They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Done right, it can also help the imitator tap into the zeitgeist and pick up more followers as a result. That looks like it might have been some of the logic behind the relaunch of the website of Easy Living, a UK magazine published by Conde Nast, which relaunched this month with a Pinterest-like grid interface on its home page.

Check it out:&http://www.easyliving.co.uk/

Source: techcrunch.com → | ∞ Permalink

Pretty amazing iPad app. Forget everything else, make it easy to publish content online. No doubt 22 of the top 25 news companies are using Storify, including the White House and presidential candidates this year.

Source: scobleizer.com → | ∞ Permalink

Really good list to bookmark for later use.

Source: bumpzee.com → | ∞ Permalink

Driverless cars? That’s some kind of futuristic fantasy, right? Think again. Driverless car technology has taken giant leaps in the past few years — in fact, you might see one driving right next to you any day now.

Source: mashable.com → | ∞ Permalink

The Boston metro area is no Silicon Valley. But it fields its fair share of startups and it raked in the lion’s share of the nearly $780 million in venture capital invested in the New England region in the fourth quarter of 2011. While the area is more famous for the tech luminaries and startups it lost to other regions — Harvard alums Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Bill Gates being the most famous examples – it still can claim a roster of impressive tech startups. As a Silicon Valley-based partner for Boston-based North Bridge Venture Partners‘ Paul Santinelli has studied the differences between the two technology hotbeds up close and come up with a few conclusions. ”Boston is strong in infrastructure, comms [communications], and enterprise software — the kinds of technologies needed to build businesses,” he said in a recent interview.

Source: gigaom.com → | ∞ Permalink

All I Really Want™&lets you give and receive the perfect gift on every occasion by allowing you to create and share your personal wish list. Easily upload pictures of your favorite items onto your list.
Then share and swap your list with anyone you want. Finally you have a way to take the guesswork out of gift giving.

Source: allireallywant.me → | ∞ Permalink

At the same time, we understand and respect that sometimes site owners do not want any of their material pinned. For these folks, we provide a snippet of code that can be added to any website.

meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" /

Source: blog.pinterest.com → | ∞ Permalink

Forbes Blogger Steals $20,000 and 1 Million Pageviews from New York Times by Changing Headline Now how’s that for a grabber? If it got your attention it just demonstrates how important headlines are in online journalism.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but how much is a title worth? If the story that proceeds is any indicator, a title is worth over 6700 words and months of research. It all began Friday when the New York Times published an article “How Companies Learn Your Secrets“. It was an extremely long article which discussed how large companies like WalMart and Target collect data about your individual consumption patterns to figure out how to most efficiently make you happy. It was a great piece but there was one problem: it didn’t have the title it deserved.

The original title was “How Companies Learn Your Secrets.” Kashmir Hill, a writer at Forbes, realized this and quickly developed a condensed version of the article with a far more powerful title: “How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did“. It cut out the crap and got to the real shocker of the story. As of the writing of this story, the New York Times article has 60 likes and shares on Facebook versus 12,902 which the Forbes article has. The Forbes article also has a mind boggling 680,000 page views, a number that can literally make a writer’s career.

This is as clever as it gets.

&

Source: futurejournalismproject.org → | ∞ Permalink

Pinterest could be in Fair Use territory (meaning, legally protected).& Fair Use law allows people to use work they do not own the copyright to.

There are four elements to consider when determining if something is&Fair Use:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. The nature of the copyrighted work [is it fictional or factual]
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion [of the work] used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work

Perfect 10 v. Google&[...] Google won the case. The courts ruled that Google Image search is Fair Use because it's transformative.

Maytal told us, "The use of the thumbnails was highly transformative, allowed users to get to a source of information that they couldn’t otherwise get." Google Image search becomes a social benefit and a reference tool.

Read more:&http://www.businessinsider.com/pinterest-illegal-faq-2012-2

Source: businessinsider.com → | ∞ Permalink

Make conversation better. Together.

