This is the third post in a three-part series. The first part was Nick Carr, hypertext and delinkification. The second part was Money changes everything.

Nick Carr, like the rest of the “Web rots our brains” contingent, views links as primarily subtractive and destructive. Links direct us away from where we are to somewhere else on the Web. They impede our concentration, degrade our comprehension, and erode our attention spans.

It’s important, first, to understand that every single one of these criticisms of links has been raised against every single new media form for the past 2500 years. (Rather than rehash this hoary tale, I’ll point you to Vaughan Bell’s excellent summary in Slate. For a full and fascinating account of the earliest episode in this saga — Socrates’ denunciation of the written word — I recommend the elaboration of it in Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid.)

Throughout history, the info-panic critique has been one size fits all. The media being criticized may change, but the indictments are remarkably similar. That tells us we’re in the presence of some ancestral predilection or prejudice. We involuntarily defend the media forms we grew up with as bastions of civilization, and denounce newcomers as barbaric threats to our children and our way of life.

That’s a lot to hang on the humble link, which — in today’s Flash-addled, widget-laden, real-time-streaming environment — seems more like an anchor of stability than a force for subversion. But even if we grant Carr his premise that links slow reading and hamper understanding (which I don’t believe his evidence proves at all), I’ll still take the linked version of an article over the unlinked.

I do so because I see links as primarily additive and creative. Even if it took me a little longer to read the text-with-links, even if I had to work a bit harder to get through it, I’d come out the other side with more meat and more juice.

Links, you see, do so much more than just whisk us from one Web page to another. They are not just textual tunnel-hops or narrative chutes-and-ladders. Links, properly used, don’t just pile one “And now this!” upon another. They tell us, “This relates to this, which relates to that.”

Links announce our presence. They show a writer’s work. They are badges of honesty, inviting readers to check that work. They demonstrate fairness. They can be simple gestures of communication; they can be complex signifiers of meaning. They make connections between things. They add coherence. They build context.

If I can get all that in return, why would I begrudge the link-wielding writer a few more seconds of my time, a little more of my mental effort?

Let’s take these positive aspects of linking in ascending order of importance.

Links say “hello.”

A link to another site can serve as a way of telling that site, “I just said something about you.” This invites spammy abuse, of course. But it remains an elegantly simple device. Many bloggers still check their referrers today as they did a decade ago in the early days of weblogging. High-traffic sites can’t and won’t bother paying much attention to this, but out in the middle and nether reaches of the Web-traffic curve, this kind of link remains a valid and valuable social gesture.

Links show a writer’s work.

Any post or page with hand-selected links provides a record of the writer’s research, reading and sourcing. Some people are happier with this stuff collected at the end, as we did for centuries in print. But linking in situ gives the reader the information right where it’s needed. (If reading a link adds to “cognitive load,” surely the effort of scanning down to a footnote or, even worse, flipping back to an endnote piles on even heftier brain-freight.)

Links keep us honest and fair.

If you’re quoting someone and you link to the original, you’re saying to the reader, “Check my work — see if I’ve presented the other person’s point of view accurately and fairly.” This provides a powerful check on bullying and misrepresentation. It’s the rant without links, the disconnected diatribe, that’s suspect.

In a media environment where a dwindling number of participants believes that objectivity is either possible or desirable, the best yardstick for fairness we have is this: does a writer present the perspectives of those he disagrees with in a way that they feel is fair? Linking to those perspectives is a way for a writer to say: Go ahead — see if I got you right.

Links enhance trust.

Let me quote Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen, from 1999 (in a text I reread thanks to a link I followed from a discussion of my earlier post at Crooked Timber):

Not being afraid to link to other sites is a sign of confidence, and third-party sites are much more credible than anything you can say yourself. Isolated sites feel like they have something to hide.

Links knit context into the Web.

Most Web critiques includes ritual denunciation of the medium’s disconnected, fragmentary nature. And certainly there are plenty of fragments out there in HTTP-land. But the disconnected ones, by definition, don’t get read much. We read the posts and pages that get widely linked to.

A fragment that gets connected is no longer a fragment. It becomes a working part, a piece of a mosaic, a strand in a web. (There’s a reason these words are embedded in Internet history.)

It always amazes me to hear the complaint that the Web doesn’t provide readers with enough context. Then I realize that this criticism is usually made by print journalists. They are accustomed to having their words acquire a bountiful context on paper. Then, typically, their work is spat onto the Web by an automated content-management system — and served up without a link in sight.

Theirs is an experience of loss of context. But for the rest of us, writing for the Web offers more frequent and potent opportunities to give our words context than we’ve ever had before.

What pages shall we connect our words to? We have the entire rest of the Web to choose from! And the choices we make say worlds about our writing.

The context that links provide comes in two flavors: explicit and implicit. Explicit context is the actual information you need to understand what you’re reading. Here’s what I mean, if I can go all recursive on you for a moment: Let’s say you landed on this article out of nowhere. Someone sent you a link. (Now, right there Carr and the link-skeptics might say, “”There’s the problem! If you were reading a magazine or a book, that would never happen.” To which I can only say, if the opportunity to receive pointers to interesting reading from a network of friends is a problem, it’s one I am very happy to have.)

So you land on my page and you might well have no idea what I’m talking about, since this is part three of a series. Links make it easy for me to show you where to catch up. If you don’t have time for that, links let me orient you more quickly in my first paragraph with reference to Carr’s post. I can do all this without having to slow down those readers who’ve been following from the start with summaries and synopses. Again, even if the links that achieve this do demand a small fee from your working brain (which remains an unproven hypothesis), I’d say that’s a fair price.

