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Live at #4AsData: Nate Silver’s simple suggestions for advertisers
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:50 AM PDT
| Live at #4AsData: Nate Silver’s simple suggestions for advertisers Posted: 17 Oct 2013 07:00 AM PDT Nate Silver, the quant savant who made waves with his accurate election predictions in 2008 and 2012 and who now works for ESPN, came to Wednesday’s 4A’s Data Summit looking to qualify not only his own successes, but also the rush to proclaim data as the magical solution to all future problems. In an intellectual and entertaining 30-minute address, Silver sought to dispute the notion that “size conquers everything else” — that Big Data, by virtue of its existence, can lead to a “magical solution.”  ESPN’s Nate Silver “All the good data in the world wont help you if you’re using faulty assumptions to process it,” he said. Silver’s talk was punctuated by three suggestions for advertisers and marketers as they move to more fully incorporate data. 1. Think probabilistically People generally have trouble grasping probability, Silver said. When something is given an 80% chance of happening, many treat that as if it means 100%. But Russian roulette has an approximate 80% success rate, yet few would give that a try. If you’re confident in certain outcomes, go ahead and project that confidence, but sometimes it’s better to show some humility than to be humbled when things don’t turn out as you expected. “Thinking probabilistically is a way to reconcile what we don’t know with what we do know,” Silver said. 2. Know where you’re coming from Drawing on a sports analogy, Silver referenced Michael Lewis’ “The Blind Side,” offering the theory that in football, a weak offensive line can make even the most talented quarterbacks and running backs appear weak. “You’re defined sometimes, in very competitive realms, by your weakest links, so it’s important to note what things you might be doing wrong — where your ‘blind spots’ might be.” Considering your assumptions and recognizing your own potential for bias is essential for people in the data world. 3. Try and err Silver said Google was the most successful user of Big Data, because they are “constantly iterating their products,” experimenting and pulling back when things don’t turn out right. They test their results in the real world, and have the discipline and courage to change course when things go wrong. “Focusing on processes can give you better results,” Silver said. He closed by quoting Duke University scientist Michael Babyak, who said that “in science, we seek to balance creativity and skepticism.” Silver said that the same principle could be applied to advertising. Be creative and aggressive in your campaigns and use of data, he said, but don’t be afraid to abandon ideas if they aren’t helping an organization achieve their critical objectives.
Related Posts: Live at #4AsData: Nate Silver’s simple suggestions for advertisers originally published by SmartBlogs | | Andy’s Answers: How UCB Pharma creates a social strategy around their customers Posted: 17 Oct 2013 04:15 AM PDT If you’re wondering what a pharmaceutical company is doing in social media, you’re not alone. Regulation, corporate culture and touchy subject matters kept UCB Pharma from completely engaging on Facebook and Twitter until this year. But according to Social Media Manager Greg Cohen, the company’s presence in social serves an important purpose: telling their customers’ stories. In his presentation at SocialMedia.org‘s BlogWell conference, Greg shares how they create a social media presence that encourages patients while complying with regulation and keeping the C-suite happy. Here are some key points from Greg’s presentation: - It’s not about selling: Product information has no place in UCB Pharma’s social media strategy. Instead, they focus on helping their customers connect with other people like them and encourage one another.
- Be the arm around the shoulder: Greg talks about how they encourage patients to share their success stories, help them communicate with doctors, and be a part of a community.
- Help the legal team understand: In a regulated industry like pharmaceuticals, getting social media content approval is difficult. Greg shares his secret to communicating with their legal team to get everyone on board.
Watch the video below to see Greg’s full presentation.
Related Posts: Andy’s Answers: How UCB Pharma creates a social strategy around their customers originally published by SmartBlogs | You are subscribed to email updates from SmartBlogs » Social Media
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Six Things I Took Away From the MarketingProfs B2B Forum #mpb2b
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:45 AM PDT
| Six Things I Took Away From the MarketingProfs B2B Forum #mpb2b Posted: 17 Oct 2013 07:02 AM PDT Our flagship event, the B2B Forum, last week delivered equal measures of ideas, inspiration, fun, heart, guts, and soul. Does it seem odd to talk about things like “heart” and “soul” in relation to a business conference? And if so, why? Because I think it makes total sense. Here’s why. First, an acknowledgement to my friend and B2B Forum speaker Doug Kessler (and a hilariously sore loser (!)) of our first annual Bright Bulb Awards) for helping me sort out what made last week’s B2B Forum so special. Last week, on the ground, in Boston, I could sense that something special was afoot. But I’m awfully close to it to have much perspective: It’s like asking a parent to articulate why her child is so spectacular a human being… You end up with an almost incoherent rush of words and feelings that’s capped with a lump in the throat. Doug helped me find the narrative thread by offering me necessary perspective. Thank you, Doug. So what did I take away from Boston last week? Heart. Our speakers are simply some of the brightest people in marketing. We hand-pick them because of that, and because they love what they do. But, even more than that, our speakers are also interesting, generous in sharing their knowledge, and nice. 
“Nice” might sound like a throwaway term. But it’s not. Truly it’s a quality we value in those people we put in front of our community. Do you want to learn from a jerk? Neither do I. Inspiration. A real benefit to in-person events is, of course, the education you get from the sessions. But it’s also something more: The jolt you get from being in the same room as like-minded people whose view of the world is similar to yours… but not the same. The kind of inspiration—as I’ve written before—that makes all the difference between a groove and a rut, as the songwriter Christine Lavin sings. (“There’s a very fine line between a groove and a rut; a fine line between eccentrics and people who are just plain nuts.”) Thursday’s kickoff featured a surprise flashmob from the Boston hip hop group Phunk Phenomenon (a great group of kids who arrived at 6:45 AM!). We knew we wanted a surprise to wake people up, but we also wanted to draw a connection between creating memorable experiences and marketing. We wanted our attendees to leave inspired to shake things up a little when they went back to their own organizations, sitting back at their own desks. The theme of the event was “Marketing Is Full of Choices,” and we want to help the marketers in our community to make inspired ones. And speaking of inspiration, the sponsors definitely had it. Sponsors often don’t get enough credit for the hard work they do on the show floor. Our sponsors obviously helped defray the cost of the event by paying to exhibit there. But in talking to many of them over the few days, I realized that so many of them offered truly inspired products and services. They were a spectacular group. Fun and humor. Morning flash mobs. An Oscar-themed Bright Bulbs awards ceremony (complete with evening wear). Giant vinyl stickers in the bathrooms with funny sayings. 
Photo booth. 
Blinking cocktail tumblers. 
Great swag and social giveaways. Superhero drawings. 
Themed costumes at Profstoberfest—our version of Oktoberfest. 
All of that fun added a sense of buoyancy to B2B Forum. None of it would’ve worked nearly as well if not balanced by serious learning in the sessions, by the way. Without the education, it would’ve been a fall version of Spring Break for marketers. But with it, we created a necessary equilibrium, I think. B2B marketing is a pretty fun place to be these days, no matter how serious your business is. Guts. We built a few surprises into the Forum, which took guts to pull off. We didn’t meet the Phunk Phenomenon dance troupe until an hour before it was set to go on, for example. We weren’t sure attendees would appreciate our quirky touches. We weren’t sure David Meerman Scott would find the setup that Tim Washer and I put together for his surprise Lifetime Achievement Award and keynote (!) as hilarious as we thought it was. We weren’t totally sure that nominees of the Bright Bulb Awards would find the Oscar theme—and all the mocking of their excellent efforts—at all charming. 
Also: One of my favorite sessions is the closing general session: “7 Minutes of Awesome.” Now in its third year, it features seven marketers speaking on a variety of subjects for seven minutes. But, really, the premise is far simpler than that: They tell stories I want to hear and share with our attendees. I admire the guts, courage, energy, and (sometimes) humor with which this year’s seven—(Andrew Davis, Jon Miller, Erika Napoletano, Marcus Sheridan, David B. Thomas, Tim Washer, Tamsen Webster)—approach those stories. It’s a warm and marvelous end to our event. 
There’s a broader marketing lesson in there somewhere—it takes guts to do the things that aren’t a sure bet—but there’s also a lesson in there for event programmers. Soul (and Much Gratitude!) I get a lot of accolades from others on the success of an event. But so many people here at MarketingProfs contribute to the success of our events program, leaving me with tremendous respect and awe for everyone who is part of the MarketingProfs family. 
Whether they were on the ground in Boston, out front or behind the scenes… truly everyone at MarketingProfs played a part in making this year’s B2B Forum the absolute best ever. But a special shout goes out from me and my B2B co-conspirator Sharon Hudson to what we think of as the Big Seven—Kathy Bushman, John Giunta, Daniele Hagen, Kristen Johnson, Corey O’Loughlin, Julie Pildner, and Jo Roberts—who put their own heart and soul into the Forum. Those seven people made us all look better, smarter, and cuter (or more handsome). A shout out to our sales staff, too, who understand what we are trying to accomplish at the Forum. (It’s not just about money.) And finally… Ideas. I was pretty busy on the ground in Boston, and I didn’t get to attend a lot of the 32 breakout sessions and 6 half-day workshops at the Forum. So, ironically, I attended our own conference like many of those who weren’t there—vicariously, via the Twitter stream, Instagram, Facebook, and other social channels. You thought the prizes we gave for social sharing (“Social Superlatives,” as we called them) were designed to benefit non-attendees? Nope. It was all for me. (Ha. I’m kidding.) (Or am I?) So, I appreciate all the social love—the social sharing, and the resulting blog posts: Curata | MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2013 Wrap-Up Eloqua | Four Captured Moments From the MarketingProfs B2B Forum Sam Fiorella | Improve the Customer Experience Using Mobile Veronica Jarski | Stuck in Elevators and Other Networking Disasters: Visual Sketchnotes of Jill Foster’s MPB2B Keynote Christine Parizo | MPB2B: Tackle Three Networking Disasters to Avoid Being Stuck in Elevators Christine Parizo | MPB2B: SMB Industry Domination Begins With Content Marketing Culture Chris Penn | Find Windows of Opportunities, Not Best Times Search Mojo | Live From MarketingProfs B2B: Creating Versatile Valuable Content for B2B Results Search Mojo | Live From MarketingProfs B2B: Conversion Optimization Tactics for Lead-Generation Pages Search Mojo | Live From MarketingProfs B2B: SEO PPC Tips to Grow Your Business Social Media B2B | How to Build a Great B2B Community on Facebook Social Media B2B | Five Smart Tips for B2B Content Marketing Top Rank | 2013 B2B Marketing Forum Preview and a Cheers Plug Top Rank | Marketing Automation Essentials for Small Businesses Top Rank | Eight Things You Need to Know About Key Influencer Marketing Top Rank | How to Build a B2B Community on Facebook Top Rank | MPB2B Photos on Flickr Amy Vernon | The Rise of Mobile and the Death of the Barroom Argument Vocus | How to Create a Content Marketing Culture in Eight Easy Steps Vocus | B2B Marketing Wisdom From #MPB2B Please plan to come next year! Because if you miss it… well, you’ll miss out. |
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How Can You Walk Through A Door If You Cannot See It?
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:43 AM PDT
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Q&A with Ian Greenleigh, author of The Social Media Side Door
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:27 AM PDT
| Q&A with Ian Greenleigh, author of The Social Media Side Door Posted: 17 Oct 2013 05:24 AM PDT As a small business owner, I’m always hustling to make the most of limited resources. The techniques presented in Ian Greenleigh’s new book, The Social Media Side Door (McGraw Hill, October 2013), are designed to help us take advantage of the seismic shifts that have happened in recent years regarding access and influence. Enjoy this Q&A with Ian, as he offers some great insights from the book. 1. What is the social media side door? We're living through an extraordinary time. Social media is decimating the human and technological gatekeepers that have historically prevented non-elites from accessing and influencing powerful people and institutions. The barriers are crumbling all around us, and so many people haven't even noticed, or they're simply not yet equipped to take advantage of these massive opportunities, what I call "social media side doors." 2. How did you discover it? I really struggled to get a decent job during the recession. I had just graduated with a degree in political science, even though it was a field I didn't want to pursue. I was in sales, and I wasn't very good at it. It was pretty bleak. None of the things our society teaches about getting great jobs were working. I thought I was bright, hardworking and creative, but I couldn't find a way to convey that to the professional gatekeepers in recruiting. I needed to try something radically different, so I scraped the bottom of my dwindling savings account to attempt something I had seen on a blog. I took out a Facebook ad, pointed it at a special "hire me" page on my blog, pointed the ad at decision-makers at the top companies in Austin, and saw the clicks roll in. Within a few weeks, I had a nice array of options for my next career step. It wasn't an anomaly. Once I started looking for them, I realized that social media side doors existed almost everywhere barriers seem to exist. I also realized that no one had written a guidebook to help people spot and take advantage of these new opportunities, so I decided to write it myself. 3. How can people find and open their own side doors in social media? Realize that side doors often open gradually. For example, every time you leave a comment on a CEO's blog, or tweet a piece of intelligent feedback to an influencer, you're opening that side door up an inch or two more. Think about the goals of the person whom you're trying to reach, and reflect on how you can help them get there faster. You can do things like introduce them to other influential people via Twitter, interview them on your blog about a project they're promoting, or help them find information they're after. Relationships are still the basis for almost all of the value created in social media. Social media makes it really easy to answer the question, "what has this person done for me lately?" As such, you'll hear "yes" far more often when you've provided value before an ask, or in conjunction with it. 4. Why should we try to open these side doors sooner rather than later? Imagine it's the dawn of the 20th century, and you're a salesperson, marketer or jobseeker. Telephones are expensive and rare, but somehow you've acquired one for free. There are no gatekeepers to screen the calls of the rich and powerful, and you can reach any of these fellow telephone owners simply by asking a switchboard operator to put you in touch. If you wait too long to take advantage of this situation, your competition will beat you to the punch, your approach will no longer be unique, and access now seems like more of a liability than an opportunity to those being accessed. We're not quite there yet with social media. We see rising adoption among powerful people, but the human and technological gatekeepers haven't caught up yet. And innovation happens so rapidly, that the arrival of each new social network brings with it a new set of access and influence opportunities. Author’s Bio: Ian Greenleigh is a social media and content strategist, and author of The Social Media Side Door: How to Bypass the Gatekeepers to Gain Greater Access and Influence. He helps companies turn data, ideas, and relationships into true thought leadership. His words and ideas have been featured in Harvard Business Review, Ad Age, Adweek, Digiday, Ragan, Seth Godin’s The Domino Project, and elsewhere. He writes and speaks on a wide range of topics, including changing consumer-brand relationships, the convergence of personal identities, and the radically shifting landscapes of access and influence. You can connect with Ian on Twitter: @be3d  |
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The five-tool employee
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:19 AM PDT
| The five-tool employee Posted: 17 Oct 2013 08:17 AM PDT "The five-tool employee" was originally posted on July 26, 2008.  Over the years, I've spoken to a lot of people about career paths. Most people are usually exploring the "what if" possibilities of a job switch and not ready to actually put some money on the table to make things happen. There's nothing wrong with that - sometimes, what someone really needs is a vacation. Or a hobby, like gardening or video games. Or an open ear for venting. But then there are the people who are ready to change. And the ones I want to work with are the five-tool players. In fact, I think every hiring manager wants these players, whether it's a role in a startup or a Fortune 50 organization. You see, in baseball a five-tool player is someone who can hit for average, hit for power, run the bases shrewdly and quickly, throw, and field. In a corporation, the five-tool employee is one who: 1) gets things done with results to show for their effort - no excuses for failure
2) accomplishes things that are remarkable - above and beyond what's expected
3) exercises sound decision-making skills, acting quickly and decisively
4) communicates well and can convince others to act
5) deals well with ambiguity, makes order where others see confusion Let's take this analogy further. Baseball's five-tool players are most often outfielders, sometimes infielders, and almost never catchers or pitchers. Likewise, corporate five-tool employees are most often in management, strategy, and marketing roles, can be found in IT and finance, but rarely appear in other areas. If you're looking, or looking to hire - think about the tools you possess or want to have on staff. The five-tool employee is difficult to find and worth retaining once on board...and will have many chances to succeed, because they naturally create value for their companies and opportunities for themselves. Tweet | You are subscribed to email updates from Being: Peter Kim
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Blogs - ASP.NET Weblogs
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:11 AM PDT
| Blogs - ASP.NET Weblogs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:10 AM PDT As mobile devices are becoming more and more popular, web developers are also finding it necessary to target mobile devices while building their web sites. | | MSDN Blogs - MSDN Blogs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:10 AM PDT Learn more about the MSDN Blog Platform at the MSDN Blogs - Help blog! Provide Site Feedback on MSDN Blogs | | Blogs : The Official Microsoft IIS Site Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:10 AM PDT Read or subscribe to IIS blogs. Bill Staple's blog and other Microsoft IIS team blogs. | | .NET Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:10 AM PDT The .NET blog (AKA: dotnet blog) discusses new features in the .NET Framework and important issues for .NET developers. | | Building Windows 8 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:10 AM PDT Official Microsoft Developer Network blog providing the latest news and information about the operating system. | | MSDN Blogs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:10 AM PDT To follow up on our announcement of releasing Rx 2.1 , we'd like to let you know what changed in this release. We have updated the Reactive Extensions for .NET ... | | Developer Tools Blogs - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:10 AM PDT Search this blog Search all blogs. Related resources. Visual Studio Developer Center Visual Studio Product Website; Buy an MSDN Subscription; | | MSDN Blogs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:10 AM PDT This morning, Mozilla shared their feelings on IE9 with a post that claims to answer the question, "Is IE9 a modern browser?" While they grudgingly concede that ... | | MSDN Blogs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:10 AM PDT In case you are capable of the German language, Christian Binder has posted an interview with me taken during TechED 2009 in Berlin, and we augmented it with an ... | | MSDN Blogs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:10 AM PDT Office hours: in-person help for US developers working on Windows 8 and Windows Phone apps | | Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:10 AM PDT A blog about fighting spam and malware by a member of Microsoft Forefront Online Security anti-spam team | | Windows PowerShell Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:10 AM PDT In addition to being a scripting language, Windows PowerShell is also used as a platform in many applications. This is possible because the Windows PowerShell engine ... | | The Old New Thing - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:10 AM PDT We saw over a decade ago (my goodness I've been doing this way too long) that the AdjustWindowRect and AdjustWindowRectEx functions do not take menu ... | | The Silverlight Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:10 AM PDT Silverlight Show: Windows 8 and the future of XAML Part 7: The application lifecycle of Windows 8 applications | | IEBlog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:10 AM PDT Microsoft corporate weblog about the IE browser. | | Official T4 team blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:10 AM PDT T4 stands for Text Template Transformation Toolkit and is Microsoft's template based text generation framework included with Visual Studio. | | MSDN Blogs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:10 AM PDT My name is Jeff Cardon. I'm a member of the Microsoft OneNote team and I'd like to share some of the tips and tricks that are available in this fantastic product. | | The Visual Studio Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:10 AM PDT The Visual Studio Blog. The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team | | MSDN Blogs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:10 AM PDT We're putting this blog (Data Access blog) into suspended animation. That doesn't mean we will stop blogging about ADO.NET and data access stuff, or that we'll take ... | | MSDN Blogs Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:10 AM PDT Jensen Harris' blog about the Microsoft Office user interface | You are subscribed to email updates from Search Msdn
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Open thread for night owls: New Homeland Security Chief justified excesses in war on terror
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:09 AM PDT
| Open thread for night owls: New Homeland Security Chief justified excesses in war on terror Posted: 17 Oct 2013 08:58 PM PDT Bob Dreyfuss at The Nation writes New Homeland Security Chief Spent Years Justifying War on Terror's Excesses: | Back in 2012, just before he stepped down as general counsel for the Department of Defense, Jeh ("Jay") Johnson delivered a speech at Oxford University titled: "The Conflict Against Al Qaeda and its Affiliates: How Will It End?" The very title carries an optimistic ring, since it often seems that the war on terror will never, ever end – as evidenced, perhaps, by the simultaneous raids last week into Libya and Somalia that captured a former Al Qaeda big wig and sought, without success, to take down an Al Shabab leader. The two actions, coming amid a steady stream of statements from top Obama administration officials that Al Qaeda has been decimated, followed an extraordinary sign earlier this year that Al Qaeda – or at least the threat of Al Qaeda as bogeyman – is still alive and kicking: that, you'll remember, was the reported intercept of an email from Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's chieftain in Pakistan, to the head of Al Qaeda's Yemen franchise, containing an unspecified threat against the United States that led to dozens of American embassies shutting down from North Africa to the Middle East and deep into South Asia. No attack was forthcoming. Now, Johnson has been tabbed by Obama to be the new secretary of homeland security. Which makes his speech at Oxford relevant again. To be sure, in his post at the Department of Homeland Security, as opposed to DOD, Johnson won't have responsibility for the war on terror, if we're still calling it that. (Obama, at least, isn't.) But Johnson's speech was widely cited as important back in December 2012 because he had the temerity to suggest that there would come a day when the conflict with Al Qaeda will "end." In the speech, Johnson said:
| I do believe that on the present course, there will come a tipping point – a tipping point at which so many of the leaders and operatives of al Qaeda and its affiliates have been killed or captured, and the group is no longer able to attempt or launch a strategic attack against the United States, such that al Qaeda as we know it, the organization that our Congress authorized the military to pursue in 2001, has been effectively destroyed. At that point, we must be able to say to ourselves that our efforts should no longer be considered an "armed conflict" against al Qaeda and its associated forces; rather, a counterterrorism effort against individuals who are the scattered remnants of al Qaeda, or are parts of groups unaffiliated with al Qaeda, for which the law enforcement and intelligence resources of our government are principally responsible, in cooperation with the international community – with our military assets available in reserve to address continuing and imminent terrorist threats. | Problem is, of course, until that as-yet-undefined moment when the "war" against Al Qaeda ends and the "counterterrorism effort against individuals" begins has not, it appears, yet occurred – at least in the eyes of the Obama administration. So, as a result, the White House continues to order drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere, launch Special Forces raids to kill or capture alleged Al Qaeda officials in Africa and Asia, and, in Afghanistan, insist on the continuing right of U.S. forces to seek and destroy Al Qaeda units in that country, even though experts say only about 75 members of the organization remain there. And, as long as the "war" continues, then everything that goes with it – extra-judicial detention of captured fighters, vast electronic surveillance of U.S. and foreign citizens by the National Security Agency and its partners, the Guantanamo prison, and the rest, continues too. |
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—CO-Sen: Schaffer on His Own Now: | National Republicans have decided Bob Schaffer is a sinking ship, and you know what happens with the rats then. Last week there were rumors that the NRSC was going to pull out of Schaffer's campaign for the Colorado Senate seat being vacated by Wayne Allard. That speculation is confirmed today.
