If you’re checking out who checked in at different locations last night, it’s likely you’ll notice that mostly your male friends were doing the check-ins. According to a report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project which examines internet trends in the United States, men use Foursquare, Gowalla and other location bases services for check-ins at double the rate of females.

For people unfamiliar with these services, they allow you to check-in at each location you visit, while broadcasting your location to friends and the public (if you choose to share that information). User can then receive badges and other rewards for checking in.

According to the study 6% of males who were asked said they use the services, while only 3 percent of internet using females said they check-in at locations.

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Facebook has been approved for a news feed patent which allows them to generate a personalized story feed for users, the patent in many ways is similar to the news feed patent they received earlier in 2010.

The patent, named Generating a feed of stories personalized for members of a social network is described as:

“Systems and methods for generating dynamic relationship-based content personalized for members of a web-based social network.” read more

After unveiling their Nokia app to the world, Automattic (the company behind WordPress) has announced that they have now surpassed one million mobile users.

We just passed 1 million mobile users across all platforms, which is not only a huge landmark for us, but for mobile blogging altogether. Cell phones are becoming our new personal computers, always with us and always ready when something needs blogging about. Each day thousands of posts are written and posted using nothing but a wee phone keyboard and a built-in camera. It’s truly about capturing the moment, and as smart phones are becoming more popular we’re trying to stay with you with your platform of choice. (Official WordPress Blog) read more

In an attempt to regain relevancy among the masses, Digg has announced that the company is bringing back the bury button to the celebration of Digg fans everywhere.

I am happy to announce that we’ve made a few changes to our story list design, including bringing back the bury button.

When burying a story, the story will remain visible with the ‘Buried’ label on top of it. Simply hover over the story and the label will hide so that you can continue interacting with the story. Note, you can still save or comment on stories that you’ve buried, but you can’t Digg something once you’ve buried it so make sure you use some discretion when burying. We’ve also removed the “Report” link from permalink pages. This was intentional, as burying a story also flags the story for review so our team can remove content that violates our terms of service. (Official Digg Blog)

The company also made a few more cosmetic changes making it easier to see who submitted stories  as well as follow people without visiting their profile page thanks to the mini “hover window” that appears when your cursor rolls over the submitter’s link.

While it’s good to see the bury button return, only time will tell whether this change will pacify some of their hard core users, as well as help the company compete against its more social rivals like Twitter and Facebook (the latter who seems to have stolen most of Digg’s thunder).

I use Twitter as a means to get company’s attention all the time. For example, I recently reached out to my cable provider after their phone representatives proved useless, 10 minutes later a month worth of issues were fixed. I also see issues being addressed by people in my stream all the time, but my favorite Twitter complaint user has to be Facebook.

In the social networks case, Facebook has been taking to Twitter to address visitors concerns. The use of the network started in full force when Facebook was experiencing down times several weeks ago and now they’ve used the service once again for a smaller issue, Font Size.

Recently Facebook had made their News Feed font size smaller, so small in fact that many users began complaining about how hard the feed was to read, in response Facebook posted the following Tweet:

“Thanks for the feedback on the font size. We’re listening and sharing it with our teams here.”

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Automattic (the company behind WordPress) has launched their first “portal” which caters to the thousands (if not millions) of WordPress food bloggers online.

Today we’re thrilled to announce FoodPress, the go-to destination for the hottest dishes from WordPress.com bloggers. To help us run the site, we’ve partnered with publishing company Federated Media. Each day, FoodPress features snippets of posts, which is designed to get new people to discover and then click through to a blog. (Official WordPress Blog) read more

We recently have published the excellent The History of Online Video infographic and some months ago already had the Google’s timeline so it is no surprise that our next infographic the story of Youtube visualises.

The startup, launched in April 2005 was sold to Google only 18 months later for the sum of USD1.65 billion. Even after the acquisition by the Palo Alto search giant, the video platform continued to grow and is now one of the most popular websites in the world, hosting billions of videos and playing more than 2 billion videos every day. Often marketing campaigns heavily rely on Youtube plays and many artists use the platform as well as MLM marketers.

Thanks go to the crew at Infographiclabs for another graphic.

Want to write more posts each week and do that consistently? Or maybe spend less time and get the same things done faster? Is this even possible?

Be more responsible! – some blogging ‘gurus’ say. Have no fear! –other gurus shout.

Nonsense. While those things might work, they produce very small results.

A Study That Showed The Power of Specificity
In his best-selling book “The Power of Full Engagement”, author Tony Schwarz describes a study of a group of people being asked to exercise at least once for twenty minutes during the next week. Easy, huh? Twenty minutes, one day of the week, shouldn’t be so hard. Well, it seemed to be very hard actually…based on that request only, only 29% of the people complied. read more

After a two year YouTube blackout, officials in Turkey today lifted their ban on the world’s most popular video sharing website.

Bans originally started in March 2007 when videos showed up on the website with offensive comments made against Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. After a short period the site was unblocked only to repeat the block/unblock cycle for just over one year, until in May 2008 YouTube was completely blocked in the country.

The recent whitelisting of the site according to Turkish Transport Minister Binali Yildirim occurred because:

“…We didn’t get here easily, we have been through a lot in the process. I hope that they have also learned from this experience and the same thing will not happen again. YouTube will hopefully carry out its organization in Turkey within the limits of law in the future.”

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