Third-party commenting engines like Disqus, Facebook Comments or Intense Debate make it easy for you to enable commenting on any website /blog but there’s one downside – some of these commenting engines are implemented in JavaScript and hence search engines may not be able to read /index the comments that visitors are writing on your web pages.

In other words, your web pages will rarely get any SEO boost as comments are rendered in JavaScript within an <IFRAME> and hence the text is not visible to search engines.

That seems to have changed recently at least in the case of Google. [Update] This was later confirmed by Matt Cutts - "Googlebot keeps getting smarter. Now has the ability to execute AJAX/JavaScript to index some dynamic comments."

Googlebots, or the spiders that crawl web pages,  are now reading Facebook comments on websites just like any other text content and the more interesting part is that you can also search the text of these comments using regular Google search.

To give you an example, here’s a comment from Robert Scoble that he has previously written on a TechCrunch page using the Facebook comments system..

..and here’s the same comment available through Google web search. You can in fact use search queries like “commenter name * commenter title” (for example – “Robert Scoble * Chief Learning Officer at Rackspace”) to discover all comments that he or she may have written on various websites that use the Facebook comments platform.

If you have so far avoided using Facebook comments on your website /blog just because of the SEO factor, you may want to reconsider your decision now.

However I am not too sure if Google would pass any juice to any of the website links that some people may be dropping in your comments. Also, moderation of Facebook Comments is all the more important now as the comment text is part of the page content itself and you don’t want to be in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines just because of those angry comments that do not use very civilized language.


This story, Google Begins Indexing Facebook Comments, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on October 31, 2011 under Facebook, SEO, Internet.

Don’t believe everything you see on the Internet because screenshots can be easily faked. Sometimes these fake images are for pure fun – like you putting your picture on the cover of TIME magazine, sometimes they may be deceptive.

My favorite is Wall Machine – a service that lets you you create fake screenshots of Facebook walls and other Facebook related activity - like X is now a friend of Y or Z changed their relation status on Facebook. Every part of that screenshot can be customized including the conversation text, the profile images and you can have as many comments on a Facebook post as you like.

Another service – iFakeText - lets you make screenshot images of text messages exchanged on an iPhone. Just enter the text of the SMS conversation in a proper format and generate the screenshot – see example.

I also like Fake Tweet Builder for creating screenshot images of Twitter conversations that may or may not have happened. The screenshots of individual tweets look extremely real - see example – and you may also use customize the profile pictures, the name of the Twitter client and how many times a particular tweet has been retweeted.

Ticket-o-Matic lets you print boarding passes of any popular airline, Fodey generates newspaper clippings while Expense Steak creates PDF receipts of restaurant bills and office supplies for a given amount. When you print these receipts on paper, they’ll look real but there’s little potential for misuse as they carry old dates.

Finally, if a web form makes it mandatory to fill the street address or the phone number, use this website to generate random data for putting into that form.


This story, The Internet of Fake Screenshots, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on October 31, 2011 under Screenshots, Internet.

Social networking sites allow us to maintain a web presence long after death
It is a most basic fact of life: we will all die. There are no creams, no pills, no incantations that can change this. However, more and more of us have the opportunity to perpetuate ourselves by the grace of overenthusiastic automated Facebook reminders and the digital archives of identity that we upload with pieces of us.
After we die, we leave behind an estate that tells a particular story of who we were. We have no control over how we are represented, perceived or passed around: the post-death identities of highly public, controversial figures such as Muammar Gaddafi are appropriated for political agendas and images ricochet around news outlets and the web; more popular people such as Steve Jobs are bequeathed elevated cachet offline and on; and the less well-known but just as deserving, such as recently deceased computer scientist Dennis Ritchie, maintain an afterlife among the faithful who cluster around biographies and tributes.
As for the rest of us, pre-web, we'd have faded away pretty quickly. Now, it's possible to have our own public perpetuity. This can be disconcerting to those we leave behind. Many of the stories I've heard about digital death experiences come from bereaved people who are jolted by the activity surrounding a loved one's online profile, or the skeletons that were hidden in an online closet. One person who contacted me about his experience of 21st-century death commented: "It's a very weird thing, Facebook after death: it's a strange, living memorial to which anyone can add and contribute – and which the family cannot control." Social network accounts become windows into the worlds of their former owners, exposing the good and the devastating facts – such as hidden relationships or mental health problems – of a person's life.
Most social network services allow family members to access a deceased loved one's account, to turn it into a memorial page, to archive it or to delete it. This can preserve the online identity as part of the whole person, something that, pre-Facebook, wouldn't have been part of the mainstream idea of "self". Virtual memorials can be a real source of comfort to loved ones. The same commenter told me: "Following the recent first anniversary of [my brother's] death, it was emotional – and not unpleasant – to log back on and see people posting anniversary messages and to see that he was still in the thoughts of so many people."
We are now embedded in online social networks, which means they can be speedy conduits for informing people whose lives were touched by the deceased person. Others told me that, although they'd only known someone online, when they'd heard about their death, they felt compelled to go to their funeral.
Death is big business and there is an emerging industry that wants to help us deal with our digital assets before we die. The fourth Digital Death Day conference takes place in Amsterdam in November, aimed at a motley crew of undertakers, human-computer interaction researchers and social network administrators. It hopes to answer questions about new forms of estate and legacy planning, the implications of the web for end-of-life and after-death care and the ways the terms and conditions of online tools are constructed to take into consideration the end-of-account requirements of their customers.
People are already lining up to advise us on what should and shouldn't be included in a last will and testament, offer hacking services for the bereaved to gain access to locked-down computers and social networking accounts, and flog augmented headstones so grave site visitors can discover more about an entombed person's life by scanning it with a smartphone. Our digital assets are incredibly rich resources, and the archive of emotional and biographical assets that we leave behind is growing every day. Parents document everything about their children's lives and upload it to the web, from first moments to first days at school, and beyond.
Once we have control of our online selves, we continue to pour the minutiae of us into infinitely deep memory books. "I'm not espousing that we chronicle every little aspect of our lives: that would be ridiculous, redundant and boring," says John Romano, one of the authors of Your Digital Afterlife, "but there are things that we value that we put online. And there are times when representation online is the only way that it's stored."
"It used to be the things that were most important to us had tangibility," continues Evan Carroll, Romano's co-author. "Now that we're doing these things digitally, the content – no matter what format it's in – is still important." These are potentially valuable emotional assets, personally and socially, and their worth only truly realised by the people who survive us. For this reason, Carroll and Romano recommend taking a regular audit of what's important – photos, videos, status updates, blog posts, online banking passwords – and entrusting an executor with the details of how to access them.
Death in the age of the web reminds us how much the technology has become part of the fabric of our personal and social identities. Once we're gone, what we leave behind is a rich resource of who we are. We may not survive beyond the release of the next social network, but our inevitable ends are being extended by our digital lives.
InternetAleks Krotoskiguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