Mark Udall, has been posting consisten leads in polling for the last month, probably one reason a cash-strapped NRSC has decided to retrench and defend other seats. It's not just the NRSC that have been scared off. "Independent" 527s, are also pulling out, looking to Oregon and North Carolina to try to salvage a few Republican incumbents. |
Tweet of the Day:
On today's Kagro in the Morning show: Shutdown's over! Greg Dworkin wraps up the politics, the "big whoop" journalism (formerly "both sides"), and how "why won't Obama lead?" really means "cut entitlements." Grover Norquist claims to be mad at defunders. Ted Cruz's $24 billion mailing list. And how did that number get decided on, anyway? "32 Republicans Who Caused the Government Shutdown." What Cruz's fake filibuster should have taught us about predicting the cave. Reinsurance fee, explained. Tea Party insight from the New York Review of Books! A frightening and abusive FBI practice, targeting American Muslims, of course.
High Impact Posts. Top Comments.  | | Economics Daily Digest: Welcome back, government Posted: 17 Oct 2013 08:15 AM PDT By Rachel Goldfarb, originally published on Next New Deal Click here to receive the Daily Digest via email. Debt Ceiling Crisis Averted, House Tea Partiers Express No Regrets (MoJo) Tim Murphy reports on Tea Party reactions to the deal that reopened the government. They don't care that they gained nothing and damaged the economy, because apparently it was more important to continue their crusade against Obamacare. Gridlock Has Cost U.S. Billions, and the Meter Is Still Running (NYT) Annie Lowrey, Nathaniel Popper, and Nelson D. Schwartz look at estimates of how much the shutdown cost. The ripple effects aren't over yet, since the housing market slowed, short term interest rates rose, and there's another fight ahead in January. Study: Congress's Budget Battles Have Cost the Economy $700 billion So Far (WaPo) Brad Plumer examines a study from Macroeconomic Advisors that claims that since 2010, all the fiscal fights have cost nearly three percent of GDP. He questions these estimates, because they rely on "policy uncertainty," a concept of questionable usefulness. - Roosevelt Take: Plumer pulls from Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mike Konczal's work to explain why the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index might not be a useful measure.
Male Senators Begrudgingly Admit Women Are Important (National Journal) Marina Koren points out that the Senate deal was authored mostly by women. A few male Senators have talked about the importance of the female Senators in leading the charge to reopen government, but they all do so in very awkward ways. Why the House Should Dump Boehner (MSNBC) Timothy Noah argues that the Speaker's continued eagerness to accommodate the far right side of his party has marked him as incompetent. By voting with the far right, the Democrats could push Boehner out after the 2014 midterms. What to Expect During the Cease-Fire (Robert Reich) Robert Reich considers what's to come, since last night's agreement only funds the government through January. He hopes the President and Democrats in Congress will focus on the needs of the people in budget negotiations, instead of deficit reduction.  | | What would they say if Obama made the mistake this House Republican made about 'Amazing Grace'? Posted: 16 Oct 2013 08:08 AM PDT  Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) Much was made Tuesday of the fact that House Republicans began their hostage strategy meeting with a rendition of "Amazing Grace," starting with the Republicans in attendance themselves:  Rep. Burgess confirms GOP mtg began w "Amazing Grace." "All three verses, w/o the words written out," he adds. "Isn't that impressive?" — @AshleyRParker Um, "all" three verses? Sure, it's a relatively minor mistake, but if President Obama said there were only three verses to "Amazing Grace," by now Twitchy and Breitbart and the rest of them would be claiming this was proof he'd never set foot in a Christian church in his life, with a side of speculation on whether songs are limited to three verses in Kenya. In fact, John Newton wrote six verses, and while you rarely hear all six of those, at least one other verse ("When we've been there 10,000 years") has been added through oral tradition. Someone, send Rep. Burgess back to church. Or Kenya.  | | Workers at biggest fast food companies need billions in public assistance Posted: 15 Oct 2013 10:28 AM PDT Walmart isn't the only corporate giant relying on government assistance to make up for the low, low wages it pays its workers. According to a new report from the University of California-Berkeley Labor Center, 52 percent of front-line fast food workers are on some form of public assistance, at a cost of nearly $7 billion a year. And the 10 largest fast food companies account for $3.8 billion of that, the National Employment Law Project estimates. The UC-Berkeley study only looks at participation in Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families; if it included all government programs, such as child-care subsidies and reduced price school lunches, the total would be higher. That's because fast food restaurants pay wages so low that even the families of full-time fast food workers rely on public programs—the median income for people working more than 10 hours a week 27 or more weeks per year in nonmanagerial fast food jobs is $8.69 an hour. The companies benefiting from all that low-wage labor and the food stamps and health care assistance needed for workers to get by are doing just fine. Last year, the 10 largest fast food companies earned $7.44 billion in profits, paid their top executives $52.7 million, and distributed $7.7 billion in dividends and buybacks, according to NELP. Meanwhile:
Like Walmart, McDonald's and Taco Bell and Domino's are profiting directly off of government programs for low-income people. Taxpayers are subsidizing wages at these immensely profitable companies, while Republicans in Congress block the minimum wage increase that would raise many fast food workers out of poverty.  | | Judge Posner concedes that landmark ruling okaying Indiana voter ID law was wrongly decided Posted: 16 Oct 2013 10:16 AM PDT  Next time, clean those glasses before writing your ruling. In his new book, Reflections on Judging, 31-year veteran Judge Richard Posner of the federal judiciary's Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit concedes that he screwed up in writing the majority opinion of a seminal voter ID case that has had far-reaching effects. The case was Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. In 2005, the Indiana legislature passed a law requiring a voter to present a photo ID at the polls before being allowed to cast a ballot. Despite plaintiffs' insistence that this would keep some citizens without a proper ID from voting, the Seventh Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law. Subsequently, with Crawford as their shield, other states from Pennsylvania to Texas have added or tried to add a photo ID requirement for voting. All part of a concerted Republican effort to shave a few points off the turnout of demographics more likely to vote Democratic than not. A 1981 appointee of Ronald Reagan who has acted like a moderate Republican on the bench even as he adopted right-wing Chicago School economic views, Posner now says what the Crawford ruling was about "is a type of law now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than of fraud prevention." In a video interview with the Huffington Post:
Asked whether the court had gotten its ruling wrong, Judge Posner responded: "Yes. Absolutely." Back in 2007, he said, "there hadn't been that much activity in the way of voter identification," and "we weren't really given strong indications that requiring additional voter identification would actually disenfranchise people entitled to vote." The member of the three-judge panel who dissented from the majority decision, Terence T. Evans, "was right," Judge Posner said. Indeed, he was. Here is the no-nonsense crux of Evans's dissent: Let's not beat around the bush: The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too- thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic. We should subject this law to strict scrutiny—or at least, in the wake of Burdick v. Takushi, 504 U.S. 428 (1992), something akin to "strict scrutiny light"—and strike it down as an undue burden on the fundamental right to vote. The percentage of eligible voters participating in elections has, for many years, been on a downward trajectory. With that being the case, one would think states should be looking for creative ways (like allowing people to vote at places they frequent and are familiar with, like shopping malls rather than basements of fire stations) to increase voter participation. Yet, the Indiana law we sanction today does just the opposite. Constricting the franchise in a democratic society, when efforts should be instead undertaken to expand it, is not the way to go. The fig leaf of respectability providing the motive behind this law is that it is necessary to prevent voter fraud—a person showing up at the polls pretending to be some- one else. But where is the evidence of that kind of voter fraud in this record? Unfortunately, Evans died in 2011 and isn't around to hear Posner admitting he was right all along. Not that the book-promoting judge is offering anything like an apology for the damage he caused by getting it wrong. The problem, he says, is that the court was not given enough facts to get it right. Given Evans's clear view of the matter, that's a thinly argued cop-out.  | | Democracy Corps survey shows growing support for Obamacare Posted: 16 Oct 2013 01:52 PM PDT Last weeks' NBC/ Wall Street Journal poll showed a marked increase in support for the Affordable Care Act, particularly in those who strongly supported the law. A new survey from Democracy Corps and the Women's Voices Women's Vote Action Fund indicate that those results might not be an outlier. At all. - Just 38 percent now clearly oppose the Affordable Care Act. While likely voters divide evenly on the plan, 8 percent oppose the law because it does not go far enough. As a result, just 38 percent oppose the law because it is big government.
- By significant margins, voters want lawmakers to implement and fix the law, rather than repeal it. By a 20-point margin, 58 percent to 38 percent, voters say lawmakers should implement and fix the law rather than repeal it. Additionally, intensity favors implementation—38 percent strongly favor implementing the law while 28 percent strongly favor repeal.
- Strong opposition to the law has dropped a net 10 points since 2010 —now at 34 percent. This is a totally different context than 2010, when Democrats paid the price for the ACA and Republicans took control of the House [...]
- By a 17-point margin (49 to 32), voters say they trust Democrats more than Republicans on implementing the Affordable Care Act. The more Republicans make the period ahead about implementation, the more voters trust Democrats to do a better job in government.
The shifts Democracy Corps identifies are in the groups who have been most likely to see the benefits of the law so far: unmarried women, white non-college voters and seniors. Additionally, independents are increasingly supporting the law, possibly because they've been so phenomenally turned off by the GOP obsession over Obamacare, that they're lining up behind the law. All of which makes this:
 Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS) on whether GOP will try defund strategy again to gut Obamacare: "We'll be looking for any opportunity." — @cimarcos ... and this:  Sen. @marcorubio to speak on Senate floor shortly about next steps in fight against Obamacare. #cspan2 — @AlexConant ... both hilarious and pathetic. But by all means, Republicans, make 2014 and 2016 all about Obamacare. Really.  | | Classic Bachmann: Default avoided because Republicans were 'the adults in the room' Posted: 17 Oct 2013 12:12 PM PDT  Pssst, Michele, you just called yourself not an adult. Michele Bachmann's ability to lie not just with a straight face but with utter, intense conviction is almost like a superpower. Wednesday night, Bachmann told Fox's Sean Hannity that President Obama: ... rolled the dice, he knew that Republicans would be willing to be the adults in the room to make sure the country didn't go into default, he was willing to let it default, and we're at the result we are tonight. Straight face. No ironic half smile, no wink. "Republicans would be willing to be the adults in the room" ha ha ha ha ha "to make sure the country didn't go into default." That's the default, by the way, that a frightening number of Republicans didn't think would be a problem. The default that was only at risk to begin with because Republicans thought it would be fun to take the entire economy hostage to defund Obamacare before it had a chance become popular by helping millions of people gain health coverage. And, uh, Michele? If, by voting to avert default, Republicans showed that they were the adults in the room, what does it say about you that you voted no?  | | So how'd that Obamacare fight go, Ted Cruz? Posted: 17 Oct 2013 09:41 AM PDT  At least he's still got his mailing list. Remember how Ted Cruz and House Republicans shut down the government for 16 days and took the nation to the brink of default because they wanted to kill Obamacare? Well, they didn't quite get that accomplished, and the one Obamacare concession they did get—income verification—is, well, pretty much meaningless. [T]he deal basically requires two submitted reports in the course of the next year. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is due to submit the first report by Jan. 1, which must detail "the procedures employed by American Health Benefit Exchanges to verify eligibility for credits and cost-sharing reductions described in subsection." Six months later, the HHS inspector general is required to submit a report "regarding the effectiveness of the procedures and safeguards provided under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act for preventing the submission of inaccurate or fraudulent information by applicants." That's it. That's what Republicans "won" on Obamacare. A handful of staff at HHS will have to spend several hours every few months compiling reports. But Republicans should take heart. This will cost taxpayers a whole lot less than the plan they originally had in mind to scrutinize and double-scrutinize the financial status of every single applicant (because Freedom!). There's a compromise that's good for the deficit. Because that's what they care most about, right?  | | Daily Kos Elections 3Q 2013 House fundraising reports roundup Posted: 16 Oct 2013 11:35 AM PDT Quarterly fundraising reports for federal candidates, covering the period from July 1 through September 30, were due at the Federal Elections Commission on Tuesday night. Below is our list of fundraising numbers for House candidates in key races:
As always, all numbers are in thousands. An explanation of each column is below: • "CD" stands for congressional district. • "Raised" is the amount the candidate has received in donations from donors during the quarter, not including any loans. • "Self Fund" is the amount of direct contributions a candidate has made to his or her own campaign. This number, if any, is not counted in the "Raised" column. • "Self Loan" is the amount of any loans a candidate has made to his or her own campaign. This number, if any, is not counted in the "Raised" column. • "Spent" is the amount of money the campaign has spent during the quarter. • "CoH" stands for total cash-on-hand at the end of the quarter. • "CTD" indicates a candidate's contributions raised cycle-to-date, as of the end of the quarter. To access our spreadsheet directly, click here. If you click through, you'll see an additional column called "Transfers" that shows monetary transfers from other political committees. Previously, we put together roundups for the first and second fundraising quarters as well.  | | Crafty legislative genius Ted Cruz won't say if he'd do it all over again Posted: 17 Oct 2013 03:15 PM PDT Former Speaker of the House Ted Cruz sits down with ABC's Jonathan Karl and demonstrates his political brilliance by refusing to say whether he'd shut down the government all over again:
KARL: So you would do it again? CRUZ: I would do anything, and I will to do anything I can to stop the train wreck that is Obamacare. But that wasn't the question. The question was whether he'd do what he did all over again, and he refused to answer. So Karl asked him again: KARL: Will you rule out pushing to the brink of another shutdown by saying you would block funding for the government unless Obamacare is defunded? Will you do that again, or will you say you will not do that again? CRUZ: Jon, I know you want to nail down all sorts of future tactical decisions. What I intend to do is continue to stand with American people to stop Obamacare. KARL: So you might do it? CRUZ: What I intend to do is continue to stand with American people to stop Obamacare. Now, to be fair to Ted Cruz, I'm not saying that he admitted that his tactics up to this point have been a miserable failure. But I am saying that if he didn't think they've been a miserable failure, he wouldn't have repeatedly dodged Karl's question. Apparently even Ted Cruz has a limit on the amount of B.S. he can dish out. Who knew?  | | Boehner's Bottoms Up Posted: 17 Oct 2013 02:50 PM PDT 
(Click for larger image)
 | | Shutdown ended, but the economic whacking it gave us is far from over. Where is the long view? Posted: 17 Oct 2013 01:15 PM PDT By now, everyone following the government shutdown has probably heard that in 16 days it ripped $24 billion out of the U.S. economy. That's Standard & Poor's estimate, released Wednesday. It's probably as good an educated guess as anyone's. But it is just a guess. And it could be six months to a year before we have a really good grip on the real costs. Before then, of course, given that the deal to end the shutdown is a temporary matter and the tea party seems perfectly capable of continuing to shoot itself in the foot and blame the bullet, there is no guarantee we won't see another round of this in early 2014. Some view the shutdown and accompanying maneuvers as mere theater, and obviously elements of that exist. But this doesn't lessen the impact of the shutdown on the workings of an economy riven with the worst inequality of wealth and income in more than a century and plagued by a tepid 51-month "recovery" almost all of whose benefits have flowed to the top one percent. Nearly six years after the Great Recession began, unemployment remains at 7.3 percent and only that low because so many have bailed out of the workforce altogether. What's most troubling is that too few economists and almost no politicians see these acute problems as being mostly mere symptoms of chronic problems with the economy, not the least of which is the highly predatory capitalism associated with over-financialization of the entire system. Amid this continuing mess, it may seem like small potatoes that Standard & Poor's estimates that the shutdown has (or will) cut 0.6 percent off the fourth-quarter gross domestic product, which is what that $24 billion figure amounts to. S&P had previously forecast a 3 percent growth rate for the fourth quarter (on an annualized basis) but now is calling it closer to 2 percent. And S&P's previous forecast has been high compared with others. At IHS Global Insight on Wednesday, analysts lowered their fourth-quarter GDP growth estimate to an annualized 1.6 percent from 2.2 percent. In December, estimates for GDP growth for all of 2013 were running as high as 3.5 percent. A few details of the shutdown's cost, according to S&P: Some $3.1 billion in lost government services; $152 million a day in lost travel spending; $76 million a day lost from closed national parks and monuments; $217 million per day in lost federal and contractor wages in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area alone. The effects, especially the psychological effects, won't end just because the shutdown has. Please read for more analysis and a prescription below the fold.  | | Rubbing salt in their wounds: Adding to our Virginia slate Posted: 17 Oct 2013 12:47 PM PDT  Virginia House of Delegates Democratic challenger Jennifer Boysko  We have already endorsed John Bell and Kathleen Murphy in their races for Virginia delegate. They are contesting two of the 18 Republican-held seats that President Barack Obama won in 2012. Without those seats, Republicans wouldn't have that big 67-32 advantage in the House of Delegates. Virginia Democrats are fighting hard to change that, and we're lending a hand. But if helping out two Dems is good, why not add more? The community response these last two days has been fantastic: nearly 600 donors and $16,000. These races are a great investment: The overall budgets are smaller, so your dollars go a long way. And while a larger Democratic caucus is good for Virginia, retaking the chamber this decade is good for all of us as the GOP's U.S. House majority is built almost entirely on gerrymandering. Thus, our long-term efforts toward a truly representative House must go through states like this one. So given the impetus to do more, we rolled with it. Introducing two new additions to our Virginia candidate roster:
 Atif Qarni is running against the infamous " Sideshow" Bob Marshall, whose greatest hits include calling Obamacare "rape", said that disabled kids are God's "special punishment" for women having abortion, sees no difference between homosexuality and pedophilia and necrophilia, wants Virginia to mint gold and silver "alternate currency", and tried to mandate guns in schools. This is a 55-44 percent Obama district, so no reason someone this crazy should hold it. But of course, Virginia Republicans benefit from their off-year elections as they dampen Democratic base turnout. Let's help reverse that trend. Jennifer Boysko in HD-86 is running against longtime incumbent Tom Rust in this solid-blue district, 60-39 Obama. Rust has managed to sell himself as a "moderate" and is personally popular, thus bucking his district's partisan trends. He wouldn't survive reelection with presidential turnout, but he doesn't have to. There is no public polling in either of these two races, but my new mantra applies: If our people turn out, we win. The districts are just two Democratic to fear otherwise. Thus, I'm personally chipping in to both candidates and hope you follow suit. Our ability to turn the U.S. House of Representatives solidly blue in the long-term is dependent, in huge part, on our ability to control the 2020 redistricting process. And that battle begins in Virginia, this November. So please don't sit on the sidelines. A few bucks provides a huge boost to our Virginia friends fighting the good fight. Update: David got his hands on Jennifer Boysko's internals:
We now have our hands on a third internal poll from a Democratic candidate running against a Republican incumbent in Virginia's state House, and the news is once again positive for the challenger. In the state's 86th District in Northern Virginia, longtime Delegate Tom Rust has a narrow 47-44 lead over Democrat Jennifer Boysko, which pollster Myers Research says represents a "16 point net shift toward Boysko from earlier this year." Given Rust's enduring personal popularity and moderate profile, it's pretty remarkable that Boysko has made the race this close. According to Myers, the shutdown has definitely harmed Rust, and Republicans would be in much worse shape without him, since Democrats lead on the generic ballot 48-42. What's more, Democrat Terry McAuliffe has a wide 53-41 lead in the governor's race. If McAuliffe can finish strong, this is very much the sort of race where his coattails could extend further down the ballot, especially since Obama won this seat 60-39. 3:57 PM PT: For those of you who'd love to help, DFA has set up a virtual phonebank here.  | | Shutdown aftermath: Republicans are left with an unanswered ransom note and lame excuses Posted: 17 Oct 2013 12:39 PM PDT  Not our fault! After Democrats in Congress stepped in on Wednesday night and ended the Republican shutdown—a sixteen day temper tantrum that cost this country $24 billion—Republicans were left with nothing but their unanswered ransom note and a lot of pathetic excuses. We had the Republican congresswoman from the state of denial:
"I'm not prepared to suggest that this has been a complete loss," said Representative Cynthia M. Lummis of Wyoming. ... and Rep. Jack Kingston, the Georgia Republican who thought the shutdown and teetering on the edge of default was totally worth it since it allowed them to reconnect with their (apparently not-too-bright) base: But on the other side, I think it was important to us to reestablish our brand as being against Obamacare ... sometimes our base thinks that we haven't driven the point enough, even though we've had something like forty different votes to defund it in one form or the other ... ... and it would allow Republicans to rev up for their next 40 or so votes against Obamacare because: "... Democrats will have no choice but to reconsider our fair and reasonable proposals to delay the law," Georgia Republican Rep. Tom Graves said in a statement. ... and really, they were just doing the country a favor because it: ... "clarified where each party stood," [Republican Sen.] Sessions said. ... because apparently the aforementioned 40 plus votes Republicans have held to defund or repeal Obamacare had left everyone in a fog on where each party stood. But leaving all that aside, it's important to remember that the Republican shutdown wasn't really the Republican's fault. Because they were tricked by that tricky trickster, Barack Hussein Obama:
Barack Obama set the trap. Some congressional Republicans walked into it. As a result, the president is stronger, the GOP is weaker, and ObamaCare is marginally more popular. Curses! So, what comes next? If history is any guide, more ransom demands ... followed by more excuses. Only question is, how much will the next Republican tantrum cost this country?  | | Karl Rove reveals the world in which sneaky Obama snookered GOP into shutting down the government Posted: 17 Oct 2013 12:36 PM PDT Karl Rove spins out of control, starting with his latest headline: Republicans Walked Into Obama's Trap
His goal was to discredit the GOP before 2014. The defunders fell for it. Yes. President Obama, executing the the most complex eleventy billion dimensional chess move ever attempted by a mere mortal, craftily demanded that Republicans end the government shutdown and avoid default without asking for anything in return. And when Republicans refused, they walked straight into President Obama's trap—a trap which nobody could have possibly seen, and from which there was no easy escape. Except, of course, the part where they could have decided to not shut down the government or threaten default, and the fact that President Obama had repeatedly urged them over the course of many months to avoid walking down that path. But other than that, yes, they stumbled straight into Obama's stealthily set trap.  | | Midday open thread Posted: 17 Oct 2013 12:00 PM PDT - Today's comic by Ruben Bolling is The Obamolitionists continue the fight...:
- What could have been funded by what the shutdown cost. Standard & Poor's estimated the 16-day shutdown cost the economy $24 billion. Think Progress compares that with some government programs: The Child Tax Credit—$22.1 billion; the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program (formally known as welfare)—$17.7 billion;
Head Start, the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and Women Infants and Children (WIC) program combined—$25.2 billion; the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP)—$24 billion; the Department of Agriculture's proposed budget—$22.6 billion; NASA's approved budget—$16.6 billion; all air transportation programs, including the Federal Aviation Administration, security, research, and other costs: $21.9 billion - But the folks at Foxaganda think it was no big deal: Despite Standard & Poor's estimate, Fox Business's Melissa Francis added her voice to that of Megyn Kelly and Lou Dobbs to deny that the Republican-engineered action produced a "huge hit on the economy."
- Study shows Oreos may be more addictive than cocaine or morphine: The researchers studied the brains and behavior of rats presented in a maze with a choice of an Oreo or a rice cake. As if that is a choice.
What was surprising—and I'm not kidding—the rats preferred to open the Oreos and eat the middle first, then eat the cookie outside. Seriously. - Boehner may want to unfriend a few folks at Facebook. The House speaker posted an explanation of his decision to allow a vote on reopening the government. Some 5,000 of his 387,000 Facebook fans liked him in 45 minutes. But some others, well:
[They] called him an "asshat," a "sellout," Obama's "patsy," a "weasel piece of garbage" and a "Jellyfish." "Resign and go smoke a pack in the tanning bed," one wrote. "Fuck you, RINO!!!" wrote another. "Don't give in to the communist," said one. Others called him a "coward turncoat" and said he "just killed the republican party!" "You can kiss my ass, you spineless cretin!" wrote one. - Bloomberg holds press conference 16 stories below Central Park in City Water Tunnel No. 3: Having been in construction like some underground medieval cathedral for 43 years, the $5 billion tunnel, which will carry drinking water, became operational Wednesday. Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned reporters present not to disclose its exact location.
-
 Vice President Joe Biden and EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy
(passing out muffins) welcome an agency employee
back to work Thursday morning. - Chinese book from 3rd century details Roman products. The book, now in translation, is that of Yu Huan, written between 235 and 265 CE. The author provides a list of more than 60 items the emperor has in abundance. Besides the gold, silver, copper and iron, there were: "divine tortoises" used for divination; white horses with red manes; rhinoceroses; "red hornless (or immature) dragons" (which produced the famous "dragons' blood" resin); finely patterned multicoloured wool carpets; gold threaded embroidery; asbestos cloth; myrrh; frankincense; and, "poison-avoiding rats" (mongooses).
- A kiss, apparently, is not just a kiss.
- On today's Kagro in the Morning show: Shutdown's over! Greg Dworkin wraps up the politics, the "big whoop" journalism (formerly "both sides"), and how "why won't Obama lead?" really means "cut entitlements." Grover Norquist claims to be mad at defunders. Ted Cruz's $24 billion mailing list. And how did that number get decided on, anyway? "32 Republicans Who Caused the Government Shutdown." What Cruz's fake filibuster should have taught us about predicting the cave. Reinsurance fee, explained. Tea Party insight from the New York Review of Books! A frightening and abusive FBI practice, targeting American Muslims, of course.
  | | GOP spin: Re-elect McConnell because he eventually figured out the Republican shutdown needed to end Posted: 17 Oct 2013 11:20 AM PDT A spokeswoman for Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Kentucky, tweets this perfectly reasonable metaphor about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who will face Grimes if he survives the GOP primary:  Senator Gridlock is like an arsonist who lights the fire and then claims credit for helping put it out. #KYsen — @CharlyNorton And the National Republican Senatorial Committee responds, first by saying the Grimes campaign is in "free fall" and then: Alison Lundergan Grimes' Campaign is Melting Down Because a handful of people—include Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid—saluted McConnell for his decision to finally agree to end the shutdown that he helped start. The problem with this spin is obvious: If McConnell wanted credit for being reasonable and avoiding a government shutdown, he shouldn't have supported it in the first place. It's good that he finally came to his senses, but it's not exactly a strong reelection platform. And despite the GOP's spin that Grimes is melting down, today Public Policy Polling released a new poll conducted for Americans United For Change on October 14th and 15th with a margin of error of ±2.8 percent:
PPP's newest Kentucky poll finds voters in the state extremely unhappy about the government shutdown, and taking it out on Mitch McConnell. The Republican Senator Minority Leader now trails Alison Lundergan Grimes 45/43 for reelection. 60% of Kentucky voters opposed the shutdown, compared to only 32% who supported it. Those numbers are in line with what we've found in other red states- it doesn't matter if a place went for Obama by 20 points or Romney by 20 points last fall, the shutdown is a huge problem for Republican politicians everywhere. Only time will tell if McConnell's decision to change course will save his political future, but at this point one thing is clear: He's the one who is nervous, not Alison Grimes.  | | You know shutdown optics were terrible when THESE guys voted to reopen government Posted: 17 Oct 2013 09:27 AM PDT  Arkansas Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Surrender Caucus) Conservatives spent the last three weeks they were fighting for the American people, attempting to carry out their will. The polling easily disproved that, of course, but it didn't matter. Two million people signed Sen. Ted Cruz's petition, which is exactly like 314 million Americans supporting them. So when it finally came time to vote to end the shutdown and threat of national default, it was genuinely interesting to see Reps. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, and Steve Daines of Montana vote in the affirmative. All three are either declared or presumed Senate candidates, and all three represent solidly red states. Not all Republican Senate hopefuls voted yes. In Georgia, where a crowded primary will ultimately crown the most faithful teahadist, none of its congrescritters voted yes. But Cotton, Capito and Daines don't have serious primary opposition to worry about (not yet, at least), thus were able to vote in line with public opinion. And since public opinion isn't in line with Ted Cruz, they ended up going the smarter direction.  | | In the end, Ted Cruz was a wimp Posted: 17 Oct 2013 10:00 AM PDT 
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz last night, using rather colorful imagery to attack his fellow Senate Republicans for not filibustering the final deal to reopen government and avoid default: If you think about it, the House Republicans marched into battle. And it should have been the Senate Republicans riding like the cavalry to support them. If the Senate Republicans had stood united with the House Republicans, that's how we would have won this fight. Instead Senate Republicans were divided and became basically an air force dive-boming the House Republicans and conservatives. So if Ted Cruz had gotten his way, Senate Republicans would have remained united and filibustered any legislation that ended the shutdown or avoided default without defunding Obamacare. In his dream, they would have kept on doing this until President Obama caved, and begged them to stop inflicting damage on the United States. It would have been a glorious victory for conservatives, according to Cruz. But here's the thing: If Ted Cruz really believed this strategy had any hope of working, shouldn't he have tried to filibuster the deal last night? If he were a true right wing hero, shouldn't he have taken to the floor and instead of fauxlibustering, delivered the real thing? Instead, he caved like a wimp. Of course, there's always the possibility that's he's not a wimp, but a stone cold liar who knew that he'd already milked the shutdown for as much personal gain as he was going to get—he says he's already added two million names to his fundraising list. Keeping up his charade wasn't going to help him build the list any further, not at this point, so with his personal political objectives satisfied, he threw in the towel, not for the good of the country, but because there was nothing good left to gain for himself.  | | Republicans try out a weak spin on Cory Booker's New Jersey Senate victory Posted: 17 Oct 2013 07:11 AM PDT Wednesday night, Cory Booker became just the fourth African-American senator elected by popular vote in the history of the nation, defeating Republican Steve Lonegan by 55 percent to 44 percent. With Booker's win coming the same night as Republicans faced the defeat of not getting to drag the country into default or take health care from millions of people, they have a lot to spin. In the days leading up to the special election, Republicans sent Reince Priebus and Sarah Palin to stump for Lonegan and make wild claims about the importance of the election. According to Priebus, Lonegan was going to "bring our party together." To Palin:
"New Jersey, know that the eyes of America are on you now," Palin said. "You can turn things around. Something big is happening here," the former vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor told an enthusiastic crowd of about 4,000 people at the New Egypt Speedway. The eyes of the nation were probably much more on the possibility of default, but all that high-level Republican optimism about Lonegan's importance left them spinning desperately Thursday morning. The spin? Booker didn't win New Jersey by as much as Obama, and also the polls narrowed from Booker's gaudy early leads. If you know absolutely nothing about elections, not the first thing, maybe this is convincing. If you know even a little about elections, though, you know that polls are always going to tighten when one candidate starts out with hugely more name recognition than the other and that the Republican base is made up of much more reliable voters than the Democratic base. Scheduling the election for Wednesday, not Tuesday, made it even less likely that irregular voters would vote. In the end, as Steve Singiser wrote last night, "Turnout, as would be expected in a midweek special election, was dismal, with most fully reporting counties reporting roughly a third of their 2012 presidential turnout." The recipe for a disproportionately Republican electorate, in other words. Combine Booker's 11-point win with the Democratic victory in a Florida special election for state legislature and the overwhelming likelihood that Virginia will soon have a Gov. Terry McAuliffe, and what you have is exactly the reverse of a sign that Democrats are weak. 9:18 AM PT: Dave Weigel punches a cathedral-sized hole in this Republican spin:
Booker's 55 percent was the most any candidate's won in an open seat race for U.S. Senate in New Jersey since the 1930 election of Dwight Morrow. It's vanishingly rare for a New Jersey candidate to crack 60 percent statewide; it hadn't been done since 1984, the first re-election of Bill Bradley.  | | House Republicans vow to keep fighting their losing fight Posted: 17 Oct 2013 08:12 AM PDT Never mind their disastrous loss in the $24 billion temper tantrum, in which they gained absolutely nothing but historically low approval numbers, House Republicans promise more of the same. "Republicans have an opportunity to reset the debate over the next few months. As the nation's attention turns from Washington politics to the Obamacare disaster, Democrats will have no choice but to reconsider our fair and reasonable proposals to delay the law," Georgia Republican Rep. Tom Graves said in a statement. [...] Rep. Mick Mulvaney, a key figure in the House conservative wing, argued Wednesday's defeat came about because conservative weren't able to "drive home" the argument that their opposition to Obamacare is based on fundamental "fairness." [...] Asked if there would be any difference the next time Congress faces a shutdown deadline, Mulvaney said, "The natural inclination is to say, 'No, it'll be exactly the same.' But if we can figure out a way to drive home the [fairness] argument …. then the outcome may be different." Because, clearly, fairness means only healthy and wealthy people should have health insurance. Even the not-entirely insane members of the House GOP found some kind of encouragement in this disaster, like Rep. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming: "I'm not prepared to suggest that this has been a complete loss." And as for their "leader"? Those conservatives seemed pleased with Mr. Boehner's performance, no matter the outcome. "We know he tends not to want to pursue tough battles," said Representative John Fleming of Louisiana. "I think he's migrated more toward us. We are appreciative of that." Fleming also promised that this shutdown and debt ceiling crisis was only "Round 2. See," he says, "we're going to start this all over again." And clearly, they have every expectation that Boehner will follow them again. And why not? He's made the decision: His gavel is more important than his country. But, by all means, House Republicans should follow their misguided, dangerous, self-destructive principles. Because there's still plenty of room for them to bottom out in the polls. Zero percent approval is attainable!  | | Obama statement on reopening of government and what's next on agenda Posted: 17 Oct 2013 07:30 AM PDT 
President Obama is scheduled to make a statement from the White House on the reopening of government and what's next on his agenda. The statement is scheduled to begin at 10:35 AM ET. You can watch live video above and we'll provide updates throughout. 7:31 AM PT: Oh, the indignities! GOP Rep. Charles Boustany was just informed by Fox host Bill Hemmer that if the president begins soon, Fox may have to interrupt the congressman—who proceeded to say Republicans may shut the government down again in a few months. (To be fair to him, he used less honest language to say that.) 7:36 AM PT: BTW, ICYMI, government is back open. 7:44 AM PT: 7:50 AM PT: While we wait for President Obama: Orrin Hatch shreds Heritage Foundation to shreds for becoming a bastion of radical conservative nihilism. 7:58 AM PT: According to S&P, the Republican shutdown cost at least $24 billion and achieved absolutely nothing. Heckuva' job, GOP. 7:59 AM PT: Oh, it also cut economic growth by at least 0.6 percent. All thanks to the party of Ted Cruz. 8:01 AM PT: Here's the president. 8:02 AM PT: "The first shutdown in more than 17 years is now over. The threat of the first default in more than 200 years is now over." Obama says the shutdown caused "completely unnecessary damage to the economy." 8:04 AM PT: "The American people are completely fed up with Washington. At a moment when our economic recovery demands more jobs, more momentum, we've got another self-inflicted crisis that sets us back. And for what? There's no economic rationale" for what happened. "Some members who pushed for the shutdown say they were doing it to save our economy, but nothing has done more to undermine our economy over the past three years than the kinds of tactics that lead to these manufactured crises." 8:05 AM PT: Shorter Obama: These Republicans aren't just lunatics, they are damaging America's economy and America's standing in the world. "Probably nothing has done more damage ... than the spectacle we've seen over the past few weeks." Obama even says: "It encourages our enemies." This is accurate, but also is going to inflame the loons in the GOP caucus. 8:06 AM PT: "To all my friends in Congress, understand that how business is done in this town has to change." (Surely, idiot Beltway hacks will say that is uncivil.) 8:07 AM PT: Uh oh! President Obama just took a shot at bloggers. :) I'll assume he wasn't talking about us. More like the astro-bloggers with gigs on Fox. 8:11 AM PT: "Let me be specific about three places where I believe we can make progress right now." First, he says, a long-term budget to bring stability and encourage growth. "We shouldn't approach this budget as an ideological exercise ... just cutting for the sake of cutting. ... Remember the deficit is getting smaller, not bigger ... The challenge we have right now are not short-term deficits, it's the long-term obligations we have around Medicare and Social Security." Obama says we need to cut corporate tax loopholes and increase investments in things like infrastructure and education. 8:11 AM PT: Number two: "We should finish the job of fixing our broken immigration system." 8:13 AM PT: On immigration: "This can, and should, get done by the end of this year." 8:14 AM PT: Number three: "We should pass a farm bill." Obama says it should include not just support for farmers, but also food assistance for Americans who need it. 8:16 AM PT: On all three things—budget, immigration, and farm bill—Obama says Congress can get it done by the end of the year. "I understand we won't agree on everything," he concedes. "That's okay. That's democracy. That's how it works. We can debate those difference vigorously, passionately, through the normal democratic process, and sometimes we'll be just too far about to forge an agreement. But that should not hold back our efforts in areas where we do agree. [...] I will look for willing partners wherever I can to get important work done. And there's no reason we can't govern responsibly despite our differences without lurching from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis." Obama adds that one thing we learned during the shutdown is that smart effective government is important—and that people care about it and value it. 8:18 AM PT: "Let's work together to make the government work better, instead of treating it like an enemy, or making it work worse. That's not what the founders of this nation envisioned when they gave us the gift of self-government. You don't like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position, or win and election. But don't break it. Don't break what our predecessors spent over 200 years building. That's not being faithful to what this country is about." 8:20 AM PT: Obama to workers who were hit by the shutdown: "Thank you. Thanks for your service. Welcome back. What you do is important. It matters. You defend our country overseas ... you protect our borders [...] you help businesses grow [...] you protect the air we breathe [...] you push the boundaries of science and space. Thank you. What you do is important, and don't let anybody tell you different." 8:21 AM PT: "Disagreement cannot mean dysfunction. It can't degenerate into hatred. [...] Our regard for [the public] compels us all to cooperate, and compromise, and act in the best interests of our nation. One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." 8:22 AM PT: And President Obama has concluded his remarks. 9:32 AM PT: Here's the full transcript of the president's remarks.  | | The Obamolitionists continue the fight... Posted: 17 Oct 2013 06:50 AM PDT 
