Future:Media:Change

Two “outreach bloggers” were selected via a competition process among Australian bloggers, the winners Joel Katz and Sharna Bremner will be heading out to Bangladesh to work directly with people living in the slums in Dhaka, both blogging about their personal experience as well as setting up facilities and training community members on how to use social media, audio, video and blogging to share their stories.

If you want your content to be remembered, use color. More specifically, use natural color. So says an interesting psychological study I ran across today.

Google celebrates the 30th birthday of Pac-Man in true Google fashion, with a “Doodle.” This Doodle has a surprise. It is actually a playable Pac-Man game for one or two players. I wonder what they will do for my birthday.

Location based social network Foursquare counted their 40 millionth checkin according to a tweet from one of their developers.

GoogleLabs launched Living Stories last year, as an experiment with content partners The Washington Post and The New York Times. While the experiment has now finished,  Google has open-sourced the code it and made a Wordpress plug-in to boot.
The video explains the concept but for the skim readers, Living Stories, basically brings current events into a wider context by providing a background on a current news stories, by serving up related information about the event/issue, instead of traditional search which returns information mainly about the incident itself.

Living Stories was …

Nielsen and Facebook found friend endorsement of brands through the site’s “Become a Fan” functionality increased ad recall 30%, brand awareness 13%, and purchase intent 8% with certain levels of social context

With 17,396 views on YouTube since it was posted eight days ago, this Brazilian video may have what it takes to “go viral.” Real ants actually carry protest “signs” against an insecticide. As the description says, “Real ants, real cardboards, a real motive: a protest against Baygon.”

In a recent study, Hubspot found that small and medium sized B2C businesses that used Twitter saw twice as many business leads as those that didn’t. Blogging significantly increased business leads for both B2B and B2C businesses.