For one thing, Reader is only sort of a social network. In many senses it’s an anti-social network. Not in the sense that people in Reader are anti-social so much as the point is to harbor a small enclave of carefully selected people and create a safe-haven of sorts where that “carefully constructed human curated” list of shares and insights can flourish. In Reader, you don’t go after as many friends as possible. You certainly don’t see anyone from high school. Nobody shares photos of their kids. The discussions that do blossom are almost always very smart and focused. It’s the internet if the world were a more prefect place.

Google Reader was one of the last vestiges of the Internet where you could avoid all the 'friend-ing' and focus purely on content sharing. Of course, you had likes, sharing, and following friends but that was never primary goal of the service. Any communication you had with your 'friends' was focused on the content you shared.

The Internet’s favorite top-level domain is close to hitting a huge milestone. The .com domain is now on the brink of reaching 100 million registered domain names. It’s a real triumph for what is already by far the world’s largest top-level domain – it accounts for around 45% of all domain names.

It’s not quite there yet, though. There are currently 98 million registered .com domain names, so there are still two million to go. Judging by the chart here below from Registrar Stats, we will reach the 100-million milestone within a few months, sometime around the end of this year.

The .com domain is one of the original top-level domains on the Internet, having been around since 1985 and the start of the Domain Name System that we all depend upon so much.

To give you an idea of how the .com domain has grown since its inception, we’ve put together this chart for you:

The number for December 2010 is an estimate based on the Registrar Stats chart and an old domain name industry brief from Verisign. The others come from BV.com.

Quite amazing, isn’t it? Especially when you compare today’s numbers with the modest beginnings in the 1980s and early 1990s, before the World Wide Web (you may have heard of it) made everyone flock to the Internet.

P.S. If you wonder about the jagged section in the chart from Registrar Stats, here is the explanation.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Qualcomm Inc has finally got license from the Department of Telecom (DoT), to launch broadband services in the country, according to Reuters reports.

Last year, Qualcomm paid about $1 billion for the wireless spectrum it won in a state auction in four of India’s 22 telecoms zones and needed Internet Service Provider’s license to launch broadband services. The U.S. chipmaker’s initial application for the license was rejected by the DoT on the grounds of late submission. The ministry also said that Qualcomm had applied for four separate licenses, when it should have applied for just one.

On Tuesday, Qualcomm stated that it had received a letter from the telecoms ministry, offering to grant the company a license covering all the four zones.

Qualcomm, which is planning to deploy LTE (long-term evolution) broadband technology, stated that it is looking for more operator partners in the Indian venture and  that the company plans to eventually exit the business.

Recently, there were reports that Reliance Industries is finalizing deals with global technology players and service providers for the launch of high speed broadband wireless services in India. Apart from Reliance, other telecom firms like Bharti Airtel , Aircel and privately held Augere and Tikona also have wireless broadband spectrum in select zones in India.

 

 

 

 

 

More justice.

The inspiring and brilliant Steve Jobs passed away on October 5 and, as expected, people around the world turned to the Internet to read more about this sad news. The interest was so high that “steve jobs” became the most searched phrase on the web that particular day according to Google Trends.

It was early morning here in India but when employees of some tech companies went to Google, looking for news around Steve Jobs, they faced an interesting problem – the corporate web filters blocked their searches. Here’s why:

Apparently, the word ‘Jobs’ was blocked by the corporate firewall to stop employees from searching for jobs in other companies. To discourage staff from finding employment at other companies, the word ‘Jobs’ has been blacklisted.

Ria Sharma says that, due to this keyword-based Internet filtering, employees of Mahindra Satyam, iGate, Cognizant and Genpact weren’t able to search Google or any of the other search engines for news related to Steve Jobs.

