Every four years, though, something changes. For a month, the whole country transforms into a hub of soccer fanatics. You walk down the street and see huge crowds stuffed into bars watching soccer games. You walk down the hall in the office and see your coworkers huddled around a computer watching replays on ESPN.com. Even here at ISM we've recently been spending a little more time in our conference room, with its giant plasma TV.

This phenomenon is known as the FIFA World Cup.

"Soccer 2" by stock.xchng user amcrimmins

Watching the World Cup has always been a social event. But the rising popularity of social media has given this year's tournament an added element of engagement. Mashable put together a good history of social media's presence in the World Cup in the last decade. A lot has changed, especially in the past four years.

• In June 2006, Facebook was only available to college and high school students. Now Facebook has over 50 million users worldwide.

• In June 2006, social networking sites were a pastime, used primarily for keeping in touch with friends. On June 12, 2010, 30 percent of Facebook status updates related to the U.S.-England World Cup game that day, according to the Wall Street Journal.

• In June 2006, Twitter was still being created. Now Twitter has close to 200 million users generating 65 million tweets per day, according to TechCrunch.

• In June 2006, real-time interaction online was mostly mostly limited to instant messaging. On June 24, 2010, a Twitter record was broken with 3,283 tweets per second right after Japan beat Denmark.

"USA v Algeria World Cup Match" by Flickr user jasonwhat

Social media is connecting fans all over the world and letting them enter the stadiums in South Africa, virtually at least. "You could argue that social media has become a proxy for being in the stadium itself," Nielsen Co. executive Pete Blackshaw told the San Francisco Chronicle. "It's almost like the notion of spectatorship has been redefined."

With technology changing so fast, who knows how social media with evolve by the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. I bet augmented reality will play a huge role in how fans experience the games. What are your predictions?

- Mashable Social Media Day: Mashable is hosting a worldwide Social Media Day on June 30th, with over 340 events in 74 different countries. The NYC event will be held at The Mean Fiddler (266 W. 47th Street) from 6pm - 9pm. Mashable is partnering with the Girls in Tech Happy Hour for this event. Registration is FREE, drinks are cheap, and you could win a Sony Dash!

- Mashable U.S. Summer Tour NYC: Mashable is all over these summer events! This one isn't free, but your $30 gets you drink tickets, appetizers and "surprises." You also get to meet some Mashable all-stars like Adam Hirsch, Sharon Hirsch, Adam Ostrow, Vadim Lavrusik, Brenna Ehrlich, and many more. The event is on Wednesday, August 9th from 7pm - 10 pm at 92Y Tribeca (200 Hudson Street). And if you happen to be traveling this summer, you might be able to catch the Mashable tour's other stops in Seattle, San Francisco, D.C. and Chicago.

- NYC Mobile Tech Salon: Every month MobileActive.org hosts gatherings for people passionate about using mobile technology for social change. Their motto: We bring the beer (and wine)!  You bring your projects, passions, tools, and conversation. July's theme is "Capture the World Around You: Participatory Mobile Sensing," featuring guest speaker Deborah Estrin, a UCLA Professor of Computer Science with a joint appointment in Electrical Engineering at UCLA. This free event is on Thursday, July 8th from 6pm - 8pm at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (721 Broadway, 4th floor).

"InSTEDD, UNICEF and Ushahidi at MobileActive '08" by Flickr user whiteafrican

- NYC Tech Talks: These free monthly meetups are for serious techies only! The description warns that if you don't write/test code or work with servers, this group is not for you. Participants can present tech problems and solutions to the other members so everyone learns from each other. The next event is on June 29th at 7pm at 632 Broadway.

- Game Dynamics and Marketing: Every month Ultra Light Startups hosts technology entrepreneur forums, and July's event is all about game-based marketing. Panelists will provide case studies, give advice on developing and utilizing gaming as part of a marketing strategy, and discuss how game dynamics can manipulate and motivate users to take actions. Tickets are $20 in advance, and the event is on Tuesday, July 6th from 6:30pm - 9pm at Microsoft (1290 6th Avenue, 4th floor). Side note - if you're interested in gaming, check out our recent post about the gaming aspect of location-based apps.

This is only a sample of upcoming events, so check out Eventful, Eventbrite and Meetup to find more! Have you gone to any cool events recently? We want to hear about them!

So what makes a Twitter user stop scrolling and actually click on something? For me, it's a link to an image. If a picture speaks a thousand words, I would much rather look at a picture than read a thousand-word article.

Images also make your posts more personal. In Chris Brogan's recent list of 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business, he says pictures help you "share the human side of your company" (#18). People relate to pictures. They like seeing that behind your brand/blog/company name, you're a person just like them. This doesn't mean you need to post a photo of what you're eating for lunch every day, but the occasional photo of an office outing or your new puppy can go a long way.

"maltese puppy 3" from stock.xchng user icekitty37

It's easy to post photos on Twitter with photo sharing services like TwitPic or yfrog. For other options check out this great summary of the top 10 photo sharing websites from Free Nuts. When you're choosing a photo sharing site the most important feature to look for is tracking. Monitoring clicks helps you determine what types of photos appeal the most people.

Happy photo posting! We would love to see this pictures you're tweeting, so use the hashtag #powerofimages in your posts if you want to show us!

