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?

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!

Then last night, ISMers Tad and Andreea got a chance to check out the Internet Week nightlife. Here's Tad's recap of the night:

Congratulations to Jeff Pulver and #140, Laurel Touby and Mediabistro, and of course, Dina Kaplan and Mike Hudak and blip.tv. The #140 party was at such a gorgeous locale (the Hudson Terrace) it was impossible not to relax and enjoy the view. Laurel looked resplendent in her feather boa as usual.

"mediabistro.com and Internet Week Party" by Flickr user Mediabistro

It was awesome to celebrate with Mediabistro. Laurel's done such amazing work for so many people for so long. Did you know Laurel started Mediabistro at Jules Bistro in 1994, back when the Interwebs were a series of tubes ... or something...

Also the blip.tv party was so off the hook. It's hard to believe it's been five years. They deserve so much credit for creating such a great environment for so many web video producers. And, of course, Dina's new hairdo was worth the price of drinks - FAB! Not to mention the after party. w00t! We met so many great people and enjoyed so much Internet Week exuberance ... we may not be able to handle so many parties tonight ...

"Founders" by Flickr user angusmci

ISM has been well-represented at Internet Week parties, but it's harder for us to find time for the day events. We're too busy training for Friday's startup kickball tournament...I mean working very hard at our desks.

There are other ways to stay involved, though. You can find real-time updates by following the Twitter hashtag #iwny and the Twitter handle @InternetWeek. Also, a lot of the events are streamed live from the Internet Week website, and posted on video sites like YouTube. I just watched the always-engaging Gary Vaynerchuk talking about the rising popularity of the freemium business model.

Flickr is another great way to see what's been happening. Searching for photos tagged "iwny" shows you all the latest events. And you just might see some pictures of me tagged there tomorrow. Anyone else going to the Thrillist Loft party tonight?

"Good Advice on a Monday Morning" by Flickr user Aaardvaark

This week in What's Happening Around the Web, we're going to talk about some great advice we've read recently.

To start with, here's some meta-advice that we've been trying to follow on the ISM blog: How to write good blog posts. Chris Brogan, social media expert and ISM crush, details how to deliver great content while accomplishing the goals you've set out for your blog.

Here's a sampling of his words of wisdom:

Always Write With Service In Mind

For every idea you share with people, be it a blog post about a suitcase, or an embed of a YouTube video by your favorite band, take a few extra moments to think about how this post will bring value to your audience. See if you can’t give them a takeaway or a next action.

On the ISM blog, we try to make each post meaningful and interesting, and we definitely try to include takeaways. For example, Joy's recent post about ISM's referral program is informative, in that it explains our recently-implemented referral program. And in my mind, the takeaway is that ISM rewards its publishers for spreading the word, and readers of the blog can then choose to sign up with us to become publishers. If you're already a publisher, our blog post helps you get started with the referral program. Good things all around.

Another collection of fantastic advice that we came across recently was this post on Daily Blog Tips on how to deal with criticism. Nothing hurts more than someone dissing your hard work. What should we keep in mind when someone gets all up in your grill?

Just because you fall short doesn’t mean you failed.

Easy to say, but not necessarily easy to live with. No one likes criticism. No one likes to admit that there’s a better solution, but the fact is, there are always better solutions. Criticism is a tool. It provides different perspectives. It identifies steps that you missed during the first round.

Become a stakeholder but don’t drive your stake through the heart.

Become a stakeholder in any project or undertaking but don’t cling to your POV with your last breath. There are a million ways to get it right and listening to some constructive criticism from a client, a co-worker, family member or friend may actually move that undertaking in another direction. A better direction.

I like that last piece of advice a lot because it hits pretty close to home. You know those sentences or paragraphs that you write and then think, "Good lord that's good"? I once had a professor in college (the ISM College of Hard Knocks) who told me to immediately delete those sentences. You can always create a beautiful turn of phrase. What matters is the content, and you should be ready to try a number of different ways to express that content. That's something I'm working on.

