Mashable! |
- "Harrass a Booth Babe": A Twitter Contest Too Far?
- KAPOW! Comic Book Themes Come to iGoogle
- Small.bog: AVG Sparks iTunes Trojan Horse Alert
- Twitter is Blocked in Iran … And in The White House
- In the Future, the Cost of Education Will Be Zero
- #Hyatt4Good Tour Starts Next Week: NYC, CHI, DEN, SAN, DC, BOS
- 5 More Twitter Related Trends to Watch Right Now
- Microsoft: We're Just Going to Keep Running, Running, and Running (Scared of Apple)
- Coming Soon: A New Twitter Homepage
- Twitter Corrects Follower Counts: How Many Followers Did You Lose?
- Thanks to Mashable's Socially Savvy Supporters
| "Harrass a Booth Babe": A Twitter Contest Too Far? Posted: 25 Jul 2009 12:51 AM PDT It's the wording of the contest that has Twitter up in arms, however: attendees are told to "Commit Acts of Lust" (see image below), which some allege is a recipe for sexual harassment. Others argue that attendees typically take photos with booth babes regardless. @danteteam did receive hundreds of responses to their request, but many are negative and critical of the behavior the contest might encourage. "Tongue in Cheek"In response to the Tweets, the team behind the promotion posted an apology on Twitpic saying the campaign is "tongue in cheek". Opponents, however, seem unimpressed, and have combined their efforts using the hashtag #eafail. What do you think: did EA go too far, or is this a storm in a Twitter teacup? [image via Ars Technica] Reviews: Twitter Tags: twitter
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| KAPOW! Comic Book Themes Come to iGoogle Posted: 24 Jul 2009 10:53 PM PDT On the Google blog, successful comic book artist Jim Lee writes of the launch:
Reviews: Google
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| Small.bog: AVG Sparks iTunes Trojan Horse Alert Posted: 24 Jul 2009 10:11 PM PDT An extensive thread in the Apple discussion forums shows that AVG is giving a false positive: there's no risk of trojans in iTunes, and quarantining the files will break your iTunes install. You can disable the alerts by creating an exception in AVG:
AVG will no doubt correct the issue in their next definitions update.
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| Twitter is Blocked in Iran … And in The White House Posted: 24 Jul 2009 05:24 PM PDT Specifically, Gibbs said that "for some reason Twitter is blocked on White House computers … I'm on camera enough that people have a decent sense of what I'm doing minus Twittering." Why the block? Gibbs didn't say, but the answer would appear to be security, as a similar question was posed to an aide last month after a press briefing. While it's easy to understand that The White House is especially sensitive to security, they did find a way to let Obama keep his BlackBerry, so why not find a way to make Twitter work? [via Politico] Reviews: Twitter Tags: obama, twitter, White House
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| In the Future, the Cost of Education Will Be Zero Posted: 24 Jul 2009 12:51 PM PDT Of course, quality education will always have costs involved — professors and other experts need to be compensated for their time and efforts, for example, and certain disciplines require expensive, specialized equipment to train students (i.e., you can't learn to be a surgeon without access to an operating theater). However, social media can drastically reduce much of the overhead involved with higher education — such as administrative costs and even the campus itself — and open source or reusable and adaptive learning materials can drive costs down even further. The University of the PeopleOne vision for the school of the future comes from the United Nations. Founded this year by the UN's Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID), the University of the People is a not-for-profit institution that aims to offer higher education opportunities to people who generally couldn't afford it by leveraging social media technologies and ideas. The school is a one hundred percent online institution, and utilizes open source courseware and peer-to-peer learning to deliver information to students without charging tuition. There are some costs, however. Students must pay an application fee (though the idea is to accept everyone who applies that has a high school diploma and speaks English), and when they're ready, students must pay to take tests, which they are required to pass in order to continue their education. All fees are set on a sliding scale based on the student's country of origin, and never exceed $100. Right now, the University only teaches two courses, information technology and business administration, which school founder Shai Reshef says are the two most useful degrees for finding a job around the world. Of course, the school is not yet accredited and can't yet confer degrees, but applying for proper accreditation is planned. Each week, students log onto to the school's web site to attend a lecture, following which they can discuss the subject matter with other students (asynchronously due to time differences), download course materials, get help from other students or volunteer professors, or take tests to advance to the next course unit. Tests will be automatically graded, or peer-reviewed by multiple other students. "It's not for everyone," said Reshef at an education event earlier this year. "You need to know English, you need to have a computer… our assumption [is that the students will be from] the upper end of the lower class or the lower end of the middle class… it's people who almost made it… who could have been at the university but missed their chance." The administration of US President Barack Obama is reportedly also considering the merits of establishing a free online university. According to draft discussion documents obtained by Inside Higher Ed in June, the administration has had high level discussions about creating courses aimed at community college attendees that would be delivered online for free. According to the report, the government is considering a $50 million per year budget to "pay for (and own) courses that would be free for all, as well as setting up a system to assess learning in those courses."
