Social Media Coverage on Mashable

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Sunday, April 08, 2012
SOCIAL MEDIA TOP STORIES About.me iPhone App Launches With 'Who's Nearby' Feature Top 6 Mashable Comments of the Week Facebook Relationship Status Update Sparks Gun Fight ALL STORIES SOCIAL MEDIA 68-Year-Old Skateboarding Professor Becomes Viral Meme [PICS] Saturday, April 07, 2012 7:12 PM Alissa Skelton Tom Winter, 68-year-old University of Nebraska classics professor, rose to Internet stardom after a picture of him riding his skateboard, with a briefcase in hand, became a Reddit top post on Thursday. Numerous blogs and news publications wrote stories about the web-famous skateboarding professor. Winter had never heard of Reddit until his students notified him about his popular picture on the website. He checked the network out for himself and found some of the memes hilarious. He thought others were full of confusing "contemporary slang." He received even more Internet love on Friday when BuzzFeed published a The 30 Best Teachers Of All Time, with Winter landing on top. "You can roll, but you can't hide," Winter told Mashable when asked what he makes of all this. When Mashable asked him about meme culture, he thought "memes" referred to the book "The Selfish Gene" by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. The sight of a professor on a skateboard may be surprising for some, but Winter thinks it's normal. He drives to work and then skateboards on his Arbor Pocket Rocket board around campus. He even tries skateboarding tricks. He has battle wounds to show it -- he once broke a rib while attempting a wheelie. "Walking sucks, so I get there on my wheels," he said. "I am 19 exceptjoints are all of 68. Walking is of discomfort. Once I get the board going, I can keep my balance and the joints are happy." For more Winter-inspired hilarity, check out the gallery below. Winter reviews nine memes that fans have created using his picture. Image courtesy of Reddit 43 New Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed Saturday, April 07, 2012 6:32 PM Matt Petronzio If you missed any of Mashable's resources this week, hopefully it wasn't because you were dealing with that nasty "Flashback" virus (make sure you check if your Mac has been infected by using this nifty script). Once you know you're not one of the 600,000 unlucky ones hit with the malware virus, get caught up with our weekly features roundup! This week, we've covered the ways to add LinkedIn to your company's website, tech time warp videos that will take you back to the '80s and '90s and memes brought to life via Twitter. We also have a Q&A with author Jonah Lehrer, an office tour of StumbleUpon's San Francisco headquarters and infographics on topics ranging from slacktivism to employee privacy. We even have the best Draw Something sketches from Mashable readers, like you. Go ahead and enjoy this week's digital media resources. Editor's Picks How to Be Creative: The Science of Genius In his book Imagine: How Creativity Works, author Jonah Lehrer posits that geniuses are not superheroes, but rather products of unstifled imagination and free-flowing ideas. How One Website Connects Those in Need With Government Assistance Finding a government program specifically tailored to one's needs and location can be difficult and intimidating. That's where innovative website Aunt Bertha comes in. Conan O'Brien Takes Over Mashable for April Fools' Day Just in case you weren't obsessively checking Mashable last weekend, we wanted to give you the full picture of one of Mashable's best-ever April Fools' Day pranks. Enjoy! Why 'Slacktivists' Are More Active Than You Think/a> Sortable created this infographic, which looks at the rise of slacktivism. 11 Early Pics From Android Instagram Users Instagram launched for Android, and users are already flocking to the app to show off their best skills. Social Media Get Your Nerd On With Nerdist Industries' New YouTube Channel Nerdist Industries has launched a new platform for its nerdy content in partnership with YouTube. 7 Useful Pinterest Tools to Supercharge Your Pinfluence Several third-party sites and services have piggybacked on Pinterest's success, and can help you get more out of the social networking site. 10 Hilarious Memes Brought to Life on Twitter Can't get enough of those "Advice Animals?" Follow you these memetastic characters on Twitter for non-stop Internet hilarity. 20 TV Shows With the Most Social Media Buzz This Week/a> Which TV shows generate the most buzz on social networks? Find out each week from our social TV chart. Pinerly: Hands on With the Newest Pinterest Analytics Tool New startup Pinerly wants to help you get a grip on your "Pinalytics." We go hands-on with the beta service. How Google+ Can Succeed at Business Without Really Trying G+ is Google's Trojan horse thanks to these features, which make it a great tool for enterprise social collaboration. What's at Stake When Employers Ask for Social Media Passwords?