And finally, the best piece of advice we've read this week comes not from a blog, but from a blogger's friend. Boonsri Dickinson of TechStartups recently wrote about the Library of Congress archiving all the world's tweets, to which her non-tweeting friend responded...

Interesting piece, but interesting because of how unmoored and utterly clueless we’ve become as a society. What’s next, recordings of all our farts?

This is so the Emperor’s New Clothes it’s mind boggling! What utter nonsense! It’s like saying we could really understand a culture and a moment in time by keeping a record of everyone’s conversations, or letters and postcards. And school reports and traffic and parking citations.

So? We could tell where everyone ever went too, if we could keep the impressions of every footprint made since, say, March 2006.

A staging of The Emperor's New Clothes, courtesy of the Northfield School of Arts and Technology. Adorable.

I tend to disagree about the Emperor's New Clothes allegation because I do think the Archive of Tweets will be an amazing cultural artifact however-many-years down the line... but I also have the sense of humor of a five year-old. And I think that recording farts would be AWESOME. Let's get it started, y'all.

So, let's follow Chris Brogan's advice. What are the takeaways of this post?

Takeaway one: Carly is immature.

Takeaway two: There's an endless number of smart people writing on the internet, and we have so much to learn from them. Chris Brogan and the editors of sites like Daily Blog Tips and TechStartups are just a small sampling of them.

We're a young group of bloggers so we're still learning, but you can rest assured that the best pieces of advice that we receive, we'll be sharing with you all. What have you learned recently that you'd like to share with the class?

Courtesy of Flickr user fidgetrainbowtree

Since we consider ourselves to be a part of the new wave of internet advertising and web monetization strategies, we try to stay abreast of internet advertising news at Image Space Media headquarters. That means spending a bit of time every day on our Google Readers, on Yammer, and on Twitter, reading the latest about tech startups, advertising, marketing... Anything that seems relevant to our work. And about once a week, we've been sharing what we've been reading with you all, at our What's Happening Around the Web tag.

So what's new this week?

In startup news...

Quora recently closed its first round of funding with a valuation estimated at $86 million. Quora is a new site (invite only!) that provides a question and answer service. It's success, however, is based on the fact that it goes beyond just Q&As by sparking discussions. As TechCrunch described Quora, "there’s a magic to Quora that has captured Silicon Valley’s imagination. Something about the quality of the people and the content. Real discussions break out on Quora all the time."

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch (who gave us some love last week!) sat down with Quora's founders and investor to chat about the startup. I found their concept of "reverse blogging" to be pretty interesting:

What makes Quora so special? Why are people raving about it?

I don’t think it’s any one thing, but it’s a bunch of little things. Part of it is the right audience. Instead of just Q&A, we think about this as blogging. Some people call it inverse blogging or reverse blogging. When you write a blog post, you write to your audience. When you write on TechCrunch, you know that these people are expecting techie news about startups.

When you come to a question page on Quora and it’s blank there are a bunch of people waiting for the answer. An expert will look at it and say “there’s an audience here and I know exactly what they want to hear. And I actually know about this stuff, or know enough to research and produce a really interesting piece of content, and it’s going to go to the perfectly targeted audience who opted in to hearing about this.”

On a different note, you maaaay have noticed recently that the health care reform bill passed the United States Congress. Whether or not you support the bill, now that it has passed it means the times they are a-changin' in the way businesses provide health insurance for their employees. But what does it mean for small startups? ReadWriteWeb has a channel specifically for entrepreneurs and startups called ReadWriteStart, and they recently detailed the programs, laws, and providers dealing with new health care policies that are relevant to new start-ups. If this applies to you or your company, check it out.

In marketing/advertising news...

We've all seen the "Windows 7 was my idea" ads... want to hear from the creative mind behind them?