A College Education for Free: OpenCourseWareIn April 2001 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology proposed something unheard of in the pages of the New York Times. They said that they would begin putting their entire course catalog — some 2,000 courses — online, for free, over the course of an ambitious ten year initiative at the cost of up to $100 million. The following year, in October 2002, the first fifty courses went up on their OpenCourseWare site. Nearly 7 years later, MIT is nearing its goal, with about 1,900 free courses available through the OpenCourseWare program, and materials now routinely posted on other social media sites, including YouTube, Flickr, and iTunes U. In fact, the OpenCourseWare initiative (or its ideas) has spread to over 200 institutions of higher education around the world, including Yale (not technically OCW, but the same idea), Nortre Dame, Tufts, and the Stanford School of Engineering (also not technically OCW). OpenCourseWare doesn't confer degrees, but it allows anyone to audit classes at some of the world's most prestigious institutes of higher education for only the cost of bandwidth. However, because OpenCourseWare course materials are released under a Creative Commons license that essentially allows for the materials to be shared and remixed for non-commercial purposes with attribution, it's easy to imagine that they could someday be used by institutions like the University of the People or Obama's theoretical online community college as part of a degree granting program. Of course, OpenCourseWare isn't free — or even cheap. Stanford estimates that the cost of putting courses online runs between $10,000 and $15,000 per course — and courses with video content cost twice that. However, beyond the initial outlay to get the courses created and put online, the price of delivering them to the public is only the cost of bandwidth, which is close to free. A Radical Idea: Free TextbooksAccording to the College Board, the average cost of textbooks and supplies for a college student attending a four-year college in the US is $1,077. But what if textbooks were free? What if printed course materials were made open and available online at no charge? How would that change the game? The Wikibooks project, which began in 2003, aims to create open source, CC-licensed textbooks written by volunteers. The site now contains over 38,000 pages of free textbooks, but unfortunately many of the books remain incomplete. Like Wikipedia (a more well-known project from the same foundation), entries are only completed as volunteers have time, and quality assurance is potentially spotty. Perhaps a more sustainable model is Flat World Knowledge, which offers free, CC-licensed textbooks and study materials, but charges a fee for paper copies. The Flat World Knowledge books are written by expert authors that have been vetted by the company and generally have advanced degrees, are professors, or have practical experience in their field. The books are licensed under the same permissive Creative Commons license as the OpenCourseWare materials. Flat World Knowledge books are currently in use at a number of universities, including Eastern Michigan University, the University of Rhode Island, the State University of New York system, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Sam Houston State University, and others. ConclusionThe marginal cost of education is being driven toward zero due to social media and innovative approaches to online learning like OpenCourseWare, Flat World Knowledge, and the University of the People. That's because the nature of information is such that it can be created once at cost and distributed and consumed over and over again for free. "Knowledge is, as the economists say, a non-rival good," wrote venture capitalist Brad Burnham in May. "If I eat an apple, you cannot also eat that same apple; but if I learn something, there is no reason you cannot also learn that thing. Information goods lend themselves to being created, distributed and consumed on the web. It is not so different from music, or classified advertising, or news." So in the future, the cost of education might be free, or nearly free, which could just level the playing field. More social media resources from Mashable:
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Liliboas Reviews: Flickr, YouTube, iStockphoto Tags: education, flat world knowledge, mit, opencourseware, social media, textbooks, university of the people
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| #Hyatt4Good Tour Starts Next Week: NYC, CHI, DEN, SAN, DC, BOS Posted: 24 Jul 2009 12:14 PM PDT Each tweetup will feature a local sponsor to help cover some food/drinks and a cash bar will be available. The style is an informal meet and greet for the social media community, and we look forward to meeting all of you. Starting next week, we're in New York City. The ticket and registration sites are below: please note that there are only a limited number of tickets per city being released due to capacity restrictions. All ticket sale income goes to the Summer of Social Good charity fund. Sponsor opportunity: we are looking for one local sponsor per city. Please contact hyatt4good at Mashable dot com for more information. New York – Grand Hyatt New York109 East 42nd Street at Grand Central Terminal Monday, July 27th Chicago – Hyatt Regency Chicago151 East Wacker Drive Tuesday, August 4 Denver – Grand Hyatt Denver1750 Welton Street Thursday, August 6 San Diego – Manchester Grand Hyatt San DiegoOne Market Place Friday, August 7 Washington, DC – Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill400 New Jersey Avenue, NW Thursday, August 13 Boston – Hyatt Regency BostonOne Avenue de Lafayette Friday, August 21