/a> Who is requesting access to social media information? Does access to employees' social media passwords leave an employer legally vulnerable? MLB Fan Cave: The Core Of Major League Baseball's Social Strategy The MLB Fan Cave and the people in it are at the very core of Major League Baseball's social media strategy. 8 Tips To Maximize Your Brand's YouTube Presence Brands need a YouTube game plan. Here are eight tips for creating such a plan and turning your brand's YouTube channel into a video hotspot. 25 Most-Buzzed Universities on the Internet MIT is the most-buzzed about university on the Internet. 9 Ways to Engage Your Employees on Pinterest Businesses can use Pinterest to encourage employees to get to know each other, and to communicate their personalities to the wider public. How Social Media Can Help You Land That New Job/a> Social media can play a major role in finding that first job or hopping to a better one. For more social media news and resources, you can follow Mashable's social media channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook. Business & Marketing 4 Facebook Features Marketers Can't Afford to Ignore Marketers need to know which networks are the most vital to their industry, and what features are key. In Facebook's case, there are four. YouTube's 20 Most-Shared Ads in March/a> March's list of most-shared YouTube ads is quite diverse. We've got tear-jerkers, special effects, animation, comedy and more! The Impact of Online Giving/a> Millions of charitable dollars are given online every year. Where does it all go? What's it worth? And how have digital donations changed the game? Impact Investing: How One Foundation Empowers Social Entrepreneurs Mashable spoke with John Walker, finance director of Echoing Green, a foundation that awards grants based on the individual's potential and not the business plan. 9 Ways to Add LinkedIn to Your Company Website Adding LinkedIn's social features to a company website is a great way to tap into the large-scale recruitment platform. Here are the nine key plugins. 3 Twitter Rumors and What They Could Mean for Brands Twitter is trying to become more attractive to advertisers. Read on for three possible changes Twitter could be making for brands. Stumble Into StumbleUpon's San Francisco Office/a> Take a look inside the discovery platform's innovative California headquarters. How One Company Helps Sales Teams Leverage Their Social Influence/a> Jon Ferrara, founder and CEO of Nimble, talks about how social media can be combined with CRM for better sales. 5 Best Practices for Creating Viral Branded Videos Want to know how to get your brand's campaign to go viral? Here are a few great insights to consider. Crowd-Powered: Why Doritos Lets Fans Make Its Super Bowl Ads The cheesy chip company gives the reigns to its consumers to develop Super Bowl commercials. Here's how it all works. How One Non-Profit Aims to Create Open-Source Government This politically tuned non-profit's objective is to make the government's public data more accessible to everyone in real-time. Learning Experiment Sparks Student Imagination With Cute Robots Reboot Stories uses experimental education projects to keep kids in low-income areas engaged with learning. Crowdfunding: What it Means for Investors The crowdfunding feature in the recently passed JOBS Act will not only impact startups, it will affect investors, too. Here's how. 4 Ways to Rethink the Press Release Check out the four examples of companies reinventing how they use and present the press release. For more business news and resources, you can follow Mashable's business channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook. Tech & Mobile 10 Upcycled Gadgets for Your Home and Office Check out these 10 upcycled tech gadgets repurposed as modern home and office accessories. 20 Cool Easter Eggs Hidden in Google's 8-Bit Maps Google Maps transformed into a gamer's paradise, adding an 8-bit layer filled with landmarks and gaming characters to its virtual globe. 7 High-Tech Cars that will Save You Gas Money/a> With the price of gas topping $4 a gallon in many parts of the U.S., people are once again buying more fuel-efficient electrics and hybrids. 25 Best 'Draw Something' Sketches From Mashable Readers/a> We asked Mashable's readers to show us the best Draw Something sketches they have created. How 'Draw Something' Is Taking Over the World/a> It's official: The world is obsessed with Draw Something. Learn the numbers behing the break-out game's astounding growth. Hang Ten! How the History of Surfing Went Digital How the author of the successful Encyclopedia of Surfing is gathering online support to take the print project completely digital. This Is What Your Future Home Might Look Like Believe it or not, the future of the urban architecture could be in plain sight. We explored two viable options. 9 Bold Predictions for the Digital World of 2020 Click through the slideshow to see what our experts foresee: artificial intelligence, cloud computing, virtual healthcare and digital jewelry. Happy 404 Day! Here Are the Web's Funniest Error Messages/a> In honor of 4/04/12, we recapped some of the Internet's funniest 404 error messages. 