Battlefield: Bad Company 2 sells 2.3 million originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Ezra Klein:
CBO: Health-care reform bill cuts deficit by $1.3 trillion over 20 years, covers 95%  —  Washington has spent the past week or so waiting for the Congressional Budget Office to release its preliminary estimate of the Senate bill with the reconciliation fixes.

While consumers have shown some early acceptance of paying for content on Amazon’s Kindle, the big question is whether publishers can charge enough to make money. The even bigger “if” implicit in that question is figuring what’s the right price. Our Staci D. Kramer moderated a late morning panel at the MPA’s 24/7 Digital Conference on the “e-reading revolution” and asked Maria Streshinsky, Deputy Managing Editor for The Atlantic, which is selling individual short stories and packaging it for Amazon’s Kindle. Kramer noted that she had downloaded Christopher Buckley’s 15,000-word Cynara for $3.99.

While it’s great to have the instant access to an original short story like this, wouldn’t consumers be hesitant to buy more because of the price, which is practically half that of an average e-book sold for the Kindle. Streshinsky: “We’re just getting started, but we are making money on this. As for the price, we have to start by valuing content. We believe a 15,000-word story by someone as notable as Christopher Buckley is at least equal to a Starbucks coffee.”

Esthétique et capacités de franchissement d'un vrai 4x4, robustesse et garantie constructeur de 3 ans ou 100 000 kilomètres d'une Dacia... Le Duster prone l'efficacité au meilleur prix. A 11 900 euros, il est imbattable ! Photo

James White

Source : Games and GeeksAndroid + Little Big Planet

Avec plus de 926 000 articles au compteur de la version francophone (et plus de 3,2 millions pour la version anglophone !), Wikipédia est sans aucun doute l'une des plus belles réussites du web et du travail collaboratif. Après neuf ans d'existence, l'encyclopédie libre et gratuite est désormais omniprésente et profondément ancrée dans le paysage des internautes, malgré l'apparition ponctuelle de polémiques sur la qualité réelle de son contenu ou sur les actes de vandalisme commis par quelques internautes.

This post was written by Kasia Grabowska for last semester’s LIS 768: Library 2.0 & Networking Technologies class. Kasia has allowed me to repost it here.

After doing brand monitoring research for the past few weeks, looking closely at Skokie Public Library (and not so closely at several other libraries), I decided to put together a list of “do’s and don’ts” for librarians on successfully utilizing social media.

This is what I learned from doing brand monitoring and what I personally would recommend to libraries that are getting started with social media.

Join the RIGHT conversations at the RIGHT time. In other words, stay on top of what people are saying about you and make sure to respond, to let people know that you are listening and willing to join the conversation.

Tools to utilize for brand monitoring include RSS feeds, Google Alerts, Technorati, and staying on top of your Twitter, Facebook and other social media accounts. This is definitely the number 1 lesson I learned from this assignment.

You’re already engaging in conversations, why not ask people for some feedback? There are plenty of quick and easy ways to get good information that will help you keep learning from what you’re doing and improving the process as you go along. Just make sure not to overdo it; remember to always engage in conversations as a person.

Set goals, measure and iterate your social media efforts in order to continue to grow and improve your efforts. Make sure everyone who is involved in your social media strategy clearly understands the role and goals of this initiative. There’s nothing worse than joining a social network with no purpose, plan or a way to measure what you’re doing.

By using trackable links (like bit.ly or su.pr) to help track what your users are responding to, you will be able to measure your efforts and make improvements.

I noticed a lot of libraries who do wonderful things on Facebook, Twitter or Flickr yet they don’t include links to their social networks on their websites. Or libraries that use Twitter often but don’t follow anyone; that’s not a good way to start a conversation.

A library website should be an entry point to social media; you need to create awareness. People should not have to search for you on Facebook, or Twitter, you should reach out to every member of your community first.

This is where a social media policy comes in. By making sure everyone who is involved in your efforts understands what to do (what they’re allowed to say, how they should respond in different situations, etc) you won’t have to monitor what each person does. Instead, you will be able to focus on making improvements.

One tip about your social media policy — make sure it’s succinct and to the point, otherwise no one will want to read it.

Use social media to build trust, credibility and awareness in your community. Instead of broadcasting information, try creating conversations. Remember, speaking doesn’t always result in being heard.

Be helpful, stay relevant and focus on your community’s needs. It’s also important to humanize your efforts; don’t hide behind your library’s logo, allow your users to get to know you as a person.

Focus on small, consistent and ongoing change. Let your members decide how they want to use “their” online community. Listen to what they have to say and change your goals and objectives based on how your community wants to utilize social media.

By building relationships with key people within your community who also utilize social media you can leverage your efforts and obtain better reach. People who are influencers, those who are natural communicators or leaders in your community can help your social media efforts immensely. Identify these people and ask for help. Word of mouth can be very powerful.

Remember, you don’t have to be an early adopter. It is much better to wait for your community to start utilizing the technology before adding it to your social media arsenal. In short, go where your users are. It’s much easier for someone to join you on Facebook or Twitter if the person actually uses the technology.

