Category: Tech

Hip-Hop Word Count sounds like a pretty simple application. It counts the number of words in hip-hop songs or something, right? Wrong. On the surface, it may seem like HHWC performs a simple task, but it goes way deeper than that. If you have ever wanted to perform serious analysis on the music you listen to or compare it to the music you avoid, this is probably your best bet for getting the job done.

“The Hip-Hop Word Count (HHWC) is a searchable ethnographic database built from the lyrics of over 50,000 Hip-Hop songs from 1979 to present day. The database is the heart of an online analysis tool that generates textual and quantified reports on searched phrases, syntax, memes and socio-political ideas.”

What we have here is a database that describes the technical details of most of your favorite hip-hop songs. This data can then be used to not only figure out interesting things about the songs themselves, but to describe the culture behind the music. How can analyzing lyrics teach us about our culture? The analysis tool is able to discern the education level needed to understand each song. In addition, it rates the artistic sophistication of the piece by looking at how metaphors, similes, cultural references, alliteration, and other techniques are used.

To get a better understanding of how this works, let’s compare “Microphone Fiend” by Rakim to “I Get Money” by 50 Cent. According to Hip-Hop Word Count analysis, Rakim gets a score of 16 while 50 comes away with a 7. Rakim, using words like “hypochondriac,” is on a University Degree education level, and a reading level of “Atlantic Monthly.” 50’s money word is “millionaire,” is at a Junior High education level, and a reading level of “True Confessions.”

Hip-Hop Word Count has been on the hush for a while now and is currently in private beta. It looks like it will appeal to extremely technical types as well as people just looking for interesting hip-hop comparisons. The searches in HHWC database are done using Apache’s Lucene, which allows for some pretty advanced queries. It is the brain child of Tahir Hemphill, who currently operates the creative enterprise Staple Crops. Also, if you love hip-hop, spreadsheets, and dealing with data, Tahir is looking for an intern to help with the project.

Threadsy, probably the only truly integrated communications web application, launches a public beta of the service today. Threadsy is the ultimate tool for pulling yourself together. It integrates Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail into a clean and simple interface that helps you stay on top of what’s going on.

Since it was first launched in private beta last year, Threadsy has continued to improve at every step of the way. They have improved the interface and added features to make your communications manageable. One of my problems with the service last year was that it asked for usernames and passwords. That has been corrected as Threadsy now supports OAuth, Facebook connect, and Gmail’s new authentication method.

Threadsy sets itself apart from other services by providing two-way interaction between multiple services. You can reply, favorite, and dm on Twitter. You can Like, dislike, comment, etc. on Facebook updates. Gmail integration provides you most of the features available in Gmail itself. If you don’t use Gmail or have alternate email accounts Threadsy also supports Yahoo!, Hotmail, MobileMe, AOL Mail, and generic IMAP accounts.

For most users, Threadsy is probably all you need to simplify your social media and communications. Any message sent directly to you shows up on the left side of the screen so that you can process it. This includes your Twitter DM’s, emails, and Facebook messages. On the right side, you will see a smaller column showing tweets from those you follow on Twitter and status updates from Facebook. Threadsy also takes care of your instant messaging needs with Meebo integration. This lets you IM your friends on Facebook, Myspace, AIM, and Google Talk.

I like Threadsy, but there are still a couple of things I’d like to see them do. Primarily, Twitter lists would be a great addition. For power users of Twitter, you may become frustrated with the Threadsy interface because tweets and everything are only given one column. You can’t really fit much in there and you may miss a lot. Adding support for Twitter lists would be a welcome addition. A simple dropdown of all your Twitter lists in the Stream column would work, just as you can access all of your Gmail labels from the left side.

