Alexander Hotz is a freelance multimedia journalist and public radio junkie based in New York City. Currently he teaches digital media at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Follow Alex on Twitter at @hotzington . With another long hot American summer coming to a close, many students are scrambling to get back into “learning mode” before school starts. One of the simplest ways to ease that transition is with podcasts

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15 Essential Back to School Podcasts

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We’ve all done it — surfed on over to the book of faces, our hearts racing and pupils dilating with excitement, let our cursors linger over those oh-so-powerful words, “Remove From Friends,” and clicked away with the maniacal glee of a serial killer. Still, there aren’t too many among us who have the skill, nay, the expertise to cut ties without cutting deep. At this point, some of you may be reminiscing about the sepia-tinged past, those glory days when, if you didn’t want to chill with Lucy “I Eat Paste” Smith anymore, all you had to do was ghost out of her life, letting the last tendrils of your friendship dissolve into the ether like wisps of smoke. Well, those days are as dead as Lucy’s creepy gray front teeth

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To Unfriend or Not to Unfriend: That Is the Facebook Question

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We shared numerous textbook buying tips with you this week , but reader beala lets us know that merely buying overseas can save you a lot of money on its own. More

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Formerly a Principal Engineer at Amazon , Darren Vengroff is Chief Scientist at RichRelevance where he helps retailers like Overstock and Sears create a more personal shopping experience for consumers. You can read more from Darren on the RichRelevance blog. Amazon and Facebook are making headlines with the launch of a new application that allows shoppers to receive product recommendations based on Facebook preferences. Once users enables this app, Amazon is able to monitor their activity on Facebook, including what pages they likes, and use that information to recommend products they are likely to be interested in purchasing. Combining accounts with an application such as this, whether specific to Amazon or other merchants, has the potential to be a compelling hybrid of social networking and shopping that creates value for shoppers and for merchants

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How Online Retailers Can Leverage Facebook’s Open Graph

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This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here . The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. Name: CouplesSpark Quick Pitch: Crowdsource your relationship issues with CouplesSpark

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Crowdsource Your Relationship Issues

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“Jane Austen’s Fight Club” Fake Trailer Goes Viral [VIDEO]

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Nook for Android hit the Market for free download today, and it has some nifty features that make e-book reading easy and clean, even for someone who would much rather breathe in the dust of a library book than stare fixedly at her Droid X. A little less than a month ago, the Kindle for Android app came on the scene, much to the delight of the Google device-inclined. Although Amazon’s app is clean, simple and rather stunning (much more attractive than its iPhone counterpart and Borders’s Kobo-powered app, IMHO), Barnes & Nobles’s app has a few more goodies. First of all, the Nook boasts eight font styles and five text sizes — which means I can read Imperial Bedrooms in Times New Roman (no Comic Sans, alas).

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Nook for Android Is Here

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Facebook’s astronomic rise, staggeringly large user-base, and world’s youngest self-made billionaire CEO make it one of the most fascinating companies around today. While everyone knows the basics about the service’s Harvard dorm room origins, we’ve delved a little deeper to find out more interesting snippets of info. Here are 10 facts you might not know about Facebook, so read on and let us know your favorites in the comments box below. 1

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10 Fascinating Facebook Facts

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This series is supported by Ben & Jerry’s Joe , Ben & Jerry’s new line-up of Fair Trade and frozen iced coffee drinks. Learn more about it here . Infographics help communicate information in a digestible manner as they creatively present data in an understandable and engaging format.

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10 Beautiful Social Media Infographics

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“Twilight: Eclipse” Is Way Better in 8-Bits [VIDEO]

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Trailer Hits the Web [VIDEO]

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Whether you own a Droid , sport a Nexus One or do the Backflip, there’s one thing you have in common with more than eight million other people — you operate on Google’s mobile phone OS, Android. To celebrate all that is Android, we’ve rounded up a whopping 15 fab items featuring the platform’s cute little green bot mascot. Each item could help spread the word and show some love for the ‘droid, so hit up our curated collection below and let us know in the comments which ones suit your fancy. 1

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15 Awesome Android Accessories

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If you’re looking to stock your summer reading list YourNextRead is a simple and crowd-driven tool for finding out what book you should read next based on the ones you’ve recently finished. More

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Back when Google announced it was looking for cities to test its fiber-to-the-home trial network ,

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Nick Carr is worried the Internet is making us stupid. It’s not so much our preoccupation with LOLCat photos or videos of fat girls flying off of swings that concerns him as it is the way we read and consume information on the Internet itself. He thinks the Internet is rewiring our brains, perhaps for the worse, and he’s written a book to warn us all about it called The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains . Carr also finds links to be too distracting. Carr raises some good points worth contemplating, but his arguments also strike me as incredibly self-serving.

