If you haven't yet seen the Language Trainers Accent Game , it has won the "best viral marketing strategy of 2008″ )in my eyes(. The idea behind this game is to listen to videos of individuals from all over the world speaking a sentence or reciting the lines of a poem, and you need to guess where the accent is from. You even get bonus points for guessing exactly where )regionally( the individual is from, which gives this game added appeal.

This is a guest post from kd kelly. kd kelly, aka dotlizard , has learned a harsh lesson or two in her time on the internets, and wants to warn us about the dangers of social media as it relates to trusting relationships that end in lies, deception, and hurt. She's a very social creature and is known as "dotlizard" pretty much everywhere. Smile, I'm sending you some sunshine. Did your room just light up? What can you say about a beautiful girl who died?

With many individuals finding great success with social media )and as an aside, a basic understanding of search engine optimization(, they immediately consider themselves social media marketers and consultants )as well as seasoned SEOs( and offer to sell their promotional services. What skills, though, do successful social media marketers have that put these individuals above the average )or addicted( social media user, and better yet, above the traditional marketer?

Earlier this month, Plurk was discovered and has had social media addicts abuzz with the "new Twitter clone," especially as a result of Twitter downtime . After using both closely, the comparison to Twitter shouldn't even be the case. Plurk and Twitter are two entirely different beasts. Personally, I don't even see the need to compare the two at all. The only similarity is a 140 character limit for posts " so Plurk is essentially a microblogging platform.

This is a guest post from Samir Balwani of Internet Marketing blog Left the Box.com . It feels like every day there's a new post about Plurk, Twitter, or some new micro-blogging platform . They're always heralded as the next big social media hit , the best on the web, or something killer. The truth is, they're not. Most of these platforms are too young to be killing anything, and are generally unfinished. Twitter has major problems with uptimes,

In one of the most brilliant marketing moves of all time from a social media perspective, alternative rock band Weezer created an awesome video for their new single, "Pork and Beans," using internet superstars from a handful of successful YouTube videos. Here's a look at their amazing creation: These are all the original YouTube stars.

Many tech geeks will often say that their first forays into cyberspace began with a 300 baud modem and a BBS. I'm a little younger than that )finally, I can say that!(, but I was an early adopter of social networks from when I first opened my 3.5″ floppy of Promenade )later to be called AOL( and signed up to use the service. I used Prodigy, but I never was a fan of the randomly generated alphanumeric username and didn't stick around. On the other hand,

As many of you know, I took off my Digg hat and put it on the shelf on January 28th after algorithmic changes at Digg made it extremely tough for me to appreciate the social news site that used to give you somewhat of a "high" for getting your stories front-paged. In the subsequent months, many people did not follow in my lead. In fact, most of them had already left. In the past few weeks, however,

Last month, I wrote about the ease of FriendFeed to spy on your friends . In other words, I can check someone's Friendfeed page and get any information I want about them, including when they are actively engaged in social media activities and how much of a priority social media is to them in their online habits and information consumption. While users can opt to have private feeds, I strive for transparency and don't mind if my content is public.

FriendFeed has been out for just a few months and has already established itself as a solid startup with an indefinite amount of potential. Founded by four ex-Googlers, FriendFeed allows you to subscribe to your friends' updates across 35 social networks and to stay up to date with the content they're discovering and sharing across the web. Currently, FriendFeed supports the following social networks and tools: FriendFeed aggregates social news sites )Digg,

After months )and I mean months( of planning, the blog redesign for techipedia is finally live. This wouldn't have been possible if not for a few people, so I'd like to thank them for their awesome work. First, thanks to designer Patrick Winfield of 10e20 for the excellent graphic design work. Pat was very patient, and as you can tell, he did an excellent job. Also, thanks to Chris Winfield for giving me a hand on this project. Second, the backend coding,

As I was traveling on my last of three conferences, Chris Kieff tagged me on the 4×4 meme that's going around. The idea of this meme is somewhat like previous memes , but it's four times full of fun. You're given four questions and you need to provide four answers. Then, you need to top it off by tagging four people. Here goes' 4 Things I Have Done in the Past 4 Years Clearly, the past four years have been the most enjoyable years of my life.

I'm still going through SXSW notes and will eventually post some great recaps of sessions and events, but I'm still in conference mode. With that said, it's just two days away to the Internet Marketers of New York charity party in NYC )during SES NY( which is sponsored by the coolest guys on earth, Best of the Web . What: A charity party. Your $40 at the door goes straight to a charity. When: Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 8PM until 12AM. Where : Black Finn NY,

Greetings all from SXSW! It's been an incredibly busy and physically taxing few days )with little hotel internet and no real opportunities to sit down and edit posts(, so you're seeing yesterday's keynote today )and numerous other posts to be put on this blog in the upcoming days(. Here we go with the highly-talked-about keynote presentation at South by Southwest' Just like an Apple keynote, they tried to build up some serious momentum for this event. In fact,

SMX West occurred last week, kicking off a bunch of conferences and meetups for yours truly )I'm headed to SXSW Interactive on Thursday followed by SES NY right after I get back, and then there's the Saturday night Blogger Social event only a week later(. As all conferences I've attended, it was a great one, and by far the best part was the smallness of the conference overall which really helped the networking efforts . As for the sessions I liveblogged,

This is a guest post from Pierre Far, who recently launched a very cool program called Social Alerter which notifies you as soon as your website has a solid chance of hitting the Digg or del.icio.us frontpage. We have all engaged in debates over the past few years about social media. Is it new? If so, how? Even a recent thread on Cre8asite Forums discussed this, kicking off by someone stating they find social media very intimidating. Then and Now In the good old days,

Awhile ago, I used Twitter to talk about one of my favorite cold remedy vitamins, Airborne . It was then that two friends suggested Zicam to me. When stocking up on medication for the winter months, the high recommendations of Zicam had me buying the oral mist. On Sunday night, after a rather interesting Superbowl XLII, I felt the onset of a cold. As most of these cold medicines suggest, you should take the medicine at the first sign of illness.

A week ago, I gave a relatively unbiased account of the "Digg revolt," a response to Kevin Rose's post that there were to be algorithmic changes to Digg that likely will impact only the top submitters. After seeing how it panned out, I have to say that I'm not impressed. Here's a screenshot of a story that became popular with a whopping 235 Diggs. It was taken the night of January 28,

Over at the Blog Herald , Chris Garrett says that Twitter is changing his news consumption habits. How do you get your news? In the past I have variously read newspapers, watched TV news bulletins, read news.bbc.co.uk and obviously more recently sites such as Digg. Now it seems I get most of my news from Twitter. Twitter: The Upside and the Downside Three days ago, Heath Ledger passed away. The actor was found dead in his apartment. He was 28.

After Kevin posted to the Digg blog Wednesday evening that there were algorithmic changes to affect the impact of stories that will be promoted to the front page of the site, a " revolt " ensued and an open letter was written. An emergency Drill Down episode was held where numerous Digg users, including regular hosts Andy ) MrBabyman (, Reg ) zaibatsu (, and Muhammad ) msaleem ( spoke with other Digg users, including David Cohn ) DigiDave (, Karim ) supernova17 (,