Have you tried Threadsy? Are you going to try it? Let us know what you think!

via TC

Earlier today on Twitter, @IAmDiddy announced the completion of the trailer for the “most positive inspirational BLOG in THE WORLD.” Anyone who ever pays attention to tweets from Diddy is well aware of his excessively positive attitude and “LET’S GO!!!” demeanor. In addition to saying things in ALL CAPS on a regular basis and conveying urgency and excitement, he also tends to tweet positive and inspirational messages to his followers. If you combine this with the fact that he is fascinated with creating viral videos and garnering attention online, you might even wonder what took him so long to launch DiddyBlog.com.

The site is still in preview mode, so the only thing you see when you visit is the full screen trailer which includes commentary from Will Smith, George Clooney (as his character in The Men Who Stare at Goats), and Diddy himself. The overall message regards destiny and choice. Smith talks about the “redemptive power” of making a choice rather than simply letting things happen to you. The Clooney quote says “Your life is like a river, and if you’re aiming for a goal that isn’t your destiny, you’re always going to be swimming against the current.” Diddy talks about making mistakes sometimes, but always having the will to get up and keep going.

Overall, the trailer is telling you to get up, get out, and get something. This is probably one of the most important messages to inspire and motivate anyone. Most of us don’t fail because we are inadequate or ill equipped, it’s simply because we don’t try in the first place. Don’t let the river carry you.

Diddy has already been doing video blogs on on his PTWITTYTV channel, but most are not anything like this. They range from him streaming live from the studio, to random videos of his artists, to him talking seriously about Haiti. I’m wondering exactly what type of content we can expect to see on this new site. Will it be serious all the time, will it incorporate some of his personality and shenanigans, or will it be a mixture of both. Check out the trailer below and tell us what you think.

A few days ago, we talked briefly about Global Grind’s content scraping practices. As you may know, Global Ground is like Digg for the hip-hop community. They cover hip-hop stories, celebrity gossip, entertainment, and more. This is a pretty broad selection of content, so many bloggers were shocked to find that Global Grind had basically cut and pasted their hard work and posted it on their own site. They even went so far as to allow these competing pieces to be submitted to Google News. Any blogger would take it pretty hard if their content was scraped by any site, let alone Global Grind, which has ties into the exclusive Google News network, a PageRank of 5, and millions in funding. GG wasn’t even providing a simple link back to the original source article.

A major point that Patrick O’Keefe makes is the double standard between Global Grind and Digg. If Digg had never killed the Digg Bar and just started snatching bloggers’ content, there would probably be rioting in the streets or at least in the blogosphere. As far as GG goes, they are probably getting away with it because the audience is different. They’re not as tech savvy as a whole. In addition, many of the bloggers affected may not have a clue about how to keep track of their own content for the same reason.

It seems that Patrick’s contact with Global Grind has yielded some positive changes that better align with what we should be seeing within the blogging community. They also seem to be committed to making changes in the near future to cooperate with the community rather than simply dominate it. They have killed the top frame bar that they were using. Digg recently made a similar move as Kevin Rose took the wheel.

Most importantly, full text scraping has been turned off. Content excerpts for submitted stories now have a content limit. You can still submit the full text of a story via the manual form, but this is supposed to become human-edited to avoid further incidents. Content that has already been copied to GG will me reformatted so that the full content is not displayed. Links to the original sources of the articles are more prominent but, more importantly, actually exist as a rule.

It will definitely be interesting to see how this plays out. Most sites would receive a huge backlash for scraping content, even if it was not intentional. I doubt that Global Grind will see any such downturn in traffic or popularity. On the plus side, this may be the beginning of a closer relationship between Global Grind and the community at large.

Using a combination of “cyber sleuthing, old-school gumshoe reporting and persistent stalking,” the folks at Wired were able to verify the identity of the guy that found the prototype iPhone at a bar an eventually sold it to Gizmodo. Not only is it a decent case study on how to find those who do not wish to be found, but it also highlights the fact that you really can’t hide from anyone these days. Once you start sharing your identity online and connecting with others, you have already failed at fading into the background when the stuff hits the fan.

