Archives: January 2010

Facebook corporate-communications associate Malorie Lucich wrote a post on the Facebook Blog discussing how the social-networking site’s News Feed enabled her to follow two earthquakes — a minor one near Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., and the devastating one that hit Haiti.

Lucich discussed Facebook efforts by news organizations including ABCNews.com, France 24, The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN, CBS News, CNBC, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, and USA Today.

Highlights from Lucich’s post:

When the earthquake hit Haiti, victims in the area, news affiliates, and people around the world used Facebook to learn what was happening, connect with loved ones and quickly disseminate information. ABCNews.com and France 24 added Facebook live-stream boxes to their sites to enable people to share their feelings on the disaster and relief efforts, and publish it back to their Facebook status. Meanwhile, The New York Times created a special Facebook Page dedicated to Haiti coverage, resources, and updates from their reporters on the ground.

Just as your friends can post news throughout the day, so do many news outlets. By connecting with their Facebook Pages, you can stay updated and interact with outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, and CNN, and directly with reporters and anchors such as Katie Couric of the CBS Evening News and CNBC’s Nicole Lapin.

You can even create a “News” list to filter news-oriented Pages into one view on your News Feed. Simply add relevant Pages to the list, just as you would with a friends list. The next time you sign on to Facebook, you can click the “News” filter to see stories from all of the news outlets of which you’ve become a fan.

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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.

The world of social games was abuzz this week of January 25, 2010. EA is looking for more social games companies, Sony Online Entertainment partners with Live Gamer, Taito uses OpenFeint for its iPhone titles, Break Media enters Social Gaming, and more. Read on for this week’s social gaming news.

Esquire’s director of design last week showed off his foray into the world of “augmented reality” at a Sobel Media event in Manhattan. David Curcurito created a December cover featuring Robert Downey, Jr., seated atop a box with a marker on it. After a download, a consumer can scan that marker in front of a [...]

In preparation for its implementation of an online pay wall in early 2011, announced last week, The New York Times announced a handful of staff changes at NYTimes.com.

Paul Smurl was promoted to the newly created position of vice president, NYTimes.com paid products, where he will be responsible for the implementation and financial performance of the metered model, as well as growing paid products, crossword subscriptions and mobile game products. Smurl, who had been VP of advertising, reports to The New York Times Media Group senior VP and chief advertising officer and NYTimes.com general manager Denise Warren.

VP of operations and strategy Eliot Pierce was promoted to VP, advertising and digital strategy, business development and ad operations, continuing to oversee digital strategy and business development for NYTimes.com while adding oversight of advertising planning and digital ad operations. He will continue reporting to Warren.

Nick Ascheim was promoted to the newly created post of VP, new ventures, from VP, product management. Ascheim will be tasked with extending the newspaper’s reach into different products, services and platforms, including new video opportunities, and he will now report to Warren.

Former VP, classified products Ira Silberstein was elevated to VP, product management and classifieds, continuing to report to chief technology officer, digital operations Marc Frons and adding oversight of the product-management group.

And Rob Larson was promoted to VP, search products, from VP, digital production. He will continue to manage The New York Times Index, Times Online Services and The Times’ Digital Archive Distribution relationships, adding a focus on its Open Topic platform and semantic Web initiative. Larson continues to report to Frons.

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Bloomberg Television anchors Erik Schatzker, Margaret Brennan, and Francine Lacqua broke in their respective Twitter accounts — @ErikSchatzker, @margbrennan, and @Flacqua — at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, this week, mixing in news from the conference with observations about being in Davos.

Some tweets from Schatzker:

Davos 2010: This place always has a few surprises. Tonight’s: essence of pigeon consomme? I know, sounds awful. But it was delicious.

Why come to #Davos: Where else can you run into Cisco’s Chambers, AMAT’s Splinter and Teck’s Lindsay, all in less than 10 minutes.

It’s dumping in #Davos! How many #WEF delegates will ditch the sessions for the slopes? That fresh powder sure is tempting.

From Brennan:

#wef #davos #soros “the mistake of allowing lehman to go bust” made system break down and caused artificial life support to be used

Is banning the burqa going to help or hurt muslim women in france? and is the debate really about the burqa? http://bit.ly/9ovEi4

Just wrapped an interview w/the stunningly intelligent & beautiful Queen Rania – HM asking companies/govt to make good on aid

And from Lacqua:

Snowing very hard #wef #davos – set looks covered in sugar-ice

Almunia says there is ‘no chance’ Greece will leave euro zone

#wef #davos trying to get to Bill Gates at Congress Center

Seesmic founder and CEO Loic Le Meur was the moderator of a Wednesday panel at the World Economic Forum meeting taking place in Davos, Switzerland, through Sunday.

