You know the best way to get the public to respect your brand? Have a respectable brand. Offer a great, innovative product and make responsible, ethical business decisions. Lead the pack! Evolve! Don’t send hundreds of temp workers to the gulf to put on a show for the President. Hire those workers to actually work! Don’t dump toxic dispersant into the ocean just so the surface looks better. Collect the oil and get it out of the water! Don’t tell your employees that they can’t wear respirators while they work because it makes for a bad picture. Take a picture of those employees working safely to fix the problem. Lastly, don’t keep the press and the people trying to help you away from the disaster, open it up so people can see it and help fix it. This isn’t just your disaster, this is a human tragedy. Allow us to mourn so that we can stop being angry.

via Street Giant – Leroy Stick: the man behind @BPGlobalPR. Wouldn’t change a word of this article.

To manage your privacy on Facebook, you will need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options. Facebook says it wants to offer precise controls for sharing on the Internet.

via Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options – NYTimes.com.

We’re going to be forced to adjust as a society. I firmly believe that we will simply become much more accepting of indiscretions over time. Employers just won’t care that ridiculous drunk college pictures pop up about you when they do a HR background search on you.

via Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions. The future of information leads to two things either we all stop caring about minor indiscretions or we hide everything. Arrington’s hope for the future of information on people is my hope as well.

Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that's an average of 600 tweets per second.

via Twitter Blog: Measuring Tweets. Absolutely insane and I’m helping out.

I realize that many parents think that they’re doing good by their kids when they choose to limit their exposure to the randomness of the world, but it just makes me deeply deeply sad. And so I simultaneously am amused by ChatRoulette and depressed because I realize that so many folks would prefer to keep themselves and their teens/college-aged-kids sheltered rather than giving them a way of thinking about systems like this and teaching them to walk away when things get weird. And this deserves a Le Sigh Royale.

via apophenia » Blog Archive » ChatRoulette, from my perspective. I love reading danah boyd’s thoughts for gems like this, and I throughly enjoy the idea of bringing the weird back into the internet.

A Florida woman yesterday filed a class-action lawsuit against Google Inc., charging that the new Buzz social networking tool set violates the privacy rights of users.

via Google slapped with class-action lawsuit over Buzz. It was only a matter of time. How in the world did Google get the idea that tying a public and automatic social networking system to a private system made any reasonable level of sense?

Your most vivid fears…

are almost certainly not the most important ones.

via Seth’s Blog: Your most vivid fears…. If there was one blog you should be reading to understand and try to get a handle on the new world of marketing, communication, selling and understanding in an internet, social media driven world, Seth Godin’s is the one.

Clerks director Kevin Smith has revealed he was asked to get off a plane in the US because he was too big for the seats.

BBC News – Director Kevin Smith told he was ‘too big’ to fly. This was really dumb of Southwest and yet another thing with social media companies mistakes are publicized in real time before the company can fix it.

Recently Gary McGraw echoed Ben Smith’s 1991 observation. “People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network,” he said, “but I’m already part of a network, it’s called the Internet.”

via Critical mass and social network fatigue « Jon Udell. A problem I’ve found myself over and over, yet I keep joining up and then deleting old and useless profiles.

To make this idea a viable business you would almost have to only allow for e-books. While you could rent physical copies of books, unlike a DVD the normal wear and tear for a book is a lot higher. This throws more weight to Amazon as they have released their Kindle app for Windows PC’s.

As a side note, I’ve downloaded the Kindle app along with a nice selection of the zero cost books listed. It’s actually quite nice. My most likely complaint of the book not being enjoyable since it isn’t a physical book, really didn’t seem to matter. Though admittedly I have yet to read a book the whole way through, once that happens I may have a different opinion.