A place to have meaningful conversation with the people you know and the communities you care about.

Find communities that share your interests, so you can talk about the things you're passionate about with people who care.

Easily find out who's involved in a conversation, so you can feel relaxed and speak your mind.

Not only should you control what you see and how you're seen, but you should have a say in the direction of the site itself! Ayloo is yours, after all.

Source: ayloo.net → | ∞ Permalink

Looks like much-maligned U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is getting into the holiday spirit and trying to make entrepreneurs swoon. After six years, the agency has suddenly decided to give Steve Rosenbaum, founder and CEO of Magnify.net, the gift he’s been waiting for—U.S. Patent No. 8,117,545, covering a hosted video discovery and publishing platform—complete with a Valentine’s issuance date.

"A hosted system provides any Internet user with the ability to quickly set up and customize a video channel, preferably as a web page or site that can be reached from any Internet-accessible device having a web browser. The solution includes tools for use by channel site creators to customize the look, feel, and page design. A particular web page or site may be associated with a given subject. As used herein, a page or site that has such an association is sometimes referred to as “subject-specific...”

That's a big blow to any startup focusing on video curation. Though who knows if Magnigy will do anything to leverage this against them. As much as it seems a bad thing for competition purposes and eco-system, historically it has been rare that companies leveraged patents to kill their competitors. Though now, we know who's the 800lb gorilla....

And Magnify's valuation just increased tremendously. Large players like Google like to buy startups for:

• the unique technology
• the talent/team
• the patent it owns for a product/service Google has its feet in

Source: betabeat.com → | ∞ Permalink

Pinterest has managed over the past few months is spectacular. Recently reaching the milestone of 10 million users, the site has gained traction faster than just about any other site in history. But with that growth comes the responsibility to handle it and the site seems to be falling into spammer territory. A couple of hours ago (as of the time that I’m writing this), Google’s Don Dodge started tweeting that Pinterest was sending him a mass amount of emails saying that he had been followed on the site, and then asking him to follow that person back.

Black hat email marketing?

But with the average Facebook user&having 120 friends&(and many folks having exponentially more), it’s easy to see how growth of active users like this could happen in a much less justifiable way. To quote a Facebook friend of my own, “spam called. They want their idea back.”

Source: thenextweb.com → | ∞ Permalink

2. Snip from your Mobile device by Email

To:&Your_Unique_Email@snip.it

Subject:&Facebook picks fight with Google over who is more evil

Body:

http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/23/technology/
google_plus_facebook/index.htm

@Tech News

Will be interesting to see how this skirmish turns out.

3. Use the Magic URL

snip.it/http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/technology/personaltech/is-this-living-room-big-enough-for-my-tv.html

Source: snip.it → | ∞ Permalink

A screen grab of the BBJ's pinboard, showing architects' renderings for planned buildings throughout Boston. After a careful read of the fine print, it has been taken down.

Unlike other social media services, when you ‘pin’ something on Pinterest, you automatically upload an (at least) medium-sized version of the related image to the service. Exceptions for publishers of user-generated content&protect Pinterest, but they don’t protect you. Unless you know you have a "worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license," you'd better tread carefully. I was not able to immediately reach Pinterest, for comment.

Source: bizjournals.com → | ∞ Permalink

Caterina Fake is back with a brand new venture. The co-founder of Flickr and Hunch revealed the new startup Pinwheel on her blog Thursday, comparing it (kind of) to a “Flickr for places.” The idea is that you can find and add notes on physical places, anywhere around the world. The initial implementation is browser-based, although Fake said in the blog post that an iOS version is in the works. That can be anything — including stories, memories, found objects, information or even ads. To kick things off, Pinwheel has raised a $7.5 million Series A round led by Redpoint Ventures. That’s in addition to about $2 million in angel funding raised last year from investors such as True Ventures (see disclosure), Betaworks, Founder Collective, SV Angel, Obvious Corp and other angels. Along with the most recent funding, Redpoint founding partner Geoff Yang has joined the Pinwheel board.