The panel, The Growing Influence of Social Networks, also included Forrester Research CEO George Colony, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini, Wikinomics author Don Tapscott, Facebook director of market development Randi Zuckerberg, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta, and Twitter CEO Evan Williams.

Inside Network will hold its Inside Social Apps 2010 conference at an as-yet-undetermined venue in San Francisco April 20.

The parent company of Inside Facebook set the date for one day before Facebook’s f8 developers’ conference, also in San Francisco, and it said Inside Social Apps 2010 is aimed at developers on Facebook, MySpace, and the iPhone, as well as senior executives and investors.

Confirmed speakers currently include:
Atul Bagga, vice president, equity research, games, ThinkEquity
Adam Caplan, VP, virtual currency, Super Rewards/Adknowledge
Renata Dionello, chief of staff to the CEO, eBay, and former director of consumer business development, PayPal
Eric Eldon, editor, Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games
George Garrick, CEO, Offerpal Media
Vikas Gupta, CEO, Jambool
Sebastien de Halleux, founder and chief executive officer, Playfish
Nick Lawler, managing director, Maverick Capital
Vish Makhijani, COO, Zynga
David Marcus, CEO, Zong
Dave McClure, investor, Founders Fund Angel and fbFund Incubator
Rex Ng, co-founder and CEO, 6waves
Jason Oberfest, VP, social applications, ngmoco
Mark Pincus, founder and CEO, Zynga
Shervin Pishevar, founder and executive chairman, SGN
John Pleasants, CEO, Playdom
Keith Rabois, VP, strategy and business development, Slide
Peter Relan, executive chairman, CrowdStar
Justin Smith, founder, Inside Network
Kavin Stewart, CEO, Lolapps
Jay Weintraub, founder, LeadsCon

mediabistro.com will be holding two related conferences, also in San Francisco: the Social Gaming Summit May 6-7 and the Social Developer Summit in June.

AOL News is AOL News again, and Sphere was jettisoned into the stratosphere, as an AOL tipster told Silicon Alley Insider that CEO Tim Armstrong was no fan of branding the news site Sphere.

AOL announced in November that the name of its blog-content engine would change from Sphere to Surphace, and that the main page for AOL News would be rebranded as Sphere, but the Sphere URL is automatically redirecting Web surfers to AOL News.

As reported by Silicon Alley Insider, the official explanation, from the AOL News About Us page:

Welcome to AOL News. Over the last few months, we’ve overhauled our site and we’ve built a news operation that relies far less on wire reports and focuses on original reporting, analysis, and commentary.

We’ve been featuring those stories on Sphere.com, a site designed to showcase our exclusive stories. Our coverage on Sphere was received with such positive attention that we’ve decided to fold it all into AOL News, a site we hope will become the place you go for news, analysis and opinion.

Who can’t use $50 these days? One way to collect that sum: Write a 1,000-word interview with one of the 2,000 or so bands and artists set to perform at the SXSW 2010 music festival in Austin, Texas, March-17-21, along with a biography of 300-500 words, for AOL’s Seed.com, according to GigaOM.

Former New York Times writer Saul Hansell, who was named head of programming at Seed in December, told GigaOM he is trying to learn how to “deploy human intelligence at scale,” adding that the goal of Seed.com is not just to aggregate “the lowest-common denominator of SEO-friendly pages.”

Hansell added that willing free-lancers would be provided with questions, and all submissions would be edited by AOL staff, telling GigaOM the goal was to “attract the people who are already excited about the process (and give them a) mix of financial and non-financial rewards.”

On the subject of Seed.com, TBI Research reports that its content-management system will not be ready until the end of 2010, adding that AOL’s acquisition of StudioNow will allow it to tap into a higher-quality video free-lance network.

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, who got his own CNN show based on his prolific use of social media, is going Hollywood.

Sanchez has been asked to moderate a panel at the Recording Academy’s Social Media Rock Starts Summit ahead of this weekend’s Grammy awards.

The panel includes Digg CEO Jay Adelson, Pete Cashmore, founder and CEO of Mashable, Courtney Holt, president of MySpace Music and Tumblr founder David Karp.

This afternoon’s conversation, held at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, will spotlight the intersection of music and the digital space focusing on the evolution of social media and how it has radically changed the way music fans consume and share news and information about their favorite artists.

Actor Jared Leto, who will also participate on the panel, will be on Sanchez’s CNN show “Rick’s List” today. Leto spent part of his youth in Haiti — his parents were missionaries — so expect the two to talk about the situation there.

> Update: Leto won’t be on CNN, after all. But he is still part of the panel which is being streamed on CNN.com.

> Update 2: Turns out Leto did make it for his interview on Sanchez’s show. As did Jody Whatley.