Reviews

Social Media Outraged By Amazon's Objectionable Titles

by Ron Callari

How does a book with the heinous title, "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure" make Amazon's Top 100 list for Kindle? How does Amazon accept pre-orders for the hardcover version of "I Am the Market: How to Smuggle Cocaine by the Ton, in Five Easy Lessons," or sell "RapeLay," a video game in which the protagonist stalks and rapes women?

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iPad Throws Legacy Newspapers & Deep Throat Reporter A Life Raft

by Ron Callari

This week, the Washington Post joins the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Financial Times, The Guardian and The New York Times as the latest newspaper app to be made available on Apple's iPad. Over the course of the last two years, legacy newspapers have been shuttering their doors due to failing ad sales and reduced readership. With the innovation of the iPad, the cream of the crop are successfully migrating to a paperless world.

Social Media's McRib Gets Raked Over The Coals

by Ron Callari

In the early days of Twitter, a major brand like McDonald's didn't have to spend a dime on the microblogging site to sell a few extra Big Macs. With their following of over 60,000+ folks, a few well-placed tweets with a link to a discount or coupon usually did the trick. Now, with this year's roll-out of Twitter's Promoted Trends, McD's has been said to spend as much as $80,000 with a less than desired return on its investment.

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Social Media Goes Monster To Help White House Find Jobs

Obama & Monster.com to help Americans find jobs!

by Ron Callari

With the mid-term elections behind the administration, unemployment continues to be the paramount issue for most Americans - and the reason so many are frustrated with the the current policies in place to turn it around. Party affiliations take a back seat when it comes to issues that hit one's pocketbook.

Social Media Leaps The "Great Firewall" Of China With Kindle In Black Market

by Ron Callari

Amazon is once again in the news with its recent acquisition of Diaper.com for a cool $540 million. But the real story, somewhat overlooked in the States is the emergence of a black market (aka China's gray market) that's smuggling Kindle 3G's into the country for a specific purpose. Apparently, it's been discovered that Kindle is the only handheld device to date that can leap the "Great Firewall" of state Web censorship.

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Social Media's Bully Gets Taste Of His Own Medicine

by Ron Callari

Mark Zuckerberg's 'bad boy' image rendered from a movie, an unauthorized biography and a graphic novel was known early on to call his Facebook followers "dumb f*cks." Of recent date, he has censored Proposition 19 (for the legalization of marijuana in California) from advertising on his network, in addition to filing a lawsuit against a Web site called 'Teachbook' for daring to use the word "book" in its title.

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Social Media Data Wars Will Determine Semantic Web Leader

Facebook vs Google vs China to Dominate Web of the Future!

by Ron Callari

Social Media or Web 2.0 can be considered the battleground for Web 3.0's Semantic Web. The shift has been happening subtly but is picking up speed as Internet companies and nations vie for control of data. With 600 million users now on Facebook, Google's 1.3 billion visitors per week and China's 1.35 billion citizens, these three entities have the greatest opportunity to dominate the Web of the Future.

Social Media Inception Advertising Could Be Coming To A Social Network Near You

by Ron Callari

For anyone who has seen Christopher Nolan's mind-bending movie "Inception," the science of planting images and ideas into a subject's brain is not pure fiction. A research team at Northwestern University are actually working on a study designed to make people remember things that never happened. As a result, there is speculation that implanted memories into one's existing photos could alter one's reality of the past and subsequent brand loyalty.

Social Media Elections On Foursquare Just As Corrupt As Real World

by Ron Callari

Having just completed another exhausting political election season, it seems at this point in time we're pretty much jaded by corruption and the number of scandals that seem to surround many of our political figures on the state and federal levels. However, who would have suspected that corrupt mayors also existed on the nation's favorite location-based social network - Foursquare?

When iPhone Targets Retail Stores Will It Lose Its Caché?

by Ron Callari

Just in time for the holidays, after launching sales and support for the iPhone at Best Buy and Walmart back in June, Apple is officially going mainstream when it arrives at Target stores on November 7. Consumers will be able to purchase both the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS at any of the department store chains' 846 stores. With such a major merchandising change-up like this, does Apple run the risk of losing some of its mystique and exclusivity by going mainstream?