Luckily they must have had Internet on their mobile phones that didn’t necessarily have to pass through the corporate firewall.


This story, Some Indian Companies Blocked “Steve Jobs” Related Searches, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on October 10, 2011 under Censorship, Steve Jobs, Internet.

Write it only if you mean it.

On Twitter, Sally Hogshead (one of my most favorite people!) asked, "How well do you need to know someone before endorsing them on LinkedIn?" My tweet back was: "I'd say well enough to give an authentic endorsement. I was asked to give one by someone I never worked with. Huh?!?" What's the big deal? Why not just write a testimonial or endorsement for anyone who asks? It's simple, fast and easy to do it and nobody gets hurt.

Maybe...

If you don't have to look someone in the eyes or disrupt their day and you can simply whip off an email to your entire address asking for a testimonial or a recommendation, it removes a lot of courage. An email request simply isn't the same as doing it in person or calling to ask for something. Email has de-personalized a lot of our communication, and - in many instances - this is a very good thing, but not when it comes to recommendations and testimonials.

Why saying "no" is often the right thing to do.

I have think skin and I have a hard time saying "no" to anything, but I often ignore, delete or refuse to write a testimonial or recommendation unless I can be both sincere and authentic about it. Pushing this beyond recommendations and testimonials, I feel the same way about writing a review for a product and/or service. The thing is that the Internet has completely democratized publishing. It's free. Anybody can do it. Anybody can do it very fast. If we don't put any integrity into the words we write and simply toss recommendations and testimonials around like they're meaningless, guess what?

They become meaningless.

Much in the same way that I don't like Blog posts for the sake of Blog posts, any publishing of content that the person who is creating it wouldn't stand behind with full - one hundred percent - integrity diminishes the value of the entire Internet. There's also something about holding yourself up to that kind of higher standard that elevates both the quality of things you can find online while at the same giving you a personal "out" when someone you haven't spoken to in over a decade asks for a LinkedIn recommendation, even if you have never worked with them and the last time you saw them was your final year in High School.

It turns out that the integrity and quality of everything that you see online won't be the responsibility of traditional editors and the local intelligentsia.

It's going to be up to you, me and everybody we know. Yes, we have a fairly good infrastructure that - to date - has been fairly good at self-policing itself. But, it's a fragile relationship that can crack at any moment. You may think that a recommendation for someone on LinkedIn that you don't really know won't make all that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, but if everybody thinks like that, how valuable/credible will those recommendations be? If you're writing them without thought or care, how much do you value the other ones that you come across? If you're constantly publishing content that you don't believe in or wouldn't stand behind, what does that say about the credibility of everything that everyone else is publishing online?

The integrity of the system is up to you. Are you ready (really ready) for that responsibility?




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Yahoo's shares soared by 10% on the rumour that the software giant said to be considering a fresh bid for the internet business
Microsoft is considering a fresh attempt to take control of Yahoo, sources close to the situation have told Reuters, more than three years after its first bid for the internet business failed,
The software giant launched a $44.6bn hostile bid for Yahoo in 2008 that was vigorously rebuffed by the company. Yahoo's share price has subsequently collapsed and the firm was valued at less than $18bn before Microsoft's renewed interest was reported.
Yahoo's shares soared by 10% on the rumour, which neither company would comment on, before falling back in after-hours trading. Peaking at $15.94, the shares were still barely half the value of Microsoft's $31-per-share offer in 2008.
Yahoo axed chief executive Carol Bartz last month and said the company was conducting a strategic review of its business, prompting speculation that it was a takeover target.
Goldman Sachs and media specialist Allen & Co are working with the firm and are believed to be sounding out potential buyers. Last month, several Yahoo employees in were told in a memo that the company's financial advisers were "fielding inquiries from multiple parties that have already expressed interest in a number of potential options."
Jack Ma, chief executive of Chinese internet company Alibaba, has already expressed an interest in buying Yahoo. The US firm owns 40% of Alibaba and Ma has previously sought to buy back the holding. The two firms have had a contentious relationship and Bartz was criticised for her handling of the Chinese firm, seen as one of Yahoo's best assets.
Other potential bidders include News Corp, buyout firms Providence Equity Partners, Hellman & Friedman and Silver Lake Partners and Russian technology investment firm Digital Sky Technology. Microsoft may seek a partner to go after Yahoo, according to Reuters' sources.
If Microsoft makes a bid it will be at a fraction of the price it was prepared to pay in 2008. That bid ended in failure after an intense four-month battle that eventually led to the resignation of Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, who has opposed Microsoft's move.
According to Reuters there are "two camps" within Microsoft. One group of executives believe buying Yahoo would be a 'knock-out blow' to rival AOL, leaving MS-Yahoo as the undisputed leading web portal. Others, though, believe Microsoft should focus on buying companies with more potential for growth.
Yahoo is still one of the biggest draws on the internet but it has lost out to Google and Facebook in the battle to win over advertisers.
At the time of the original bid Microsoft's chief executive Steve Ballmer said buying Yahoo was the best way to achieve scale online, an area where the software giant has trailed arch-rival Google.
The two firms started talking again in 2009 and Microsoft signed a 10-year deal with Yahoo to run its internet search advertising business. That deal was attacked by Google as an "attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC."
Any new deal between the two firms is also likely to spark regulatory scrutiny and fierce lobbying from Google.
Tech analysts were sceptical about the chances of Microsoft bidding for Yahoo again, especially now it has secured the search advertising deal. They also argued that the sale process remains in its early stages.
Yahoo takeoverMergers, acquisitions and fundingMicrosoftComputingYahooInternetTechnology sectorMedia businessDigital mediaDominic Rusheguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The social network's 'jokes in the pub' analogy, defending its decision not to take down pro-rape pages, is offensive
It doesn't matter how hard I study Facebook's terms and conditions, I still can't find the bit where it says: "Like Humpty Dumpty, Facebook is at complete liberty to interpret the words used in this document in any way it sees fit." And yet that's obviously what Facebook executives have been doing: making words mean what they want them to mean, or else they'd have removed the pages that promote rape and other forms of violence against women months ago.

