Social media jobs: Here to stay?

Digital Nativity Story: See First Christmas Retold Through Social Media (VIDEO)
A festive video called "The Digital Story of the Nativity" tells the tale of the first Christmas as it might be told today--through the eyes of Social Media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, as well as through popular websites like Google, Wikipedia and Amazon. The video's creators, Portuguese digital marketing company Excentric, were inspired by the narrative of the birth of the Baby Jesus and the visitation by the three Magi and have visualized the story's major plot points using forms o...

The Nativity story, as told through social media
(CNN) -- From elementary-school plays to plastic Joseph and Mary figures on lawns, the Holiday Season brings all kinds of re-enactments of the birth of Jesus. But what if the Nativity were to happen today, in the age of Google and Twitter? A popular new video takes the Immaculate Conception into the 21st century. Designed by Excentric, a Lisbon, Portugal-based digital marketing company, "The Digital Story of the Nativity" tells the familiar biblical story through Google searches, e-mails, tweets...

New York's Food Porn App Hits 500K Users
New York and San Francisco-based Foodspotting, the iPhone app for taking pictures of food and geotagging them for other users to find, hit 500,000 downloads today just as New York's Foursquare launched a similar feature with photos and comments. Foodspotting is a startup from Soraya Darabi, formerly of The New York Times and Drop.io, designer Alexa Andrzejewski, and Ted Grubb of the Customer Service and review site Get Satisfaction. The iPhone app lets users find grub by proximity and also by ...

The College Diploma Fraud
For more than a half-century, government has tried to close racial gaps in educational attainment. Sad to say, those gaps have proven intractable. Nevertheless, the impulse remains as heartfelt as ever (perhaps due to its financially lucrative character), but the emphasis is now shifting from actual learning to equality of graduation rates. President Obama has spoken of adding 5 million graduates to the Workforce by 2020, and credential-mania is now all the rage. This shift is a disaster in the ...

QDDR -- No bull's-eye, but generally on-target
On Dec. 15, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rolled out the State Department's first ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) at an internal town hall meeting -- a year behind schedule. No surprise, it turns out to be more of a Public Relations document than a disciplined strategic review. Yet if it doesn't score a bull-eye, the QDDR at least hits an outer ring by describing an ambitious and needed reform agenda. Quadrennial reviews -- used by the Department of Defense since 1...

Nativity Story Told through Social Media Goes Viral
A digital marketing company has produced a modern way of telling the nativity story that has caught on with millions of people. 'The Digital Story of the Nativity,' created by Excentric, goes viral. In tune with the Social Media era, Excentric – a Lisbon, Portugal, company – created a video that tells the Christmas story through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google, among other popular media tools. In the last week, the video has been viewed more than 2 million times on YouTube, wit...

Really, Teacher. I read the Assignment. The Marvel Comics version.
I don’t usually bother reading anything Conor Friedersdorf has to say. While it is fun to watch in a kind of rooting-for-injuries kind of way, there are only so many times one can sit through the wrecks of his attempts to redefine the word “conservative” as the actual state of American Conservatism rejects his blandishments, and while reality consistently demonstrates its well-known liberal bias. It’s always seemed better (or at least more efficient) to fall back on a&#...

US corporations move to create a part-time, contingent workforce
Big employers in the US are increasingly using part-time and temporary workers to hold down labor costs, according to the latest figures from the Labor Department. In a trend that has been accelerated over the last two years, corporations are moving to phase out full time positions and create a Workforce earning far lower wages and fewer, if any, benefits that can be hired and fired at will. In November there were a total of 9.2 million "involuntarily part-time" workers in the US. After adding...

Anonymity And Urban Life, Ctd
by Conor Friedersdorf One common response to my inquiry - Does the Internet age portend the end of cities as a place where anonymity is an option? - is that lots of people go through life offline, and that people can choose to avoid tools like Facebook and Twitter. Though there is truth in both of these criticisms, I'd like to challenge them, though I concede that anonymity can be preserved by someone who takes extraordinary measures to do so. For the rest of us, a few examples that be...

Google Won't Beat Facebook, Says Ex-Googler Who Coined "Don't Be Evil"
Paul Buchheit was employee #23 at Google. He left to seek his fortune by starting a Social Media company, which he sold to Facebook for $50 million, and he's apparently not under any legal obligation to keep his mouth shut about any of it. Gawker's Ryan Tate perked up when he read Buchheit's frank posts predicting Google will kill its new browser-based Operating System Chrome OS within a year. "Yeah, I was thinking, "is this too obvious to even state?" but then I see people taking ChromeOS ser...

Bargain Junkies Are Beating Retailers at Their Own Game
In the economic wasteland of the past three years, the biggest success story has been a website that gets us to buy stuff we never knew we wanted: Helicopter-flying lessons, hot stone massages, professional photo portraiture, obscure ethnic food, hot air balloon rides. More precisely, what we buy at Groupon—the two-year-old startup that, with projected revenue of more than $500 million this year, was called the “fastest growing company ever” in a recent cover story—is th...

The Top World News Websites of 2010
Just when it seemed impossible to blur the lines between old and New Media any further, 2010 witnessed the Controversial rise of info-anarchist Julian Assange and Wikileaks. By publishing raw intelligence on its own site and leaking excerpts to major News Media outlets, WikiLeaks nearly obliterated the neat boundaries between the media and motivated, tech-savvy individuals. With each year the differences between a topical news story and a trending topic become fewer, as Internet tools like Twi...

Facebook testing new filters for News Feed
Over the weekend, Facebook began testing new filters that allow users to sort their News Feed (friends’ status updates, photos, links, and wall posts) in various new ways. Users may have noticed the new filters in the top bar amongst “Top News” and “Most Recent”. While Facebook has previously offered individual sorting options in past iterations, the new set of filters seek to give you an unprecedented control over your News Feed. Included are filters for “Gam...