Tom the Dancing Bug, by @RubenBolling. BE THE FIRST ON YOUR BLOCK to see Tom the Dancing Bug every week! Members of the elite and prestigious INNER HIVE get the comic emailed to their inboxes at least a day before publication -- and much, much MORE! Please click HERE to find out how to join.  | | Analysts offer wildly different estimates of what the Republican shutdown cost the economy Posted: 16 Oct 2013 02:33 PM PDT The differences aren't small. Experts who dared to estimate the total blow delivered to the economy by the government shutdown are all over the place. Mark Zandi, chief analyst of Moody's Analytics, said early on the cost would be $55 billion for a one-month shutdown including direct and indirect costs. When 400,000 civilian employees of the Defense of Defense were called back to work, he lowered that to $50 billion. On the other hand, market research firm IHS Inc. put losses at $160 million day, or about $5 billion for a month-long shutdown. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said a month-long shutdown would shave 0.5 percent off fourth-quarter growth in gross domestic product, reducing it to 2.0 percent. Website OutlineUSA, which boasts no special economic knowledge and takes its information from accounts at news outlets, is keeping a second-by-second running total at shutdowncost.com. As exact as the count appears—the tally when this was written had hit $4.708 billion—it is at best a crude guesstimate. The 27-day shutdown in 1995-1996 cost the US economy over $2.1 billion in today's dollars, according to the Office of Management and Budget Data. The reason Zandi's estimate is so huge is that it includes indirect costs. That's a reasonable approach but devilishly hard to quantify. Zandi predicted there would be a slow-down in housing loan originations, which has happened, and there would be severe hits to the stock market, which there haven't been. Not only are estimates of indirect costs inevitably fuzzy, many of the losses will also almost certainly be covered once the government is fully up and running again. On other hand, lost wages for many private-sector employees dependent on government spending will not be made up. The CEO of Ridgewells Catering, whose subsidiary CapitalHost is the exclusive caterer for the House of Representatives, says the company has lost about $200,000 from the shutdow so far. More than 60 employees have been furloughed by Ridgewells. Even if the feds open the doors Thursday, some damage is ongoing. See below the fold:  | | While you were sleeping, President Obama, Democrats, reopened the government Posted: 17 Oct 2013 05:36 AM PDT  President Obama didn't spike it ... but he could have On Wednesday night, 16 days into the costly Republican shutdown, President Obama officially reopened the government and avoided a catastrophic default:
President Barack Obama signed a bill that ends the 16-day partial government shutdown and raises the debt ceiling, the White House said early Thursday morning. The signing followed votes in the Senate and then in the House, where Democrats led the way in ending the long, Republican temper tantrum over Obamacare. (At least for now.) But something to remember going forward: 144 Republicans in the House and 18 Republicans in the Senate voted for the United States to default on its debt. They were willing to destroy the full faith and credit of this country to ... what? Grow Ted Cruz's email list?  | | Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest: Check out our massive House fundraising chart Posted: 17 Oct 2013 05:00 AM PDT  Want the scoop on hot races around the country? Get the digest emailed to you each weekday morning. Sign up here. : • Fundraising: Daily Kos Elections is once again pleased to bring you our quarterly House fundraising roundup. Our latest list features 234 candidates running in 115 different districts. With Democrats feeling increasingly chuffed about their chances in the House next year, now's the time to dig deep into the numbers to see where the party's biggest opportunities—and vulnerabilities—are.  | | Cheers and Jeers: Thursday Posted: 17 Oct 2013 05:19 AM PDT From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE… Oh! More Things I Know:
If the color-coded terrorism alert system the Republicans created was still in place, it would've gone to Level Red this week because of the terrorism threat created by the Republicans. Joe Lieberman has been gone from the Senate for 287 blissful days. Prediction: To revive his political career for 2016, Jeb Bush will change his last name to Reagan. [This item removed due to a twinge of doubt.]
 Another thing I know: John
Boehner survives...barely.
- One feature of the new $100 bill that hasn't changed: for working women it's still only worth 77 bucks. Just this once, I would approve of letting Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi take a victory lap around Washington in a golden chariot. (Yes, yes...with a staffer behind them whispering a warning that glory is fleeting so don't get cocky except for this one chariot ride.) The U.S. Capitol has a tomb in the basement that was created especially for George Washington, who opted instead to be buried at Mount Vernon. No one has ever rested in it except Ted Cruz during daylight hours. At the Washington D.C. tea party protest Sunday, people were screaming at the police: "You work for US!!!" My first thought was: what shitty asshole bosses they have. The new Republican chant: "What do we want?" "Hell if we know!" "When do we want it?" "1950!!!" There's a little bit of a little bit of all of us in all of us. Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]  | | Daily Kos Radio is LIVE at 9am ET! Posted: 17 Oct 2013 05:00 AM PDT
Daily Kos Radio's Kagro in the Morning show podcasts are now available through iTunes. Don't. Even. Ask. I'm serious. Everybody knows what the topic of the day is. It was crazy enough as it was, yesterday, without having to deal with technical difficulties on top of everything. BUT WHY NOT HAVE A HEAPING $#@&-LOAD OF THOSE, TOO, RIGHT? And my coffee maker broke! Anyway, look. Something, something about the country, blah, blah, Treasury. OK? We'll make it work. We're LIVE at 9:00 a.m. ET with Kagro in the Morning, thanks to NetrootsRadio.com. Listen LIVE here: The Daily Kos Radio Player Click this Link to Listen on your iTunes, Winamp or Windows Media Player Can't see the live stream and/or podcast players in these posts? Do you use NoScript or something similar to control Javascript? Want to? Remember to enable Libsyn and Shoutcastplayer, and you'll see our players every morning! Or if you prefer, why not download the Stitcher app on your favorite mobile device, and search for the Netroots Radio live stream? And hey, when you do, be sure to sign up with the promo code DAILYKOS, and earn Daily Kos Radio $1 in the Stitcher affiliate program! Please do remember to "favorite" us while you're at Stitcher. We're bouncing up and down in the rankings these days, and the more of you who help us, the more listeners out there who'll find us on the Stitcher network. Miss yesterday's show? You can catch it here: Need more info on how to listen? Find it below the fold.  | | Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: The nihilists surrender Posted: 17 Oct 2013 04:30 AM PDT Washington Post: There is a growing rift between tea party supporters and the rest of the Republican Party, according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center. The poll shows moderate Republicans' views of the tea party have dropped from 46 percent favorable in June to 27 percent favorable today -- a 19-point decline in just four months time. Washington Post: Senate plan avoids any major changes to the Affordable Care Act, a major victory for Democrats. New York Times: Congressional Republicans conceded defeat Wednesday in their bitter budget fight with President Obama over the new health care law, agreeing to end a disruptive 16-day government shutdown and extend federal borrowing power to avert a financial default with potential worldwide economic repercussions. Washington Post: It was over. They lost. On Wednesday, those two ugly facts began to sink in among the House's hard-core conservatives. For nearly three years, they had effectively led the House itself — drawing their power from the intimidating sense that they were capable of anything. They often compared themselves to William Wallace, the Scottish rebel who (at least in the movies) succeeded because he refused to compromise. But then — just like in the movies — Braveheart died. More politics and policy below the fold.  | You are subscribed to email updates from Daily Kos
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Updated Nook for Windows 8.1 app launches
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:01 AM PDT
| Updated Nook for Windows 8.1 app launches Posted: 18 Oct 2013 02:47 AM PDT Yesterday marked the official launch of Windows 8.1 as a downloadable product for users of the Windows operating system. Today the Windows 8.1 operating system will be available on DVD and on new computers and other products from retailers. The launch of Windows 8.1 has also brought with it a rash of updated applications specifically […] | | Canon VB-S30D PTZ network camera has built-in analytics Posted: 18 Oct 2013 02:33 AM PDT Typically, when we talk about Canon we’re talking about consumer focused digital cameras and video cameras. Canon also builds a range of small network cameras designed to be used for video surveillance and security among other things. Canon has announced that it has added a new S-Series of compact full HD resolution network cameras to […] | | MakerBot Thingiverse app launches for iOS Posted: 18 Oct 2013 02:10 AM PDT If you’re a fan of 3-D printing, one of the most accessible 3-D printers on the market comes from MakerBot. The company also runs a 3-D printing design community called Thingiverse. The design community houses a huge number of 3-D printing projects with lots of pictures and other content. The Thingiverse community now has a […] | | Fujifilm X-E2 interchangeable lens camera boasts fastest-ever auto focus Posted: 17 Oct 2013 11:09 PM PDT Following on the heels of the Fujifilm XQ1 compact digital camera recently announced, the camera maker has also introduced the interchangeable lens X-E2. With this camera comes the ability to swap out lenses for more demanding photography needs, bringing along an APS-C sized variety of the X-Trans CMOS II 16.3-megapixel sensor. In addition to the […] | | Fujifilm XQ1 compact digital camera unveiled with “premium” features Posted: 17 Oct 2013 10:43 PM PDT Fujifilm has introduced its smallest offering in its X Series, the Fujifilm XQ1 compact digital camera. The device maker is referring to the XQ1 as a “premium” camera, giving photographers a pocket-sized shooter with a sensor much larger than what you’d find in most digital cameras of comparable size. The camera is being launched alongside […] | | Volvo details new battery technology that utilizes car body panels Posted: 17 Oct 2013 09:12 PM PDT Electric vehicles are a fast-growing technology that is ever evolving, and one of the latest contributors to that technological evolution is Volvo. The auto maker has come forward with details about its new battery technology, which, among other things, utilizes the car’s body panels and super capacitors. We’ve got all the details on this tech […] | | Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus beefed up with Core i7 and Windows 8.1 Posted: 17 Oct 2013 09:03 PM PDT The notebook team at Samsung have unveiled a new Ultrabook configuration this week in the ATIV Book 9 Plus, a machine rolling out with a build just a pinch (or a punch, whichever you perceive it to be) of a feature set upgrade. This new configuration still works with a 13.3-inch QHD+ 3200 x 1800 […] | | Xbox 360 takes hit as PlayStation 3 becomes top US console Posted: 17 Oct 2013 08:13 PM PDT Microsoft has enjoyed a long run as maker of the most popular video game console in the United States, with the Xbox 360 consistently trumping Sony’s console month after month. All good things comes to an end, however, and the Xbox 360′s reign is over — for now, at least — with the latest numbers […] | | Google Nexus 5 product shot surfaces on Google Play Posted: 17 Oct 2013 06:52 PM PDT Earlier today, press renders of the Nexus 5 surfaced via Canadian carrier Telus, something that has paled in comparison to the latest image available. Today on the Google Play Store, the Nexus 5 has appeared in part, with an image being visible but nothing more than an error happening when the link is clicked. We’ve […] | | Facebook for iOS app update brings photo commenting, additional editing options Posted: 17 Oct 2013 05:59 PM PDT Facebook has updated its social networking app for iOS to version 6.6, bringing with it some additional functionality that desktop users have enjoyed, improving the overall process. After updating, users will be able to add photos to comments they leave on statuses, something that has been available for a little while now on the Web, […] | | Apple executive joins eBay as chief product officer Posted: 17 Oct 2013 04:58 PM PDT The latest in company poaching comes by way of eBay, which has nabbed Apple executive R. J. Pittman who will now reported to the retail company’s president as eBay’s Chief Product Officer. The move comes after what is said to be a couple months of talks going on behind the scene, and is unrelated to […] | | Google Q3 buoyant despite Motorola stumbles as Page talks smartwatches Posted: 17 Oct 2013 04:12 PM PDT Google made $14.9bn in revenue in Q3 2013 despite Motorola Mobility sales continuing to shrink, with CEO Larry Page making one final earnings call to praise the Chromecast and namecheck smartwatches as one of the next big things in digital. Overall, revenues were up 12-percent versus the same quarter last year, with cash or cash-equivalents […] | | Archos Titanium smartphone budget series brings Jelly Bean and Dual-SIM support Posted: 17 Oct 2013 03:48 PM PDT Archos has rolled out the red carpet for four new budget smartphones under the new Titanium series. The phones are being targeted at those who don’t want to shell out for higher end handsets, but who need certain aspects to be robust in their offerings: Google services access, network support, and such. The prices range […] | | Fifty cents more in sensors could’ve made the iPhone 5s an empath Posted: 17 Oct 2013 03:05 PM PDT An extra fifty cents worth of sensors and your iPhone 5s could have read your emotions rather than just track exercise and fitness, chip manufacturer Freescale says, predicting a time soon when smartphones will know more about our moods than our friends and families do. The iPhone 5s’ M7 co-processor, added by Apple in its […] | | Google Glass double-blink for photos appears in firmware update Posted: 17 Oct 2013 02:30 PM PDT There’s little doubt at this point that a future update for Google Glass will unveil the ability to take a photo using little more than a blink. In the most recent firmware update pushed to the wearable headset, it’s been revealed that a previously known feature has been given a new name, complete with connection […] | | Nexus 5 press renders arrive from Canada Posted: 17 Oct 2013 02:04 PM PDT We have seen Nexus 5 leaks coming out of countries around the world. Just in recent days there was a sighting in France and Russia and as of today it looks like Canada. One difference with this latest leak though, instead of looking at in-the-wild style images, we are seeing what appears to be the […] | | Original Grand Theft Auto being rebuilt in 3D Posted: 17 Oct 2013 01:41 PM PDT It would appear that nostalgia is getting the better of at least one of the original designers of the original Grand Theft Auto as Michael Dailly has announced his intent to re-make the original Liberty City. This re-creation of the original landscape from the top-down game that eventually lead way to one of the best-selling […] | | Lenovo BlackBerry bid potential resurfaces Posted: 17 Oct 2013 12:25 PM PDT Lenovo is once again rumored to be considering a bid to acquire BlackBerry, with sources claiming the Chinese company has inked a non-disclosure agreement to dig through the ailing Canadian firm’s financial records. The interest, reported by the WSJ, does not mean that Lenovo will definitely attempt to buy out BlackBerry, though fuels long-standing speculation […] | | Tesla AT&T deal confirmed with mobile hotspot in pipeline Posted: 17 Oct 2013 11:54 AM PDT Tesla‘s in-car telematics system relies on AT&T’s HSPA+ network, the carrier has confirmed for the first time, part of AT&T’s attempt to push its new mobility options which include intelligent SIMs that can split payments between car manufacturers and drivers. The system, which Tesla currently uses for sending telematics and car status data from the […] | | AT&T one-day tablet data pass launches to snipe down hotel WiFi Posted: 17 Oct 2013 11:27 AM PDT Like death and taxes, the one thing inevitable about hotel WiFi is that it’ll be expensive (not to mention often slow and unreliable). AT&T is aiming to keep people off the hotel network and buying piecemeal access to its LTE instead, with the launch of a $5 day data pass for its 4G service that’s […] | | Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag hands-on with 4K Posted: 17 Oct 2013 11:06 AM PDT This week at a special event held by NVIDIA in Montreal, we got the opportunity to get some hands-on time with the near-final build of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag in 4K resolution. This experience was made real on an LG 84LM9600 4K television and was played on a monster custom gaming rig constructed by […] | | Watch Dogs gameplay details spilled Posted: 17 Oct 2013 10:29 AM PDT This week we’ve had the opportunity to have a peek at some Watch Dogs gameplay action never before seen by the public, courtesy of Ubisoft and NVIDIA, the latter group holding a gaming event this week in Montreal. As this work has not been finalized, we’ve not been allowed to film it – but we […] | | Here’s how to get Windows 8.1 Posted: 17 Oct 2013 10:22 AM PDT Microsoft has finally got around to releasing Windows 8.1, the company’s first significant refresh of its desktop, laptop, and tablet platform. Available as a free update to those already using Windows 8, the new upgrade refreshes how the Metro-themed Start menu looks and works, with easier access to all applications, boosted multitasking with the ability […] | | Batman Arkham Origins NVIDIA graphics optimizations and gameplay eyes-on Posted: 17 Oct 2013 10:09 AM PDT Ben Mattes Senior Producer from WB Games spoke up on the inner bits of Batman: Arkham Origins this week at NVIDIA’s Montreal gaming event. Running down the details of the plotline first, Batman Arkham Origins was described as an exercise in Batman history, taking place in the second year of Batman’s career – decidedly NOT […] | | Philips hue teases more focused lighting for holidays Posted: 17 Oct 2013 09:54 AM PDT Philips’ next expansion for the hue remote-controlled LED lightbulbs will be out before the end of the year, the company’s head of technology has confirmed. “We’re busy bringing out new ways of interacting but also new ways of bringing lighting into your home” George Yianni said at Mobilize today, before revealing that hue will add […] | | Samsung Smart Media Player adds on-demand to dumb TVs Posted: 17 Oct 2013 09:34 AM PDT Samsung has revealed a new set-top streaming box for adding Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Instant Video to TVs that don’t have internet features baked in. The Samsung Smart Media Player (GX-SM530CF) pulls over 100 of the apps Samsung usually includes in its smart TV line-up, but pipes them through to any TV with an HDMI […] | | Samsung offers patent injunction promise to escape antitrust fine Posted: 17 Oct 2013 09:03 AM PDT Samsung has promised not to threaten rivals with injunctions over mobile standards-essential patents for the next five years, as the Korean firm attempts to evade antitrust penalties after being accused by Apple of misusing its 3G IP. According to Apple, while it offered to license the standards-essential technology for use in the iPhone, Samsung instead […] | | SteamOS to have NVIDIA developer tools from day one Posted: 17 Oct 2013 08:30 AM PDT This week the folks at NVIDIA have suggested that their developer program with the likes of GameWorks will not be limited to the likes of Linux, Android, and the like. NVIDIA made clear that not only would they be extending GameWorks support – developer tools for games, that is – for Ubuntu environments, but for […] | | Nokia wearable patent tips incoming smartwatch [Update: Video] Posted: 17 Oct 2013 08:27 AM PDT Details of a Nokia wearable leaked a short while back. At the time there were some images of what appeared to be