First, we'd like to thank all 596 survey respondents and the many Open Thread commenters who gave such interesting and valuable feedback in our recent post "Should Social Media Experts Be Required to Know Their Tech?"

Over the past couple days, we've been able to put together a decent picture and identify some knowledge gaps and points of confusion for many would-be social media experts. But first, let's address why some of the RWW staff - and many of our readers, some of whom must hire social media experts - feel it's important for even the most marketing-oriented of consultants to have a rudimentary understanding of the workings of the Web, including its ecosystem of companies and applications.

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You will always need to know more about the Web.

Konqueror is a popular browser among Linux users. The browser Mozilla hasn't been supported since 2006, having been replaced by Firefox and, to a lesser extent SeaMonkey, both products of the Mozilla Foundation.

The Web does a lot more and a lot less than the average bear would think.

For the most part, we humans have a hard time admitting that we're "average bears," though. Before you earn the moniker of "guru" or "expert" or even "professional/consultant," you need to be far above average in your knowledge of the Web, not just how to get a few thousand Twitter followers or how to increase sales by X percent through Facebook promotions. Those things can come down to common sense or secondhand advice from true pioneers in social media.

Generally speaking, a social media expert will have been around the block long enough to know a CMS from a CPU, to know a bit about servers and DDoS attacks, to know what kinds of operating systems and browsers and even hardware the tech elite prefer to use (or debate over). And the good ones will remain humble enough to keep learning and will always admit there's more to know. Some of the wisest social media advisors I've know will ask to not be called experts, in fact, for how can any one person truly be an expert on something as vast as the Internet?

Flip Side of the Coin: Imagine someone telling you he was a broadcast media expert. That includes television - national, local, cable, satellite, you name it - and all kinds of AM/FM and satellite radio. It might also include pre-show advertisements in movie theaters. That also includes media spend, account management and metrics for all kinds of ads, from branding to direct response. Essentially, the person is claiming to be a one-man ad agency - an impossible claim at best and a fraudulent one at worst.

How to Fill the Knowledge Gap: Start listening to people who disagree with you. Search the farthest corners of the Web for new people and new ideas. Stop hanging out in echo chambers and start telling yourself every day, "I know that I know nothing." That phrase seems to have done Socrates some good; chances are it could help you, too.

You need to communicate with developers.

Haskell is a rare and complicated programming language. .NET sounds more familiar, but it's a framework, not a language.

In almost every social media project that doesn't involve something as simple as setting up a Twitter account, you'll have to work with and rely on the expertise of developers.

You might not want to learn a programming language yourself - it can take a lot of time, which is a precious commodity. But if you don't know the basics of what programming languages can and cannot do, as well as what languages your developer colleagues use, you'll end up frustrated and inefficient. And the aforementioned developer colleagues might feel disrespected as well; being asked to deliver fantastical products or results from someone with no understanding of your work isn't a fun experience.

Flip Side of the Coin: Imagine a CTO telling you, an interactive marketer, to run a direct mail campaign and get 500,000 new registrations. It could be done, perhaps, but it's not efficient or a good way to use your skills. Even if he told you he wanted 500,000 new signups, is that a realistic goal? Is it based on current adoption trends? Does this guy have any idea what he's asking for?

How to Fill the Knowledge Gap: Read up on the basics of programming languages; spend a few hours here and there on Wikipedia and O'Reilly books. Then, ask questions of developers you trust. Don't be afraid to "sounds dumb" or be inquisitive.

You need to rely on hard data and facts, not gut feelings.

It may seem to be the ad-free fluffy bunny of the social networking world, but Twitter turned a profit through search deals in 2009.

On occasion, we social media folks make intuitive choices that turn out to be dead wrong. While there's a lot to be said for making bold choices for your users and clients, there's much more value in making solid choices based on observed trends, analyzed data and tested outcomes. In fact, it's plain irresponsible to make recommendations to clients based on feelings rather than facts.

Always challenge yourself to make sure your opinions and advice line up with facts, not the other way around. As a wise man once wrote, "You don't use science to prove that you're right, you use science to become right."

Flip Side of the Coin: Rather than looking at marketing budgets or user traffic, your CEO tells you to spend $1 million on an AdWords campaign because "Google and advertising are where's the money's at online, right?" It seems like a ridiculous gamble with no logical reason or rhyme.

How to Fill the Knowledge Gap: Test everything you might suggest. Test it over a reasonable period of time, making sure to take peak times into account, and get a reasonable data sample. Learn about A/B and multivariate testing, website analytics, SEO and all the dirty details of traffic and user responses. Most of all, never, ever assume.

You need to know about the finance and investment market to identify competitors, potential partners and pitching opportunities.

