From the Reader 3-26-2008

Trying to catch up on my RSS reader so here's some tasty treats for you on the WWW:

• Nathan Snell: Starbucks and Social Media. (hat tip.) Nathan gives some good insight as to why Starbuck's new venture in creating a social media site didn't make the splash it wanted to or maybe could have.
  
  
• Modite: Gen Y Women, Out of the Woods? Love this post by Rebecca! She makes some great points about women in the workforce and an takes an interesting term from Monica called 'casual sexism.'
  
  
• AdAge: 2007 Ad Spending Barely Budged. Online ads, magazine, cable TV spending grew just barely, whereas network and syndicated TV went down.
  

  Online ad spending continued to grow faster than any other media, notching a 15.9% increase to reach $11.3 billion, although its rate of growth fell from 17.3% in 2006. Consumer magazines grew 7% to $24.4 billion. Cable TV expanded 6.5% to reach $17.8 billion. And outdoor rose 4.9% to $4 billion.

• Cheezhead: HotJobs Changing Search Algorithm. Instead of searching by date, changing to relevance. This definitely will make it all the more important to incorporate SEO in job postings and descriptions. Although in some aspects, I'm not sure this makes much difference outside of HotJobs' website mostly because to appear in search engine results and vertical search engines outside of the job board, you'd need to exercise some SEO.
  
  
• Chris Brogan: Social Media Starters for Freelancers. This is some sound advice for freelancers and really anyone who's trying to break into the Social Media scene. Overall he's got some great tips on starting a blog, promoting it and then networking using various online tools.
  
  
• LocalNa8ion: Another Story about Small Business and Social Media. Julian points to a good article on social media for the small business owner. I like this because it seems to be a good follow up article after Guy Kawasaki's talk here in Charlotte.