Internet

Essence, MSNBC Team to Cover Magazine's Festival

Ziff Davis: We're No 1 in Tech After Nabbing NetShelter

21 Creative Home Improvement Apps: DIY, Design & Shopping

Social Signals Are So Last Week – Use Infographics to Drive Real Leads

Zach Galifianakis is well-known for his dry comedy, but it turns out he’s got a sweet spot. It turns out the 43-year-old comedian recently saved an older woman from homelessness. According to a New York Daily News report, Galifianakis befriended a Los Angeles-area laundrywoman named Elizabeth “Mimi” Haist nearly 20 years ago. A few years ago, when Galifianakis learned that the 87-year-old Haist had no place to call home, the Hangover star set her up with a one-bedroom apartment an has been paying her rent. Now, Galifianakis is even bringing along Haist as his date to Hollywood premieres. Haist was reportedly brought to the premieres of The Hangover Part II and The Campaign, where gawkers wondered whether the woman was Galifianakis’ grandmother. According to the Daily News report, Haist relishes the looks she gets on the red carpet and enjoys martinis at exclusive after-parties. (Image courtesy Tom Sorensen/Wikimedia Commons)

Just one day after Yahoo announced that former Googler Marissa Mayer would be taking the reigns as the new CEO, the internet rose up with its first request: Please make Flickr awesome again. Ever since Yahoo acquired the photo-sharing service back in 2005, users have dropped off and the quality of the experience has gone down – at least according to the general consensus. The common wisdom is that Yahoo kind of screwed up Flickr, and now they’re looking to rectify that damage. At a press event in NYC, just hours after Mayer officially announced the company’s acquisition of Tumblr, Yahoo unveiled a completely revamp Flickr – complete with a fresh UI redesign and a whole hell of a lot of storage. The latter is probably the most significant news to come out of the announcement. Starting today, you now have a free terabyte of space. That’s huge. As Yahoo says, “you could take a photo every hour for forty years without filling one.” That’s approximately 873,813 4.0 megapixel photos, 436,906 8mp photos, or 218,453 16mp photos. This upgraded storage also means that you can house longer videos on Flickr – 3 minutes at 1080p per video. The interface has received a massive upgrade as well, as Flickr has done away with most of the white space on the site to give users a truly immersive photo experience. “We want Flickr to be the most amazing community and place for you to share your photos. So, we’re also revealing a beautiful new design that puts photos at the heart of your Flickr experience, where they should always be. Whether it’s a sweeping landscape or a family portrait, we want every photo to be at its most spectacular,” says Flickr’s Markus Spiering. “Your homepage is now a gateway to everything you care about, and all the photos Flickr has to offer. Our new Activity Feed combines your friends’ recent uploads with activity on your own photos, and all in a beautiful design that lets you share and interact right on the page.” The individual photo pages have been improved to highlight the image in high-res, pushing the photo information below the fold. There are also some new paid options for the service – for $49.99 a year you can get rid of all the ads on the site, and for $499.99 you can snag 2TB of storage. Flickr also unveiled a new Android app, which brings it up to speed with the iOS upgrade the service received a few months ago. “The world is going mobile, and in December we took the first big step to send Flickr wherever you go with a new and beloved iPhone app. Our brand new Android app pushes the boundaries on beauty even further. We designed it with your needs in mind: how you interact, how you share, and how you view photos when you’re on the go.” The new site is live, as is the new Android app. Check it out.

Gamezebo Rating: I’ve been mucking about with Dragon Bane for a while now; slaying undead, battling dragons, forging powerful new gear, and so on. In all that time I still haven’t managed to figure out how I feel about it. There are some interesting ideas here and a surprising amount of unique elements. Conversely it also uses a very bizarre freemium model that dilutes the fun a bit. It’s complicated.

