Alexandre Gamela

Social media sites have become an integral piece of the hiring puzzle; it’s how to leverage these sites most effectively as a recruiting tool that has companies scrambling. These sites are low-cost or free to join, but it takes time and effort to make them truly useful. “Most companies aren’t doing enough,” says Veronica Fielding, president of Jump Start Social Media. “They think there’s an ROI that’s got to be associated with it immediately.” - Alexandre Gamela

An ongoing project devoted to discovering all the words and everything about them More than 1.7 million words, and more than 130 million examples! - Alexandre Gamela

Recent missives from the influential tech bloggers Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble have attacked the P.R. industry as being out of touch. Rafe Needleman, an editor at CNET, has started a blog called Pro PR Tips that gives publicists elementary guidance, such as “Before you press ‘send’ on your bulk e-mail press release, make sure the site you’re pitching is actually live.” Instead of calculating the impressions an article gets by estimating a publication’s circulation and pass-along rate, Mr. Solis counts the number of people who tweeted about a company and their combined following, the number of retweets or clicks on links, as well as traffic from Facebook and other social networks. - Alexandre Gamela

If you’re a PR person sitting in the room while I interview your client, don’t pretend you’re a reporter and ask questions of said client during the meeting. Tech journalists are spoon-fed enough as it is, you don’t need to jam the flatware down my throat. Come to think of it, I may institute a new no-PR-in-the-room policy. Don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that before. - Alexandre Gamela

One of the main arguments for reciprocal following on Twitter is that you gain the ability to send direct messages between accounts without (usually) having the message show up in public timelines. Here are five reasons Twitter Direct Messages are actually quite useless: - Alexandre Gamela

PHP is the most popular web programming languages in use today due in large part to the fact that it’s a highly flexible syntax that can perform many functions while working flawlessly in conjunction with html – Plus it’s relatively easy to learn for beginners, yet it’s powerful enough for advanced users as well. It also works exceptionally well with open source tools, such as the Apache web server and MySQL database. In other words, its versatility is unsurpassed when compared to other scripting languages, making it the language of choice for many programmers.Though many programmers and developers may be implementing PHP in their websites, the issue of PHP security is often overlooked when building a site. Insecure coding is rather common in PHP due to the fact that it’s such a forgiving language that will often “work” even when there are a few loose ends in the coding. These “loose ends” are what hackers are looking for, and in PHP, they’re not that hard to find. - Alexandre Gamela

Business blogs also need to see a return on investment as well (even though much of the real ROI comes from the interaction you build up with your readers who are all potential customers). To help you in your blogging efforts, personal and business, here’s a list of some tools and tips that you might find useful. - Alexandre Gamela

So Steve Rubel has dumped blogging for lifestreaming. Charles Arthur at The Guardian also notes that participation on Twitter and Facebook is replacing blogging. Whilst I’ve noticed some of my favourite bloggers aren’t posting as frequently as usual, my own take on this is simple: don’t abandon your blog – just yet. - Alexandre Gamela

"I repeat, I re-cite: hauntology is the closest thing we have to a movement, a zeitgeist, at the moment (and one of the uncanniest aspects of it is the fact that there seem to be very few lines of explicit influence among the artists involved)." - Alexandre Gamela

I don't delegate that. Maybe others want to accept the filter of the press, that's their right. But I don't care what they think is news. It's not that I decided not to care, it's that I truly don't care. Permalink to this paragraph - Alexandre Gamela

"A Lei Azeredo pode ser derrubada. Numa reunião de cinco horas na quarta-feira entre deputados, ativistas do software livre, especialistas em direitos autorais, provedores, Polícia Federal e governo, críticas colocaram em xeque mais pontos do projeto de lei 84/1999, o qual já havia tido alguns artigos polêmicos cortados. A questão que fica é: com tantos cortes, sobra alguma coisa que justifique a votação?" - Alexandre Gamela

"Sounds good — but what can we expect from the actual impact of making legally interoperable the mass of Free Culture and its exemplar, Wikipedia? How can we gauge that impact, short of access to a universe where Wikipedians reject CC BY-SA? A few ideas:" - Alexandre Gamela

"GGF would like you to think that they will control The New Pirate Bay but I believe that accolade is for the community to bestow. So is OBT (c’mon, what’s a tracker without an acronym these days?) the New TPB? It is if you say it is." - Alexandre Gamela

"As a prior post indicated might occur, this post is set on reviewing an interesting paper I recently learned about, thanks to a reference at the orgtheory.net blog. The ideas in the paper bear on figuring out what the addition of networks (+N) will mean for TIMN evolution, and in what ways such networks will be different from tribes (T)." - Alexandre Gamela

I may be the last to comment on the American Press Institute's report, "Newspaper Economic Action Plan," which was produced in May and distributed in June at the not-so-secret NAA meeting in Chicago. But I was flipping through it this morning and was struck how thoroughly the report exposes its own fatal flaws, in a section titled "Assumptions:" - Alexandre Gamela

"Use your blogs to target particular audiences and have a clear mission, and you'll get a following. Blogging should be the means to another goal -- a rough draft for future articles/books, a way to network with professionals, a place to document your life for your children, a way to have fun. Those are very real and good outcomes of blogging and that's why I'm continuing to keep at." - Alexandre Gamela

What lessons can be learned from the battles sports journalists have fought with leagues that want to limit digital rights? We asked a few people who have been on the front lines, and here’s what they told us. - Alexandre Gamela

Some bloggers misrepresented key parts of the Marburger proposal. This is not an attempt to monopolize facts. This is about giving news organizations the right to recoup their investments of time, energy and resources and to sue Web aggregators who post such significant rewrites or summaries that readers to their sites lose any interest in reading the original stories. - Alexandre Gamela

"The task remains of reclaiming the future as a place of expanded human subjectivity and social wealth, rather than as a repository for present day anxieties. If sometimes it feels that we are in dark times, we must remember that the darker the night, the brighter the stars." - Alexandre Gamela

The cheap tools and affordable devices the average Joe has at his disposal to produce precision journalism and distribute it around the world are enough to make the reporters of yesterday sob in envy. It's the difference between digging ditches with a spade and excavating a canal with dynamite. - Alexandre Gamela

"A minor bout of stock market hysteria broke out the other day with the announcement of the acquisition of The Pirate Bay by Global Gaming Factory but now pundits aren't so sure they like the deal." - Alexandre Gamela

"Granted, some of these ideas may be similar to what Global Gaming Factory wants to do with the site. But at least I spelled it all out, instead of simply putting up a smoke screen of crackpot ideas and contradictory statements about how to deal with unlicensed content. The one thing that the Pirate Bay really needs now is a clear vision. Anything short of that will lead to the site’s inevitable demise." - Alexandre Gamela