Compatible Files

You can upload the following types of documents:

• Word (.doc)
• PDF (.pdf)
• text (.txt)
• PowerPoint (.ppt)
• Excel (.xls)
• Postscript (.ps)
• LIT (.lit)

Once your documents are in the shared online library users can:

1. Embed your document into their web pages using a simple HTML code
2. Download the document in PDF, Word, Ascii or MP3 format (if there’s an audio track available)
3. Perform search into shared library using tags and keywords

It’s a kind of…. social sharing

Scribd can be considered a kind of YouTube for Office Automation due to Social Networking features embedded in the system like buzzing and comments. Popular documents are listed into the above-the-fold area on the right.

If you are not interested in files sharing you can anyway use scribd like an online file converter disabling the “share” flag of each file.

Here it are others interesting features;

• Discover related documents to your own with special algorithm
• Upload multiple files at once (Bulk upload)
• Make some money when a user make a hard print copy of your document

Subscription is free and space is unlimited!

Image Credit: solarseven

Uploading your own music

After your subscription you can upload yours MP3s to your profile. Dealing with copyright is obviously on you. In few words, you can only upload music from your CDs or mp3 songs regularly purchased online. Once you do this, you can listen to your songs through streaming directly from your account.

Comment  and listen other users’ songs

You can search for the other users’ (DJs) songs in the search field and once you find them, listen to a preview.

To listen to the whole songs or add them to you playlist, you should make comments on them by clicking on blip. After your comment, the song will be uploaded to your blips list on the home page.

At this point you can:

• Listen to the whole song through streaming by clicking on play
• Send an alert to the song’s owner by clicking on the ok hand (called props and used to determine the users’ karma)
• Add a song to your playlist by clicking on the star
• Add the user as one of your favorite DJs

There are two very useful functionalities: the chance to listen to the songs other users are blipping in real time and the chance to follow your Favorite DJs’s blips (and, obviously, be followed).

Social Functionality

Blip activity can be embedded into;

• Twitter
• FriendFeed
• Pownce
• Tumblr
• Live Journal
• Jaiku
• AudioScrobbler

Your blips are automatically shared with the others micropublishing services.

There are other web 2.0 music sharing services, such as last.fm, anywhere.fm, etc, but Blip is much more simple and fun. My username is ikaro, hope to hear from you! : )

You can check my funny italian slang here (I’m @ikaronet)

About the Manifesto, i report an important point  from the official page;

Many people on twitter want to add social media consulting or claims of social media expertise to their little bag of tricks. This is quite prevalent now. Indeed there seems to be a wave of people seeing social media consultancy as something they can just breeze into and use to make money from naive clients.

This ruse is assisted by the fact that it is difficult to prove social media expertise, but rather easy to claim it. One obvious way to lay claim to twitter expertise is to amass a large number of friends and followers. Another is to seek high rankings in the various twitter ranking systems or on twitter leaderboards.

These systems and leaderboards reward twitter account holders with increased scores for certain supposedly valued twitter behaviour. Generosity scores are based partly on the number of retweets that one tweets. Frequent publishing of the @names of others is considered generous as well. It is not hard to realize that retweeting a string of @name recommendations is a generosity ranking bonanza—a huge payoff in just one tweet…

The point is: is FollowFriday spam?

First of all i wanted to verify if it works: i sent 15 twits via Twitter with users recomendations. In 10 minutes i loose 10 followers and i got 4 new ones. So, it seems that i loose just 6 followers but the matter is about quality, not numbers. So, my little experience says that Follow Friday does not work.

I loose followers who was really interested in resource sharing because of the noise that i generated with my twits, and i got 4 followers that probably will never interact with me. People follow people using follow friday just to increase their followers number and cheat the game.

To be fair i have to say that not everybody act in this way, but most users do. This concept is expressed perfectly into the Manifesto.

Another important point is that the problem is not ethical, but pretty practical. I have “just” 400 followers and on friday it’s almost impossible to follow the twits because of FFriday.