Marian Wright Edelman: Katrina's Children: Childhood, Still Interrupted
Television images of the Children and families trapped in New Orleans during and after Katrina in August 2005 made Poverty in America shockingly visible. The world saw hundreds standing in the hot sun on the interstate for days awaiting rescue, surviving with little or no food or water in the fetid Convention Center or on the roofs of their flooded home or emerging from the dangerous Superdome where Children saw fights and shootings and later drew pictures of stick figure bodies covered in cra...

Scott advised to slash and merge - Florida - MiamiHerald.com
Tallahassee -- Governor-elect Rick Scott should arrive in the state capital with a wrecking ball to tear down a dozen state agencies and merge them together to save money and streamline services, advisors to the new governor say in a series of transition reports delivered to him this week. Scott, who has promised to cut 6,000 state jobs on his way to creating 700,000 private-sector positions, could be the consolidation king if he adopts the proposals offered to him by his transition committee...

JetBlue extends CEO's contract through 2015
https://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/12/22/2010-12-22_horror_in_harlem_dead_woman_found_stuffed_in_suitcase_on_sidewalk.html?utm_sourcefeedburner&utm;_mediumfeed&utm;_campaignFeed%3A+nydnrss%2Fhome+%28Home%29 NEW YORK (AP) _ JetBlue Airways has extended the employment contract of its top executive, president and CEO Dave Barger, through 2015. (AP) - The New York airline said Wednesday that Barger's current contract was set to expire in three years. Barger joined JetBlue in 1998, two years be...

Screening the Credit History of Job Applicants Is Discriminatory, EEOC Says
Wednesday, December 22, 2010 By Sam Hananel, Associated Press (AP) - Federal authorities on Tuesday filed a Lawsuit against Kaplan Higher Education Corp. for allegedly discriminating against black job applicants by screening the credit history of potential employees. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says the practice of rejecting job seekers based on their credit history has a discriminatory impact on some racial and Ethnic Groups. The Lawsuit alleges that Kaplan's practice is no...

Losing Hope About a Recovery
When will The Economy begin to recover? The National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee says the recovery began in June 2009, but unemployed Americans beg to differ: That pie chart is from a new report from Rutgers’s Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, which has periodically resurveyed the same group of American workers who were unemployed at some point in the year after the Financial Crisis hit (and many of whom are still unemployed). In November 20...

We Are Not Scrooges!
Ever been stuck in holiday traffic fighting to be stuck in a holiday cashier’s line so you can purchase low-price presents on your high-balance Visa listening to high-volume holiday music and think, “Why am I doing this to myself?! I don’t even really LIKE Christmas. It’s just a scheme to get me to gain more weight AND gain more Debt.” When you’re broke, there’s nothing like Christmas to make you feel bad about yourself. Nothing shatters one’s cont...

Newsom scrambles to land America's Cup
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is working around the clock in a last-ditch effort to keep the city's bid for the America's Cup alive - even as Larry Ellison openly courts Newport, R.I. "We are in the red zone," Newsom said Tuesday evening. San Francisco's bid for the 2012 race took a sudden dive last week when Team Ellison began talking very publicly with Newport about holding the race there. "I would like to believe that our deal was not used as a negotiating strategy to leverage a deal in ...

Now the Fun Begins, by Ben Philpott
Republican Gov. Rick Perry leads his Democratic challenger, Bill White by 10 points — 50 percent to 40 percent — in the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll, which was conducted in the days leading up to early voting. Libertarian Kathie Glass has the support of 8 percent of respondents; Deb Shafto of the Green Party gets 2 percent. In the last UT/TT poll, conducted in early September, Perry led by 6 points, 39 percent to 33 percent. That poll also found 22 percent Undecided;...

What does the census tell us?
Besides the political changes that avid followers of politics are salivating over, we can learn something else from the Census results announced yesterday. People are voting with their feet and they're voting for low-tax states. As Michael Barone summarizes, [G]rowth tends to be stronger where taxes are lower. Seven of the nine states that do not levy an Income Tax grew faster than the national average. The other two, South Dakota and New Hampshire, had the fastest growth in their regions, the M...

Comcast Chronicles -- The Surrender
This will probably be the last dispatch in my nearly three-month quest to get decent service from Comcast since the installation of a cable card in my TiVo. Many phone calls and visits from service techs later (previous episodes in the saga are here), I'm pretty much back where I was on October 3. But it's apparent that it's pointless to continue this pursuit. Herein is my instrument of surrender, e-mailed to Comcast Customer Service this morning:Dear [Comcast]: I’m following up on my ser...

Tension as Italian students protest education law
By Massimiliano Di Giorgio ROME | Wed Dec 22, 2010 10:56am EST ROME (Reuters) - Thousands of Italian Students marched in Protest against a new university reform law on Wednesday as police blocked off large parts of central Rome to stop a repeat of violent clashes at a similar march a week ago. Last week's demonstration saw cars torched, shop windows smashed and dozens injured in street battles between Protesters and Riot Police after the initially peaceful march descended into some of the wor...

M.B.A. Hiring Trends Improve in 2010
Though she was employed at an advertising agency, Stephanie Burns wasn't satisfied with her career trajectory and craved a new challenge. She enrolled in the M.B.A. program at National University in San Diego and graduated in 2008. Though she had maintained her full-time job while in school, she was surprised when her firm didn't offer her a raise after she completed her degree. She looked elsewhere, but didn't find that her new M.B.A. had significantly enhanced her earning power, as other firms...