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Track Your Favorite Band’s Online Buzz with Next Big Sound

Mashable!

- 2 hours and 55 minutes ago

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: Next Big Sound

Quick Pitch: Next Big Sound is a tool that gauges the popularity of bands and artists via fan activity on a variety of social networking sites.

Genius Idea: As the music industry and the online world become more and more enmeshed, tracking band popularity via album sales — and even digital downloads (Hello, piracy!) — seems rather arcane. Just because a band isn’t moving a ton of CDs at any given time doesn’t make it less buzzworthy — especially as services like Pandora and Spotify continue to take off.

That’s where Next Big Sound comes in. The website is basically a tool for fans, artists, music industry professionals and journalists to track the popularity of an artist across 16 sites: Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Twitter, iLike, Wikipedia, Soundcloud, Reverb Nation, Pure Volume, OurStage, Vimeo, Bebo, Amie Street, Jam Legend and Virb. Fan interaction counts as plays, fans, views, likes, downloads and comments — depending on the site.

As of right now, the site functions like a wiki; you can add bands that have not yet been included (I added Everyone Was in the French Resistance… Now!). Currently, there are 699,328 artist profiles.

We tested out the service with YouTube darlings OK Go, banking on the fact that the social media space has been buzzing about them as of late.

As you can see, there’s a pretty visible spike in online activity around March 1, when OK Go’s new video premiered.

You can also compare bands to see who’s getting the most buzz. This could be a great tool for determining the breakout band during a festival like SXSW — or for bitter, insecure musicians to employ when their rivals hit the big-time. We tried it here with OK Go and smaller (yet perhaps more rad) band Surfer Blood.

Surfer Blood’s social media cache isn’t quite as big as OK Go’s, but there’s a visible spike in recent activity, which makes sense considering the band is playing SXSW today.

Next Big Sound makes it pretty easy for you to get in on the action — as least as a fan, I’m not in a band, so I haven’t tried out the “verify your band’s account” feature — you can star your favorite bands and have updates on their stats sent your inbox at whatever time you choose (either daily or weekly).

Right now, the site is collecting data on media mentions of SXSW bands to determine which are getting the most attention — it even has as online playlist of hot bands. This data is sure to be a godsend to music journalists, concert venues and labels following the fest, which is considered one of the top arenas for breakout bands to make their mark.

We’re down with Next Big Sound — as both a tool and toy for musicians and music enthusiasts. It’s cool to see a company change how it thinks about the music industry, which seems to be more in flux every day.

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

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Questioning Collapse

Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog

- 21 hours and 29 minutes ago

In an unfortunately-forgotten bit of 70s academic bloodsport, Marvin Harris and Marshall Sahlins battled it out in the pages of the New York Review of Books over the origin Aztec cannibalism: was it, as Harris argued, something Aztecs were driven to as a result of a protein deficiency? No, Sahlins answered, but even if it was all of the symbolism and institutions surrounding it would still have to be explained as a result of culture, not nutrition. Sahlins’s argument was devastatingly convincing because it explained two phenomenon with a single maneuver: Aztec cannibalism was a result of culture, not nutritional needs, just as Harris’s belief in it was motivated not by facts, but by his own (American) cultural tendency to see human behavior as shaped by biological factors.

A disagreement with similar contours is afoot today. The latest skirmish in the Jared Diamond wars deals not only with issues of scholarly accuracy, but also the cultural/personal motivation of the protagonists as well as the social effects of their arguments. The main protagonists are the authors of Questioning Collapse, an edited volume in which expert scholars take issue with Jared Diamond’s reading of their specialty topics: the Rapa Nui (Easter Island) specialist discusses Diamond’s use of the Rapa Nui data, the Incan specialist discusses Diamond on Pizzaro and Atahualpa, and so forth. The book is critical of Diamond, who has responded with a review in Nature that is none too friendly itself.

