A couple of eye-brow raising stats came out recently. The Society for New Communications Research released a study regarding journalists and their use of social media. It’s no shock that the study revealed the “use of social media tools by journalists is surging, growing in double-digit percentages in some cases.” But, as ZDNet points out… there’s interesting insight to how many of the 341 journalists surveyed are not taking advantage of social media sites.

More on social media in journalism + social media usage at work stats >>

Loopt, a mobile application, announced they are donating $1 for every check-in at Chipotle, Whole Foods or Panera Bread before the end of Sunday. The proceeds will go towards the relief efforts in Haiti and there’s no charge to the Loopt user either. Minutes later, I read that Gowalla, a competing app, will be launching a campaign called “Hearts for Haiti” on Monday, February 8th.

The Hearts for Haiti campaign will take place in the SF Bay Area at three specified locations — two Peet’s coffee shops and the Barenaked Ladies concert. When someone uses Gowalla to check-in at one of those locations during the event, $50 will be donated in to the Red Cross in that person’s name. Gowalla hopes to reach $20,000. In addition to Gowalla’s charitable efforts, the two Peet’s locations will also be donating 10% of sales towards Haiti efforts. Details on when to go where can be found over at the Gowalla Blog.

Continue reading to learn how Loopt and Gowalla work >>

In spite of constant layoffs and a (seemingly) still drowning economy, Americans set a record for mobile giving yesterday. Tens of thousands of cell phone users texted donations that totaled $3 million. This record-setting amount of donations to the Red Cross will benefit the recent Haiti earthquake. According to Daily Finance, yesterday’s record blew away previous single-day mobile giving numbers. The Indian Ocean tsunami crisis in December 2004 brought in $200,000, and in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina received $400,000. The Haiti earthquake hasn’t seen anything yet, though.

News of the earthquake rang around the world, perhaps much more quickly than news of Google leaving China. And this also seems to be the case for news of text donations; word has spread like a viral video on YouTube. The dollars are still banking in by the text message. Right now, donations to the Red Cross, alone, have succeeded the $4 million mark.

Wait, there’s more. Twitter is abundant with tweets about donations to various organizations. Google live search also shows a constant stream of chatter. Even the President is spreading the word. If you would like to contribute, here are a few organizations accepting donations via text:

• Text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to American Red Cross.
• Text “HAITI” to 85944 to donate $10 to the International Medical Corps.
• Text“HAITI” to 20222 to donate $10 to the Clinton Foundation.
• Text “HAITI” to 25383 to donate $5 to the International Rescue Committee
• Text “HAITI” to 45678 to donate $5 to the Salvation Army in Canada.
• Text “HAITI” to 864833 to donate $5 to The United Way.
• Text “YELE” to 50150 to donate $5 to Wyclef Jean’s Yele fund.

As we are becoming more comfortable and reliant on technology, I wonder what numbers the our next mobile giving record will reach… What do you predict?

Is China going too far? Was the Chinese government behind, as Google puts it, “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack” that’s gotten Google ready to pull out of China? In mid-December Google and, apparently, about 20 other companies, were attacked. Google’s investigation discovered “that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties.”

A blog post from Google’s Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, declared that Google is “no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn.” Google doesn’t necessary dominate the internet search market in China (about 15% or so), but there is lots of potential for growth — especially since Google will soon dominate the world. And if they pull out, Baidu, China’s leading search engine, will surely saturate the market even more.

Continue reading about Google’s approach to China >>

How are you saying good-bye to 2009 tonight? Sleeping like any other day? Dinner with friends? Clubbing with strangers? Counting down with Dick Clark (or is it Ryan Seacrest now)? Here at SoftwareNewsDaily, we wanted to say farewell by reminiscing our top 10 technology news stories of 2009. When I say “our” top 10 stories, I suppose it’s really more “my” top 10 stories. That’s okay, I don’t mind dominating the office opinion; they’ll agree with me. Counting down to the number one story, here are “our” picks.

Continue reading SoftwareNewsDaily’s Top 10 Tech news Stories of 2009 >>

Backupify is dropping all charges and providing free services until January 31st. Securely back up all your online accounts automatically. As an attempt to gain a stronger and larger customer base, Backupify is providing its services without charge during this promotional duration. Backupify president Rob May urges internet users, “If you sign up during this time period, you get unlimited storage, for free. You get an account that is not a free trial, not free for a limited time, free forever.” Act now, before it’s too late!

