Offbeat posts

Yahoo is finally tossing its hat into the social media ring. Recently, Yahoo announced that it would be incorporating tweets into its newsfeed on Yahoo.com. This signals a serious shift, since Yahoo is giving equal weight to tweets and ‘bona fide news.’ Anyone who’s paying attention will have noticed that Twitter is one of the largest growing companies in the world. With over half a billion users and over $250 million in advertising revenue just last year, Twitter is also one of the most valuable brand strategy tools available to a company. However, Yahoo is now using Twitter as a news outlet,…

Nikola Tesla was ahead of his time. In many ways, he is still ahead of our time. Some of his inventions and discoveries are still baffling scientists today (notwithstanding the conspiracy theory that his technology has always been understood but was suppressed, but that’s a different story). If he were around today trying to raise funds for his wireless energy concept, there’s a good chance that he would be met with insurmountable obstacles. The money is controlled by people who are not adequate in their understanding of how such amazing inventions can operate in this world and are driven by the…

You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin’! Yep, times are still changing, as more public company boards are lending their ears to digital directors who can develop their online marketing, social media and mobile device strategies.  “Content marketing” is the new buzzword on everyone’s lips, and C-suite execs are finding themselves “increasingly ill-equipped in the boardroom” and, in many cases, digitally illiterate. This may be enough to scare many into hurriedly making a Facebook or Twitter page – but it’s not the whole…

There hasn’t been a movie since The Sixth Sense that had more potential for disaster than Star Trek: Into Darkness. No, Spock doesn’t see dead people, but that doesn’t take away for the desperate need to avoid that annoying co-worker who loves to talk about the movie he watched this weekend. Kudos to J.J. Abrams for pulling off one of the hardest challenges in Hollywood – making a movie that appeases the long-time faithful while still offering a complete experience to those who aren’t as familiar with the source material. Rotten Tomatoes, the consolidated source of reputable reviews, gave the…

If there’s one major flaw with the way that many businesses use automation tools, it’s that they’re not able to properly control the flow of content from its longest form down to it’s shortest form. This is unfortunate because using RSS feeds to post to Facebook and Twitter from a blog, for example, doesn’t save much time at all but minimizes the effectiveness of the networks. It’s all about flow. It’s about taking advantage of the strengths of the various networks will not falling into the traps that each allows. Let’s take a look at an example of content flow. In this case, we’re going to work it down…

There are two stages to this gambit by Yahoo that must be accomplished. They have to beat out Facebook, Microsoft, and anybody else interested in the 10-digit price that Tumblr is likely to fetch in the coming days. Then, they have to let the site be as it is and make no changes at all to the platform. The Swisher/Kafka tandem over at AllThingsD have reported that the Yahoo board is going to meet this weekend to discuss buying the social blogging platform for a reported $1.1 billion in cash. Sources said that the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s CEO Marissa Mayer has decided that buying Tumblr was going…

Content speaks for itself. It speaks for a company. It speaks to the people. Most business websites are sorely short on content. Sure, they have sales content and information about the company, but so few today are actually putting out high-quality content about relevant topics that make their websites more of a resource. Today, people want to trust a company before doing business with them and content is the easiest way for them to understand that you know what you’re doing. It’s not just about having information for visitors to see in order to convince them that you’re an expert. It’s also about…

The New Yorker, a magazine owned by Condé Nast Publications, released a new online service called Strongbox this morning. First put together by Aaron Swartz, who died in January, and Kevin Poulsen, Strongbox allows people to send documents and messages to the magazine with a reasonable amount of anonymity. For a long time now, anonymity has been a big issue with journalism. Often times sources will send confidential or even potentially dangerous information to journalists. Doing so anonymously means that they needn’t fear repercussions for leaking information, but modern technology…

In one corner, you have a real many who has dreams of a greener world that travels to space using genius and money. In the other corner, you have a fictional character who saves the world from bad guys using genius and money. The similarities don’t end with intellect and cash. Elon Musk has been successful in three completely different arenas: eCommerce through PayPal, environmentally friendly cars with Tesla, and space travel with SpaceX. His list of accomplishments are the type that you’d normally see from a fictional character, which makes the comparison to Iron Man’s Tony Stark an easy one…

We’ve seen the Minecraft treatment done to Game of Thrones that blew our minds with the digital effort put into it. Now, we get to see physical effort at its geekiest with this recreation of the Helm’s Deep battle scene from Lord of the Rings: Two Towers. So far, it has taken 150,000 LEGO blocks to put this thing together. It’s not complete, but you probably won’t even notice.  LEGO pros Rich and Big J K have outdone themselves with this particular creation. In the book/movie, the kingdom of Rohan was being threatened by Uruk-hai orcs sent by Saruman. The Rohirrim took refuge at Helm’s Deep to make…