LikeMe App for the Pre

Having one of the first apps on the new Palm Pre offers a swelling of pride, and a pain in the head. I will do my best to keep a smile on my face, but I am not in love with social media geared towards only liking things. It keeps thing positive, but doesn’t allow for much wiggle room of opinion. That being said, our site and our iPhone app are very useful and fun. Here is a somewhat shabby article written on the subject.

LikeMe, a social recommendation site similar to Yelp.com lets users rate and review local businesses, attractions, restaurants, and clubs. After you join the service, you can upload info about yourself, your favorite places, and your favorite things to do in order to kick start the service’s personalized social recommendation engine.

Now the app joins a handful of others (really, just a handful) on the new Palm Pre. But before you go and download this one, there’s something you need to consider about LikeMe: their reviews may be compromised.

At the beginning of this year, LikeMe came under fire when it came out that a lot of the reviews on the site were written by ad representatives for Village Voice Media (VVM), owner of over a dozen weekly papers and a LikeMe partner. The reviews, all good of course, focused on businesses that advertised in the VVM papers. Talk about a conflict of interest!

Read the rest of the article at: readwriteweb.com

All Press is Good Press

As the pimpin’ wars continue, Village Voice Media wants to be heard. As reported 2 weeks ago, Craigslist CEO Buckmaster decided to whine to the world by throwing his competition under the bus. Now VVM strikes back.

And you thought the South Carolina v. Craigslist story was dead.

If anything sucks more than being the target of an ambitious but delusional gubernatorial candidate who has suddenly developed a bit of a fetish for prostitution, it’s being ignored by that candidate. As far as Village Voicesees the world, Craigslist just got a bunch of free press. And they want their share.

When Craigslist management was facing a criminal investigation for listings on the site they did the smart thing. They talked about the law, and they pointed out that the real smut was on other sites that were being ignored by the South Carolina Attorney General. If you really want hard core porn and prostitution, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster pointed out, check out Village Voice’s BackPage.com.

That’s all body fluids under the bridge now, of course, since a federal judge smacked down McMaster and forbid him from stalking Craigslist management.

But Village Voice is still smarting from those Buckmaster links in that blog post. Yesterday they issued a very official press release titled “Village Voice Media to Craigslist CEO Buckmaster: Calm Down, Back Off; There is Nothing Wrong With a Little Competition.”

Read the rest of the story on techcrunch.com

Trent Reznor Raises Close to a Million for Sick Fan

Trent Reznor has been a driving force in music since he exploded on the scene in 1990. His raw emotion pours onto the stage and into the crowd. Lately, NIN has been on their fairwell tour, and it looks like they are reaching out to the Twitter public for financial support for a fan in need. Great story.

Twittering Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor opened a campaign last Wednesday to raise money for Eric De La Cruz, a Nevada Medicaid patient in need of a heart transplant. Both Nine Inch Nails and tour mates Jane’s Addiction are offering special deals for the remaining shows on their tour to fundraise for De La Cruz’s hopeful transplant.
A $300 donation will grant concert attendees access to the pre-show soundcheck and a meet-and-greet with the band, while $1,000 will get you backstage for dinner and relaxing with the band, as well as stage-side viewing for the show, autographs and pictures. For fans without tickets, a $1,200 donation comes with two tickets to the show and VIP treatment backstage. This is NIN’s final tour, so fans of the band will want to seize this opportunity.

De La Cruz was turned down from transplant lists because of the lack of transplant centers in Nevada. Reznor became aware of his situation after De La Cruz’s sister, former CNN.com news anchor Veronica De La Cruz, began a fundraising campaign on her website. The campaign is as much to raise money for Eric as it is to raise awareness of Nevada’s limited transplant opportunities, and to petition Senator Harry Reid and other Congress members for improved legislation.
Read the rest at: pastemagazine.com

Tweeting Your Way to a Job

Keep in mind, we only really have one example in this article. It’s kin of like looking at the NFL and picking one rags to riches story and forgetting about the 10′s of 1000′s of men who never got there shot. You have to be the best of the best to even be considered. One piece of advice I can give; Use social media for your enjoyment. Build your personal community. Get out of the house or office and network with the people you connect with. If making a buck from it is going to happen, then it will.

nytimes.com – “IT is my mission in life to get this job,” said Amanda Casgar, who is better known to executives at Murphy-Goode Winery in Sonoma County as applicant No. 505.