"Visible Measures is the independent third-party measurement firm for Internet video publishers, advertisers, and viral marketers. The company provides its customers and partners with unprecedented visibility into their online video audiences and how they engage with both content assets and advertising placements." A Special Thanks to HyattReviews: Mashable Tags: Events, hyatt4good, mashable, sosg, summer of social good
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| 5 More Twitter Related Trends to Watch Right Now Posted: 24 Jul 2009 10:35 AM PDT As such, we thought we'd update our list and chronicle five more important Twitter trends to watch like a hawk. Once again we'll take a step back from the single status updates that fill our stream, and analyze Twitter from a birds-eye view. These service-wide trends are shaping the way brands communicate, changing how payments are processed, re-imagining how people band together, reinventing how live video is shared, and determining how application developers build their services. 1. Twitter eCommerceIn light of the PayPal X announcement on Thursday, and with Adaptive Payments already live, we know for a fact that micro-payments are not only here to stay but about to make a big splash. Especially significant is that the new APIs can be used for peer-to-peer payments on multiple platforms, and split payments. An early indicator of what's in store comes via TwitPay. The service is using the new PayPal Adaptive Payment Platform and your Twitter account to let you send and receive payments through Twitter. RT2Buy is an extension of the Twitter payment platform, and it essentially lets you sell your digital content on Twitter. You upload your content, set the price, and RT2Buy does the rest, including processing payments made by those who retweet your shared content. RT2Get and RT2Give are two more Twitter payment services from TwitPay that are in the works. Look for this to extend way beyond TwitPay, such that more application and website developers will incorporate the new and improved PayPal APIs for quick and easy Twitter payments in the very near future. Keep an eye on this trend, as it's likely to make Twitter evolve from a communication platform to an eCommerce solution. 2. Twitter PetitionsPetitions have always been a way to rally a group of people with the same mission and gain support for a cause; they're a type of civilized community uprising. Given that Twitter is a platform for immediate communication, information sharing, and offers potential for widespread distribution through retweets and trending tropics, it's not a stretch of the imagination to think that it could be a power-to-the-people tool for collecting petition signatures. In fact, it already is. If you think that the Twitter petition is something to scoff at, think again. We're still in the beginning stages of this trend, but we've already seen extremely effective case studies where petitions which were started on Twitter gained enough steam that they made a difference. As a prime case in point, AT&T did not originally plan to offer the iPhone 3GS at subsidized prices to iPhone 3G owners who wanted to upgrade on day one. This created a bit of an uproar, and many of us used our Twitter clout and network to sign our name to the AT&T Twitition. Eventually AT&T caved, offering subsidized 3GS prices to more 3G owners. Though they didn't publicly acknowledge that Twitter played a role in their decision, it's hard to ignore the fact that the original petition amassed over 15,000 Twitter signatures and contributed to a loud, and impossible to drown out, volume of Twitter negativity directed at AT&T. Recently our features editor, Josh Catone, broke down how to start a petition on Twitter. The article points to four different sites — Act.ly, TinyPetition, Twitition, and Twibbon — that can help you rally the Twitter troops, and get Twitter to create a movement for you around your mission. 3. Live Video SharingSharing video on Twitter is becoming incredibly popular. Since our post on the subject, we've seen even more growth in the space and 12seconds.tv position itself as a Twitter video sharing service. Pushing this trend forward are new services offering live video sharing with Twitter. Livestreaming video isn't a new concept, but specifically taking your Twitter identity and network, and applying livestreaming, is certainly a fresh implementation. Twitcam from Livestream, which just launched, and CamTweet from Justin.tv, still in private beta, are essentially offering the same service. You'll use your Twitter account to log in to the service, your web cam to capture video, and the various platforms to stream video and tweet it out to your followers. They, of course, can come watch, sign in with their Twitter accounts to chat and update Twitter at the same time. The interesting thing to note is that both of the two services mentioned are extensions of platforms that already allow for live broadcasting, and yet both felt compelled to create a custom offering for live broadcasting of video to Twitter. 