The Usual Denunciations are already issuing from Stinky Journalism.org, which mostly focus on how unethical it was for Diamond to write a review of a book that criticized his book without explicitly telling readers the book he was criticizing criticized him. You can check it out if you want, but I think its much more interesting to see how the back and forth between Questioning Collapse and Diamond exemplified some of the issues that played out twenty years earlier in the Sahlins/Harris debate. How do we tack between the social effects of our work and its accuracy? How can we address the cultural underpinnings that motivate an author’s writing without falling back into ad hominem attacks? How well does Collapse stand up to scholarly scrutiny? And how good a job does Questioning Collapse do of reaching out to Diamond’s popular audience? These questions are worth asking — even if you are a little burned out on the Jared Diamond wars.

In this piece I want to review Questioning Collapse through the lens of these issues. I’ll start by working backwards from Diamond’s review in Nature to the book itself. In the end, I find Questioning Collapse’s critique of Diamond extremely compelling, particularly for the way it highlights the theoretical difficulties of Diamond’s position. That said, however, Questioning Collapse’s (henceforth â€˜QC’) authors often don’t do the readers any favors â€” as a piece of public anthropology I feel it has a long way to go.

Diamond’s piece is actually a review of two books, Questioning Collapse and The Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age. In the event, however, only about 400 of its 1300 words focus on the later volume. In the review, Diamond pulls a classic Sahlins maneuver, arguing that the authors are driven by a tendentious preference for a “positive message about human behavior” is “laudable” but, unfortunately, does not mesh well with the facts. The result is a “naively optimistic redefinition” of the data which “inevitably forces one to distort history and to avoid trying to explain what really happened.” Indeed, Diamond even claims that although they take issue with his work the authors of QC “do not offer a substitute thesis” for facts which “cry out for explanation, even if one relabels them as something other than collapse”. Political correctness, it seems, blinds Questioning Collapse to The Facts. Or, as the subtitle of the review puts it, â€˜realism’ (i.e. Diamond) must trump â€˜positivity’ (i.e. QC).

In fact there are four themes in Questioning Collapse: that of resilience (as opposed to collage), of colonialism (â€˜empire expansion’), of the similarity of current environmental issues to the past, and that of what constitutes an adequate popular anthropology. Diamond deals mostly with the first two topics in his review, and I will skip the third here but I’ll address the rest as well as make a few points about the factual errors each side accuses the other of having.

Resilience versus collapse, or, seven million Mayans can’t be wrong

Is Diamond correct when he says QC’s feel-good agenda prevents it from seeing the truth about collapse? On this first major claim, I think Diamond and QC are talking past one another. At the broadest level, QC takes issue with the three key words in Collapse’s title: â€˜collapse’, ’success’, and â€˜choose’. What, specifically, counts as collapse? The authors of QC argue that there is more to societal continuity than Diamond’s focus on population size and social complexity. There are, they point out, millions of Mayan people alive today â€” how then can we say that Mayan culture has disappeared? They also point out that it is hard to tell where one society starts and another begins. Is agriculture in the Netherlands an example of ecological success once we think about the effects their importation of fodder has on countries like Brazil from which they import it? And â€˜success’: how long does a society have to be around before it is officially considered to be one? In his excellent article in the QC McNeill points out that Diamond plays fast and loose with dates â€” the Greenland Norse, for instance, survived longer than all of the modern societies that Diamond lists as successes. And â€˜choice’: many of the authors of the volume point out that societies are not people â€” different parts of them make different decisions for different reasons. Often times â€˜choices’ are the emergent property of many individual decisions. And in a world where actions have unintended consequences, even selfish choices might end up being sustainable ones, and vice versa. It is for this reason that the authors tend to focus on â€˜resilience’ rather than â€˜collapse’ â€” on the way that populations change over time, but tend overall to endure.

In sum, QC argues that Diamond’s notion of collapse is too simple. Societies are not externally bounded and internally homogeneous. They do not make decisions like humans do. They change through time, making it difficult to identify when they change beyond recognition. Long-term trends are, they argue, mostly for continuity, which is why they use the term â€˜resilience’ rather than collapse. Mayans are still around. Easter Islanders are still around — in fact, QC has little boxed-in sections highlighting contemporary descendants of supposedly-collapsed societies.

