Shorten urls, share files and track visits - Owly In the age of sharing, linking, retweeting, capped attention spans and character limits, people need things to be shorter, better, faster, stronger. The Ow.ly social bar is your answer. What does this mean for you, the content creator? The social media marketing wizard? The link sharing, social bookmarking and retweeting addict? For the active social media participant: Sharing functionality remains the focal point of the Ow.ly social bar. For the content creators, prolific publishers, savvy social media marketers and web developers, ow.ly 2.0 has a ton of features that you and your readers will find useful: Drastically increase the amount of clicks on every submitted link thanks to stickier and more versatile sharing functionality. Interested in finding out how you can get an Ow.ly social bar of your own? Ow.ly Social Bar Partner Program
Lusha the monkey outperforms 94% of Russia bankers with her inve By Will Stewart Updated: 00:13 GMT, 13 January 2010 They are paid a fortune for their ability to make complex decisions about where to invest millions of pounds every single day. But perhaps the job of an investment banker is not quite as difficult as it might seem. A chimpanzee in Russia has out-performed 94 per cent of the country's investment funds with her portfolio growing by three times in the last year. Moscow TV reported how circus chimp Lusha chose eight companies from a possible 30 to invest her one million roubles - around £21,000. Lusha the monkey in her stage act for a Moscow circus. 'She bought successfully and her portfolio grew almost three times. He questioned why so-called financial whizz-kids are still receiving hefty perks for their expertise . 'Everyone is shocked. The money-wise mape was given cubes representing different companies and asked: 'Lusha where would you like to invest your money this year?' Pausing briefing to think, she then picked out her eight cubes.
Google Reader Lets You Subscribe to Any Page on the Web RSS technology makes it possible for anyone to keep up with fresh content without having to visit the site in question. Now the same holds for webpages without RSS thanks to a new Google Reader feature. Today Google has rolled out a subtle change to Google Reader that lets you create custom feeds to track pages that don't already have them. So you can subscribe to updates for any webpage simply by typing the URL into the "Add a subscription" text box. Should you put the new feature to work, you'll start to receive short snippets for any updates made to the pages, and Google asserts that it's committed to improving the quality of these tiny blurbs over time. On the flip side, webpage owners can choose to opt out by adjusting a few lines of code. So when might this come in handy? [img credit: filiph]
Business Guys on Business Trips Listorious: Discover the Best Twitter Lists The Real Story in the Google – Encyclopedia Dramatica Censorship Seems to be a bit of hype growing about the recent Google unlinking to pages on US-based Encyclopedia Dramatica(ED), a satirical version of Wikipedia. The gist of the story is that a particular ED entry contained racist comments about Aboriginal Australians. An Aboriginal man took his complaint with the page to the Australian Human Rights Commission asking for the page to be blocked. Google Australia responded by removing the allegedly discriminatory content from their search engine. At first there were stories on the SMH saying the site had been banned. In any case, the best take on the whole affair comes from Duncan Riley over at the Inquisitr, who wrote about it a couple of days ago when the story first popped up. First – Google did not block ED. Does this amount to censorship by Google? I can see the press wanting to make a Google story about this (maybe in light of the whole China row), but there’s nothing really here from a Google story POV. That sounds kind of fair. Or don’t.
With New Client, ICQ (Finally) Enters The Realtime Era I had just turned sixteen when instant messaging client ICQ was first released in November 1996. I started using the program a couple of months later, and will never be able to erase that annoying ‘uh oh’ sound from my memory. Like many others, I moved on from ICQ to other, more feature-packed communication services at the dawn of the new millennium and never really looked back. After a decade of barely remembering it exists, I reinstalled the ICQ client on my computer this morning. The reason isn’t nostalgia: more than 13 years after its first release, and nearly 12 years after Aol bought the company behind ICQ (Mirabilis) for a whopping $407 million, there is an updated client available for download that finally brings the product into the era of the realtime web and social networking craze. The question is: is it too little, too late? New tabs brings streams from these networks to the messenger client, and you can interact with your friends and content from inside the client to boot.
ICQ Launches ICQ 7 – Introduces Social Messaging Across Networks If we look back at history , we find that long before Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, there was ICQ. For anyone who doesn’t know, ICQ was created in 1996 and is now wholly owned by AOL. ICQ was THE pioneer of social media and real time updates. It introduced us to instant messaging and a revolutionary new way to communicate with people instantly in real time. It’s taken ICQ quite a long time to get back to its status as a social pioneer but now with it’s new client, ICQ is getting back to what it was about all the way from the beginning – a place to interact with your friends everywhere. ICQ 7 is a client that brings together all your social interactions from across the Web. ICQ 7 enables real-time updates from content sharing sites and top social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg and Delicious and will soon announce the integration of local social networks. A few cool features to note in the new ICQ 7:
Society » Nieuws » Nieuws The right to link « BuzzMachine My column in the Guardian argues that we have a right to link and that the link is the basis of freedom of speech online. The issues are important and so I’m posting the entire column here: Linking is more than merely a function and feature of the internet. But News Corporation has made good on its threat to fight the link, preventing the UK aggregator NewsNow from linking to several of its newspaper sites. It’s true that internet protocols make it easy to block crawlers from search engines or aggregators; one simply adds a line to the robots.txt file on the web server. But NewsNow has fought back, launching a campaign in support of the link at right2link.org. Right. We in the media tend to view the internet in our own image. I fear that what is really in danger here is the doctrine of openness* on which journalism and an informed society depend. I understand that people caught on Streetview might not want us to see them strolling into a drug den or brothel.
LessigCreative Commons August 27, 2004 · Richard Posner In an article in WIRED called Insanely Destructive Devices, Larry Lessig discusses one of the greatest of possible techno-disasters, a terrorist-engendered smallpox epidemic. What gives it a technological dimension is that experiments have shown that genetic alteration of the smallpox virus, utilizing biotechnological techniques and equipment that are inexpensive and widely available, including in Third World countries, could make the “juiced up” virus not only more lethal than “ordinary smallpox” (which kills a “mere” 30 percent of its victims) but also, and more important, impervious to smallpox vaccines (and there is no cure for smallpox). Lessig despairs of being able to come up with a technological or regulatory solution to this threat. Lessig’s is a counsel of despair, and is premature. Yet there is the standard, and very serious, dual-use dilemma.
10Stages of SocialMedia Business Integration Brian Solis is a principal at new media agency FutureWorks. You can connect with him on Twitter or Facebook. An overnight success ten years in the making, social media is as transformative as it is evolutionary. At last, 2010 is expected to be the year that social media goes mainstream for business. In speaking with many executives and entrepreneurs, I've noticed that the path towards new media enlightenment often hinges on corporate culture and specific marketplace conditions. Full social media integration often happens in stages — it's an evolutionary process for companies and consumers alike. Here are the ten most common stages that businesses experience as they travel the road to full social media integration. Stage 1: Observe and Report This is the entry point for businesses to better understand the behavior of an interactive marketplace. Reporting: Distill existing social media conversations into an executive report. Stage 2: Setting the Stage + Dress Rehearsal Stage 7: Community