nptech.info

a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nptech onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#nptech');#bnptech/b/a a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23idealist onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#idealist');#idealist/a Director of NSNS - U.S. PIRG - Chicago a href=http://ow.ly/18WdCyhttp://ow.ly/18WdCy/a

8 fantastic visual diagrams to explain good usability experience | a href=http://ow.ly/2BNgYhttp://ow.ly/2BNgY/a a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nptech onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#nptech');#bnptech/b/a

By Laura Kreutzer and Sabrina Willmer, Reporters, The Wall Street Journal

Raising a venture capital fund these days is no easy feat. But a small number of firms appear to have the wind at their backs, and that wind may have a name: Zynga Game Network Inc.

Foundry Group and Avalon Ventures, both of which invested in one of Zynga’s first rounds of financing back in early 2008, each have plenty of interest in their latest fund offerings, in part because of the performance boost they’ve gotten from that deal – even if much of it is on paper.

Avalon, for example, is expected to wrap up its ninth fund, ahead of a $150 million target sometime later this year. Meanwhile, Foundry Group has already collected at least $225 million in commitments for its second venture fund, according to investors.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

div style="float: left; padding-right: 10px;" !-- div style="background-color: #B3B3B3; width: 160px; padding: 1px;"a title="Click here to read Set Priority Inbox to Play Nice with Your Filters" href="http://lifehacker.com/tag/gmail/" style="background-color:#888888; color:#FFFFFF; font-size:12px;text-align:right; display:block; height:14px; padding:1px 2px; text-decoration:none; text-transform:uppercase; width:156px;"span style="color: white;" class="hash"#/spanspan style="color: white;"gmail/span/a/div -- diva title="Click here to read Set Priority Inbox to Play Nice with Your Filters" href="http://lifehacker.com/5634154/set-priority-inbox-to-play-nice-with-your-filters" class="pp_image" img style="border-color: #B3B3B3; border-width: 0 1px 1px; border-style: none solid solid;" height="120" width="160" title="Click here to read Set Priority Inbox to Play Nice with Your Filters" alt="Click here to read Set Priority Inbox to Play Nice with Your Filters" src="http://cache-03.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/17/2010/09/160x120_160x120_gmailpriorityinboxthumb.jpg"/ /a/div /div A lot of Lifehacker readers a href="http://lifehacker.com/5631990/how-does-gmails-priority-inbox-work-for-you"are still on the fence/a about Gmail's a href="http://lifehacker.com/5626016/gmail-priority-inbox-finds-and-sorts-important-messages-automatically"new Priority Inbox feature/a. One potential hurdle to its success: By default, Priority Inbox ignores anything your filters pull out of your inbox. a href="http://lifehacker.com/5634154/set-priority-inbox-to-play-nice-with-your-filters" title="Click here to read more about Set Priority Inbox to Play Nice with Your Filters [Gmail]"Morenbsp;raquo;/a br style="clear: both;" /div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?a=0Ne_rRC711c:pQW7jPrt2dc:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?a=0Ne_rRC711c:pQW7jPrt2dc:D7DqB2pKExk"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?i=0Ne_rRC711c:pQW7jPrt2dc:D7DqB2pKExk" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?a=0Ne_rRC711c:pQW7jPrt2dc:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?i=0Ne_rRC711c:pQW7jPrt2dc:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?a=0Ne_rRC711c:pQW7jPrt2dc:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /div

Bill Zielke is senior director of Merchant Services at PayPal, which recently announced the initial rollout of Mobile Express Checkout. Bill is responsible for the development and marketing of product strategies related to PayPal, and for counseling merchants with product recommendations.

Remember when people debated whether e-commerce was for real? When the media scoffed at the idea of being able to “just point and click for great deals?”

Today, e-commerce is a massive industry. In the U.S. alone, online spending reached nearly $130 billion in 2009. Like e-commerce before it, mobile commerce is on the cusp of becoming a multi-billion dollar industry, and it’s time for merchants to take notice and seize the opportunity.

M-commerce by the Numbers

At PayPal, when we look at our merchants’ numbers, we’re seeing the impact of mobile commerce jump:

• Our mobile transactions show dramatic growth, increasing nearly six-fold, from $25 million in 2008 to $141 million in 2009.
• We expect to close out 2010 with over $500 million in mobile payment volume, and more than 5 million members regularly using PayPal from mobile devices.

But we’re just a slice of the overall m-commerce pie:

• Globally, consumers are expected to spend $119 billion by 2015 through their mobile phones, accounting for about 8% of all e-commerce activity, according to ABI Research.
• The total value of mobile payments around the world will quadruple from $170 billion in 2010 to $630 billion in 2014, according to Juniper Research.

From point of sale offerings, to mobile shopping apps and enhanced mobile web experiences, it seems like companies both big and small are trying to capitalize on what mobile commerce promises consumers.

Though much attention has been paid to how consumers are adopting a mobile shopping experience, little consideration has been paid to how merchants can get in the game. In my years helping merchants of every size enable sales on the “third screen” (with televisions and computers as the first and second screens), a few things have held true in most of the successes I’ve seen.

Mobile Browsing vs. Mobile Shopping

The numbers speak for themselves, so it’s fair to say that consumers are rapidly adopting mobile shopping as a way to buy physical and digital goods. This rapid adoption rate means customers are starting to expect that their favorite retailers will have a mobile presence, making mobile commerce both an opportunity and an imperative for merchants.

Realizing measurable gains from engaging with these tech savvy shoppers means understanding what motivates them to complete a mobile purchase. Consider the difference between “mobile browsing” and “mobile shopping.” Applications and websites that allow customers to view the latest fashions are great for brand awareness, and maybe even getting them in the physical store, but without a mobile-specific checkout experience, they don’t yield actual sales. I call that mobile browsing because making the purchase is secondary to just looking at the item for a price tag.

