Eric Berlin

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The coupling of the current “post-web 2.0 era” with the ongoing economic slump would seem to make for a perfect opportunity for a startup like GlassDoor, a job-seeker and career community where you can find and share information about companies, careers and specific jobs, including details […] Read more »

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As respected online publications such as Salon.com, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal removed all or most of their paid subscription models over the course of the decade, conventional wisdom formed that holding print content intended for a mainstream audience behind a pay […] Read more »

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We recently covered status update services Ping.fm and HelloTxt, competitors in the growing market for tools and services that help social media fans and online marketers  manage communication using multiple social media profiles. Now Facebook has made Facebook Pages, the publicly available profiles for businesses, accessible […] Read more »

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Increasingly, social media web sites are becoming much more than places to keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues online. They’re becoming major hubs of information consumption, analysis and distribution as well, so it’s important to understand how this trend is playing out on some […] Read more »

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Just as services designed to help social media enthusiasts manage multiple online profiles are becoming increasingly popular, services designed to manage posting status updates and communication to multiple online profiles are becoming plentiful as well. Recently, I covered Ping.fm, which has now been joined by Italy-based […] Read more »

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Inbound marketing is marketing focused on getting found by customers. In other words, instead of taking the time and resources to go out and find customers, you set yourself up in such a way that the right kinds of qualified leads find you. Inbound marketing, focused […] Read more »

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For many bloggers, RSS subscriber numbers are a fun and useful way to get an approximate read on how many “loyal customers” they have. For others, however, RSS numbers take on a greater significance, impacting such things as advertiser and investor relationships, as well as a web site’s perceived influence.

But how are RSS subscriber numbers calculated, can they be trusted, and what do they really tell us? And while Feedburner is certainly the industry leader in “burning” RSS feeds for web publishers and providing subscriber counts, what are the alternatives? Read more »

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For web workers, some social networks matter more than others. What I mean by that is while MySpace is still one of the most popular web sites on the planet (Alexa has it ranked No. 9 currently), it’s simply not that important — in relative terms […] Read more »

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When I first read about Freedom, “an application that disables networking on an Apple computer for up to eight hours at a time,” on Salon.com, I had to ask myself if I was looking at yet another early April Fool’s Day prank. But the more I […] Read more »

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Whether you help run a web-based startup, are a member of an online production team, or earn your living in part by understanding how things get done on the web, it’s important to get a sense of how the most innovative Internet companies create their products and build their businesses today.

Even though the current economic climate is not so hot, amazing advances in the open source software movement, coupled with vastly reduced costs for such things as infrastructure, bandwidth and software services are allowing web-based companies to develop online products and services faster than ever before. And Internet companies themselves are developing non-traditional strategies that best meet the needs of the hyper-paced modern web marketplace. Read more »

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Often it’s the (seemingly) simple applications that turn out to be the most powerful, and the most popular. Twitter is a great example of this. Ping.fm, a service that allows you to easily update a host of social networking and social media profiles all at once, […] Read more »

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Collaborating on design work is notoriously difficult. Deciding what the perfect shade of blue is, how rounded those rounded corners should be, and whether or not to make the logo bigger is all difficult enough when a discussion is happening between people in the same room. […] Read more »

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A piece by Chris Brogan called “Why Bookstores Are My Office” made me think about how web workers and telecommuters have an enormous amount of discretion in setting up, organizing and utilizing their time. Web working is an enormous opportunity to thrive under an ideal environment and an ideal schedule, yet it’s also a little bit scary for many to figure out how to be productive outside the walls (and cube farms!) of the traditional office workplace.

Here are some tips on how to set up the best web working day for you. Read more »

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As I was leaving a bar late one night while at South by Southwest last week, someone handed me a Blellow sticker. “Pretty cool, funny name,” I thought. It turns out that Blellow is more than just a name. In fact, it’s an ambitious microblogging platform […] Read more »

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Twitter’s meteoric rise in popularity – particularly over the last year – has been widely covered, and indeed the simplicity and flexibility of the 140 character-based microblogging platform continues to attract people all over the world in huge numbers, while a thriving community of developers build add-on services using its open API. We’ve also heard a lot about the power of Twitter as a communications, promotional and marketing tool.

Twitter and other microblogging services are radically shifting the ways in which people communicate and share information. And that shift is now entering the workplace on a large scale, particularly for web workers and for companies who are embracing the ways in which microblogging platforms can save time while increasing productivity. Read more »

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A session called Bootstrap Your Startup at South by Southwest 2009 provided valuable insight for the many web workers who are either embarking on their own online business venture or considering doing so. Led by Bijoy Goswami, CEO of Aviri, and Marcy Hoen, founder of Austin […] Read more »

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Technorati has long been known as a source for ranking the authority and influence of bloggers relative to one another. In an effort to maintain its position as a go-to source for online authority ranking, Technorati has now launched The Technorati Attention Index, a list of […] Read more »

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South by Southwest 2009, one of the largest and most widely-covered technology and Internet conferences of the year (and that’s to say nothing of the music and film portions!), is fast approaching. While many industry insiders will attend in person, SXSW will also be widely covered across a wide swath of mainstream media news web sites, blogs, YouTube, Qik, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Tumblr, posterous and just about every other social media publishing platform that you can think of!

Here’s a guide to the SXSW 2009 Interactive panels that web workers worldwide should look out for. Read more »

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Something that web workers deal with throughout the day but don’t spend a lot of time talking about is the deluge of e-mail alerts, updates, and notifications that batter us like a cacophonous rain of data throughout the day, much of it due to the social […] Read more »

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If the “Web 2.0 era” marks the time when widgets became a household term (in web workers’ homes, at least!), 2009 is looking like a year when widgets are evolving and maturing to add real value for web site publishers and their visitors. Whether you’re running […] Read more »

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It’s easy to understand why URL-shortening tools such as TinyURL and bit.ly are popular on the social web. For web workers, the ability to quickly absorb, organize, package, and redistribute information is a critical and demanding task. BurnURL, a new service produced by ReadBurner (first mentioned […] Read more »

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Web working increasingly means having to read up-to-the-nanosecond trending topics and conversations across the social web, and Twitter in particular. With the huge and growing number of Twitter apps and related services that are now available, it can be confusing to figure out the best way to quickly and easily extract those keyword-based threads that you need.

It is possible to do this, as it turns out, but it takes a little work. Read more »