A Chinese man decided to build Megatron in tank form (from Transformers). So he did it. And it is ridiculously detailed and just brain meltingly awesome. The whole sculpture (that’s what he called it) weighs just about 5 tons. [Zcool via Neatorama] More »

LinkedIn, the social network for the career-minded, has unveiled Company Search, a way to “search for companies not only by attributes such as location, industry, and size but also by how you are connected.”

The feature not only makes it easier to search for companies, and employees of those companies with whom you have a connection, but also follow those companies explicitly so you can keep up to date with news, hiring and other events. For a social network centered around professional connections, it only makes sense to make explicitly accessible the other half of the professional social graph – the company.

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The search goes well beyond a simple keyword based search, allowing users to filter search results according to how many connections they have at a certain company, its location, industry and other criteria. Brad Mauney, product manager for search and cloud at LinkedIn, explains the feature on the company’s blog.

Results are personalized for you based on a number of factors including the keywords used in your search, any filters you have applied, and your overall connection strength to that company. When searching for a company, we not only look across the words used to describe that company but also the words that the company’s employees use to describe themselves on their LinkedIn profiles.

Mauney explains that the feature could be great for job-seekers, as they can search for companies, filter by only companies that are hiring and then immediately look at those companies’ job listings. We hope that the follow feature lives up to its full potential and helps us keep an eye on internal movement in the industry. Even better, if we could grab an RSS feed of each company and look at that data in our RSS reader, we’d be even happier. What do you say, LinkedIn?

Discuss

In case you ever wondered what driving a kite-powered electric car across Australia must be like, it definitely looks sublime. The trip cost only around $13 in electricity and took 18 days to complete, earning the German extreme sportsmen Dirk Gion and Stefan Simmerer three world records in the process. The pair hoped to inspire new, environment-friendly means of travel. [Treehugger] More »

There’s no doubt about it. The marketing world is abuzz with the effects mobile usage is having — and will continue to have — on consumers’ purchasing decisions.

As if the shift toward inbound marketing and away from traditional, outbound marketing wasn’t enough of a change for us marketers to adapt to! Now, we need to be concerned with consumers’ increasing use of the web on their mobile devices. This all begs the question …

“Is your business prepared?”

Thinking this mobile marketing stuff is just another marketing trend that won’t catch on or affect your business? Consider the following predictions from Morgan Stanley internet analyst, Mary Meeker, who regularly releases a ‘State of the Internet’ report and has been dubbed the ‘Queen of the Net.’ 

1. Within the next five years, “more users will connect to the internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs.” Meeker’s point is that mobile internet usage will only increase with time. Companies who take advantage of it will win, and those that ignore it will lose.

2. Mobile internet usage is ramping up substantially faster than desktop internet usage did. Meeker compared iPhone/iPod Touch adoption rates to those of AOL and Netscape in the early 90s, and she determined that adoption of Apple devices is taking place 11 times faster than adoption of AOL took place and several times faster than adoption of Netscape.

3. Increased mobile usage will result in growth in ecommerce. According to Meeker, users are more willing to pay for content on mobile devices than desktops for a variety of reasons, including personalization, small price tags, and easy-to-use/secure payment systems.

Mobile Browsing Implications for Marketers

As consumers increasingly turn to their mobile devices to browse the web and seek information about products and services, it’s extremely important that businesses make sure their websites are mobile-friendly and compatible. Ensuring that mobile site visitors have a positive user experience is the first step in taking advantage of this powerful shift toward mobile browsing.

Go ahead: Pick up a smart phone and access your company’s website with the browser on your mobile device. Chances are, you probably have some work to do. Is your CMS able to support efforts to make your website mobile-friendly? Are you a business that can potentially leverage the consumer trend of mobile purchasing by using location-based services or mobile coupons?

How is your business preparing for this important shift toward mobile browsing?