Diamond is not having any of it. He responds that “It makes no sense to me to redefine as heart-warmingly resilient a society in which everyone ends up dead, or in which most of the population vanishes, or that loses writing, state government and great art for centuries… Even when many people do survive and eventually reestablish a populous complex society, the initial decline is sufficiently important to warrant being honestly called a collapse and studied further.” Diamond’s model of collapse is that familiar to us from the video game Civilization by Sid Meier: civilizations all grow in one direction towards more and more complexity with bigger and bigger cities, and if they go down in size, you lose. The authors of QC have a more anthropological understanding of societies, insisting that they not internally homogeneous or externally bounded, that they persist in time, and that we must understand their ups and downs.

At heart, then, the resilience/collapse debate is a discussion of interpretation, not facts. Many readers will probably find Diamond’s civilization-or-bust definition of collapse compelling, and agree with him that â€˜positivity’ leads QC’s authors to a tendentious interpretation of the facts. This is a pity since I think QC takes a principled and satisfying theoretical position on collapse. Still, one can see why popular readers might not be swayed.

It’s the Colonialism, Stupid

Diamond does remarkably less well when it comes to â€˜empire expansion’. One of the most egregious howlers from Diamond’s review is his claim that “although the authors of Questioning Collapse may wish it were otherwise, students and laypersons alike know that Europeans did conquer the world” and that “the authors seem uncomfortable with the glaring fact that it is Europeans, not Native Australians or Americans or Africans, who have expanded over the globe in the past 500 years.” The kindest thing one can say about Diamond’s position here is that it is unintelligible, because the alternative options are that a) Diamond’s personal animus against the authors was so intense he could not understand the content of the book or b) he simply did not read the book he is reviewing.

As far as I can tell, Diamond believes the book argues the exact opposite of what it actually says. He appears to think that the authors of QC are arguing that the hand of European rule lay lightly on the colonized world, which never suffered population loss. QC doesn’t admit that there is such a thing as â€˜empire expansion’? How about the ending of Michael Wilcox’s essay in the volume (one of my favorites):

Diamond’s tidy explanation of conquest and global poverty is not only factually incorrect; it gives us the sense that its origins lie somewhere out there, beyond the agency of the reader. The implication is that if conquests were situated long ago, somewhere else, then we are powerless over their contemporary manifestations. Conquests are never instantaneous, transformative, or all encompassing. They are enacted, reenacted, and rewritten for each succeeding generation. In this sense Diamond’s narrative of disappearance and marginalization is one of conquest’s most potent instruments. (p 138)

Does this sound like someone who didn’t get the memo that “Europeans did conquer the world”?

Diamond accuses QC of down-playing the role of colonialism in human history, and not offering an alternate explanation for the collapse of indigenous society, when in fact colonialism is their alternate explanation for the collapse of nonwestern societies. Wilcox writes “a more appropriate troika of destruction [than guns, germs, and steel] would be â€˜lawyers, god, and money’”. Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo write that “ancient deforestation was not the cause of population collapse. If we are to apply a modern term to the tragedy of Rapa Nui, it is not ecocide but genocide.”

In sum, QC attempts to take the moral high-ground out from underneath Diamond when it comes to colonialism, arguing that he underplays the horrors of colonialism because his cultural blinkers prevent him from seeing the truth. Indeed, one of the major arguments of the book is that Diamond (and other social scientists) aid and abet on-going oppression of indigenous people. The proper response from Diamond — had he noticed — would have been to cast the authors of QC as a bunch of lefty radicals who have given up on Scientific Accuracy in the name of advocacy. Except of course he didn’t notice.

Some readers may find Wilcox’s invective overheated, and find the anti-colonial agenda of QC too â€˜pc’ in their denunciation of the book’s social effects. That is why it is so gratifying that the volume also takes up the issue of accuracy and never lets go: Diamond is not just tendentious, he is also wrong. The fact that Diamond simply missed this major part of their argument really detracts from his credibility.

Fact Checking

Beyond these overarching themes there are a number of particular factual disputes between Diamond and the authors of QC. In his review, Diamond argues that the Yali he met and the Yali that Gewertz and Errington’s volume is about are different people; he argues against Wilcox that Chaco canyon was deforested; he argued against Berglund that the Greenland Norse died out, rather than emigrating; he argues against Taylor that ecology was a factor in the Rwandan genocide; and he argues against what he calls David Cahill’s “absurd rewriting” of the Spanish conquest of the Inca.

