokia Foursquare app will launch first for Symbian^3 devices. Support for newer S60 devices is slated for a future date.

Images courtesy of Electricpig

Internet Explorer 9 Has Arrived

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 11:05 AM PDT

Microsoft is pulling out all the stops to mark the launch of the open beta for Internet Explorer 9, a web browser the company promises will “beautify the web.”
The IE9 beta launches today here at the Design Concourse Center in San Francisco with a major gala that includes hundreds of developers, journalists and Microsoft employees, as well as a live band playing on pedestals in the lobby.
“The browser is a stage. It is the backdrop of the web,” said Corporate Vice President of Internet Explorer Dean Hachamovitch.
Microsoft says that IE9 is a reinvention of the browser. It not only includes greater HTML5 and web standard compliance, but also the ability to turn any website into an application on the Windows taskbar. Thee websites are pinned to the taskbar, providing users with a one-click option to a their favorite websites. It also includes Windows 7’s jump lists; any website that supports them will provide a quick menu to its most popular webpages.
The focus of IE9 is on the “regular consumer,” which may irk those of us who generally have more than 10 or 20 tabs open at any given time. Tabs appear on the right side of the address bar, decreasing the amount of real-estate for tabs. To help decrease tab overload, they are grouped based on different websites within the taskbar.
Perhaps IE9’s biggest selling point is hardware acceleration. The company has used four developer previews to show off the speed of IE9 compared to its competitors. IE9 harnesses the PC’s hardware to accelerate graphics, videos and text. The result is that IE9 is able to render heavy graphic interfaces far better than even Chrome or Firefox.
The IE9 beta is available for download today on the Beautify the Web site Microsoft has launched as part of its promotional campaign. We have had access to the IE9 beta for a while now and will be posting our thoughts and reviews soon. In the meantime, let us know whether you believe Microsoft can get back into the browser game with IE9.

Reviews: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Windows
More About: Browsers, IE9, internet explorer, Internet Explorer 9, microsoft, trending, Windows, Windows 7

EXCLUSIVE: Digital Music Organizer TuneUp Raises $4.3 Million

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 09:45 AM PDT

Digital music collection organization tool TuneUp has raised another $4.3 million in funding, Mashable has learned. The Series C round was led by IDG Ventures with participation from initial seed-funder KPG Ventures.
The news comes as TuneUp prepares to announce a major product revision to better organize digital music collections. TuneUp has ascended to the top of iTunes plugin deck on the backs of features that correct music metadata and fill missing album art.
Launching in Q4 2010, the new TuneUp will add lyrics support and library deduplication. While iTunes currently supports deduplication, it isn’t the smartest aspect of the software. TuneUp’s DeDuper is capable of intelligently removing duplicates from music collections through the use of acoustic fingerprinting technology. Additionally, it’s capable of distinguishing the same tracks from original albums, greatest hits and compilations.
The new lyrics features will pull from a currently unannounced partner. Lyrics will be embedded directly into the ID3 tag of the MP3, making the lyrics a part of the track metadata. This ensures that the lyrics always go with the track.
More About: funding, IDG Ventues, itunes, KPG Ventures, music, TuneUp, venture capital

21 Creative Blogger Bio Pages

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 09:11 AM PDT

This series is supported by Gillette. Learn more about Gillette and its products at Gillette.com.

Your blog’s “about me” page will be read by a vast audience that includes anyone in the world who randomly finds your site, potential employers, potential significant others, and your mom. It’s your opportunity to tell the world who you are and what you do, so don’t squander it.
There’s no “right” way to author your about me page. Some read like resumes, and others read like fun stories. Designers have the skills to add a little (or a big) artistic flair to their blogs’ autobiographies, but you don’t need to be a designer to be creative. Most pages at a minimum include the author’s name, purpose for creating a website, and links to the author’s other online content. It’s all about presentation.
A little stumped? We’ve rounded up 21 creative examples for inspiration. Add your favorite about me pages in the comments below.

