August 2011
1 post
3 tags
Skirting Technological Tools. In a Chronicle of Higher Education blog, a member of the academic community writes about faculty members’ reluctance to take up new technology. But I’ve encountered this attitude outside of academia as well.
Trying to revise documents via e-mails is a Sisyphean activity. Yet, people fear embracing a new tech option that will, in fact, free up their time...
July 2011
4 posts
4 tags
News Feed Optimization. Research by a Facebook management firm shows that nearly all comments that appear on a brand’s “status updates” come via the user’s News Feed and not from visiting the brand’s Wall.
That’s hardly surprising.
Facebook decides which posts get placed at the top of a user’s News Feed. But try these News Feed optimization techniques.
If you want people to engage with...
4 tags
Quit Following Me! O.K. That’s something one never ever says to one’s Twitter followers. But still, of their own volition, they (sometimes) peel away, one by one, without a farewell word. And one is, at that point, gripped by the desire to know who they were. Well, these apps can track those mean-spirited twerps, not tweeps.
Unfollowr. When someone stops stalking, it lets the aggrieved party...
6 tags
Social Media Toolkit. Here are some apps I may want to acquaint myself with better.
SnapApp. Highly useful if one is managing Facebook pages.
SnapApp is a marketing platform that allows one to create custom applications such as quizzes, polls, surveys, sweepstakes, and contests, and share them across the social networks.
BackTweets. This tells one who is tweeting one’s links.
This...
3 tags
June 2011
3 posts
4 tags
What’s Google+ About? As a group-messaging service allows you text to an inner circle of friends, so Google+ lets you share with a smaller social circle, rather than “posting everything to everyone,” as Facebook does.
It’s this feature that I love the best.
[Unlike Facebook], Google+ isn’t based on two-way “friend” relationships. Instead of making friends, you create...
4 tags
How We Consume News Today. A recent study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, on the nature of online news consumers, and the pattern of their consumption, threw up some eye-openers.
A distillation of the findings follows.
There is not one group of news consumers online, but several, each of which behaves differently.
“Casual users” make up the largest single...
2 tags
May 2011
4 posts
4 tags
Sonnets And Tweets. Robert Pinsky, United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, believes poetry is well-suited to the digital world.
E-readers, which lack the ability to display lines of verse, present a challenge that “in some ways that goes back to the Greek and Latin poets: they had lines to be heard, but their poems were written on scrolls or wax tablets...
3 tags
“Was the chief of the International Monetary Fund telling other countries to...”
– Maureen Dowd, on the sex-crime-plagued International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, in her column “Powerful And Primitive.”
5 tags
2 tags
“According to a recent survey by the National Retail Federation, Americans will...”
– Jesse Einhorn, in The Daily feature “The Mom Mass Market.”
April 2011
4 posts
4 tags
5 tags
Facebook Diplomacy. Unlike its Arab neighbors, who perceive social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as “dangerous vehicle of popular insurgency,” Israel has been employing these platforms to “disseminate the official line and to manage Israel’s international reputation, particularly during times of military confrontation.”
But Facebook initiatives are...
4 tags
5 tags
March 2011
19 posts
3 tags
4 tags
Tweet Success. Cover letters and resume may soon become redundant to prospective employers. A candidate’s worthiness may be gauged solely on the basis on his or her Twitter proficiency. Campbell Mithun, a Minneapolis-based advertising agency turned to a non-traditional method of selecting its summer interns.
The intern search was conducted through Twitter, which applicants were asked to...
4 tags
6 tags
3 tags
“And short isn’t necessarily a shortcut. When you have only a sentence or two,...”
– Andy Selsberg, an English professor at John Jay College, in an op-ed in The New York Times, “Teaching To The Text.” He writes about the need to teach students to not write the traditional five-paragraph essay, but say, “two lines of copy to sell something” on eBay. His...
5 tags
“Modern marketing embraces the convergence of entertainment, media and brands.”
– Keith Weed, Unilever’s chief marketing officer, on the future of brand building.
5 tags
3 tags
4 tags
“Tortellini, which I love—tiny tortelloni, they’re normally filled with...”
– Chef Jacob Kenedy, whose recipes are featured in the book “The Geometry of Pasta.” (Lucrezia Borgia was the illegitimate daughter of Rodrigo Borgia, the powerful Renaissance Valencian who later became Pope Alexander VI. Lucrezia was cast as a femme fatale, a role she has been portrayed...
4 tags
Best And Worst States For Business. South Dakota is the No. 1 Best State for business. Well, I’ve spent time as a graduate student there. Now, I’m thinking of launching my start-up there. And New York, the state I presently live in, ranks as the No. 1 Worst State.
3 tags
“According to the common law rule, I discovered, a false report of death is not...”
– Zick Rubin, in The New York Times op-ed “How The Internet Tried To Kill Me.” That’s precisely why one should Google oneself, at least, once a week.
4 tags
Suburban Chinatowns. Back in the 1970s, there was a flight of well-to-do, white folks from the crime and the grime of the cities to the clean, leafy suburbs, leaving behind immigrants to dwell in the city.
And now, it’s the turn of the latter to migrate, leading to the rise of “ethnoburbs.”
[They are] entire cities dominated by a nonwhite ethnic group. They are suburban in...
4 tags
4 tags
3 tags
The Write To Publish. An editor of academic books, offers a small tip to academics, who crank out academic products.
Do yourself a favor before you submit your next manuscript to a publisher. Shrink it by 50 percent and scroll down the text on your computer screen. What does the visual presentation tell readers before they even start to read? Does it look like midtown Manhattan, all tall...
4 tags
4 tags
4 tags
“From my own experience as an editor and publisher, it is awkward and difficult...”
– Arthur S. Brisbane, Public Editor of The New York Times in his column, Business News You Didn’t Read Here. I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Brisbane. As a former journalist, I find it awkward even thinking that I should be publicizing my own blog to strangers and urging them to read it. I...
3 tags
“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating....”
– Steve Jobs, on design.
February 2011
15 posts
3 tags
A Literature-Oriented M.B.A. Course. It’s a pity that most B-schools don’t offer enough “creative” courses like this one taught by Srikumar Rao called “Creativity and Personal Mastery.”
[In his class], readings range from Kahlil Gibran to George Bernard Shaw to the Bible to legendary college basketball coach John Wooden.
Little wonder that he’s been an instant hit in the elite graduate...
3 tags
4 tags
Social Media Penetration In Middle East, North... →
The recent spate of revolutions sweeping across the northern rim of Africa, from the Egypt to Libya, has been believed to have been fanned by technology such as cell phones and social networks.
But data compiled by CNN reveals that access to these tools is overestimated. Contrary to popular belief, only a small fraction of the population in these countries has access to these tools. In Algeria,...
3 tags
2 tags
“A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.”
– Martin Luther King Jr., on leadership.
3 tags
4 tags
5 tags
3 tags
“Changes only happen when we go against everything we are used to doing.”
– Paulo Coelho, on change.
4 tags
4 tags
“South Dakota has the greatest percentage of households with no car, and which...”
– Apart from its arctic weather, apparently, South Dakota also has the distinction of having the nation’s seventh worst dietary habits. Mt. Rushmore State is of interest to me since I’ve lived there. On first blush, this nugget of information seemed a bit of a stretch, but then, I...
4 tags
4 tags
4 tags
3 tags