7 Tech Time Warps That Will Blow Your Mullet Off/a> These YouTube videos look at today's most used apps and technology as if they had been created in the '80s and '90s. 7 Crazy Tech Toys You Could Buy With Your Tax Refund The average U.S. federal tax refund is $2,946. Think of all the awesome gadgets you could get with it! 8 Handy Tablet Styluses to Boost Your Creativity Whether you're sick of getting fingerprints all over your iPad or you want to get seriously creative, try a stylus for your tablet. For more tech news and resources, you can follow Mashable's tech channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, akinbostanci. Top 10 Twitter Pics of the Week Saturday, April 07, 2012 5:42 PM Charlie White Well hello there, Android Instagram users! You had quite an impact on the pictorial portion of Twitter this week, as evidenced by the huge influx of pictures from the brand-new app. That new burst of enthusiasm drove our picture total from which to choose our top 10 Twitter pics of the week to more than 52 million. You'll notice that foolish holiday that some of us love to hate -- April Fools' Day -- topped the list this week, followed by a couple of positively lovely pictures, a bit of rueful comedy, some much-needed social activism and a whole lot more. SEE MORE: Top 10 Twitter Pics of the Week Where did all these fascinating pictures come from, anyway? We had the assistance of our astute partners at Skylines, whose supersharp trendwatcher Julie Donders (@IkbenJulie) wielded Skylines' powerful custom algorithm that's able to extract the most explosively popular pictures. Beyond that, her incisive writing helps us make sense of this astonishing variety of imagery. So once again, we bring you the most popular pics of the Twitterverse and beyond, all boiled down to the microcosm that is the Top 10 Twitter Pics of the Week. In case you missed them, here are last week's Top 10 Twitter Pics. Exclusive Look Inside the New Facebook HQ: You'll Like This [PICS] Saturday, April 07, 2012 3:50 PM Chris Taylor It's been a little more than a year since Facebook bought a 57-acre campus on the outskirts of Menlo Park in Silicon Valley, and started the slow process of turning it into its headquarters of the future. Well, the future is now. As of last week, every last Facebook staffer has been moved into the Menlo Park facility, which is almost unrecognizable compared to the way it looked a year ago. Mashable checked in on the new Facebook HQ in December, but there's been a lot going on since then. The entire campus has a fresh coat of paint -- not to mention fresh graffiti-style spray painted and stenciled artwork everywhere. (Employees are encouraged to "hack their space.") We got an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at what makes Facebook tick -- the high-tech booking systems, amusingly-named conference rooms, and premium caffeination facilities. (What really makes Facebook so eager to constantly upgrade itself? Two words: Philz Coffee.) We saw plenty of things that make working at the social network so much fun -- including a wall where Jeremy Lin had marked his height, towering above the rest of the staff. Take a look at the pics, and tell us in the comments whether you'd want to work here. YouTube Passion Project Sends a Journal Around the World Saturday, April 07, 2012 2:32 PM Joann Pan The MeetingLife Journal Project is an art project that started in Rome, Italy on Nov. 11 and has traveled to 11 countries and counting. The online passion project is inspired by travel, life and YouTube. For the past three months, a leather-bound journal has been traveling around the world into the hands of YouTube personalities. As soon as these YouTube video bloggers get this notebook, they are encouraged to make video responses about their week with the journal. "It's an experiment we are doing to find out how positively peoples' lives can change by coming across random people and random experiences," Ernesto Cinquenove, web communications director at startup MeetingLife, told Mashable. So far, the MeetingLife Journal Project has reached 15 YouTubers around the world, in locations including Norway, Germany and Portugal. On YouTube, the project has garnered over 500,000 views, plus thousands of comments by supporters and individuals who want to be a part of the project. The latest video blogger to fill the notebook's pages is 20-year-old Ena Clark from Bergen, Norway. The film student and singer has been making YouTube videos since 2006. Participants are encouraged to read the book's entries. Clark made a video while taking the book to the center of her Norwegian hometown, surrounded by traditional Norwegian architecture and mountains. In the video, we see her reading the notebook. Cinquenove told Mashable the team loves the "romantic" aspect of the notebook. "In a world where everyone communicates via Facebook or Twitter using pen and paper makes you appreciate simple things," he said. "Using the social networking sites and the Internet, we are reaching more people and affecting as many people's lives as possible." The notebook is tracked and mapped using Google Maps. Updates are available on MeetingLife's