LinkedIn and Facebook may have the market cornered for building relationships between business professionals, many startups are starting to pop up that take it to the next level. One such startup is Favo.rs.

I was first turnedonto Favo’rs a couple of months ago from an article on Wired. A “good ol’ boy” network, as they describe it, Favo.rs allows users to connect with other professionals just as LinkedIn and Facebook. The difference is in the accountability aspect; with Favors, users get to keep track of what they do for others and what others are doing for them.

The interface is solid, keeping a timeline of those who are needing favors within ones network. This is where it gets important. It is through the accountability and desire to grow a network that Favors separates itself. Making connections is often the key to business social networks and receiving introductions is an important component of a network’s success.

We will watch more closely, but for now, we’re simply going to give it a shot.

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Today is a different world when it comes to political campaigns. A decade or two ago given the same candidates of today with the same scenarios but a less-prevalent internet, Ron Paul would be in single-digits in the early primaries and Rick Perry (and possibly Herman Cain) would still be alive and well. Mitt Romney would have a commanding lead and Santorum would have placed 3rd or 4th in Iowa instead of winning it.

The internet has completely changed the way that candidates get their message out. It has completely changed the virility of news and opinions. It has completely changed the impact of the campaign dollar.

Ron Paul is still a contender because he has masterfully played the internet like a 35-year-old tech geek instead of a 76-year-old politician. If any of the 6 other candidates that were in the race a month ago had the same skills, the race would be nothing like it is today after Gingrich’s win in South Carolina.

Social media and politics

There is little doubt that political social media is a driving force in amplifying messages positive and negative surrounding the candidates. Herman Cain is the only victim of this year’s presidential race who could not have changed his fate by using social media. All of the others who have dropped out would have had a chance of making a stronger impact if they had been working social media for the past year the way that Ron Paul and his supporters have done for a long time.

Social media is two-fold. It is obviously a place where people go to express their own opinions and hear the opinions of others, but it’s also a barometer that mainstream media uses to gauge sentiment. After every debate so far, there has been a mention of Twitter and Facebook.

After the Fox News South Carolina debate earlier this week, Twitter was a focal point. Ron Paul was the only candidate who showed positive sentiment across the board. Mitt Romney, who went into the debate with a commanding lead, failed on Twitter in every subject.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Is this reality, or is it “Ron Paul Bots”? It’s likely a mixture of both, particularly in this case where the question being asked on the topics was about whether or not the candidate dodged the question or answered it. Agree or disagree with Ron Paul’s policies, nobody doubts that he says what he means and means what he says.

Some will say that his lack of a victory means his social media tactics aren’t working. On the contrary, I would contend that it’s because of his social media mastery that he’s still in the conversation at all.

SOPA opposition

There were only two people running for President who voiced opposition to SOPA and PIPA before the South Carolina CNN debate Thursday: Ron Paul and Barack Obama. Paul was also the only GOP candidate who participated in the SOPA Blackout. Had any of the other candidates sent out a simple Tweet in opposition on Wednesday, they would have received free publicity and air time on television. Instead, they were silent and the opportunity passed.

Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum had a “wait and see” approach to SOPA. Once they saw that the protest was approved by most Americans, they echoed the public’s view during the debate the following day. Mitt Romney gave luke-warm opposition and used gentle language so as not to risk any campaign dollars that might head his way (despite most dollars in Hollywood being slated for Obama). Ron Paul has been opposing PIPA and SOPA from the beginning.

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Just as movies are made outside of Hollywood and cars are built outside of Detroit, entrepreneurs, startups, and venture capitalists are present in places other than Silicon Valley. Worldwide, there are business-friendly environments that are conducive to expansion of technological advancements.

This graphic by Gist examines these various “Entrepreneur Meccas” where talent and dollars collide to bring advancements to the world. Click to enlarge.

(Via: Gist. H/T: Cleveland VW.)

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I’ve been warning the news publishers to be careful about viewing Twitter and Facebook as if they were equivalent to the web. This would be like Kodak trusting Apple to handle its digital photography strategy. We know now how that turned out.

Twitter and Facebook are rich and getting richer. Either of them could easily buy a struggling but independent news organization. Then where would you be if you were dependent on them to distribute news? It would be like the Times depending on Murdoch to print their daily paper. Instead the Times invested in their own printing plant, presumably so they could have better control of the product, both from a creative and tactical standpoint. If Murdoch owned the presses and the trucks, who do you think would deliver the most timely news? They have to think about Twitter that way. At some point they will come to see themselves as a media company, if they don’t already.

Caught in the middle is the original idea of the Internet and the web, that people could be media instead of just consuming it. For that to continue, enough people have to see their future as publishing independently, and enough people have to read independently of corporate media, neither originating from Silicon Valley or Hollywood, to keep the flame alive.

