Lulu provides authors with new opportunities
Lulu is a self-publishing platform for authors that has recently teamed up with book lovers’ social network weRead.

The partnership offers even more direct marketing and promotion opportunities for Lulu users, Mashable reports.  “As weRead operates as a social networking and recommendation tool for readers, it’s a great target for authors looking to leverage Web-based platforms to spread the word about their work.”

weRead allows its members to compare, rate and recommend nearly every book in print, allowing Lulu authors to present their work within an established community of avid and well-read members.

Pew study reports growth in search engine use
The percentage of Internet users who use search engines on a typical day has been steadily rising from about one-third of all users in 2002, to a new high of just under one-half (49%), reports the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

With this increase, the number of those using a search engine on a typical day is pulling closer to the 60% of Internet users who use email, the Internet’s most popular app on a typical day.  View the complete report (PDF).

The long-awaited new layout and URL for Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) is now available.  Sign into your account and see what’s new, or create one if you haven’t already.

“Delicious has a bold new design that is more powerful and easier to use, along with a revamped search that’s faster and more robust. It’s also full of useful features that people have been requesting for years,” they say on the site.

There are new tag, bookmarking, and navigation features, including menus that give you quick access to your Bookmarks, Network and Tags pages.  [via Lifehacker]

This site, pointed out by iLibrarian, offers many resources for people who haven’t used business-oriented social network LinkedIn much, or who want to maximize its potential. 

The articles were created through a group project called “Smart Ways to Use LinkedIn.”  Cateogories include:

• Business Development / Marketing / Sales
• Career Management / Personal Branding / ResumesJob Search
• Recruiting
• Growing Your Network
• Keeping in Touch
• Meeting Face-to-Face
• Organizing and Extending Groups
• Miscellaneous
• Specific Jobs / Industries
• Lists

Videos for Toddlers
Totlol is a new community-moderated video site for “those between the ages of 6 months and 6 years.”  The site provides the type of filtering that most large video sites do not — a way to find age-appropriate videos that the youngest family members will enjoy.

The embedded videos are based on the YouTube API.  [via Google Blogoscoped]

Field Guide to Firefox 3
Tuesday is the big day when the final version of Firefox 3 is ready for download.  Ready to help you enjoy all its new features is the Field Guide. 

“The new features cover the full range from huge and game-changing to ones so subtle you may not notice… Overall the result is the fastest, safest, slimmest, and easiest to use version of Firefox yet,” they say.

Pew report: More people using Internet for campaign news
During this 2008 election time, “a record-breaking 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others,” reports the Pew Internet & American Life Project. 

Three online activities are especially notable:  35% of Americans say they have watched online political videos — nearly triple the number during the 2004 race;  10% say they have used social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace to gather information or become involved; and 6% of Americans have made political contributions online, compared with 2% during the entire 2004 campaign.

Mobile picture books
Hot sellers in Japan are made-for-mobile picture books for kids.  One publisher plans to have 50 titles and 10,000 downloads by next September. [via iLibrarian]

How Americans use the Internet for purchase decisions
“The internet plays an important role in how people conduct research for purchases, but it is just one among a variety of sources people use and usually not the key factor in final purchasing decisions,” notes this Pew Internet & American Life report (PDF).

Among online Americans who use the Internet for product research, online resources make shopping more efficient by helping them explore options and compare features.  Although many use online resources to look for better deals, few actually make the purchase online.  Among the product purchases examined were music, cell phones, and new housing.

New instant copyright licensing services
In response to growth in blogging and social networking, iCopyright has launched two new instant licensing services – Instant PDF E-Prints and Instant Web Post – to help online publishers promote lawful reuses of their copyrighted content while protecting their rights.  See LISWire for details.

Common Craft’s new video explains social media “in plain English.”  As always, the video is both simple and clever, and completely achieves its goal of explaining the phenomenon of social media.

Free wiki app Wetpaint received an investor boost of $25 million for a new project called Wetpaint Injected that “allows online publishers to engage their audiences in completely new ways,” says the Seattle P-I.

Launching today, Wepaint Injected lets online publishers embed code to open up selected Web pages, allowing readers to “inject” videos, photos, reviews and comments alongside the professional content.  They tout the benefit of new, fresh content, created by the readers themselves.

Some believe this form of social networking is the next wave in online publishing.

“In some ways, I think Injected is to social publishing what Mosaic was to the Internet,” said Frazier Technology Venture’s Len Jordan, a board member and early Wetpaint investor.

Why?  Web publishers are increasingly looking at ways to combine traditional editorial content with social and community functionality, tapping into viewers insights about sports, travel, music or other areas.