1. Aaron Iba

1. <a href="http://aaroniba.net/" target="_blank">Aaron Iba</a>

Why write about who you are when a psychologist has already done it for you? AppJet founder Aaron Iba's about me page is the scanned psychological evaluation of his 7-year-old self. "Aaron is a handsome, friendly, and outgoing boy, tall for his age, with a ready smile and an open and verbal manner," the report states. Yea, we'd post that, too.

2. Brad Colbow

Explanation for the co-author of a weekly comic: "He spends part of his days wondering how to combine his two loves, comic books and easter eggs. The rest of his time he spends trying to design killer user interfaces."

3. gummisig

Are these the only three options?

4. DreamerLines

This about me page is part of a larger, artistic site that shifts to show you what you're interested in instead of opening new pages.

5. Sohtanaka

Good writing states the five W's quickly and concisely on this page. The format makes writing an about me page a little bit easier.

6. Rob Palmer

We're not sure why the bird likes Rob so much, but it makes us like him a little bit, too.

7. Alex Dawson

Don't be depressed if you can answer the question, "Who am I?" with one sentence.

8. Dan

It's appropriate that the bio page of iamdan.com begins, "hi. i am dan." It kind of makes you want to say "hi" back.

9. Tim Van Damme

This is more of a mini "about me" site, but the way it lays out all of Tim's social networks and sites alongside his bio is quite nifty.

10. MetaLab

Here's a site that practices what it preaches.

11. aialex.com

What is he pointing at?

12. Dustin Curtis

Most about me pages don't include phrases like, "Dustin Curtis will die on March 23, 2068 at 4:34AM, probably from a myocardial infarction (projection)." Curtis says he got the idea to put his life into a time line when he realized that every year, 1.2% of his life goes by. "It's morbid, but it's also motivational," he says.
He based the projections on the best data he could get from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization for a 22 year old male in New York City.

13. Odds&Ends

Zhixin Lim interviews himself for his photo blog's about me page. Two of his first questions are "Do people find your name weird?" and "So, how do I pronounce your name?"

14. The Big Noob

Pairing a photo of an intimidating leather-bound book with a lighthearted explanation that includes the sentence, "Fast forwarding 3 years, we find our heroes neck deep in the poo of that same client work," will certainly get attention.

15. Binary Bonsai

Why does everything sound so much more authoritative when it comes from the Hitchhiker's Guide?

16. 99daz

Remember that about me page that was only a sentence long? Not this page. Possibly the longest "about me" page on the Internet, this literally includes the author's life story -- complete with photos, video, and even soundbites. We haven't read the whole thing, but we're still impressed.

17. The Jungle of Life

Lance Ekum blogs about the journey/jungle of life. So it's oddly appropriate that his about me page features the important people in his life impersonating jungle animals.

18. Troundup

You would expect a blog about T-shirts to be casual, and this about me page is refreshingly so. Basically, it's a list of random facts. One of the more scandalous snippets reads, "I don't actually wear graphic tees that often anymore (maybe I shouldn't admit that)."

19. Sean Geng

Sean Geng created a self-portrait graphic and dubbed it "the floating Asian kid." It actually floats around the page when you mouse over it.

20. quomo

Quomo sometimes sings or plans things or travels or even works out (and has a illustrative graphic for each), but above all (also pictured) quomo does design.

21. Ethan Marcotte

As far as personal branding goes, it's hard to top "Unstoppable Robot Ninja."

Series supported by Gillette

This series is supported by Gillette. Learn more about Gillette and its products at Gillette.com.

More About: about me, about me pages, better profile series, blog, blogging, BLOGS, design, designers, online reputation, personal branding, social media, web design

Bing to Add Facebook “Like” Data to Search?

