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What's better than handing the @NHLBlackhawks their first shutout of the season? A congratulations from Mr. Hockey

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Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Twitter: Web Giants Make Unexpected Announcements

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It's been a big week for 3D-printed weaponry. On Monday, a Wisconsin man announced that he had built a largely plastic gun for just $25. Now, a Tennessee man has designed and printed bullets using the same technology. In a video posted to YouTube on Sunday, Jeff Heeszel — he goes by taofledermaus on the site and his clips have more than 43 million views — announces that a friend of his sent him several 3D-printed bullets. A shooter then loads one into a Mossberg 590 shotgun and fires at a dartboard. Amazingly, the plastic slug does some serious damage. But then, the same goes for some of the subsequent bullets fired: Silly Putty, bubblegum, frozen Vienna sausages, etc. Read more...More about 3d Printers, 3d Printing, Us World, Us, and Guns

The consensus on WWDC’s sellout time this year seemed to be about 2 minutes. As one of the many people who hammered the servers trying to get a ticket, only seeing error messages until being shocked by a “Sold Out” banner far too quickly, it felt like a lot less time — the unofficial “71 seconds” time sounds right to me. It’s a great story. Last year, WWDC tickets became available suddenly, without advance notice, and they took almost 2 hours to sell out. Even this year’s Google I/O tickets, notorious for selling out very quickly, took 49 minutes. Surely this year, in the height of Apple pessimism, WWDC selling out so much faster than Google’s conference would be a great story. You’d think Apple might even mention it afterward — if that’s really what happened. Maybe it is. I have no evidence and haven’t heard any tips to the contrary. But I do have another hypothesis that I think is more likely. For the last few years (since WWDC started selling out), Apple has limited tickets to approximately the same total: 5,000 to 5,500, depending who you ask. Presumably, at least a few hundred of those are allocated to press, VIPs, big partners, student scholarships, etc. that Apple can give away as they see fit, so let’s assume about 4,500 are made available for public sale. After this year’s unexpectedly rapid, effectively random, and error-filled sellout, we started hearing about people getting calls from Apple offering them tickets. Most of these were people who successfully added the ticket to their cart during those 71 seconds, but weren’t able to complete the checkout due to server errors. These phone calls seemed to go to a lot of people. I’ve seen at least a hundred people report that they got a call after having the ticket added to their cart but having errors with checkout. It’s likely that I didn’t see all of them, of course — I’d estimate that Apple may have called at least 500 people after the sellout who had tickets in their carts. I don’t think I’ve heard from anyone who had a ticket added to their failed cart and didn’t get a phone call from Apple within a week of the sellout. That’s a lot of extra tickets to be selling. And that’s not all. Apple has since called many people who reached out to developer-relations contacts, offering them tickets as well. I know a lot more people who have gotten tickets this way, even as recently as this week. Apple’s still selling tickets — there are probably at least a few hundred more that have been sold this way. So I see two possible explanations. Apple could be selling far more than the usual number of tickets, probably by at least 1,000, because they want to please the large number of people who tried and failed to get tickets during those 71 seconds. If this is the case, it should be easy to tell: WWDC was already crowded, and there aren’t many places to hide an extra thousand people. They’ll be noticed. Or maybe all of those server errors meant something. My best guess: some part of the infrastructure handling the purchases mistook 4,500 connections, transactions, or sessions for 4,500 sales. And when the front-end servers collapsed under the load of everyone hitting them at once — a first this year, since the availability time was preannounced — we all started refreshing, those connections started stacking up, and something on the back-end triggered the “Sold Out” state early because it was mistakenly counting all of those failed sessions.1 Maybe the actual number of tickets successfully sold during those 71 seconds was much lower than 4,500. It sure didn’t look like a system that was successfully processing transactions and behaving as expected.2 If so, it probably took more than a few minutes to realize what happened, by which point it was too late — the