None of Diamond’s factual claims are very convincing. Which Yali was which does not matter, because Gewertz and Errington’s merely use the conversation with Yali as a set piece to raise a series of other claims about colonialism in Papua New Guinea, none of which Diamond addresses. Diamond offers as evidence that overpopulation was a factors for genocide in Rwanda a school teacher’s assertion that “The people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the people who could buy shoes for theirs.” Which seems to me to be an argument about inequality rather than population pressure â€” if it is not just a statement about shoes. Wilcox provides two citations to back up his claim that Chaco canyon was forested, while Diamond never cites his sources in the review or in Collapse, and so it is impossible to verify his claims. This also makes his claim that there is archaeological evidence of the death of the Greenland Norse impossible to verify. His claim that David Cahill’s paper is an “absurd rewriting” of Incan-Spanish relations seems to miss Cahill’s careful and, as far as I can tell, uncontroversial point that conquerors often keep local systems of social stratification intact and install themselves on top of them.

Now, it is surely unfair to ask a 1300 word review to exhaustively respond to all of the criticisms made in a 375 page book. Still, one can’t help but notice that the authors of QC make serious claims that throw Diamond’s entire reading of societal collapse into question, and Diamond’s response is to ignore the forest and call out a few trees. When people like Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo argue that Diamond’s claims about Rapa Nui are fundamentally mistaken, you expect such big-issue claims to merit a response.

Of course, Questioning Collapse was not perfect either

That said, the authors of QC do not always make it easy for readers to be swayed to their point of view. The editors claim that “participants committed themselves to setting aside abstruse academic prose and cumbersome in-text references in favor of a more user-friendly text.” Really? Can we blame Diamond for not lingering carefully over, for instance, Cahill’s prose when it contains sentences like this:

It encoded all the familiar generic facts of colonial conquests as seen by Europeans: the mutual incomprehension and marveling at the mirror-image alterities; the chasm between New World and Old World epistemologies, “true” rational knowledge against heathen superstition; clever Castilian against dullard Inca; true believers versus the unevangelized barbarians, at best seen as promising neophytes; asymmetrical technologies manifest in the flash of steel and the thrust of lance against bronze close-combat weapons, slingshot, cotton armor and buckler; European initiative against the kind of unquestioning obeisance associated with “oriental despotism.”

I am guessing the average reader will quit long before they get to the part of the sentence where they miss the Wittfogel reference. While several of the authors write clearly and passionately, on the whole Diamond still wins the contest for clear prose. In fact, many of the essays employ all the apparatus of scholarly prevarication: introductory sections reflecting on what it means to write for a popular audience, wider theoretical issues of contextualization, and so forth. You must wade through all this to get to the point where they actually talk about why they think Diamond is wrong.

Or you may not. One of the strangest things about this otherwise very ballsy collection is that many â€” maybe even most â€” of the articles do not actually quote Jared Diamond. Sometimes I think the authors are so immersed in the topic that they forget to leave signposts to the reader about what they are doing. Joel Berglund’s piece, for instance, appears to be a valuable detailed commentary on Diamond’s chapters on Norse Greenland, but only if you put the two books next to one another. For many readers it will seem like a tour of various facts about Norse Greenland which mentions Diamond at the start. Cahill’s paper often takes aim at “standard colonial tropes” of “indegnous dullards who â€˜didn’t know what hit them’” or views in which “Andean civilization… becomes a kind of â€˜unenlightened’ primitive polity”. The positions he put in scare quotes are certainly worth criticizing — but are they Diamonds? A close reading — and actual citation — of Diamond’s argument would have made the essay stronger, especially since Cahill’s data so obviously gainsays the claims Diamond actually does make. The best pieces — Hunt and Lipo’s and Wilcox’s, McNeil’s, and so forth — are very strong (disclosure: I share a department with Hunt) and other pieces could have profited by being as tightly written.