The specific clause in Facebook's statement of rights and responsibilities that's supposed to protect groups against violence and hate speech instructs the user: "You will not post content that: is hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence." However, Facebook has now defended the numerous pages that clearly violate these terms by claiming: "Groups that express an opinion on a state, institution, or set of beliefs – even if that opinion is outrageous or offensive to some – do not by themselves violate our policies." Which is strange, because if a page entitled "Roses are red, violets are blue, I've got a knife, get in the van" isn't hateful, threatening or gratuitously violent, I don't for the life of me know what is.

It was back in August that feminists first began to notice the proliferation of pro-rape pages on the popular social networking site. Two months later over 176,000 people have signed a US-based petition calling on Facebook to take them down, and nearly 4,000 people have signed a UK-based petition calling for the same. The Facebook pages, such as the one cited above and others that include "You know she's playing hard to get when your [sic] chasing her down an alleyway" still remain.

Facebook's initial response to the public outcry was to suggest that promoting violence against women was equivalent to telling a rude joke down the pub: "It is very important to point out that what one person finds offensive another can find entertaining" went the bizarre rape apologia. "Just as telling a rude joke won't get you thrown out of your local pub, it won't get you thrown off Facebook."

And in some ways they're right: telling a rude joke probably wouldn't get you thrown out of your local pub. I'd suggest, however, that propping up your local bar while inciting others to rape your mate's girlfriend "to see if she can put up a fight" would not only get you thrown out, it would in all likelihood get you arrested as well. Still, at least you could log on once you got home and post your offensive comments on Facebook instead, safe in the knowledge that they wouldn't do anything about it.

What Facebook and others who defend this pernicious hate speech don't seem to get is that rapists don't rape because they're somehow evil or perverted or in any way particularly different from than the average man in the street: rapists rape because they can. Rapists rape because they know the odds are stacked in their favour, because they know the chances are they'll get away with it.

And part of the reason rapists get away with it, time after time after time, is because we live in a society that all but condones rape. Because we live in a society where it's not taken seriously, and where posting heinous comments online that promote sexual violence are not treated as hate speech or as content that threatens women's safety, but are instead treated as a joke and given a completely free pass.

By refusing to take these pages down, and by resorting to such a ridiculous and quite frankly offensive "rude joke" analogy to justify their decision, Facebook executives have made absolutely clear where they stand on the issue of gender hate crime. It's fine to post hateful or threatening content on their site, just as it's fine to post content that incites violence. Well, as long as it's primarily aimed at women, that is.
FacebookInternetRapeGenderSocial networkingFeminismWomenCath Elliottguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The advent of Facebook's new Timeline feature gives you, your colleagues, and your customers a whole new set of reasons to share your moment-by-moment news, photos, and reflections. Instead of a flat list of stories on your wall, and a glob of biographical data on your profile, the new Timeline creates a visually attractive story of your life dating all the way back to the date of your (reported) birth. If and when Timeline gets rolled out to Pages (as Facebook is already hinting), we will see brand presences change in much the same way: into dynamic, chronological, and visual stories.

But the business impact of Timeline will be felt long before it arrives on brand pages. As Timeline rolls out on individual profiles, anyone who has both a professional career and a Facebook account will have to rethink the relationship between them. Timeline is going to change the way Facebook interacts with our professional lives. Here are the changes to watch for &#8212 and the ways you can make them work for you instead of against you:

1. You'll know too much about your colleagues: If the folks in the C-suite have remained largely inscrutable until now, expect at least some of them to fall prey to Facebook's enhanced charms. Just as it's hard to resist mugging for a camera, it may be hard to resist Facebooking just to make your Timeline look prettier, more interesting, or simply less food-centric. That can easily lead to oversharing &#8212 which is especially problematic if the person sharing Too Much Information is the public face of your organization. And you don't have to be the CEO to worry. The Timeline lays so much out in a browsable form that you need to assume that it will be used as part of hiring processes, client assessments, and even just colleagues wanting to know the name of your new puppy.

You can take full advantage of Timeline without oversharing yourself. If you want to build a Facebook Timeline as a personal scrapbook or intimate communications channel, set up an "inner circle" friends list and make it your default level of privacy for all your posts, or even set your default privacy levels to "only me."

2. Your colleagues will know the "propersonal" you: If you were holding onto the idea that Facebook could be your personal haven while you build your professional profile on LinkedIn, it's time to let that fantasy go. The Timeline offers an opportunity for you to tell the story of your career in a uniquely compelling way, so you need to consciously tackle the challenge of building a propersonal profile that will position you appropriately in the eyes of employers, clients, or colleagues.