Source: gigaom.com → | ∞ Permalink

Advertising is the monetization plan for many of the hottest consumer Internet startups. But for brand new companies, nailing down that first brand partnership is a daunting task. It’s an experience Jeffrey Cutler, now Director of Digital Strategy at Team Epic, knows well. He spent a chunk of time “literally running up and down Madison Avenue,” he says, as Director of Marketing at Going.com before it sold to AOL in 2009. The time sink required to court brands and agencies is frustrating an...

http://hearmypitch.com/

Source: pandodaily.com → | ∞ Permalink

Arguably most intriguing, however, is that 80 percent of all pins are re-pins, meaning that an overwhelming majority of content shared on site is recycled between users.

“Pinterest is conducive to sharing,” Moore said in an interview with VentureBeat. “There’s a very low barrier to sharing [pins] with everyone who is following you,” Moore said of the re-pinning phenomenon.

If i am not mistaking, this is the same for Tumblr in terms of re-sharing vs adding. It is important for any network to allow users

Source: venturebeat.com → | ∞ Permalink

Pinterest is no longer using Skimlinks, and they probably realized that affiliate marketing did not perform too well as a revenue model for their platform.

Why?

Because Pinterest is a discovery engine. People are not in the mindset to buy when they browse Pinterest, and most pins are not products anyway. This means, a low click through rate (CTR) and verly low volume of sales (low conversions), on top of which they need to split the commissions with Skimlinks. That's not much left.

Pinterest needed to clean up the drama, so they added a new topic "How does Pinterest make money?" on the help page section. Time to move on.

What users need to understand is that Pinterest will test making money, because like&any other startup, Pinterest needs to make money at some point to be a sustainable business.

But what will be the right advertising model for Pinterest when&brands/marketers take over the site?

I bet on "Sponsored" pins.

Pins that would be relevant to a pinboard, targeted to specific users/visitors demographics and do not disrupt the discovery process of users, actually add quality to it by helping discovering new products for example.

It took over a year for Twitter to test and build their advertising app, so it probably will take a couple months for Pinterest to build an interface to allow brands and maybe small businesses to advertise on their site.

Source: bumpzee.com → | ∞ Permalink

Prefixed classes guide developers towards a simpler and more maintainable direction for building an extensive CSS design system. Here’s what we have if we take away the generic base class and scope things per component with prefixes:

.btn-success { ... }
.alert-success { ... }

This way, the base class is at the component level and not the entire system level. In other words, our base classes have become .btn and .alert, not .success. There’s no bleeding of styles or behavior from one component to another here because we treat components in a “successful state” as an idea across the design system. 

Source: markdotto.com → | ∞ Permalink

For any consumer application, email is an important tool to drive engagement. Last year, Fred Wilson went as far as calling it “Social Media’s Secret Weapon.” After optimizing the Hunch weekly recommendation emails for a few months last summer, I thought it might be useful to share some of the key lessons we learned to increase user engagement in emails and acquire new subscribers.

Source: estromberg.com → | ∞ Permalink

Clever idea. How did i just discover this, so useful.

Source: placehold.it → | ∞ Permalink

Wiser than a tutor, faster than flashcards, more fun than trampolining - Memrise - the best way to learn new words in any language.

This has potential.

Source: memrise.com → | ∞ Permalink

The best content discovery tool forsocial media marketers and managers.

• Find relevant content to share with customers, fans, and followers.
• Focus on other responsibilities while we capture good content throughout the day.
• Capture and review Tweets about your brand, industry, and chosen keywords.
• Improve your incoming signal-to-noise ratio.
• Smart content feeds throttle popular items so they don't overwhelm your stream.
• Easily discover fresh content that was previously hard to find.
• Remove irrelevant items and prevent them from polluting your stream again.

Source: crowdspoke.com → | ∞ Permalink

If you were someone wondering if curation was going to have any future and was just a hype, this is the perfect example that curation is the future.