Above all, a central argument of QC is that the world is â€˜complex’ and it would be better if popular audiences did not need to have it ’simplified’. As Thomas Hylland Eriksen reminds us, however, this simply will not fly. Public anthropology is, I’ve argued, the bar at the conference — when people tell you straight up and without hedging what they think is really going on in their papers. It is in the nature of the game to “dare to be reductive”. I think QC would have done better to explore how to reduce effectively, rather than lament the fact that such a move was necessary — or attempt to avoid making it at all.

Taking the fight to the streets?

Regardless of what you think about the particulars of Questioning Collapse, it establishes once and for all that mainstream academic authors consider Diamond’s work to be problematic. Coming from a major major press (Cambridge) with a roster of quality specialists, Questioning Collapse is undoubtedly Ivory Tower. If anything, it could have let down its hair a bit more. If only there were some way to reach a popular audience… to take the fight to the streets… in like… say… a blog…? Luckily, they have one, although it has not been updated regularly.

It seems to me QC’s blog could serve two purposes. First, it would also be an excellent place to begin a long and exceedingly detailed analysis of some of the particular factual claims Diamond makes â€” particularly those in the Nature review. This is the sort of intellectual spadework that publishers are not keen on, which should be made available to the public, and works well in small sub-essay size units which can be clearly written and do not take forever to read. Blog posts, in other words.

Second, Questioning Collapse is relatively expensive (US$30) and formally written — not ideal for spreading the word. The website could become a great location for remixed versions of the articles: piece available for download as teaching resources, or for the casual reader, where the authors cut right to the chase, free and open access, for anyone who is interested in reading them.

Conclusion

In sum, QC excels in empirical accuracy, not public outreach. While I find their arguments persuasive â€” in most cases, completely persuasive â€” I think they could have done a better job reaching a broader audience. There is a danger that their accounts of the social effects of Diamond’s work, and his personal/cultural motivations for writing could turn into ad hominem, which would be a shame. Because Diamond is a public figure, the proper course would be to be even more scrupulous in adhering to standards of professionalism and impartiality than a scholar normally would, even though the impulse is (I imagine) to go in rather the other dimension. From my point of view, the central issue has got to be the empirical adequacy of his claims.

As for Diamond, the impression I get of him is of a scholar who increasingly refuses to adhere to the best practices of the university, and who can get away with it because of the power and influence that comes from being in the public eye. Of course, there is nothing wrong with going AWOL from the academy if one wants to become a free-floating intellectual. But Diamond is not Carlos Castaneda, and his audience gives him credence because of his situation within the academy and his role as a translator of technical discourse. It is easy to become complacent when you’re, you know, an ultra-rich Pulitzer Prize-winning author (or so I imagine!). But one must resist the temptation to relax one’s standards. Both lay readers and his colleagues deserve better work than we see in Nature review.

In the seventies, Sahlins and Harris didn’t have the Internet to fall back on. Today, we are blessed with a means of communication that allow incensed scholars to argue endlessly in front of the entire planet! Now that the book is published, I look forward to seeing the authors of Questioning Collapse â€“ and perhaps even Diamond himself? â€” move these issues forward.

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Lunchwalla Makes Restaurant Planning Easy

Mashable!

- 21 hours and 29 minutes ago

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: Lunchwalla

Quick Pitch: Social planning website that offers restaurant suggestions, organizes plans and allows friends to vote on where they want to go.

Genius Idea: Lunchwalla takes the best Yelp, OpenTable and Evite and mashes it up into one tool for planning group get togethers at restaurants or bars.

Signing up for Lunchwall is a simple process — you can use Facebook Connect to easily create an account (just verify your e-mail) and then import people into your address book from multiple web services (like Gmail, LinkedIn, Yahoo! mail) to invite them to join.

From there, you can select your participants, choose a selection of restaurants and then have people vote on places they want to eat. This makes planning lunch with co-workers much easier than playing e-mail tag. People can accept or decline invites, which also makes this a good option for non-work related gatherings.

Because it integrates with OpenTable at participating restaurants, it’s easy to make reservations at sit-down places. We also really like that Lunchwalla displays coupons for restaurants nearby. That’s slick, and a nice feature that other eatery based services lack.

Check out this video that explains how Lunchwalla works:

We’d love to see Lunchwalla create an iPhone app or a mobile optimized site that would make sending and creating invitations from the go really, really easy. As it stands, I look forward to trying Lunchwalla with some of my local friends.