By implicit context, I mean something a little more elusive: The links you put into a piece of writing tell a story (or, if you will, a meta-story) about you and what you’ve written. They say things like: What sort of company does this writer keep? Who does she read? What kind of stuff do her links point to — New Yorker articles? Personal blogs? Scholarly papers? Are the choices diverse or narrow? Are they obvious or surprising? Are they illuminating or puzzling? Generous or self-promotional?

Links, in other words, transmit meaning, but they also communicate mindset and style. By this, I don’t mean “stylish linking.” There have been fads in linking — the first and best-known was probably the playfully ironic, self-deprecating style pioneered by Suck.com in 1995 (I wrote about it in Salon a long time ago). They come and go, just as catch-phrases and tics in casual writing do. As with other link mannerisms, remnants of the Suck style survive in a few places; but mostly, Web users have rejected the practice of links that obscure or misdirect or joke. We prefer links that clarify.

The history of Web linking has been a long chronicle of controversies we didn’t need to have: irrelevant debates over issues like so-called deep linking (if you really don’t want to be linked to, why are you on the public Web?) or the notion of a power-law-driven A-list in blogging (if you want to become a celebrity, other media are far more efficient). To this list, we can now add the “delinkification” dustup.

It’s hard to imagine the benefit for ourselves, or for the Web, of a general retreat from linking. Writing on the Web without linking is like making a movie without cutting. Sure, it can be done; there might even be a few situations where it makes sense. But most of the time, it’s just head-scratchingly self-limiting. To choose not to link is to abandon the medium’s most powerful tool — the thing that makes the Web a web.

A long time ago, I wrote a column titled Fear of Links about the then-burgeoning movement of webloggers. I urged professional writers to stop looking down their noses at links and those who make them: “A journalist who today disdains the very notion of providing links to readers may tomorrow find himself without a job.”

That was 1999. Today, we live in that piece’s “tomorrow.”

It’s free and comes with a slew of touch interface bells and whistles built right in. The app is intended to allow for seamless navigation between tweets, photos, web pages, videos and other media and updates. It’s also usable even for those who don’t have Twitter accounts.

Twitter for iPad [iTunes link] has a few new UI touches that you haven’t seen elsewhere. These features are custom-designed for the larger screen and touch capabilities of the iPad. It also caters to what the iPad was made for: media consumption rather than creation. Twitter’s Leland Rechis, a mobile UX designer, writes on the Twitter blog that the iPad is “a device that really lets content shine.”

The main interface is a series of panes that can expand and retract based on the kind of content the user wants to access. “Tapping on a Tweet opens a pane to the right. Depending on the content in that Tweet, you’ll see a video or photo, or maybe a news story, or perhaps another Tweet. You can continue tapping on Tweets, opening new panes, and getting new content as long as you’d like,” wites Rechis.

Media viewing is optimized for the iPad, as well. Videos play in-line with other content and can be loaded while you’re browsing through your timeline. You can pinch a video to view it fullscreen, too.

Finally, Twitter has really done some interesting things with touchscreen capabilities in this app. When you pinch a tweet, you’ll see details about the author and have a list of actions you can take, including reply and retweet. A two-finger pull-down gesture will show the entire conversation around a tweet.

It’s a creative way to approach multitouch app building, and we look forward to playing with it ourselves. We’re also really looking forward to what apps may come to other tablets in the future.

The iTunes release is rolling out right now; if you can’t get the latest version of the app right now, wait a bit and try again. And of course, let us know what you think of Twitter for iPad in the comments.

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Excited about your new Facebook page but don’t know what’s next?  What does a truly advanced company look like in social business?  They can say yes to seven or more of these ten criteria.

We’ve been interviewing the most sophisticated brands in the world when it comes to social business for our upcoming report on “Enterprise Social Strategists Role”.  We’ve come to learn which companies are advanced and why.  Secondly, I meet a variety of companies who tell me they are “Very advanced, having done this for a few years, and have dozens of Facebook efforts” but when I ask them some specific questions on their sophistication, they often retract their statement.

How to tell if your Company is Advanced: 10 Criteria Of Social Business Maturity.
Corporations that have these and other following elements in place, may truly be sophisticated when it comes to social business:

1. Clear understanding of their customers socialgraphics. Clear understanding of how their customers use social media by knowing the socialgraphics of your customers.  Granular knowledge of where their customers are, which behaviors they use, who they trust for information, and how they influence their peers in the context of their own products.
   The true test? Your company can adjust budgets of your integrated social strategy based on data –not gut feel.
2. Your organization is in Hub and Spoke, Dandelion, or Holistic formation. Social technologies enable all employees that want to talk to customers to do so.  This means a massive change inside of your organization to get ready.  Your company is sophisticated if you’ve organized in the Hub and Spoke, Dandelion, or Holistic and all employees clearly know their role, process, and contact points.
   The true test? A product crises has emerged on YouTube on a Friday evening before a three day weekend and you can sleep peacefully.
3. Corporate website integration: Social sign on. When customers come to the corporate site, they can see which one of their friends uses which product, and what they think about it.  Common technologies would include OpenID, Facebook Connect, and other social sign on technologies.
   The true test? You can disable your corporate registration page and use social logins instead.
4. Personalized corporate website based on social data. When a prospect (someone who’s never logged into you website before) arrives to your corporate website, they receive a customized experience based on their social IDs.  This would be based on Social CRM infrastructure, social sign on technology and a large inventory of personalized content.
   The true test? The voices of the consumers real world friends emerge above that of the brand right on the corporate website, see Levi’s foray.
5. Thriving advocacy program: customers are actively selling on your behalf. The sophisticated marketing program isn’t really the company talking much at all, instead they’ve a thriving advocacy program and word of mouth program that encourages customers to recruit prospects for them –all unpaid.  Learn how to do this, by reading this piece on Forbes.
   The true test? most leads are coming in through existing customers –not your sales team.
6. A community of customers supports each other, reducing support center calls. A company that has a thriving branded community where customers are self-supporting each other with little aid from the brand or the support team is a sign of a sophisticated social support program.
   The true test? A majority of customer support issues are resolved by community faster, with greater satisfaction than your dedicated support team.
7. Anticipation of prospects and customers using Social CRM technology.  Brands can anticipate before a customer has a problem, or grab leads “right out of the air” by using brand monitoring software, intelligent keyword monitoring and responding to be faster than real time using Social CRM strategies.
   The true test? sales and marketing are getting leads before the consideration phase, and the support team reduces inbound calls by triggering the community to resolve a potential issue before it’s escalated.
8. Innovation of new products with customers using web collaboration.  Companies that use these same tools to glean input from customers (ethnographic data collection) or create private communities, or use collaboration and innovation tools like Ideastorm or Uservoice and build new products and services demonstrate true sophistication.
   The true test? faster time to market on products because consumers have dictated the specifications, and less inventory as the product is built on spec.
9. Supply chain is influenced by social data in real time. Social media isn’t just about marketing and support, but is very valuable in listening to customer signals then to anticipate which products, services, and teams should be when and where.
   The true test? Your company is sophisticated if you’re using social data to adjust your supply chain in real time based on customer signals from checkins, tweets, and plancasts.
10. Real time reporting of revenues, costs and efficiency:  I’ve met with some of the most advanced teams, and they have clear reporting and can measure the increased revenues (over the total cost of the program) to tell their executives the true ROI of their business program.
    The true test? Real time dashboard measures the health of all social channels revenues, CSAT, sentiment and overall program costs.

We’ve done research on the roadmap for companies to reach these 10 levels of nirvana, but have found few companies that have done a few, or even a majority of them. If you know of any companies that have achieved five out of ten of these criteria, we’d love to know, please leave a comment.

As the fugitive businessman Asil Nadir flew back to Britain from his North Cyprus bolt-hole last week, Sean O'Neill, the crime editor of The Times, scooped Fleet Street by being the only print journalist on the plane. Yet those searching Google for the latest on the breaking story that morning would have found no sign of O'Neill's exclusive – only follow-up stories by rival news organisations such as The Guardian and ITN.

Note: Data Week is a new series that collects notable stories and developments from the data world.

Artist and scientist Stephen von Worley announced the launch of a new blog, Data Pointed, showcasing his data visualization research. "One part magazine and two parts blog", the site tells the story of von Worley's own data visualizations, and surveys choice picks from others.

The lead story covers the results of the XKCD color name survey, illustrating the entertaining differences in the way different genders refer to colors.

Across the top, witness the nuanced verbal repertoire of feminine color differentiation. While us men are busy grunting, guzzling beer, and shoving our hands down our pants, women get specific by mixing fruits, animals, spices, flowers, and other such familiarities with finely-honed modifiers like neon and dusty. The result? A vast panoply of warm-fuzzy color names that seemingly trounces anything our Y-chromosomes have to offer.

The visualization shows colors organized horizontally by hue, and vertically by gender preference. Immediately obvious is the contrast in nuance between female, at the top, and male. Click the graphic below to reach the full article and interactive visualization.

The community Q&A site Quora is rich with information about data science, analytics and computing. An especially illuminating answer was given this week to the question How do I become a data scientist — how does someone with a computer science background get the math and statistics knowledge required for data science?

Providing an extensive reply, Alex Kamil gives eight points from his perspective as an undergraduate student. Many of these reference statistics and math, and Kamil provides an excellent list of papers, websites and technologies to tinker with.

Several of Kamil's suggested starting points struck me as common themes among those who define themselves as data scientists:

• Start learning statistics by coding with R: whatever the size of the data you're working with, many data analysts perform and prototype investigations using the R language. Some will later translate these into larger map-reduce jobs to be run on Hadoop, for instance. R provides a hands-on way for developers to teach themselves statistics in practice.

• Linear algebra: a grounding in linear algebra is common among many data scientists, and important because matrix math underpins many data mining applications, such as the famous PageRank.

• Machine learning: allowing computers to alter behavior based on input data is fundamental to many innovative data-based products and services. Many developers start this ad-hoc, but there is much available literature. Kamil references Bradford Cross' extensive list of machine learning resources.
  

There are many more starting points referenced in the full answer.

The field of data science is a place where book learning meets code and produces results. In the words of Kurt Lewin: "There's nothing so practical as a good theory."

Cloudant, providers of hosted CouchDB infrastructure, have released their clustering technology, BigCouch, as open source . CouchDB is a document-oriented "NoSQL" database, noted for its replication features. Use it as part of your application and you can count on database replication "for free."

