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I am no longer a part of Stack Exchange. I still have much literal and figurative stock in the success of Stack Exchange, of course, but as of March 1st I will no longer be part of the day to day operations of the company, or the Stack Exchange sites, in any way. It's been almost exactly 4 years since I chose my own adventure. In those four years, we accomplished incredible things together. Stack Overflow is now an enormous bustling city, a hugely positive influence on the daily lives of progra...  show all text

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The band OK Go is known for its imaginative and original videos, and its latest, for “Needing/Getting”, is no exception. This time the folks from OK Go played the instruments used in the song – with a car. They outfitted a Chevy Sonic with retractable pneumatic arms, and then drove it around with the arms hitting more than 1,000 actual instruments posted on the side of the road in a desert near Los Angeles. What makes the entire project really amazing (and a bit crazy) is the fact that the enti...  show all text

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So you’ve got a great job that’s waiting to be filled at your company, and you decide you want to tap into the already measured power of social media recruiting. You start to wrestle with the big kahuna, LinkedIn, and you’re also covering niche social media sites for your industry. But you may be ignoring an intensely powerful tool hiding right under your nose — Facebook. The social media mega-site has proven successful for snapping up young professionals, but it can be a great resource for fin...  show all text

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Good luck with that, there aren't any. If you hesitate when leaping from rope to another, you're not going to last very long. And this is at the heart of what makes innovation work in organizations, why industries die, and how painful it is to try to maintain the status quo while also participating in a revolution. Gather up as much speed as you can, find a path and let go. You can't get to the next rope if you're still holding on to this one.

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The New York Giants official website accidentally announced the winner of Super Bowl XLVI more than 24 hours before Sunday’s big game even started, by the look of images floating around the web. The error was immortalized Saturday in this TwitPic screenshot (above), which Jeff Frias posted to Twitter. No signs of the mistake are left on the team’s site other than a reported link that leads to the image below: The Giants have yet to publicly confirm whether this whammy is real or the handy-work ...  show all text

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This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. The Google Chrome Web Store has made it easy for anyone to stay organized, and the browser has gotten much faster, as we’ve noticed in the beta version of Chrome 17. But as the web gets bigger and stronger, so many apps and plugins are available that it’s hard to know which is the best for you. If you’re running a business  show all text

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This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. Companies that rely on a visual or photographic web presence often find it difficult to convey their media on Twitter. Take, for instance, apparel brands that need to get social media eyes on their merchandise, or a design firm that seeks exposure. How can these types of businesses ensure that Twitter followers see their ...  show all text

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This guest post is by Marcus Sheridan of The Sale Lion. We’re all communicators. That’s what we do. Some of us love the feel of pen in hand. Others find joy as the fingers hit the key pad. But for me, the magic is in the communion that occurs in front of a live audience, a place where I feel more at home than any other. Like you, I’m a blogger. I’m also a business owner. In fact, I own a swimming pool company. Ten years ago, I started the business with my two partners. The challenges of entrepr...  show all text

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While playing for the Tennessee Valley Vipers in the Arena Football League, and pursuing his dream of playing football professionally, Lewis Howes broke his wrist diving for a pass. He gutted out the rest of the season, playing through his injury, but underwent career-ending surgery in the offseason. For the next six months he wore a full-arm cast and went about trying to answer the lingering question, “What now?” He didn’t have a back up plan — it was football or nothing. Following the advice ...  show all text

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Facebook’s public offering will make a lot of billionaires and millionaires, some of them prominent people and others not.

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This year’s fifth annual Crunchies Awards has just finished up at the classy Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and it was a smashing success. We poked fun #humblebraggers, got cussed at by Siri, honored former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde, and gave wild monkey trophies to tech’s greatest innovators. If you missed the event or our livestream, check out the full list of nominees and winners below. The world owes a thank you to Jack Dorsey, the “Founder Of The Year” and leader of Twitter, win...  show all text

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How much do you know about the NASA space program, Earthling? NASA has launched a multi-player Facebook game to test just that. Space Race Blastoff poses a series of surprisingly tough questions — for example, who launched the first liquid-fueled rocket? — that cover a range of space-related topics including history, technology and science. There’s even a pop culture category. Users play the game by choosing an avatar then answering a series of 10 multiple-choice questions. They can compete with  show all text

