Yahoo! News: Internet News: In Jerusalem, an old-fashioned medium goes online (AP)

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In Jerusalem, an old-fashioned medium goes online (AP) Oct 2nd 2011, 08:15 JERUSALEM – For ultra-Orthodox Jews who shun secular newspapers, radio and the Internet, the best way to hear the news has long been by literally reading the writing on the wall. The insular, strictly religious community still relies on black and white posters pasted up on walls in their neighborhoods to hear the latest rulings from important rabbis on modest dress, upcoming protests and the correct way to vote in elections. Now one avid collector has teamed up with Israel's National Library to bring this old-fashioned form of communication into the 21st century by scanning more than 20,000 of the posters — known locally as "pashkevilim" — into a digital online archive. The project, which includes an exhibit that opened at the library earlier this month, offers a glimpse into one of the main media used by a group trying to hold the line against the march of modernity. Yoelish Kraus, a 38-year-old ultra-Orthodox resident of Jerusalem, began peeling the posters off the sooty stone walls of his neighborhood when he was a teenager. Today they fill a windowless, crumbling two-room library. Some are filed by subject. Others lie in piles under a layer of dust and scattered black fedoras. The posters are typically written in Hebrew or Yiddish and use incendiary language. "Jerusalem is in danger!" one bellows — the danger being a mixed-gender swimming pool. Others urge the observant to demonstrate and demand the closure of a parking lot because it violates the Sabbath. The word "pashkevilim" evolved from the name of an Italian statue known as Pasquino, in Rome, where locals pasted satire and protest calls in the 16th century, according to Ido Ivri, digital programs manager at the National Library. Though the Romans have long since abandoned the practice, the name lives on in Jerusalem and other cities home to Israel's 700,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews, about 9 percent of the national population. Two years ago, the National Library offered to help Kraus catalog and scan his collection. It was an unlikely partnership: Kraus will not enter the library because it carries secular literature and a boycott of it was announced — by pashkevil, of course — decades ago. Kraus had been looking for a new place to store his collection. His library ceiling is crumbling. He stored posters in the cellar until mold destroyed dozens of them. "It's strange but I have no choice," Kraus said. "I looked for years for someone to take it." The library staff agreed to lend him a scanner and computer with no connection to the Internet — largely banned by rabbinic decrees publicized by pashkevil. They then taught him to use it, as Kraus had never used a computer before. Soon, he was scanning and cataloging hundreds of the posters a day. The project cost about $27,000. The library has put up 100 of the most striking posters in an exhibit. One warns against computer use by showing a Jewish boy turning into a horned beast after spending hours on one. Another provides a visual guide to women, warning against all the ways a shirt collar can be immodest. The National Library added Kraus' extensive collection to its own archive of about 7,000 posters, including many from the Jewish community in Poland in the 1930s. The pashkevilim have not been completely successful in keeping modern life out of the ultra-Orthodox world. Some ultra-Orthodox Jews use mobile phones, including a model that automatically powers down on the Sabbath. Others filter their Web use through "Koogle," a kosher search engine. One service has even taken to photographing pashkevilim and uploading them for smartphone users.

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Yahoo! News: Internet News: Blogger Outreach: 5 Tips for Connecting With Top Influencers (Mashable)