This is a big player, and this is going to hurt a lot of small curation services out there...

msnNOW is the only place that looks at the hottest trends from Facebook, Twitter, Bing and Breakingnews.com. We give you the inside scoop so you always know about what's trending, if it's true, and why you should care. And we're constantly checking the latest buzz, so just look for links with the gray speech bubble on MSN.com to make msnNOW part of your daily routine.&

Source: now.msn.com → | ∞ Permalink

Is that really a surprise? Pinterest already blew off any expectations they could have had in terms of building a valuable destination for millions of internet users. Their stats are more impressive than Twitter's at the same running point. Making money is much simpler than driving millions of users to a website everyday.&

There is one problem: The 16-person Palo Alto, Calif., start-up isn't sure how it is going to make money.

"Pinterest's monetization strategy isn't in the oven and it's not even off the baking table," said Jeremy Levine, a board member of Pinterest and a venture capitalist at Bessemer Venture Partners. "We have one hundred ideas but no execution as of yet."

This is your common startup problem when you offer a free service. Although in this specific case, i think there is a huge opportunity for brands to advertise on it. Fashion advertising can drive high revenues.

The prospect of making money off of social-networking sites, which are usually free to users, has been a challenge. The options for Pinterest suggested by analysts so far, which center around selling targeted advertising and data on users' interests, aren't terribly original and run the risk of alienating users—problems faced by bigger social-networking sites such as Facebook.

Source: online.wsj.com → | ∞ Permalink

The idea came from the man who ended up investing in&Engagio:&Fred Wilson needed such a service to deal with the issue of spread conversations and interactions happening via social networks and blogs, now all in one cozy place.

I have been part of the beta for a while, and i love the service. This is very promising.

Why? Because it answers the following:

There is an existing growing Problem. Engagio offers a&Solution.

&

Source: bumpzee.com → | ∞ Permalink

Usability and user experience testing is vital to creating a successful website, and only more so if it’s an e-commerce website, a complex app or another website for which there’s a definite ROI. And running your own user tests to find out how users are interacting with your website and where problems might arise is completely possible. But using one of the many existing tools and services for user testing is a lot easier than creating your own. Free, freemium and premium tools are out there, with options for most budgets. The important thing is to find a tool or service that works for your website and then use it to gather real-world data on what works and what doesn’t, rather than relying purely on instinct or abstract theories.

Source: uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com → | ∞ Permalink

Start your own movement...

Pinterest is popular because it feeds our insatiable appetite to share the things we’re passionate about. It allows us to start movements of our own, pointing others to things we like and enjoy.

People share, curate...

Pinterest is now taking it one step further and allowing us to share anything we come across on the web. Buzzword or not, ‘curation’ is here to stay.

Visual inspiration...

And you tap into a digital world of curation, sharing and visual inspiration. It’s the future and it’s happening right now.

Source: forbes.com → | ∞ Permalink

Learn What You Want, Teach What You Love -&Organize any video, article, or website into a Playlist. See what your friends are learning.

Curated lesson by organizing media available online.

Source: mentormob.com → | ∞ Permalink

Plan B&is what you pivot to when you recognize that a new opportunity has more potential than the one you are working on. Sometimes you change to Plan B because A is not working, which is what most think when they hear “Plan B.” But sometimes A&is&working, yet Plan B appears to have more potential. Regardless of the reason for shifting, the best Plan B’s are different but related to what you are doing now; this way you can apply the lessons you’ve learned to date to the new plan.

This is right on. It's not necessary that Plan A was not going to work, but it's that you recognize a bigger opportunity in plan B.

Source: techcrunch.com → | ∞ Permalink

Lots of good stuff in there...

Source: adobe.com → | ∞ Permalink

Earlier today Google released data from two related studies of US consumer shopping behavior during Q4 2011. The studies were both conducted online and fielded in January 2012. In both cases just over 600 consumers were surveyed. Both studies claim to be representative of their respective populations -- essentially e-commerce buyers who own smartphones (and tablets).