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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Quipol Quick Pitch: Quipol is a web application that makes creating and embedding polls on blogs easy. Genius Idea: Quipol allows bloggers to get feedback from their audiences with a super simple and customizable polling template. If Quipol were an ice cream flavor, it would be vanill...  show all text

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Are you looking for some good blogs to read? Look no further! Our third-annual social media blog contest generated nearly 600 nominations (almost twice as many as last year’s contest). Our panel of social media experts carefully reviewed the nominees and finalists, analyzing the quality of their content, the frequency of posts and reader involvement (among other things). With that in mind, here are ten blogs that need to be at the top of your reading list. #1: Social Mouths Social Mouths, the b...  show all text

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While many modern executives live behind a wall of communications operatives, Rupert Murdoch, the chief of News Corporation, is openly expressing his opinions on Twitter.

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Sure, it's easy to grab a first name from a database or glean some info from a profile. But when you pretend to know me, you've already started our relationship with a lie. You've cheapened the tools we use to recognize each other and you've tricked me, at least a little. Direct mail used to take advantage of this technique a lot, and since they measure everything, they knew when it worked. Online, though, we're seeing less disciplined marketers (big and small) continually mess it up. The clues...  show all text

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It really is a choice, one or the other. Either you happily recommend the best option for your customer, or you give preference to your own items first. Either you believe in what you sell, or you don't. Either you treat your best partners better, or you treat everyone the same. Either you shade the truth when it's painful to do otherwise, or you consistently share what's important. Either you always keep your promises or you don't. Either you give me the best price the first time, or you make ...  show all text

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The debate about what should — and shouldn’t — show in a Google search result for “santorum” has been well-documented, at this point. But I’d like to use this now famous search to illustrate something else: how it appears Google is taking its eye off the ball of... Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

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A staggering manufacturing system in China has made it possible for Apple and other companies to make devices almost as quickly as they can be dreamed up, but for workers, it can be dangerous.

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The NFL is going to allow players to tweet during the game from this Sunday’s Pro Bowl. As first reported by CNBC’s Darren Rovell, players will be allowed to tweet from a designated area on the sidelines. The NFL, often called the “No Fun League,” famously disallowed in-game tweeting in July of 2009. The NFL later fined a player for tweeting from a training camp. Still, the league’s position regarding social media has evolved over time. Of course, this is the NFL, so the sanctioned Pro Bowl twe...  show all text

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Mashable’s Davos coverage is presented by BMW i, a new concept dedicated to providing mobility solutions for the urban environment. Documented@Davos The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, has been called one of the most important conferences in the world. Once a year, heads of state, politicians and leaders from across the world join together for a week to discuss the key global economic, societal and political issues that will shape the coming year. There’s often a debate about the ...  show all text

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You can run, but you can't hide. Facebook's biggest user interface overhaul since the Wall, the Facebook Timeline, is now becoming mandatory for all users. According to the company, over the next few weeks, everyone will get the new Timeline. And here's the important part: when you do, you'll have just seven days to preview what's there now, and hide anything you don't want others to see.

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Gearing up for Twitter’s self-serve advertising launch — currently in beta stage with only a small selection of advertisers — the company announced its acquisition of spam and malware protection service Dasient on Monday. Dasient will be integrated into Twitter’s “revenue engineering team because they have a deep understanding of advertising-platform security issues,” says Rachael Horwitz, a spokesperson for Twitter. The team will be very valuable as Twitter continues to expand its ad products....  show all text

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This guest post is by Herman Dias of SEOsoeasy.com. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will have heard about the Google Panda update and what it did to many low-quality websites last year. It was more like a Google sniper attack on all the spam and rubbish sites. Honestly, this does not seem to be the end of the Panda: there is more to come, and we need to watch out. The whole reason Google made these changes was to give Google users a good experience when they use Google search, and w...  show all text

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Editor’s note: Mark Hendrickson is the founder and CEO of Plancast, a social site for planning events, which he has decided to stop working on full-time. In this guest post, Hendrickson takes us through a detailed analysis of why it never took off and what he learned. He is also a former TechCrunch writer. Nearly three years ago, I left my position at TechCrunch to start my own Internet business, with the idea of creating a web application that’d help people get together in real-life rather than  show all text

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This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. An entrepreneur’s life can be a real roller coaster. Having started a few businesses in my career, I thought it would be useful to highlight some of the hard-won experience I’ve learned throughout the process — the kind of advice I wish I’d known when I started my first, or even second, business. 1. Don’t Underestimate a...  show all text

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