To create a strong propersonal profile, you have to start by burying any inappropriate content. Use the new privacy setting called "limit the audience for past posts," so that your entire history becomes invisible to everyone except a select group of friends. Then, go back through the timeline and select a representative, but flattering range of posts and photos that you will share publicly. Complete your career information and flesh out any gaps with additional posts or photos (which you can backdate). Review your new Timeline and make sure the story it tells is consistent with the chronology in your résumé, and more importantly, with the way you present yourself in other professional contexts.

3. You'll know more about yourself: Even those of us who use Facebook for professional purposes rarely look back further than the past few weeks' worth of updates and comments. Facebook Insights may tell you the longer-term story in analytics, but that is different from re-reading the cringe-worthy, tone-deaf update you wrote on your first wall post back in 2007. Now that Timeline encourages us to turn back the clock, many of us will get a fresh perspective on how we present ourselves to our colleagues and the world &#8212 and we may not like what we see.

That perspective could be as valuable as a year's worth of executive coaching &#8212 if you seize the opportunity to take a hard look at where you spend your time and attention. Before you check out your Facebook Timeline, jot down the professional highs and lows of your past few years. Now look at your Facebook Timeline and compare: Did your big work breakthroughs come when you were barely updating (and perhaps a bit more focused on your job)? Or did your flurries of online activity correlate with the times when you felt especially alive and attuned to the pulse of your organization? You may gain surprising insights into the relationship between your social media life, your professional success, and your personal satisfaction.

Facebook's positioning of Timeline as a kind of digital scrapbook suggests that Timeline will primarily be used as a way to look back on one's own life. Every experience we've had with social media to date &#8212 including Facebook itself &#8212 suggests the opposite. Each new way of sharing or curating our life experiences becomes another opportunity for self-narration, and we spend as much time investigating, critiquing, and engaging with other people's presences as we do in reviewing our own. With the advent of Timeline, that balance needs to shift &#8212 at least until you're confident that the story you're telling is a story you can live with.

Let’s say your team has just launched a new product at some conference and they have asked you to collate all the conversations and buzz happening around that product on various websites, blogs and social sites. You have to act fast because the stuff that gets shared on the real-time web often gets buried almost as quickly.

So how should you go about collecting stuff around the Internet? Should you just save everything that’s being said to your browser bookmarks? Or maybe put all the web clippings in an Excel sheet as that would be easy to share? Or how about capturing screenshot images of the chatter?

There are umpteen ways to do this but what you should really look at is a dedicated content curation tool that is designed to capture web content with minimal effort.

Don't Bookmark, Curate Online Content
A content curation tool, in simple English, lets you easily pull videos, images, presentations, tweets, blog posts and other web content into a collection which you can then embed, publish or share online. I have been testing a few online curation tools and here’s a quick review of them all to help you pick the right one for your needs.

The way these content curation tools work is quite similar to Evernote’s web clipper. You install an add-on for your browser, or a bookmarklet, and then clip content with a click.

The first tool that I tested is Bundlr available at gobundlr.com. Bundlr can automatically recognize content on YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare, Twitter and a couple of other sites. Alternatively, you may select an image or a text snippet on a page and add it to your bundle. The bundle may then be embedded in another page or you can publish it as a standalone page.

Bundlr makes clipping pages really simple, especially when you are collecting individual tweets, but I wish it supported more services and the overall layout of the bundle doesn’t look all that nice (see example).

Next in the list is curated.by – it offers a Chrome extension that adds a “Curate” button next to every single tweet on twitter.com and you can thus save any of them to your bundle with a simple click – no  pop-ups needed. Curated.by can also be used for curating media content from around the web in the same bundle (see example).

Then you’ve everyone’s favorite curation service called Storify. You can add items to your Storify collection in two ways – there’s the bookmarklet to curate content from any public webpage and then you also have an integrated search where you can add items by simple drag and dropping. For instance, you may search public updates on Facebook or Twitter and drag any of them to your collection without leaving the Storify website. This works with Google search results and RSS feeds as well.

The designers at Storify have done an excellent job with the formatting and this makes your overall collection look really good (see example). You can embed Storify collections as a JavaScript widget but the most-unique part is that you can also “publish” the story to your Tumblr or WordPress blog as a new article (so you also get the SEO benefit).

You may also want to check out the new version of delicious service for curation. They have added “Stacks” which are like a collection of bookmarks but the difference is that stacks can display media content inline without you having to click the bookmark. For instance, if you bookmark a Flickr page, the corresponding picture will included in the stack page automatically and the same is true for YouTube videos or Slideshare presentations.

Unlike any other curation tool, Delicious stacks include a thumbnail feature so if you bookmark a web page, the thumbnail image of that page will automatically get included in the media view (see example). I will however give maximum points to Storify because, other than presenting your curated stories inside a clean and beautiful layout, Storify also lets you easily publish them to other sites.


This story, The Best Tools for Content Curation, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on September 29, 2011 under Embed, Internet.

The Facebook iPad application has become a hostage in a tense negotiation between Apple and Facebook.

Users testing out Facebook's new "Timeline" profile might have noticed that they could see who "unfriended" them in an ordered manner. Facebook's since patched the so-called "bug," but not before everybody swarmed on to see who unfriended them.