Mobile shopping on the other hand, offers consumers the chance to buy something in a checkout experience catered to a mobile device and perhaps most importantly, reduces the amount of clicks it takes to finalize the purchase. This is particularly important in the context of mobile web browsers, where cutting back on content and minimizing the number of clicks is vital to keeping shoppers engaged.

I spend a lot of time on my phone checking out how retailers are taking their online stores mobile. I’ll log onto a retailer’s mobile website which allows me to look at all the merchandise I want. Content loads quickly and after a pleasant and easy browsing experience, I decide to go ahead and make the purchase.

As is all too common with mobile shopping, I’m taken to a third-party checkout site that is not catered to a mobile browser. Instead of making a couple of clicks, I find myself scrolling, re-entering sensitive information, resizing the screen, ultimately getting frustrated and abandoning the purchase.

As a retailer, it’s critical that your mobile customer has the same level of convenience that they would have if they were shopping on their laptop with a checkout experience that’s designed for the device.

A number of retailers have successfully brought easy shopping experiences to mobile platforms. Buy.com, for example, has tailored their mobile website for intuitive shopping and quick checkout. While developing a mobile shopping experience is more art than science, layouts with large buttons, minimal text, little scrolling and a fast checkout have proven key to conversion.

The Mobile Web vs. Native Apps

Much has been made of whether the future lies in mobile applications or the mobile web. Both apps and browsers offer compelling characteristics that, in the context of mobile commerce, can draw in shoppers.

Mobile apps are like your neighborhood produce store. You walk inside the doors looking for specific items. They also typically let users tap into their phone’s full potential. For example, a native app might integrate with a phone’s camera, voice recorder, contacts or other features. And for shoppers looking for a richer, more advanced interface, applications typically win out over the mobile web because they are designed specifically for that handset’s hardware and operating system.

Overall, native apps offer a tailored shopping experience that’s well delivered but limited.

The mobile web on the other hand is a like a huge shopping mall with seemingly limitless stores and tons of options all under one giant roof. It’s not as constricted or fragmented as shopping on disparate mobile apps but the experience isn’t as tailored as the specialty store.

Unlike device-specific native apps though, the mobile web has enormous flexibility and, usually, much larger reach. Customers don’t need to download robust programs from app stores to their handset in order to begin shopping. Instead, all they have to do is type in a web address in their mobile browser to start spending their digital dollars. Much of the time mobile sites serve as stripped-down versions of regular websites and serve a utilitarian purpose: selling goods and services.

The mobile web offers what native apps lack and vice versa. And just as in the real world, there’s room for both. As long as there is an easy way for consumers to shop from their mobile devices, both apps and browsers serve a purpose for retailers.

Get Ready: The Holidays are Coming

With the biggest shopping season of the year just weeks away, now is the time for retailers to look to the mobile channel to boost sales and meet their customers where they want to be met.

Last year, PayPal saw mobile payments on Black Friday rise about 650% compared to 2008. This year, the holiday season will be a pivotal time for retailers to capitalize on the mobile opportunity as the market really becomes mainstream.

Right now, merchants from small businesses all the way to the largest companies in the world are finalizing their strategies for the holidays. They’re thinking about how many MP3 players to keep in stock and how to get feet in the door, and which demographics they should be targeting once the doors fly open on Black Friday. But maybe this year, the smart merchants will think back to the 1990s –- to the birth of e-commerce — and decide to act on the opportunity that mobile commerce opens up, and to change the relationship with their customers once again. E-commerce drove sales, but also more importantly it changed merchants’ relationship with their customers. And mobile commerce has the potential to do it all over again.

More Mobile Resources from Mashable:

- Top 5 Mobile Commerce Trends for 2010
- Why Smartphone Adoption May Not Be as Big as You Think
- Top 5 Mobile Advertising Trends To Watch
- The Rise of Text Messaging [INFOGRAPHIC]
- A Look Back at the Last 5 Years in Mobile

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Talaj

Reviews: iStockphoto

More About: consumers, e-commerce, m-commerce, Mobile 2.0, mobile browser, mobile commerce, moblie app, paypal, phone, retailers, shopping, smartphone

For more Mobile coverage:

• Follow Mashable Mobile on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Mobile channel
• Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

p span class="inline inline-left"img src="http://www.nten.org/sites/nten/files/images/idealware_1.thumbnail.gif" alt="" title="" class="image image-thumbnail" width="100" height="32" //spanAre you working on your year-end fundraising appeals? Are you looking at your organization's goals and wondering, quot;Will we be able to fundraise the projected amount?quot; /p p Make a sound investment in Idealware's Email Fundraising Course and you might just reach your goals! This intensive course will take a deep dive into the ins and outs of Email Fundraising. Over the course of this five-part series, you will design and create a full-fledged email fundraising campaign, ready to go for your year-end appeal. Through expert-led sessions, worksheets, and review of your work by both peers and experts, we'll walk you through creating an overall strategy, writing a series of emails, defining the email and online donation tools that you'll need, and creating an approach to tracking and measuring your success.   /p p This course will require about two hours a week outside of the sessions themselves, and is geared at those who want to literally produce an email fundraising campaign during the course. /p p Idealware is offering a 15% discount to the NTEN Community. Just enter the code strongGD15EF/strong into the discount box on the registration page. /p p stronga href="https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/957/p/salsa/event/common/public/?event_KEY=62632"gt; Learn More and Register Now/a/strong /p p The quick details: /p blockquote ul li5 online sessions: Tuesdays 3:00 - 4:30 Eastern Time/li liStarting Tues, Sep 14th and running through Tues, Oct 12th/li li$275 for up to three people in the same organization. NTENers receive a 15% discount!/li /ul /blockquote p And don't forget to share your fundraising success stories with us at the end of the year! /pdiv class="image-clear"/divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/nten/~4/8FhCMuuKxF8" height="1" width="1"/

Vogue is one of the biggest, glossiest names in magazine publishing, and it’s just given its website a huge facelift.

