20 TV Shows With the Most Social Media Buzz This Week




Sunday night's broadcast of the BET Awards 2012 tops this week's social TV charts, leaving the 2012 UEFA European Football Championship game between Spain and Italy in the dust. We think it was Samuel L. Jackson's impersonation of Nicki Minaj (complete with fuschia wig) that did the trick.

EURO 2012 remained pretty buzzworthy through the last week of the tournament. But now that Spain reigns victorious, there will be room for other programs at the top of the charts.

Kanye West, Jay-Z, Beyonce and Chris Brown were the big winners at the BET Awards — each took home two awards. Of course, the real winner of the evening has to be Blue Ivy Carter, who proudly repped mom, pop and Uncle Ka…
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More About: Entertainment, infographics, Social Media, social tv, social tv charts, Trendrr, TV

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/07/02/social-media-tv-chart-7-2/?utm_source=feedburn...

5 Chinese Social Networks You Need to Watch




Connections mean “power” in China. This is why social networks have become part of the relationship-building fabric of Chinese society. The numbers certainly bear this out. Roughly half of China’s 513 million netizens are using social networking sites, and all of these social networks are home grown.

While it’s true that the government makes it virtually impossible for foreign players to enter the social network market in China, some consumers use VPN services, which provide access to sites like Facebook. But even if China allowed outside players, Chinese companies have the natural advantage of understanding the nuance of the Chinese consumer. This is why the following five s…
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More About: china, contributor, features, social networks, trending

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/07/02/china-social-networks/?utm_source=feedburner&u...

Single Application Mode in OS X Keeps Your Desktop Distraction Free [Mac OS X Tips]

It's easy to get distracted when you have a bunch of different applications open. One bouncing icon and suddenly your focus is gone and you forget what you're doing. You can download programs to keep you focused, but blogger Zack Shapiro points out an old trick in OS X called single application mode that keeps your desktop clean. More »


from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5922815/single-application-mode-in-os-x-keeps-your-desk...

Users to YouTube: let us record your videos

If YouTube wants to be the future of broadcast, then it also has to support the DVR of tomorrow. That’s the main argument of a new online petition urging Google to allow third-party tools and services that record content from YouTube, which has attracted more than 170,000 signatures in just three days.

The petition was launched in reaction to reports that Google has been sending cease-and-desist letters to YouTube-MP3.org, Music-Clips.net and other sites, demanding to take down offerings that allow users to download the audio tracks of YouTube videos. In the letter, a YouTube lawyer referred to the site’s Terms of Service, which don’t allow the downloading of content that isn’t made available for download by YouTube itself.

The petition, on the other hand, argues that downloading MP3 files from YouTube is simply an act of recording media, comparable to the DVR or even the cassette recorder. From the petition:

“For decades people were allowed to take a private copy of a public broadcast. You could record the radio program with a cassette recorder or make a copy of your favorite movie by using a video recorder. All these techniques have been opposed heavily in its early years by the big media companies who didn’t want the public to have such technology… Several years later history is about to repeat: Google has teamed up with the RIAA to make the same claims against all sorts of online recording tools for their 21th century broadcasting service: YouTube (“Broadcast yourself”).”

Contacted for this story, a YouTube spokesperson sent me a brief statement reiterating the Terms of Service argument:

“We have always taken violations of our Terms of Service seriously, and will continue to enforce these Terms of Service against sites that violate them.”

Video conversion and downloading tools for YouTube aren’t exactly new; numerous sites and apps have made use of the site’s MP4 streams to offer high-quality audio and video downloads in the past. Some of those also have gotten cease-and-desist letters before, but this recent wave seems to have received a bit more attention in part because the folks are the center of it are more media-savvy. The petition was started Friday by Philip Matesanz, who happens to also be the founding admin of YouTube-MP3.org as well, and his site now also features a prominent link to the petition.

However, there’s also an underlying trend here that makes this more of a pressing matter for YouTube – and it’s not necessarily any pressure from the record industry, as the petition alleges. As YouTube is stepping up its efforts to monetize content on the site, it has to make sure that its video views are actually counted, and that ads are displayed when people play any of its clips. Both isn’t possible when users download YouTube clips through third-party services.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/video/youtube-mp3-download-tools-petition/?utm_source=feedb...