As part of offering cloud-based CouchDB services, Cloudant has developed software to create clusters of CouchDB instances, distributed among many servers. In Cloudant's words, "Instead of one big honking CouchDB, the result is an elastic data store which is fully CouchDB API-compliant."

The most direct comparison to existing technologies is with Amazon's Dynamo, according to the announcement:

The clustering layer [features] consistent hashing, replication, and quorum for read/write operations. CouchDB view indexing occurs in parallel on each partition, and can achieve impressive speedups as compared to standalone serial indexing.

You can download BigCouch from its Github Project Page, and collaborate on the #cloudant IRC channel on Freenode.

Elsewhere this week, ReadWriteEnterprise reports that scientists working at CERN are using CouchDB to support their work on the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment (CMS) on the famous Large Hadron Collider.

Chief among the attractions of CloudDB to the scientists is the ability to manage petabytes of data, the built-in replication features, and an easy compatibility with Oracle. Simon Metson of the Data Management and Workflow Management group at the CMS project reports that CouchDB has a shallow learning curve, but is harder for those with deep SQL backgrounds: "The more you know Oracle, the harder it is to pick up."

If you enjoyed any of the previous items, stay tuned — we're excited to announce the launch of Strata, an O'Reilly conference focusing on the business and practice of data. The conference will be held in Santa Clara, Calif. from Feb. 1-3, 2011.

At O'Reilly, we believe that the future belongs to those who understand how to collect and use their data successfully. There's a change in both the skills of data analysts and the technology they use that's sweeping through industry and science. Our aim with Strata is to be the defining event for that change: for practitioners, businesses and data vendors.

The call for participation is open until Sept. 28. We're looking for proposals from practitioners, business leaders, analysts, designers, and developers covering the spectrum of data business and practice. Suggested topics include:

• Distributed data processing, Hadoop ecosystem
• From research to product
• Streaming data processing
• Becoming a data-driven organization
• Data science best practices
• Data acquisition, cleaning, distribution and markets
• Machine learning
• Training and recruitment of data scientists
• Applications, case studies, and cautionary tales
• Visualization and design principles
• Augmented reality and immersive interfaces
• Data protection, privacy, and policy
• Changing role of business intelligence

Email us news, tips and interesting tidbits at dataweek@oreilly.com.

Thanks to a partnership with Vlingo, owners of Android 2.0 or higher-equipped phones can now check in to Foursquare and update their status on Facebook and Twitter simply by speaking into their phones.

To try it out, download the free Vlingo app to your Android handset.

Using your voice, you can then update your location status on Foursquare by saying “check into Logan Airport”, locate your friends with commands like “where are my friends?” and “who’s nearby?” as well as send shout-outs to your buddies (e.g. “shout at Logan Airport waiting to board a plane to San Francisco”).

That’s not all though. The latest version of the Vlingo app also lets users share the service with their friends with the click of a button and also update their status on Facebook, Twitter and/or Foursquare at the same time by saying “social update” and speaking the message.

Previous Vlingo features remain, too: you can still use the app to send text and email messages, search the web, use Google maps and more.

As for BlackBerry, iPhone and Nokia S60 users – they’ll have to be patient for a while before they can start updating their status and locations with their voice.

Vlingo says it plans to roll out this functionality to other supported platforms in a future release but didn’t mention specific dates.

Do you consider voice-driven applications to be an ideal way to interact with mobile apps on your phone? Why (not)?

We would love for you to join us, so we’re giving away passes to BlogWorld. To enter, answer the following question — “What is the future of blogging?” — in the comments below. Readers with the best answers will win one of five “full access” tickets to BlogWorld, which includes MashBash. Winners are invited to attend this industry celebration where the online world comes together to meet, relax and make important business networking connections.

Date: Friday, October 15
Time: 8:00 p.m.-10 p.m.
Location:Haze at Aria. 3730 Las Vegas Boulevard, Las Vegas, NV.
Tickets: Must have BlogWorld Badge to enter.

• Simply click the “Like” button on our Facebook Page (below).
• Respond to the question: “What is the future of blogging?” by noon ET on Monday, September 6, in the comments section of this post.

Please use your real identity so that we may contact you via e-mail, Twitter or Facebook to let you know that you’ve won and how to redeem your prize.

BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Las Vegas on October 15-16: “Join us at the World’s Largest New Media event and learn about Content Creation, Distribution and Monetization strategies, step-by-step techniques and bleeding-edge tools from the most successful Bloggers, Podcasters, Social Media Pro’s, Internet TV and Radio Content Generators and New Media Marketing Pro’s! From the premier educational sessions at the Social Media Business Summit and BlogWorld Conference, to the resource-rich New Media Expo, to Amazing Networking events…it’s One economical trip, One weekend, One Big Show you can’t afford to miss!”

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The Last Beach Party in 2010 by razrez

Infographics at their best are more than just pictures — they can provide new understandings, succinct summaries, or just plain old fun.

In that respect, reading newspaper archives isn’t the only way to get a deeper understanding of current events. Infographics can help us get a better grasp on what’s going on.

Check out these 10 visualizations to learn more about the news with a quick look.

Last month alone, Google acquired social-search service Angstro, visual shopping search engine like.com, and social currency company Jambool. Google has been on an acquisition binge for some time, and it’s getting tricky to keep track of its appetite.

This graphic shows a timeline of Google’s activity in three categories: “Building Revenue Streams,” “Cutting Competition,” or “A Little of Both.”