How can i read the suggestions of my followers if there are hundreds of nickname running on the timeline each 10 minutes? It’s noise hiding signal.

But also i believe that it’s people who create situations. There nothing bad or good, is the way we act that make something bad or good.

So, there is no rule to follow. We just have to act on ourselves to change the way we interact with others.

This Manifesto could be a good start point to seed a conversation in order to discover the best way to interact between ourselves…

What do you think about it? Did you ever use Follow Friday to increase your followers number? Tell us something about your experience.

So, accepting all the  incoming friendship requests could work well on Facebook but could not on LinkedIn. Lifestreaming is strictly unrecommended  and it is better to add your website link into your profile only if it provides relevant information about your job and your skills.

Another substantial difference between LinkedIn and others social network is;

Do not join groups for the sake of adding one more group logo on your profile page. Join a group only if it relates to your career or interest and only, only if you can devote time to participate and be a valuable member of that group.

but my favourite recommendation is:

Do not beg for recommendations. If people think you are good they will recommend. If you feel like asking for a recommendation, make sure the person you are asking is a good colleague whose words actually bear some weight when possible employers look at your profile. Don’t have your uncle,aunt,mom and dad leave recommendations for you. We are not in high school.

Come on, who did not  thought this almost one time! I am a good boy, you can check it

Check this video out if you still don’t know LikedIn:

Via Applicant

In fact, as well as the web and social networks have influenced both media and marketing with viral effects, so have they been strongly influencing financial products such as loans.

A loan system, that is, a micro-credit one managed with social dynamics is called Social Lending.

Photo Credit: mitarart

If you’re not familiar with social lending yet, here’s what you need to know:

What’s the difference between Social Lending and traditional loans?

On traditional loans, it is the bank that lends you money, on social lendings it is the individuals like you who will lend money to you.

If I’m not granted a loan through the bank, is it likely that I’ll get it from websites like these?

Hardly. Even on online social lendings, the requester’s rating is calculated (the risk for investors who lend you money). If you’re a high risk borrower for a bank, you’ll probably get the same status online.

Do I need to provide guarantees for a loan?

No, or at least, not the way it is requested by banks.

So, there’s a chance I may not restitute my debits? Once there are no guarantees…

Theorically, you might, but consider that you won’t get high sums of money from Social Lending. And not restituting a small sum of money implies the impossibility of reusing this opportunity in the future and for good. Is it worth it?

If it is individuals like me to lend the money, consequently, I myself can do it.

Exactly. In a Social Lending platform, you can register for both loans request and financial investing by lending money to others.

If I wish to lend money but the requester doesn’t need to give any guarantees, what kind of guarantees will I have?

There’s a maximum limit of money you’re allowed to invest, which is subdivided in parts. You can’t lend more than one part to the same person.

To provide a practical example: if you invest 10.000 euros in total, you can’t lend a single person more than 10% of this value. Therefore, you’re compelled to lend 1000 euros to 10 different persons. That limits your risk and avoids speculation.

Consequently, the person requiring the loan will receive it from lots of investors, not only one.

But, what’s the interest rate?

That is perhaps the most interesting point about social lendings: the interest rate is established by whom requires the loan. The requester submits the request specifying the amount, the motivations for the request and the interest rate they are willing to pay.

But, then I can ask for a very low rate!

Yes, but who will be willing to lend you the money? These are the laws of supply and demand. If your rate is too low, no one will offer you money, and you’ll have to submit the request again, raising it. Therefore, as you can see, it is all about the laws of the market, with banks outside.

So…

I hope to have succeeded in explaining the concept of social lending. And beware to the fact that each social lending platform has its own rules, so consider the information on this post as a general guiding.

Here are some peer-to-peer loan platforms:

• Zopa
• Prosper
• Kiva
  Targeted to microcredit for poor countries, based in the USA.
• Virgin Money
• CommunityLend
• LendingClub
• GlobeFunder