To protect themselves against excessive monitoring, security exploits and ISP throttling, some BitTorrent users turn to anonymizing services such as VPNs and proxies. Over the past months interest in these privacy protection services has surged. However, for some less technically skilled people all the talk about privacy settings and IP-leaks may prove to be too much. The latter group is now catered for by TrafficPrivacy, a new and fully anonymous BitTorrent client that launched this week. Feature wise the client is relatively limited, but unlike others it has a fully configured and dummy proof anonymity option built in. Simply enter your login credentials and everything just works. “TrafficPrivacy’s mission is to provide users with real 100% protection and anonymity without additional settings, which can be quite difficult for non tech savvy users. That’s why we include protection into a tiny BitTorrent client,” TrafficPrivacy’s Alex told TorrentFreak. As with other anonymity services a long term subscription to TrafficPrivacy doesn’t come free. The service is currently priced at $6.95 per month, but there is a 7-day free trial available for people who want to give it a spin before committing to it longer term. Contrary to VPNs or BitTorrent proxies, users will have to swap their current BitTorrent client for the TrafficPrivacy software. This is a deliberate choice from the makers, as it’s the only way to guarantee that all the privacy settings are properly configured. With Vuze, uTorrent and other clients people often forget to use the right settings or get confused by the terminology, which can result in their true IP-address leaking out. The new client’s goal is to avoid this. “The target audience for TrafficPrivacy are users who put a lot of value on their safety and anonymity, but do not want to configure all the complicated settings. We want to keep everything as simple as possible and let users feel safe without tinkering with various privacy options in current BitTorrent clients,” Alex says. TrafficPrivacy BitTorrent Client One thing to keep in mind is that TrafficPrivacy only offers anonymous BitTorrent transfers. Other traffic, such as that generated by a web browser, will be linked to the user’s regular IP-address. Users can see if anonymity is turned on directly from the client, but it’s always wise to verify it through an external service that checks the BitTorrent IP. To guarantee the user’s privacy the company says it doesn’t keep any connection logs that can be traced back to individual customers. Also, if the TrafficPrivacy servers happen to go down the client will stop working entirely. “If TrafficPrivacy server goes down, all downloads stop and it doesn’t leak the real IP-address,” Alex informs TorrentFreak. The TrafficPrivacy team are no newcomers to the security scene. The new client was developed as part of the existing TorrentPrivacy proxy/VPN service, but when the new client was finished they decided to turn in into a completely new product and a brand of its own. While TrafficPrivacy might not appeal to all BitTorrent users, its ease of use and simplicity will probably be welcomed by those who are less technically skilled. Source: TrafficPrivacy Launches Anonymous BitTorrent Client

In a neat gimmick to illustrate its stop-start technology, which turns the car off when stopped, Volkswagen launched a Chrome plugin that pauses a video when you look away from the screen. The app uses your computer's camera and some facial recognition technology to achieve the feat. In a quick test, it worked well enough, but seemed to require exaggerated movement properly — like turning your head all the way to the side. It's also hard to think of a practical use for the app, unless you're training yourself to be less distractible. It performs well as a marketing tool, though. SEE ALSO: 10 Essential Chrome Extensions for Designers Read more...More about Video, Volkswagen, Chrome Apps, Business, and Marketing