Education technology startup Knewton just inked another deal with a major education publisher. But, for the first time, the initial audience for its partnership with Macmillan isn’t high school or college students — it’s for adults around the world learning English. Since launching in 2008, the adaptive learning company, which takes a data-driven approach to personalizing learning, has partnered with less than a handful of other publishers, including Pearson, Wiley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Its latest partnership shows that its not only making headway in the domestic K-12 and higher education markets, but that it’s extending its reach overseas and among markets that have been slower to go digital. “Today, ELT [English Language Teaching] is all offline,” said David Liu, Knewton’s COO. “[Macmillian is] creating content for the digital experience from scratch — not only the educational content, but the assessment content.” Over time, Liu said, the partnership will extend to other Macmillan content, not just that for ELT. But, to start, Macmillan will build on Knewton’s adaptive learning platform to provide personalized grammar and vocabulary lessons, exam reviews and other kinds of content to ELT classrooms, as well as individuals, across 120 countries. In the increasingly hot adaptive learning space, Knewton isn’t the only game in town. Dreambox Learning, McGraw-Hill and Cerego are a few other companies pitching various approaches to customized digital learning experiences for K-12 students, colleges and individual learners. While Knewton offers some evidence of its success – in a 2011 program of 2,000 remedial math students at Arizona State University, the company said, withdrawal rates dropped by 56 percent and pass rates climbed 11 percent – it’s still early days for adaptive learning and some learning experts say more proof is still needed.  Still, Knewton is growing steadily. By the end of last year, the company, which has raised $54 million, reached about 500,000 and it expects to reach 5 million students by the end of this year.

If you're drinking the inbound marketing Kool-Aid and regularly publishing content online, there's a good chance you may have experienced content theft at one point or another. Many of us are all too familiar with the feelings that follow the discovery of content thievery: your stomach drops, quickly followed by thoughts of "Why me?" Then the anger sets in. You’ve spent hours (or even days) creating content you think your buyer personas would love, only to have someone else reap the benefits on their own site? Not cool. At your core, it feels very wrong to have someone benefit from your creativity and hard work. To help combat the internet thieves of the world, you’ve got to be prepared. You need to know how to find out whether your content has been stolen, have a good understanding of the laws, and determine if it’s worth your time to pursue -- and that’s only the beginning. Then, you have to know which steps to take to get the thief to remove your content removed, and how to prevent it from getting stolen again in the future. This definitely isn't something you want to deal with every day. After all, you signed up to be a marketer -- not the content police. To help, this post will show you how to evaluate your particular stolen content situation and craft a plan to fight back (or not). If you're looking for a quick overview of the process, check out our SlideShare below: Are People Stealing Your Content? How (and When) to Fight Back from HubSpot All-in-one Marketing Software Use Technology to Your Advantage: How Do You Know When Someone Steals Your Content? First things first: You’ve got to discover that your content has been taken without your explicit permission and determine whether it violates the fair use copyright clause (more on that later). With the ever-expanding number of websites in the world, tracking down stolen content isn’t always easy. Here are a couple ways to find it: Copyscape: Simply plug your page’s URL into the search box, and voila! Copyscape locates where your content appears elsewhere online. In the free version, you can only see the top 10 results. If you want a more robust report, you can sign up for the premium paid version. That being said, most of us won’t need the supercharged results unless we’re hunting down stolen content full time. Referral Traffic: Dive into your marketing analytics to see which sites are sending you traffic. See traffic spike from a specific source, or just a source you don’t recognize? Take a peek to see if your content appears there. Pingbacks: Depending on your content management system, you may have the ability to be notified whenever a site links back to a post. If someone straight up copies your content and pastes it on his or her site, this is a really easy way to be notified -- no analytics necessary. Google Alerts, Topsy, and HubSpot Social Inbox: Whichever tool you prefer, you can set up alerts to ping you when someone mentions your content online. Keep in mind that you'll need to use a combination to stay on top of your content across the web: While Google Alerts used to be the be-all-end-all for marketers looking to monitor their brand or content online, it's recently been returning fewer and fewer results. To make sure you're covering all your bases, you can use Google Alerts to pull information from websites and blogs, Topsy to monitor Google+ and Twitter conversations, and HubSpot Social Inbox to see who from your Contact Lists is mentioning your brand or keywords on Twitter. (Bonus Tip: Some companies track a specific phrase at the bottom of each piece of published content, which can be more effective than trying to monitor a different phrase for each piece of content they produce.) Manual Searches: You also have the option of manually searching for your content. For written content, search for a long-tail phrase -- whether it be the specific one you include at the bottom of every post or just an excerpt from the body text -- to find your content mor

Imagine a situation when you have a mobile phone or a tablet and you want to download some apps or games in it or you want to update existing apps. But you don't have an Internet connection in the device or you don't want to use the Internet connection provided by your mobile operator. What [...] Read rest of this article at AskVG.com