internet

Interesting TEDTalk by Sherry Turkle on Social Media and its impact on human interaction and communication: Checking email during meetings. Shopping on your smartphone in the middle of class. Texting at funerals. These are a few of the examples that MIT professor Sherry Turkle offered during her TEDTalk, in which she argued that “technology is taking us places we don’t want to go.” Turkle, a psychologist who leads MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self, believes that while our constant communication and social media engagement does make us more connected, it’s coming at the sacrifice of real conversation. And she thinks that will have some serious consequences for our relationships, our self-perceptions and our emotions.

Having a solid search engine optimization strategy is very important because today’s internet search is in a constant state of change. In order to create more transparency about how their search actually works, Google regularly updates its users about algorithm and feature changes on its Inside Search Blog. SEOMoz, a leading provider of SEO software, published a great infographic showing all of the significant algorithm changes that Google has made in the past months, including a version breakdown of the controversial “Panda” update.

Please click to view Infographic | courtesy of SEOMoz

Facebook today announced Timeline, a total redesign of the current profile page. Timeline chronicles your Facebook history and enables you to look at everything that has ever happened in your Facebook lifespan. Here’s a Mashable post that offers some great snapshots of Facebook’s new appearance and discusses some of the novelties. What do you think?

Picture courtesy of Mashable

Some of the new features include:

• “Timeline” – a stream of information about you (the photos you’ve posted, all your status updates, the apps you’ve used, even the places you’ve visited) that scrolls all the way back to your birth.
• You don’t have to just like something – “Facebook Gestures” enables users to express various kinds of reactions or emotions.
• Facebook apps will only ask for permission once to post content on your behalf – before apps had to ask each time before sharing information about you.
• Lightweight or trivial information is going to the “Ticker” – only the more relevant things such as status updates, photos from a wedding or a vacation, or changes in relationship status will appear in your news feed.
• And lastly, you can watch TV and movies, listen to music, and read news with your friends — all within Facebook.

Not necessarily groundbreaking news and in need of a little update, this engaging video (researched by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and Jeff Bronman) nevertheless shows some incredible and fascinating numbers associated with the speed of technology. Enjoy.

As a freelancer, you are most likely doing some form of social media marketing to reel in a job, project or engagement. Tell me if I’m wrong. But which social sites are best for which marketing outcomes? This useful chart by CMO.com & 97th Floor shows which social networks are best for various organizational, CRM and marketing objectives. So, in case you’re not sure if Flickr is good for SEO or whether Tumblr drives traffic, it might just be what you’ve been looking for. The infographic gives a great overview of each channels suitability in terms of customer satisfaction, brand exposure, traffic, and SEO. I think it comes in really handy as quick point of reference. What do you think?

image courtesy CMO & 97th Floor

a recent survey, conducted by elon university, found that cloud-computing will increasingly gain importance in the future. the majority of social analysts, internet and tech experts questioned in the survey, predict this form of internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information, are provided to computers and other devices on-demand, to prevail. mashable offers a great summary of this study.

image by mashable

brian solis’s conversation prism portrays how comprehensive the social web has become and how wide the conversations range that define it:

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brian solis is a digital analyst, sociologist, and futurist. he’s recognized widely as one of the most prominent thought leaders in social media.

“why should i sign up for another website, and just add to all the sites i already use? …the idea for vreebit grew out of frustration with artificial limitations of these sites. vreebit does not just combine the most valuable elements of existing social networking and groupware technologies – it transforms these indispensible platforms into powerful and effective tools. in short, vreebit changes the very concept of social networking into one of versatility, simplicity, efficiency – and fun!”

ruder finn, a u.s. public relations firm, recently conducted a survey on ‘why people use the internet’. the firms puplic relations cover healthcare, technology, consumer, interactive, media, arts and culture, and environmental programming. according to ruder finn, the most popular reason for going online is to “pass time”. other popular reasons were “education”, “connecting with others”, “researching” and “sharing”.

…take a look at the complete survey here.

“from e-mail machines like the blackberry to svelte handsets like the iphone, many cell phones today are essentially small computers with microprocessors, gigabytes of memory and the ability to surf the internet. so why use a laptop at all? can’t we do everything now on a smartphone?…”