If you want to create a successful blog and business on the internet then you are going to need to write awesome content for your audience. It’s not just about writing content that is of value – it’s also about knowing what your audience wants. I have multiple web sites and blogs and even though the basic principles are always the same, the content for the sites are not. Let’s take ZacJohnson.com and BloggingTips.com, for example. They are very close in nature, but if I were to always write about WordPress and blogging on ZacJohnson.com then my audience would not find as much value in the content. The same thing can be said for BloggingTips.com if I were to always write about social marketing or how to create pay per click ad campaigns. The best way to know what your audience is looking for is to determine what types of content on your blog get the most views and comments. Tutorials, reports and case studies are always going to be some of the most successful posts on a blog and this is because people love to learn how to do stuff and see real life results. What type of content are you creating for your site? Every day I get asked the same old questions about what types of blogs people should create. The “make money blogging” and “how to blog” niche is extremely saturated. There are many different bloggers who write the same articles and content on how to start a blog and talk about the best WordPress plugins, and it’s a good bet that your traffic doesn’t find any value in these posts. Instead you should be putting a creative twist on your content and provide information on topics and tasks that haven’t been discussed a million times. How to come up with creative and new content ideas An excellent way for you to come up with new and attractive ideas for your site is to get active on social networks. There are millions of users in free blogging and internet marketing groups on Facebook and they are all talking about different topics every day. Lots of these discussions are on what’s hot in the industry right now. You can also ask these audiences what type of content they would like to see and have them contribute with their comments and ideas as well. Keeping your blog following strong In addition to using Facebook and Twitter for new content ideas, you should also be utilizing these social networks to grow your blog following. Through the use of a Facebook Fan Page and Twitter account, you can start to accumulate new followers every day and have your blog updates sent right to their social network feeds. This is a great way to automate the process and expand your reach in the process. Optimization of your content is key While optimization of your content is important, you shouldn’t make all of your content around the focus of “how can I make money with this”. Content IS and ALWAYS will be KING, but the makeup of the content is the value that people find in your content. Some of the best blogs in the world have never spent a dime on SEO or advertising and have become what they are today because they focused on creating amazing and killer content. Take the time and effort to create amazing content for your audience and it will continue to work for you for months and years to come. I am blogging on behalf of Visa Business and received compensation for my time from Visa for sharing my views in this post, but the views expressed here are solely mine, not Visa’s. Visit http://facebook.com/visasmallbiz to take a look at the reinvented Facebook Page: Well Sourced by Visa Business. The Page serves as a space where small business owners can access educational resources, read success stories from other business owners, engage with peers, and find tips to help businesses run more efficiently. Every month, the Page will introduce a new theme that will focus on a topic important to a small business owner’s success. For additional tips and advice, and information a

Guest post by Danna Vetter, VP, Consumer Strategies, ARAMARK You’ve heard it all before. You do your research. You write the strategy. You set the goals and objectives. You train your community managers. You go live in two weeks. Facebook announces Timeline. You kick [insert EVERYTHING]. There is only one thing that can be done in situations such as these – control what you can control. As marketers, we have all come to rely on these external social platforms, of which we do not own, control, or lead. There is obviously a certain compromise that we all must accept in this new world – we don’t make the rules. It’s not our code. It’s not our functions. It’s not ours. Welcome to Digital Marketing 2013. But here’s what you can control – always preparing your organization. Give them the tools and resources they need to be successful in social media every single day. Training is a fundamental part of getting your users ready for managing social media. But learning can’t end there. The industry evolves and changes too much. Education and knowledge need to be a continuous process. What they learned yesterday is already the past. And by continually providing the right tools and resources to your managers, you can ensure they are prepared in the best ways possible. Get your team the technology to manage social media. At ARAMARK, we started with a social media management system (SMMS). This gave us a place to corral all of our company’s social accounts, and just as importantly, it gave our community managers a one-stop shop where they can manage multiple social channels and campaigns. They can schedule, publish, and track content, as well as measure analytics. Most SMMS providers now even have functionality for ads buys on Facebook as well as targeting your content’s audience and promoting your posts. Also, we kept our social managers up to speed on the latest developments through topical resource guides, mini playbooks, and even infographics. Be creative. Collaborate. Communicate. Share knowledge. Hear what your team needs, what they want, and what they are missing. Then provide it back to them. Learn from each other. If you don’t have an internal collaboration network, consider cloud versions like Yammer or Chatter. If your company wants to keep everything in-house, use email. Or pass notes. Maybe shout. Find anyway possible to share information and experiences. If you don’t have the answer for a community manager, maybe one of their peers does. There’s so much out of our control today as marketers. But no matter what, at a company, you win and you lose together. So stay ahead of the game and keep your company prepared. And look out – Facebook just changed how people access and use newsfeed! Part of an ongoing series… They All Laughed – The Road to Becoming a Social Enterprise The 5th P of Marketing is People – Engagement begins within  Mitigating Risk in Social Media Engagement Follow Danna on Twitter Image credit: Shutterstock