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No, The Internet Won’t Make You Stupid

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The woman in this photo is an employee at the Library of Congress . She is using a high-tech scanner to map the individual chemical components of a century-old book in order to learn how to better preserve it. More

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New stats we’ve just been shown by video measurement company TubeMogul show that Twitter is quickly growing as a top referrer for web video traffic, far outpacing Facebook, Yahoo, Google and Bing. Further, when it comes to getting users to watch videos, users who discovered a video via Twitter tend to stay around longer, too. In fact, these users will view a video for an average of just over two minutes. In a quick Twitter poll, we tried to ascertain the reasons for Twitter’s emergence as a video-sharing tool. From what we can tell, people are using Twitter to connect not just to their real-world friends, but also to specific interests.

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Twitter Emerging as Online Video Power Broker [STATS]

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It’s official: Kindle is coming an Android phone near you sometime this summer. Kindle is already available on the iPhone, iPad, and BlackBerry, but Android will join the mobile lineup in the next few months. The free app comes with all of the features you’d expect in a Kindle app: access to Amazon’s half a million e-books, automatic sync of bookmarks, notes, and highlights, and the ability to read books in portrait or landscape mode. While Kindle for Android seems very similar to its iPhone and iPad counterparts, it does come with an additional feature: the ability to buy books through the app itself. iPhone and iPad users currently have to buy Kindle books via the Safari mobile web browser because Amazon doesn’t want to give up 30% of its book sales to its new e-book rival .

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Kindle Arrives on Android This Summer

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Both auto-tune and cats are Internet meme darlings — Auto-Tune the News snagged a Webby this year and Lolcats is basically an empire — it was only a matter of time before they were joined together in sweet, sweet harmony. Just ignore the dude in the vid — he kind of ruins the hilarity. Still, anyone who furnishes, “Yes I really do have that much free time,” as the video description is OK in my book. For more web video coverage, follow Mashable Web Video on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook Reviews: Facebook , Internet , Twitter Tags: autotune , cats , humor , viral video , youtube

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Meme Collision: Kittens in Auto-tune [VIDEO]

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If you are a book lover and love to read then you must know about the free iBooks app for iPad that has a built-in iBookstore with access to thousand of books you can download and begin reading immediately. iBook on iPad is an amazing way to download and read books. You can browse your library on a beautiful bookshelf, tap a book to open it, flip through pages with a swipe or a tap, and you can also bookmark your favorite passages. You can get free iBooks app from here , just drag the ePub files into your iTunes 9.1 Library and sync your iPad with your computer. The books will appear on your shelf in iBooks

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Free iBooks On iPad For Books Lover

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Alyssa Milano was the guest of Jimmy Kimmel Live, and right off the bat, Jimmy asks her to explain Twitter and hashtags to him. In the video below, we learn that she tweets quite a lot (12 to 22 times per day), that she likes to imagine Jimmy Kimmel naked when she’s nervous, and that she uses a lot of hashtags, which is a big plus in my book. Looking at her Twitter stream closely, you’ll see that she also uses TweetDeck, and she asks Twitter “not to kill TweetDeck”. True, with the acquisition of Tweetie , the future of other third party Twitter clients is a little uncertain, but with support like this, I think the folks at TweetDeck have nothing to worry about.

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Alyssa Milano Teaches Jimmy Kimmel How To Use Twitter [VIDEO]

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For years, we’ve heard the music industry talk about declining sales and profits (often unconvincingly tying these numbers to piracy ), but what about the artists? How much do they earn when their music is distributed online, compared to selling CDs? It’s a very hard question to answer, because some of this data is kept secret, and it varies from country to country. Still, David McCandless , author of the book “Information Is Beautiful,” rolled up his sleeves, researched the available data and created this beautiful infographic that shows how hard life is these days for most music artists (unless they’re Lady Gaga ).