4. Apps Slow to Support Twitter OAuthSign in With Twitter has been around since March of this year and it's currently in the wild being utilized by a number of different Twitter applications and website owners. Aps that use Twitter OAuth make it easy for you to link your Twitter details with their service and lower the barrier to entry, and you can get a little bit more security and a better experience. You may have noticed, however, that a number of your favorite Twitter applications have yet to press go on Sign in With Twitter. Though it's easy to assume that they're just slow on the uptake, the reality is there is something a bit more business critical going on. As everyone knows by now, Twitter used to have more rough spots than not, and frequent downtime gave birth to the fail whale. While the darkest days seem to be behind them, Twitter is by no means a perfect service. This means that any Twitter application developer that switches to OAuth is trusting Twitter to keep the lights on, and this is a fearful concept. Say, for example, that Twitter is down or they decide to disable OAuth again. Those apps using OAuth are effectively useless for that duration of time, and this is something that really hurts the third-party developers. Take TwitPic and Tweetphoto, both designed specifically for sharing photos on Twitter. Neither have implemented OAuth support, despite the fact that they've had months do so, but when Twitter is down the photo sharing and non-Twitter dependent activities can still continue. 5. Big Twitter Missteps By Big BrandsLast week Twitter, and the web in general, witnessed a mini melee between blogger Doug Meacham (@dougmeacham) and Best Buy CMO and Twitterer (@BestBuyCMO), Barry Judge. Meacham had a poor experience with the big retailer when Best Buy didn't initially honor the online price (which was an in store and web deal) in the store. He was a little soured by the experience and took to his Twitter to direct his concern at the big brand's Twittering CMO. You can view the whole Twitter exchange below, but as evidenced by the tweets, Judge does not come off as the brand and consumer advocate that you would expect. We know his tweets came from his phone (using TwitterFon), so it's quite possible he was mobile and distracted, but Meacham wasn't alone in perceiving Judge's tweets as a poor representation of the brand. So he took it off Twitter and on to his blog, writing a post that caught the eye of Chris Brogan and amassed more than 100 comments. Judge has yet to publicly respond to the mini dust up. We can analyze the tweets all day long, but putting personal opinion aside, the bottom line is that whether or not Mr. Judge intended his tweets to be perceived as they were, the simple fact that they were exposed to a large enough audience, in a public arena, means they could have undone the months of goodwill and relationship building that was built by being on Twitter in the first place. As more and more big brands start to experiment and put themselves out there on Twitter, the odds that another C level executive at a major brand will misspeak in 140 characters or less is quite high. Plus, Twittering best practices, and code of conduct are still being cemented by experimental brands like Best Buy. More Twitter resources from Mashable:
Reviews: TweetPhoto, Twitter, Twitterfon, act.ly Tags: big brands, Lists, OAuth, paypal, petitions, sign in with twitter, twitpay, twitter, twitter trends
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| Microsoft: We're Just Going to Keep Running, Running, and Running (Scared of Apple) Posted: 24 Jul 2009 09:36 AM PDT Microsoft's response? "We're just going to keep running them and running them and running them," said COO Kevin Turner. And that they are, although they've considerably softened the message by removing specific mentions of price from the commercials, instead having "Lauren" say the far less powerful and much more obvious "it seems like you're paying a lot for the brand." As AdAge notes, the original ad featured Lauren saying "This Mac is $2,000, and that's before adding anything," and her mom following up with "Why would you pay twice the price?" So what's the big deal? In a recent poll, our readers indicated that they significantly prefer Apple's "Get a Mac" ads (55 percent) to Microsoft's "Laptop Hunter" (22 percent) series. Microsoft tells AdAge that the adjustments "[do] not change the focus of the campaign, which is to showcase the value and choice of the PC." But by not directly assaulting Mac on its biggest perceived weakness – price – it seems unlikely that momentum will shift.
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| Coming Soon: A New Twitter Homepage Posted: 24 Jul 2009 09:04 AM PDT Twitter is now moving fast to address this problem. Last night, they launched "Twitter 101 for Business," a getting started guide that discusses the very basics of Twitter in an especially thorough way. Next week, the company will go a step further, revamping its homepage to try and get new users started off on the right foot. Frankly, Twitter's probably missed out on thousands if not millions of potential users by not making its homepage more interesting. With an estimated $48 million worth of exposure in the media each month, its homepage is undoubtedly being hit by the likes of Larry King, Oprah, and Ellen viewers, many of who probably have that same thought: "why would anyone care what I'm doing?" Next week, we'll see how Twitter tries to address it. Reviews: Twitter Tags: twitter
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| Twitter Corrects Follower Counts: How Many Followers Did You Lose? Posted: 24 Jul 2009 05:04 AM PDT We still haven't noticed a (significant) change in our personal accounts or Mashable's Twitter account, but it's possible that this change is being delivered gradually and that some accounts will be affected later than others. We'll be monitoring Twitterholic closely to see how the accounts with very large number of followers have been affected; for now, we've seen some significant but not-too-dramatic drop at some of the top users such as Ellen DeGeneres.
