Myself and the Scoop.it team have begun creating miniature infographics (affectionately called “micrographs” at the office) based on Scoop.it user data we’ve discovered over the past few months. These are absolutely free for you to save, enrich with your own thoughts, and share with the entire world.
Read MoreBrands, companies, and individuals — I think it’s time for some real-talk about content and social media.
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Today, Google Reader was officially turned off. While not a fundamentally game-changing action on its own, when coupled with several other trends in the online content landscape such as the rise of curated media (Upworthy, etc) and the development of new curation and reading tools (Flipboard and our own Read.it), we can infer that a major shift is coming our way, and coming fast.
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What the heck is a Personal Branding Illusion? That’s a good question, but it begs the question “What is a Personal Brand?”, so let’s start there.
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As you’ve undoubtedly discovered during your time as a professional, it’s not just about what you know — it’s also about who you know. There are people out there that can make your dreams come true by exposing you to the world in ways you never imagined or give you access to markets you didn’t think you could reach.
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Read MoreGoogle Reader is slowing down. Over the past few days, buttons have broken, marking feeds as read seemed to take a bit longer than usual, and the Android mobile website on some devices shifted over to the desktop view with no way to change things…
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post for the #learningtolearn series. Finding and collecting inspiration from unexpected places is an integral part of staying motivated and expanding the scope of your knowledge.
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The communication of knowledge and ideas is intrinsic to the human condition. Our earliest ancestors had a rich oral tradition, through which they passed on what they knew about the world, often across great distances. Our systems of communication have evolved and matured, from those oral traditions to the earliest cuneiform writings and all the way up through books and newspapers, to radio and television. With the advent of the modern age and Al Gore’s gift of the Internet, we’re now able to share our knowledge, ideas, and lots and lots of cute pictures of cats, around the world in less time than it has taken me to write this sentence.
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Be prepared, and don’t say you haven’t been warned. Our very own Guillaume Decugis will be speaking at Techweek Chicago 2013 about his experience as an entrepreneur and “Building Startups to Scale and Success from Any Market.” If you’re attending Techweek, be sure to check out Guillaume’s presentation on Saturday, June 29, at 3:30 PM CDT.
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In a recent post for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson investigates what drives people to read content online. As a writer for a popular news site, it’s of interest to Thompson to find out what people are clicking on and why when navigating through the endless amount of web content available. Though it sounds like a boring study of analytics at first, his findings and references are actually super interesting.
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Whether you are trying to be a successful entrepreneur, parent or friend, it’s wise to calibrate your knowledge meter. How much knowledge is too much? Is there such a thing as having too much knowledge and if so, how do you know when knowing too much actually hurts you, rather than inspires you?
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A few nights ago, I was sitting on my couch about to get down with a bottle of wine and some Netflix. I grabbed my phone and opened the XBox SmartGlass app, which basically works like a virtual game-slash-remote controller. As I was mindlessly scrolling, my dude and roommate — an audio engineer — walked in with his iPad, frustrated and annoyed that this new interface app he’d downloaded allowed him to create and manipulate different sounds, but didn’t automatically sync up with his main program, or allow him to save audio files to Dropbox.
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In an age where new phone applications fly at us faster than bugs at a windshield, app developers are working hard to stand apart from the crowd. On April 12th, Facebook upped the ante when it launched Facebook Home. As this app hits its one month anniversary, the important question is, Facebook Home: Boom or Bust?
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I was always a bookworm. In fifth grade, I was one of the only students in my class to finish every last book on the Battle of the Books competition list.
Fast forward a few years and here I am: one of those people who can’t stand the thought of reading on an electronic device simply because of the pure joy that comes from opening up a new book and turning each page as more new information is absorbed.
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When they first open up shop, every professional has a vision. It may be a simple like “I want to make enough money to buy that shiny gadget from the local store”, but it’s a vision and goal nonetheless. What motivates you is your business alone, and nobody can take that away from you.
