MSCO March 21, 2011 at 11:01 AM
Mark Stevens? OMG! Doesnt type. Dont buy the marketing-hype. 1 in 20 is still a loser
Twitter Ordered to Turn Over WikiLeaks Data (issj.sys-con.com) at 1:00 AM
The Justice Department got a federal magistrate judge in Virginia last Friday
to uphold her previous order telling Twitter to give federal prosecutors
access to the accounts maintained by people close to WikiLeaks. That includes
the contacts, records of activity, e-mail addresses, banking and credit card
information associated with them. The government, which hasn’t asked for
content, is looking for evidence that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his
associates broke US law. It would like to tie Assange to Pfc. Bradley Manning,
the US soldier believed to have sent WikiLeaks a treasure trove of classified
documents. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier
Foundation and lawyers representing the account holders, including WikiLeaks
volunteer Birgitta Jónsdóttir, now a member of Iceland’s parliament, opposed
the move on First and Fourth Amendment grounds.
read more
TestDisk, PhotoRec Fix Disks, Recover Files (Computerworld) at 1:00 AM
If you’re a fan of character-based interfaces–such as DOS–and free data
recovery, you’re going to love TestDisk and its companion utility, PhotoRec (a
brother program included in the TestDisk download). Both free programs run in
a DOS box or from a command line and test, report on, fix common disk boot
problems, and recover files from damaged hard drives. All this is done at low
level, below the operating system.
Google Trashes Gears (websphere.sys-con.com) at 1:00 AM
Google is dumping Gears, the widgetry used to let Google Apps work offline.
The functionality has been moved to HTML 5. The company said in a blog that
there will be no new Gears releases, newer browsers such as Firefox 4 and
Internet Explorer 9 won’t be supported with plug-ins, and Gears will be
removed from Chrome in Chrome 12. In its place it’s implemented support for
application caches to replace Gears’ offline features, replaced Gears Database
API with an IndexedDB API that its “friends at Mozilla and Microsoft” – yeah,
it really said that – collaborated on, substituted a File API for Gears’ Blob
functionality and implemented the geolocation, notifications and web worker
APIs in Gears natively in Chrome.
read more
Web Design Software Pick of the Week: Mozy (About) at 1:00 AM
Yesterday I opened a project I’m working on, only to find that the file had
somehow become corrupted and most of the work I’d done on Friday was gone. In
the past that would have been devastating to me–having to re-do an entire
day’s work is not appealing. But I didn’t panic or even get upset. I just went
to my backups, restored my project from Friday night, and kept working where
I’d left off. There are lots of different personal backup options out there.
I’m on a Mac, so my first choice is TimeMachine. But sometimes that doesn’t
cut it (what if there were a fire–my TimeMachine disc is in the same room as
my computer). This is where a service like Mozy becomes really useful. You can
set up a system to back up up to 50GB for only $5.99US per month. Six dollars
isn’t too much to pay for peace of mind. Below I list a few options for online
backup–what online backup tools have you used?
* Automatic Backups: Mozy
* Backblaze
* Carbonite
* IDrive
* Jungle Disk
* SOS …
Article: Mobile Travel Planners Offer Marketers Growing Target (Emarketer.com) at 12:01 AM
Nearly a third of smartphone users will research travel plans via mobile this
year
Article: PR Pros Use Social Media More Effectively (Emarketer.com) at 12:01 AM
Both ad and PR agencies see social media revenue growing in 2011
Google Accuses Chinese of Blocking Gmail Service (New York Times) March 20, 2011 at 10:47 PM
Google says China has made it difficult for users to gain access to its e-mail
service.
Why Sentiment Analysis Is the Future of Ad Optimization (New York Times) at 9:23 PM
_[Peter Yared is the vice president of apps at Webtrends, which acquired
Transpond, a social-apps developer he founded.]_
Sentiment analysis is a hot new trend in social media, with the promise of
helping brands understand what consumers are thinking and saying about their
products. Products including early contender Radian 6, newcomers such as
BuzzLogic, and my own company’s Webtrends Social Measurement product are
becoming pervasive in marketing organizations. But while consumer sentiment is
important, what’s much more important is revenue.
When revenue is down 10%, “but people like us!” is not an acceptable response
from the head of marketing. Sentiment analysis isn’t a solution unto itself,
but it can be highly useful as a realtime feedback loop for advertising
effectiveness and may soon be able to predict advertising results.
In the Mad Men-era heyday of mass marketing, marketing spend was impossible to
quantify. TV, magazine, radio and billboard ads were purchased, and it was
very difficult if not impossible to track exactly the return on investment of
various slices of the marketing spend. Marketers would focus on issues like
branding, messages and color schemes, with virtually no feedback loop other
than the occasional focus group.
With the advent …
Randy Quaid performs "Star Whackers" song (Reuters) at 9:01 PM
TORONTO (Hollywood Reporter) – First he ran from the star whackers. Now Randy
Quaid has taken to a Vancouver concert stage to blast them in song with his
backup band, The Fugitives.