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 07:56 AM PDT

Can data from Facebook's increasingly ubiquitous "Like" buttons give Microsoft an advantage in the search wars? The software giant may be banking on it, as AllThingsD reports the two companies are “deep in talks” about expanding their search partnership.
Such a move wouldn't be a huge surprise. Ever since Facebook introduced its Like buttons there's been speculation about a grander plan to organize the web around Likes instead of links. With the button now in use by hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of publishers, that possibility is quickly becoming more of a reality.
The even more intriguing part, however, would be Facebook offering up this information to Bing, and in turn giving Microsoft a treasure trove of social data not available to Google. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday that “The best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data,” as the company looks to integrate social features into more of its products.
Facebook may be willing to work with Google, however. The company signed deals with both Microsoft and Google to make information like public status updates available as the two tech giants launched their own real-time search products last year. The possibility of additional cooperation may be growing less likely though as Google's revamped social strategy takes shape.
We'll obviously be tracking this story and will update with any additional information.

Reviews: Bing, Facebook, Google
More About: bing, facebook, microsoft, Search

For more Social Media coverage:

Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Social Media channel
Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

Top 10 Twitter Tips for Bands, By Bands

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 07:18 AM PDT

Listen up, bands: Twitter is more than just a place to wax poetic from the tour bus and gripe about broken guitar strings (and/or dreams) — it can also help you promote your music and connect with your fans.
While you don’t have to go all Kanye with your Twitter stream, hooking up to the micro-blogging site can add a whole new dimension to your act.
We talked to a ton of bands — from up-and-comers like The Limousines, to indie darlings like The Thermals, to established artists like Pete Yorn and Ben Folds — about how they use Twitter, and compiled the following list of tips and tricks.
Got some more clever musical uses for Twitter? Be sure to share your pro tips in the comments below.

1. Build a Fan Base

So you’re just about to burst on the scene, showering the populace with your synth-heavy, electropop goodness. How do you go about capturing the attention of those who will make or break you: your future fanbase?
According to Brian Levine, manager and social media consultant for the emerging act Bananas for Mowgli, “Up and coming bands with little to no released music are able to take advantage of Twitter by aligning themselves with artists who share a similar fan base or aesthetic. First thing you should do is start following these people as well as the most relevant taste makers in your genre or ’scene’ if you will. Use Twitter management tools to expand your network and be in the right circles.”
That’s what Levine is doing right now for Bananas for Mowgli, whose debut album drops on October 26.

2. Collaborate

Do you follow some awesome band on Twitter that you would kill to jam with? Why not tweet at them? It can’t hurt. You never know who’s going to be down to hook up with you — especially if you don’t try. Eric Victorino of The Limousines was able to score a kind of collaboration with DJ Samantha Ronson by merely paying attention to mentions of his band on Twitter.
“We keep tabs on who’s talking about [us] and who’s mentioning us,” Victorino says. “Samantha Ronson and Lindsay Lohan were both talking about us once, so we just reached out to them, like, ‘Hey, hi.’ And from that came — I wouldn’t say a friendship — but just sort of an e-mail conversation with her. And whenever Samantha would go DJing, we’d give her a new track.”

3. Trade a Track For a Tweet

Are you a smaller band with a pretty strong fan base? Well, use the hell outta them, we say — but give them something in return. Paul Lamontagne of Bearstronaut used Twitter as both a method of releasing the band’s new single, “Shannon,” [click to download] and gaining more followers.
“We used something called 'Tweet for a Track,'” he says. “Fans can — for the cost of one tweet — [get the song]. It gets reposted on their Twitter to all their followers, and they get the single. No money changes hands, but we get to reach as many followers as possible.”

4. Get Your Fans to Promote For You

Similar to trading a tweet for a tune, crowdsourcing your fans when it comes to promotions can also be a boon. Brian McClelland of He Whose Ox Is Gored told us, "[Our Twitter following] really did pick up once we started talking with people, and it's kind of snowballed from there… We've been getting some radio play, so we're going to go on our Twitter and do merch giveaways to people who call up and request a song.” Get He Whose Ox Is Gored’s new single, “Cloven Hoof” here.