How do you plan where to eat with friends or coworkers? Let us know!

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

Tags: evite, lunchwalla, opentable, yelp

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Kelly Landry in a bikini and other news

The Ultimate March Madness Social Media Guide

Mashable!

- 1 days and 4 hours ago

social media guide ncaa basketball march madness 2010 As far as we’re concerned, March means Madness of the basketball variety, and keeping up with all aspects of the NCAA tournament is an absolute must. If you feel the same way, then we think you’ll find our complete guide to all things college basketball on the social web indispensable.

A recent survey revealed that this year, more Americans than ever are going to be turning to the web and social media for their NCAA fix. Although traditional TV comes out on top, 54% of those quizzed are planning to catch the action live online, 10% via a mobile device, and 18% through various social networks. If you’re one of the many participating online this year, check out these resources.

Facebook Fast Break

Facebook is a popular destination for NCAA fans. Not only can you catch up on the latest news, but you can get your fellow basketball-loving buddies involved too — whether it’s for some trash talking, or to celebrate the win of a mutually fave team.

The Official NCAA Men’s and Women’s Basketball Facebook Fan Pages will allow you to connect with nearly 10,000 others (4,000 on the Women’s page) on the social networking site.

As well as having info on the NCAA with links to sites of interest, the Pages offer informal commentary from the NCAA teams, fan comments and insight, ticketing info, and comprehensive events data.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a bracket system that’s available within Facebook, then Bracket Challenge by Citizen Sports is a popular option. The free Facebook app will get you making your picks in no time at all, and offers the chance at a $5,000 grand prize. Bracket Challenge also has the option to create pools with your friends.

Mobile Madness

Pocket Bracket iPhone App

Citizen Sports also offers a free companion app (to their aforementioned Facebook application) for the iPhone or iPod touch with customizable push notifications for your favorite teams.

More mobile options include the 99 cent Pocket Bracket for the iPhone and Android devices that allows you to create unlimited brackets and organize pools from your phone. You can compete against thousands of users on the PocketBracket Network, as well as your friends, family, and coworkers.

The Baseline Fan series of apps, available for the iPhone and iPod touch, offer basic team-specific data for 99 cents a pop, while fans of free should take a look at Talk Hoops, another dual-platform app, offering aggregated news in one place.

Web-based Winners

Facebook and phones certainly aren’t the only places to get your bracket challenge fix. There is a wealth of online options, many offering larges cash prizes, should you be astute enough to pick the perfect bracket. Of course, the odds of that happening are a whopping 9.2 quintillion to 1. Still, the contests below are all great places to make your picks and each (excluding Applebee’s) come from sites that offer a dearth of tournament news, scores, opinions, and analysis, as well.

The 2010 Yahoo! Sports Tourney Pick’em game offers a whopping million dollar prize for a perfect bracket, while having the next highest scoring bracket will nab you $10,000. This gives you the option to join the masses or create a private group with invites that can be sent via e-mail, Facebook or Twitter.

If you don’t have a Yahoo! ID or care to create one, there’s also ESPN’s 2010 Tournament Challenge, as well as another chance at a $1 million prize from restaurant chain Applebee’s.

Also getting in on the online action is Fox Sports with their bracket challenge, and CBS, which is offering the enticing grand prize of a 2011 Infiniti M for the top bracket champ.

The biggest prize this year, though, has to be from AOL’s Fanhouse, with the SoBe Lifewater Zero Inhibitions Bracket Challenge that boasts a $9 million jackpot for anyone with a perfect bracket. (Again, though, good luck with that.)

Video Slam Dunk

NCAA Live Stream Image

With your bracket picked, you need to find somewhere to watch the action, and while the NCAA’s official YouTube channel offers a good overview of the organization, the better destination for live coverage is the NCAA March Madness on Demand website.

Powered by CBS, this website offers free live streaming video of every game in the 2010 championship. That means, the only things you’ll need to watch the entire tournament is your computer and an Internet connection. In addition to the live streams, there will be game highlights for those that need to catch up in a hurry, and full game archives for any poor sucker that missed a must-see match. A “High Quality” player option offers a widescreen view with a better quality feed.