The site has grown exponentially in glamor and functionality with its latest iteration. Colors and typefaces are dramatic, images are huge, social sharing features are discreetly accessible and interaction opportunities are appropriate for this brand’s targeted users. All-in-all, it has established a better web presence for a very high-end publication.

A few designers we polled informally on Twitter had mixed feelings about the site’s new, larger banner up top and its floating menu bar, but just as many said they liked the showy, high-impact, “magazine-y” look and feel. Our own Christina Warren made the salient point that the new Vogue.com “looks more like a Tumblr theme than a fashion rag”; perhaps digital times call for digital measures.

Let’s take a look at how and why Vogue chose this new look and what kinds of content will be showcased in the spectacular (in the most literal sense) new interface.

The How

If Women’s Wear Daily is to be believed, one of the biggest reasons the new Vogue.com looks so amazing is because “no expense was spared.” The definitive publication for the fashion industry said publisher Condé Nast spent more on Vogue.com than it has on any other web property, and it overspent other sites’ budgets by a wide margin.

To put this in context, another Condé Nast property, social bookmarking site Reddit, was forced to adopt a freemium model just last month because the site’s admins had been given a fixed budget for the site and their Condé Nast-imposed bottom line was not being met. After around 10,000 Reddit members donated, the site was deemed “saved.”

Of course, websites are not built on grand budgets alone. The talent behind these gorgeously constructed pages is Code and Theory, a web shop with San Francisco and New York City offices that has a bit of experience dealing with high-end brands.

Brandon Ralph is Code and Theory’s executive creative director. In an e-mail, he told us that the entire site was was created, from concept to deployment, in just six months. They were tasked by Vogue to “break the mold.”

“Overall, we were inspired to create a site that was worthy of launching with Fashion Week… bringing more of the visceral, thrilling qualities of the fashion world online, the experience of the collections as they unfold, getting truly exclusive access to designers and their perspectives, and of course, the parties.”

Here’s the firm’s “case study” showing the many features and pages of the new Vogue.com:

The Why

Vogue’s Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour told WWD in an e-mail that the magazine’s average reader “is completely engaged in the world of technology” and that she knew she needed to “take the authority, quality and beauty of Vogue and bring those values to the digital realm.”

Of course, Wintour also noted that the modern newsroom is a 24/7 environment with fast-breaking coverage that is far too timely (and far too great in volume) for a monthly publication to encompass.

But rather than trying to write, film and photograph it all, Vogue.com will continue to curate content according to the dictates of its own aesthetic. As Wintour put it, “Vogue.com isn’t going to be covering everything, just the right things.”

Wintour strikes the right note from a PR perspective, but Vogue needed a new web presence for another reason: Its existing site was, if not a mess, certainly not representative of the brand.

You can see visions of Vogue.coms past via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and here’s a screenshot taken in April 2009:

It’s too busy to be high-impact; with no white space, the eye wanders without editorial direction. It looks like a rather pedestrian website, not the digital face of a fashion magazine. Vogue.com was in great need of more than just a facelift; the site needed a ground-up re-imagining.

The What

As far as content is concerned, the new Vogue.com is essentially a vehicle for fashion multimedia. In the same way that its print counterpart is a showcase for huge, glossy photo spreads, the website is an exhibit for large, high-quality images and video. Full-screen slideshows are a perfect fit for elaborate fashion collection displays, for example.

One of the more interesting features on the site is Vogue’s new “lightboxes,” a sort of digital version of a lookbook for readers to bookmark their favorite “photos, trends and inspirations” in the site’s elegant styling. The lightboxes can be created and shared by individual users; think of it as an in-site Tumblr.

Sharing and commenting features — another visual element that usually leans toward clutter, discrepancy and noise — are also rather quietly integrated on the site without throwing too many odd colors, typefaces and distractions into the mix. There is some sense of community on the site, though. Readers can comment on stories, share items through the usual social channels, follow Vogue on Twitter and Facebook, and more.

According to WWD, the site will also soon include a searchable archive of Vogue articles from 1892 to the present day. The site is also planning to add “Voguepedia,” which will be roughly what it sounds like: a fashion-themed, encyclopedia-style resource.

What you won’t see much of, however, is traditional display advertising. You might catch a skyscraper here or there touting beauty products or boots, and you’ll definitely see a few calls to subscribe to the magazine; but for the most part, marketing initiatives are slickly wrapped in Vogue.com’s typefaces, imagery and styles. This is surely as welcome to the ad-weary reader as it is to the aesthetic perfectionist.

“We’re proud of the overall experience and how it blends content, community, advertising and consumer marketing,” said Ralph. As far as advertising is concerned, he noted that C&T’s strategy was quality over quantity.

“There’s more value for sponsors if they can have exclusive representation with innovative placements above and beyond standard IAB ads on pages that are highly engaging to the audience. For an iconic brand like Vogue in particular, it would be criminal to have a web presence that looked like Nascar.”

Did this minimalist, designer-y approach to ads work for Vogue.com’s bottom line? According to Ralph, the new inventory was so compelling that the Vogue sales team has already exceeded their goals for revenue and are optimistic about the future.

Designers, what do you think of the new Vogue.com? Let us know what you love, what you hate and what you’d change about it in the comments.