5. Have a Personality

Yeah, your lyrics may be tight and your beats danceable, but that doesn’t mean you’re socially literate. Pick the wittiest member of the band and assign him or her the role of official Twitterer, or “Twitter Czar” as Westin Glass of The Thermals deems himself. If fans can tell you’re having fun via your tweets, they’re much more apt to engage with you (and attend shows, buy records, join a cult in your name, etc.).
"Last May, when we were doing our spring tour, we were posting on our Twitter and we were just going crazy on there,” Glass says. “One of us would be sitting in the front of the van and one of us would be sitting in the back of the van and we'd be just like just posting all kinds of crazy inside jokes, nicknames for all the people in the band. We were just trying to make each other laugh by posting all sorts of weird stuff that probably made no sense to anyone, but people seemed to like it…. I just post jokes and song lyrics from '90s epic hit songs, pictures of Axl Rose and, I don't know, just whatever."

6. Organize an Aftershow

According to Jon Foreman of Switchfoot, "The best music happens after the show." Foreman often uses Twitter to organize said aftershows. He merely sends out a time and location, and the crowds come running. Most of the time, they’re totally lo-fi, with just an acoustic guitar — but the audience can number up to 500 fans.
Recently Foreman had a run-in with the cops in Florida after they broke up one of his on-the-fly gigs. What’s more rock ‘n’ roll than that, really? Still, Foreman is now taking greater care to run his Twitter-organized shows by the local authorities before rocking out.

7. Retain Your Independence

When you’re in the public eye, most of what you say and do goes through a kind of filter, which makes it hard to retain some measure of indie cred. Remember Hanson? The teen pop group from 1997 who took the world by storm with their jam “MMMBop?” Of course you do. Don’t front. We all had that tape.
Back in the day, Hanson was signed to Mercury Records. But after Mercury got swallowed by Island Def Jam in the merger of PolyGram and Universal in 1998, Hanson left and put out their third release, Underneath, in 2004 on their own label, 3cg Records. They’ve been indie ever since, releasing their latest album, Shout It Out, this year.
“[Twitter] allows you to take out the middle man,” Taylor Hanson tells us. “If we had had Twitter [back when we started], it would have moved us even more rapidly toward the idea that has made it possible for us to continue as a band, which is, in part, that direct connection with your fans…. And with Twitter, it’s really about, ‘how do you make that connection?’ …. It would have been a really key component for us, probably moving faster toward being independent. Because it would have even further empowered and encouraged us by being able to communicate with our fan base, and stay really proactive with them, regardless of changing label structures and corporate mergers.”

8. Share Photos

While we wouldn’t suggest giving followers a flipbook of your life, sometimes a picture can — to be totally cliche — be worth a thousand words. "I enjoy putting up pictures of [my] kids doing things because it humanizes [me] just enough with photographs without getting too much closer,” Ben Folds tells us. “It's a pretty mean world out there sometimes, it's kind of nice to make someone a little more human."
Folds also includes his wife, Fleur, on the action. "[Fleur] feels like she can provide another angle to it,” he says of his wife, who once ran the main newspaper in the Turks and Caicos Islands for five years and was also a photographer for that paper.
“We're actually going to make a book of TwitPics together — like a coffee table sort of thing,” he says. “So on the left page, if you have Fleur's photograph of the moment and on the right page you have my photograph of the moment, it actually tells kind of an interesting story that way."

9. Have a Contest

Everyone loves a good contest — it combines fierce, tooth-and-nail competition with prizes. What could be better than that? If you’re edging up to an album release or a tour, a contest can be a great way to drum up some publicity and to engage your fans by letting them feel like a part of your creative world.
"I wanted to give out commemorative posters to all of the concert-goers at my first two record release party shows,” says Pete Yorn, whose self-titled disc drops on September 28. “So I was like, ‘Make a poster everyone, it will be fun.’ It's cool that people actually made them; it's just another way to see the artistry of the fan base and how creative they are. Usually that's the best stuff. I'm blown away by how talented they are; they come up with really cool stuff."