The first stop in locating one Brian Hogan, the infamous iphone finder, was Facebook. As the iPhone story broke on Gizmodo, an intern at Wired happened to be paying attention to relevant sources on Facebook and noticed a comment by Hogan that seemed suspicious. They took a screenshot for later as the single word comment wasn’t enough to make a move at the time.

About a week after the Gizmodo story broke, Hogan had deleted his Facebook account and attempted to disappear from the Internet. This was a signal to Wired that he was probably involved and should be investigated. As they say, a hit dog will holler. Wired was already aware that the iphone finder had been identified by police, but his identity was kept secret.

Referring back to the Facebook screenshot, Wired figured out that several of the other users commenting on the Gizmodo story along with Hogan happened to have attended Santa Barbara City College. They friended about 25 of these potential connections to Hogan. Working on the assumption that Hogan had also attended this college and that he had subsequently moved to Redwood City where the phone was found, Wired.com’s Kevin Poulsen searched a people-finder website. He found a Brian J. Hogan who just so happened to live a mile away from Gourmet Haus Staudt, the bar where the phone was found.

A visit to the address combined with a couple of semi-lucky Google searches and the excessive friending on Facebook eventually led to Wired being contacted by Hogan’s lawyer. This was the confirmation they needed, but they still squeezed the lawyer for as much information as they could before publishing. Moral of the story is, you can’t hide from a tenacious journalist who knows how to use Google and social media.

We’ve covered Posterous here on multiple occasions simply because it’s an awesome blogging service. Setting up your new blog is as simple as sending an email. It’s simple to set up, simple to maintain, and free without being overburdened with ads. Just recently, however, one user noticed something fishy going on. Posterous was converting links to affiliate links without any prior notification or consent. This particular user was able to see what was going on because of a minor glitch on how the affiliate links were being generated.

What’s really going on is that Posterous has partnered with a service called VigLink. What VigLink does is to convert outgoing links into affiliate links on the fly. So, as the visitor clicks a link in your post, some fancy Javascript code intercepts the click and adds an affiliate code. What this would do is help to generate revenue for Posterous, which is a good thing. Rather than sticking a bunch of banner ads all over the place or using some type of invasive monetization strategy that would interfere with the user experience, Posterous has chosen to try a relatively benign strategy that most users and visitors won’t even notice.

The primary issue here is that Posterous did not notify users of the potential changes (they have only been testing the feature so far). Full disclosure and transparency have become pretty standard, so this being accidentally discovered by a user looks kind of shady. Posterous cofounder Sachin Agarwal has since posted an apology regarding the matter. The integration with VigLink actually began in December of 2009 on an experimental basis. There are also a few points to note:

1. Links in Posterous posts are not edited in any way
2. VigLink Javascript intercepts clicks and adds an affiliate code when possible, but affiliate codes are not stripped or altered if they already exist
3. Copying links is unchanged
4. Publishers can opt-out specific links my including a rel=”noskim” attribute with an option coming to omit entire pages
5. There is no breaking of the web, redirecting, or other trickery that might have an adverse effect on your page rankings with Google. VigLink is backed by Google Ventures, after all. (VigLink statement)

Some users are upset that Posterous would do something without notification, or that Posterous is monetizing using affiliate links, or even that Posterous is changing anything period. The bottom line is that Posterous isn’t doing anything all that serious here except to neglect notifying users of what they were doing and potentially tenting their perception of transparency.

via TC

Posterous Implements Facebook Likes

Choosing to waste no time, simple blogging-by-email platform Posterous has implemented Facebook Likes on all blogs via the new Open Graph API. You don’t have to actually do anything to benefit. The like button appears after each post (depending on your theme) and, when clicked, will share a link back to your blog on that visitor’s Facebook page. Great way to get new eyeballs on your content.

Regator Gets a Fresh New Design

Regator has a new layout in the works that takes the site to a whole different level. It’s cleaner, much easier and intuitive to navigate, and it just pops. Regator helps you find all the hottest blogs on the topics you’re interested in. It’s a very useful tool for finding quality blogs. To get the invite code for the preview, check out the coverage on Mashable.