@WHIZ Christi Day of Southwest.
Three weeks ago Murphy-Goode began a search for a “social media whiz,” a wine enthusiast interested in moving to Healdsburg, Calif., for six months to promote the vineyard’s malbec and chardonnay on blogs, Facebook and Twitter. The job — which comes with the official title “lifestyle correspondent” — pays $10,000 a month, plus free accommodations at a private home within walking distance of the tasting room. Ms. Casgar, a former magazine marketing executive, has been endorsing herself as enthusiastically as she would a bottle of petit verdot.

Already an occasional Twitterer, she increased the number of tweets she posts; they are mostly about wine. She created a Web site, “Goode Times With Amanda Casgar,” to chronicle her job quest. Like about a half-dozen other eager applicants, she has started a fan group on Facebook, buying ads for 50 cents a click to generate traffic.

Read the full article at nytimes.com.

Can Social Media Help Michael Vick?

Man what a hot button topic. I personal think if he wasn’t Michael Vick, He never would have seen the inside of a prision cell. His fame made him a martyr for the cause. They striped him of his title, yanked his money and locked him away, but I digress…

Social media can be good for a rep or bad, it just depends how it’s used. I don’t think MV the person needs SM right now. He needs to pick up the pieces, be happy to be free, and repair the relationship in his life in person. SM could be way too over bearing in this case… my two cents.

mashable.com – There was a time when Michael Vick was one of the most popular athletes on the planet. Of course, today sees Vick in a far different circumstance, as the former Atlanta Falcons quarterback was released from federal prison (and will finish his 23-month sentence under house arrest) and awaits a job making $10/hour in construction.

For now, Vick’s football career is in doubt, as he remains suspended by the NFL, and signing the athlete would be a huge PR risk for any team. But Vick is already taking steps to try and rebuild his image – in addition to his humble blue collar job, today it was announced that Vick will be working with The Humane Society to help stop dogfighting.

Read the full story at mashable.com.

Microformats on the horizon…

Today at Searchology, Google has launched a search results enhancement called “rich snippets” that uses meta data from web pages (from microformats such as hCard, hCalendar, and RDF) to display additional details (both content and meaning) about pages in the results. This initial launch supports reviews (with sites such as Yelp) and people (with sites such as LinkedIn). They will be adding more sites and categories over time.

Reviews include the average star rating and and number of reviews for things like restaurants and products.

Google is also showcasing reviews in other ways. They’re using sentiment analysis to pull review information from pages and display that as the description below a result (even in cases where rich snippets aren’t used). This comes into play particularly with the new search options feature. You can choose to see only reviews and those descriptions based on Google’s new sentiment analysis are notated by quotes. This feature works better for some searches than others. For this search on [smx advanced], for instance, when you choose the reviews option, the fourth result is the first one that pulls a review into a snippet.

People search provides disambiguation, such as a person’s location and job title so searchers have a better sense of which result matches the person they’re looking for.

It makes sense that people search is the other topic Google has chosen to launch first, as they’ve been focusing on profiles for a while including the evolved Google Profiles and people search OneBox. In addition, Google’s internal search logs likely confirm what a PEW/Internet stuty found in late 2007: over 50% of searchers have searched for people.

Site owners have been asking for support of microformats for some time, so this should come as welcome news both for them and for searchers who will benefit from the increased set of information in the search results. Google has been testing this new results format for a while, and the reviews topic in particular has been in action for a while in Google Local [although when I talked to a search engineer after the event, he said that the technology behind revies inlocal results and rich snippets is different, although the UI looks similiar. He agreed that it may make sense in the future to find some way to integrate the two, but that’s not being done at this point.

On first glance, Google’s rich snippets appear very similar to Yahoo’s SearchMonkey. However, there are some differences, the key one being that site owners don’t have to do anything other than make the metadata available. With SearchMonkey, on the other hand, enhanced listings are based on SearchMonkey applications that outside developers build. This coincides with Google’s overall aim to algorithmically determine relevance, with little manual input from content owners required. While many site owners want to be able to provide more input, Google is dealing with the scale of the entire web and wants to build features in such a way that all content can be included, even if the content owner doesn’t know anything about Google.

The other announcements at Searchology, such as Google Squared, illustrate Google’s intent to algorithmically structure the web with little outside input.

This announcement may help SearchMonkey adoption, however, as Yahoo is encouraging use of these formats. And while Yahoo may not have enough market share to compel past the tipping point, Google may be able to spur adoption.
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