Ultimate Tips for an Easier Life in Excel, Part #1: Shortcuts

Ugh, Excel. It’s one of the most widely-used software applications that ever existed. Whether you’re a Finance, Administrative or Sales professional, employers today are hiring those who can produce deliverables quickly, often in Excel.

As of earlier this month, our community had answered more than 1,000,000 questions in the Smarterer Excel test. Yet for most people, Excel still looks intimidating with its seemingly complex formulas and a big learning curve.

We want to help you become an Excel ninja with a series of posts in the next few weeks, where we will cut through the clutter and drill down on the most practical techniques.

For Part 1 of this series, here are 3 tips for any beginners:

#1. Use Excel for something fun.

It may seem like a spreadsheet is just for school projects or boring accounting ledgers, but it could actually be a fabulous organization tool for anything fun in your life. Divya Bahl, blogger for HerCampus.com, used Excel to keep track of her adventures in trying different restaurants when she first moved to NYC. By categorizing her list the way she envisioned her journey, the experience was less overwhelming than searching on Yelp and much more personalized.

Excel is a prerequisite for most professions today, so why wait to learn it over something not as fun? Practice makes perfect.

#2. Unplug your mouse.

We know this sounds crazy, but imagine having to click through the ribbon a hundred thousand times over your career. That could add up to thousands of hours which you could’ve spent on a vacation or pursuing a new interest. For many competitive entry level jobs such as Investment Banking, productivity in Excel plays a large part in the hiring decision. @IBDBlogger, a blogger who specializes in career advice for bankers, drew from his experience that forcing your hand muscles to practice the shortcuts was a worthwhile investment.

It’s common knowledge that ctrl+c and ctrl+v are shortcuts for copying and pasting. Beyond that, which keystrokes are actually used often out of the 200+ that exist? We recommend learning the following shortcuts first, in order to get comfortable with maneuvering and performing basic operations (Windows, Excel 2007 only):

  • F5: go directly to a specific cell. Nothing wastes more time than scrolling down or to the right to look for a specific cell.
  • Ctrl + arrow (up, down, left or right): go directly to the end of a block of data. Many times you need to get to the bottom of a data set. This saves time from scrolling and clicking.
  • Ctrl + Shift + Arrow (up, down, left or right): select an entire block of data instantly. No need to drag the mouse and miss a cell.
  • F2: edit content in cell. Get in the habit of using this instead of double clicking. Imagine not having to move your hand to the mouse and risk clicking the wrong cells.
  • Alt + = : auto create sum formula and add all values on top. Most of the time you have a simple table that sums a list of numbers. Not having to type the formula can save you a lifetime.
  • Shift + spacebar: select entire row. You may often want to clean out an entire row, copy the row or insert a new row on top. Now you don’t have to scroll all the way to the left of the screen to do it.
  • Ctrl + spacebar: select entire column. Similar to selecting an entire row; with this, you don’t have to scroll to the top.
  • Ctrl + z: undo. It’s easy to mess something up. Undo lets you go back easily.
  • Alt -> E -> S -> V: Paste Special Value. To keep things simple in the beginning, you may like to play with a copy of some data without tangling with the existing formulas or formats. This will provide you the value of the cell with a fresh start. When maintaining advanced data analysis between multiple workbooks, this will become very handy.
  • Ctrl + Page Up or Page Down: Move to the next or previous worksheet easily without moving your hand to the mouse.

#3. Keep everything neat.

Nothing hurts the eye more than a messy spreadsheet, where you can’t immediately decipher the categories or the content of individual cells. Formatting a sheet, however, is very time consuming without the practical shortcuts. Here, we recommend:

  • Ctrl + B: bold fonts. Simplest way to create headers for your data block.
  • Ctrl + Shirt + &: adds border around the cell. For the most basic spreadsheets, adding border to highlight a summary value is often enough.
  • (select entire column) Alt -> O -> C -> A: auto-adjust column width based on content. No need to drag the tiny line of a column trying to fit the content!
  • (select entire row) Alt -> O -> R -> A: auto-adjust row height based on content. No need to drag the row.
  • Ctrl + 0: hide the entire column. No need to select entire column and right-click for the menu in order to hide it.
  • Ctrl + 9: hide the entire row. Same as above.
  • Ctrl + !: format as Number with 2 decimals
  • Ctrl + $: format as Currency
  • Ctrl + %: format as Percentage
  • Ctrl + /: format as Scientific

If you tackled all of these and are looking for more shortcuts, Bill Jelen, the renowned “Mr. Excel” and Microsoft MVP, offers a video showing many keystroke tricks.

