Today's Most popular News

November 2nd, 2007 at 7:48 pm

Remember when the asinine office policy was to wear a Hawaiian shirt on Fridays?Serena Software, some boring company in San Mateo, has begun a policy of “Facebook Fridays,” where the entire 900-person company is forced to spend an hour on Facebook, updating their profiles, throwing virtual sheep at each other, and, hopefully finding potential Serena employees while they’re trolling for hotties. God, what is this economy coming to? Companies that force their employees to share information on a social network? Doomed to fail.

Source:Valleywag

It's catching, Facebook hopes Remember the “sponsored groups” for which Facebook charges advertisers $100,000 a month? Those advertiser havens on the social network may soon be supplanted by a new form of advertising, VentureBeat reports. Codenamed “Pandemic,” the ads will appear as “stories” — short items that appear on users’ profiles — describing the actions Facebook users undertake on third-party websites. One example: a multiplayer game like World of Warcraft might inform a Facebook user’s friends that he’s reached a new level. Or a music store might inform friends of a recent purchase. The advantage over sponsored groups? The ads will be based on friends’ activity, not some generic commercial message. That’s the kind of information Facebook users are already looking for on the site, so presumably, the ads will gain a better reception. Or, equally possible, they’ll be so creepy Facebook users will start groups on the site to complain about them.

Source:Valleywag

Irina Slutsky is a winner! Irina Slutsky of Geek Entertainment TV has found a way to carry on her idea of celebrating the best in video podcasting. Under PodTech, where Slutsky brought the awards last year, the event was badly mismanaged. Slutsky left Podtech, but the “Vloggies” name remained with PodTech. Former CEO John Furrier “openly” trademarked “Vloggies” shortly after firing the event’s organizer. At the Winnies, in a dig to PodTech, which failed to have a sufficient number of Vloggies awards made last year, attendees will bring their own, old trophies to swap “instead of wasting money on ‘made in Hong Kong’ trophies.” Oh, and it gets better.

Everyone who attends will receive an award, and everyone’s a presenter, making the event more of a party than a PodTech egofest. Gary Vaynerchuck of WineLibraryTV will cohost the event scheduled for November 30 somewhere in Los Angeles. Sounds all right to me. If you’re going to celebrate loser-generated content, the least you can do is not have it run by a loser-generated company.