Even hackers are able to come up with a business model for twitter. According to Kaspersky Lab, hackers are now selling stolen account information for users with a large following. These accounts are then used to send malicious code to attack more accounts, and in turn gain access to a larger amount of personal information. For more information on this go here.

Still looking for ways to recapture their 90's era popularity, American Online (AOL) has launched Owl. Owl is a site focused on user-generated content using AOL's content management system called "Seed."

The site will be a repository where freelance "experts" can provide knowledge, opinions, and images. Crowdsourcing the articles should allow AOL to increase the content on the site quickly and cheaply.

Contributors to the site will be paid 50% of the profits from advertising if the content is exclusive and 20% if not. Techcrunch did note that the site is more of a design concept and that most of the articles seemed to have been written by the staff.

Read the story here.

Due to Tiger Woods' recent personal choices and indefinite hiatus from the sport of golf, the PGA seems to be in a tough position. Being left without their superstar (to bring attention and money to the sport), how do they stay relevant? The writer of this article mentions that the sport of golf was around before Tiger and will still be here when he has left permanently therefore they can't bank on one athlete forever. The article goes into more depth about how they can use different social medias to keep the sport relevant and keep fans interested (post-Tiger).

Read more here.

WooRank is a simple yet fairly powerful website analysis tool. It features a streamlined interface with easy-to-understand analytics summaries for any web address given. Each web analysis is listed in sections ranging from general traffic to social media exposure. While recently released and currently in beta, WooRank promises to provide real-time reports on how Google indexes the searched site with SEO suggestions on improving your "WooRank" score. As stated before, WooRank is in beta so some features may be disabled or may not load properly, but the reports are worded for anyone to understand them easily.

Since marketers and advertisers are investing a lot of money in social media, they want to know and demonstrate their return on investment. To give them more information about their return on investment, Facebook is planning to put in a conversion tracking tool to its advertising products based on the demand of the market. With this tool marketers will be able to track clicks through conversion and will have an option to set up multiple tags for the tracking. This platform will help advertisers and marketers build out messages as the campaign expands.

To read more about the article click HERE

Several weeks ago, Google announced that it was the victim of several cyber attacks directed at obtaining information on Chinese rights activists. The company announced that it would no longer censor search results in China and the US State Department even brought in its own remarks on the issue.

Now Twitter's CEO is making his own statements on the issue. Evan Williams has now publicly stated his support for Google's stance on censorship. Twitter has also been partially censored by the Chinese government as well as several other countries. Although Twitter supports freedom of speech, Williams has stated that the company has nowhere near the clout the Google does, reducing the ability of the company to engage the Chinese government.

What Twitter is able to do to support freedom of speech is inherent in the way Twitter is structured, according to Williams. Its open accessibility by various programs and websites allow users to access the service in ways that the Chinese government may find difficult to locate and censor. This is a subtle admission that although the company is not attempting to find ways to circumvent the Chinese government, third-party developers definitely have the capability to do it themselves.

Read the story here.

Motorola announced that the device would be one of 20 smartphones the company will release this year. The phone will be sold directly to consumers, and will use the same strategy Google used for the Nexus One. They have yet to decide on the carrier.
Motorola has invested a considerable amount of resources behind their Android-based phone- Droid. However, they are willing to try Google’s direct-to-consumer approach.

To read more about the article click here

Social media marketing campaigns can be hugely successful. They allow a channel for direct contact with customers which provides for extensive feedback. Pepsi has taken advantage of this collaboration with consumers and have seen positive results.

Randall Rothenberg, head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, recently discussed the implications of today's devices' access to the internet and how they are blocking advertisers' access to consumers. He borrows Josh Bernoff's term "splinternet" to describe the phenomenon: With the creation of devices like the iPad comes the "semi-privatization" of the internet, such as Amazon's Kindle and the major game consoles. Advertisers are having a much more difficult time reaching consumers when major streams of web-based information is being sucked down through private "tubes." The Kindle, for instance, has almost no access to the online world, apart from downloading Amazon's media. This connection is completely closed off to anyone outside the system.

It has become an issue in the recent past that Google is not censoring what is said about religions in the search engine. Religion has always been a highly debated topic among people and Google unintentionally added a little flame to the fire. When something is searched for on Google, past searches that people have done are displayed to help aid the searcher. However, for the phrase "Islam is" no previous results were being yielded, thus causing people to think that those results were being tampered with. SImilar kinds of situations occured when a derogitive photo of Michelle Obama ended up within the first page of results for a Google image search. Google constantly apologieses but maintains that they will not tamper with the alogorithm or the results it kicks back.

This means that all indexing is still done in a seemingly fair way which is good for everyone else out there. Yay!

More here.