This is important, especially for libraries that can be very resistant to change at times: if you want to lead change, find one thing you said no to in the past and give it a try.

This is actually something I heard at a digital marketing conference I got a chance to attend last month, but I think it applies great to libraries and social media.

Gallery: Skate 3

Skate 3's 'Skate School' as taught by Coach Frank originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Gallery: Skate 3

Skate 3's 'Skate School' as taught by Coach Frank originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The “location wars” between rival mobile check-in services, the unmet expectations of the Twitter keynote and the hordes of newbies crowding out regulars (as they do every year) were some of the leading threads at SXSW this year. And — rightfully so — everyone was talking about them. Meanwhile, from the outside, skeptics pooh-poohed geeks getting drunk on promo budgets while pretending that changing the world had anything to do with why they were there. Also fair. But somewhere in between those two takeaways fall my three highlights from SXSW, which I think showed us the way social technology will work in the near future:

Foursquare tattoos seemed as ubiquitous at SXSW as people staring down at their phones when they walked into a room.

• While the competition among location-based services will hopefully result in a winner, loser or combination thereof sooner than later (because honestly, who cares), using either Foursquare or Gowalla in Austin this past week was a really cool experience. Rather than seeing scattered updates from the few friends you have who happen to avidly use social media, at SXSW location-based services were able to take a larger-scale pulse of where people were moving. So as you walked down the hall, the wisdom of crowds would tell you that 300 people were listening to a session in Ballroom D, or that 200 were already drinking over at Six Lounge. Sure, that just pushes hordes towards hordes, but it also reveals a vibrant ecosystem — and felt completely different than using mobile social sites at home.

• It was totally awesome to have reliable and quick AT&T phone service and mobile Internet. As I tweeted on my first day in town, “My breakout stars of #sxsw so far: excellent, ubiquitous Wi-Fi and great AT&T service. No joke.” And trying to use my iPhone upon returning to San Francisco has made it all the more obvious how awful we have it by comparison. It’s no fun to be a second-class mobile citizen after you’ve gotten a taste of what could be. I completely support MG at TechCrunch’s take: “Dear AT&T, Whatever You’re Doing At SXSW, Please Do It In San Francisco.”

A snapshot of Austin check-ins from SimpleGeo's Vicarious.ly mashup

• You’ve undoubtedly heard horror stories about exposing the backchannel of audience conversation during conference panels and how that detracts and distracts from the core content. But I had a really excellent experience engaging with tweets during the panel I moderated. First of all, the crowd helped direct us to choose a less unwieldy hashtag than the one assigned — #contentme instead of #contentrelevanttome. Then I kept a Twitter search page open to see what people were saying. When the tweetstream was drowned out by fun facts about coincidences on Hunch given by panelist Hugo Liu, the company’s chief scientist (for instance, if you tell Hunch you like to dance, there’s a very high correlation that you’ll also say you like using Macs), it got harder for me to pick out audience questions. So I asked them to direct the questions to me by mentioning @lizgannes in a tweet. When I got too many questions to process, I was able to choose the ones that had been retweeted by other people on Twitter (who may have not even been in the room).

That’s kind of a long story, but the point is that I hadn’t actually planned to do any of it. But because so many people in the room were using Twitter at the same time, we were able to use it to better tweak the panel on the fly in order to address their needs. (Though I did feel afterwards that I should watch a video of the panel; multitasking is damn hard!)

Top photo courtesy of Flickr user schatz.

YouTube yesterday touted the fact that it now processes about 24 hours worth of video content each minute — a milestone for the site. But while that number is impressive, there are a few others that say they can beat it. Without having the advantage of being owned and operated by Google, live streaming startups Ustream, Livestream and Justin.tv all claim to encode more video per minute than the largest video site on the web.

In an email to NewTeeVee, Livestream CEO Max Haot said that his company ingests an average of 1,600 concurrent streams each day. That 1,600 minutes of recorded or uploaded video translates into about 26.6 hours of video being processed every minute. Justin.tv also bests YouTube, with users reportedly uploading about 30 hours of live video content per minute, according to a recent article in High Scalability.

But Ustream might have them all beat. The site claims some 120 million live video streams uploaded each month. But according to a spokesperson, the site had an average of 3,200 concurrent streams at any given time, equal to about 53.5 hours of video that is encoded and processed every minute. Ustream attributes that increase to a high amount of live streaming that its users have been uploading through the iPhone ever since the company’s Broadcaster app was approved by Apple.

Despite the large amount of video that needs to be processed, the live streaming startups have, for the most part, decided to take such processing in-house rather than go with a third-party for encoding. Justin.tv and Livestream both started on Amazon Web Services, but transitioned to their own infrastructure to encode and stream user videos. In an email to NewTeeVee, Haot said that his company moved to its own infrastructure due to a lack of guaranteed bandwidth and the cost of cloud computing. In the High Scalability article, Justin.tv’s founder and VP of engineering also cited cost and lack of performance guarantees as reasons for moving out of the cloud.

Related content on GigaOM Pro:

Is Facebook Video Chat the Future of Social Media? (subscription required)