Bill Volhein

An interesting new twist in social check-in apps… tracking your physical accomplishments across the globe. According to Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz…

“EpicMix has the ability to track your physical accomplishments, similar to Nike+, and then combine it with the community experience of location-based social media, similar to applications like Gowalla,” said Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz. The app was unveiled earlier this week, and it officially launches November 5 at Keystone.

There are a number of other ski apps, and even a few launched by specific areas or resort operators, like Snowbird in Utah. But based on the demos Vail Resorts debuted this week, EpicMix goes far past those in terms of functionality. It’s the first to combine the physical performance with social media elements, and it offers a peek at what might lie in the future for participation sports.

Read More http://www.wired.com/playbook/2010/09/vails-epicmix-app/#ixzz0yO0VI2Rd

Bengals Rewarded in Social Media Activity by Chad Ochocinco & Terrell Owens

Media and marketing power come in many different forms. Whether good or bad, publicity can bring in the $. Who knows if these 2 characters can survive together on the same team, but for now, the Bengals will reap the rewards.
examiner.com – Go ahead, ask me how I found out T.O. (Terrell Owens) signed with the Cincinnati Bengals. Did I find out through ESPN? No. NFL Network? Wrong again. How about the Cincinnati Enquirer? That’s three strikes and you’re out! Oops, that’s a baseball term. We are talking football here. Actually, we are talking social media. I found out the Cincinnati Bengals signed T.O. from Chad OchoCinco on Twitter.
I got a tip early Tuesday morning, July 27, 2010 that T.O. was signing with Cincinnati. A friend of mine who was near Paul Brown Stadium confirmed that several media outlets were lining up outside the stadium. I quickly came to the conclusion something big was going to happen. Unfortunately, I was not able to officially confirm that T.O. was being signed. Instead, I read news articles saying the New York Jets were potentially interested in signing T.O. I tried to dismiss those reports, but nothing else was being posted about T.O. signing with the Cincinnati Bengals. This led me to start looking at online buzz for more information about where T.O. was going to sign. Online buzz showed the Bengals were the front-runner in the T.O. sweepstakes, at least from a conversational stand-point.

FlipBoard Causes a Legal Stir

As print products die in the digital age, copyright infringement is becoming increasingly more topical. With the complexity of the changing digital landscape, more questions arise about online content usage.

Wired – Social news app Flipboard was yesterday’s hot new app, despite—or perhaps because of—technical problems that prevented some features from working. But there might be a bigger snag: Is Flipboard scraping content it doesn’t have the rights to?

Flipboard, the new iPad app that renders links from your Twitter feed and favorite sites in a beautiful, magazine-style layout, has a problem: it scrapes websites directly rather than using public RSS feeds, opening it to claims of copyright infringement.

Unlike some similar news apps like Pulse, Flipboard appears to eschew the older syndication standby RSS to instead grab URLs from Twitter and Facebook feeds. While news sources that maintain their own automatic Twitter feeds tend to link the same stories as they do in their RSS feeds, there’s one critical difference: RSS also allows content to be included in the feed, whereas Twitter provides only the URLs that link back to the full website. (Unless, of course, the site only writes 140 character news stories.)

Read More….

Consumers More Likely to Buy from Media Site Advertisers

June 17, 2010: A survey conducted by Harris Interactive for the Online Publishers Association found that 72 percent of consumers trust the content they see on media sites, such as ESPN.com, Wall Street Journal Online, or NYTimes.com, compared to 60 percent who find content on portals like Yahoo Sports or AOL News trustworthy and 23 percent who trust what they find on social media sites.
The media sites also tend to generate more confidence in their advertisers; 24 percent of respondents said they find advertisers on media sites to be “high-quality and reputable,” compared to 20 percent for portals and 8 percent for social media sites.
Those who recalled purchasing from the advertisers on a website were significantly more likely to have done so from a media site — 8 percent — compared to 5 percent for portals and 3 percent for social media. The loyal users of social media sites are more likely to purchase from their advertisers (15 percent), than portal fans (8 percent), or those loyal to social media sites (4 percent).
RadioLink

Twitter Record Broken During World Cup 2010

Two major sporting events this week have helped Twitter Inc. to reach all-time records for tweets, the San Francisco microblogging service said Friday.

The 2010 World Cup soccer tournament has elevated Twitter traffic overall, but a record was set Monday when tweets were sent at a rate of 2,940 per second just 30 seconds after the Japanese team scored its only goal in a 1-0 victory over Cameroon, spokesman Sean Garrett said.

That record, however, was short-lived. Thursday night, traffic spiked to 3,085 tweets per second as basketball fans weighed in on the Los Angeles Lakers finishing off the Boston Celtics to clinch pro basketball’s world championship.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/18/BU6U1E1BFD.DTL#ixzz0rKevDFLz

Motörhead Will Never Die!

Lemmy has always been a great performer, and that hasn’t stopped. At the age of 64, Ian Fraser Kilmister took the stage again last night at Austin Music Hall at the SXSW Music Festival in Austin TX. I was a short set, but covered his classics in an entertaining method. I hope all of you got a chance to see him.