Friends and family (and fools) will always be the first to invest in any startup.

Especially if you're communicating with or about startups, you need to understand a little bit about venture capital, if for no other reason than to understand an app or company's place in the market. VCs can sometimes be good barometers of a startup's health or the likelyhood of future success.

Likewise, with regard to our survey question about profitable social media apps and companies, knowing about various stages of development can help you know when to suggest key partnerships. Collaboration between two entities can give a boost to both.

As a strategist, a consultant or any kind of expert, you need to be able to spot a sure bet just as quickly as a sinking ship. And in the startup-filled world of social media, few are better at this all-important task than those with an understanding of tech investment.

Flip Side of the Coin: Your CEO informs you that the company is about to start a marketing campaign on a website that, through your social and industry connections, you know is about to go out of business. In fact, every website of its kind if flailing; you're surprised he wasn't aware of the situation.

How to Fill the Knowledge Gap: Read ReadWriteStart, of course! We recommend (and frequently interview and comment on) various brilliant VCs, angels and experienced entrepreneurs on this channel.

We hope you've found this information entertaining and informative. The remaining questions on the poll were, by and large, answered correctly. There still seems to be some confusion on the definition of the word "hacker," but I'm convinced that one will simply take more soapboxing on my part.

What words of advice do you have to share with your less technical colleagues in social media? How can we all improve our game online while making the Internet a better, smarter place? Let us know in the comments.

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It’s getting tough to keep up with all of the location-related developments leading up to this year’s SXSW, and they just keep coming. Tonight, on the eve of the event, Plancast has just had its iPhone application approved. The service, which we’ve previously described as a ‘Foursquare for the future’, allows you to tell your friends where you’re planning to be as opposed to where you currently are (in other words, it lets you and your friends plan ahead). You can grab the new iPhone app here.

The application itself looks solid, and includes the core functionality you’ll find on the Plancast website. The main view allows you to scroll through a list of your friends’ upcoming events, and tapping on an event will show you where it is on a map and who else is going. At SXSW, where there are always many panels and parties going on, this can come in handy — sometimes it’s more practical to plan ahead than it is to walk across town when you notice a few of your friends are checking in somewhere.  One feature I’d like to see is a way to get push notifications when a bunch of friends are planning to attend the same event (e.g. “Hey, your friends are all going to Salt Lick in a few hours!”); hopefully we’ll get something like that in the next release. There’s also a mobile version of the site available for users on other mobile platforms.

Plancast was founded by TC alum Mark Hendrickson, and recently closed an $800,000 seed funding round that included a bevy of well known angels like SoftTech VC, Dave McClure, and Joshua Schachter.

For other SXSW-related location news, see Loopt’s new iPhone app, Gowalla’s new app, and Vicarious.ly, a new app from SimpleGeo that brings all of this location data together.

CrunchBase Information Plancast Information provided by CrunchBase

TechStars is an early stage venture fund based in Boulder, Colorado. ReadWriteWeb was given an early peek at historical results data on TechStars companies, which the organization is about to release. The data shows acquisition and failure rates, as well as how many of the TechStar companies have gone on to receive angel or venture funding.

TechStars reports that nearly 6 of 10 of their companies have historically gone on to receive outside angel or venture funding (not including friends or family). Five other companies reported that they are now profitable without outside funding, so overall 27 of 39 (69.23%) TechStars companies have either raised outside funding after the program or bootstrapped to profitability.

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Of the 39 TechStars companies analyzed, 29 are still active (74.36%), 4 were acquired for > $2M (10.26%), 1 was acquired for < $2M (2.56%), and 4 failed (10.26%). One of the companies is listed as "other" (2.56%), but there is no explanation of what that means.

The data that TechStars reports is similar to a recent study by the blog Awesome Zombie, which did an analysis in December of similar early stage venture fund Y-Combinator. Awesome Zombie found data on 145 Y-Combinator companies from a variety of non-official sources, such as CrunchBase, news articles and discussions on Hacker News. It found that 82 Y-Combinator companies are active (24 having received further public investment rounds), 33 failed, 14 were acquired. The rest were stealth, unknown or "other" (e.g. merger or private investment).

The TechStars numbers are very encouraging for early stage companies. Nearly 70% of TechStars companies have raised outside funding or have become profitable on their own, which is comparatively better than the more high-profile Y-Combinator (with the proviso that the Y-Combinator data was unofficial and gathered by a third party).

TechStars attributes this success rate to its "mentorship driven approach." The program also only funds 10 companies per batch, which TechStars says is due to its focus on quality over quantity.

