Archives: November 2009

It’s all too often that I see a new company unleash a new design and I immediately think to myself “What the hell they were thinking?” The page may look good from an aesthetic standpoint but when it comes to usability, it’s clear that the company could have improved the way things were laid out. This blog as well has some significant design issues (which are currently being improved) but it doesn’t mean we aren’t paying close attention to the metrics.
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Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

As part of CNN’s coverage of Decision: Afghanistan, President Barack Obama‘s address on Afghanistan Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET, CNN.com will feature extensive coverage, including breaking news updates and analysis, as well as live video via the site and the CNN App for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

CNN.com also launched new blog Afghanistan Crossroads, which will gather all of CNN’s Afghanistan coverage, including breaking news, content about the country’s culture, video, photography and discussion.

Josh Horowitz of MTV News will moderate Avatar Live: An MTV News Facebook Forum, in which Avatar director James Cameron and stars Sam Worthington and Zoë Saldana will field questions from users of the social-networking site and MTV viewers.

Avatar Live: An MTV News Facebook Forum will begin Thursday at 3 p.m. ET, streamed live in HD simultaneously on MTV.com and Facebook.

The 20th Century Fox feature film will debut in theaters Dec. 18.

Android Twitter client Twidroid 3.0 launched earlier than expected Monday, bringing with it features including geolocation, in-app image previews, threaded conversations and a plug-in platform, ReadWriteWeb reported.

The image previews cover files from TwitPic, yfrog, Twitgoo, phodroid, Posterous and Twitter profile images, according to ReadWriteWeb, which added that Twidroid 3.0 also offers a streamlined menu design with icons, a share option for single tweets, the ability to view large avatars in profiles, saved searches that sync with Twitter, the ability to report spam, the ability to remember time line positions, the ability to jump to the top of a time line, autocomplete user names and the ability to bring up the tweet box by typing @.

TweetDeck 0.32 made its debut Monday, with new features including support for Lists and retweets, maps for messages that incorporate geotagging and streams from LinkedIn, TechCrunch reported.

According to TechCrunch, TweetDeck is essentially swapping its Groups function for Twitter’s Lists function, although existing TweetDeck Groups will still work, or they can be exported as Lists.

TechCrunch added that Lists can be edited in a pop-up lightbox, and TweetDeck 0.32 includes a suggested users feature, which chooses people to add to Lists.

As far as retweeting, TweetDeck 0.32 displays two small, overlapping avatars of both the person being retweeted and the person doing the retweeting, according to TechCrunch. And a small red drop appears at the bottom of geotagged tweets.

A video introduction to TweetDeck 0.32:

The Global Language Monitor‘s top English-language word for 2009 wasn’t Obama, or H1N1, or stimulus, or vampire, CNET reported, but rather, the top finisher was everyone’s favorite 140-character social-networking service.

Global Language Monitor arrives at its conclusions by using its proprietary Predictive Quantities Indicator algorithm, which tracks the use of words and phrases in the media and on the Internet, weighing its results by frequency, contextual usage and “appearance in global media outlets,” according to CNET.

Global Language Monitor president Paul J.J. Payack said:

In a year dominated by world-shaking political events, a pandemic, the aftereffects of a financial tsunami and the death of a revered pop icon, the word “Twitter” stands above all the other words. Twitter represents a new form of social interaction, where all communication is reduced to 140 characters. Being limited to strict formats did wonders for the sonnet and haiku. One wonders where this highly impractical word limit will lead as the future unfolds.

The word of the day, courtesy of Euro RSCG Worldwide: cyberdisinhibition, or the fact that people are more likely to complain on the Internet than in person, eMarketer reported.

Research from Euro RSCG Worldwide showed that nearly 43% of Internet users in the United States feel less inhibited online, adding that of 1,228 adults surveyed, 20% had used the Web to lash out at companies about their brands—24.4% of males and 15.8% of females, eMarketer reported.

Euro RSCG Worldwide also found that 31.5% of those surveyed felt empowered to use the Internet to do something they’d been wanting to do—33.9% of men and 29.2% of women.

WebMediaBrands, the parent company of mediabistro.com which publishes this blog, has completed the sale of Internet.com to QuinStreet. The $18M sale was approved by WEBM stockholders during a special meeting held earlier today.

GlobalPost will provide breaking news and international reporting to PBS’ The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer under terms of a news-gathering partnership announced Monday.

GlobalPost correspondents and videographers will produce weekly video segments to air on the broadcast and appear on the Website, and the two staffs will collaborate on story selection and production aspects.

The two parties also announced that GlobalPost executive editor Charles Sennott may occasionally appear on the show, which will be renamed PBS NewsHour Dec. 7.

The Web and television staffs for NewsHour had previously been housed in two separate buildings, but they were merged into a single 20-person bullpen in early November, The New York Times reported, adding that the Fort Hood shootings occurred four days after the move.

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Are you a shopaholic or a shopOholic? If the answer is the latter, Oxygen Media and Personal Shopper have a Website for your holiday needs.

shopOholic offers fresh content, electronic commerce, social shopping, interactive gaming and a holiday gift guide, and the site allows users to shop for Oxygen-branded merchandise, as well as curated looks and deals from name brands targeted toward young women.

The site also offers commerce-enabled games, and Oxygen will incorporate widgets throughout its Web properties.

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