Twitter and Facebook pages. Pieces of the project coalesce on the blog, creating an inspirational read. Due to the interest in the project, the group may open it to non-YouTubers in the future, according to Cinquenove. The journal's next destinations will be England and the United States. Who will receive the notebook is still a surprise. SEE ALSO: Theater Company Lives Between Cyberspace and the Stage Individuals who want to partake in the passion project can upload a video or write a blog entry for the MeetingLife blog. The blog's followers will vote who gets the journal. "Try to be as inspirational as possible," Cinquenove said. "It's about spreading a positive message to the world." MeetingLife Journal Project participant 19-year-old Rafael Moreira in Oporto, Portugal told Mashable after reading the book the message was clear-cut, despite its diverse contents of drawings, stories and Post-it notes. "I think whoever gets to hold this journal in their hands is going to realize how big this project is and how it connects so many people in one place," Moreira said. Watch Moreira's video from the project: Images courtesy of MeetingLife Top 6 Mashable Comments of the Week Saturday, April 07, 2012 1:11 PM Keith Kaplan We're back with our weekly top comments from the Mashable community. In this column, we showcase the best comments we see from our readers, on our site as well as from our Facebook page. We're always looking for insightful contributions that spark discussion, add unique perspective, or simply make us laugh. This week, some of the most-discussed topics we covered included Mashable's April Fools Day prank with Conan O'Brien and Google's launch of project glass, which includes Augmented Reality Glasses. There was also a lot discussion around the Flashback Trojan virus that infected many Apple computers during mid-week. Below, check out this week's roundup of our top 6 comments from readers. If you haven't commented on a Mashable article before, check out Mashable Follow, our content curation and social tool, as well as our comment guidelines to learn more. We'd love for you to join the conversation. Remember to comment on next week's articles for a chance to be in the top comments roundup. About.me iPhone App Launches With 'Who's Nearby' Feature Saturday, April 07, 2012 12:35 PM Joann Pan The simple one-page profile platform About.me is now available on iPhones. Since its 2010 launch and acquisition by AOL, around 1.5 million people have built a splash page, a collection of their social media handles. An About.me page consists of a background photo, as little as two or three lines of text and buttons linking to a person's social networks. It's a summary of who you are online that you can attach to email signatures, attach to Twitter and now view on your phone. The personal pages are short and sweet. The sleek interface packs a punch with its analytics system. Stats include views per month, clicks, links to you, average time spent on people and more. Now, About.me iPhone app users can make pages on-the-go as well as connect with people on the street with the mobile app. The 'Who's Nearby' feature -- unique to the app -- is something that will appeal to people watchers, co-founder Ryan Freitas told Mashable. "There is this ability to create an opportunity for discovery, to see the way people are literally around you in a geographical location and how they represented themselves creatively," Freitas said. "They have done something interesting to show off who they are as a person." The app brings many pieces of the successful web platform to the iPhone. About.me creators say much of the website's appeal lies in the ability for people to browse the directory, not limited to friends. SEE ALSO: 38 Million Americans Visit Social Networks on Mobile Devices 'Near Daily' "People enjoy the people-watching we provide," Freitas said. "Not voyeurism, but about getting additional information about the people around you." Privacy consistently being a controversial topic with location-based apps, About.me requires users to opt-in to become visible on the network. The app does more than finding businesses on the go, says Freitas. It's about finding interesting people to follow on Twitter or cool websites to visit. "With the app, it doesn't always need to be about utility," Freitas said. "It can be about something as simple as finding out interesting people around you who you haven't met yet." About.me is now working on apps for iPad and Android market.		TOP STORIES TODAY Top 10 Twitter Pics of the Week Exclusive Look Inside the New Facebook HQ: You'll Like This [PICS] 68-Year-Old Skateboarding Professor Becomes Viral Meme [PICS] 43 New Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed YouTube Passion Project Sends a Journal Around the World TOP TOPICS Trending 5,394 followers Tech 8,063 followers Social Media 66,115 followers Business 33,703 followers Gadgets 7,541 followers Apps And Software 836 followers Facebook 79,659 followers Dev & Design 564 followers Mobile 4,582 followers Twitter 52,708 followers
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