a Nokia branded smartwatch, though the details were a bit lacking at the time. But it now looks like some additional evidence has appeared. This time around we are seeing a filing from […] | | iPhone most satisfying on AT&T and Verizon says JD Power Posted: 17 Oct 2013 08:13 AM PDT The iPhone is the most satisfying smartphone on AT&T and Verizon, while customers of other carriers are happier with Samsung devices, according to the latest set of JD Power experience surveys. Breaking down the smartphone satisfaction score by each of the four top US carriers for the first time, the new batch of numbers – […] | | NVIDIA Project Logan runs Faceworks in real time Posted: 17 Oct 2013 07:50 AM PDT This week at an event in Montreal, NVIDIA showed off the high-powered demo software called Faceworks (previously working on NVIDIA Titan processors for PC) working on the next-generation mobile-aimed processor Project Logan. This processor will almost certainly be re-named Tegra 5 as each “Project” codename has been re-named “Tegra #”, and what we’ve seen here […] | | SwiftKey 4.3 beta brings multiple keyboard layouts with custom positioning Posted: 17 Oct 2013 07:48 AM PDT SwiftKey has rolled out the latest beta app update. This one brings the app up to version 4.3.0.139, but before anyone knocks this as simply being a bug fixing update in the beta process — there are some worthwhile changes and improvements this time around. The folks at SwiftKey have this listed as bringing “layouts […] | | NVIDIA suggests gamers double US citizenship at Montreal Gaming week Posted: 17 Oct 2013 07:23 AM PDT Speaking on stage first this week at NVIDIA’s Montreal gaming event series was Tony Tamasi – SVP of Content and Technology, letting it be known that this week’s content would work with Game Platforms, Game Works, and Game Technology. He went so far as to suggest that three new technologies (at least) would be revealed […] | | iPad mini 2 Retina a no-go as leak tips thinner body Posted: 17 Oct 2013 06:47 AM PDT We already know that Apple will be holding an event on October 22 where it plans to unveil new products to the masses. Apple hasn’t said exactly what the products will be that it plans to show off on October 22, but rumors continue to insist we will see the iPad 5 and the iPad […] | | Samsung Galaxy S4 LTE gets official Android 4.3 update Posted: 17 Oct 2013 06:27 AM PDT We mentioned in early September that the Samsung Galaxy S4 and S3 smartphones were tipped to get the update to Android 4.3 this month. Samsung has now officially begun to roll out the Android 4.3 update for the Galaxy S4 GT-I9505. There’s no word on the update for the Galaxy S3 at this time. The […] | | Pyle Hi-Speed HD action camera debuts Posted: 17 Oct 2013 06:12 AM PDT Earlier this month action camera manufacturer GoPro unveiled the latest version of its HERO camera line called the HERO 3+. That new camera was undeniably cool and has a lot of features, but it was also expensive at about $400 putting it out of the reach of many users. Pyle is a company more known […] | | LG G Pad 8.3 tablet launches in the US Posted: 17 Oct 2013 05:28 AM PDT Earlier this month a rumor surfaced that LG would be unveiling its new G Pad 8.3 tablet on October 14 in Korea. Today LG officially announced the launch of the LG G Pad 8.3 tablet in the US. The tablet is available to purchase right now online. The tablet will be available in retail locations […] | | Ubuntu 13.10 available for desktop and smartphone users Posted: 17 Oct 2013 05:10 AM PDT With Windows 8.1 officially launching today, refreshed operating systems are on the minds of a lot of computer users. If your tastes lie in an operating system other than Windows, you may be interested in the latest version of Ubuntu Linux that launched yesterday. Ubuntu 13.10 launched on October 17 bringing a number of improvements […] | | Windows 8.1 now officially available Posted: 17 Oct 2013 04:55 AM PDT We’ve known since August that today was the official launch date for Windows 8.1. Microsoft has now officially announced that Windows 8.1 is available globally. If you’ve been following Windows 8.1, you may already know some of the things that the new version of the operating system brings to the table. Microsoft promises that Windows […] | | HP Velotechnik e-trike goes further with new dual battery system Posted: 17 Oct 2013 04:35 AM PDT A German company known for making three wheel electric trikes called HP Velotechnik has announced a new battery option for some of its offerings. The new dual-battery option will be available for the company’s entire line of electric tricycles starting next month. The dual batteries means the trike will be able to go twice as […] | You are subscribed to email updates from SlashGear
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The SEO of Tolstoy: A Guide to Effective Content Strategy
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 03:01 AM PDT
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NaNoWriMo 2013 November Word Counting Calendar
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:54 AM PDT
| NaNoWriMo 2013 November Word Counting Calendar Posted: 17 Oct 2013 10:58 AM PDT 
While I am not participating in National Novel Writing Month AKA NaNoWriMo this year, I’ve gotten several requests to update the calendar. I’m quite fond of the calendar myself, so I updated it for this year and made some improvements; skip to the end of this post for the download link! If you’re not familiar with NaNoWriMo, it’s a world-wide effort by thousands of writers to bang out a rough draft of a novel in 30 days. It happens every November, and the goal is to write a minimum 50,000 words. They don’t have to be good words, because the underlying premise of NaNoWriMo is getting unstuck and writing! It’s the habit that writers must develop! It doesn’t hurt that there are prizes you can qualify for. For example, last year I got a big fat discount on Scrivener, a product that I totally love and use for all my exploratory writing. 
Last year’s success (other than uploading my words to the nanowrimo website) is evidenced by the last year’s calendar (above). I learned how to be productive just by doing something every day. A powerful lesson that can b e supported with a powerful word-counting calendar at your side! :-) Instructions The calendar covers the month of November, helping you track word counts and visualize your daily writing effort. The visualization is done by filling-in boxes that represent 250 words of writing, which are piled in a pyramid shape. If you fill in at least 7 of them to get to the first plateau of 1750 words, that’s enough to comfortably finish in 30 days IF you are writing every day. There are a couple higher boost levels: 2250 for writing just on 5 days a week (e.g. Monday-Friday), and 2500+ for people who want to fill-in that last block when they blow the curve. At the end of the week, there’s a progress box that helps you assess how well you’re doing. Add-up the word counts from the week, and use the information to get a feel of how screwed you are :-) This Year’s Improvements There is always room for improvement, so this year I made the following changes: - Addition of a “daily word count” box for each day.
- Simplification of the “progress summary” boxes at the end of each week to require less math.
- Addition of a “2500+” label, for those amazing days when you blow by your minimum word count. Feel proud!
- New prompts for the 25%, 50%, and 75% calendar days.
- Encouraging cheesy prompts for Sunday.
- Highlighting the last week of the month.
The calendar is designed for US 8.5 x 11 inch paper, but it should work fine on A4 if you “scale to fit” when printing. The margins are a little more generous this year too, for people who prefer to bind their calendars. Download NaNoWriMo Tracking Calendar  Download NaNoWrimo Calendar PDF
Having trouble saving? Right-click or option-click and choose “save link as” if you are having trouble saving the file. This is free to use for non-commercial purposes. Enjoy, and have a great NaNoWriMo!
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#Ebook Deal/Day: Regular Expressions Cookbook - $19.99 (Save 50%) Use code DEAL
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:49 AM PDT
| #Ebook Deal/Day: Regular Expressions Cookbook - $19.99 (Save 50%) Use code DEAL Posted: 17 Oct 2013 01:34 PM PDT  Get "Regular Expressions Cookbook" today using code DEAL and save 50%! This sale ends at 2:00 AM 2013-10-18 (PDT, GMT-8:00).  | | OpenStack release offers more flexibility and aids to performance Posted: 17 Oct 2013 10:13 AM PDT I talked this week to Jonathan Bryce and Mark Collier of OpenStack to look at the motivations behind the enhancements in the Havana release announced today. We focused on the main event–official support for the Ceilometer metering/monitoring project and the …  | | More Instantly Better Vim Posted: 17 Oct 2013 10:14 AM PDT Maybe you’re a hardened veteran of the editor war. Maybe you just need to make Vim do more for you. Or perhaps you just want to watch Damian Conway tell a great story with Vim as the central prop. At …  | | Four short links: 17 October 2013 Posted: 14 Oct 2013 10:42 AM PDT Pencil — An open-source GUI prototyping tool that’s available for ALL platforms. lmctfy — open source version of Google’s container stack, which provides Linux application containers. ASCII WWDC — searchable full-text transcriptions of WWDC sessions. Cryptogeddon — an online infosec …  |
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Make Likes Matter to Your Word of Mouth
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:45 AM PDT
| Make Likes Matter to Your Word of Mouth Posted: 17 Oct 2013 10:30 AM PDT Research has shown that close to 70 percent of adults with access to the Internet log in to Facebook daily. Such numbers present a good opportunity for personal brands to reach to their target audiences faster. Consider who you want to reach who would be a great referral source, connection, provider of up-to-date information in your industry or a great mentor?  Smart marketers post their products on Facebook. Currently, the site has recorded more than 15 million brand advertising pages, many of which have been successful in their endeavors. The main goal behind such a strategy is to reach as many of your Facebook connections as possible to like the product. If a friend likes it, chances are most of his/her friends will follow suit, thus you have reached out to many other potential customers.
The same works for your personal brand. According to Jim Rohn, motivational thought leader, you are the average of the five people you hang out with the most. Online through the multitude of social networks you can zero in on who those top five are regardless of geographic location. With rule of six degrees of separation still in play, friends of friends are still the most effective and powerful way to connect with people. Below are some tips on how to make sure Facebook likes positively influence someone's decision to connect and invest time in you. Target the right peer group Surveys conducted by Bazaar Voice have shown that a higher ratio of online customers believe their fellow peers more than critics. For example, a study done on various electronics brands with a presence on Facebook show that 77 percent of clients considered the opinions of their peers than other external suggestions. Peers have close relations regardless of the extent to which they know each other. Naturally, you will be inclined to follow the recommendation of your friends and co-workers than you would any other source. Action: What have you done to make your personal brand message portable? By portable, I mean that someone must be able to easily say what make you unique or what you deliver to someone who is in their sphere of influence. Get the likes Secondly, to ensure your Facebook likes turn into good connections, you have to focus and know specifically who you would like to connect with. The more likes you get for your brand within your target on Facebook, the more connection power it gains. It's not quantity here, it is quality. However, if you can increase the quantity of connectors (people who are at the hub of their industry or who naturally have a large connection of people who know, like and trust them), you increase your reach and visibility. Review! Review! Review! Apart from likes, you need also to urge Facebook users to review your services or products. Ensure that your Facebook page is the platform of choice when it comes to such reviews. Doing this has shown to help increase sales rather than harm your brand's reputation as many people might think. A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that well composed and insightful remarks and reviews have positive impact on sales. For your personal brand, this is effective too. How many times has someone said something positive about you on your Facebook page? Do you provide them the opportunity to do so or are your updates focused on negatives, memes and off brand updates? I'm not saying to go out and solicit reviews. I am saying to provide a great forum and platform where someone can share a testimonial about you. [tweet this] For example, if you volunteer for a non-profit, communicate with them that you would like to forgo the plaque, trophy or gift and save that expense for them so it can be put towards their mission and you would rather have a letter of thanks that you can add to your personnel file and a public comment of thanks on your Facebook and LinkedIn page. Too bold for you to ask? Then, try a post with a photo of somewhere you've volunteered and say what you enjoy about working with this organization or why you are passionate about their cause. Then publicly thank them for the opportunity. Tag their page so that your contacts can find the organization in case you have inspired them to become volunteers themselves and then let the comments/feedback flow. Last but not least, after earning a substantive amount of likes and reviews, let your Facebook fans do the rest. Thank those who do make comments and provide feedback. Comment back and have a conversation with them on your page to encourage more conversation and to let them know that you do read and pay attention to what is posted. According to Forbes, close to 80 percent of those surveyed agreed that posts made by their friends have a major impact on their decisions. This justifies the fact that by motivating your personal brand advocates to share with their friends your values, you will significantly make a significant and powerful impact on your personal word of mouth. Author: Maria Elena Duron, is managing editor of the Personal Branding Blog, CEO (chief engagement officer) of buzz2bucks– a word of mouth marketing firm, and a professional speaker and trainer on developing social networks that work. She provides workshops, webinars, seminars and direct services that help create conversation, connection, credibility, community and commerce around your brand. Maria Duron is founder and moderator of #brandchat - a weekly Twitter chat focused on every aspect of branding that is recognized by Mashable as one the 15 Essential Twitter Chats for Social Media Marketers. Are you busy? Here's some quick and easy tips on Social Marketing for busy people. | | Talking Money: It’s All About the Benjamins! Posted: 17 Oct 2013 02:30 AM PDT OK. It’s not ALL about the Benjamins. But they are important to most of us. Money discussions have been a consistent concern in job interview seminars I have conducted over the past six years and proper handling can offer the potential to add $10,000, $25,000, or far more to a job seeker’s annual income  The contents of this blog are a general introduction to this important and complex topic. I will write more on this important subject in future posts.
First, as discussed in my book Fast Track Your Job Search (and Career!), consider the classic admonition that “He who speaks first loses.” Keep this in mind throughout your job search — and particularly once you have begun discussions with a potential employer. Speaking first may (a) lock you in to a number that sets the bar too low, thus lowering your possible income or (b) immediately eliminate you from contention due to you setting the bar too high. Next, consider the following general perspectives for guidance: 1. If you strongly desire to move past the current step in the job interview process, no matter where you may be, then be more cautious with your responses. 2. If you are unsure about your interest in the position or clearly have no interest unless a certain minimum income is available, you may want to quote a specific amount (or at least a bottom level in a range) that is your firm minimum. This will better insure that you do not go through an extensive interview process, only to learn that your income desires have no chance of being met. Third, be prepared mentally for money discussions to surface in each of these steps in the interview process: Initial Phone Screen – This early step is frequently a “check the boxes” exercise conducted by an HR person. A common question would be “What are your salary requirements?” They want to know if you are too expensive or too cheap. In-Person – In your initial in-person interview (or initial phone/video interview in some cases), you may be asked to confirm figures you provided in the phone screen or money may arise for the first time. Final – If the money topic has somehow been deferred to the final interview, you are in a better negotiating position as you have made it through most of the screening process and you are one of the finalists. Interviews Complete, Job Offer Being Discussed – In some odd situations, the employer may not discuss money until they are ready to make you an offer. Most will share specific monetary terms at this point and seek a verbal agreement. Lastly, whenever money is discussed it is crucial that you have a pre-defined strategy and have specific numbers in mind. Here are some options and basic example wording for responding: a. Redirect – "I'm sure you have guidelines in your company. What does this position pay?" or “What is budgeted for this position?” b. Delay tactic – "I need to know more about this opportunity, just as you want to evaluate my suitability. If things look like a fit from both sides, I'm sure that money will not be an issue" or "I would need to know more about the responsibilities, benefits package, etc., to define my compensation expectations." c. Offer a range – "I'm not totally aware of the job requirements and benefits package at this point, but a range of ____ to ___/yr would seem appropriate. How does that sound to you?" or "Based upon research I have done, the market for this type position seems to be in the range of _____ to ____/yr and that will work for me. Is that in your range?" d. State a firm minimum – "Based upon my last position and what I currently understand about this job, I would expect this to pay at least _____/yr. Is that within your range?" or "In my current/last position with XYZ Corp I was earning ________ and would expect to earn ________ in the position we are discussing. Would that work for you?" Be prepared and you might just gain that $10K, $25K, or larger annual compensation increase by handling money discussions effectively. What about you? What have been your positive or negative experiences discussing money with potential employers? Author: Richard Kirby is an executive career consultant, speaker on career strategies, and author of Fast Track Your Job Search (and Career!). Richard Kirby's earlier experience includes managing engineering, human resources, marketing and sales teams for employers that ranged from a Fortune 100 to a VC-funded entrepreneurial startup. For the past 11 years at Executive Impact, Richard has helped hundreds of executives and professionals successfully navigate today's transformed 21st century job market and achieve better employment for themselves. Richard's expertise includes career assessments and goal setting, personal marketing/branding, resume enhancement, strategic networking and job interviewing, and "contrarian" job search methodologies. He is a Board Certified Coach (in career coaching) and a Certified Management Consultant (recognized by the ISO). |
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Four short links: 17 October 2013
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:40 AM PDT
| Four short links: 17 October 2013 Posted: 14 Oct 2013 02:38 AM PDT - Pencil — An open-source GUI prototyping tool that’s available for ALL platforms.
- lmctfy — open source version of Google’s container stack, which provides Linux application containers.
- ASCII WWDC — searchable full-text transcriptions of WWDC sessions.
- Cryptogeddon — an online infosec wargame.
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Three common faults of the social media job description
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:34 AM PDT
| Three common faults of the social media job description Posted: 17 Oct 2013 06:29 AM PDT Writing a social media job description can be tough. It’s still a relatively new discipline. It’s continuously evolving. And, it can be tough to define.
So, it’s hard to fault folks for writing ludicrous social job descriptions. Yet, there they are. In droves. Every day, online. In my inbox. On professional organization’s web sites. I see them. You see them. We all see them. And now it’s time to highlight a few of their common faults–and make sure fewer people make them going forward. Because the biggest problem with social media job descriptions may be this: The people writing them have no idea what they’re doing or asking for. Half the time, they’re probably written by HR people with minimal–if any–experience in the social/digital marketing world (not necessarily their fault, but just stating the reason here). The other half, they may be written by senior managers who have little experience in the discipline–after all, this is why they’re hiring the position. So, let’s take a look at three common pitfalls of the social job description–and what you can do to make it right. Fault: 10+ years experience in social does not exist Suggestion: Be realistic when asking for years experience Years experience in our field definitely matters. If you’re hiring for a senior position, you want someone with experience. But 10+ years simply doesn’t exist. Um, social media hasn’t even been AROUND for 10 years! Instead, focus on finding people with some relevant experience, and look for the intangibles you really want (people skills, experience with a specific platform or industry niche, and an aptitude to pick up and develop new skills). 