YouTube Rolls Out New Flash Player

As Apple and Adobe continue to argue about Flash support on Apple devices, Google has quietly revamped their Flash player. First , Google changed the site layout entirely and created a new HTML5 player for YouTube. Now, they are enhancing the existing Flash player. New features include and auto-hiding progress bar and technical details about the video you’re watching. Check NewTeevee for more details.

AOL Sells ICQ

Remember ICQ? It was Instant Messaging before IM’ing was popular. It was how many people talked to each other long before Twitter came along. You didn’t even get a username, just an ID number that people would use to connect with you. AOL bought it for $287 million in 1998 and has finally been able to sell it for $188 million. The new owner is DST, a Russian Telecom company. ICQ, while pretty much dead here in the US, is still hot in Russia and DST’s CEO Yuri Millner had this to say:

“The acquisition of ICQ is a strategic enhancement of our business in Russia and Eastern Europe. ICQ’s long-standing brand name and its sizeable loyal customer base together represent a very attractive opportunity to further strengthen our position in the region.”

va RWW

Steve Jobs Tells Us How He Really Feels About Flash

If you were ever curious about why there is no Flash on the iPad or why it’s not supported on your iPhone, this letter by Jobs should explain. He really goes in on Flash in detail, starting from the beginning of the relationship between Adobe and Apple. You read the entire letter here.

I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.

Researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center seem to be creating the ultimate Twitter client. Not because of the number of columns you can have, the types of URL shorteners it supports, or any of the other features that users and developers normally worry about, though. It’s because this particular client aims to make sense of the deluge of tweets many of us see on a daily basis. Even when following a few hundred people, there is a monumental amount of information to dig through and usually leads to information overload.

This new Twitter client, known as the Eddi Project, uses sophisticated algorithms to help you easily makes sense out of a large number of tweets. Rather than the normal routine of scanning through each tweet in your timeline manually and trying to parse everything in your head, Eddi will do it for you, picking out the topics of interest and giving you a clearer picture of what’s going on. The name comes from the idea of eddies in a stream, which indicate an area of contrary motion within a stream. Ed Chi, area manager and principal scientist for the Augmented Social Cognition Research Group at PARC, believes that people choose to dip in and out of their Twitter stream, but don’t necessarily want to consume it all at once.

The researchers have developed two primary ways of interacting with the Twitter stream. The first is a recommendation system. It finds tweets that a user might be interested in based on that users interactions with others and the content of the user’s tweets. This is somewhat similar to technology we already see in the wild for recommending new people to follow.

The second tool is a topic browser. This is the more interesting piece as it is at the heart of summarizing your entire Twitter stream, enabling you to quickly figure out what’s going on at a glance without reading every post. Figuring this out is not as easy as one might think. At the core of the problem is Twitter’s 140-character limit. Most natural language processing relies on having a good amount of text to deal with, but 140 characters is far from adequate. Researchers then realized that search engines have been dealing with this issue from the beginning and started looking at the problem from a different perspective.

The new system should be available for the public some time this summer. Until then, you can play with their recommendations engine Zerozero88, a robot which will help dig up news stories customized for you.

Lala is shutting down as of May 31st. Very disappointing news for many users of the service who actually preferred it over iTunes. The service is now closed to new users. Apple acquired Lala back in December of 2009 when it seemed that the cloud-based service was in financial trouble. This is after Lala seemed to be making big moves in partnerships with Google and Facebook that should have helped turn business around.

If you recall, Lala is behind Google’s Onebox feature, which lets you play and purchase music directly from your search results. It allowed you to play any song once for free and songs that you do purchase are available for play from your online dashboard. When I first covered Lala, I used the phrase “iTunes in the cloud.”

To understand the ramifications of this purchase, it’s important to understand what Lala really is: iTunes in the cloud. Instead of purchasing music from a website and downloading it to your computer, you simply buy what you want and play it instantly from your library in the cloud. Lala will also match the songs on your computer to the ones in their library and adds them to your online collection. You can even play any song for free, but only once. It’s only 10 cents to add a song to your online library and play it unlimited. 79 cents to download the actual mp3.