Nuance has released another mobile application for iPhone, Dragon Search. Powered by their popular Dragon NaturallySpeaking software, the app lets you search the web just by saying the words. It’s the “fast, easy, and smart way to search online content on your iPhone using your voice,” declares Nuance. Voice your search and receive results from engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, Twitter and iTunes. Their top five reasons for getting it?

• Most convenient way to search on your iPhone
• Amazingly accurate
• Up to five times faster than typing
• Easy to use
• Safer and more productive while you are out and about

And the best reason that’s not mentioned? It’s a free download (at least for now). Download either Dragon Dictation or Dragon Search at the Dragon Mobile Apps site; it’s also available through iTunes.

The Federal Government in Australia is introducing an internet filter that will block access to sites containing obscene and criminal content — think child sex abuse, sexual violence, bestiality, detailed tutorials on how to commit crimes and other things that are most likely found in the Anarchist’s Cookbook. The Huffington Post reports that such material is already banned from Australian sites, but the government has no control over its access on servers overseas.

The reasoning behind such censorship? Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says, “The Government believes that parents want assistance to reduce the risk of children being exposed to such material.” Conroy also believes that some internet content is just not appropriate for civilized society.

Continue reading about Australia’s green light to censor the Internet >>

Adding to our last post about customers switching to Google Apps, CNET News has just reported that Los Angeles is ready to make the switch. The city, like many government agencies, has had security concerns over making the switch. The concerns were brought to light “after the poor e-mail practices of an employee at Twitter and an easy password reset mechanism at Yahoo gave a hacker access to sensitive Twitter documents stored on Google Apps.” While this has nothing to do with the security of Google Apps, it did raise questions about cloud computing in general.

Despite concerns, L.A. appears to be moving forward with the 5-year, $2 million contract. The main driver appears to be cost. Meanwhile, the city will keep Microsoft Office on PCs that already have it, and future additions will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

What do you think of the country’s second largest city making the switch to Google Apps?

If you’ve been on Twitter today, you probably have noticed that Outlook 2010 is a trending topic. Why all the hype surrounding Microsoft’s new and unreleased email client?  A group called the Email Standards Project recently started a website called FixOulook.org in response to Microsoft’s plan to use Word as the rendering engine for Outlook 2010. This microsite is rallying people together to get Microsoft’s attention, in an attempt to ensure they comply with standards and use a web-based browser to render emails.

The new Outlook 2010 is still a year away from its commercial release. As such, Microsoft’s designers are beta testing its new features and are looking for public input on the software. A blog post on the Email Standards website gives an insight into Microsoft’s thought process surrounding their decision to make Outlook 2010 a walled garden and to not support web standards.

To quote from that blog post, when asked why Outlook 2010 is using Word to compose email, Microsoft project manager Dev Balasubramanian said:

“The reason for this lies in the benefit Outlook users gain by having Word as their e-mail authoring tool; rich tools like SmartArt, automatic styles and templates, and other benefits found in Word 2007 and 2010 enable Outlook users to write professional looking and visually stunning messages.”

“I am aware of where this decision on our part places Outlook from a standards perspective – at the same time, we ask that you consider the benefits Outlook users get from having Word tools in their e-mail authoring experience.”

This is simply not acceptable from the perspective of any person that uses html when writing emails. Every single other email client uses a web-based rendering tool that presents emails in the same manner. If Microsoft proceeds as planned, Outlook users will see broken html emails from everyone that composed that email using any software other than Outlook. Do you want to see broken emails in your Outlook inbox?

Even worse than seeing broken emails in your inbox is sending out emails that were composed in Outlook. If you currently use Outlook 2007, you know what I’m talking about. You write a nice email and format the text, colors, and images to look professional and clean. Then you send the email, and the world opens it in Gmail or Yahoo, and your nice email looks like garbage. Why? Because Outlook 2007 composed the email using Word, which no other email client can understand. Outlook 2007 just made you look stupid. Enough is enough – Outlook 2010 needs to supports web standards.

To make your voice heard on this issue, send a Twitter update with the link http://fixoutlook.org in it. There are over 16,000 people that have sent tweets with this link so far! For more info, check out the Email Standards Project.

Just another example of how social media is changing the world…