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Facebook Quiz Blocker!

Description: "It will only block quizzes and trivia, and has a handy block in the upper right to show them again. Choice! Now I found out useful happenings about my friends."

News from the Herd: Has the Web created a 'brand bubble'?

The reason for all this? Surprise, surprise, the democratisation of the Web and the rise of social media. According to the authors, brands by and large haven?t shifted gear still keeping hold of 20th century notions of brand control. When instead: ?Like a wiki page, the concept of ?what is truth? is open to critique and is always changing."

America's Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire (WSJ)

Paid bloggers fit just about every definition of a microtrend: Their ranks have grown dramatically over the years, blogging is an important social and cultural movement that people care passionately about. Bloggers make money if their consumers click the ads on their sites, which is of course a system that promotes sensationalism, or doing whatever it takes to get noticed. All this fits with the trend toward Opinion TV. Less and less of our information flow is devoted to gathering facts, and more and more is going toward popularizing opinion. Twenty-four-hour news channels have been replaced by 24-hour opinion channels. The chatter is the story.

Avinash Kaushik looks at the misleading world of Daily, Weekly, Monthly Unique Visitors

Many web analytics programs don't count Absolute Visitors and so give stats that are less than helpful.

News from the Herd: More important to problem solve than come to consensus

The academics found that the more talking there was, the less effective the group was. Instead, it was better to come up with a set problem solving task in meetings, rather than try and end up with a consensus. According to Jessica Mesmer-Magnus: ?Teams who talk more amongst themselves aren?t necessarily sharing useful information. Therefore, they?re not actually coming to a better result. Rather, it?s more important what the teams are talking about, than how much they are talking.?

O'Reilly's Joshua-Michele Ross: Why Business Needs To Get Social

There is another implication for businesses in the term "social": a recognition that we are moving increasingly toward a new model of engagement for businesses, that is, (you guessed it!) social. We have many years of refining a model of management that centers on routinization of work and highly constrained communications flow. We have extracted as much productivity as we are likely to get from these command-and-control techniques, and we have squelched enough employee value in the process.

Advergirl with a review of a neat social media-integrated site

So, the site maps in comments from the Facebook page; pulls in Tweets with a certain hashtag; grabs photos from Flickr, etc. Super simple show and tell with a whole campus of feedback. Proving again that one of the best assets an agency can have is a bootstrappy programmer who's willing to take home a weighty print out of Facebook developer guidelines and mine for answers.

News from the Herd makes the O'Reilly Facebook/Corporate post the quote of the day

This harks back to the Skittles experiment, where a standard homepage was replaced by social media feeds. It was noteworthy, not because of the way it was implemented, but because it questioned the purpose of old-school one-way websites.

Picturesurf

Easy embeddable picture galleries for blogs.

Eudora Mailbox Cleaner

Migrates Thunderbird email to Apple Mail

How to Enable Safari Single Window Mode on Mac OS X | Answerbag.com

Add Google Maps directions tool to site

Easy links & forms for driving directions via Google Maps

Recording Skype calls on GarageBand with LineIn and SoundFlower (Mac)

Don't see why it wouldn't work with Quicktime or Audacity. Question: can built-in mic be substituted for an external, plugged in one?

15 Apps for Recording Skype Conversations | VoIP Sol

TinyChat.com

From ReadWriteWeb: Tinychats works exactly as advertised. It's a disposable, no-frills chatroom, with a deliberately limited feature set. There are no accounts to sign up for and whenever you open up a new room, TinyChat will simply create a new URL for you.