I still hope that there’s a remnant of the idealism of tech. That there was value in the personal-ness of PCs. The net is the same way. We need to make it ever-easier for people to own and run their own infrastructure. People think it’s hard, but it doesn’t have to be! Each of us can have the equivalent of a printing plant, that’s the magic of tech. No harder to keep running than a laptop. To those people in tech who still hold to the ideal of free communication unrestricted by government or corporations, please use some of your profits to help guarantee the future of an independent Internet.

Otherwise, I think we can all see this clearly now, the net will be a single amorphous Disneyfied mess, not too far down the road.

This post first appeared on Scripting News.

Dave Winer, a visiting scholar at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software. A former contributing editor at Wired magazine, Dave won the Wired Tech Renegade award in 2001.
Follow @davewiner on Twitter.

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According to Google, “rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away.” To help users get to that content, Google may drop ad-heavy websites from its search results.

Google says that the change will only affect about one in 100 searches, and emphasizes that websites using what Google’s Distinguished Engineer and SEO guru Matt Cutts calls “ads above-the-fold to a normal degree” will not be affected.

Instead the change is designed to punish sites that “go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page.” In other words, if a site is so packed with ads that people can’t find what they’re looking for then Google isn’t going to send them to that site anymore.

While the distinction seems clear at first glance, digging deeper reveals some potential confusion for webmasters — for example, what role does screen size play? On a netbook, for instance, Google’s own search results page is almost entirely taken over by advertisements, not the actual search results (i.e., the content).

Google on a netbook screen: Ads are in red, search results in green

At small screen resolutions, Google’s own search results page is one of the worst offenders when it comes to advertising clutter obscuring content. That seeming hypocrisy may leave some webmasters wondering what constitutes “a normal degree of ads” and how screen size affects what is defined as “normal.” Sticking simply with what Google has written about the change, copying Google’s search results page is probably not a good idea in this case.

Cutts does encourage webmasters view their websites at different screen resolutions, suggesting that screen size does play a role, but unfortunately he doesn’t offer any details about what that role is or how it affects the algorithm’s new layout ranking scheme.

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Shortly after Google launched Search plus Your World earlier this month, critics accused the company of favoring its own nascent social network over the much richer results on others, like Twitter or Facebook. As Wired’s Steven Levy quipped, “there’s too much Plus and not enough of Our World, which has oodles of content on other social networks.”

Now developers at Twitter, Facebook and MySpace have put together a demonstration of just how much relevancy Google sacrifices in order to push Google+. The demo, which uses only Google’s own results, shows, among other questionable results, how Google routinely ignores more relevant Twitter pages to show off seldom-used Google+ profiles. To see it in action, head on over to the new Focus on the User website.

If you decide you prefer the often more relevant results from the Focus on the User experiment there’s a bookmarklet available, cheekily entitled “don’t be evil.” Just drag the bookmarklet into your web browser’s bookmarks bar and then click it whenever you want to see more than just Google+ results in Google’s search results.

The developers behind Focus on the User do work for Google+ rivals, but that doesn’t change the results of the experiment which speak for themselves. The developers also point out that their tool relies entirely on Google’s own data to rank social search results. Here’s their description of how the don’t be evil tool works:

the tool identifies the social profiles within the first ten pages of Google results (top 100 results). The ones Google ranks highest — whether they are from Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Quora, Tumblr, Foursquare, Crunchbase, FriendFeed, Stack Overflow, Github or Google+ — replace the previous results that could only be from Google+.

In other words the bookmarklet largely returns Google to its previous state, before the Search Plus Your World Update. If you’d like to know more about how the bookmarklet works or see some examples and situations in which the emphasis on Google+ social results actually degrades the quality of search results be sure to check out the video below.

Photo: Rene Tillmann/AP

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When asked today about how Apple was handling the competition from lower-priced tablets—specifically the Kindle Fire—Apple CEO Tim Cook said, effectively, that it isn’t a competition at all. Which would sound like hubris, if the numbers didn’t back him up so strongly. More »

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This is Argus One, the Pentagon’s newest unmanned aerial spy. It can carry 30 pounds of high-tech sensors and it just happens to be shaped like a sperm because this shape is better at handling turbulences at high altitudes. More »

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In a privacy policy shift, Google announced today that it will begin tracking users universally across all its services—Gmail, Search, YouTube and more—and sharing data on user activity across all of them. So much for the Google we signed up for. More »

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Ah, young love. It warms the heart to see young gaming characters finding each other after a long quest and heading into the world of everlasting relationships as it so often does in gaming lands. Unfortunately for Link, his humble abode may not be exactly what Zelda had in mind.

(Via: GabeDraws)

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