With Injected, online publishers maintain the social aspects on their own pages instead of becoming part of someone else’s network.  They control the design elements and get the search engine benefits of hosting that new content.  Injected is fully customizable, allowing publishers to control which pages are open and how.

“Media companies have been incredibly interested in it, because they recognize that getting search engine results is incredibly competitive and this technology let’s them do that without having to pay authors,” said Wetpaint co-founder Ben Elowitz. “If you had to pay people to write every page of Wikipedia, imagine how expensive that would be.”

Wetpaint Injected is free to publishers that use the tools to generate fewer than 100,000 page views per month.  After that, they plan to take a percentage of advertising revenue.  Check out the brief video on the site.

Talk about the world around you with GeoGraffiti
This find strikes me as a unique way to capitalize on our social networking and sharing culture, as well as on the prevalence of cell phones.

GeoGraffiti now has a public beta of a free “verbal bulletin board.”  You can create location-speciific audio notes, called “voice marks,” from any cell phone.  Share them with the world and listen to and/or respond to other people’s voice marks.

GeoGraffiti says its mission is to organize the mobile phone community’s “wisdom of crowds” intelligence, and to facilitate the exchange of that location-specific intelligence by providing a voice-driven platform that is accessible from any phone and any place.

MobileCrunch says that once you have registered, “adding a new location through the site is quick and easy, but doing so over the phone is currently a bit of a chore. If you initiate the Voice Mark over the phone, its placement is only accurate to the zip code. After you record your Voice Mark, you’ll click your way through a series of menus to properly tag your recording - it’s easy to follow, but listening through the options takes a bit too long.”

The video demo shows how you can take advantage of GeoGraffiti.  [via TechCrunch]

Photoshop Express adds Flickr support
When we first posted about the new free online image editor, Photoshop Express, we listed the supported photo sharing sites and mentioned that Flickr was expected in the future. 

Now Lifehacker reports that Flickr support has been added so you can take images from your Flickr account, edit them with PS Express, and put them back, all without downloading anything. 

“It’s not full-on Photoshop”, they say, “but still a great web-based editor for your Flickr photos.”

 LinkedIn is a popular free social networking site focused on enhancing your business and industry connections, rather than on the mostly social aspects of sites like MySpace and Facebook.

Digital Inspiration has a LinkedIn guide that helps you use it more effectively.  You need to be logged in for any of the tips to work and then get the tip links on Amit’s site.

Tips include how to export LinkedIn connections, remove connections, find people you may know, find out who has viewed your profile, change your LinkedIn URL, enable network feeds, add your blog RSS feeds to LinkedIn, and more.

An Associated Press article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer sounds a warning about applications downloaded in social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. 

When the account holder decides to add an application from a third-party developer to their home page, they have to agree to let the developer “know who I am and access my information” which means everything on a profile, except contact information.   Agreeing to those terms has become a matter of routine for the nearly 70 million Facebook users worldwide who use applications to enhance sharing and communication with friends online.

Even if you always choose to keep your social pages private — only accessible to selected friends — you may have opened the door to privacy and security abuses when you add one of the growing number of applications.

The third-parties developers say they use the information to connect users with similar interests, or to target ads, based on demographics such as gender and age (something Facebook and MySpace also do).  Facebook and MySpace say they hold application developers to strict standards and note that e-mail addresses and phone numbers aren’t made available.

Experts in online security issues, on the other hand, think there’s too much personal information accessible online with few guarantees that it’s safe.  Social networkers may have little understanding where their information goes and have a false sense of security.  After awhile, it is too easy to check those boxes allowing access to your information, especially if you want to enjoy the fun that the apps can provide.

“I suspect that there’s a whole lot of clicking without a lot of thinking,” says Mary Madden, a senior research specialist at the Pew Internet & American Life Project who studies privacy issues. “So much of this sharing happens in a way that users don’t see the consequences. It’s kind of a big, black hole.”

The article offers these privacy tips:

• Provide enough information for your friends to be able to identify you — but not so much that someone could use information to steal your identity. There’s no reason to include your entire resume, from education to work history.
• Consider making your profile private so people you don’t know can’t “scrape” information and images from it.
• Even if your profile is private, remember that your information and photos can be accessed by third parties through your friends — and through application developers on such sites as Facebook and MySpace.
• Remove social networking applications you’re not using and check out the creators of those you do install. If something seems suspicious, report it.

If you are a member of a social network, be sure to examine the privacy options, understand what might happen to your information, and ensure that the settings coincide with your wishes.