If you can’t get yourself in front on a computer in time for tip-off, then the CBS Sports NCAA March Madness On-Demand app for the iPhone and iPod touch is a great option. It’s also perfect for those who don’t want to be tied to their desk or television screen during the tournament.

NCAA iPod Video

For $10, this app will give you live streaming video of all 63 games via either Wi-Fi or a cellular connection, from the first round through the finals. The app also offers game previews, a real-time tournament bracket, scores and headlines, and the option to comment and trash talk via Facebook and Twitter.

Twitter Tip-Offs

As with any other topic you could possibly name, Twitter offers a great way to keep up with what’s happening in the world of NCAA basketball, and there are a few Twitter accounts you should follow if you want to stay in the hoop… sorry — loop.

The main NCAA Twitter account offers all sorts of official news from the world of college sports. But if you’re only after hoop-specific NCAA news, the basketball account is where it’s at.

Elsewhere, you can grab news snippets from the Twitter home of the “ubiquitous college basketblog” Rush the Court.

If you like getting your basketball news from sources who can add a bit of commentary to the game, then there’s a ton of sports journos tweeting who can offer just that.

Tweeple that cover the NCAA basketball championship for various media outlets include 12 New York Times reporters and editors at The Quad, and a team of Sports Illustrated writers and photographers as well.

ESPN fans can follow longtime college basketball analyst Dick Vitale, senior writer and college basketball reporter Andy Katz, college hoops reporter Dana O’Neil, and Jimmy Dykes, who works for ESPN and also offers analysis on ABC.

CBS meanwhile comes in with Seth Davis, as well as columnist Gary Parrish, who should offer you some good insight into the Big Dance.

Conclusion

If we’ve overlooked a service you use, be sure to shout it out in the comments. Or, if you have an idea for an even better way to use social media to keep up-to-date with the March Madness, then Coke Zero wants to hear from you as part of their clever, basketball-themed social media promotion.

The fizzy drink company is currently asking for ideas to improve the NCAA fan experience. A winning idea could net you $10,000 and tickets to the 2011 Final Four. So get your thinking caps on!

More sports resources from Mashable:

- 5 Reasons Every Sports Fan Should Be On Social Media
- 5 Social Media Lessons the NBA Can Teach Businesses
- When Social Media Gets Athletes in Trouble
- How the PGA Tour Uses Social Media to Connect with Fans
- Social Media Analysis: The 2010 Winter Olympics

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, http://www.istockphoto.com/user_view.php?id=185191

Tags: basketball, facebook, iphone apps, List, Lists, march madness, NCAA, sports, twitter

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GE Announces ‘Create' Camera Giveaway

Monte Carlo Rally Lagonda at H&H Race Retro Sale

Classic cars, Vintage Racing, Classic Rally

- 1 days and 5 hours ago

One of two LG45 Tourers entered by Lagonda for the 1936 Monte Carlo Rally was the undisputed star of the H&H sale at Race Retro, Stoneleigh last Saturday (March 13). Though the car slid out of the rally after just 200 miles, this magnificent Post Vintage Thoroughbred has survived the last 74 years without further mishap and, resplendent in cream coachwork complemented by green leather upholstery, it sold for £167,200 - way over even its top estimate.

The motorsport-orientated sale contained a number of fast Fords, including the 1975 Haynes of Maidstone Escort RS1800 campaigned so successfully in period by former European Rallycross Champion John Taylor. Still sporting the same bodyshell with which it ended its period career and original Terry Hoyle BDG cylinder block, KKL 280P is widely regarded as one of the most original RS1800 rally cars in existence and unsurprisingly returned £99,000. The stunning RS1600 built by David Sutton for Stig Blomqvist to contest the 2007 East African Safari Classic made an estimate topping £77,000.