Reviews: Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter

More About: code and theory, conde nast, fashion week, magazine, magazine website, media, publishing, vogue, vogue.com, web design

For more Dev & Design coverage:

• Follow Mashable Dev & Design on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Dev & Design channel
• Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

pimg alt="twitter_sand.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/twitter_sand.png" width="150" height="113" /This post was made possible thanks to a phenomenon I call "twitterdipity."/p pTwitterdipity is the experience of wading in Twitter's shallow, fast-moving data stream and suddenly - and surprisingly - mining treasure from a tweet. It's casually catching the eye of good fortune in a speed-of-light culture. It's when you score a free ticket to an exclusive event or click a game-changing link at just the right time. My most recent (and exciting) experience of twitterdipity happened when I tweeted that I was reading a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Levinson"Paul Levinson's/a book Digital McLuhan and then the award-winning sci-fi writer, singer/songwriter, communications professor and oft-interviewed media ecologist decided to follow me. Me!/p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21733amp;cb=21733' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21733amp;n=21733' border='0' alt='' //a/p piGuest author Michelle Anderson is a a href=" http://linkedin.com/in/iheartmedia "storyteller, media ecologist and community builder for hire/a. She goes by the moniker a href="http://twitter.com/mediaChick"@mediaChick/a on Twitter and just about everywhere else, as well. She is the creator and author of a href="http://bit.ly/mij_rww"The Miracle in July/a, an ambitious, genre-busting storytelling experiment seeking to redefine what "success" means in today's global theater. Through teaching, consulting, speaking and publishing, Michelle hopes to inspire storytellers world-wide to experiment with social media ecology in their work. She also a href="http://bit.ly/mmmpie_rww"bakes one hell of a pie/a./i/p pimg alt="marshallmcluhan.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/marshallmcluhan.png" class="alignright" /As a rogue media ecologist, I play scholarly voyeur on the a href="http://www.media-ecology.org/"Media Ecology Association's/a mailing list. Over the years I've passively learned the intricacies of the interdisciplinary study of the ecosystems of media by eavesdropping on riveting academic discussions. The ones that interest me the most are the endless conversations about Marshall McLuhan, the cutting-edge communications and media theorist who coined phrases such as "global village" and "the medium is the message." /p pIt was from studying McLuhan that I realized that the word "medium" was meant to include roads, electricity and assembly lines as well as broadcast television and the telegraph. I realized that it is the form of a medium, rather than its content, that molds and shapes our view of the world, and that the "message" of the medium is the change in the pattern of humanity. But it is McLuhan's famous 1962 declaration in The Gutenberg Galaxy that "the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of the global village" that got me thinking about the conditions that conjure twitterdipity./p pAppropriately enough, from this media ecologist's point of view, it is Twitter's ecosystem that breeds these wonderful moments of twitterdipity. The choice in following (or not following or blocking) a tweeter leads to the customization of Twitter's indiscriminately rich fire hose of data; it makes for a fertile, personalized climate. /p h2Conditions for Twitterdipity/h2 pContent published from a world-wide, realtime community of incredibly diverse producers and consumers, who all have access to the same high-volume channels in which to influence others and attract the influential, seeds potential twitterdipity moments. Add to this environment the a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/147/doctor-love.html?page=0,2 "natural affinity for the brain to treat online and offline social interactions exactly the same/a - creating the same feelings of empathy and rivalry and social pressure to maintain a community decorum - and you've got yourself conditions ripe for twitterdipity./p pTake, for instance, the twitterdipity environment that created this post:/p pI tweeted that I was reading Paul Levinson's book a href="http://www.amazon.com/Digital-McLuhan-Guide-Information-Millennium/dp/041519251X"Digital McLuhan/a - a key book in my education of how McLuhan's ideas work in the Digital Age. Paul Levinson saw the tweet. He saw my bio. ( I called myself a media ecologist and a "bliss follower.") He decides to follow me. I worked up the nerve to ask Levinson - a man who's been interviewed by damned-near everybody, including Bill O'Reilly in a a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0cCOs4XTTI"fun boxing match about the mass broadcasting of beheadings/a, and whose a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_Upon_a_Rhyme"1972 pychedelic folk rock album "Twice Upon a Rhyme"/a still appears on cult collector's lists - to answer 5 questions for a post. Levinson agreed. I smiled like crazy for days./p pSo, what five questions does a rouge media ecologist ask her academic hero, the award-winning sci-fi writer, singer/songwriter, communications professor and oft-interviewed Paul Levinson? These five questions: /p pbAnderson:/b McLuhan's 1960 "global village" concept includes a tribal environment prone to discord and disagreements due to the invention of worldwide, real-time interconnectivity of electric technology. Yet, in 1966 he said at an author's luncheon in New York, "The satellites, as a new garbage or climate surround around the planet, are moving information at speeds that the planet can not cope with and have created not a global village but a Global Theater. I no longer use the phrase global village. It's global theater now, and everybody out here, and me too, we're all out to do our thing. Jobs are finished, jobs are over, role-playing comes in." (Hear McLuhan a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h97Wt0KId_I"say this at the 3:36 mark/a.) McLuhan's "global theater" idea involves a global village in which everyone acts as both producer and consumer, actor and spectator. So, why do you think that the temperamental "global village" concept is the one that is commonly referenced as McLuhan's predictive metaphor for the Internet rather than the everyone-as-content "global theater" concept?/p pbLevinson: /bI think 99% of the ascension of global village over global theater has to do with the homespun, populace appeal of village in contrast to the haute, upper-crust vibes of theater. Most people don't go to the theater anymore - or, if they do, it's to see their kids in a high school play. In either case, theater is far more specialized than village. Also, the village is a antonym to global, which gives the metaphor tension, in contrast to global theater, which sounds like something out of Shakespeare. The 1% is that global village had already caught on by 1966./p pbAnderson:/b (That was a long question. Here's a short one!) What do you predict will be the long-term effect of the social web (which is becoming an "equalizer" of sorts) on the offline world in terms of access to information and influence?/p pimg alt=" PaulLevinson.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/%20PaulLevinson.jpg" width="200" height="241" class="alignright" /bLevinson: /bThe long-term effect will be that governments, corporations, universities, elite media will find it increasingly difficult to dole information out on their own terms. Information will be out there for everyone, all the time, anywhere they and the information may happen to be. Further, as I detail in my a href="http://www.amazon.com/New-Media-Paul-Levinson/dp/0205673309"New New Media/a (2009), all receivers and consumers of information will become producers - anyone can set up a Facebook page, upload a video to YouTube, Tweet 20 hours a day. This means that the difference between professionals and amateurs - between those whose profession it is to produce versus those who produce for love - is becoming less and less. Anyone can write and edit on Wikipedia, and a survey in Nature Magazine a few years ago found no difference in error levels in the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia. We come from a world in which gatekeepers decided what the rest of us could see and hear in our media. With the advent of new new media, the gatekeepers are leaving their positions, and the playing field of significant public communication is open to everyone. This is a great step forward for freedom and democracy./p pbAnderson:/b Since the very first modem whine, the Internet has been the perfect environment for groups to propagate. With its infinite space and real-time communication, today the Internet sustains countless communities, ranging from metropolitan and bustling to rural and quiet, and more are forming every day. What are your thoughts on the role of the relatively new career of a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_community_manager"Online Community Manager/a, a position created to build and manage groups of digital personalities that are joined together under a common interest or goal?/p pbLevinson: /bMy opinion is the Internet is not about empowerment of new leaders, it is about the empowerment of everyone. The idea of an Internet professional community leader is an oxymoron. Leaders arise without training, and survive or not based on their performance, not their credentials, in the new online world./p pbAnderson:/b In 1972, McLuhan participated in a debate on the subject "Do books matter?" by giving a speech which he called "The Future of the Book" (Understanding Me, 2003). "The book is not moving towards an omega point," he said, "but is actually in the process of rehearsing and re-enacting all the roles it has ever played, for new graphics and new printing processes invite the simultaneous use of a great diversity of effects." Do you think McLuhan was talking about a new technology (Kindle, Vook, iPad), or a new process in which we define what a book is (a new technology-neutral format)?/p pbLevinson: /bI think McLuhan was talking about the Internet, without giving it that name, back in 1972. His view of this new "book" is something I explore in Digital McLuhan, where I point out that the Internet is the media of media. Kindle, iPad, etc. have this same quality./p pbAnderson:/b Thanks to innovative digital strategies from Wieden + Kennedy, one of the top brand agencies in the world, the brand Old Spice recently enjoyed a a href="http://adweek.blogs.com/adfreak/2010/07/hey-old-spice-haters-sales-are-up-107.html"107% increase in sales/a. The campaign's raging success also created a new benchmark for large agencies who wish to convince their traditional media-minded clients that using inexpensive (even free!) social media tools in their ad campaigns can be very lucrative. What do you see as the fall-out from this adoption of the social web by "big money" agencies for individual producers and consumers of online content, as well as the smaller Internet marketing firms who specialize in digital strategy?/p pbLevinson: /bThe age of Madison Avenue style advertising - what we see aborning on "Mad Men" - is coming to an end. Rather than advertise on traditional media such as television and billboards, campaigns of the future will be closer to what my namesake (but no relative) Jay Conrad Levinson calls "guerrilla marketing." The advertising campaigns of the future will be increasingly waged in the jungles and dirt roads and nooks and crannies of the Internet - all of which may be more direct routes to our minds than looking at a television./p h2"The Empowerment of Everyone"/h2 pWith instant access to everything all the time, our global village has little patience with high-gloss, slick campaigns where consumables are layered with glitz to hide mediocrity within. In a village, everyone knows everyone else's business - their strengths, weaknesses, triumphs and failures - which creates the "equalized" playing field that Levinson described as "a great step forward for freedom and democracy." A global village, one that pairs the oxymoronish intimacy of village life with a worldwide web of connectivity, can then lead to a once-impossible moment of twitterdipity, where an up-and-coming media ecologist in Portland, Oregon can pick the brain of a world-renowned and award-winning author, professor, and media environment expert from the East Coast. As Levinson noted, "the Internet is not about empowerment of new leaders, it is about the empowerment of everyone." Thanks to the global village, that everyone includes you and me./p pemsmallTop photo by a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/rosauraochoa/3939487692/"Rosaura Ochoa/a/small/em/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitterdipity_and_paul_levinson_social_medias_ecology.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/WBvKpW8ZToXHOtU2pj3vZti0fac/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/WBvKpW8ZToXHOtU2pj3vZti0fac/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/WBvKpW8ZToXHOtU2pj3vZti0fac/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/WBvKpW8ZToXHOtU2pj3vZti0fac/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QlgLZ2EvHi4:NMgntD4BfAQ:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QlgLZ2EvHi4:NMgntD4BfAQ:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QlgLZ2EvHi4:NMgntD4BfAQ:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QlgLZ2EvHi4:NMgntD4BfAQ:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QlgLZ2EvHi4:NMgntD4BfAQ:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=QlgLZ2EvHi4:NMgntD4BfAQ:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QlgLZ2EvHi4:NMgntD4BfAQ:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=QlgLZ2EvHi4:NMgntD4BfAQ:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QlgLZ2EvHi4:NMgntD4BfAQ:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=QlgLZ2EvHi4:NMgntD4BfAQ:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QlgLZ2EvHi4:NMgntD4BfAQ:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/QlgLZ2EvHi4" height="1" width="1"/