TechStars CEO David Cohen told ReadWriteWeb, "I think that the programs that will ultimately prove to be most powerful for their local entrepreneurial communities are those which follow the mentorship+community formula that we pioneered. It's powerful in so many ways when you get dozens of mentors involved in very hands on, meaningful ways with each company from day one of the program."

I happened to be in Boulder on Wednesday, where Elyssa Pallai and I met with a group of TechStars companies for lunch. The knowledge and passion for web technology exhibited by each person at the lunch impressed me a lot. If this group of young entrepreneurs were representative of the Boulder startup scene, then it's a city with plenty of vitality and smarts.

If you're a U.S. company interested in applying to TechStars, applications for their Boulder program are open for a few more weeks. TechStars also has a new Seattle program starting soon.

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Plancast, the plan-sharing startup with big-name angel investors and "future as platform" aspirations, has just had its iPhone app accepted into the iTunes store. The app was built by contracted star developer Leah Culver. It's simple, functional, attractive and useful. It's going to be very good for SXSW and probably beyond, if the service continues to stick with users as it has so far.

Here's the iTunes link and below you can see some screenshots.

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The folks behind the music video jukebox Sonicswap are at it again, this time launching what could soon be every Nexus One user’s best friend. Tunevision compiles music video playlists based on your Last.fm, iTunes or Sonicswap usage data — users can also start from scratch by simply entering a few band names. Think Pandora, but for music videos. The functionality is very similar to the original Sonicswap site, with one big difference: There’s also a mobile version of Tunevision that runs on a Nexus One via Adobe Flash 10.1.

Of course, Adobe hasn’t officially released Flash 10.1 for Android yet, but Sonicswap worked closely with Adobe on the development of the app. Sonicswap CEO Dan Skilken recorded a quick video demo of the app running on a Nexus One for us (embedded below), and I gotta say: It looks pretty darn cool.

Tunevision serves music videos from YouTube and Sony’s online properties, and it offers its users the ability to fine-tune their playlist through sliders that impact factors like the popularity of the artists selected. Users can also start off their playlist with a number of Last.fm user names – a neat feature if you want to compile a list based on the taste of a group of friends.

The application is currently only available on the web, but a Adobe Air client is in the works. Tunevision will release an Android app based on Air in the next couple of months, and Android users will also be able to access a mobile version of the site as soon as Adobe releases Flash 10.1 for the mobile OS.

Skilken made a point of telling us that something like this wouldn’t have been possible on the iPhone. “There is no question in my mind that the performance of Flash on Nexus is so good, that Steve Job’s ranting is motivated by the fear of this unlocking the walled garden,” he wrote us in an email, adding that the development of the Android app only took a couple of days.

Sonicswap also won’t have to wait until Apple approves the app, though it will have to hold out until Adobe finally ships its Android Flash 10.1 player. Adobe demoed Flash 10.1 on a Nexus One in January, and the company told us at the time that it was on track to release the Flash 10.1 player for Android phones in the first half of 2010.

SonicSwap is based in Palo Alto, California. The company has four employees, and has raised $2.5 million in angel funding.

Related content on GigaOm Pro: Forget Syncing, Let’s Put Music in the Cloud! (subscription required)

Do you worry about your daughter growing up feeling weak, ineffectual, powerless, and generally having less options in life than her male counterparts? Men are still more successful in many industries, and the changes in the status quo have created a number of social areas in which men (often unconsciously) will strive to use language and aggressive behavior to make women feel excluded, seeking to maintain their position as the top dogs. Little girls can grow up feeling intimidated by this kind of masculine posturing, or you can teach your daughters to recognize that swear words are simply words and that when men watch gratuitous violence, it’s simply entertainment and not real. There is every reason in the world that these previously “intimidating” aspects of the male world will feel as comfortable and normal to her as they do to your sons. The only thing that might make her feel uncomfortable and threatened in these situations is programming, not biology, and as a parent, you have choices about that. By all means acknowledge the differences between the sexes (and between all human beings), but let women become comfortable with traditionally masculine behavior, so that there won’t be areas of the world which they feel excluded from.

Like lots of girls, I grew up wanting to dress up as a pretty pink princess, but I also wanted to be Leia or Ripley, to have weapons and action adventures too. Some of the greatest films ever made are filled with swearing and violence and my dad brought me up to love them. Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull, Mean Streets, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, etc, all traditionally “boys” movies. These are powerful, emotionally turbulent, culturally seminal movies. I implore you, bring your daughters up with choices and options. Do not use the yoke of society's inhibitions to restrict what you expose them to. If you see something you would let a little boy see, then let your daughters see it too, please let them grow into the strong women that they could be.