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How Much do Music Artists Earn Online? [INFOGRAPHIC]

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For one reason or another, I’ve spent the past few weeks down at the TechCrunch offices. As a result, it’s proved almost impossible to avoid iPad fanboy hysteria. Mike has already said that the device “beats even my most optimistic expectations”, Jason was one of the first in line at the San Francisco launch and even Sarah – who until now didn’t have an iPhone – has succumbed to its charms as a work/play device for long-haul travellers. And then there’s me. I’m still not convinced

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NSFW: I Admit It, The iPad Is A Kindle Killer. I Just Wish It Weren’t Going To Kill Reading Too

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Today’s kids are so lucky; not only do they get to enjoy the Dr. Seuss app for the iPhone , they also get to experience the Seussical one on the iPad ! Oceanhouse Media, the people that make the Dr. Seuss apps for the iPhone, have released updates for the three most popular Dr. Seuss apps, which make them iPad-compatible. That means that if you already own The Cat in the Hat [iTunes link], Dr.

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Dr. Seuss Comes to the iPad

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Jim Tobin is president of Ignite Social Media , where he works work with clients including Microsoft, Intel, Nature Made, The Body Shop, Disney and more implementing social media marketing strategies. He is also author of the book “ Social Media is a Cocktail Party: Why You Already Know the Rules of Social Media Marketing .” “What’s next in social media?” It’s among the most popular questions out there. But while most folks currently answer with “location-based services” (i.e. Foursquare , Gowalla ) or “group purchasing” (i.e. Groupon , Twongo , Living Social ), the real battle may be between Facebook and Google .

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Facebook vs. Google: The Billion Dollar Battle to Be Your Default Social Profile

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Here you go, folks, an official statement from Redmond itself on the perennial Windows Phone 7 Series / copy-and-paste discussion . First and foremost, from the onset, there will be no copy and paste in the traditional sense; Microsoft is hoping to bypass the issue by integrating into the OS contextual, single-tap instances for viewing an address on a map (let’s hope it has some good recognition algorithms here), doing Bing searches based on highlighted terms, dial a phone number, and so on. But the book isn’t entirely closed here, apparently, as the statement goes on to say the company “will continue to improve our feature set over time based on what we hear.” We’ve also got a statement regarding the hacked emulator , to which a representative told us, “we have been very clear that [it] is based on early code and is not reflective of the final user experience,” which is a nice way of saying don’t get your hopes up on those fun little surprises (task manager, anyone?). Full statements after the break. Continue reading Microsoft: Windows Phone 7 series ‘will not initially offer copy and paste,’ case-specific actions integrated into OS Microsoft: Windows Phone 7 series ‘will not initially offer copy and paste,’ case-specific actions integrated into OS originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:41:00 EST

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Microsoft: Windows Phone 7 series ‘will not initially offer copy and paste,’ case-specific actions integrated into OS

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In our Scamville series of posts last October we exposed the massive user fraud occurring Facebook and MySpace social games. Fake quizzes tied to long term mobile subscriptions, malware-laden toolbar downloads and other scams were the center of the controversy. The industry did a lot of talking in the wake of those posts and some long term changes have been made. For the most part, for example, Fake quizzes and the Video Professor scam are off Facebook (but see below on what’s still there). But now we’re seeing the same old scams hit the iPhone

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Scamville Marches Onto The iPhone, Sneaks Back Into Facebook

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Next time you drop a book in the bath or end up with an otherwise water-damaged periodical, document, or photograph, reader pearce.kilgour recommends a simple solution: Put it in the freezer . Photo by dno1967 . Ever drop a book in the tub? Don’t despair, you can save it. Put it into a plastic bag (not vacuum seal) and place in the freezer.

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Save Water-Damaged Books, Docs, and Photos by Putting Them in the Freezer [MacGyver Tip]

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This is what digital books from Penguin—one the mega-publishers—will be like on the iPad. Children’s books that are games, interactive anatomy books, and an augmented reality intergalactic GPS system. This is the future we’ve been waiting to see.

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Penguin’s Incredible Vision of Books on the iPad Doesn’t Look Anything Like Books [Ipad]

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Ed. note: If you do extensive reading on a computer screen you know how quickly start black-on-white text can strain your eyes. One Lifehacker reader, tired of straining his eyes, changed the default background color with pleasing results. We watch the #tips box every day to see all the tips, tricks, and clever uses Lifehacker readers come up with.

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Change the Background Color in Adobe Reader for Eye-Friendly Contrast [Tweaks]

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