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Blogger Outreach: 5 Tips for Connecting With Top Influencers (Mashable) Oct 1st 2011, 18:14 This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. Some of the most respected influencers on the Internet today were viewed as illegitimate sources just a few years ago. You know them as "bloggers." In a recent Technorati poll, more than 40% of those surveyed stated that their views closely align with those of bloggers, while their trust in mainstream media continues to wane. [More from Mashable: Product Development: 9 Steps for Creative Problem Solving [INFOGRAPHIC]] For those who seek to market a product or service online, this is the perfect moment -- many of the top industry influencers are also the most accessible. A single relationship with the right blogger could lead to thousands of instant relationships with targeted readers who fully trust that particular source; not to mention the back links. Unfortunately, the hunt for the right blogger can be a job all its own. Here are five tips to help make the hunt for the perfect blogger a bit easier. 1. Look Right Under Your Nose Simply scouring the web in search of the right blog can result in an overabundance of bloggers ill-matched to your business. Why search aimlessly when some bloggers have done a lot of the work for you? Review your site for comments, revisit old emails and check for Twitter mentions where a blogger may have already reached out to you. Bloggers who have made the effort to engage you have proven they are diligent marketers and will help get your brand seen and heard once you collaborate. [More from Mashable: Battlefield 3: EA's New Shooter Gets Social With Battlelog [HANDS-ON]] 2. Reference Blog Directories Browse Technorati, review Alltop, crawl BlogCatalog and search Alexa to determine who is the big blog in your field. Find the top influencers in your industry, research them and move in for the kill. If there is a blogger you wish would highlight your business, but you feel they are too big to conquer, search the content of their blog for mentions of smaller, yet related blogs that you can successfully connect with. Once you have built relationships with these smaller blogs, you can return to the once-unapproachable site with some posts under your belt that are worthy of mention. 3. Help a Reporter Out Join HARO, a service that compiles lists of queries from reporters and bloggers who are seeking experts willing to share their experience, tell their story or sell their product. HARO sends out thousands of daily requests directly to your inbox and can often be better than the best of leads. Since 2008, HARO has published more than 750,000 journalist listings, including many from The Huffington Post and Lifehacker, all of whom need someone like you to complete their post. This tip is a must -- it's free and extremely useful. 4. Utilize a "Blogger Dating" Tool The rise in popularity of blogger outreach prompts the emergence of sites based entirely on this concept. There are now a number of services to help you find, research, contact and track your outreach effort. Much like dating sites for bloggers and marketers, services like BlogDash, eCarin and GroupHigh help you find relevant influencers and allow you to rate them, group them, contact them and follow up. 5. Utilize Good Ol' Fashion Google With all the Google products in existence, it's no wonder that more than one can aid with blogger outreach. The obvious choice, Google Blog Search, is where you can search keywords relevant to your business as well as your business name. This allows you to locate and contact those who may already be an evangelist of your product (see Tip #1 above). Similarly, Google Analytics can reveal your product preachers through reports of blogs that have linked back to your site. Need just a simple blog suggestion tool? Google Reader suggests blogs that address the topics you care about and never seems to run out of recommendations. Follow these five tips and you will find many relevant bloggers, but unless you properly organize your findings, you will end up overwhelmed and discouraged. From the very beginning of your hunt, list all possible candidates in spreadsheet that includes columns for contact email addresses, dates of interaction or engagement, page rank, web statistics and, once a post is uploaded, back links. Implement these tactics in an organized manner and you will be well on your way to a successful and pleasant blogger outreach effort. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, loooby This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Yahoo! News: Internet News: Facebook Says It's Looking Beyond Click-Throughs [INTERVIEW] (Mashable)

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Facebook Says It's Looking Beyond Click-Throughs [INTERVIEW] (Mashable) Oct 1st 2011, 15:32 As innovative and influential Facebook is, the company still mostly relies on a technology that's been around since 1994: display advertising. Facebook's display ads get fewer click-throughs than those that run elsewhere, at least according to one researcher. Not surprisingly, Facebook is looking to redefine the technology and de-emphasize click-throughs as a performance metric. In an interview with Mashable, Brad Smallwood, Facebook's head of measurement and insights (pictured), discussed how the standard metric for online advertising -- the click-through -- is largely irrelevant to most advertisers, why Facebook is working with Nielsen and why digital media buyers are behind the curve on online ad measurement. Excerpts from the interview appear below: [More from Mashable: HOW TO: Subscribe to the Mashable Team on Facebook] Why is click-through a poor measurement of performance? A lot of online has really been focused on search and [the direct-response ad industry] has really been the early adopters online and they're looking at click-through rates, click-to-conversion ratios, all those hard measures. As the Internet grows up, you want to be talking about brand advertising and the stuff that happens beyond the click. There's a study that Nielsen put out that says those things aren't that correlated with one another, that there's actually a negative correlation between CTR and brand lift measures. "A lot of the digital buyers are very focused on that CTR measure. The guys who are buying on TV they understand that they're not expecting someone to watch a TV commercial and then jump inside a TV and buy the product." The thing about CTR though is it is a measure. Without that, how are they supposed to know if an ad works? Just like CTR is a measure of performance, there are a couple of companies like Dynamic Logic and InsightExpress that are trying to measure the other measurements like as a result of being exposed to the advertising, first did it change people's awareness of the product or the message that the advertisers were trying to get across? And did it change a stated intent, like did I intend to go to a Walmart based on what was in this ad? Those companies all have those measures, so what we're focused on is developing standards around those measures so that people can understand how advertising is driving upper funnel measures. [More from Mashable: Facebook Is Getting Too Damn Complicated [OPINION]] Are most marketers sophisticated enough to know that CTRs aren't important? A lot of the digital buyers are very focused on that CTR measure. The guys who are buying on TV -- they understand that they're not expecting someone to watch a TV commercial and then jump inside a TV and buy the product. But the online guys don't have those measures. I'd say there is a massive education that needs to happen and having a bunch of standards that those TV buyers are used to having is a really powerful tool. Is that what's behind your use of Gross Ratings Points with Nielsen? There are three main factors -- Who is the ad hitting?, Does the ad actually move perception in those people's brains? and the last is, Does it actually lead to sales?. The [online conversion rate] is really focused on that first one. Is it hitting the right people? The OCR product that Nielsen developed is really about allowing understands who are you hitting? What are their ages and genders and what do those people look like? With what frequency are you hitting them? in exactly the same way they understand the overnights for TV which describes what American Idol hit in terms of ages and genders so it gives a measure that's identical on the reach side. This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Yahoo! News: Internet News: Samsung delivers top Android devices this week (Appolicious)