The campaign for gay marriage has passed a multitude of milestones over the last decade. Unfortunately for those trying to keep track of them, the victories and setbacks vary drastically by state. Decisions are reversed and in some cases overturned by higher courts, which makes progress hard to track.

This map from the LA Times shows the status of gay marriage in each state by month. Click on a state for its most recent ruling or watch the country change from being legally similar in its treatment of same-sex couples in 2000 to sharply divided in 2010.

The frequency and fatality of IEDs (homemade bombs) in Afghanistan was highlighted when WikiLeaks published more than 90,000 secret documents about the Afghan war. Anti-war activists published this illustrative video that includes all of the incidents reported in these leaked documents.

On April 20, an explosion on a BP drilling rig started what has become the largest accidental oil spill in history. Despite numerous strategies that were deployed to plug the leak, it wasn’t capped until July 15.

This video graphic by New Orleans online newspaper NOLA wraps timeline, graphic, and cumulative damage data into one easy-to-digest piece of media.

The CIA World Factbook has always been a great resource for putting news stories into the context of their geographic location. But now it’s also easy to get the information at a glance.

The World Factbook Dashboard allows you to color code the countries of the world by population, population growth, infant mortality, agricultural GDP, industry GDP, services GDP, total GDP, GDP/inhabitant, or inflation. Clicking on a country zooms in for more information.

This map from The New York Times illustrates not only which areas suffered the highest unemployment rate after the recession, but also offers the option to filter data by metropolitan areas, areas with housing bubbles, rural areas, and manufacturing centers.

The Wall Street Journal updates this map constantly with violent conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If you want to learn about the day-to-day details of the war or understand its scope, there’s no better visual resource.

Even if you read through every health care bill article, it could be hard to exactly pick out what the law would change about your insurance coverage and taxes. The Washington Post made it easy by providing this nifty tool. Input whether you have insurance coverage, your family size, your income, and your marital status, and it will tell you how health care reform will impact your life.

For the broader picture on healthcare reform, see this subway-style map from GOOD Magazine.

The government is still busy spending much of the $787 billion it allotted for the economic stimulus in February of last year. This infographic effectively illustrates how that huge chunk of change is being distributed.

This chilling interactive graphic from USA Today simply illustrates the deaths in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Information seekers can search deaths by personal factors like name, age, gender, race, or home town as well as by military service details, date, cause, or place.

CNN has a more elaborate version here.

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It’s the Holy Grail of interactive marketing: getting “social media influencers”—the ones with the voice and the reach, the ones to whom everyone else listens—to endorse and promote what you’re doing.

Recently, my company managed to inspire 60 such influencers to participate in our event, called The Influencer Project, and they even took it upon themselves to help spread the word.

People like Social Media Examiner’s own Michael Stelzner, Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scoble, Gary Vaynerchuk, David Meerman Scott, and others all signed on. We were grateful beyond belief.

Some of the brightest minds in social media spoke at The Influencer Project.

Why’d they come on board? And how’d we do it?

It takes creativity to inspire others.

Many of us who are new to the social media space want influencers to “get behind” our brands, products and special events.

We think we can just reach out to them, and if we have a great thing going on, they’ll naturally want to endorse what we’re doing.

It’s an honest mistake, usually, but it does backfire—or at least, it won’t get you the results you’re looking for.

Of course, if you have deep reserves of cash, you may be able to afford paying handsomely for a big name to review your product—although, to be sure, that can get into very tricky ethical territory and is a delicate issue.

But for the rest of us—for those who don’t have tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on “influencer outreach”—we have to be a little more creative.

In fact, we have to get rid of the very idea of “trying” to “get” a social media influencer to “back” our brand.

Instead, we need to create innovative ways to inspire not only well-known influencers, but also large numbers of participants, to join a project, a cause, an initiative. And that takes a different kind of thinking—one that I’ll explain below.

The thing is, no-one wants to be your salesperson—unless they are, of course, being paid to sell your products. But everyone—social media influencers included—wants to be part of something that’s bigger than them, that’s creative and that brings new ideas into the world.

So, without any further ado, here are my 5 creative ways for inspiring web celebrities to come on board with what you’re doing:

Don’t ask them to endorse a product or site. Instead, create a project—related to, but independent of, your brand—that they can get behind. Think about the “Yes We Can” video that will.i.am created for Barack Obama’s campaign.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsV2O4fCgjk

Regardless of your political leaning, there’s a lesson here. Yes, will.i.am’s a celebrity. And yes, Hollywood is known for bringing other celebrities on board political campaigns. But that’s not the fundamental point. The point is that there was a cause, an initiative, a project that people wanted to get behind, that inspired them to act—and they did.

This is what you need. You want to create something that many people will join. A cause, a vision.

Memetic means that it has a meme-like quality. Well, what’s a meme, you ask? In its simplest definition, a meme is an idea that spreads from person to person, one that’s so “catchy” that people almost can’t help but to spread it.

“Yes We Can” was a meme.

A meme is bigger than a brand. Just Do It is a meme. No Fear is a meme. The Red Bull Flugtag is a meme. It’s something that people can identify with, make their own and share with others. If you’re simply trying to strong-arm a social media influencer into singing your brand’s praises, good luck. But if you have a project that has memetic quality, then you’re on the right track.

A meme unto itself isn’t enough. Sure, you could get lots of YouTube video views by trying to replicate something like a funny hamster, but you won’t be enrolling people in a vision.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8Kyi0WNg40

In other words, you won’t be providing extraordinary value—to the end user or to the influencer.