I also mentioned that users might benefit from Apple’s purchase of Lala in the long run. It was already pretty obvious that Apple would shut it down and this was simply a grab for talent and a way to remove a competitor. Why buy from iTunes for 69 cents to $1.29 per song when I can just pay 10 cents to Lala and play any song unlimited via the web?

For those who have invested their time and their money into Lala, the credits for your Lala web songs will be moved over to iTunes. If you have an outstanding wallet balance on Lala, it will also be migrated to iTunes. Gift cards will be moved to your wallet balance or otherwise refunded. In other words, you are now an iTunes customer so get used to it. We can only hope to see some of the features we loved about Lala being integrated into the new iTunes service when it does finally launch.

It seems that Facebook’s new Community Pages (how-to here) are part of a grander scheme to get Facebook users to connect with stuff. Remember all those random keywords you used to fill out your profile? Stuff like your favorite movies and books? Well, Facebook has basically turned them all into actual Community Pages. Instead of just listing Blade or The Science of Getting Rich as stuff you like and leaving it at that, Facebook has taken it upon itself to turn each of these words or phrases into a link. These links connect you to the Community page for those items.

You may have noticed a popup telling you to connect your profile with a bunch of stuff when you recently logged into Facebook. This is where the conversion part happens, where they turn your simple keywords into actual social connections and links. You can choose to connect to all the pages displayed or pick from them individually. I would suggest you do the latter because I noticed a few surprises while looking through my own choices.

Keep in mind, this is the opt-in part. When you accept these connections, people will see these links on your Facebook profile. They will probably believe these are things that you have chosen to be connected to. The links will lead to communities based around those things. What if you decide you don’t actually want all of that excitement on your profile? You just want to keep things simple and define yourself without all these 3rd party connections. The problem is that you can’t.

According to the Facebook FAQ “What if I don’t want to connect to all these pages?”

“If you don’t want to connect to any Pages, the corresponding sections on your Profile will be empty. Connecting to Pages will now be the main way to express yourself on your profile, and you can always edit your profile to remove specific suggested Pages that you don’t want to connect to.”

While you’re not really being forced to opt-in, the alternative is unacceptable. Either you connect to the pages or your profile will be blank. The affected sections include: Work and Education, Current City, Hometown, and Likes and Interest. You will have to make a tough decision between a blank Facebook profile and a profile that may not describe you exactly as you would like. It’s one thing to simply list something on your profile as an interest and totally another to actually connect yourself to an entire community on the subject.

Which will you choose?

more details at RWW

Google Follow Finder

Follow Finder is a nifty little app that will help you find people to follow. You plugin your Twitter username and it will scan your public social graph to show you people you might want to follow. It’s hosted on App Engine and makes extensive use of Twitter’s new @anywhere platform.

1. Tweeps you might like: We start with the list of people you follow, find others with similar lists, and then identify accounts you might also want to follow. If people with similar lists tend to follow accounts that aren’t in your list, we’ll recommend those additional accounts to you. For example, if you follow CNN and the New York Times on Twitter, and most people who follow CNN and the New York Times also tend to follow TIME, we’ll suggest TIME as a user to follow.
2. Tweeps with similar followers: We find people with similar public lists of followers to yours. For example, if ten people are following you, and the same ten people are following a second user, we’ll include the second user in this list. You may already be following some of these people.

Twitter @anywhere

Twitter’s @anywhere platform literally lets you put Twitter anywhere. You can add advanced integration features to your blog or website that will integrate it tightly into Twitter. Visitors can follow you with a click. You can automatically linkify @usernames and add hovercard functionality. It’s no harder to implement than any other Javascript widget. For full details, check out the tutorial at SocialTimes.

How Much Do Artists Earn Online?

