World News

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  Slashdot Struggles to Remain Relevant in The Social Web

  29th July 2010 09:51

  Earlier today we published an analysis of the top traffic drivers in social media, based on data from Web analytics company Woopra. The biggest traffic driver was StumbleUpon (51%), followed by Digg (30%), Hacker News (12%) and Reddit (5%). Surprisingly, tech news community Slashdot was not in the list of top referrers. In fact, according to Woopra CEO John Pozadzides, Slashdot "drives close to 0% of traffic to the sites Woopra measures." (emphasis ours) Why is Slashdot almost irrelevant to…

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  5 Critical Web Metrics To Keep a Close Eye On

  29th July 2010 07:10

  You probably have a good idea of how many page views and unique visitors your company's website gets, but how many people are truly interacting with your brand? How successful are your digital marketing efforts? Traditional Web analytics metrics can provide a ton of actionable intelligence about your site's users, but only when they're combined with other measurements does the full picture start to emerge. With so many measurements and data points flying across your desktop, it's hard to know…

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  Fake Chinese iPads No Longer Hot Sellers

  29th July 2010 06:38

  China's vibrant "shanzhai" (also "shanzai") industry, which modifies or knocks off existing electronic products, quickly pounced on the iPad as it did many other phones and devices. Shanzai.com, a site that reviews these ersatz gadgets, reported the first iPad clone in March. Since then the faux iPads have reportedly been selling like crazy. "China's shanzhai industry is rolling out 'iPads' faster that people can say 'one gig or two'!" CNNGo wrote in June. But months after the iPad's release, Chinese…

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  Turn-key, Customizable WordPress Hosting & Maintenance Now Offered by WP Engine

  29th July 2010 05:06

  A small team of high-profile developers are unveiling its new service for hosting customizable but automatically maintained WordPress publishing software installs tonight. WP Engine seeks to serve what they believe is a large market: businesses that need more customizability than WordPress.com hosted accounts offer at low-end prices but more ease of use and scalability support than the millions of WordPress.org users get running open source installs on their own or rented servers. For $50 a month, the service will offer…

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  Kindle Wins E-Reader Price Battle, But It Hasn't Won the War

  29th July 2010 03:04

  Is the latest, cheapest Kindle ($139) evidence of an escalating e-reader price war? The Kindle has gotten pleasantly better and cheaper since its debut for $399 in 2007, when it sold out in hours. By last year, the price was down to $259. Then in June, Barnes & Noble slashed the price of its Nook e-reader to $199. Amazon dropped the price of the simplest Kindle to $189 almost immediately. That's when both companies stopped making money on the e-readers,…

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  Gist Gets $4 Million and the Catalyst is the Cloud

  29th July 2010 02:30

  The social enterprise space continues to gain acceptance. After years of promise, the market seems to be truly hitting its stride. This is best represented by the continued funding of social enterprise services such as Gist, which today announced it raised another $4 million. A catalyst for this new energy has to be the synergies with cloud computing, which is fueling apps and ecosystems that provide a fertile place for SaaS services to grow and build its subscription base. Demand…

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  Maybe Your Customers Don't Want to Talk to You

  29th July 2010 01:30

  Despite all the buzz surrounding social media marketing, its promise to better enable conversations between businesses and their customers, a recent essay in the Harvard Business Review by Matt Dixon and Lara Ponomareff point to research that suggests that maybe your customers really aren't that interested in talking to you after all. "Have you ever walked into an airport, seen that there is nobody in line at the check-in counter, but still made a bee-line for the self-service kiosk?" the…

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  Maybe Your Customers Don't Want to Talk to You

  29th July 2010 01:30

  Despite all the buzz surrounding social media marketing, its promise to better enable conversations between businesses and their customers, a recent essay in the Harvard Business Review by Matt Dixon and Lara Ponomareff point to research that suggests that maybe your customers really aren't that interested in talking to you after all. "Have you ever walked into an airport, seen that there is nobody in line at the check-in counter, but still made a bee-line for the self-service kiosk?" the…

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  Why Facebook Questions Could Be Zuckerberg's Dream Come True

  29th July 2010 00:31

  Take one look at the newly launched Facebook Questions feature and it's clear that things are about to change dramatically on the world's largest social network. Take a second look and it's also clear that the feature isn't working very well yet - but it will be fixed and is going to be a very big deal. A few million people have been given access this afternoon to Facebook Questions, a social Question & Answer feature built under the leadership…

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  The Real Question About Facebook Questions: What Will The API Do?

  29th July 2010 00:00

  In theory, Facebook's new question and answer feature has a million possibilities for users, app developers, advertisers and search engine marketers. But the feature's significance will largely depend on what the promised Application Programming Interface (API), the technical platform that lets outside developers build on Facebook data, will let developers do. Will marketers flood Facebook with automatically-posted queries and self-promoting answers? Will advertisers target specific users based on their queries? And crucially, will developers be able to tap into the…