The weekend witnessed a spat between popular restaurant guides, Zomato and Burrp, with the former alleging that Burrp was copying listings data from its website including proprietary data points such as location co-ordinates. Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal, in his blog post, also included screen-shots of Burrp pages.

The evidence: pages from Burrp featured a custom phone number originally allocated by Zomato to facilitate table bookings, of which even the restaurant staff is not aware of.

The post also linked to the Linkedin profile of a Burrp employee who had added the listing, to show that it was not a user submitted listing. Zomato has also mentioned that Burrp’s listing included the same GPS coordinates for the restaurant, until the 5th decimal point, which a user is unlikely to submit along with the listing.

Zomato also adds that there have been similar instances in the past, and on informing Burrp, the response that they received was that these were user uploads.

Burrp’s side of the story

In a response to Zomato’s blog post, Burrp also posted one on its own blog, defending the accusation. It said that the request to add the business listing came via an email and that Burrp added details verbatim, in good faith. Further, it says that the phone number mentioned in the listing should have carried an extension number, without which it doesn’t connect to the business. So, if it was to copy the number, it did not make sense to leave the extension.

Burrp alleges that Zomato is the one which copied features from Burrp, is poaching Burrp employees from sales and content, and is putting fake reviews of  un-reviewed business and submitting them to Google. Burrp did not include any evidence in the post, to substantiate these counter-allegations.

Our Take

- For any local listings aggregator, listings are a vital asset which drive traffic to the website. These sites generate money form paid listings, which are in turn-dependent on traffic generated through search. So, even if it’s a question of a handful of listings, a local search business can not ignore it.

- User Generated content is a major liability for content players, and if it has a major role to play in the functioning of the business, it must be well moderated. There is no place for ‘good faith’ when you are susceptible to getting sued for copyright violation.

Nikhil adds: Under India’s new IT Rules, Burrp can be held liable for these listings for copyright violation, if it does not take them down on being notified by Zomato, or vice versa. If either of them refuses to comply with the request, the plaintiff can take the matter to court. Remember that previously, Cleartrip has also been accused of data theft.

- Zomato substantiated their accusations with proof, including screen-shots and links.  Burrp defended the accusations, but did not cite any proof. Why didn’t it include a screen shot of Zomato’s alleged fake reviews on Google?

- It seems like this was not just a one-off incident and Karthick Gopal earlier tweeted a picture (via Gautam John) of a restaurant menu with Zomato’s watermark being used on Burrp. Pluggd.in also published some listings from Burrp and Google, which featured the same Zomato phone number.

- On poaching employees, Deepinder Goyal replied to my tweet saying that Burrp has a high attrition rate and Zomato hired some of their best people. In any competitive industry, this is a normal practice, and in contrast with copyright violation, isn’t illegal. Note that there is no explicit allegation of database theft by Burrp. Readers should keep in mind that JustDial had sued Burrp’s sister company AskMe of database theft.
*Reach India’s Digital Industry Decision Makers: Advertise on MediaNama. Contact sales@medianama.com. For more info, click here.

The current big international social networks are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the newly formed Google+, and perhaps Tumblr, if you choose to look at it as a social network. However, go back to around 2004-2005 and these were either not around yet, or just taking their early baby steps. Back then the big ones were Friendster, LiveJournal and MySpace.

And we’re talking in past tense, because oh how the mighty have fallen. Web users are a fickle bunch, and there is probably no market as trend sensitive as social networking.

How bad is it? As you’ll see, they’re all caught in a downward spiral, but they might have peaked later in life than you think.

MySpace
Started in 2003, MySpace was the big dog before Facebook stole its thunder. It was a pretty strong player until quite recently, especially in the United States.

At its peak in 2007-2008, the then News Corp-owned MySpace was valued at $12 billion. In June this year, News Corp. sold MySpace for $35 million and a 5% stake in the new owner, Specific Media.

Worldwide interest in MySpace, 2004 – today:

Worldwide site traffic to Myspace, 2009 – today:

(There’s more information over at Wikipedia, if you want to read up on MySpace’s history.)

Friendster
Started in 2002, Friendster quickly became a huge success (it’s the site that inspired MySpace) and pretty much became a blueprint for the modern-day social network. It went from being popular everywhere, to mostly being used in Asia, especially SE Asia, which has remained its power base.

In May this year, Friendster pretty much committed harakiri – at least as a social network – and was completely redesigned to focus on social gaming.

Worldwide interest in Friendster, 2004 – today:

Worldwide site traffic to Friendster, 2009 – today:

(You can read more about Friendster’s history over at Wikipedia.)

LiveJournal
Started in 1999, LiveJournal is a blogging service with strong social elements. In many ways it’s one of the social networking pioneers. To give you an idea of its status, early in the movie The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg (as played by Jesse Eisenberg) is seen blogging on LiveJournal. The scene takes place in 2003.

In 2009, after having been bought by a Russian company (SUP) a couple of years earlier, the operation of LiveJournal was moved from the United States to Russia.

Worldwide interest in LiveJournal, 2004 – today:

Worldwide site traffic to Livejournal, 2009 – today:

(More about LiveJournal’s history over at Wikipedia.)

“Hold on, we’re not dead yet!”
The funny thing is, relatively speaking these social networks are still big. They still have millions of users. They haven’t died, they’ve just fallen from grace, most of their users having left for greener pastures.