The music industry is in a constant state of change due to the Internet and social media. Customers have become accustomed to immediate access to music and many music consumers don’t even know what’s it’s like to have a physical music collection. But the question is, how is this new marketplace affecting artists? This image by David McCandless gives us a rough estimation.

Cuil Launches Cpedia and Lashes Out at Users

Cuil was supposed to be the “Google killer.” A search engine above all other search engines. It was supposed to cure cancer and solve wo

rld hunger. Ok..maybe not that last part, but the hype around Cuil was at such a ridiculous level that when we all found out how uncool Cuil really was, there was a huge backlash against it. That was 2008.

Almost two years later, the makers of Cuil have launched Cpedia. This is some kind of Wikipedia competitor where the data is automatically pulled together from mentions about some topic or person. It’s actually a cool idea, but some of the results are either extremely useless or extremely hilarious. This resulted in some not-so-nice press about Cpedia.

That would be the end of it, except that Cuil CEO Tom Costello went in on all the Cpedia “haters” (his word, not mine) in a blog post…and you thought the tech world didn’t have any drama.

Xobni (that’s Inbox backwards) is the plugin for Outlook that provides super search abilities and social networking integration. Outlook 2010 is still in beta and it’s weeks before it will actually be ready for prime time, but Xobni has already released a version for you to play with. You can download Xobni 1.9.2, which is compatible with Outlook 2010. Of course, you’ll need Outlook 2010 beta also, download it here.

If you already use Xobni, simply upgrading to the Outlook 2010 beta should automagically download and install the new Xobni for you.

In addition to helping you search and find emails and contacts, Xobni also helps you find important bits located in your inbox. These include things like attachments, meetings, and links. This new version of Xobni is pretty much focused on being Office 2010 compatible, so there are only a few feature additions:

• Outlook 2010 Compatibility: All features available in previous versions now working and optimized for Outlook 2010. 32bit and 64bit versions supported. New Quick-Access in the Ribbon.
• Search when Xobni collapsed.
• Show/Hide Xobni instantly.
• Xobni Options always available: If multiple Outlook windows are open, Xobni can move from one to the other.
• Users who are not “administrators” on their computers can now install Xobni. This is especially important in corporate environments.
• Twitter profile images now show in business card area.
• AutoSuggestions can be deleted from the compose screen.

Keep in mind that Xobni does have a premium level of service called Xobni Plus and some of the most interesting features are not available in the free version. These include stuff like advanced search, accessing your xobni contacts from the compose window, finding links you’ve exchanged with contacts, and locating calendar appointments. For more information on Xobni plus, check out the comparison on their website.

Xobni might seem anxious in releasing this new 2010 beta-compatible version, but it could be they’re feeling some pressure from competitors. Gist, a service that makes it simple to keep track of potential business collaborators, offers some very similar functionality to Xobni but with more social integration. Gist also has an Outlook plugin that seems to duplicate for free much of what Xobni is charging for. Or maybe Xobni is just trying to stay on top of their game.

MySpace has recently made an update to their events system that may have musicians scrambling to update their profiles. The new events page is a complete overhaul of the simple and pretty much useless events system of old. It also adds a bunch of features which make it much more useful to artists, profitable for MySpace, and helpful to users and fans.

Many have lamented the alleged demise of MySpace as the top social network, which is odd because you would be hard pressed to find someone who was a MySpace fan in the first place. Although Facebook has since taken the crown of #1 social networking site, MySpace has not simple accepted defeat and laid down to die quietly. Despite their setbacks, they have made some pretty smart decisions and done a good job of playing to their strengths.

Primary among these are it’s use for musicians and artists. Facebook might be the top social network, with Twitter running close behind, but it’s a major pain to try and promote your music on either. MySpace has already been doing this for years. MySpace has also rolled things out slowly, bit by bit. This keep people paying attention and avoids them doing some major redesign that everyone soon forgets.

With the new events page, people can easily promote their upcoming events in a visually pleasing interface (especially when compared to what was available before). You can see the Who, What, When, and Where about the event as well as a detailed description. You can RSVP, share the event on your other social networks, and see who else is going. There is also an integrated map that shows the event’s location.