Sound Asleep Pillow Soothes The Savage Beast

by Doug Bonderud

This built-in speaker pillow sings out its desire to bring peace, if not quiet, to the sleeping masses.

Social Media Netizens In Europe Migrate From Home-Grown Networks To Facebook

by Ron Callari

For those that doubt the ubiquity of Facebook, one has only to look at the trend emerging in European countries, where home-grown social networks are either being sold or are losing their user base to Facebook. World domination is a slow process, but one that Facebook appears to be making headway across the pond.

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Social Media App That Detects Apathy & Lazy Voters

by Ron Callari

Voter turn-out for mid-term elections normally - well - how should I put this… suck! Where the 2008 national election turnout came in at 56.8 percent, the mid-terms in 2002 and 2006 averaged less than 38 percent. Why is this the case?

Social Media's Privacy Satirized With 'Fear Medal' At DC Sanity Rally

Stephen Colbert's first Annual "Fearie" Award!

by Ron Callari

Appropriately enough, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook were presented with a Fear Award at the first-time "Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear" event hosted by satirical pundits Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert at the National Mall in DC today. In true "point-counterpoint" fashion the two venerable comedians traded barbs as to who best represented reasonableness versus those that raised the bar on ratcheting up the public's sense of fear.

Social Media Strategy Targeting China, Japan, India & Brazil

Social Media Strategy Targeting China, Japan, India And Brazil

by Ron Callari

In June, 2010, when the Internet World Stats report published the "Top 20 Countries With Highest Number of Internet Users," it was not a surprise that China, the US, Japan, India and Brazil would take the top spots. According to the data, the highest percentage of Internet users are China with 21.4%, the USA with 12.2%, Japan with 5.0%, India with 4.1% and Brazil with 3.9%.

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Social Media Shopping Deals For Facebook's 500+ Million Potential Buyers

by Ron Callari

Ever since the Groupon model landed on the digital landscape and captured the imagination of so many consumers so quickly, everyone seems to want a piece of their marketshare. And that includes Facebook. Rumored reports from watchdog blog All Facebook says that local shopping deals are being tested.

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Social Media Lobbyists - Facebook Fights Big Brother?

by Ron Callari

During this past summer, Facebook reportedly spent more than $6,600 lobbying California state officials to kill the "Social Networking Privacy Act." While that doesn't seem like a lot of money, especially for Facebook, it does mark the first push-back by a social network in an attempt to quash state legislature from imposing regulations over social networking terms of service.

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A Cheap Social Media Shopping Network (Just In Time) For The Holidays!

by Ron Callari

With the holidays fast approaching, the team at blinkx.com has developed a new social shopping network, with a few extra bells and whistles than some of the others noted in my previous post titled, "Top Ten Social Shopping Networks (Just In Time) For The Holidays." A great tool for not only comparison shopping but also an opportunity to share your shopping experiences with like-minded shoppers in the Cheep community.

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Social Media Virtual Currency: Does Facebook Or Zynga Hold The Purse Strings?

Facebook Credits vs Zynga Virtual Currency!

by Ron Callari

After Target became the first retailer to sell Facebook Credits gift cards in its stores last month, this week Walmart and Best Buy jumped into the fray selling $5, $10 and $25 denominations of FB Credits just in time for the holiday season. At the same time, Zynga filed a patent for "Virtual Playing Chips in a Multiuser Online Game Network." Are these tactics separate issues or the first signs of a strategic battle of wills between the two Internet powerhouses?

Social Media's Web 2.0 Merges Into Semantic Web With Paper.li

by Ron Callari

Did you ever think about becoming Editor-in-Chief of your own newspaper? Well, Paper.li can score you that gig. In an automated process, those you follow on Twitter and the links included in their tweets, can essentially become the subject matter of your own daily online newspaper that you can create in less than 5 minutes. As social media generates real-time news, it can now interface with Paper.li to not only publish this news onto a micro-site, it will also tweet it out to all of one's Twitter followers daily.

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