David Lidsky's Blog, page 4827

A Cheat Sheet to Help You Conquer Social Media

Marketeers who are still a little unsure about charting their path through the choppy waters of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn could do worse than check out this handy little guide to making social media work for them. The CMO's guide to the social landscape, created for CMO.com by client 97th Floor, takes all the major social media sites in the U.S. and analyzes their capabilities in four sectors: customer communication, brand exposure, driving traffic to your site, and SEOs. (For the...

Tweet-Mapping Arrives, Along with the Twitter's Battle Against Google

Twitter's geotagging powers could transform the lifecasting service into something extremely powerful. And the company's just taken the first steps to making this happen through its own Web page: It's turned on Tweet mapping. 

Twitter's geolocation code has been enabled since late 2009, ready for third part developers to build the right hooks into their smartphone app code that grab the user's location from AGPS tech and whizz it off to Twitter HQ. But that's about all that happened for a...

OK Go Ditches Label Over YouTube Embedding Rights

How many times does a band have to take the music video world by storm before its record label gets that its members might know a little something about music videos? We may never find out, because OK Go, the band in question, has just ditched EMI, the record label in question, largely due to that very problem.

OK Go rocketed up through the indie rock world in large measure due to the band's brilliant, lo-fi music videos, which have spread like wildfire on YouTube. But EMI, in a misguided...

ChatRoulette Spin-Off Uses Google Maps to (Almost) Shed Anonymity

It only took a couple of months, but it seems the first spin-off of ChatRoulette is here. ChatRoulette Map does exactly what it sounds like, using Google Maps to plot the IP addresses of all the voyeurs and weirdies who are online and using the crazy site. You can choose whether to hoist up a picture of yourself--so far, FC has spotted a couple of dirty bras, some tops-off Latin guys with dubious facial hair, and some badly-spelt signs leaving you in no doubt as to what the user is looking...

Sony Announces PlayStation Move, Its Wii-Baiting Motion Controller

Sony gave a brief tech demo of its motion controller at the E3 show last year (and discussed it with us just a few weeks ago), but a lot of the particulars were left unknown. Today, they demonstrated the newly-dubbed PlayStation Move, and released details about accessories, price, and release date. Sony's hoping the Move will attract buyers tempted by the Wii's motion-sensing gaming--but they've got a lot of ground to make up.

The basics are much like the Nintendo's motion controller, except...

Failblog: Following France's Tough Piracy Law, Piracy Rates Go Up

Here's one of those fabulous stats that basically explodes an argument people thought was done and dusted: New data shows that online content piracy has risen in France despite the nation's super-tough three-strikes Net ban law.

France, among several controversial legal moves concerning Net technology, has been busy enacting some draconian Web piracy laws that almost rival the Big Brother-ish moves going on in the U.K. (which even the boss of the country's biggest telecoms network

It's Banks vs. Families, Who Will Come Out On Top? Q&A with Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren is Main Street's woman in Washington. A professor at Harvard
Law School, she's researched the travails of the consumer credit market and
the hidden
bankruptcy epidemic for over 25 years. Not satisfied with merely
publishing academic research, she leaped at an invitation from Senator Harry Reid to take a more public role in reforming the financial system after the credit crisis: She's now the chairwoman of the Congressional
Oversight Panel, the group charged with...

Facebook Is Still Looking for Its "Iconic Game": Is Farmville the Halo of Facebook?

At San Francisco's Game Developer's Conference, Facebook's program manager for games put out the call for his platform's Halo or Mario, that iconic game that defines the platform. It's not hubris--Facebook, it turns out, is just as vital and vibrant a gaming community as Xbox Live, just different.

Nearly 75% of Facebook's 400 million users participate in games ranging from traditional turn-based games like Scrabble to more complex strategy games like Farmville. And these social games aren't...

Sea Shepherd Society, Subject of Hit Animal Planet Comedy "Whale Wars," Throw Sushi Protest Party

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The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which is chronicled in the fantastic Animal Planet series Whale Wars, has put together a sort of mini music festival protest to show their anger towards Los Angeles sushi restaurant The Hump. The Hump, as revealed in this New York Times op-ed, has been illegally serving whale as part of its omakase (chef's choice) menu.

Some of the team behind the (Oscar-winning!) documentary The Cove were behind the original expose, obtaining samples while at a...

OK Go Ditches Record Label After (Very) Public Tussles Over YouTube Embedding Rights

How many times does a band have to take the music video world by storm before its record label gets that its members might know a little something about music videos? We may never find out, because OK Go, the band in question, has just ditched EMI, the record label in question, largely due to that very problem.

OK Go rocketed up through the indie rock world in large measure due to the band's brilliant, lo-fi music videos, which have spread like wildfire on YouTube. But EMI, in a misguided...