Ben Elowitz, of Wetpaint, has a great article today that emphasizes the growing importance of Facebook for businesses and the declining importance of SEO.

"it’s clear that Facebook is not growing in addition to the Web. Rather, it’s actually taking consumption away from the publishers who compete on the rest of the Web"

As we move from the "Document Web" to the "Social Web" we move from navigating via search results and pageviews to "Social Discovery." This process brings your site visitors that are more qualified and more likely stay and also come back.

Read more.

TrestleMedia recently partnered with Campfire NYC and Fixative to create two highly successful social media applications for Harley Davidson and Snapple. 

The applications were viewed by tens of thousands of Facebook users and generated hundreds of user posts, shares and likes. But most importantly, all the user interactions were administered using a Drupal CMS so our clients could review, authorize and post user-submitted content in real time.

Read the case studies: Snapple  |  Harley Davidson

From the Atlantic Wire comes a discussion of two articles in the “Internet is making us stupider” debate.

The first mention is from Nicolas Carr’s new book (the title of which somehow manages to sound snarky, apocalyptic, and smug all at the same time), What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains: The Shallows. The premise of the book is that, well, Google is making us stupid. In Carr’s article from The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid” Carr frets about the ways in which using Google and other media are, changing the very ways in which he thinks. Carr, while giving a nod to how much the Internet has helped him as a writer has, “an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain,...

Editors Note: John Marshall is a high school educator located in Spokane, WA with a Masters in Education from Washington State University and in the process of completing his PhD. John has joined with TrestleMedia to begin work on developing open-source technology solutions for the classroom and educational institutions. John is going to be writing weekly on the subject of technology in education and of his personal experiences and challenges.

I have been a teacher for the past 15 years of my life.

The previous sentence is what all teachers write every time they are approached to work on something that is beyond the realm of actually standing up in front of students and Teaching with a big T. All teachers use this cred-crutch (we just replace the fifteen with a rolling counter until we just quit Teaching and then die). I just did this two days ago while introducing myself to a group of educators and trainers working on game development with Multimedia Fusion 2.

And here is the thing with that statement...it just comes out sounding like, “I may not know anything about Multimedia Fusion 2, but dammit I have taught for fifteen years. Try that Mr. Technology Trainer.” It is a coping mechanism, because deep down, most teachers, at least the good ones, feel like they have been in the classroom so long they don't really know anything useful about what has been happening outside the classroom.

So in a...