Photo via Flickr user kirstiecat

Let's talk about common misconceptions of internet users. One fairly common belief is that the web is full of creepers -- people who post weird things on Craigslist and spend too much time stalking people on Facebook. Or, the internet is perceived to be full of nerds obsessed with 4chan and World of Warcraft. The last, possibly more recent misconceived notion of internet users is that they are plain old oversharers who Tweet, blog, and vlog every banality. The underlying understanding of the internet, based on these web archetypes, is that it is not a particularly earnest or friendly place.

Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor, co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and open source advocate, begs to differ. He believes that the internet is "made up of millions of disinterested acts of kindness, curiosity and trust." Watch his TED talk, where he illustrates using three examples that the transfer of data over the internet is best understood as crowdsurfing in a crowded moshpit, or as the process of passing a beer from the aisle to its recipient in the middle of the crowded row -- where none of the people in the middle who receive and then pass on the beer have any stake in its arrival but they do it anyway. Ignore the fact that I can't seem to write a blog post without talking about beer and pay attention to Zittrain, especially his example of the Wikipedia entry for Star Wars Kid.

Beyond Wikipedia and CouchSurfing, the inherent friendliness of the internet has very real implications for social media, for marketing, and for the work that we and you would like to accomplish. Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, illustrates how social media, aided with the use of LOLz, can harness the group-consciousness of the internet (his speech is shorter, don't worry).

Mister Splashy Pants is awesome, but he is not the primary take-away. What we can learn from Ohanian are the ways in which organizations can harness internet consensus if they remember that it's okay to take things less seriously, and that it's very much okay to lose control of the message. As Ohanian says, the internet fervor over Mister Splashy Pants wasn't so much out of respect for whales:

This was just out of interest in doing something cool. And this is kind of how the internet works. This is that great big secret. Because the Internet provides this level playing field. Your link is just as good as your link, which is just as good as my link.

Information is not disseminated on the internet solely from the top-down, because we're all part of the same moshpit. I'm not an expert (obviously) on anything that I'm writing about, and I'm not trying to give a lecture. Blogs, Twitter, sites like Reddit -- these are all great places to have a conversation. And we'd love to have one with you about our work, about your work, and of course about the latest memes that come through our inboxes.

When the Huffington Post launched its Social News site on Facebook Connect in mid-August, the site received 6,925,000 unique users in September according to comScore. Social News allows users to link to Huffington Post articles directly onto their Facebook profile using a pop-up window and one section even them see what their Facebook friends are reading on the site.

According to Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau, Facebook-referred traffic is up 48% since the launch of its Facebook Connect site and 15% of all comments now come through Facebook. Users of the political news blog increased by 50% over the last year, surpassing The Washington Post and BBC. This is pretty impressive for an independent blog that is barely four years old.

We predict that many news organizations will follow in the HuffPost’s footsteps and encourage all of our online news publishers to appoint a social media editor ASAP!

Source: guardian.co.uk

Last week Mashable highlighted Ping-O-Matic’s new feature Publicize which allows you to instantly post your entries to your Twitter feed. Unlike TwitterFeed another popular plug-in which periodically checks your blog for new updates and posts to Twitter, Publicize is instantaneous and allows for instant feeds.

Increasingly blogs have peppered their looks with “Tweet This,” “Stumble Upon” widgets to attract traffic and hopefully more fans to their content. Of course you can always opt of the service but with many competing voices on the web it seems to be a quick and easy way to reach a wider audience.

1. Twittad is a "social media affinity network" for Twitter advertising. It offers Twitter users anywhere from $2 to $2,000 to post paid endorsements to their accounts. Twittad requires users to disclose the ads by posting a Twittad badge to their profile and including a link to 'spon.in' in their post to indicate that there is a 'sponsorship in update.'

2. Ad.ly automatically sends one tweet to your feed every other day for a week. (Users must explicitly approve these tweets first.) At the end of each Ad.ly tweet, (Ad by http://Ad.ly) appears to let readers know that it is an advertisement. Ad.ly's impressive list of registered publishers includes celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Greg Grunberg, and Nicole Richie.

3. IZEA's SponsoredTweets is another platform that is connecting advertisers with Tweeters. Users set the price they want companies to pay them and then wait for ad offers. SponsoredTweets promises 100% disclosure and belives in "safe, ethical sponsored tweets" through their disclosure engine (below).

All of these ad services are meeting the basic requirements of the FTC's new guidelines. However, their standards of disclosure vary, which may end up confusing the average Twitter user. We wonder whether 140 characters is enough room to accurately notify readers of the message's paid sponsorship. And will filling your Twitter feed with ads turn off followers? What do you think?

The Federal Trade Commission is putting limitations on advertising on social media sites in an attempt to make sure that paid endorsements are fair and transparent. On Monday, the FTC updated its guidelines to specify that bloggers are required to publicly disclose “any material connections” they might have to a brand or product they discuss, even those posted on Twitter and Facebook. While these guidelines are not law, the FTC can bring advertisers and bloggers into court for violating them.

To define what constitutes an "endorsement," the FTC examines factors such as:

-    Whether compensation or a free product/service was provided by an advertiser
-    Previous or future acceptance of products/services from the same or similar advertisers
-    The terms and length of the relationship
-    The value of products/services received

The FTC says that “a consumer who purchases a product with his or her own money and praises it on a personal blog or on an electronic message board will not be deemed to be providing an endorsement.” This means that independent consumers are still allowed to review their brands.

It’s important for all of our publishers to know about the FTC’s new guidelines. To make sure you stay safe and informed, read the full FTC announcement here.