div style="float: left; padding-right: 10px;" !-- div style="background-color: #B3B3B3; width: 160px; padding: 1px;"a title="Click here to read Google Maps for Android Updates, Includes Walking Navigation and Street View Smart Navigation" href="http://lifehacker.com/tag/updates/" style="background-color:#888888; color:#FFFFFF; font-size:12px;text-align:right; display:block; height:14px; padding:1px 2px; text-decoration:none; text-transform:uppercase; width:156px;"span style="color: white;" class="hash"#/spanspan style="color: white;"updates/span/a/div -- diva title="Click here to read Google Maps for Android Updates, Includes Walking Navigation and Street View Smart Navigation" href="http://lifehacker.com/5634149/google-maps-for-android-updates-includes-walking-navigation-and-street-view-smart-navigation" class="pp_image" img style="border-color: #B3B3B3; border-width: 0 1px 1px; border-style: none solid solid;" height="120" width="160" title="Click here to read Google Maps for Android Updates, Includes Walking Navigation and Street View Smart Navigation" alt="Click here to read Google Maps for Android Updates, Includes Walking Navigation and Street View Smart Navigation" src="http://cache-04.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/17/2010/09/160x120_walk12_cropped.jpg"/ span class="play_icon"/span /a/div /div !-- videoId: KZ2_7bKlcvI --!-- /videoId: KZ2_7bKlcvI -- Google made their Maps application for Android even more useful today, adding walking navigation and navigation of street view with a drag-and-drop Pegman, just like on the desktop. a href="http://lifehacker.com/5634149/google-maps-for-android-updates-includes-walking-navigation-and-street-view-smart-navigation" title="Click here to read more about Google Maps for Android Updates, Includes Walking Navigation and Street View Smart Navigation [Updates]"Morenbsp;raquo;/a br style="clear: both;" /div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?a=tuUhYrh7Xw4:PMCMVbUorg4:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?a=tuUhYrh7Xw4:PMCMVbUorg4:D7DqB2pKExk"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?i=tuUhYrh7Xw4:PMCMVbUorg4:D7DqB2pKExk" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?a=tuUhYrh7Xw4:PMCMVbUorg4:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?i=tuUhYrh7Xw4:PMCMVbUorg4:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?a=tuUhYrh7Xw4:PMCMVbUorg4:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /div

