By Ryan Chittum Conor Friedersdorf makes a nice catch on Tom Friedman's Sunday column bemoaning the commercialization of seemingly all aspects of American life: For example, his column is bizarrely titled, "This Column Is Not Sponsored by Anyone," despite the fact that right above it on NYTimes.com there is a banner ad for a Citi/American Airlines credit card. But Friedersdorf...

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Hitting the friendly skies doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t make a mobile phone call — at least if you’re flying on one of Virgin’s new Airbus A330 planes. The airline plans to make in-flight calling available first on its flight from London to New York. By the end of the year, in-flight calling will be available on 17 planes and at least 10 routes. Calls will be restricted to the time the plane is actually in the air – so you’ll still have to power off when the plane takes off or lands – and...  show all text

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I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon. It’s not that the word “privilege” is incorrect, it’s that it’s not their word. When confronted with “privilege,” they fiddle with the word itself, and haul out the dictionaries and find every possible way to talk about the word but not any of the things the word signifies. So, the challenge: ...  show all text

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Some states are diverting their share of a $2.5 billion they were awarded in the mortgage settlement, money intended to help homeowners and mitigate the effects of foreclosures.

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  As a global organization, Black Card Circle's reach extends beyond its North American home. BCC Founder Lotay Yang recently traveled to China, the world's 2nd largest economy. Read one of his personal experiences there on Lotay's blog.

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General Motors plans to stop advertising on Facebook after determining its paid ads had little impact on consumers. The news comes just days ahead of Facebook's IPO.

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Klout is the Standard for Influence. Join Klout to discover your influence and compare with others you may know.

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Government plans which could reduce state benefits paid to thousands of blind people have sparked a revolt by Liberal Democrat MPs in the latest sign of tension inside the Coalition over cuts.

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When I was younger, my parents liked to listen to the big soft rock stations in Los Angeles. Once in a while, the sappy love songs would be interrupted by an emotional dedication from a boy/girlfriend to their significant other. It was awkward, but also kind of beautiful. But mostly awkward. Now it sounds like Pandora has made an impressive gesture toward keeping that tradition alive, while also demonstrating the power of its ad targeting. So yeah, this happened: Someone, specifically someone n...  show all text

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Tweet Big news came in from the folks at Buffer and Twylah this week. The two companies partnered up to give your Tweets much more impact than possible before. I’ve written about the magical Power Tweet before, which increases your engagement by 400%. As of today, you can make this Power Tweet from Twylah even more powerful and send it through Buffer. Buffer, if you haven’t come across it yet, is a super smart Social Sharing app. Any page that you read on the web and want to share with your f...  show all text

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Former Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic is due to go on trial in The Hague on 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Allan Little, who covered the Bosnia war for the BBC, reflects on the conflict.

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Posted by Carson Ward If the last few months of ranking changes have shown me anything, it's that poorly executed link building strategy that many of us call white hat can be more dangerous than black-hat strategies like buying links. As a result of well intentioned but short-sighted link building, many sites have seen significant drops in rankings and traffic. Whether you employ link building tactics that are black, white, or any shade of grey, you can do yourself a favor by avoiding the appea...  show all text

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Facebook social travel app Gogobot announced on Wednesday that it has reached the 1 million registered users mark. The app launched on Facebook in January, when the social network unveiled a slew of integrated apps, including Gogobot. Gogobot was in use before that time, launching in private beta 18 month ago. Now the app is exploding in popularity: A new user joins every 15 seconds, more than 5 million places have been shared on Gogobot and overall membership has grown 65x year-on-year. The so...  show all text

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In the white heat of the current tech market it’s sometimes easy to forget that some companies, although taking their time, simply become viable businesses – instead of waiting for a call from Facebook or Twitter that may never come. I’ve been covering web site and shop builder Moonfruit for longer than I care to remember (they launched in 2000), but along the way husband and wife team Joe and Wendy White kept on pushing the company until it was one of the most innovative of its kind out there....  show all text

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Cloud-based telephony API startup Twilio has made significant inroads into VoIP and other carrier services like SMS by launching products that work on the web and in iOS apps, supporting 90,000 registered developer accounts in the process. Today it’s widening that net considerably with the launch of a new Android client, the first SDK from the company to work on Google’s platform. And it hints that Windows Phone may be next in line. Considering that Android is currently the most popular smartph...  show all text

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Erin Podolak (blog, Twitter) was interviewed at The SA Incubator a few weeks ago. Then she decided to turn the tables on me and interview me ...

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The world continues to wait for more details on what caused the surprising $2 billion trading loss at J.P. Morgan. As far as we know, the loss occured through J.P. Morgan's Chief Investment Office under the watch of trader Bruno Iksil. But who was on the other side of that trade? According to a new report from the The New York Post's Michelle Celarier, the man on the other side was Boaz Weinstein, head of Saba Capital Management and former proprietary trader at Deutsche Bank.  From the Post: A ...  show all text

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The Twitterverse has been ablaze with blokes getting things off their chests. Is it a guy thing? It's been a shrill week for male rage on Twitter. Sony award loser Huey Morgan ranted about radio colleagues (Lauren Laverne: "Ask me to cover for her and up her ratings. F*ck that sh*t"; Fearne Cotton: "sh*t is fake") followed reliable Twitterranters Joey Barton (Gary Lineker is an "odious little toad") and Giles Coren, who called a critic of his Times column a "barren old hag". If aggression is any  show all text

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When Facebook made it easy to share what videos you were watching, companies like Socialcam, Metacafe, DailyMotion and Viddy rocketed up the app-charts and saw a sharp increase in the usage and downloads of these apps. Of course, with this friction-less sharing actions came howls of complaints from Facebook’s users. Well, it seems the party has come to an end. The reality check is eerily reminiscent of the decline in attention for social news-reader applications. AppData.com statistics show a s...  show all text

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German designers placed a high-tech, sensor-equipped chair in the middle of a palazzo in Milan last month to record stress points on the backsides of thousands of people. The goal? To determine how to design a lightweight and efficient chair that’s sturdy enough to support a wide variety of users. When someone sat in the chair, monitors recorded data and processed it with an “algorithm that determines the most structurally efficient version of the chair,” according to the blog Co.Design. The en...  show all text

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Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, post links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.

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Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea.

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Mr. Sorkin said last year that he was inclined to adapt Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs for Sony. But no deal had been set until now.

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There are a bunch of ways to explain away GM’s decision to stop spending ad dollars on Facebook. We’ll get to those. But there’s one thing that even the most ardent Facebook fan can’t argue with: Facebook advertising is very much a work in progress. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Facebook itself: “We believe that most advertisers are still learning and experimenting with the best ways to leverage Facebook to create more social and valuable ads,” the company says in its IPO filing. If you’...  show all text

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It couldn’t have happened at a worse time for Facebook, which has its initial public offering of stock later this week. General Motors has decided to stop advertising on the social networking giant, citing concerns about the site’s effectiveness. Meanwhile, a Forrester analyst says... Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

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Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea. More »

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