On the other hand, if your project provides overwhelming value and is memetic, then you’re not only sure to inspire people, you’ll also be making the world a better place.

It makes business sense, too. Simply trying to make a campaign “go viral” for the sake of going viral is far riskier than creating a project that offers tremendous benefit. In our case, we provided users with more than 60 helpful tips that they could use to increase their digital influence in 60 minutes. They heard from luminaries they respected.

Everyone won. There was no attempt to manipulate people to act on our behalf for a hollow goal. It was values-driven all the way around.

There are two things all of us have an increasingly short supply of: time and attention. Unless you’re Apple or Microsoft and you’re offering a blogger a sneak peek at your new product, asking someone to write a whole blog post about you—or, for example, do an hour-long webinar to your not-quite-robust-enough-yet list of subscribers—is going to make getting a “yes” a lot harder.

In our case, we only asked for 60 seconds of the speaker’s time. The proposition was often met with enthusiasm. “Sure, I’d love to do a 60-second interview!” It was fun, short and interesting. There’s no way we would have gotten 60 busy people to do full-hour interviews each right off the bat. So we made it radically easy for them to say “yes.”

But that’s only part of the picture: we also made it incredibly easy for the audience to say “yes.” For only an hour of their time, we were going to give them 60 tips from 60 experts. Not a bad deal. And that’s exactly what we heard from participants: it was completely manageable and reasonable to take one hour to learn from so many people.

So don’t just reduce the barriers for those you want to headline your campaign, also make it easy for your intended audience to participate.

When describing his company’s financial practices, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said that while his software-as-a-service platform may have been revolutionary, his bookkeeping methods were as traditional as they get.

Similarly, I believe that it’s important to let your creativity and imagination run wild, and to create something new—for example, to take a conventional idea (say, marketing conference) and challenge it (the shortest marketing conference ever). But I see far too many campaigns that feature weird, wild and avant-garde stuff without making it accessible to the end users.

The “60-in-60″ idea was new. But it wasn’t “43-in-68.” We didn’t ask them to speak for 10 seconds. We didn’t request that they sing, dance or rap. In other words, it all made sense—both to them and to the audience. “60 tips” is still an attractive value proposition, and participants felt that they truly benefited from the advice.

But the other side of completely inaccessible and avant-garde is utter banality. Think of the typical webinar, conference or jargon-ridden special report. Sure, those can be great as ongoing lead-generation sources, but not as a way to get noticed and build digital influence rapidly.

So even though I’d recommend erring on the side of accessibility, I still want to challenge and encourage you to come up with something innovative.

Hopefully, these tips have given your creative faculties some juice to explore what you can do to inspire social media influencers—and your target audience—to join your cause.

What do you think? Have you had success recruiting influencers? Put your comments in the box below.

Of all topics, this is one of the perennials. People want more traffic, more attention, more awareness to their blog. It’s fair. We work hard on our blogs. We want more attention and traffic. If your business depends on volume, this is especially important (for instance, if you’re using ads). Getting traffic is a tricky business, and it requires a lot of experimentation. I’ll tell you what’s worked for me, so far, and I’ll tell you what you might try. Maybe others will educate us both in the comments on their best methods.

The first few seconds of someone’s attention are the hardest to pass. If you have a lame blog post title, no one’s going to want to read the post. For whatever reason, we react to “how to,” we react to “7 great,” we react to all kinds of things. Not sure where to look? I stole this advice from Brian Clark years ago: go to the grocery store, buy some ladies’ magazines like Cosmopolitan, and learn how THEY write headlines on the front page.

This entire series (and most of my blog posts) use graphics to catch your eye. It’s an easy way to get one’s attention. Screen captures help. Video helps. There are tons of ways to get people into a receptive space with your material, and graphics are just the easiest one.

Now that we’ve got a decent title, decent graphics, let’s be quick about your content.

Keep your posts brief (unless you want tons and tons of bookmarks). People don’t have all day to read. If you can keep your posts between 250-500 words, that’s in alignment with most people’s attention spans. Hey, you’re welcome to write whatever length you want. You asked me how to grow traffic to your blog. I can only give you results that I’ve tested. When I write a super long piece, I get much less involvement with it.

I’ve written about making shareability a priority. If you don’t have easy-to-share buttons on your blog, you’re missing the easiest way for people to see your stuff on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, and all the other sites where it would matter. Sharing out is a great way to make some more traffic happen. I also automatically push my posts into Facebook with their notes feature. I have an automated post into twitter via @broganmedia, but don’t do this same effect on my primary @chrisbrogan account.

In my case, subscriptions to my blog matter. I want people to subscribe, because I don’t necessarily survive on ad revenue. If you’re trying to monetize via ad revenue, and if your ads are in the header and the sidebar, a subscription really won’t help you get more traffic. If for whatever reason you want people to come to your website directly instead of via your RSS feed, you might want to obfuscate where you put your subscription information.

If you’re like me, you ask for the subscription all the time. In fact, I’ll ask now. You’re not yet subscribed? Enter your email (I respect your privacy):

Over in the Third Tribe, we talk about guest posts quite often as a great traffic-builder to your blog. Find someone who has a very similar kind of blog topic to yours (not sure where to start? Check out Alltop), and offer a guest blog post. Oh, and then actually follow through. I have heard recently from my friends who accept guest posts that often, people ask for something, get approval, and then don’t take an action. That doesn’t sound like a good plan. Just FYI.