It’s like one of those aging Hollywood movie stars of yesteryear, still good, but no longer cast in the best roles and no longer able to pull the crowds to the theaters.

“I used to be famous,” she said with a sigh. “I used to be a star.”

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Mumbai. Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan is all set to join Facebook after joining Twitter. However on Facebook, he is going to be more active and personal with his fans. King Khan is all set to send out personalized birthday wishes to his fans by posting messages like “Happy Birthday my sweetest friend” on their Facebook walls through a Facebook application.
But this is not going to be free for the fans; they will have to shell out some money to see SRK post some finest birthday wishes.
“Just 500 rupees,” informed Chanchal Pandey, the publicity agent of the Bollywood superstar, “Fans have to authorize an application named SRKsays and make a payment of 500 rupees through credit card, and their job is done. The application will find out their birthday as per their Facebook profile information and post a birthday message on their wall on behalf of Shahrukh.”
The application will post personalized and unique messages on the Facebook walls that will appear to have been posted personally by Shah Rukh Khan from his personal profile. A sample post could look something like this:
Shah Rukh Khan’s Facebook application wishes you a Happy Birthday
The application will also broadcast an update on the Facebook ticker that will read something like “Manish Kumar was just wished by Shah Rukh Khan on his birthday” so that other users are tempted to use the application as well.
When contacted by Faking News, King Khan confirmed the development and hoped to connect with his fans on Facebook on a daily basis. He also termed it as “democratization” of his celebrity status.
Shahrukh Khan dancing at a wedding party
“See, I have been taking part in weddings of the rich and powerful and acting as if those rich people were my personal friends. But the truth is I did that for money,” SRK candidly admitted, “Now if I can act like personal friends of the rich and the powerful, why should I deny the same rights to my fans who are not so rich and powerful?”
Shah Rukh claimed that 500 rupees that he was charging was a modest professional fee that his fans should pay for this “service”. In return, fans will get a memory that they can cherish for whole of their life.
“Their Facebook friends will be jealous, and they can frame the screenshots of the wall post to show it off to their non-Facebook friends,” SRK’s publicity manager explained.
Facebook experts believe that the latest campaign by Shah Rukh Khan is going to be a runaway success and he could earn substantially this way, more than what many other actors earn through box office collections. However some experts foresee trouble for SRK.
“Is this application going to be exclusively for Indian fans only? What if Facebook users from Pakistan are going to authorize this application? We could see another political controversy with parties like Shiv Sena opposing this move,” a Facebook expert warned.
Experts also foresee other celebrities, especially Salman Khan and Aamir Khan, joining Facebook to launch similar applications. While Salman’s application could give birthday bumps to users, experts believe that Aamir will wait till Facebook becomes perfect and launches its new Timeline for every user.
Unconfirmed sources suggest that model Poonam Pandey too could launch a Facebook application that will post her semi-nude pictures on walls of users for free.
Possibly Related News:Mayawati joins facebook! Exclusive snapshot of her wallFacebook launches Facebook Tsunami to take on Google WaveHoneymoon picture on Facebook receives “Hang Kasab” commentEarliest facebook users oppose immigration of orkut usersNow Salman can “burn” Shahrukh; Madame Tussauds to sell celebrity wax candles

Advocates of this kind of public-spirited innovation, typically known as "e-government," "we-government," or "gov 2.0," say they're employing social media and mobile technology to build not only a more responsive, collaborative, and effective government but also a more engaged citizenry and a richer civic life.

Reporting potholes is the gateway to civic engagement.

The tragedy—small in the scale of things, no doubt—of this film is that practically everyone watching it will miss this point. Practically everyone walking out will think they understand genius on the Internet. But almost none will have seen the real genius here. And that is tragedy because just at the moment when we celebrate the product of these two wonders—Zuckerberg and the Internet—working together, policymakers are conspiring ferociously with old world powers to remove the conditions for this success.

An otherwise brilliant movie, Lessig's point is well taken. 'The Social Network' is about characters more than the business aspect. In spite of the fact that this country is pro-business, the only example you will hear frequently of a business movie is 'Wall Street'. And even that isn't exactly a good one.

"Despite its haters and trolls, the massive realm of the internet still has enough bright spots to improve any dark mood. Here are eight websites that feature positive and uplifting stories for people like Burke. Or you.
Who knows? They may even help renew your faith in the goodness of the human experience. Enjoy."

Perhaps there is still hope for the Internet to bring a smile to your face.

"On a more conceptual level, the move from the browser model to the app model (where content is more likely to be accessed via smartly curated “stores” like iTunes, Amazon, or Netflix) signals the first real taming of the Wild Digital West."

Does this mean that we are returning to the days of AOL's walled garden? Or was this merely the eventual transition to curated content to combat against the overwhelming amount of information out there.

"If this study is correct, the Internet will not produce a cocooned public square, but a free-wheeling multilayered Mad Max public square. The study also suggests that if there is increased polarization (and there is), it’s probably not the Internet that’s causing it."

"The 17-year-old was over in the U.S. to talk to developers and potential investors about how to evolve his site, which he developed over three days in his bedroom."

A simple bare-bones startpage for your browser that displays only icons for the first sites you visit each morning. Customizable.

