More Fuel for the Social-Media-At-Work Debate
Not long after we discussed the stats, pros, cons, and variables for social media use in the workplace, here at Murdok, UK firm Demos has been talking about a study that suggests that social media is in fact good for businesses. I’m still sticking with the "it depends on a number of variables" theory, but the Demos info is worth taking a look at either way.
Google Helps Volunteers Recruit Voters
Recently Google launched a couple tools for helping people find out the information they need to vote on November 4th. They created a site based on Google Maps, and a Google Gadget supplying essentially the same info. To use these, you would search for your address, and then you would be provided with information like how to register to vote in your state, your state’s election website, and the location at which you are supposed to vote.
Showing Respect With Your Anchor Text
Bloggers and other web-based writers do a lot of linking. It’s great for the Blogosphere. In fact it’s really the only reason we have a Blogosphere. How often are our links misleading though? I’m not talking about "paid" or sponsored links that are deceptive and just trying to go after a click. That’s another issue entirely. I’m talking about just the everyday point-of-reference links.
Cogent and Sprint Break the Internet!
Tens of thousands of public internet addresses located on Cogent’s backbone are no longer accessible from Sprint Customers. This disruption is affecting thousands of web properties including Murdok.com. Drudgereport.com was also affected by this outage but has apparently managed to route around Sprint’s network.
Broadband Users See Service As A Must
High speed Internet customers like their service but 30 percent are willing to ditch their provider if they can find a more affordable service elsewhere, according to a report from J.D. Power & Associates.Cost savings is cited by 69 percent of high-speed Internet customers and 40 percent of dial-up customers as the main reason they would consider switching providers.
Google Stands Behind the Cloud
Today Google is touting the reliability of Gmail, and comparing the service to several "on-premises" solutions in terms of downtime and lost productivity. In a post on the Official Google Blog, Google Enterprise Product Director Matthew Glotzbach writes:
What Home Entertainment Technology Will Win?
There has been a lot of new news lately around the idea of home entertainment and media and I wanted to write a post reflecting on recent announcements coming out of Microsoft on their Media Center platform in Windows 7, the new XBox 360, an increasing role for Netflix’s "watch now" technology and today’s announcement regarding Netflix by TiVo.
Link Directly To Any Moment in a YouTube Video
YouTube announced today that it has implemented the ability to jump straight to any point in a video by simply adding a few extra characters at the end of the video’s URL. The YouTube Team explains on the official blog: To create a deep link, append the following to the end of a YouTube video URL: #t=1m15s. This says to link to the time 1:15 – you can replace the numbers before the ‘m’ and the ‘s’ with anything you like.
McBrain vs. Zombama
Upon a seller tagging his or her Barack Obama mask in such a way to make it appear for the term “terrorist costume,” Amazon has made the proper adjustments. While that’s a fascinating event, there’s still a lot of guilt-by-association fun to be had by examining Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…” feature.
A Gold Rush For Twitter Squatters?
There’s no good way to mashup the words Twitter and squatting into anything new and cutesy (a la Twellow, Tweeple, Twapper); the two just don’t mesh well. The proposed rush to secure your or your brand’s Twitter ID to guard against Twitter-squatting might not mesh well to you, either.