10. Keep Up with Tech Trends

OK, so Twitter basically approached Arcade Fire about offering a deal on their new album, The Suburbs, through the @EarlyBird program. Still, the band has been majorly into social media of late — playing a live-streamed show on YouTube and even launching an interactive in-browser video with Google. The band was therefore a natural choice for Twitter when it came time to pick an album to sell via the service.
"We saw that Arcade Fire had a new album coming out, and there was a lot of anticipation around it and the fact that they were doing a live stream on YouTube and taking a Q&A from Twitter,” says a rep for Twitter. “We knew that they were familiar with the platform and open to using it in innovative ways, so we thought it was a great opportunity to get them involved in our @EarlyBird program and also make a pretty compelling story to help with their album sales."

Google Goes Mysterious for Agatha Christie’s Birthday

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 06:54 AM PDT

Today’s Google logo (or Google Doodle, as the company calls its everchanging logo) is one of the most elaborate we’ve seen: It’s a murder scene with one of Google’s o’s depicting a lady lying dead in the middle of a room full of other characters.
But who’s the murderer: the butler, the elegantly attired woman, the gentleman, or the stable boy? There’s only one person who can find out: Agatha Christie’s fictional detective Hercule Poirot, represented by the capital G in the image, sporting his famous bow tie and mustache.
The logo is, of course, a tribute to the famous crime writer, who was born on September 15, 1890 — exactly 120 years ago. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Christie is the world’s bestselling author, having sold more than 2 billion copies of her books in 44 languages (puts Stieg Larsson’s success on the Kindle in perspective, doesn’t it?).
Google often highlights famous writers with its logo; it even had a series of UFO-related doodles celebrating the work of famous science fiction author H.G. Wells.
The logo is currently visible in the UK, Ireland, and several other countries, but not in the U.S. To see it, click here.

Top 3 Stories in Social Media and Tech This Morning

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 05:50 AM PDT

This series is brought to you by HTC EVO 4G, America’s first 4G phone. Only from Sprint. The “First to Know” series keeps you in the know on what’s happening now in the world of social media and technology.

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.
Twitter Unveils New Web Interface
At its press event Tuesday, Twitter revealed the new version of its website, which will roll out to users over the next several weeks.
Besides integrating multimedia into the stream, a feature we learned about a few hours prior to the event, the new Twitter.com features an entirely new interface that more closely resembles its recently released iPad app.
Mashable’s Jennifer Van Grove contends that the new, multimedia-rich interface “effectively makes Twitter desktop clients irrelevant in the long run.”
Google’s Core Products to Become More Social, Says CEO
Google may not launch its social network, tentatively titled Google Me, by the end of this year after all. We can, however, reasonably expect that new social components will be added to the company’s existing line of products and services in the near future.
“We’re trying to take Google’s core products and add a social component.” CEO Eric Schmidt revealed at the company’s Zeitgeist conference on Tuesday. “If you think about it, it’s obvious. With your permission, knowing more about who your friends are, we can provide tailored recommendations. Search quality can get better,” he added.
Google Engineer Fired for Invading Minors’ Privacy
A Google engineer was fired in July for invading the privacy of four underage teens, Gawker has learned.
The 27-year-old former Google employee repeatedly accessed the e-mail accounts, contact lists, Gtalk chat transcripts and Google Voice call logs of the minors, whom he met through a technology interest group in the Seattle area.
In a statement to Gawker, Google confirmed that Barksdale was fired “for breaking Google’s strict internal privacy policies.”
Further News

Five years after its original "Crash the Super Bowl" contest, Pepsico is once again inviting consumers to create :30 commercials for its brands to run during the Super Bowl.
OnStar confirmed rumors that its next generation, in-vehicle hardware will allow users to read and respond to Facebook statuses and SMS messages over audio.
Epic Games announced that the developer kit for its popular Unreal graphics engine will soon "generate iOS applications." In other words, one of the most popular and advanced 3D engines used by console and PC video games will soon be used to produce graphically impressive iPhone, iPod touch and iPad games.

Series supported by HTC EVO 4G

Reviews: Facebook, Google, Google Voice, Gtalk, Twitter, iPhone

Tags: Mashable

Popular Posts