Follow us on Twitter @smarterer to stay tuned for our Part 2, Powerful and Essential Formulas.

 

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/ultimate-tips-for-an-easier-life-in-excel-part-1...

Twitter releases "transparency tool" to reveal government requests

In the vein of what Google has done for a few years now, Twitter released a “transparency tool” on Monday. The company showed the public for the first time exactly how many times governments ask for user information or ask for content to be taken down. The tool also shows how many DMCA takedown requests are made. The new tool's release comes on the same day that a New York criminal judge denied Twitter's motion to quash a subpoena request for an Occupy Wall Street protestor's data.

Not surprisingly, requests from the United States government top the list, coming in at 679 (out of 849 requests made in 2012). Twitter complied in whole or in part with 75 percent of those requests. The report shows that the company did not comply with any government content removal requests. The transparency tool measures requests between January 1, 2012 and June 30, 2012.

By comparison, American authorities requested over 3,800 items via court order from Google in the second half of 2011. Google says it complied with 40 percent of the American requests.

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from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/07/twitter-releases-transparency-tool-to...

Ask Stack: What is the best way to divide work between developers?

This Q&A is part of a biweekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 80+ Q&A sites.

Robert Harvey asks:

My team and I are rebuilding a site we developed around ten years ago, and we want to do it in Agile. After I've spent a lot of time reading (probably not enough), I am having trouble with the question of how to divide work between developers.

I'll be more specific and say that the site is divided into separate modules which don't have much integration between them. What is the best/most accepted way to divide the work between the developers?

Read more | Comments

from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/ask-stack-what-is-the-b...

Boxee, Comcast agree to a workaround for encrypted basic cable channels on third party boxes

Boxee usually doesn't get along with the existing media / pay-TV conglomerates, but now it's telling the FCC it has come to an agreement with Comcast. The solution agreed to lets live TV-friendly Boxee access encrypted basic cable channels thanks to a DLNA-controlled high definition digital transport adapter that would connect to the box via Ethernet, with an eye towards no longer requiring an adapter at all down the road. Multichannel News quotes Boxee CEO Avner Ronen as saying it was "good to work with Comcast" on a deal that gives third parties like his company continued access to basic cable. The benefit for Comcast and other cable companies is that they could progress with encrypted all-digital solutions that would open up bandwidth for things like higher speed internet, something Boxee was arguing against previously. What this means for existing standards like CableCARD or the long awaited AllVid is unclear, but if it's one step closer to a legitimate option to ditching the cable box, we'll take it.

Boxee, Comcast agree to a workaround for encrypted basic cable channels on third party boxes originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 01 Jul 2012 00:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Multichannel News  |  sourceLetter to FCC from Comcast / Boxee  | Email this | Comments

from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/01/boxee-comcast-agree-to-a-workaround-for-en...

BBC introduces Red Button to the internet, thinks they'll be great pals

BBC to introduce Red Button to the internet, thinks they'll be great pals

Since 1999, the BBC's Red Button feature has delivered alternative camera angles, sports scores and the like over broadcast spectrum, but it's now set to become internet enabled. Channel surfers shouldn't expect a full-blown web experience, however, as the Beebs stresses it's not about to include everything and the kitchen sink in terms of functionality. Rather, their Connected Red Button aims for simplicity. Punching the clicker could bring up the iPlayer to catch previous episodes of shows or save recipes from a cooking program for later viewing on a computer or smartphone. Companion screen experiences such as the Antiques Roadshow app, which is slated for a September release, are also part of their web-connected roadmap. Mum's the word on when these new features might roll out, but we're promised the BBC's Olympics coverage will give us a taste of what's to come.

BBC introduces Red Button to the internet, thinks they'll be great pals originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 30 Jun 2012 11:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/30/bbc-to-introduce-internet-connected-red-bu...