The reason all of this is top of my mind right now, is because last night I saw the movie adaptation of the comic book Kick Ass, and all I could think was that I would have loved it if this movie had existed when I as a little girl.

(Warning: I do not really enjoy film reviews because I hate spoilers, so I’m apologizing in advance for any inadvertent spoilers.)

I went to see Kick-Ass filled with trepidation. We’ve all seen lackluster movie-versions of comic books and I was worried that this simply wouldn’t measure up. I enjoyed the book and there were elements that I dearly wanted to see translated onto the screen. It’s a comic book worth reading, a nice bit of fun, but you need to be comfortable with the fact that any so-called superhero who existed in the real world would be inflicting horrible pain on people, would have to be somewhat violent and/or angry, or it just wouldn’t work. The film manages to embrace these facts.

Seeing Romita’s dynamic action sequences brought to life was a blast, the film perfectly echoes his energy and electricity. Obviously the boldest example of this is in Hit Girl, who is the most disturbing character in a story filled with disturbing characters. Thankfully the filmmakers didn’t wimp out and water down the role she plays in rescuing big strong men and violently murdering psychopaths. Hit-Girl is an angel, (one of those vengeful, scary ones from the bible.) Remember Natalie Portman in Leon (or The Professional)? Well Chloe Moretz playing Mindy Macready (AKA Hit-Girl) is twice as good. This is a cartooney film, very over-the-top, but she still brings a vitality, joy and vulnerability to her performance that is incredibly appealing. There are moments that are difficult to watch, when she’s hurting or being hurt in such realistic ways that I grimaced. That’s a bloody good thing too, because it’s important to remember that turning into a violent, psychopathic killer is not a viable career option and getting hurt is not a good life plan.

The casting throughout is incredibly strong, and the actors embrace their characters with gusto. For my money, Kick-Ass is the least interesting, likable, or reasonable character in the book, and the film is only slightly different. At least they picked a rather pretty young man to play him (Aaron Johnson, who looks like a young, confused, weedy version of Michelangelo’s David). However, as the twisted, broken, pathetic lynch pin/everyman who brings the films disparate elements together, he performs his role admirably.

Nicholas Cage as Damon Macready (AKA Big Daddy) and Mark Strong as Frank D’Amico made me stupidly happy. These are the most prominent adults of the story, and they have been perfectly cast, in looks and talent, they just fit. Unlike the comic book, which glosses over these two men’s backgrounds and connections, these actors bring their characters to life with great enthusiasm. Cage is at his absolute best when he toys with his roles and allows his humor and depth of knowledge of the medium to inform his acting. In this regard he is perfect as Big Daddy, just exactly the right mixture of fun, affection, gravitas, delight, insanity, and kindness. He has empathy for anyone who ever put on a Batman suit, (listen out for the Adam West Bat-dialogue. It is a thing of beauty). I love him for taking on this role and playing it the way he does. Mark Strong has been a powerful, versatile actor for quite a while, but as he ages, I’ve noticed him making great headway in playing some excellent villains in big budget movies (like many great British actors before him). He proves the old adage that the villains of the piece are often the most important actors. His ability to create a truly believable evil, while also conveying his own personal belief in himself is an incredibly tricky combination. In Kick-Ass Mark Strong carries it off, admirably, all the while being just exactly that right amount of comedic to remind as that this is not a movie about the real world.

One last word on the actors and their talent: McLovin! Okay, I know, Christopher Mintz-Plasse has an actual name, and like all the other actors, he brings his character Chris D’Amico (AKA Red Mist) to life and then some. Like all of the characters, I liked him a hell of a lot more on film than I did in print, so that worked out nicely.

Now I’ve waxed lyrical about the acting and the action, but the unexpected bonus of the film was the art, the wonderful, amazing, funny, appropriate art. I haven’t seen art that added this much to a film since Rushmore. While Andy Warhol’s lovely gun screenprints added much, it was Marc Quinn’s Bloodhead, in the background of a final fight scene which really drove the nail home for me. I’m sure there will be much art-spotting to engage in when I rewatch this (and I will), but on first watching, the art choices were just marvelous.

Let’s not dwell on the plot. If you read the comic books, you know the story. The changes that the film makers choose are minimal and necessary. I’m not going to ruin the surprises for you by going over them here, just go see it (and take the kids). It’s a good film.

Le 3 mars dernier, le morceau "Dying For An Angel" (en radio edit, donc écourté) était mis en ligne ici :
http://www.tobiassammet.com/eng/news_1267642250.php
Chanson sur laquelle on peut entendre Klaus Meine (Scorpions) s'additionner à Tobias Sammet.
Le titre est également en écoute sur Youtube :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5c8M7Yxz2M



Ce 10 mars, nous apprenons...