When a user RSVP’s, they have the option to promote the event to their friends. You can buy tickets directly through MySpace for the event, which earns them a little revenue. Advertisers looking to promote their own events can purchase add space in the social calendar.

MySpace might be down, but is definitely not out. They are playing to their strength in media events and slowly rolling out features so people know they are still alive. They have even integrated directly with Facebook using Facebook Connect. They plan to roll out additional features around mobile access, concert notifications, movies, and DVD releases in the near future.

When is the last time you logged into MySpace?

more at TechCrunch and hypebot

With Earth Day approaching, going green is at the forefront for many businesses and individuals. Some people don’t know where to start. It seems as if you may need to completely change the way you do business to even make a significant change. This is not the case, though. Every little change that you can make will be a benefit to the environment in the grand scheme of things. You don’t have to make some huge long-term investment in solar panels or wind power to make a difference. This post will go over four ways that you can go green now without putting your business out of business.

Go Paperless

This is a pretty obvious one and also a pretty easy one to implement. Most of the time, we are printing things out just because it’s what we’ve been trained to do. You can just as easily read something on your screen as you can read it on a piece of paper. This is especially true of the types of content we come across in doing business. Emails, invoices, newsletters, marketing messages, NDAs, proposals, and even contracts can all be done electronically. Microsoft Office is one option that will make sharing and collaborating on documents simple.

Work From Home

According to Energy Star, working from home or running a home business can reduce energy costs by about 30 percent. Of course, this depends on the specifics of how you run your business and exactly what type of investment you’re able to put into going green. Bottom line is that you won’t be adding to commute pollution.

Involve Your Clients and Customers

Part of going green as a business is helping communicate and spread the same types of ideals to your customers, clients, and employees. Work with your clients to see if getting rid of paper is acceptable for them while working with you. Instead of always meeting face-to-face, see if some or all of your meetings could be done by phone or maybe via Skype. Outlook with Social Connector can help in keeping in touch.

Turn Stuff Off

Something so simple can make a lot of difference. Many people and companies as a whole don’t even bother to shut down their computers and other office equipment at the end of the day. This wastes loads of energy. Back in the day, many businesses and a few individuals ran their own servers at home. While some still do, it’s just not a necessity anymore. The cloud makes all of your data available 24/7 to you and your clients without the need for your personal computer to be on. When you shut it down for the day or turn in for the night, give your electronics a rest as well.

What have you done to make your business greener?

Bing has started rolling out a new feature called Social Search. This allows you to see real-time results from Twitter right alongside your Bing search results. If that sounds familiar, it should. Google has been doing it for a little while now. This feature has been rolled out to a subset of Bing users, so you may not have access to it just yet. The goal here seems to be to give you real-time trending results alongside the sites you might expect to find. You’re basically getting the best of both worlds in one shot.

Microsoft has actually had a deal with Twitter for a while now and initially offered Twitter results via an entirely separate beta site. Now, these results will be integrated into your actual search results.

Bing pulls in social content generated on Twitter to surface the most relevant updates within seconds of a breaking news event. From people on the ground tweeting about what’s happening around them to users sharing interesting news links while browsing at home, the Twitterati can be significantly faster than traditional media outlets in picking up information on breaking events. Further, the Twitterati also picks up information that the traditional media outlets often ignore – such as the latest viral video being shared online.

The feature should be available to most Bing users “very soon” according to Microsoft. In addition to helping fill out your standard searches, Bing will also keep an eye on trending topics and fold in tweets on those topics from Twitter within your search results. This will help you keep your finger on the pulse of the Internet.

It’s not really surprising that Google and now Bing have decided to make social media a part of their search strategy. f course you want your old standbys when search for things, but times are changing and many people aren’t satisfied with simply knowing about things that have happened. They want to know what’s happening now at this moment or even what might possibly be happening in the very near future. To give the people the information they hunger for, integrating social media sites is the next logical step.