quot;Build Communities to Enhance Your Fundraising Campaignsquot; a href=http://buzzy.bz/1g8Chttp://buzzy.bz/1g8C/a a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nptech onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#nptech');#bnptech/b/a

a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nptech onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#nptech');#bnptech/b/a a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23idealist onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#idealist');#idealist/a Program Director with clinical focus a href=http://ow.ly/18Wbbfhttp://ow.ly/18Wbbf/a

a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nptech onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#nptech');#bnptech/b/a a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23idealist onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#idealist');#idealist/a ERP/Systems Reporting Analyst a href=http://ow.ly/18Wbbghttp://ow.ly/18Wbbg/a

Hostilities between NetApp (NTAP) and Sun Microsystems, which was acquired by Oracle (ORCL) last year, have finally ended. This morning the two companies said they had agreed to dismiss their respective patent infringement lawsuits against each other, closing out a battle that began back in 2007. Neither company offered much in the way of comment on the deal, saying only that they “seek to have the lawsuits dismissed without prejudice” and that the terms of their agreement are confidential.

pimg alt="php5bin.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/php5bin.png" width="147" height="136" style="float: left; margin: 0 20px 20px 0;" /If you use Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS for client projects or for your company you've probably stared at the following line: emRequirements: PHP 5.2 or better./em Yet, when checking back to see what PHP is actually available through the standard yum repos you find... no PHP 5.3 and not even PHP 5.2. Visions of dependencies flash through your mind. /p pLuckily, there are PHP RPM alternatives. Let's take a look at where to start./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21309amp;cb=21309' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21309amp;n=21309' border='0' alt='' //a/p h2The Power of Community/h2 blockquoteemUpdate: Please see the clarifications and comments below from the IUS Community as well. Thanks! -- RWH./em/blockquote pThere is good news for the weary developer or sysadmin seeking an up to date and well maintained RPM for PHP5.x releases. From the a href="http://iuscommunity.org/" target="_blank"IUS Community Project/a FAQ:/p blockquoteThe IUS Community Project is an effort to package rpms of the latest stable versions of the most commonly requested software on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS. IUS provides a better way to upgrade PHP/MySQL/Python/Etc on RHEL or CentOS. The project is run by professional Linux Engineers that are primarily focused on RPM Development in the web hosting industry./blockquote pGetting started with IUS is very straight forward and you'll find "a better way to upgrade rhel" for more than just PHP./p pa href="http://iuscommunity.org/getting-started/" target="_blank"img alt="ius-dl.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/assets_c/2010/09/ius-dl-thumb-360x257-21734.png" width="360" height="257" style="" //a/p pOnce you've completed the steps outlined for updating to reflect the a href="http://iuscommunity.org/getting-started/" target="_blank"IUS Yum Repository/a you can expect to see what you once thought was impossible./p pExample of final step for upgrading a stock RHEL5.x system to PHP 5.3 system:/p pscript src="http://gist.github.com/571544.js?file=ius-complete.txt"/script/p h2A Name You Can Trust/h2 pOne concern with repos is who might be behind them. Are they reliable? Can they be trusted? Does the repo maintainer own a copy of the movie a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118589/" target="_blank"Glitter/a? Serious questions are serious! Accepting any old repo you find on the Internet is a href="http://saferepo.iuscommunity.org/about/" target="_blank"just plain unacceptable/a./p pimg alt="rackspace.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/rackspace.png" width="170" height="58" style="float: right; margin: 0 0 20px 20px;" /Fear not! Simply refer to the a href="http://saferepo.iuscommunity.org/" target="_blank"SafeRepo Initiative/a and know that the IUS Community is sponsored by the fine folks at a href=""Rackspace/a. In fact, you can find IUS linked on php.net under a href="http://www.php.net/downloads.php" target="_blank""Binaries for other systems"/a./p pFeel better? Now what do you want phpinfo() to return on your RHEL server? /p pLet us know in the comments below!/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2010/09/alternatives-to-stock-rh.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vCeg-ghb7nR6iud-Q11ae7xaWN8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vCeg-ghb7nR6iud-Q11ae7xaWN8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vCeg-ghb7nR6iud-Q11ae7xaWN8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vCeg-ghb7nR6iud-Q11ae7xaWN8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ZjirRIB0ezc:RTN5IObiINg:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ZjirRIB0ezc:RTN5IObiINg:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ZjirRIB0ezc:RTN5IObiINg:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ZjirRIB0ezc:RTN5IObiINg:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ZjirRIB0ezc:RTN5IObiINg:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=ZjirRIB0ezc:RTN5IObiINg:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ZjirRIB0ezc:RTN5IObiINg:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=ZjirRIB0ezc:RTN5IObiINg:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ZjirRIB0ezc:RTN5IObiINg:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=ZjirRIB0ezc:RTN5IObiINg:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ZjirRIB0ezc:RTN5IObiINg:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/ZjirRIB0ezc" height="1" width="1"/

