I can’t turn on the TV, surf the web, or peer into my Twitter feed without stumbling into another year-end wrap-up of 2010. These dime-a-dozen contrivances abound like the proverbial lemming to the cliff (lemmings don’t really do that, it’s also a contrivance). However, there have been enough of some…
Last night the local Social Media Club chapter here in Buffalo put on the event TacoVino, a wine tasting paired with a local taco truck who has social media to thank for some of its success. City Wine Merchant opened its doors, and bottles of wine, while Lloyd Taco Truck…
This may be somewhat old news by now, but given the hubbub last night that Apple and some makers of apps for the iPhone are getting sued over tracking users without consent, it seems that the struggle between privacy and features will never be old news. Back at the dawn…
First off, let me apologize for ending the title of this post with a preposition. I am playing off an idiom, so I think I have some leeway. Besides, “You get that for which you pay” just doesn’t roll off the tongue. In the last week I have watched two…
You might recognize the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) from such specifications as HTML, CSS, XHTML, ARIA, MWABP and other acronyms that are hardly pronounceable. Today the W3C has added yet another item to its list, in the form of the Federated Social Web Incubator Group (the announcement). You may…
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standards body that has brought us such fun specs as HTML, XHTML (or what’s left of it), CSS and other exciting yet dry specs, has today announced that it has created a standard for mobile web applications best practices. From the Mobile Web…
Brighkite has made an announcement today that affects me and a handful of other people (not counting all the people on Facebook whose timelines I inadvertently spam): Brightkite is dropping check-ins, posts and streams. Brightkite started 3 years ago with a Twitter-like ability to share your random musings. However, it…
One of the ongoing truths about search engine optimization (SEO) has been that inbound links are usually a good thing. This has caused SEO scammers to abuse the practice by creating and using “link farms,” sites that exist solely to link back to client sites. This “spamdexing” technique is based…
One of the best parts of December, regardless of whether you believe in Christmas or that it belongs in December, is the fun of the advent calendar. As a kid I used to look forward to jamming a new piece of creche-themed chocolate (chocolate stablehand, anyone?) into my mouth every…
In an effort to help educate the general public about its browser, Chrome, and the web in general, Google released an online “book” called 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web. Done in the style of an illustrated children’s book that allows readers to flip through the pages,…
Today Opera Software released data about how users of its Opera Mini mobile web browser use the web. Opera does this periodically to give some insight into how its users may be surfing, but what we don’t know is how much Opera Mini users correspond to the web in general.…
I finally get to eat. Two years ago I hosted Thanksgiving dinner in my shoebox of a house and managed to pull it off without setting anyone on fire. Back then, my experience with social media was limited and my favorite social media tool was Brightkite. In addition to a…