Can you tweet your way into a job?
It's the latest and greatest way to employment. That's if you're hip to micro-blogging. The position of social media specialist, introduced by companies like Comcast, General Motors and JetBlue Airways, has become the hottest new corporate job among the Twitterati. To marketers, it seems, personal relations have become the new public relations. Read how some are using social media to land that special job.
What are you doing?
Whatever it is, Google can't fly fast enough to keep up with the Twitter jet. Google co-founder Larry Page says the search engine has been losing out to Twitter's micro-blogging site in a battle to provide real-time information, while Google's CEO Eric Schmidt drops a hint that Google could go into partnership with Twitter. Yeah, we've heard that one before.
Twitter has come from nowhere to become the third most visited social networking site in the U.S. in just three years by allowing its users to broadcast their thoughts, actions and news instantly. Google's search engine, in contrast, can take hours or even days to update.
'Keyboard Cat': Kaboom, meow.
Late night comic Stephen Colbert joked about it.
A online craze called "Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat," a user-generated video meme in which a clip is played of a pratfall or some unfortunate, self-inflicted accident, immediately followed by an old clip of a cat playing an upbeat tune on a keyboard. The inane phenom was thought up by Brad O'Farrell, a 22-year-old syndication manager for the video website MyDamnChannel.com. Meow.
Nork number, plee-yuz...
North Korea has begun limited Internet service for mobile phone users, allowing two million Pyongyang, North Koreans access to a website to see news reports carried by the country's official Korean Central News Agency as well as news about the capital Pyongyang. Computer versions carry North Korean music, info about books, art and investment opportunities and Internet chatting. Expanded coverage to the entire country is expected over the next few years.
"Mobile phone users in authoritarian North Korea are not allowed contact with the outside world, or with special telephone networks used by foreigners inside North Korea," according to the article.
Tech savvy lawbreakers you know
Some of the people who created the technologies we use today have some "bugs" in their "software." What did Bill Gates do to earn a mug shot? Which software developer got nabbed for breaking into a school to steal Apple II computers? Have you heard about "The Whistler," a blind seven-year-old who whistled his way into an arrest for phone fraud after getting caught for whistling at 2600Hz into a handset to make free phone calls? How about the guy who prior to becoming everyone's friend on myspace got into some hot water with the law. Why? Find out more at this site that gives up the code on the case of eight "arrested developers."
How to embarrass yourself in front of the world
Who's who?
Meet the "50 Most Important People on the Web," who are shaping what you read, watch, hear, write, buy, sell, befriend, flame, and otherwise do online. Google, Apple, Bit Torrent, Wikipedia. Skype, You Tube, the FCC – who are the names behind the names?
And while we're at it ... here are the Top 50 Tech Visionaries, without whom the technologies you use every day might never have been invented.
Who wants yesterday's papers?
A recent study by the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication found that 22 percent of Internet users have canceled a print subscription because they could get the same product online. Average newspaper sales tumbled 7.1 percent in the six months from October to March from the same period a year earlier, leading some newspapers to shut down, eliminate publication days or cut delivery to a few days a week.
The tough economy means a Raleigh, N.C., suburb can't replace some computers and police vehicles. So the town's mayor figures he can save $13,000 by posting public notices of rezoning requests and major land development plans on the town's Web site, rather than in the local newspaper. To the dismay of struggling newspapers also beset by the same dragging economy, other U.S. communities are abandoning the old for the new. About half of Internet users have gone to classified ad Web sites like Craigslist at some point, a doubling since 2005, and one out of 11 Americans seek online classified ads on a typical day, according to a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Newspaper advertising revenues fell by 17.7 percent in 2008, with classified ads sinking 29 percent to nearly $10 billion, according to the Newspaper Association of America. And with auto dealerships folding like a bad poker hand, newspaper ad revenues will slow to a crawl.
Are you a Twitter quitter?
I guess you'd have to figure that of the millions who have signed on to "tweet" their thoughts, Twitter quitters outnumber the flock of habitual tweeters on the rapidly growing online communications service. A Web analysis reports that more than 60 percent of Twitter's U.S. users don't return a month later because they don't see the point in spending time on Twitter.
Twitterers you should follow:
World Net Daily's Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein keeps you updated throughout the day on what's happening in the Middle East.
Popular radio and TV host Glenn Beck signed on this week. Within hours he had nearly 12,000 followers. Glenn gave in and joined the microblogger after a weekly newsmagazine erroneously attributed a Twitter quote to him that was written by an impersonator.
Commenting about it on his radio program last Friday, Beck said:
"We had to send our attorneys after these people. There are five or six people including somebody who called themselves the real Glenn Beck that had accounts apparently in the tens of thousands of people that were claiming to be me."
Name that face!
Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, e-mail, or wherever you happen to be. "What's your name" is a new blog at Tumblr where you can upload a photo of someone whose name you don't remember, in hopes someone will recognize and identify them. Do you have a picture of someone you knew but don't remember his or her name? Submit it to whatsyournameblog at gmail dot com. New sets of photos are posted on this blog every week.
Reserve 403rd Wing makes Air Force history
A Pentagon survey revealed that 94 percent of people born after 1990 actively either blog or use social networking such as Facebook. New media ranks second behind television on how people receive information. The Air Force Reserve and the 403rd have embraced the new media when it offered a first-ever opportunity to the blogging community.
An Air Force Reserve 403rd Wing "Hurricane Hunters" WC-130J departed May 19, the military's first media flight compromised solely of bloggers, giving them an opportunity previously available only to traditional media outlets. During a two-hour flight over the Gulf of Mexico, bloggers described to their readers how Hurricane Hunters collect life-saving data inside storms and what goes into training for one of the most challenging missions in the Air Force. Hurricane season begins June 1.
Pentagon cyber command
The Pentagon spent more than $100 million in the past six months responding to and repairing damage from cyber attacks and other computer network problems. So, our military will use a new command at a Maryland Army facility to create a digital warfare force for the future. The military's new cyber command at Fort Meade, Md., will be a sub-unit of U.S. Strategic Command, and would be designed to "defend vital networks and project power in cyberspace." Defense Department networks are probed repeatedly every day and the number of intrusion attempts have more than doubled recently, officials have said.