Fault: Don’t ask for the moon Suggestion: You may have to hire more than one person (eventually) The job description below is ridiculous for one key reason: It’s asking for entirely too much. You will find NO ONE that has all these skills. At least not anyone that’s proficient in them all. Instead, look to hire for the key areas you really need–and outsource the rest (until you feel it’s time to hire for that discipline, too). For example, if you really need social media help, look for someone with community management and strategy experience (and analytics as a bonus). Fill that hole. Then look to outsource other skill sets where you may have needs (SEO, web design, etc.). 
Fault: Writing + Analytics skills hard to find Suggestion: Hire by niche and coach up on complementary skills Analytics is THE one skill most people are looking for right now. And that’s only going to increase in the months ahead. And while good analytics people are certainly hard to find, good analytics people who can write well with strong storytelling skills are damn unicorns. Look, I’m not a hiring manager, and I don’t hire people, but I can tell you that most people who work in analytics probably aren’t trained writers. And most people who love and excel at writing probably want nothing to do with numbers. Now, there are certainly a few out there who do both well (hello Chuck Hemann!), but by and large, those people are very tough to find. Instead, look to hire for the key skill (analytics) and seek to coach them up on the writing front. Don’t dismiss people because they don’t have solid writing skills–especially for a niche that’s as thin as analytics right now. REQUIRED SKILLS AND QUALIFICATIONS
• Strong story-telling and presentation skills, solid analytical bent to turn data into insights
• Familiarity with these solutions is preferred: Radian6, Sysomos, Google Analytics, Omniture Site Catalyst, Compete.com, comScore, Dow Jones’ Factiva, Facebook Insights, YouTube Insights
• Experience with statistical tools a bonus, CSS, SAS and/or SPSS
• Competence with Microsoft Office, expert-level proficiency with Excel is essential
• Well-developed writing skills
• Four-year college degree in social sciences, business, marketing, applied mathematics, statistics, or computer sciences
• 5+ years of professional experience in research or analytics role
• Experience managing teams and developing junior talent
• Professional interest in healthcare, consumer packaged goods, or technology Thanks for installing the Bottom of every post plugin by Corey Salzano. Contact me if you need custom WordPress plugins or website design. Three common faults of the social media job description is a post from: Communications Conversations |
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Open Science
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:28 AM PDT
| Open Science Posted: 17 Oct 2013 06:36 AM PDT I saw this tweet from my partner Andy yesterday and immediately clicked through to see what he was talking about Open science really is a thing. And it matters. http://t.co/Mdq14A7nJ9 — Andrew Weissman (@aweissman) October 16, 2013 He was talking about an announcement our portfolio company Science Exchange made yesterday. If you don't want to click thru and read about it, I will summarize here. Science Exchange is exactly what it sounds like, a marketplace for scientific services where you can find the right resarcher and laboratory to help you complete a research project you are working on. Yesterday, they announced that The Center For Open Science was making $1.3mm available, via ScienceExchange, to reproduce and validate 50 important cancer biology studies. I am excited about this for a bunch of reasons; 1) reproducing and validating research is critical, 2) The Center For Open Science is taking a marketplace model to funding this work, and 3) it points to the broader potential for Science Exchange to break down silos, open up research, and lead to better and faster scientific discovery. As Andy said in his tweet, Open Science really is a thing. A good thing.  | You are subscribed to email updates from A VC
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Are We Misunderstanding the Purpose of a Business Blog?
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:27 AM PDT
| Are We Misunderstanding the Purpose of a Business Blog? Posted: 17 Oct 2013 09:00 AM PDT 
Earlier this week, Gini had an interesting post on her efforts to drive revenue from her site SpinSucks.com: We batted around some ideas. Should we sell content? Should we create a subscription-based professional development site? Should we host paid webinars? The answer to all of those questions was yes and we embarked on trying to generate revenue from each of them. We created eBooks and sold them for $9.99. We built monthly webinars and charged $50 to attend. We even developed a professional development site calledSpin Sucks Pro that cost $50 per month to join. It all flopped.
I sympathized with Gini’s post because I’ve had the same success in trying to sell digital products and services here. In fact most of the companies I talk to show little to no direct revenue as a result of their blogging. So then why the hell are we doing this? Blogging and social media have never been the best ways to directly sell to others. Sure some people and companies can make it work, but some people can sell ice to Eskimos. For most of us, it’s a struggle to use channels that most people view as personal communication channels, and sell stuff via these channels. The mistake typically happens when we view blogging strictly through the ‘how can this make us money?’ lense. What about considering the amount of money that blogging can save you? Blogs are a great way for a business to draw exposure to itself and that exposure is a marketing cost savings. Or what about using your blog as a tool to provide customer service? Every call to customer service that’s avoided because someone read your post and solved the problem themselves is a customer service cost savings. Here’s another example: Six years ago I wrote a blog post critiquing Dell’s company blog. As a result of that post, I got to know several of the first member’s of Dell’s social media team. That led to: - My speaking at South By SouthWest in 2008 (which by itself led to a ton of other opportunities)
- Multiple projects with Dell
- Meeting Michael Dell
- Getting to know probably 20 or so key members of Dell’s social media team. Some of those people have moved on to major brands such as Adobe, Citi, Wal-Mart and Perdue.
But I had no idea any of that would happen when I wrote the post. In fact while most of my efforts to directly monetize this blog have failed, most of the money I’ve made over the last 8 years, in fact probably all of it, has happened indirectly because of this blog. So instead of focusing on how you can directly monetize your blog, think about how you can directly create value for your readers. Then once you create that value, the money will follow.   |
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Google+ Posts Now Appearing Alongside Articles in Google News
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:26 AM PDT
| Google+ Posts Now Appearing Alongside Articles in Google News Posted: 17 Oct 2013 04:05 PM PDT Google+ Posts Now Appearing Alongside Articles in Google News was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips. 
No matter how hard we try, Google+ will not be denied. We've all seen it: the integration of Google+ into even the smallest facets of search results — from recently added hashtags in people's posts to the addition of Google+ posts into the Knowledge Graph of the SERP. And we all know the story about establishing authorship through your profiles and the trust signal an image provides to your result, but this blog post isn't about that. Though, if you haven't done so, I highly encourage you to exercise authorship on your site. This post is about Google+ becoming the news. What if I told you there was a way to show up in Google News just by posting on your Google+ profile something related to an article topic? It would seem that based on topic relation, Google is now placing links to and snippets of Google+ posts under some news articles, without regard for your reputation as a news source. Sure, there are the usual suspects, AP, Fox News, CNN, Huffington Post, but regular Google+ users (perhaps with mild influence) and their posts are appearing alongside actual news articles.  Of the results I spot checked, all the Google+ posts that appeared had content-relevant hashtags and links to an article related to those listed in Google News. The implications here are big and Google+ is becoming less and less of an island. With the integration we've seen to date, it's best to put into practice concerted efforts on Google+ as marketing platform. What does this mean for online and social media marketing going forward? Here are three simple things to keep in mind given the new developments in Google News. 3 Google+ Optimizations 
Engage with your audience and in your industry – Create timely posts about current events and share them with the people in your circles. It's like content freshness but for Google+. Invite engagement, brand awareness and subject matter expertise at the same time. Tag your posts, share links to articles – In each and every post you create, do yourself a favor; use relevant hashtags and incorporate a link to an article. You never know when you're going to be in the news, and I mean that in the best possible way. Never discount how Google uses its assets – We saw this with authorship and other structured data. There are obvious incentives to using Google+, and having your posts appear in association with news articles is an added bonus. | | Code Typo In Google Analytics Demographics and Interests Reports Snippet Posted: 17 Oct 2013 10:33 AM PDT | You are subscribed to email updates from Bruce Clay Blog
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Matt Cutts on How to Guest Blog Without Looking Like a Spammer to Google
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:24 AM PDT
| Matt Cutts on How to Guest Blog Without Looking Like a Spammer to Google Posted: 17 Oct 2013 01:00 PM PDT If you're doing guest blogging and want to avoid getting in trouble with Google, you definitely want to do it in moderation, make sure you're on topic with the content and the website it appears on, and avoid abusing keyword-rich anchor text.  | | The Secrets Online Searchers Keep [Study] Posted: 17 Oct 2013 10:30 AM PDT Ask.com revealed what people search for when no one else is looking, who they are hiding those searches from and the unorthodox places they browse the web (including the toilet) in the 2013 Online Consumer Search Habits report.  | | How Facebook Ads Help Deliver Big ROI for Magnolia Pictures Posted: 17 Oct 2013 09:00 AM PDT Indie film distributor, Magnolia Pictures, turned to Facebook advertising to raise awareness and drive sales. Facebook's Optimized CPM tool helped Magnolia achieve nearly 2 million video plays of their movie trailers. Here's how.  | | Targeting Weird Niche Audiences for Links Posted: 17 Oct 2013 06:30 AM PDT Instead of making huge changes to your product or service, make small changes to make the product suitable for a weird niche audience. The fact that you created a special product specifically for that particular group of people makes you linkable.  | | Facebook Launches New Retargeting Capabilities Posted: 17 Oct 2013 05:30 AM PDT New retargeting options are coming to Facebook that won't force you to go through FBX (Facebook Ad Exchange). Advertisers will now be able to manage retargeting programs directly through Facebook's interface instead of DSPs.  | | 5 Tips to Get Your Product Feed Ready for the Holidays Posted: 17 Oct 2013 04:30 AM PDT Getting your inventory feeds in shape will help capture as much high quality traffic as possible. Here's how to make those inventory feeds work for your business this holiday and go from marketing zero to marketing hero in no time.  | You are subscribed to email updates from Search Engine Watch
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Does your healthcare marketing really matter? It can.
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:16 AM PDT
| Does your healthcare marketing really matter? It can. Posted: 17 Oct 2013 06:06 AM PDT Do your prospective customers deserve better marketing? Only you know the real answer. Step back for a moment. If you were on the receiving end of your healthcare marketing –– would it matter to you? More specifically, would it teach you more? help you do more? help you distinguish, believe and trust more? inspire you [...] | You are subscribed to email updates from Sparks
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How Online Content Can Drive Your Business Growth
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:11 AM PDT
| How Online Content Can Drive Your Business Growth Posted: 17 Oct 2013 06:04 AM PDT How Online Content Can Drive Your Business Growth written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Cassie Roberson – Enjoy! Every day thousands of people go online in search of useful information or communication through social networks. This is where your prospective customers are. So, the next question is how to get their attention and to lead them to your service offering. Saying "Don't try to sell but try to help" at first might sound questionable, but actually this is how it works with online marketing. Online content is the first step in communication with a large number of potential customers. So, bring in some online interaction with your target audience. 1. Create content that builds credibility Don't limit yourself with just writing a description of products you sell or services you provide. In addition to your website create an online platform where you will give professional advices and share useful information with people (a blog, Facebook page, Twitter account or altogether). In order to build a long-term relationship with a customer you need to make an impression of a reliable and trustful company. Instead of pushing to buy something from you, give them advice on how to make the right decision. Don't be reluctant in providing information. The more you give the more you get back. Remember that if a visitor doesn't find valuable information on your page, he would likely turn away and find it somewhere else; after all they are just a click away. In case if visitors do find helpful tips on your business page, you will instantly earn their trust as a professional. 2. Go social You have definitely heard about Social Media Marketing (or SMM) which is technically an online form of word-of-mouth marketing. A great thing about SMM is that business insiders are able to initiate and control company's presence in social networks. Millions of people somewhere online are waiting for your signal to act. But before throwing a rod you need to lure the fish. Business promotion in social networks is again all about building credibility and visibility. You have to create content that people will share and spread throughout the community. So, do not pack your Facebook page with commercial offers which are not the best posts to collect "likes". Ideally your social posts should contain 80% of useful information or interesting facts and only 20% of promotion. Providing helpful and valuable content makes people respect your expertise. Also do not forget to make it easy to share your posts on blog and website. To get even better results maximize your content through publishing on multiple platforms. Ask your staff, colleagues and partners to help you share a new post through their personal social network accounts. 3. Visualize "Better to see once than hear a hundred times" works best in case with online content. Instead of posting another 800 word article just share with visitors an impressive picture, short video or animated slideshow. You can also combine text and visual elements – support your article with pictures, charts or even animation. Studies have shown that combining information visual cues with text content can dramatically improve information retention; which is your ultimate goal in sharing content. "Overall animation increases performance with better learning results and less effort. However, visual cues rated better than replacing visual text with spoken text. Multimedia materials using both words and pictures have the highest instructional efficiency for retention and transfer." 1 To make visitors share your content it shouldn't just be interesting but outstanding. Try to use the best tools you can find for information visualization. There is numerous software to create animation, infographics or slideshows online. One of the easiest and quite powerful visualization is Presenter by Easy WebContent. This free web application lets you combine pictures, text, icons, audio and video just drag-and-dropping the elements to canvas. EWC Presenter might become a great source of inspiration for creating your next blog post. As soon as you are on the right spot with well-crafted and easy-to-share content, you will see multiple results, including but not limited to: - Top positions in search engine listings
- Thousands of potential clients engaged
- Better awareness about your business
- Motivation for potential customers to order your product or service
- Collecting useful personal information about target audience
All these indirect impacts could lead at the end to expansion of sales and better financial results. So, what are you waiting for? It's time to start improving your content management right now. References: 1 – Research Summary "Animation: How does animation affect cognitive load?" University of South Alabama  Cassie Roberson is a freelance writer mainly specializing in Business, Marketing and Web Design. Before writing for blogs she used to work as a financial manager for a small web design company, later got involved in numerous marketing & promotion projects (including content marketing and SMM) and even graphic design projects. With her Business degree, design and photography passion, she finally decided to become a full-time freelancer and continue sharing valuable content with online readers.
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Chamath Palihapitiya and the Neo-Libertarians of Silicon Valley
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:09 AM PDT
| Chamath Palihapitiya and the Neo-Libertarians of Silicon Valley Posted: 17 Oct 2013 05:58 AM PDT I left San Francisco after living there approximately one third of the time for four or five years, basically a year in aggregate. One of the things that really disturbed me was the underlying elitist, libertarian, dog-eat-dog, beggar-thy-neighbor attitude of many tech leaders, a neolibertarian ethos that has come to dominate much of the tech world there. This is shown to an extreme by Peter Thiel, who goes so far as to suggest that increases and welfare and giving women the vote made ‘capitalist democracy’ an oxymoron (see Peter Thiel, Techno-Utopian, and Beware Peter Thiel). But even a slightly more benign techo-libertarian like Eric Schmidt show his deeper leanings when he says I love gridlock’. So this exchange last week between ex-Facebooker and angel Chamath Palihapitiya and Jason Calicanis, the host of This Week in Start-ups, is just the newest go around in the rapidly emerging neo-libertarian worldview of the tech elite in SF. Calacanis makes a joke about the government shutdown, and this ensues: Palihapitiya: The government, they’re completely useless. Calacanis: The government got shut down today and the stock market went up 1 percent. Palihapitiya: We’re in this really interesting shift. The center of power is here, make no mistake. I think we’ve known it now for probably four or five years.But it’s becoming excruciatingly, obviously clear to everyone else that where value is created is no longer in New York, it’s no longer in Washington, it’s no longer in LA. It’s in San Francisco and the Bay Area. And when you look at sort of, like, how markets react to things like that, and when there’s no reaction, it should be taken as a very subtle signal that the power dynamics have changed. Because markets value meaningful events, markets discount meaningless events. And so the functional value of the government is effectively discounted to zero … Companies are transcending power now. We are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence, and capital structures that matter. If companies shut down, the stock market would collapse. If the government shuts down, nothing happens and we all move on, because it just doesn’t matter. Stasis in the government is actually good for all of us. It means they can neither do anything semi-useful nor anything really stupid. They just sit there and they just kind of, you know … [Applause.] Calacanis: There you have it. Yes. There you have it. Kevin Roose sizes this up this way: The bigger takeaway from Palihapitiya’s rant is that a certain strain of influential Silicon Valley thought has moved past passive political apathy and into a kind of anarchist cheerleading. Dysfunction and shutdowns are good, this line of thinking goes, because it hamstrings Washington’s ability to mess with the private sector’s profit-making schemes. And as long as the Bay Area is still churning out successful start-ups, what does it matter if hundreds of thousands of government workers are furloughed, essential services are cut off for low-income Americans, and the threat of a sovereign default endangers the entire economy? […] For them [Bay area tech elite], government is mostly a hindrance — a regulatory obstacle to the kinds of disruptive start-ups they fund, and an enemy of a looser immigration policy that would allow their portfolio companies to recruit more talented foreign engineers. But the message they’re pushing isn’t as simple as small-government libertarianism or selfish profit-seeking. It’s a kind of regional declaration of independence. The entrepreneurial community in San Francisco and Silicon Valley increasingly thinks of itself as a semi-autonomous region within the U.S. — one that has its own funding scheme, its own leaders, and its own paths to success. And the message they’re sending is simple: We matter, you don’t. And they could be the answer to the GOP’s burning problem, which is finding a constituency that isn’t just the Confederacy. Yes, FWD.us the tech elite that back that neo-libertarianism will become the new quadrant of the right in American politics. 
