I’m par­tial to hear­ing from young Inter­net enter­pre­neurs, like Jor­dan Gold­man, the 23-year-old founder/CEO of Unigo.com who con­tacted me today and whose site was fea­tured in last week’s NY Times Mag­a­zine. Excerpt:

One mea­sure of an idea’s great­ness is how obvi­ous it seems in ret­ro­spect, and Unigo’s cen­tral idea — that high-school and col­lege stu­dents would much rather learn from one another than from a book — is so self-evident that your first reac­tion is sur­prise that no one has acted on it before. As sta­tus anx­i­ety has helped to drive col­lege appli­ca­tions to record lev­els, the college-guidebook indus­try has expanded along with it, stok­ing those anx­i­eties in order to sell you a way to assuage them, most con­spic­u­ously through their mer­ci­less numer­i­cal rank­ing of the col­leges by every met­ric they can plau­si­bly invent. …

On Unigo, the infor­ma­tion is all free — “free,” of course, under­stood as a syn­onym for “accom­pa­nied by adver­tise­ments” — and with the excep­tion of brief edi­to­r­ial overviews of each of the 267 col­leges fea­tured at start-up, all of it is vol­un­tar­ily pro­vided by cur­rent stu­dents at those col­leges. “For so long, the col­leges have been able to have this stran­gle­hold on the P.R. image of their school,” Gold­man said recently in his office, dec­o­rated boy-workaholic-style with noth­ing but an open box of Frosted Flakes and a toy robotic dinosaur. “It’s just harder to look at them as the main source of infor­ma­tion. If you’re a col­lege stu­dent, you are as much of an expert on being a stu­dent at that col­lege as anyone.”

The beauty part is that Unigo has not only declined to enlist the col­leges’ help with this “national grass-roots move­ment,” as Gold­man likes to refer to it, but the com­pany has also kept it a secret from them. Unigo started solic­it­ing input directly from stu­dents (under a kind of Inter­net alias, “bystudents.com”) almost a year ago, and to date it has received more than 30,000 indi­vid­ual bits of con­tent — pri­mar­ily reviews in the form of responses to an essay-based ques­tion­naire, but also pho­tos, videos, uploaded writ­ing sam­ples, etc. — all before pub­licly unveil­ing the site or even the real name.  …

A good idea and a dri­ven young web­site founder — a lethal com­bi­na­tion. Check it out.

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Asso­ci­ated Press: NPR boosts online offerings.

National Pub­lic Radio,
already strong online with free down­loads from many of its shows, is
boost­ing its dig­i­tal ambi­tions with Monday’s intro­duc­tion of
social-networking fea­tures akin to Facebook.

NPR also plans to
over­haul its Web site and expand the tools for shar­ing its pro­grams
else­where over the next few months. And it is work­ing to increase the
flex­i­bil­ity of its pop­u­lar “pod­casts,” audio down­loads that have
tripled in usage over the past two years.

These dig­i­tal
ini­tia­tives are aimed at cap­tur­ing and retain­ing audiences—particularly
younger peo­ple who aren’t habit­ual radio lis­ten­ers but who rep­re­sent
the future for fundrais­ing at NPR’s mem­ber stations. …

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Anita Hamil­ton in the cur­rent issue of Time mag­a­zine: Out­smart your haters. How to win the online rep­u­ta­tion game.

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Michael Mar­tin in Salon: Old peo­ple Face­book dis­as­ters. Pro­fes­sion­als over 30 have joined the net­work­ing site in droves, but with great con­ve­nience can come great embarrassment.