Read MoreI’ve always questioned the efficacy of online dating websites that use robots and math to select possible partner choices between people.
I think that online dating, at its core, probably does “work.” But I think that math and robots will always return “safe” potential pairs and takes away the potential for the magic of human chemistry to create unique and sometimes non-sensical or non-typical pairings that are incredibly successful.
Is this okay? Of course it is. But I think that taking away the human component of match-making in preference of safe bets is a mistake. In the war of people vs robots and the automation of the entire world, romance should always be organized and curated by people.
See on citizentekk.com
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Be gone, irritating chain email about a fake virus scare that your head of HR sent out! Away, pictures of a random offsite meeting that no one actually cares about! Never again will your inbox show 298324 because everyone replied all on a staff-wide email about break room etiquette.
Read MoreI went to a huge college. And by huge, I mean almost 40,000 undergrads.
By nature, this meant that I spent a lot of my class time as follows: find a seat in a lecture hall among 400 of my “closest friends,” listen to one professor in the front of the room talk for 45 straight minutes, take notes, leave, repeat.
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Curating and sharing stories should be understood as part of a knowledge economy. If stories are tribal currency, then curators are money handlers.
The world has changed and so did the economy. From an agricultural to an industrial world, we’ve now moved into the post-industrial era where knowledge is the true currency and a lot of us are knowledge workers.
In this great post, Elia Morling explains how he views content curators as playing a key role as a “money handlers, changers and lenders all wrapped into one.”
See on tribaling.com
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I love this “secret of adulthood” by Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project: “Happiness doesn’t always make me feel happy.”
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Being a content curator is all about displaying information. We don’t create the content, we display it. We share it – and people read it. But, first you have to display it. There are several skills involved in displaying content. Here are some thoughts for you to consider when creating and curating a Scoop.it topic.
Read MoreThe challenge [for social networks] is to create something of permanent value for the community, to offer more than a temporary spotlight.
Austin Powell comes back on PaidContent the recent announcement by Tumblr to shut down Sotryboard and lay off the editorial team that was highlighting and curating Tumblr’s best content.
He makes a point that it’s been extremely hard for most social networks – with the notable exception of LinkedIn with its influencer program – to add value by curating its users’ best content.
I wonder whether that’s actually such a big deal.
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I recently partook in a discussion among some fellow community managers on the best ways to learn about the industry and how to train its future generations. When the conversation reached the point where we all shared the “training” we went through ourselves, the answers began getting interesting.
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The ubiquitous internet meme comes in many forms — from iterations on top of iterations of a viral video to a random picture of a cute animals with an ironic white Impact caption. They also seem to proliferate like one of those animals with an ironic white Impact caption, if you know what I mean.
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If you aren’t engaging your customers online, your business is missing out on a huge opportunity to generate sales and gain valuable new customers. Creating and maintaining an online presence isn’t easy. You can quickly become overwhelmed or waste money on unsuccessful outreach if you don’t approach it in an informed, strategic manner.
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One of the hardest things about becoming the “voice” of an organization is figuring out what in the world to say. Do you promote your group endlessly? Do you send out fun links you think your constituents will enjoy? Do you talk to your fans and figure out what they want? Well, the answer is yes to all the above. However, it’s very easy to fall into the trap many other organizations do and either promote the heck out of your mission or refuse to talk about yourself at all. Both tactics can result in you missing out on customers, constituents or funding and even chase your current followers away. So how do you find a good balance?
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Here in the US, the Dow recently tumbled almost 150 points in a “flash crash” caused by widespread digital panic. What was the cause of this panic? Twitter.
The bigger story is that someone hacked the official AP Twitter handle and tweeted a false report of a terrorist attack on the White House, which claimed that the President had been injured in said attack. This is significant in the grander scheme because the Dow essentially measures the health of the US economy and a hit of this magnitude means lots of people (deserving or otherwise) needlessly lost a lot of money in nanoseconds.
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