The recent Keystone Kops routine in Washington was the attempt of the Tea Partiers to move the country abruptly to the lower right quadrant of this chart, despite the rejection of those ideas by the electorate in the last presidential elections. But the goals of the neo-libertarian, SF billionaires club are much more in line with American sentiment, especially those upward strivers on both populous coasts. They will be in favor of gay rights, legalization of pot, and women’s rights (Thiel’s bile and Twitter’s board of directors, notwithstanding). They will push for directed immigration relaxation on economic grounds: they want more Indian and Rumanian PhDs. And they will support corporatist globalism, and even the extreme risks posed by big banks will not bring them to argue for increased government regulation of the financial system. But on the economics dimension they can go pretty far to the right. They will oppose raising taxes to better the welfare of poor people, or to underwrite better schools in districts that historically have done badly. They will oppose extending health care, and forget single payer. They will be able to fund their objectives, and once they get over their dislike of government — which is completely useless, after all — they will likely start to play a larger role in the power vacuum left by the collapsing of the traditional constituencies of the fading conservative bloc in the US, which is aging, and out of step on a societal level with the sentiments of the young, who have come to accept interracial marriage, gays and lesbians, smoking pot, and the decline of religion as an ethical foundation. | You are subscribed to email updates from Stowe Boyd
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McConnell: Not Doing That Again
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 01:03 AM PDT
| McConnell: Not Doing That Again Posted: 17 Oct 2013 11:56 AM PDT McConnell says no new shutdown in January 2014 or maybe ever. "One of my favorite old Kentucky sayings is there's no education in the second kick of a mule. The first kick of a mule was when we shut the government down in the mid 1990s and the second kick was over the last 16 days." One of the interesting things about this is that this is clearly not the lesson taking by House Tea Partiers who see this as a mere three month time out before the next shutdown and debt default crisis. And I strongly suspect that Democrats will be asking opposing candidates starting now to pledge never to shutdown the government or threaten debt default again.  | | 'Get Your Gun' Posted: 17 Oct 2013 08:59 AM PDT | | Good Luck With That Posted: 17 Oct 2013 08:40 AM PDT Post shutdown, Republicans are saying the key is they need more senators to defund Obamacare. That seems like a pretty elementary insight. And that goes along with President Obama's point/jab today that if Tea Partiers really want to repeal Obamacare they should focus on winning an election. But the real story, I think, is that these standoffs are seriously weakening Republican chances of winning back the Senate next year. The House is in more jeopardy post crisis. But gerrymandering, concentration of Democrats in urban areas and simple incumbency still make that a really heavy lift for Democrats. The Senate is another story. Read More → | | PSA Posted: 17 Oct 2013 08:28 AM PDT | | Hate To Break It To You Posted: 17 Oct 2013 06:58 AM PDT | | Stabbed In The Back Posted: 17 Oct 2013 06:57 AM PDT So far Republicans picking through the rubble of the shutdown debacle have identified two main culprits for their defeat: the media and moderates within their ranks. The second of those is the richest because the lesson learned for these Republicans isn't that they overreached, it's that they didn't go far enough. A lack of ideological purity and true commitment to the cause is what sank Republicans. If they had only held together tighter, then Obama and the Democrats would have blinked. It's an echo of post-election analysis in 2008 and 2012. If only John McCain and Mitt Romney had been more conservative, the White House would have gone Republican, too. Seeing other "culprits" in the conservative stabbed in the back narrative? Flag them to us by email via the "Comments & News Tips" address toward the top of the page.  | | The Unity Caucus Posted: 17 Oct 2013 06:27 AM PDT If only Republicans had remained unified, this all would have turned out so much better.  | You are subscribed to email updates from Editor's Blog
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The Social Networking Weblog
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 12:15 AM PDT
| The Crap We Missed – Thursday 10.17.13 Posted: 17 Oct 2013 12:00 PM PDT Welcome to Thursday’s The Crap We Missed, a surprisingly full bounty of shelf ass and Prince Harry being tickled by teenage girls. We try to be an all-encompassing resource, like Wikipedia, but with far less competent sourcing. Which is entirely our justification for making boldly irresponsible assumptions about what could be going on in pictures like Jane Lynch recalling the time she ran into LeAnn Rimes in the bathroom, Olivia Munn physically contacting Anna Wintour, so thankfully she’s now dead and we can all forget about those times she was hired for acting, and Boris Johnson right before asking Helen Mirren how she likes her eggs. Not a single part of any of that is true, but I’m still going to get paid for today, - Photo Boy Click Here To Start The Gallery Photo: Fame/Flynet, Getty, INFphoto, Pacific Coast News, Splash News, WENN | | Bertney And The Boobies Posted: 17 Oct 2013 11:07 AM PDT Bertney And The Boobies
by A.A. Milne Bertney knew she had promised her papa to let people look at her boobies if she got to ride the double bus like a big girl, but it still didn’t make Bertney feel good inside.
“Lettin’ people see my nippler buttons makes me feel icky in mah belly,” Caillou Bertney had said to papa with a sad face. “Sometimes I fink I’ll never be a good girl again.”
“Cheer up, Bertney,” papa said. “This is how we get money for McDonald’s. You like McDonald’s, don’t you?”
Bertney shook her head yes. McDonald’s is her favorite! Maybe showing her boobies won’t be so bad after all.
“Now go on out there and let the people have a look at you with their picture boxes,” papa said while giving Bertney a big hug. “And smile for the lights!”
Bertney couldn’t wait to make more money for McDonald’s. “Papas always make everything better,” she thought with a smile. The End Photos: Pacific Coast News, Splash News, WENN | | Bruce Jenner Is A Transsexual. There You Have It. Posted: 17 Oct 2013 10:25 AM PDT This sexy bitch is a dude? Get outta here. When Kim Kardashian divorced Kris Humphries, he was immediately smeared as a verbally abusive. When Lamar Odom started cheating on Khloe Kardashian, he was outed as a crack addict. And now that Bruce Jenner left Kris to pursue a simpler life of golf and R/C helicopters instead of hand-feeding their children into the Hollywood machine, he’s being outed as a cross-dresser who loves the feel of a silk nightie upon his Olympian breasts. Star reports: "Bruce has a feminine side," our source reveals. "He likes growing his hair out, likes getting manicures and pedicures and won't leave his house without his diamond earrings. And he's obsessed with plucking his eyebrows!"
To Star readers, the 63-year-old's feminine qualities are no surprise. Two years ago, we first reported his fetish with cross-dressing, and now, more sources are coming forward that echo our original report — including details about how he "borrowed" stepdaughter Kim Kardashian's lingerie!
"Kris has told Bruce that she will reveal his secret if he doesn't go along with her plans about their split or their show," the insider adds.
Of course, this would explain how Kris talked him into filming their separation, but then again, so would that episode where Bruce bought her a gun like an idiot which I’m pretty sure can be aimed at Kendall and/or Kylie‘s head. As for how I even know such an episode exists, funny story- *pops cyanide capsule* Photos: INFphoto, Pacific Coast News | | Michael Bay Got Attacked By Triads In Hong Kong Posted: 17 Oct 2013 09:19 AM PDT “Dude, dude, check it out. I’m with a hot chick, and the kind black dudes like. That’s funny!” While filming Transformers: Age of Extinction in Hong Kong this morning, Michael Bay suddenly found himself being exactly right that time he said all Chinese people know karate because two of them started kicking him in the face while demanding protection money, according to E! News: The siblings reportedly felt they should be compensated for allowing Bay and his crew to film in the city’s Quarry Bay district. The brothers attacked Bay, who sustained injuries to the right side of his face. The Pain & Gain director declined medical attention.
The older brother was arrested on suspicion of assault, while the younger brother was arrested on suspicion of assault and blackmail. Police have now handed the case over to specialist anti-triad units reserved for tackling Hong Kong’s notorious criminal gangs.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” Michael Bay said while hugging a brick of C4 for comfort. “I even tried reasoning with them in their own language. I said, ‘Guys, rook, me no rove you rong time, okay? But ret’s go get some Generar Tso Chicken and tark about Yackie Chan.’ But for some reason they weren’t having it. Maybe I should’ve let them bang one of the chicks on set, I dunno, I was kind of saving those for me. Plus their dicks would’ve been too small. It’s a fucked up world, man.” UPDATE: Michael Bay claims he was simply swung at by a junkie with an air conditioner – Who never connected! – but did mysteriously detonate later. Which was AWESOME. Photos: Bauer-Griffin, Pacific Coast News | | Stevie From ‘Eastbound & Down’ Tried To Bang Lindsay Lohan In Real Life Posted: 17 Oct 2013 07:45 AM PDT I love Eastbound & Down. I think this season is fucking amazing, and one of the best examples of a show hitting its stride and fitting into a perfect groove. (Unlike you, Homeland.) That said, I hate Stevie. Can’t stand the character. I don’t know why, but just something about him feels cheap. However, apparently I love Steve Little because he was goddamn magic on Jimmy Kimmel Live! last night. (On top of voicing Peppermint Butler which I just now learned and is awesome.) Above is him describing his actual attempts to bang Lindsay Lohan while she was in North Carolina filming her cameo, and below is him getting tips on picking up women from Matthew McConaughey. Which you can tell only works if you’re Matthew McConaughey because it literally involves just telling chicks you’re taking a shower. That’s it.
THE SUPERFICIAL | About • Facebook • Twitter | | Kim Kardashian’s Ass Is Back Posted: 17 Oct 2013 06:29 AM PDT After North West was born, Kim Kardashian went into hiding for three months where it was just assumed she was getting liposuction which turned out to be wrong. But thanks to the whore-rich fields of Instagram, I can now safely say she spent that entire time getting her ass resculpted by a crack team – *reaches for razor blades* – of architects and civil engineers. Not unlike the Freedom Tower because, yes, I’m equating pregnancy with terrorism. Someone has to in this world that’s turned its back on God. FREEMASONS! (Is that not what we’re doing now when we’re completely sick of something? I can’t keep track of these fads.)
THE SUPERFICIAL | About • Facebook • Twitter Photos: Instagram / Fame/Flynet, INFphoto,Splash News, WENN | | Good Morning, Ashley Greene, And Other News Posted: 17 Oct 2013 05:59 AM PDT - Zac Efron is manly now, and to his credit, I forgot how beautiful his bangs used to be. [Lainey Gossip] - Joe Jonas is a heroin addict. I believe in God now. [Dlisted] - Nothing Beats A Woman’s POV [theCHIVE] - The latest stupid shit out of Farrah Abraham‘s mouth. [Fishwrapper] - Candice Swanepoel in a $10 million bra, anyone? [tooFab] - All this time Khloe Kardashian was just a bear. Huh. How about that? [BuzzFeed] - Talita Correa in lingerie. [Popoholic] - Goddamn, Gemma Sanderson… [Hollywood Tuna] - Kendall Jenner‘s posing nude already. Oh, good. [DrunkenStepfather: Site is NSFW] - Vin Diesel drinks your milkshake, Andy Serkis. He drinks it up. [Uproxx] THE SUPERFICIAL | About • Facebook • Twitter Photos: Fame/Flynet |
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Social media brand recommendations rise while face-to-face conversations fall
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 12:14 AM PDT
| Social media brand recommendations rise while face-to-face conversations fall Posted: 17 Oct 2013 01:28 AM PDT  US consumers are increasing their use of social media to recommend and discuss their favourite brands, while face-to-face and phone discussions are taking a back seat.
According to new word-of-mouth (WOM) research from COLLOQUY, brand recommendations made via social media have grown 4% since the company's last report in 2011, while the number of 'real life' conversations about brands has dropped 4%. In previous research, COLLOQUY coined the term 'WOM champions' to describe the select group of consumers most loyal to and willing to recommend brands. In the company's latest report – 'Hashtags, Tweets and Likes: Nurturing Digital Word-of-Mouth Engagement' – researchers say it's this group that's pioneering the move to social, being almost twice as likely to recommend brands via digital channels than the general population. The report also showed that nearly half the general population believes social networks are an inappropriate way for brands to interact with customers, but that youth markets and the WOM demographic disagree, with 73% and 60% respectively believing it to be an appropriate channel. | You are subscribed to email updates from SMI
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Motorola May Lose A Billion Dollars For Google This Year ... And It Doesn't Matter
Posted: 18 Oct 2013 12:11 AM PDT
| Motorola May Lose A Billion Dollars For Google This Year ... And It Doesn't Matter Posted: 17 Oct 2013 03:14 PM PDT Google isn't really all that worried about how much money it is losing with Motorola. Google's smartphone manufacturer continues to be the company's biggest cost sink. In its third quarter earnings today, Motorola lost another $248 million on revenue of $1.18 billion. So far this year, Google's Motorola division has cost the search giant $861 million. If Motorola has another poor performance in the fourth quarter this year, Google's smartphone maker could cost the company a cool billion dollars. At the same time, Google finalized the sale Motorola's set-top TV box in April to the Arris Group for $2.05 billion. Technically, Google is up on Motorola for the year. Investors and tech pundits will cry that buying Motorola for $12.5 billion in August 2011 was the company's worst decision ever. Especially since Motorola announced four new smartphones in the third quarter including three Droid smartphones on Verizon and the Moto X, the first flagship smartphone that is derived out of the collaboration between Google and Motorola. Is Google sucking wind with Motorola? Or is the partnership just in the beginning stages and ultimately will be extremely profitable? There is still a chance that Motorola is still the worst decision that Google has ever made—but it's hard to know for sure when the flagship smartphone that the companies have created together has been on the market for only a couple of months. Moto More Than Just A Number On A Balance Sheet The fact of the matter is that Google is pushing the bounds of current smartphone technology with the Moto X and is showing other Android manufacturers some of the possibilities that can be done with Android smartphones. Google is working on technologies such as motion and gesture control that are found in the Moto X but not necessarily in other Google products. Google is also working on language technology and voice recognition, technologies that play a big role in the Moto X. These are the types of technologies that get a proving ground in Motorola's smartphones, but which can also play a wider role should, for instance, Google add them to a new version of Android or to the Chrome browser (which would essentially extend them to basically every Internet-capable device in the world). Google would love to be able to turn its Motorola division into the next Apple or Samsung. But it is not critical to Google's bottom line in the short term. Google has restructured Motorola, turning it from the bloated manufacturer it bought in 2011 to a division within Google with fewer than 10,000 employees (it employed 20,000 at the time of acquisition). With a few more flagship smartphones under its belt and a little traction in the market, Google would be happy if Motorola eventually broke even while remaining a source of protection from patent lawsuits and a test bed for pushing the bounds of mobile innovation. Of course, Motorola can't be a drag on Google's profits forever. But in the short term, there is less importance on how much the smartphone maker is losing than on building the company, its technology and infrastructure. "It is still early days for us," said Google's chief financial officer Patrick Pichette. "I think [Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside] and the team have made a huge transformation at Motorola. We now have great product quality with the Moto X, the first device that has come out, has been very well received, great product. The team is really now working on building out marketing and distribution, that is the next area. That is the mindset we have with Motorola. This is not really a this quarter or next quarter but this is much more of an optimistic reception of the company."  | | New Photos Of Apple's Top Secret Desert Data Compound 'Pillar' Posted: 17 Oct 2013 01:46 PM PDT This week, a tour of Facebook's newest cold storage technology led me far afield, deep into central Oregon's expanse of high desert—the ideal spot for major companies to store their countless bytes thanks to a confluence of environmental factors and lax taxation. While out there, I figured that I might as well track down the hush-hush Apple data center that moved into the neighborhood of Facebook's 120-acre plot off Highway 126 late last year. As it turns out, Apple's complex, code-named "Pillar"—and completely devoid of any markings identifying it as an outpost of the Cupertino company—is a literal stone's throw from Facebook's Prineville, Ore. hub. Tracking down the location of Apple's stealth site was just as easy as peering southeast from Facebook's roof, which ironically offered what was probably the best view in town. The Facebook employees pointed it out to me while cracking jokes about its apparently not-so-secret alias. Construction began on the Apple data center last October, and now the first phase's main building (the large black one) appears to be complete, to the untrained, telephoto-lens equipped eye, anyway. Eventually the project will encompass two full 338,000-square foot data centers sprawling across Apple's 160-acre Prineville plot. And because everything is spookier and more fascinating when it's built out in the desert, we bring you the photographic fruits of our Veronica Mars-style investigation of Apple's Area 51.  Ahem.  "Pillar" the code-name for Apple's Prineville, Ore. data center, is pretty serious about trespassing, apparently.  View from the roof of one of Facebook's Prineville data center buildings... Apple is the black building on the far left.  In this high desert small town, Facebook's one-story high structure is the best vantage point around.  Apple's data center in Prineville, Ore. is identified only as "Pillar"—there are no Apple logos, fonts or signs in sight.  Apple's "Pillar" data center is just across the street from Facebook—and behind an RV repair shop.  Construction on the "Pillar" site began in October 2012, and now one large building appears complete.  The Pillar site is surrounded by a large black fence on all sides, stretching out roughly 300 yards from the buildings themselves.  A visitor station with reflective black windows is the only entry point into Pillar, which is patrolled by security even after business hours.  The address for the site, 1500 SW Baldwin Way, isn't identifiable via Google Maps—but finding 1500 SW Baldwin Road, an unrelated location around a mile away, is easy.  Apple's "Pillar" project is under contract with construction company Fortis, the only other identifying brand on the site.  Facebook's relatively open and well-identified data compound is literally across the street from Pillar. It's a roughly 2 minute drive between the sites.  | | Android 4.4 KitKat May Be Dominated By The 'Google Experience' Posted: 17 Oct 2013 12:02 PM PDT The stated goal of the next version of Google's Android operating system—4.4 "KitKat"—is "to make an amazing Android experience available for everybody." What does that mean? It is odd and cryptic … and the only thing we officially know about what Google is going to do with KitKat. If we piece together some of the rumors swirling around what Android 4.4 will entail and combine it with what we know about how Google has been updating Android and its pertinent features over the last year, we get a pretty good idea. It leads us to a new Android experience. What some people are calling "the Google Experience." Waiting For The Big Android Update Android 4.4 KitKat is expected to be announced by the end of October. The hype cycle is beginning to hit full tilt as stream of leaks and rumors illuminate what Google will unveil the next version of Android and the flagship smartphone that will accompany it, the Nexus 5. KitKat will be the first new named version of Android in more than a year since Jelly Bean 4.1 was introduced at Google's I/O developer conference in the spring of 2012. Google has offered up two updates to Android since then—versions 4.2 and 4.3—that have both been rolled up in the Jelly Bean moniker. Now that Google is almost ready to unveil the "K" desert version of Android (Google normally names each new version of the operating system after sweet treats in alphabetical order), users, developers, manufacturers and consumers are expecting a lot. The last two versions of Jelly Bean haven't given us a ton to be excited about. The biggest feature in version 4.3 was the integration of Bluetooth Low Energy to the Android hardware specification along with OpenGL for Embedded Systems. These are good updates for app developers out there but leave much to be desired for users that are looking for a fresh coat of paint and improved user experience. The Google Experience In that vein, the rumor mill points towards a major feature that will change some of the fundamental usability of Android: the "Google Experience."  Source: Android Police The Google Experience Launcher is rumored to be a hub launcher for Google apps and widgets on Android devices. Google Experience will be a form of launcher within Android that will not be tied specifically to version 4.4 KitKat but will rather be an app through the Google Play app store that will be compatible with devices running Android back to version 2.2 Froyo. A launcher is also known in general terms as a "skin" but the terms are not mutually exclusive. The Google Experience Launcher is rumored by the blog Android Police to be a widget that live on the Android homescreen in which Google features like Search and Google Now are heavily integrated, can read the data within the widget and update itself. A launcher would also control aspects such as app folders and homescreens (which are rumored to be infinite instead of limited to five as they are in current builds of Android). What would Google Experience mean for Android users? Speculation is that KitKat 4.4 will enable support for lower-end Android devices. Google Experience would likely be the vehicle for that. If you have been following the evolution of Android as an operating system, you will note that the Google has made some pretty significant changes to how Android works on a smartphone. In the past, Google used to tie almost all of the functionality of its own apps to the Android kernel. That meant developers and consumers would need a certain version of Android to get new features. Wanted the latest update to the Google Play app store (formerly Android Market)? You needed to update your Android software. How about the latest APIs and user interface in Google Maps and Navigation? Update Android. Gmail, Calendar, Talk (now Hangouts) or any other Google service? It was tied to the Android kernel. Google changed all of that with the release of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, decoupling its own apps from the Android operating system. Instead of being tied to Android, features and APIs like Maps either stand alone as their own apps that live in the Google Play store and/or are tied to what is called Google Play Services. Google Experience As A Front-End Extension Of Google Play Services Google Play Services is what is known in the computing world as a "shim." Here is the definition of a shim, from Wikipedia: In computer programming, a shim (from shim) or shiv is a small library that transparently intercepts an API and changes the parameters passed, handles the operation itself, or redirects the operation elsewhere. Shims typically come about when the behavior of an API changes, thereby causing compatibility issues for older applications which still rely on the older functionality. In such cases, the older API can still be supported by a thin compatibility layer on top of the newer code. Web polyfills are a related concept. Shims can also be used for running programs on different software platforms than they were developed for. In Android, Google Play Services is a stand-alone app that runs in the background. It updates itself with functionality directly from Google without the user doing anything. It downloads its own code and enacts its own functionality. For example, if there is an update to the Google Play Store or Maps, it is downloaded and implemented through Google Play Services. If the Google Experience is really going to be a primary feature in KitKat 4.4, as the rumors say it will, then what Google is doing is giving Google Play Services a front-end user interface for Android devices. By extension, the Google Experience can be transported back to older versions of Android. If we look at the definition of a shim in that, "the older API can still be supported by a thin compatibility layer on top of the new code" then it is possible for Google to bring just about all of the Android features and functionality that are not explicitly tied to hardware back to any phone running a previous version of Android.  | | Twitter Reportedly Plans To Overhaul Its Private Message System Posted: 17 Oct 2013 11:59 AM PDT Twitter wants make it easier for users to ping each other privately instead of publicly, AllThingsD reports. Although details are scarce, the microblogging service could reportedly launch an expanded private-messaging feature that would bring it more directly into competition with texting services offered by carriers and apps such as WhatsApp and KakaoTalk. Coincidentally (or not), Twitter has made recent changes to its direct messaging feature that make it easier for users to send and receive private messages on its network. Image via petesimon on Flickr  | | GitHub Goes Government, Aims To Open Source Civics Posted: 17 Oct 2013 09:04 AM PDT Coding collaboration tool GitHub wants to make government more of a collaboration and less of a one-way street. So it's launched a portal dubbed Github and Government aimed specifically at helping governments all over the world to open source datasets, legislation and information so that citizen programmers can help solve local problems. Government budgets are always under pressure, and that's motivating more government executives to consider the power of open source. Philadelphia city employees use GitHub to store their public-facing code and accept edits and tweaks from citizen developers. Chicago released bike routes on GitHub so local entrepreneurs can use them for apps that make it easier to get around the city. To promote transparency, San Francisco hosts its entire municipal codebase on GitHub. There are at least two big benefits when citizens and city employees collaborate on GitHub. First, it makes government more transparent and approachable for citizens. And second, it lets elected officials faced with stretched budgets do more work with fewer resources. The U.S. government is beginning to recognize the value of open source on a national level. The White House has been a member of GitHub for over a year; the Defense Department has also long been a supporter, even sponsoring its own open-source conference. Unfortunately, the new portal won't help the U.S. government fix its most pressing GitHub bug report: Government occasionally shuts down. However, it will give citizen coders the ability to help fix other bugs once it's back.  | | See How I Dropped 83 Pounds With The Help Of A Smartphone Posted: 17 Oct 2013 08:01 AM PDT  ReadWriteBody is an ongoing series where ReadWrite covers networked fitness and the quantified self. This week, it is brought to you by Best Buy. Three and a half years ago, I got my first modern smartphone. And I discovered that the world of apps it unlocked—the ease of tracking my exercise and nutrition on the go—were the key to finally doing something about my longstanding weight problem. I had some external motivation—my 20th high-school reunion. Vanity, perhaps driven by social media, played a role—I knew there would be a lot of photos on Facebook. Dropping weight proved easier than I expected, especially when I combined the rigors of logging my food data with the virtuous feedback loop of broadcasting my weight-loss milestones. Back To The Basics, With New Devices My struggles with fitness haven't ended. Earlier this year, I found my weight had crept up to 206 lbs. That coincided with a slipping of my fitness tracking, I noticed—gaps in my food and exercise logs showed a neat correlation with my weight gain. So the answer was pretty obvious: Get back to the digital routine that had worked so well three years ago. That was the genesis of the ReadWriteBody series, and I hope you've been enjoying it. What makes writing ReadWriteBody so interesting is how much has changed since I first tackled improving my fitness three years ago. Apps and smartphones have gotten smarter in tandem. My 2010-era smartphone didn't have a built-in accelerometer, for example. Now my phone can track my steps. I also got interested in new pieces of hardware like the treadmill desk I now spend most of my workdays walking on, and the fitness tracker that can record my heart rate and my sleep patterns. Here's a look inside my routine: Video by Ecliptic Pictures for ReadWrite This article is brought to you by Best Buy, the place to go for your smartphone upgrade. Any carrier, any phone, any plan. Right now, get a FREE $50 gift card when you buy select Samsung Galaxy smartphones. See offer.   | | 10 Ways To Make Evernote Rock Harder Posted: 17 Oct 2013 07:04 AM PDT I used to keep notes and information in various places around the Web and on my devices: Google Drive, the Notes app on my iPhone, to-do list apps, notes scribbled on Post-It's and notepads, notes and sketches digitally scrawled into iPad apps like Paper and Penultimate. You get the picture. My information was disparate. Now, thanks to Evernote, my organization is centralized and respectable. When I first started using Evernote a few years back, it was pretty simple: upload a note to the service or simply create one natively from within the app itself. I loved the fact that I could snap a picture of a whiteboard or sign or sheet of paper and the text would be saved and searchable. For a long time that was how I used the service, in a very useful, yet basic, way. Recently, while doing a bit of research for an upcoming presentation about must-have apps, I realized that Evernote had been changing. To my surprise and delight, I stumbled across an entire universe of add-ons and accessories that revolved around the familiar green and grey elephant. Here are some of the best. Imagine being able to easily scan that mess of paper lying around your office and cluttering up your kitchen table directly into an Evernote folder. Wirelessly. Evernote is all about keeping your thoughts and information organized. The Scansnap Evernote Edition Scanner from Fujitsu takes things even further by automatically recognizing the differences between documents, business cards, photos and receipts and filing them accordingly. All this happens with the touch of a button. When you files are done being scanned, you'll get a notification summary on your smartphone. The reason people still end up using paper for note-taking is that writing on an iPad using a stylus isn't as natural as writing on tree pulp. The problem is that most people write in relatively small script on paper, but are forced to write larger when scribbling on the pixels of a tablet. When you find yourself writing with fourth-grade-sized letters, it's not really worth the hassle. That's where a completely re-thought stylus like the Jot Script comes in. It feels like a real pen—it's not chunky, but it's smart. Not only does it feature the slimmest stylus tip on the market, it uses Bluetooth 4.0 to ensure precision and to allow the tablet screen to distinguish between your palms and the stylus. Similar to IFTTT, Zapier lets you program the Web and a slew of apps to work together. This is great for creating and customizing your own workflows. It's also a great way to connect Evernote with over 240 other services. This works by creating "zaps" that connect two services together to automate tasks. Popular integrations include Wufoo, PayPal, MailChimp and Gmail. Integrating Zapier with Evernote is a great way to eliminate repetitive tasks. Hop.in is like the Evernote Web clipper for your iPad. It makes clipping any material from a webpage as simple as a double-tap. Videos, text, photos—you name it. If you've ever used Trello, the experience is somewhat similar; it involves a "card-based" UI that lets you enter a bit of text before uploading to Evernote. Another great feature is the baked-in social connectivity. If you want, it's easy to share a clip to Facebook or Twitter. You can even follow the clippings of other interesting people through the service to see what they found worthy of saving. The Evernote team developed Skitch to help you get your point across in as few words as possible. In practice, you mark up pictures (either directly within Evernote or from a stand-alone mobile app) with things like arrows and text that are designed to call attention to specific objects or areas. It's fast and easy and you can share your Skitch-enhanced notes easily. There's even an option to mark up the original image or to create a separate PDF. Sometimes, the only way to get the information you need into Evernote is to use a shotgun approach—saving an entire Web article, for instance, when all you really wanted was a certain paragraph or quote. Similarly, when it comes to saving info from a paper source (like a book page, for instance) you may not always want to grab everything on a page. The eHighlighter app allows you to act more like an information sniper by giving you the ability to save only the small snippets you want. Just highlight your chosen passage as you would in an e-book reader and clip it to Evernote. StudyBlue (Web, Android and iPhone App) StudyBlue is a tool geared towards students—or anyone wanting to learn something new. It makes your Evernote notes, well, studyable. If you are a fan of the flashcard approach (hopefully the word flashcard doesn't give you bad flashbacks), you'll love StudyBlue, because it turns your notes into flashcards and quizzes. When you get something wrong, you can circle back until you know it cold. A handy alert function will help you remember when to get your study on. PopClip saves a bit of time when it comes to copying/pasting and selecting text and getting it into Evernote as fast as possible. It's one of my most-used Evernote extensions, though it took a bit of getting used to. With PopClip, simply selecting any bit of text on your Mac opens up a convenient menu that will let you copy text or send it directly to Evernote. Yes, you'll be shaving off mere seconds from your routine, but for the lazy, it's a great way to overcome any mental reservations you may have about saving something you know you'll want to find later on. Dispatch is an email app for your iPhone that is all about getting things done by taking specific actions. One of those actions is to save an email to Evernote. True, you can do this with Evernote already using the personalized email address you get when you sign up, but some people may prefer a built-in button. Another great action? Save a snippet of your reply for reuse later on—it's particularly useful for repetitive replies on the go, since it's a bit tricky typing a long email on a small touchscreen keyboard. I know, Web Clipper is sort of a "Duh!" addition to this list since it was developed and promoted by Evernote, but still. The Web Clipper works as an add-on to Chrome, Firefox and Safari, and lets you quickly and easily save entire articles (sans ads and sidebars if you prefer), or to take screenshots (and mark them up with Skitch). Of course you can choose which notebook each clip should appear in and add tags. Lead image courtesy of Evernote  | | Is Facebook The World's Largest Open Source Company? Posted: 17 Oct 2013 06:33 AM PDT Quick question: which is the largest open source company on Earth? That's easy, right? It's clearly Red Hat. After all, the company pulls in over $1 billion each year selling services around open-source software like Linux and JBoss. But as I've argued before, such a distinction fits a very old-school understanding of open source business. Back in 2009, I suggested that Google was the world's biggest open source company, given the copious quantities of code it contributes, not to mention its source code repository, inspiration of massive projects like Hadoop and other contributions. While some took exception to my classification of Google as an open source company, I still think it was accurate. Except that Google is no longer the biggest open source company. Facebook is. Facebook: Open Source Everything As Facebook noted when releasing Folly, a collection of reusable C++ library artifacts, "Facebook is built on open source from top to bottom, and could not exist without it." While Facebook is not the first to make that claim—Google has for years acknowledged that it couldn't economically or technically scale without open source—Facebook has gone to lengths no other company has in promoting open source. After all, no one else has open sourced an entire data center. Facebook did. It's called Open Compute, and it's massive. From networking switches to designs for servers, power systems, storage and cooling equipment, Open Compute invites the world to both build a data center in Facebook's image, but then to extend it and improve upon it. It's very, very bold. It's also just one of the many open-source projects Facebook has released. From Cassandra (NoSQL database) to Thrift (framework for scalable cross-language services development) to Apache Hive (data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Hadoop), Facebook writes and contributes a great deal of incredibly useful software. It also is an active contributor to industry-defining open-source projects like Apache Hadoop, MySQL and PHP. How many lines of code does Facebook contribute? That's hard to say, and it's also not a very useful question anymore. Facebook's influence in open source is felt as much by the projects and code it contributes as the "open source first" ethos it has standardized for the industry. Web Giants Are Hotbeds Of Open Innovation Facebook may be the biggest open-source contributor right now, but it's not alone in seeing open source as standard operating procedure. Open source is the lifeblood of web companies, in particular. For example, LinkedIn contributes a great deal of open-source code, as does Netflix. Ditto Twitter, which is responsible for increasingly important projects like Apache Storm, essentially real-time Hadoop. Twitter also actively participates in other projects like MySQL. In fact, across the web world, open-source innovation is rampant, in part because it's the most efficient way for these companies to solve massive technology problems. One of these is scale, as Chris Aniszczyk, Twitter's open source lead, notes: @mjasay we have something similar called fatcache for SSDs, scaling problems are a breeding ground for innovation https://t.co/fb28NVJ2y0 — Chris Aniszczyk (@cra) October 10, 2013 These web companies can't dip into Microsoft's research labs for help with such problems: they need to get stuff done, and now. And they're not going to find answers to their most pressing problems in yesterday's tech behemoths. Microsoft, Nokia and other mega-vendors spend billions on R&D, but the real innovation is happening in web companies that are dealing with the problems of scaling to billions of users. Trickle-Down Open Source Economics Fortunately, the rest of us benefit from the work that Facebook and others do. Facebook, Twitter and others see competitive advantage in giving away code, not restricting access to it. This is a complete change from how technology businesses used to operate, and it's why Facebook can be completely committed to open source while legacy vendors like Oracle are, well, not. By open sourcing everything from hardware to software, Facebook shows the way to efficiently innovate in the 21st Century. Will other industries and companies follow suit?  | | Windows 8.1: A Fresh Coat Of Paint Over Still-Shaky Walls Posted: 17 Oct 2013 05:58 AM PDT Windows 8.1 is now ready for general availability, downloadable for users across the world. The new update comes with a wealth of enhancements and users of Windows 8 are encouraged to download and install the free update to Microsoft's flagship operating system. Among the noted changes to the OS: improved help and tooltips functionality, more comprehensive search, the ability to set applications as default, viewing more than two open applications on the screen at once and the much-ballyhooed return of the Start menu button to the "classic" desktop interface of Windows 8.1. Old apps, like Photos and Music, have been enhanced with new designs and features. But for some apps, such as Mail, the changes don't go far enough, with a noticeable absence of support for POP3 email. Overall, most early reviewers of Windows 8.1 agree that the update fixes a lot of problems that came with the release of the Windows 8 operating system. There are still some to go but committed users of Windows 8 should find the enhancements well worth the upgrade time and energy. The End Of Windows XP: Where Do Users Go? The fundamental dual-nature of the operating system and the increasingly recognizable tile-based Start homescreen may still be holding back adoption of Windows 8 even as the ancient Windows XP end-of-life deadline of April 8, 2014 looms like a U.S. congressional conflict. Microsoft is hoping that as XP users migrate to a new operating system, they will choose Windows 8 as their next destination. This would make sense, given consumer predilections for getting the latest and greatest.  StatCounter Global OS Stats, Sept. 2012-2013. The numbers, however, can tell a different story. According to StatCounter, the market share for Windows XP has been steadily dropping over the past year, down from 27.64% in Sept. 2012 to 20.59% one year later. But by far and away the biggest holder of operating system market share is Windows 7, not Windows 8. Windows 7 is still at a majority of the installed base that StatCounter monitors, with 51.98% of the market—only a tiny smidge under where it was in September last year at 52.2%. The trend does seem to be going down for Windows 7 use, especially since April 2013, but the curve is very shallow. Meanwhile, Windows 8 use is on the rise, but at 7.46% of the market, it has only just passed the 6.98% mark that Mac OS X had in Sept. 2013. Business Korea has noted this trend, which is even more exaggerated in South Korea's own market share figures. In May 2013, just after the announcement of Windows XP's end of life, they reached out to Microsoft Korea for comment. An MS Korea associate said, "The number of Windows 7 users increased because users upgraded their OS just in time around the XP support termination announcement." When asked about the still-low domestic figures for Windows 8, Microsoft Korea confirmed what many had already suspected. Regarding this, an MS Korea associate said, "Compared to other versions, Windows 8 especially depends on the hardware," and added, "There are not a lot of devices which can utilize the Windows 8 touch feature, which is why the market share is relatively low." Made For Touch: Leaving The Legacy Behind Microsoft's own employees admit the one big drawback for Windows 8: this is an operating system designed for touch screens, which many legacy PCs don't have yet. This means Windows 8 market penetration is reliant on brand-new laptops and PCs that do have touch-screen capabilities, or the sales of mobile devices like tablets and smartphones.  Windows 8.1 is still best-suited for touch-screen devices. In a sense, this is exactly what Microsoft has planned for itself. It wants to be a "Devices and Services" company and, by golly, they're doing it. The problem is, their end users still need an operating system that works on the computers they already have and will continue to use to get work done. Love it or leave it, at least two generations of users have grown used to the desktop paradigm that Windows and its competitors have used on PC platforms: the windows, menus and dialog boxes that depend on the mouse-and-keyboard combination. Windows 8, in trying to change so radically to mimic the success of the iOS and Android operating systems, is pushing desktop users who rely on familiar interfaces to get work done in the back of the operating system with the classic desktop interface that gets little fanfare and (from reviews of Windows 8.1), little love from Microsoft. No wonder Windows 7 is still popular: it represents the workspace where people can get things done. Consumers recognize that and IT departments sure know it too. And that is where Microsoft will see the most resistance to Windows 8 as businesses large and small avoid the platform in order to keep their workers on familiar ground. In a way, Microsoft laid some of the groundwork for this problem themselves. In the last decade, when the Linux operating system was eyed as a potential competitor to Windows, one of the the lines of fear and uncertainty that Microsoft trotted out was that re-training employees to use a Linux-based operating system would be too hard and expensive. Looking at the radically different interface of Windows 8, it's impossible to think that re-training really would be expensive for business adopters of Windows 8, since there is little with which users can be familiar in the new interface. Water washes away anything, over time, and eventually, as a new generation of smartphone and tablet users figures out how to produce content and get work done on touch-screen devices, operating systems like Windows 8 will be accepted. This will not be an easy transition, though, and Microsoft will probably have to start giving a lot more love to the classic side of Windows 8 to attract business and consumer users faster. Windows 8.1 still doesn't show that kind of love. Lead image courtesy of Nabor Garrido via CC.  | | Nearly 50% Of Verizon's Smartphone Activations Were iPhones in Q3 Posted: 17 Oct 2013 05:48 AM PDT In case you forget that the cellular carriers in the United States are mind-boggling large and powerful, Verizon would like to remind you that its getting bigger by the quarter. Verizon announced its third quarter 2013 earnings today with revenue at $30.3 billion, while adding 1.1 million wireless subscriptions (which Verizon calls "connections") to bring its total subscriptions to 101.2 million. About 67% of Verizon's wireless subscribers are using smartphones. Verizon activated 7.6 million smartphones in the quarter, up about 12% year-over-year. Verizon said that nearly 50% of its smartphone activations for the quarter were Apple iPhones. Verizon also said on its earnings call that it experienced iPhone supply shortages at the end of the third quarter and expects strong iPhone sales heading into the fourth quarter and the holiday shopping season. Lest you need a reminder, Verizon also tells us that American consumers give substantial portions of their paychecks to their wireless carriers, with wireless subscribers sending an average of $155.74 per account per month into the company's coffers. Verizon's wireless division accounts for 67.32% of its total revenue at $20.4 billion. Verizon 4G LTE now covers 303 million people in the United States, near 99% of its 3G footprint. The amazing thing about Verizon is that it grew 4.4% from the second quarter of 2012 to the third quarter of 2013. That is the third consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth of more than 4%. In the last quarter, Verizon released a litany of new smartphones to its network, including the HTC One (months after the other carriers), iPhone 5C and iPhone 5S, the bevy of Motorola Droid devices (Mini, Ultra, Maxx). Verizon also followed T-Mobile, AT&T and Sprint by introducing a monthly installment plan for new smartphones called Verizon EDGE where consumers can pay for a new smartphone with no contract over a period of 24 monthly installments.  | You are subscribed to email updates from ReadWrite
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