"It’s kind of like the Photoshop Problem: when people want to crop a picture, we give them Photoshop. Photoshop is a behemoth application with nearly every image editing and touchup function imaginable, and it is terribly complex. Now Photoshop is an impressive tool, but only a very tiny percentage people need the power it offers. The vast majority just want to crop their ex-husband from the photo and let their friends look at it."

"Google Buzz: revolution, evolution, or devolution? Many of you have asked me for my take. So here's how it stacks up against my five next-generation product & service design principles — the principles of "design for meaning.""

"Google just launched Google Buzz, the company's new social networking service which will be tightly integrated with Gmail. There can be little doubt that Google Buzz looks a lot like FriendFeed, the social aggregation service that was acquired by Facebook in August 2009."

"The new beta release of Chrome for Mac offers extensions, bookmark sync, and more."

The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years, a requirement that law enforcement believes could help it in investigations of child pornography and other serious crimes.

“You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.” - Steve Jobs

Join in the dialogue among all of the stakeholders – businesses, individuals, government agencies, non-profit groups, academics, teachers and students – to look more thoroughly at how advanced technologies affect our daily lives.

I have four big predictions to share for what the web will look like in the near future. This is what I expect in the evolution of our online lives

What happened with the Internet in 2009?

How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many more. Prepare for information overload, but in a good way.

Systems such as Wikipedia, Flickr, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, Hunch and various parts of the open source movement are based around small contributory systems, bodies of work in which there are incremental improvements by multiple contributors, or exposing small actions that would be insignificant in isolation, but are meaningful in the aggregate.

Cricket lovers can now watch the Indian Premier League (IPL) live on internet portal YouTube. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) will partner with Google India to stream live matches of its domestic IPL league in the Twenty20 format.

Hackers seeking source code from Google, Adobe and dozens of other high-profile companies used unprecedented tactics that combined encryption, stealth programming and an unknown hole in Internet Explorer, according to new details released by researchers at anti-virus firm McAfee.

Though forthcoming, my friend was anxious to preserve her anonymity; Facebook employees, after all, know better than most the value of privacy. As she is not permitted to divulge company secrets, and would like to remain employed, her name has been omitted from this interview. It provides an interesting snapshot of the inner workings and culture of Facebook in the summer of 2009.

Forget killer Wi-Fi. These are the real digital crimes

“People have so many online strings that bind them that cutting one does not sever the relationship. There are always more.”

You can change the upload date of your photos (you can also change the “taken on” date of your photos in the same fashion).

Here’s a brief history of the Internet, including important dates, people, projects, sites, and other information that should give you at least a partial picture of what this thing we call the Internet really is, and where it came from.

"Are you finding that the Internet is a big thing?" asked Jane Hulbert, a helpful McDonald's media-relations person

Hulu, the online TV service launched two years ago by Fox and NBC, has enjoyed incredible success with viewers — too much, it may turn out.

the whole breakfast question is a huge straw man periodically pushed across the tracks in front of speeding internet technology. There is much that happens on Twitter or on blogs or on Facebook that has nothing to do with small groups of people communicating about seemingly nothing.

Opting out of a network does not mean you will no longer receive online advertising. It does mean that the network from which you opted out will no longer deliver ads tailored to your Web preferences and usage patterns.

The departure of the site's chief financial officer has fired up speculation that Facebook is thinking about hitting the stock market. But why?

KOSMIX, a well-financed Silicon Valley start-up, is often described on blogs and news sites as a search engine that may someday rival Google. As flattering as that notion may sound, it rankles Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, the co-founders of Kosmix. And that’s not because other start-ups making similar assertions have fallen laughably short of the mark.

"These days you can find all sorts of things online, from audio books to flash files, from sound effects to CSS templates. Below we compiled a list with over 100 download sites that serve that purpose."

I'm perfectly qualified for a job -- just don't look me up online.

He saw the future of online publishing, and built a multi-million-dollar gossip blog empire. Then, for his next trick, Nick Denton foretold the economic meltdown. But as he sells off his prime assets – and crosses swords with a few too many of his victims – Ian Burrell asks if the Gawker kingpin can survive

Nobody quite does what we need. Used in concert and with a little work, these tools together can build you a pretty good reading list of top blogs in any niche.

Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb let the people who made it happen tell the story.

The Statbot is dedicated to bringing out interesting and fun stats about web communities and popular folks.

Last year, a scholarly study found a high correlation between RateMyProfessors.com and a university’s own system of student evaluations. Now, a new study is finding a high correlation between RateMyProfessors and a student evaluation system used nationa

A group at the University of California-Irvine, however, decided to approach the question from the perspective of human-computer interactions, where the humans involved were blog readers.

As a concerned citizen I found that it was very important to trace these stories to their sources and do my best to give you the most accurate information on what appears to have happened in the past couple of weeks underneath the waters covering most of

A US man has sold the domain name pizza.com for $2.6m (£1.3m) - after maintaining the site for just $20 a year since 1994.

They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

The Question Box is a project from UC Berkeley's Rose Shuman to bring some of the benefits of the information on the Internet to places that are too remote or poor to sustain a live Internet link.

"The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals." So much for Digg-ifying everything in sight, eh?

Of course, I'm talking about the city in Sweden. What are you thinking about?

Be careful when hooking up with other "adults" online—even if they say they're 18, you'll be the one in hot water if they turn out to be 14 instead.