I have been blogging professionally for nearly five years — it has been my sole source of income. It isn’t by any means an easy career decision, but I make it work for me. But, as they say, all good things must come to an end, and I fear that the day of the professional blogger is no different. For now, I’m in good company: 34 percent of bloggers who participated in Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere in 2010 revealed that they partake in this blogging endeavor on a full-time or part-time basis, meaning there is money to be made. Blogging is also incredibly popular in the States, where 33 percent of respondents…

There is a shift happening in the automotive industry when it comes to marketing from the dealers up to the OEMs. New Media (which includes social media, mobile, local marketing, search, etc) has witnessed hesitant adoption over recent years in the industry, but the last 12 months has seen a tremendous spike. It’s almost a complete turnaround and in some cases, traditional marketing has been completely abandoned. “Over the last 3 years the Kelly Automotive Group (10 Franchises) has shifted our advertising budget from 95% traditional marketing and 5% online media marketing to a 55%/45% split,”…

I have a question: how did you arrive to this article? Did you find your way here from Google Search? If by the slight chance you did, you might want to pay attention — you are part of a dying breed. Google Search is past its peak. Those cute Google Doodle’s are all that’s left. I became acclimated with Google Search while I was in middle school, while typing away at an old Mac computer in keyboarding class. I don’t remember exactly where I heard about Google, but I do remember that I was the first one in my class to use it. It was different — much more so than the likes of Dogpile, AskJeeves, and Yahoo, which…

The recent events in Egypt have, among other things, been inspiring, terrifying and remarkable. But though the political situation is obviously the story here, this hasn’t stopped many from commenting on the role the internet and social media have played. Of course, we also know that Egypt very successfully – and very scarily – almost shut down their entire internet. The response from commentators around the web has been predictable: that censorship and repression are wrong and that no country should ever engage in such practices. It has been accompanied by calls for international companies…

If you were to go by Hollywood’s logic, it is not uncommon to see the bad boy getting the girls, the notoriety, the fame, and everything else that comes with it. Transforming that from fantasy to reality, however, can be tricky, as there are plenty of good guys with great lives and have all of the aforementioned. But if you want to get noticed in social media, being an ass is most likely — at least statistically — the easiest way to make your way to the top. Pissing people off is almost as much an art as it is an annoyance. It’s all about emotion, and the easiest way to evoke emotions is through anger. So…

To say social media will be bigger in 2011 is like saying a 5-year-old will be bigger when she’s 6-years-old. It is still in its infancy and while many people are engulfed in some form of social media, there are still billions of people who haven’t been on Facebook or its kind before. As 2010 draws to a close, every website is faced with different questions that they need to answer next year. For some, it’s a matter of turning a good profit. For others, it’s a matter of staying alive to see 2012. Nobody has the luxury of having only one major question to answer, but we’ve selected seven big ones that each must…

We already know that Facebook is huge, but now we have true visual feedback to how impressive the Facebook empire really stands. It is massive. And it is clear that all of Europe and the Eastern United States have too much time on their hands. But what is even more impressive is that the above picture isn’t actually wasn’t supposed to look like our world, but it does anyways. Paul Butler, a Facebook intern who should clearly earn a job at the company, took a data set of over ten million friendship connections and plotted those connections to city points on essentially a black digital image canvas, and…

Social media blackmail. When called anything other than blackmail, it’s something that people normally talk about with a positive sentiment. Ordinary people who get extra “power” by being good at social media making big businesses bend at their wills – it’s the way we want it, “sticking it to The Man.” It’s also something that falls under the category of “what’s wrong with social media in 2011″. First, a brief story: Using “Klout” To Whine And Moan There was a time when ordinary people would have to break the law or win the lottery to get the attention of the masses. Social media has made it possible…

Today wasn’t so incredibly different from any other day: I woke up, I ate breakfast, I checked my RSS feeds, I logged into Facebook, Facebook told me I should vote, Facebook told me some of my friends had already voted, and Facebook told me that over 2.2 million other Facebook users voted. Okay, so today is election day — Facebook is making that fact well known — but could Facebook be one of the most powerful motivators to get out and vote? Maybe! At the time of this writing, 2,202,404 people have already told Facebook that they have gone out and voted, and we can’t help but wonder how many of those 2.2…

Jeff Bullas had a post up on his blog, Is Twitter About to Terminate Google Buzz, that discussed how Google Buzz is essentially dead. However, I don’t think Twitter killed Google Buzz. I think Google Buzz killed Google Buzz. I had high hopes for it. I really did. I didn’t see it as a Twitter killer or substitution for Twitter, but rather a more social version of the Google Reader Share with Note feature. I thought it might be a nice way to write a few lines about a blog post or news item you stumbled across. And with more blogs disabling comments, I thought it had potential to usher in a new era of blog commenting….