Although the site exploded into pub­lic con­scious­ness as a col­lege
net­work, now it’s for every­one. (Lit­er­ally every­one: From cheese
enthu­si­asts to fans of the ‘80s robot-girl sit­com “Small Won­der.”) More
peo­ple over 30 are adopt­ing Face­book as a net­work­ing tool, and this was
the year the old peo­ple swarmed the pool party. (By the way, when we
talk about “old peo­ple,” we don’t mean old peo­ple. We mean “old
peo­ple in Face­book years” — so any­one on the north­ern side of 30 is a
win­ner.) There are seven inter­est groups for peo­ple in their 40s, and
one for peo­ple born in the 40s. The spunkily titled group “Over 30 –
Not Over the Hill!” began in May and already has 823 mem­bers. There is,
inevitably, a Cougar Club. “Since this sum­mer, Face­book use has exploded
among my age group and older,” says Linda Keenan, a 37-year-old mother
who wrote a Huff­in­g­ton Post blog entry in July describ­ing her­self as an
“aging Face­book whore.” …

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SMM Guru: Top 198 Social Media Sites By Niche — sports, food, con­sumer, social dat­ing, fam­ily, edu­ca­tion, style and more.

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Boston Globe: Study: Most Amer­i­cans want to see com­pa­nies on social sites. Excerpt:

Accord­ing to the 2008 Cone Busi­ness in Social Media Study, 93 per­cent of Amer­i­cans believe a com­pany should have a pres­ence in social media, while an over­whelm­ing 85 per­cent believe a com­pany should not only be present, but also inter­act with its con­sumers via social media. In fact, 56 per­cent of Amer­i­can con­sumers feel both a stronger con­nec­tion with and bet­ter served by com­pa­nies when they can inter­act with them in a social media environment. …

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IBL News (Spain): Social media and cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism now on your iPhone. Excerpt:

Mobile devices are clearly the plat­form for cit­i­zen news­gath­er­ing, and an iPhone appli­ca­tion is a log­i­cal fun­nel. Soon peo­ple will be able to broad­cast any­thing live from the street; in a way, indi­vid­u­als will become walk­ing televisions.

Last week, CBS Mobile released its Eye­Mo­bile iPhone appli­ca­tion, mak­ing CBS the first broad­cast net­work to launch an appli­ca­tion enabling users to become per­sonal broad­cast­ers as they upload, view and com­ment on pho­tos and videos live, from anywhere.

The Eye­Mo­bile appli­ca­tion is avail­able, free of charge, at the iTunes App Store.

The Eye­Mo­bile appli­ca­tion offers the full func­tion­al­ity of CBSEyeMobile.com which launched ear­lier this year. Using the iPhone cam­era, users can cap­ture and upload pho­tos to the CBS Eye­Mo­bile site where they can view and rate reports and inter­act with other Eye­Mo­bile on-the-go journalists. …

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Paul Gillin’s Social Media Report: Tips for deal­ing with online negativity.

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CMS Wire: Social Media Helps Users to Be Smart Shoppers.

A new report shows that Amer­i­can adults are using social media not only to stay con­nected, but also to make informed buy­ing decisions.

The 2008 Insight Report from Mar­ket­Tools indi­cates that 68% of Amer­i­can adults visit online blogs, com­mu­ni­ties or social net­works, and 33% of those sur­veyed say they visit these sites to read up on prod­uct reviews to help them make a pur­chas­ing decision.

Six months ago, only 42% of adults were flock­ing online to visit blogs, online com­mu­ni­ties or social networks. …

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Mixx: per­son­al­ized social media from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

I’ve been hear­ing about Mixx.com for some time and a few days ago had the chance to chat with Chris McGill, founder and CEO of the site. Mixx is a plat­form that enables any orga­ni­za­tion or per­son to launch a social media site at no cost and with no tech­no­log­i­cal savvy.

The site has had 8.1 mil­lion unique vis­i­tors over the past five months — not bad for a young startup. At the TechCrunch50 con­fer­ence ear­lier this month Chris spoke with me about the site, how it dif­fers from other social net­works and where it goes from here.

Watch the video in H.264 Quick­Time on Our­me­dia
Watch the video in Flash on Vimeo

If you pre­fer audio only, here’s a 16-minute pod­cast that Nick O’Neill of Social­Times did with Chris last month.

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