div style="float: left; padding-right: 10px;" !-- div style="background-color: #B3B3B3; width: 160px; padding: 1px;"a title="Click here to read Our New Comment Update Adds Warnings, Suspensions, and Moves Bad Threads" href="http://lifehacker.com/tag/announcements/" style="background-color:#888888; color:#FFFFFF; font-size:12px;text-align:right; display:block; height:14px; padding:1px 2px; text-decoration:none; text-transform:uppercase; width:156px;"span style="color: white;" class="hash"#/spanspan style="color: white;"announcements/span/a/div -- diva title="Click here to read Our New Comment Update Adds Warnings, Suspensions, and Moves Bad Threads" href="http://lifehacker.com/5634080/our-new-comment-update-adds-warnings-suspensions-and-moves-bad-threads" class="pp_image" img style="border-color: #B3B3B3; border-width: 0 1px 1px; border-style: none solid solid;" height="120" width="160" title="Click here to read Our New Comment Update Adds Warnings, Suspensions, and Moves Bad Threads" alt="Click here to read Our New Comment Update Adds Warnings, Suspensions, and Moves Bad Threads" src="http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/17/2010/09/160x120_trolled.jpg"/ /a/div /div We do our best to keep our site's comments troll- and spam-free, but there's always room for improvement. Our new comment reassignment feature allows your comment moderators to dole out warnings and suspensions, and explain why they did so. a href="http://lifehacker.com/5634080/our-new-comment-update-adds-warnings-suspensions-and-moves-bad-threads" title="Click here to read more about Our New Comment Update Adds Warnings, Suspensions, and Moves Bad Threads [Announcements]"Morenbsp;raquo;/a br style="clear: both;" /div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?a=EHne_SJgFaM:QbXMkxiZsqg:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?a=EHne_SJgFaM:QbXMkxiZsqg:D7DqB2pKExk"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?i=EHne_SJgFaM:QbXMkxiZsqg:D7DqB2pKExk" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?a=EHne_SJgFaM:QbXMkxiZsqg:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?i=EHne_SJgFaM:QbXMkxiZsqg:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?a=EHne_SJgFaM:QbXMkxiZsqg:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /div

RT a href=http://twitter.com/ChristinasWorld@ChristinasWorld/a: Sept a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%234change onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#4change');#4change/a Chat TODAY - 2pm PST - 5pm EST - 10pm UK - Join us a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23socentchat onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#socentchat');#socentchat/a a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nptech onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#nptech');#bnptech/b/a a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23npcons onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#npcons');#npcons/a toward a a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%234change onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#4change');#4change/a network a href=http://bit.ly/aee9iThttp://bit.ly/aee9iT/a

Stoobalou writes "The people behind VLC, quite probably the most useful media player available right now, have submitted an iPod version to the Apple software police. VLC mdash; which is rightfully famous for having a go at playing just about any kind of audio or video file you care to throw at it mdash; should appear some time next week, if it makes it through the often unfathomable approval process implemented by Apple. The Open Source Video Lan Client has been tweaked to run on the iPod by software developer Applidium."pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fapple.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F09%2F09%2F1839215%2FOpen-Source-VLC-Media-Player-Coming-To-iPad" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Open+Source+VLC+Media+Player+Coming+To+iPad%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2FbNNrNr" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/09/09/1839215/Open-Source-VLC-Media-Player-Coming-To-iPad?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./piframe src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?op=discussamp;id=1782368amp;smallembed=1" style="height: 300px; width: 100%; border: none;"/iframeimg width='1' height='1' src='http://slashdot.feedsportal.com/c/32909/f/530758/s/d98f202/mf.gif' border='0'/ pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/M5Km2nOyp_LU0IJzmmO_earD-aA/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/M5Km2nOyp_LU0IJzmmO_earD-aA/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/M5Km2nOyp_LU0IJzmmO_earD-aA/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/M5Km2nOyp_LU0IJzmmO_earD-aA/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/SWjKrdfor3o" height="1" width="1"/

RT a href=http://twitter.com/ramchopps@ramchopps/a: ATTN NGOs working on global issues! Submit a Q for Pres Bill Clinton - interview will be on YT homepage a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nptech onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#nptech');#bnptech/b/a