CNET News' Ina Fried spoke with David Webster, Microsoft's chief marketing strategist, about the inspiration behind these ads and the process of naming Bing, Microsoft's search engine. Up next for Webster is designing the advertising for Office 2010, which will center around the surprising range of uses that Office programs can have. Here's a (topical!) example: "One friend of Webster does his Passover seder in PowerPoint with embedded sound clips from Charlton Heston in 'The Ten Commandments.'" I for one am interested to see how Webster incorporates his friend's story in the advertising for Office 2010.

Lastly, a big question on everyone's mind since Twitter first stepped on the scene is - how will the giant make their money? paidContent.org systematically reviews Twitter's possible revenue sources, from advertising to e-commerce to mobile deals. What will their advertising scheme look like? We know what it won't look like: Twitter execs agree with our opinion of banner ads (that audiences are blind to them!), saying that “traditional web banner advertising isn’t interesting to us." Word up, Twitter execs.

So that's what we've been reading this week. What about you?

Mainly defined as reporting news, journalism remains the cornerstone of the continuously evolving multimedia world. Today’s media business is going through the most monumental transformation in its history, one in which we are receiving information at a pace that’s unfathomable. It probably goes without saying that the emergence of Twitter is driving the transformation. Not only does Twitter have journalists reporting in real time, but readers are sharing news almost as quickly as it is being reported.


Over the past few weeks, Image Space Media has had the pleasure of watching company news spread in real time. Shortly after we launched PubStop at SXSW, Adotas ran the news and even featured a video clip of our fearless CEO, Jesse Chenard. Within minutes the story was circulated via Twitter retweets, some of which were linked to Facebook status feeds, and some even to Linkedin.

Last week, we were amazed by the rapid pace at which a TechCrunch post featuring ISM was circulated via Twitter. In less than 45 minutes the story garnered almost 200 retweets. Then on the heels of this incredible testament to media’s evolution, Tech Cocktail today reported on our efforts to seize the image space as a means to support publishers in their quests to monetize.

So to all the journalists out there who are embracing the new media evolution, we salute you. We are proud to be a part of your ecosystem, grateful for your support and are hopeful that in image advertising will be a source of revenue for each and every site that provides you with a platform to showcase your brilliance.

Long may you rave.

Where do you go to find the most interesting internet news? Are you a traditionalist who just reads the New York Times? Or - like a new generation of media consumers, do you rely on the host of internet personalities with thousands of Twitter followers to find the best of the web?

Nick Bilton wrote today about the best of the web metacurators for the Nytimes.com Bits blog - people like Atul Arora and Maria Popova who spend hours every day culling and aggregating interesting links for their friends, family, and thousands of semi-anonymous readers across the web.

Maria Popova aggregates some of the most interesting and thought-provoking links on her Twitter account (aptly titled BrainPicker). She describes her process of content discovery as "controlled serendipity."  What did I learn from checking out her Twitter? Some pretty awesome stuff:

From the blog Giladon-line, a visualization of the spread of a Twitter hashtag, #CheeringForTheYankeesIsLike. Check out the two videos, and see how Twitter really is one big network of funny people. RT @abcdude #CheeringForTheYankeesIsLike pulling for Regina George in “Mean Girls.”

The Inhabitat blog breaks the news that the Olympic Stadium being built in London for the 2012 Olympics will be made out of recycled guns and knives!  What will those crazy environmentally-friendly architects think of next?

And finally, the site Universe Today links to an audio recording of Saturn's rings picked up by the Cassini spacecraft - proving yet again that outerspace is pretty creepy.

Bilton writes that metacurators like Maria Popova are a part of the new philosophy of sharing content: "Great content going viral isn’t new. But the sharing mentality is no longer confined to the occasional gems. It’s for everything we consume online, large or small."

Who are the influential metacurators in your life? Whose Twitter is particularly interesting, or whose blog has the best content? Let us know in the comments!

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?