Social media guru Chris Brogan has released a free ebook, Personal Branding for the Business Professional.  The free download brings together Brogan’s thoughts on personal branding from his blog and compiles them into a concise (15 page) ebook.

On the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina‘s devastation along the Gulf Coast of the United States, another huge hurricane, Gustav, is howling around Cuba and heading for New Orleans, which was devastated by the 2005 hurricane. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is calling Gustav “the mother of all storms,” and has ordered the mandatory evacuation […]

Flickr has introduced a new feature that lets you create fullscreen slideshows that can be embedded and shared. Slideshows are available from just about every page where you see a group of photos on Flickr: photostream pages, sets, tag pages, group pools and search results. Just look for the slideshow icon, right. I’ve embedded an […]

In this exclusive interview, audiobook podcasting pioneer Scott Sigler explains how he used his podcast to get a book deal and even a movie deal, how he uses social media to promote his work and why he wants to kill you off in his next book.

New research shows that podcasting and social media are important technologies at the fastest growing companies in the US. The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently conducted one of the first statistically significant, longitudinal studies on the usage of social media in corporations. Research Highlights: Four out of five companies in the […]

Shel Israel has posted an interesting article looking at how he’s begun to rely on Twitter as his “personal search tool”: I am coming to trust Twitter as my personal search tool…and here’s why: I can consider the recommender. Much of the information comes from people I already know and have chatted with online. Most […]

An article in the New York Times today looks at how Getty Images plans to build a new business, based on licensing imges from social photo-sharing site Flickr: Yahoo and Getty Images said Tuesday that they have entered into a partnership under which Getty editors will comb Flickr in search of interesting images. They will […]

TinySong.com is a unique service for social media users that combines streaming audio, music search and URL-shortening to let you send music via Twitter, text messages and other services. Here’s how it works: Do a search at TinySong.com: View the search results and select the song that you want to send:

Podcasters from throughout North America gathered in Kingston, Ontario, last weekend for the third annual Podcasters Across Borders conference. Here is a quick rundown of some of the coverage of the event by participants and presenters at PAB08: Financial Aid Podcast and social media superhero Chris Penn talks a little bit about the “battle” (heated […]

A midlife crisis inspired Gary Vaynerchuk to start his video podcast, Wine Library TV, which is primarily about wine, but also about action figures, the New York Jets, thunder, and Vaynerchuk himself and his quirky onscreen persona.

That quirky persona and unpretentious wine expertise has propelled “Gary Vee” to popularity on the Internet and in the mainstream media, leading to television appearances on “Ellen”, “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” and other shows. More recently, Gary Vee has authored a book, Gary Vaynerchuk’s 101 Wines: Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World.

Podcasting News’ Publisher, Elisabeth McLaury Lewin, sat down with Vaynerchuk this weekend for an exclusive interview, which looks at how he got into podcasting, using podcasts to establish a person brand, great wines for flood cleanup and a few secrets, along the way.