div style="float: left; padding-right: 10px;" !-- div style="background-color: #B3B3B3; width: 160px; padding: 1px;"a title="Click here to read Black, White, and Back Lit: A Soothing Home Office" href="http://lifehacker.com/tag/featuredworkspace/" style="background-color:#888888; color:#FFFFFF; font-size:12px;text-align:right; display:block; height:14px; padding:1px 2px; text-decoration:none; text-transform:uppercase; width:156px;"span style="color: white;" class="hash"#/spanspan style="color: white;"featuredworkspace/span/a/div -- diva title="Click here to read Black, White, and Back Lit: A Soothing Home Office" href="http://lifehacker.com/5633758/black-white-and-back-lit-a-soothing-home-office" class="pp_image" img style="border-color: #B3B3B3; border-width: 0 1px 1px; border-style: none solid solid;" height="120" width="160" title="Click here to read Black, White, and Back Lit: A Soothing Home Office" alt="Click here to read Black, White, and Back Lit: A Soothing Home Office" src="http://cache-01.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/17/2010/09/160x120_2010-09-09_143147.jpg"/ /a/div /div Today's featured workspace isn't the only one we've featured before with great back lighting and ambient light, but it's definitely one of the first that feels like you're computing from a day spa. a href="http://lifehacker.com/5633758/black-white-and-back-lit-a-soothing-home-office" title="Click here to read more about Black, White, and Back Lit: A Soothing Home Office [Featured Workspace]"Morenbsp;raquo;/a br style="clear: both;" /div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?a=qoIZCwakVV4:IALfx67K6B8:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?a=qoIZCwakVV4:IALfx67K6B8:D7DqB2pKExk"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?i=qoIZCwakVV4:IALfx67K6B8:D7DqB2pKExk" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?a=qoIZCwakVV4:IALfx67K6B8:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?i=qoIZCwakVV4:IALfx67K6B8:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?a=qoIZCwakVV4:IALfx67K6B8:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /div

pimg alt="getglue_logo_sep10.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/getglue_logo_sep10.jpg" width="150" height="54" /Social check-in app a href="http://getglue.com/"GetGlue/a has been making significant strides in the mobile space lately with the release of a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/5m_monthly_check-ins_later_getglue_comes_to_android.php"an Android app/a following success on the iPhone earlier this summer. Today, the popular app which allows users to check-in, rate and like things like movies, TV shows and music, has come to everyone's favorite "lean back" entertainment device, the iPad. With some added functionality (and more sticker deals to boot), GetGlue hopes a href="http://bit.ly/getglueipad"its iPad app/a will become your couch surfing app of choice for "second screen" media interaction./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21730amp;cb=21730' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21730amp;n=21730' border='0' alt='' //a/p h2Lean Back, Check In/h2 pThose familiar with GetGlue on the Web or a href="http://getglue.com/apps"on their phones/a will find the iPad app very familiar. As one would expect, the app lets you check-in to the service's 8 standard categories - music, movies, TV shows, books, games, wine, topics and celebrities. The added screen size of the iPad lets you more efficiently like, rate and comment on items without leaving each screen by utilizing pop-ups and overlays./p pimg alt="ggipad1_sep10.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/ggipad1_sep10.jpg" width="610" height="458" class="mt-image-none" style="" //p pThe startup hopes these overlays will encourage social interaction on the app as people enjoy things like movies and TV shows. The overlays, which will be familiar to users of the a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/twitter/id333903271?mt=8"Twitter for iPad/a app, allow users to chat and discuss the media they are consuming with their friends and contacts in real-time - a practice that has many broadcast channels and movie studios excited./p h2Stickers from Glee, Dexter, TWiT and More/h2 pimg alt="gleestickers_sep10.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/gleestickers_sep10.jpg" width="250" height="167" class="alignright" /So excited, in fact, that many have refreshed their campaigns for special GetGlue stickers, which users can collect by watching and checking into shows and events. a href="http://fox.com/"FOX/a has agreed to promote its wildly popular show emGlee/em, long-running hit emBones/em, as well as a pair of new shows - emRaising Hope/em and emLone Star/em - with special GetGlue Stickers./p pa href="http://hbo.com/"HBO/a is running a unique campaign that rewards users for checking into each new episode of its anticipated series Boardwalk Empire. If users watch each episode on its debut night in succession, they will "level up" and earn a special sticker at the end of the season. Other shows and movies announcing campaigns include a href="http://showtime.com/"Showtime's/a emDexter/em, a href="http://pbs.org/"PBS'/a emNOVA/em and emCharlie Rose/em, a href="http://universal.com/"Universal Pictures'/a upcoming releases emCatfish/em and emDevil/em, and Leo Laporte's a href="http://twit.tv/"TWiT podcast network/a./p pimg alt="ggipadbig_sep10.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/ggipadbig_sep10.jpg" width="610" height="458" class="mt-image-none" style="" //p pAccording to GetGlue's Fraser Kelton, media networks have been impressed by the results their sticker campaigns have garnered, attracting them back again for expanded programs. /p p"Within 5 minutess of True Blood airing 2 weeks ago, 5,000 fans concurrently checked-in with an estimated reach of about 1 million people on Twitter," says Kelton. "The benefit of having trusted recommendations coming out from friends and reaching that number of people is a huge win for them."/p pKelton adds that shows and movies that run sticker promotions on GetGlue see far better engagement from the platform compared to those that don't. While this is to be expected, it is evidence that the social check-in platform is a viable market for advertising campaigns from big brands, stations, and studios./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/getglue_for_ipad_wants_to_be_your_couch_surfing_companion.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/-rIgorSpcafB5VefVAMZFa0AKso/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/-rIgorSpcafB5VefVAMZFa0AKso/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/-rIgorSpcafB5VefVAMZFa0AKso/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/-rIgorSpcafB5VefVAMZFa0AKso/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=VlEA4Tzwpek:qJpA-iTxHGM:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=VlEA4Tzwpek:qJpA-iTxHGM:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=VlEA4Tzwpek:qJpA-iTxHGM:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=VlEA4Tzwpek:qJpA-iTxHGM:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=VlEA4Tzwpek:qJpA-iTxHGM:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=VlEA4Tzwpek:qJpA-iTxHGM:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=VlEA4Tzwpek:qJpA-iTxHGM:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=VlEA4Tzwpek:qJpA-iTxHGM:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=VlEA4Tzwpek:qJpA-iTxHGM:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=VlEA4Tzwpek:qJpA-iTxHGM:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=VlEA4Tzwpek:qJpA-iTxHGM:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/VlEA4Tzwpek" height="1" width="1"/