Source: internet2go.net → | ∞ Permalink

Pressly automatically makes online publications as beautiful and touchable as native apps when visited on tablet web browsers. Learn more Display cutting-edge ads built just for the tablet, leveraging touch, video, social sharing, geo-location and anything HTML5 can handle. All of it is seamlessly integrated with your analytics services. Pressly is endlessly flexible and passionate when it comes to customization. Our template engine makes it possible to have bespoke, branded layouts up and running in under 3 days.

Interesting concept. This app will turn any blog, i guess as long as it has a RSS feed, into a good looking media your read on tablet devices.

Source: pressly.com → | ∞ Permalink

Cool left sidebar

Source: wpbeginner.com → | ∞ Permalink

Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling, and geospatial search. Solr is highly scalable, providing distributed search and index replication, and it powers the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest internet sites. Solr is written in Java and runs as a standalone full-text search server within a servlet container such as Tomcat. Solr uses the Lucene Java search library at its core for full-text indexing and search, and has REST-like HTTP/XML and JSON APIs that make it easy to use from virtually any programming language. Solr's powerful external configuration allows it to be tailored to almost any type of application without Java coding, and it has an extensive plugin architecture when more advanced customization is required.

Source: lucene.apache.org → | ∞ Permalink

This plugin uses XHR for uploading multiple files with progress-bar in FF3.6+, Safari4+, Chrome and falls back to hidden iframe based upload in other browsers, providing good user experience everywhere.

Source: valums.com → | ∞ Permalink

1. Website visitors need a certain degree of serendipity in their online browsing and shopping experience. Give it to them.
2. Content curation should factor in not just volume but quality – one will follow the other.
3. A visually appealing website is more conducive to social sharing, appealing images have become front and center in today’s online experience. It also makes for&a better experience for mobile and tablet users&– typically a more affluent demographic. Invest in an in-house photo studio if resources allow.
4. Design deep social integration throughout your site. Let visitors indicate how much they like the content via love/like buttons and comments and this will spur website engagement.
5. Stay non-invasive. Put the user in the driver’s seat in terms of what and how much they’d like to share with others.

Read more:&http://www.businessinsider.com/fabcom-underscores-a-shift-from-search-to-discovery-2012-2?utm_source=readmeutm_medium=rightrailutm_term=utm_content=6utm_campaign=recirc#ixzz1mIFuKPnk

Source: businessinsider.com → | ∞ Permalink

See, engagement is not defined through likes, comments, shares, RTs or impressions. This activity is simply a result of engagement. Focusing on soft metrics is at the detriment of the customer experience and is potentially a distraction away from developing more meaningful connections and relationships. Engagement is by design.

[...] engagement must mean something more to groom the community toward desired sentiment, outcomes, or to simply serve the needs of the community based on stated expectations or desires.

The ultimate measure however is now something more substantial, such as…

• Shift in sentiment
• Satisfaction
• Acquisition
• Referrals
• Conversion
• Leads
• Brand integrity/Reputation

Source: pandodaily.com → | ∞ Permalink

Marketers talk a lot about advanced techniques for working with their leads: lead flow, lead management, lead nurturing. But all of that is meaningless without consistent lead generation, and landing pages are the strongest tools in a marketer's arsenal to meet that looming monthly lead goal.

Source: blog.hubspot.com → | ∞ Permalink

Bring Bootstrap's components to life—now with 12 custom jQuery plugins. All plugins Modal Dropdown Scrollspy Tab Tooltip Popover Alert Button Collapse Carousel Typeahead A streamlined, but flexible, take on the traditional javascript modal plugin with only the minimum required functionality and smart defaults. Add dropdown menus to nearly anything in Bootstrap with this simple plugin. Bootstrap features full dropdown menu support on in the navbar, tabs, and pills. Use scrollspy to automatically update the links in your navbar to show the current active link based on scroll position.