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Samsung delivers top Android devices this week (Appolicious) Oct 1st 2011, 17:00 Posted October 1, 2011 12:00pm by Kristen Nicole Tags: Samsung, Smartphones, Cricket, AT&T, galaxy Samsung's been killing it in the Android market these past few months, launching smartphone after smartphone, tablet after tablet. Not shying away from competition, Samsung's upped the ante with another new line of devices, this time to compete with the iPod Touch. The Samsung Player series offers Internet access and apps galore, but doesn't make phone calls. The Korean manufacturer also released its famed Galaxy S II on AT&T. Samsung Galaxy Player Samsung's taken on the gamut of Apple mobile devices, including the iPod Touch. Further extending its market reach, the Samsung Galaxy Player is Wi-Fi only and offers access to mobile apps and the web. Set to hit stores October 16, the Player runs on Android Gingerbread 2.3, with a 3.2-megapixel rear camera, a VGA front camera and 8GB of memory, which can be expanded with a microSD card. The Player comes in two screen sizes: the 5-inch model will cost you $269 while the 4-inch model is $229. Samsung Galaxy S II Samsung's done quite well with the Galaxy series, and the S II line has been especially promising as the manufacturer reaches the 10 million mark for channel sales this week. Starting October 2, the Samsung Galaxy S II will be available at AT&T stores, having already launched on Sprint and T-Mobile. It costs $199.99 with a two-year contract, and will round out AT&T's Android offerings. Boasting Samsung's Exynos 1.2GHz dual-core processor, the Galaxy S II has 16GB of internal memory, an 8-megapixel camera with 1080p HD video capture, and runs Android Gingerbread 2.3 along with the latest version of TouchWiz. One notable update from the first generation Galaxy models is the extended battery life, with a size increase of 10 percent. Cricket ZTE Score Cricket's building out its smartphone offerings, marking its seventh family member with the launch of the ZTE Score. Running Android Gingerbread 2.3, the ZTE Score comes with 600MHz processor, with a 3.5-inch HVGA capacitive touchscreen display. It's only got one camera at 3.2 megapixels, but it does support Wi-Fi and 3G. To sweeten the deal, Cricket's ZTE Score comes with Muve Music service offering unlimited song downloads, ringtones and ringback tones. It's the first unlimited music service to be part of a wireless rate plan, which also comes with unlimited text, picture and video messaging, data back-up and 411 assistance. The latest Cricket phone is only $129.99, but doesn't require a long-term commitment for its service.

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Yahoo! News: Internet News: Product Development: 9 Steps for Creative Problem Solving [INFOGRAPHIC] (Mashable)

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Product Development: 9 Steps for Creative Problem Solving [INFOGRAPHIC] (Mashable) Sep 30th 2011, 21:30 Ronald Brown is a successful startup CEO with an extensive background in technology and consumer marketing. His new book, Anticipate. The Architecture of Small Team Innovation and Product Success is available via iTunes, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. Creativity is the main prerequisite for innovation. However, our culture emphasizes critical thinking to the near exclusion of creative thinking (although it was the key to success in the Information Age). Today's business is dominated by global complexity and commoditization. On the other hand, experts believe that creativity will be the driving force behind business success in the coming decades. [More from Mashable: Battlefield 3: EA's New Shooter Gets Social With Battlelog [HANDS-ON]] What constitutes creative thinking? For one, learning to think expansively and visually -- to see patterns and "connect dots." You also need to let your subconscious mind do a bulk of the work by temporarily disengaging your logical mind -- in other words, Einstein's process of mental incubation. And, once you have an idea, it's important to be able to communicate it clearly and accurately to others. In business, the process of generating and commercializing a good idea has been honed by creative industries for more than a hundred years. This infographic presents nine major steps toward creative problem solving for new product development. [More from Mashable: Boeing 787 Dreamliner: Can a High-Tech Jet Make Flying Enjoyable Again?] This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Yahoo! News: Internet News: You Spend 8 Hours Per Month on Facebook [STATS] (Mashable)