Photo Credit: Robert Scoble

 

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Before you whine about this Livescribe pen app only containing 100,000 of the 3,567,121 articles currently on Wikipedia, just stop and remember how freakin’ advanced our world has become, now that you can tap a written word and see information on that subject instantly. More »

The WordPress team pushed out version 3.1, code name “Reinhardt,” on Wednesday, bringing a host of new and updated features to users and developers.

WordPress 3.0 was released back in June 2010, along with its own set of new functions and features. The 3.1 release cycle was originally expected to be completed before the end of 2010, but bugs and various changes pushed that date back.

I have been using the various beta and release candidate versions of WordPress 3.1 since November and am especially excited about a few of the new additions and improvements.

From an interface perspective, WordPress 3.1 shares the same look as WordPress 3.0. A few minor changes have been made to give the WordPress dashboard a cleaner look, but the overall design remains the same. The one exception is for users of the blue admin theme. The colors and stylings for the blue theme have been refined and improved across the board.

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Post Formats, At Last

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My favorite new feature in WordPress 3.1 is the addition of Post Formats. Not to be confused with the similar sounding Custom Post Types, Post Formats can be used by theme authors to customize the way a WordPress post is presented on the web. Post Formats is not a required feature, but it is something that theme designers can implement to better show off certain content types.

Post Formats are especially useful for users who want to create a Tumblr-like experience on their WordPress blog. That means that users can designate a post as an aside, link, video, image, quote, status, audio, chat or gallery. That designation can then help a theme determine how content should be displayed.

That means that a post formatted as a quote might display a quote in a big italicized font, whereas a video post has a custom width.

Over the past few months, a number of WordPress theme developers have instated their own versions of Post Formats into themes, but with the new standardization, we expect to see the feature crop up in more places. Adding support for Post Formats requires theme authors to add a few lines of code to their templates and stylesheets.

WordPress contributor Otto wrote a great post about Post Formats several months ago that is definitely worth the read.

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Internal Linking

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Internal linking is a new feature in WordPress 3.1 that makes it easier for publishers to find and link back to previously published content. At Mashable, we often use internal linking to refer back to earlier coverage or give additional insight into a topic or idea.

Most of the time, the process of finding the link requires either searching the site or doing a custom Google search to get a specific URL. I use TextMate for all of my writing and have a custom bundle that actually lets me search the Mashable archives by entering a keyword or phrase without having to leave my editor.

WordPress’s internal linking tool isn’t quite that slick, but it does make the process of finding and linking to content much faster. Simply click on the link button in the writing panel and enter in a word or phrase. Related entries will show up and clicking on an entry will fill the link field with the correct URL.

For sites with lots of content, we can see this feature being very useful.

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The Admin Bar

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WordPress.com users are probably familiar with the admin bar that appears atop every WordPress.com-hosted site when they are logged into their accounts. The menu provides quick access to various tools and lets users quickly create new blog posts or access back-end features.

The WordPress.org admin bar will only work when users are logged into their own sites. When they are, visiting the site will display an admin bar that will then provide easy access to comments, the dashboard and other assorted tools.

I personally am not a fan of the new admin bar — and I dislike that it is enabled by default. I can see how it can be useful, especially for administrators of large blogs, but for me, it’s a hindrance. Fortunately, the WordPress team listened to some of the complaints and added the option to turn the bar on or off in the dashboard’s “Users” panel.

For individuals that want to disable the admin bar entirely, Joost de Valk has a great guide.

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Update Now

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WordPress 3.1 is available for download and existing WordPress users can perform the upgrade from the dashboard.

Is the admin bar a useful tool? Let us know what you think of WordPress 3.1 in the comments.

More About: blogging, WordPress, WordPress 3.1

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Charity is for chumps. Real estate? Too dangerous! Stock market? Boring! If I had the $2 to $10 million that this Soviet Vostok 3KA-2 space capsule is expected to sell for in April, it’d be mine. More »