Month: April 2012

The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #649: April 30, 2012

Content summary: FIR Book Review of “Reality is Broken” is up, another book review coming this week; News That Fits: Klout gears up for brand pages and social media dominance; Ragan promo; information control at the London Olympics 2012 vs ambush marketers (and activists); Michael Netzley’s Asia report from Singapore; listener comments including John Cass on CREWE; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; Dan York reports on experimenting with SoundCloud, and more; your next conference can benefit from some TEDification;…

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Content-scraping is theft, pure and simple

Jim Connolly posted a link on his Google+ page to “No Such Thing As A Good Scraper” by AJ Kohn, who writes a pretty good analysis and summary of what content scrapers often do with your written content. You’re not wholly sure what content scraping is? The Wikipedia definition of a scraper site will help you understand it, which starts thus: A scraper site is a spam website that copies all of its content from other websites using web scraping. …

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Google Cube game brings fun to learning

A very neat idea from Google – a game to raise awareness of, and educate you about, Google Maps. Cube runs in your browser (ideally Google Chrome). You play it by completing levels that set you navigational challenges in various cities around the world. I just completed the first level, navigating to a bowling venue in New York city. When you complete a level, you get a link to learn more about a particular feature of Google Maps. Fusible has…

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How to report Twitter hashtag spammers

One of the most useful features of Twitter for events like conferences and tweet chats is the hashtag. A hashtag – a keyword preceded by the ‘#’ symbol – enables conference-goers, the event organizer and anyone else interested in the event to see all tweets that include the hashtag. It enables anyone to listen to the conversation and easily participate. As Twitter explains it: People use the hashtag symbol # before relevant keywords (no spaces) in their Tweet to categorize…

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FIR Book Review: Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal

FIR co-host Shel Holtz reviews Jane McGonigal‘s Reality is Broken, which argues that the principles of game play can lead to better results than the routine approaches we take to problem-solving in the real world. From the book’s description: “In this ground-breaking exploration of the power and future of gaming, McGonigal reveals how we can use the lessons of game design to fix what is wrong with the real world. Drawing on positive psychology, cognitive science, and sociology, Reality Is…

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