A recent survey from eMarketer.com seems to show that U.S. executives are warming up to social media usage in the workplace.
Out of 438 management, marketing and human resources executives polled, 81% saw social media as being useful for both brand-building and enhancing customer or client relationships. Just under 70% see it as a valuable recruitment tool, 64% think social media is useful for customer service, and a lower sampling at 46% saw it as improving employee morale.
Asked how they themselves actually used social media in the workplace, respondents listed brand-building as their top goal (82%), followed by networking (60%), and a long tail of other reasons including customer service, sharing project information, monitoring their competitors, prospecting for sales, research, and other… Read on at mashable.com
At a first glance, the website looks pretty much as it did when it first launched – with the straightforward input field. But inside that simple exterior an incredible amount has happened. Our development organization has been buzzing with activity all summer. In fact, it’s clear from the metrics that the intensity is steadily rising, with things being added at an ever-increasing rate. Wolfram|AlphaWolfram|Alpha was always planned to be a very long-term project, and paced accordingly. We pushed very hard to get it launched before the summer so that we could spend the “quiet time” of our first summer steadily enhancing it, before more people start using it more intently in the fall… Read on at blog.wolframalpha.com
It is said that an economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders whether it works in theory. TwitterTwitter clearly works in practice – and if you want practical advice, watch Laura Fitton’s Tech talk at Google, or read her Twitter for Dummies. I’ve learned a lot from talking to her and others about this phenomenon, and I wanted to write about some theories that help me understand it… Read on at epeus.blogspot.com
Many of you have likely read about the recent study that revealed that 40% of tweets are “pointless babble.” OK, there may be a place for such babble, but 40% is pretty high. It begets the question, “What then makes a quality tweet?” The answer to this, in fact, may determine the long-term success of TwitterTwitter. As a completely user-generated content website, the quality of its content is, well, up to us users. Sure, Twitter management can add or take away features and keep the site running, but whether a new user signs on to see pointless babble or quality content is solely and completely up to us! Below are my four categories in which most high quality tweets I read fall under. # 1. Informative - Helps us learn. . . # 2. Humorous - Makes us smile… # 3. Personal - Tells us something about the person… # 4. Inspiring - Helps us increase quality of our lives…
Read on at mashable.com
There’s some excitement around the web today among a certain group of high profile techies. What are they so excited about? Something called WebFinger, and the fact that GoogleGoogle is apparently getting serious about supporting it. So what is it? It’s an extension of something called the “finger protocol” that was used in the earlier days of the web to identify people by their email addresses. As the web expanded, the finger protocol faded out, but the idea of needing a unified way to identify yourself has not. That’s why you keep hearing about OpenID and the like all the time. But those standards, while open, have failed to latch on in a meaningful way with the public at large. One of the holdups is that you have to set up a website or service you use to be your OpenID. It’s relatively easy to do, and you may already have one ready to go, but just not realize it. But it’s still kind of tricky to explain to a regular web user — wait, you login with your website?
Read on at techcrunch.om
Is it easier to talk to your online buddies than your friends out there in the “real world?” Do you feel like you know more about what’s happening in the lives of your FacebookFacebook and MySpaceMySpace friends than with those who don’t have accounts or don’t bother to update them? According to a recent UK MySpace study of over 16,000 social network users, these sorts of feelings are common among today’s younger generation. The study revealed that a good portion of this group admits to feeling more comfortable sharing and communicating with friends online than they do when logged out of cyberspace… Read on at ReadWriteweb.com
DiggDigg’s been busy lately adding new features—some loved, some not—but they seem to be having a positive effect on overall. In June, comScore estimates the site brought in 8.8 million unique visitors in the U.S alone, up 31 percent over the preceding three months. That accounts for the change all of a sudden? Well, by Digg’s own admission, once it introduced the Diggbar it saw an initial lift in visitors just as a result of people passing around short links. And it’s been getting even more aggressive on that front lately, having to reverse itself at times. But it’s not just the Diggbar. The site launched a decent search feature in April (which always helps generate more traffic) and Facebook Connect in May… Read on at TechCrunch.com
Scribd, the so-called ‘YouTube for documents’ that’s recently also become an Ebook store, has been seeing a major drop in traffic over the last two months. Since June, the site has lost over 48% of its global traffic, falling from a peak of 58.3 million monthly visitors to 30.1 million less than two months later. These aren’t fuzzy stats, either— Scribd is Quantcast Quantified, which means the traffic is directly measured (you can see their full stats here). We reached out to Scribd CEO Trip Adler, who says that the site is currently toning down its SEO efforts and further reducing pirated content. He also writes that there’s a dip associated with the summer season… Read on at TechCrunch.com
Augmented reality — or the addition of a layer to the world before your eyes (aka the “real world”) using technology — is the next big tech trend. Already making its debut in everything from mobile apps to kids toys, “AR” will clearly soon be talked about by everyone the way they used to talk about “social media” and “Web 2.0″ before that. While augmented reality has its uses — although many of them just involve oohing and aahing at nifty apps — this trend is already in danger of being over-hyped, even though it has barely gotten off the ground… Read on at ReadWriteWeb.com
Simple blogging site TumblrTumblr will reveal its July stats later today, along with a claim that it is “taking over the world”. The site served 255 million pageviews in July, according to directly measured stats by third party analytics firm Quantcast. In August, Tumblr expects to serve 330 million page impressions, and is purchasing 5 new servers to cope with the demand. Other Tumblr stats are equally impressive: # 50 million visitors in the last 30 days # 650,000 posts per day (which equals 6 new posts per second) # 5,000 new users every day # 1.5 reblogged posts per second Read on at Mashable.com
At a first glance, the website looks pretty much as it did when it first launched – with the straightforward input field. But inside that simple exterior an incredible amount has happened. Our development organization has been buzzing with activity all summer. In fact, it’s clear from the metrics that the intensity is steadily rising, with things being added at an ever-increasing rate. 
It is said that an economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders whether it works in theory. 
Many of you have likely read about the recent study that revealed that 40% of tweets are “pointless babble.” OK, there may be a place for such babble, but 40% is pretty high. It begets the question, “What then makes a quality tweet?” The answer to this, in fact, may determine the long-term success of 
There’s some excitement around the web today among a certain group of high profile techies. What are they so excited about? Something called WebFinger, and the fact that