Source: twitter.github.com → | ∞ Permalink

The Beam Brush is the world's first smart toothbrush, a manual brush that monitors your oral hygiene habits and reports them to a smartphone app. Brush your teeth at least twice daily for 2 minutes. Sync your brush with your smartphone automatically while using the app, or manually at your convenience. Smile as you achieve your brushing goals, earn incentives, and improve your oral hygiene!

Everything will be soon reported to your phone: how long you brush your teeth, how much you weigh/gain/loss/burnt, how warm is it in your living room, control your car, etc... this is just the future. Don't fight it.

Source: beamtoothbrush.com → | ∞ Permalink

Specializing in Affordable Short-Run Newspapers! Stop paying for the high cost of newsletters, leaflets or flyers! Be more professional and have more space with a newspaper! One local church profits on their newspaper—the very first day! Just one of the many benefits of a church newspaper. (less than 7 cents per paper) Teach your students not only about writing, communication, graphic arts and more, but raise much needed funds, too! (less than 10 cents per paper) Stop paying for the high cost of Menus! And stop paying for new ones when your costs go up. Turn your menu into a Newspaper!

That is going to take a lot of marketing to take off... but good concept. You could essentially curate the news and make a newspapers out of it that peope could get every Sunday morning. I would read the tech news of the week.

Source: makemynewspaper.com → | ∞ Permalink

Created by&Rand from Moz&and&Dharmesh from HubSpot. Should be interesting to watch.

Source: inbound.org → | ∞ Permalink

As for the next-generation iPad itself, sources say it will be pretty much what we’ve been led to expect by the innumerable reports leading up to its release: A device similar in form factor to the iPad 2, but running a much faster chip, sporting an improved graphics processing unit, and featuring a 20481536 Retina Display — or something close to it.

Source: allthingsd.com → | ∞ Permalink

Very interesting. Try the test and find out your trigger.

Source: sallyhogshead.com → | ∞ Permalink

Wired’s Danger Room broke the Congressional Report Service story earlier this month, calling out some of the most enlightening figures from the 50 pages study (mirrored here). About 31% of US aircraft are unmanned. That represents an amazing change over the past few years as such UAVs only represented 5% of the US total in 2005. Of course, the vast majority of these drone craft are relatively small, able to be launched by hand. The most prolific is the Army’s Raven, with 2200 on order and 1300 delivered. The most widely discussed, and feared, drones are the Predators and Reapers, which can carry heavy ordinance (including hellfire missiles) and are often operated remotely by human pilots stationed in the US. However, CRS reports that there are only about 160 Predator and Reapers in service.

Source: singularityhub.com → | ∞ Permalink

Page 39, FBI File on Steve Jobs The FBI has released its file on Steven Paul Jobs, the late Apple founder, compiled mostly during the presidency of George H.W. Bush. According to the The Vault description, “In 1991, Jobs was considered for an appointed position on the U.S. President’s Export Council. This release consists of the FBI’s 1991 background investigation of Jobs for that position and a 1985 investigation of a bomb threat against him.” The background check includes tidbits like, “Several individuals questioned Mr. Jobs’ honesty stating that Mr. Jobs will twist the truth and distort reality in order to achieve his goals.”

Source: futurejournalismproject.org → | ∞ Permalink

Glam Media launched this foodie.com which is bad news for any recipe site out there because, well it adds to the competition and Glam Media is a big fish with lots of money and quite a publisher base.

They paid $100k back in 2011 for the domain.

Source: foodie.com → | ∞ Permalink

AYTM Market Research&asked US internet users if they liked the idea of personalized search results. Of respondents, 15.5% said yes, they would like personalized search results, while 39.1% said yes, but that they were also concerned with privacy. Additionally, 45.4% said they would prefer everyone to see the same search results.

I have to agree with the 45%. I feel like i am potentially missing on something good or new.

Source: emarketer.com → | ∞ Permalink