What we'd like to know is: how is your Twitter account doing? Have you lost followers? If so, how many? Has it been a big or a small change? And lastly, are you happy about the change: would you prefer more followers, even if they're just spammy accounts, or having a lesser number of legitimate followers? Please voice your opinion in the comments. Reviews: Twitter
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| Thanks to Mashable's Socially Savvy Supporters Posted: 24 Jul 2009 05:00 AM PDT Advertise with us and get noticed.Help us to help you. Mashable is seeking out site sponsors for our large, diverse audience — social media users, venture capitalists, early adopters, developers, bloggers, and many more. You'll receive hundreds of thousands of views a day in addition to weekly recognition to thank you as our premium sponsors. Are you interested? Contact us for more information and to receive our media kit and rate card. This week, our valued sponsors are ClickZ, Influxis, EdgeCast, Microsoft BizSpark, MailChimp, Sun Startup Essentials, YieldSoftware, Eventbrite, Behance, and Livestream. ClickZ, along with YouTube and Google, brings you a forum on August 11th in San Jose, CA to dig into the successes and failures companies, celebrities, and politicians have had in the social sphere online and will deliver actionable tactics and strategies so that you can prosper from them. This one-day event is taking place in conjunction with the Search Engine Strategies San Jose Conference & Expo. Influxis is an official Adobe hosting partner and resource for the Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server. Influxis provides Flash hosting plans for all levels of use – beginner to enterprise. With a reputation for exceptional customer service, Influxis provides an extremely reliable international network of FMS servers in the U.S., U.K., and Germany. EdgeCast Networks offers a superior, cost-effective, global content delivery service that gives our customers competitive advantage in the delivery of digital media. Our world-class content delivery platform provides customers the cost benefits and flexibility of controlling their own content delivery network while liberating them from ISP contracts, capital investments and operational hassles. BizSpark is a program which offers new software businesses and entrepreneurs access to Microsoft design, development, and production tools with no upfront costs for up to three years. Members can also connect with a nationwide community of Network Partners – investors, incubators, service providers, and entrepreneurial organizations – who are keen to help. For more information, or to connect with a Microsoft BizSpark advisor, please visit MicrosoftStartupZone.com/BizSpark. MailChimp is a powerful, easy-to-use email marketing service. You design, me deliver. The Sun Startup Essentials program extends to startups all the benefits of our program; benefits designed to get startups sailing to success with the right IT infrastructure. These include introductions to interested investors; discounted servers, storage and desktops; open source software such as MySQL; discounted web hosting; and free technical support and advice from Sun engineers. Yield's Web Marketing Suite is a fully automated, integrated search marketing system that optimizes natural search, paid search, and landing pages. Accessible via any web browser, it is a complete, easy and profitable way for businesses to generate new traffic and get better conversion rates at a lower overall cost. Eventbrite is an online events marketplace where tens of thousands of individuals, businesses and organizations of all sizes manage, promote and sell tickets to their events. Make your event a success on Eventbrite. Behance is on a mission to organize the creative world. The Behance Network is the leading online platform for creative professionals to showcase their work and develop their careers. The Action Method (actionmethod.com) is a revolutionary "action management" tool that is replacing traditional project management applications across industries.Livestream democratizes television on a global scale. The technology provides a highly effective, easy to use TV studio, with the power to create live original programming, controlled by users, and embeddable on any website. Livestream has introduced several new groundbreaking innovations, in addition to paying homage to traditional TV, and has even bigger plans for innovation and interactivity on its roadmap.Additionally, thanks to the following partners for making Mashable happen:Thanks to ConVerdge for implementing our My Mashable social network and W3 EDGE for the development and maintenance of Mashable.com Mashable would also like to thank AttentionPR for their PR support. AttentionPR proves that PR today is measurable, transparent, and yes, social. Learn more about AttentionPR. 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. 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Mashable values Search Engine Optimization and endorses Stone Temple Consulting as the industry's leading Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click experts. Find out more about Stone Temple Consulting. ConcentricSky offers web development and strategic consulting services with a focus on emerging technologies such as Social Media and iPhone Apps. From simple websites to integrated web applications, we deliver innovative solutions that exceed your expectations – not your budget. Vladimir Prelovac is the author of WordPress Development book and popular articles about WordPress SEO, website optimization, customization, security and maintenance. He actively uses WordPress as a base for Internet enterprise strategy for small & mid-sized businesses. We can get your name out there.Contact us for more information about supporting Mashable's growth and development. Alternatively, visit our advertise section for more details about:
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