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You Spend 8 Hours Per Month on Facebook [STATS] (Mashable) Sep 30th 2011, 19:21 Google may still be the world's most visited website with users spending nearly 2 hours on the site in a given month. But the average U.S. Internet user spends nearly 4 times the amount of those hours on Facebook, according to a new study. Nielsen says 176.2 million people in the U.S. visited Google in August. That's more than Facebook (163.2 million), Yahoo (149.0 million), Microsoft (134.4 million) and YouTube (128.0 million). [More from Mashable: 10 Facebook Timeline Designs That Will Blow You Away [PICS]] However, in the race for user attention, Facebook is king. The average U.S. user spent a whopping seven hours and 46 minutes on Facebook in August. That's a full 15.5 minutes the average American spends on Facebook every single day. Compare that to the average Google user, who spent just one hour and 46 minutes on the site. Another surprise: YouTube wasn't the second-biggest Internet time waster (one hour, 41 minutes). That title goes to AOL (two hours, 53 minutes) and Yahoo (two hours and 12 minutes). [More from Mashable: Google Maps Launches Helicopter View of Your Route] Overall, U.S. Internet users spent 30 hours online in August, visited an average of 99 domains and viewed an average of 3,123 web pages. And 216 million Americans spent time on the web out of an estimated total of 275 million people who have access to the web. Facebook has been the web's ultimate time sink for a while now, but it's becoming clear that Facebook is taking up more and more of our lives. In August 2010, the average American spent five hours and 46 minutes on the social network. In just a year, that number has grown by three full hours. How much time do you think you spend on Facebook per month? Give us your guesses in the comments. This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Yahoo! News: Internet News: Alibaba's Ma: "very interested" in buying Yahoo (Reuters)

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Alibaba's Ma: "very interested" in buying Yahoo (Reuters) Oct 1st 2011, 01:16 PALO ALTO, California (Reuters) – Jack Ma, the founder and CEO of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, is keen on buying Yahoo Inc if the opportunity presents itself and has held discussions with other potential buyers about options. Asked whether Alibaba might like to pick up the ailing U.S. Internet company, Ma told an audience at Stanford University that he would be "very interested in Yahoo." The former English schoolteacher later added that, were he to have his way, he would be eager to acquire all of Yahoo, not just the stake it owns in Alibaba. "The whole piece of Yahoo," Ma said in answer to a question from the audience about what part of Yahoo he was interested in. "China is already ours, right? It's already in my pocket." Yahoo shares leaped 5 percent to $13.80 in after-hours trading. Acquiring Yahoo could help Ma expand his online empire into one of the world's most important Internet markets. Ma also said he planned to spend the next year in the United States learning more about the country and the market. An Alibaba spokeswoman said Ma would be based in the San Francisco Bay area, but would travel across the country and would continue his operational duties as chairman and CEO of the Alibaba Group. Ma, who was speaking at the China 2.0 conference at Stanford, said he had not visited Yahoo to discuss a deal since he arrived in the United States 15 days ago. "We are probably one of the very few companies that really understand Yahoo USA very well," he said, referring to his company's long-running relationship with Yahoo, which dates back to 2005. That relationship has grown strained in recent years. Ma's attempts to buy back some of Yahoo's roughly 40 percent stake in his company were rebuffed by former Yahoo Chief Executive Carol Bartz, who was fired earlier this month. Yahoo has received inquiries from multiple parties about "potential options," but the struggling company is expected to take months to decide its future. It has retained Allen & Co to help it conduct a long-term "strategic review. Private equity firm Silver Lake Partners is among the parties that have been in touch with Allen & Co, according to a source familiar with the matter. Yahoo's board has also started to look for a permanent CEO, but provided no details on its progress, or whether it hired an executive recruiting firm to oversee the search. At an all-hands meeting the day after Bartz was fired, Yahoo founder Jerry Yang said the company was not for sale, according to another source familiar with the matter. But analysts are staking good odds that Yahoo could eventually be acquired. Ma said he couldn't predict when a deal to acquire Yahoo might take place. "It's more complicated than we thought. And there's so many people interested in that. And we are also talking to them and they are talking to us," he said. "I cross my fingers, just to say we are very, very interested," Ma said. (Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; editing by Andre Grenon, Gary Hill)

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