This is one of those points where people disagree. I blog daily. Truth be told, I’m up to 2x a day most days. Why? Because the more I blog, the more people subscribe. I learned it from some of the larger blogger sites out there.

Lots of people justify once a week, or once every two weeks. That’s fine. But if you want to grow traffic to your blog, that’s a very long slow crawl towards that growth. That said, no matter which frequency you’ve chosen, stick to it. The moment you drop off the map, people who haven’t yet subscribed to you lose sight and move on.

You can always market your blog the good old fashioned way. I’ve had people hand me business cards at events that had a compelling question or interesting graphic, and then a URL to their blog. More often than not, I’ll at least check out the post. You might make postcards and bring them to the places where your prospective readers might congregate. For instance, if you write a restaurant blog, why not have a business card tray by the mints? Make an offer, just like you do with any other kind of marketing.

Often times, we sit around inside the fishbowl of social media and hope people from outside will find us. Here’s a hint, hero: the people you need are out there wondering what they can do to learn more about the thing you’re talking about. Go get ‘em, tiger.

I’m a big fan of the basics: write about what they need, make sure they see that you wrote about it, make it easy to carry on the relationship, make it easy for them to promote you to others.

Seems like a simple formula, and yet, we go through all kinds of hoops to come up with trickier methods. Try this one first. What do you say?

Samsung has finally spilled the details about its long-awaited tablet computer, the Galaxy Tab, during a press conference at the IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin.

Samsung calls its tablet a “smart media device,” and Galaxy Tab definitely has the specifications to back it up: Android 2.2 support, a Cortex A8 1 GHz processor, 512 MB of RAM and 16/32 GB of internal memory with the possibility of upgrading through microSD memory cards.

Furthermore, there’s a 7 inch TFT-LCD display with 1024×600 pixel resolution, a 3 megapixel camera with autofocus and LED Flash plus an additional fron 1.3 megapixel camera for video chats (that’s got to hurt iPad owners at least a little bit) as well as WiFi and 3G connectivity. The dimensions of the device are 190.09 x 120.45 x 11.98mm, with 380 grams of weight, and the battery should last through 7 hours of movie playback.

In other words, the iPad got a worthy competitor, not only because of the capable hardware the Tab is sporting, but also because it has the latest and greatest version of Android. Although it’s smaller than the iPad, whose screen measures 9.7 inches, Galaxy Tab does a lot of things the iPad cannot do: it has two cameras, it supports Flash and a wide variety of multimedia formats, including DivX, XviD, MPEG4, H.263, and H.264.

Samsung has partnered with Vodafone for the launch, and the Galaxy Tab will start selling in October in the majority of Vodafone’s European markets and later this year in the U.S and other markets.

More About: android, samsung, Samsung Galaxy Tab, Tablet

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An Event Apart, the conference for people who make websites, announces its 2011 schedule:

• Seattle – March 28-30
• Boston – May 2-4
• Atlanta – June 13-15
• Minneapolis – August 8-10
• San Francisco – December 12-14
• PLUS one additional city – date and location to be announced!

Join us for three days of the latest web standards, best practices, and creative inspiration with the web’s greatest speakers — including Alexa Andrzejewski, Andy Budd, Mark Boulton, Andy Clarke, Todd Dominey, Kristina Halvorson, Whitney Hess, Robert Hoekman, Jr., Jeremy Keith, Ethan Marcotte, Sarah Parmenter, Veerle Pieters, Jason Santa Maria, Jared Spool, Elliot Jay Stocks, Nicole Sullivan, Jeffrey Veen, Aarron Walter, Luke Wroblewski, and, of course, Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman.

Every two-day conference will be followed by A Day Apart, a one-day learning event dedicated to a special topic. You can register for just A Day Apart, or just An Event Apart, or save over $100 when you attend all three days. A Day Apart has been in very high demand this year and we’re thrilled to be bringing it to every one of our 2011 shows!

A Day Apart topics and our sixth city will all be announced soon. Subscribe to the ALA mailing list, or follow us on Twitter and Facebook to be the first to know!

Tickets are now on sale for An Event Apart Seattle 2011 and An Event Apart Boston 2011. Tickets for all 2011 shows, at the same price as in 2009 and 2010, will go on sale by or before January 1, 2011. Tickets are first-come, first-served. Every An Event Apart show in 2010 has sold out weeks in advance. Don’t miss your AEA event; register early!

Twitter officially disabled Basic authentication this week, the final step in the company's transition to mandatory OAuth authentication. Sadly, Twitter's extremely poor implementation of the OAuth standard offers a textbook example of how to do it wrong. This article will explore some of the problems with Twitter's OAuth implementation and some potential pitfalls inherent to the standard. I will also show you how I managed to compromise the secret OAuth key in Twitter's very own official client application for Android.

OAuth is an emerging authentication standard that is being adopted by a growing number of social networking services. It defines a key exchange mechanism that allows users to grant a third-party application access to their account without having to provide that application with their credentials. It also allows users to selectively revoke an application's access to their account.

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Ever since it became stable enough to use on a day-to-day basis on a Mac last year, Google Chrome has been my browser of choice. Other browsers have been adding some nice features — but Chrome keeps adding them faster. And today on its second birthday, that rate of change isn’t slowing down.

Google has officially rolled out Chrome 6 as the latest stable version of the browser today. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone using the dev or beta builds of the browser, but it’s nonetheless an important mark as it means it’s stable enough for mass consumption.