Beautifully presented and very rare (reputedly one of only 37 RHD examples made), the 1959 Jaguar XK150 S 3.4-Litre Drophead Coupe was always destined to cause great interest. Thought to have covered just 80,000 miles from new, it found a new home for £69,300. Arguably the most historically intriguing of all the cars on sale was the 1947 Healey Elliott, FGD 288. Save for the gold-coloured body (a 1970’s aberration) the car still looks very much as driven in the 1952 Daily Express Trophy by Works Healey driver Ken Wharton and countless races, sprints, hillclimbs and rallies by avid privateer Edgar Wadsworth. It attracted much interest and made above estimate at £44,000.

The sale featured a number of desirable Porsches, including the 1973 911 known as the â€˜Martini’ car in deference to its livery. Winner of the 2009 Post Historic Irish Tarmac Championship and nicely presented for sale, it fetched £42,900. The superbly-finished copper bronze-coloured 1980 911 Turbo changed hands for £20,625, while the road rally-prepared, 1961 Porsche 356B returned £20,350.
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Twitter Tuesday - this week's Twitter news, apps and more

Download Squad

- 1 days and 5 hours ago

Filed under: Features, Social Software, web 2.0, Microblogging

Hey Twitter Tuesday true believers! It's been a big week, with some of the Twitter crew down in Austin, TX for South by Southwest Interactive. As you may recall, Twitter initially launched at SXSW, and it's been a huge part of the conference ever since. No surprise, then, that Twitter's @Ev chose this event to launch a big new Twitter feature. Read on for that announcement, plus apps and add-ons -- there's even some Tweetie news!

Let's do this thing!

The big news in Twitter this week is the announcement of "@anywhere" during Evan Williams' SXSW keynote. @anywhere means that Twitter won't just be limited to Twitter.com and all of the lovely third-party apps and sites I cover in this column. Nope, Twitter will really be ... anywhere. Twitter usernames will be popping up all over huge sites like Amazon, eBay, MSNBC and Digg. You'll eventually be able to bring @anywhere to your own site, too, with just a little bit of Javascript magic.Speaking of that SXSW keynote, it was reportedly about as lively as a sack of potatoes. Ev was about to drop the bomb about @anywhere in the early going, but then the interviewers questions were so long and stultifying that everyone left. There's some hilarious chatter from the backchannel (which was Twitter, of course) over on Techcrunch. The only other interesting tidbit to come out of the interview was Twitter's goal to "be a force for good." That doesn't remind me at all of the motto of another large tech company. *cough*GOOGLE*cough*.

Twitter also finally turned on its geolocation service for the web this week, just in time for SXSW. You can now tag your tweets by location via Twitter's website, not just through third-party apps and the API.

Folks who were lucky enough to jump on the MacHeist bundle that was released last week got a little surprise bonus from Atebits software: a license for the upcoming Mac version of Tweetie 2, and access to the forthcoming pre-beta version. There have been some updates to the iPhone version of Tweetie lately, too. What this tells me is that although developer Loren Brichter may be the type to keep his lip zipped about new developments, he's been hard at work behind the scenes. I'm already itching to try this pre-beta, which is supposedly due soon.

And, speaking of awesome iPhone Twitter clients, one of our favorites was recently purchased! Birdfeed, the pretty, lightweight client with the very useful caching feature for offline reading, has been purchased by Brizzly and turned into Brizzly for iPhone. Brizzly's a pretty handy web-based Twitter client, so I'm hopeful that the iPhone version will be worthy of Birdfeed's legacy. Brizzly for iPhone is free, but requires a Brizzly account.

Ever wonder what your tweets would look like, illustrated? Well, you don't have to have any art skills to find out. A service called Funtweet converts tweets into a sort of mini-postcard format, adding an appropriate background image related to the topic of the tweet. Well, "appropriate" is relative, I suppose. For one of my posts, Funtweet apparently seized upon the word "okay" and gave me Borat in Speedo with two thumbs up. Thanks, Funtweet ... I guess.

Need to pick a random contest winner or "Twitterer of the Day" from your followers list? Tweetrandomizer can help. It requires no login or signup, and it makes the process of selecting a random user quite simple. Hey, better than having to write a custom script, eh?

Well, that's what I've got for you this week. Thanks for reading Twitter Tuesday, and don't forget to come back for next week's recap of what the Twitter team does during the inevitable post-SXSW hangover.

Twitter Tuesday - this week's Twitter news, apps and more originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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