Remember that it was just two years ago when Google surprised the world by announcing a new browser (a little early) via a comic. The next day, we got the first shots of what the browser would look like — and it was released as a beta for Windows users. It actually looks pretty much the same today, but it’s now much, much faster (and when it launched it was already faster than most browsers out there).

Google says that Chrome today is a full three times faster when it comes to JavaScript performance versus Chrome circa 2008. The rapid speed increases have also undoubtedly pushed rival browsers to become faster, so we’ve all benefited.

Arguably more important to me is that despite adding all the new features – and extensions — Chrome still seems lightweight today. I fondly remember the good old days of 2004 when I first started using Firefox as my main browser and thinking how fresh and lightweight it felt compared to the atrocity that was IE. Firefox, sadly, got bloated over the years. So far, Chrome hasn’t put on the same weight. Here’s hoping it never does.

As I said, Chrome is also showing no signs of slowing down from a development standpoint. The browser is already in the process of morphing into version 7 as well. Chromium, the open source browser that Chrome is based on, has been hit version 7 a couple weeks ago — and the dev build of Chrome just went 7 as well. Google has said they hope to iterate every six weeks going forward.

These next few months are going to be arguably the most interesting times for the browser yet. The Chrome Web Store will soon open, bringing tightly integrated web-based apps into the browser. And then, of course, Chrome OS is due before the end of the year.

Happy birthday Chrome.

Chrome then:

Chrome now:

Today, we’re announcing that the Mozilla Labs project codenamed “Bespin” is now called Mozilla Skywriter. It remains a Labs experiment to see how great coding in the browser can be by making a powerful, customizable HTML5 text editor. We’re also announcing a move to GitHub.

We’ve had many compliments and complaints about the “Bespin” codename ever since we first introduced the project. You can’t please everyone, especially when it comes to naming. The Bespin codename, derived from the awesome “cloud city” in The Empire Strikes Back, was a fun name to use for an editor that enables “coding in the cloud”.

Since the initial release in February 2009, the Bespin has come a long way. The project has changed focus and expanded its reach. The “Bespin Embedded” releases have been showing up more and more including several entries in the recent “Node Knockout” competition: Nodify, Inflatable Churn, and Wrath. Other recent development environments on the web have also chosen to use Bespin, including ShiftEdit, jGate and Mozilla’s own Add-On Builder (aka FlightDeck).

As we approach a 1.0 release, it was clear that it was time to shed Bespin’s code name and give it a real, lasting project name. We’re happy to announce that that name is Mozilla Skywriter. I think that Mozilla Skywriter fits the “coding in the cloud” theme very well indeed.

Skywriter is becoming an end-to-end JavaScript-based system. Camilo Aguilar, a new contributor to the project, has been working on porting “dryice”, our build tool, to node.js. Once that’s done, we’ll be creating a XULRunner-based desktop version of Skywriter and a new customizable server version based on node.js. It’s actually pretty amazing how many different uses for our editor we’ll be able to target with a single codebase.

Many people who have worked on Skywriter have expressed a desire to fork it on GitHub. There have been unofficial mirrors and plenty of people installing Mercurial just to use Bespin. In order to make things easier for our community, we’re moving the official repository for Skywriter over to GitHub: http://github.com/mozilla/skywriter.

A note about the repositories: that shiny new repository holds the “all JavaScript” version of Skywriter. As I write this, that repository needs a lot of work (in other words, it’s broken!). All of the “bespin” names have changed to “skywriter” and the build tooling is still in the process of being rebuilt. The existing bespinclient repository remains available for people wanting to work with something that works today. That repository is effectively a branch of the code prior to the start of the JavaScript work. For the most part, we should be able to migrate changes made to that repository over to the new Skywriter repository pretty easily. We’re just changing the tooling to JavaScript, we’re not really changing Bespin’s core plugins at all.

One final note about the Bespin to Skywriter transition: the Bespin name appears in many places and it will take some time to fully migrate over. The Mozilla Skywriter home page will always have up to date links to project resources and is the best place to look if you’re having trouble finding something.

You can follow the Skywriter project (MozSkywriter) on Twitter and ask us questions in #skywriter on irc.mozilla.org.

Finally, a big thanks to Julian Viereck who is off to university in Zürich. Julian has been a huge help to the Skywriter project since the beginning and we wish him good luck in the coming years!

– Kevin Dangoor on behalf of the Mozilla Skywriter team

In a statement, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said, “After nearly a decade-long partnership in search, we’re looking forward to expanding our global relationship to mobile search and YouTube. All aspects of our partnership will be improved by this deal.”

The extension of the deal wasn’t a given by any means; the $1 billion investment Google made in AOL back in 2005 proved to be disastrous financially. Further, Microsoft has been aggressively making deals to grow marketshare for Bing, most notably with Yahoo, which now sees Bing powering Yahoo search and its related advertising.

With the renewed AOL deal, Google locks up about 2.3% of the search market according to the most recent numbers from comScore. Google currently has 65.8% of the market, while Microsoft has 27.1% between Bing and Yahoo.

Beyond web search, today’s deal also broadens Google’s reach on mobile and gets additional premium content onto YouTube –- both of which are currently high priorities for the company, as CEO Eric Schmidt noted in his statement on the deal. “It’s particularly exciting to see our relationship expand into video and mobile. These areas are now at the heart of users’ online experiences and at the core of both of our businesses,” he said.

More About: aol, Google, Search

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