Dan Schawbel is the author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success, and owner of the award winning Personal Branding Blog.
Brand monitoring has become an essential task for any individual or corporation. Years ago, when people talked about our brands, it was behind our backs and we almost never found out [...]

When Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher launched his Blahgirls project at Techcrunch 50 this year, one of the first things investor Ron Conway said on the judging panel was that the idea would tap into the emerging billion dollar market for branded content. Media plays like Blahgirls aren’t normally so well received in the tech community, [...]

socialbrowse, the Firefox plugin that lets you surf the Web in a link-sharing social manner, has just re-released its service with a couple of major new features. The Y Combinator-backed startup as been in private beta for some time, and will remain in private beta for a little while longer, but those users testing [...]

Yesterday, we passed a big milestone for us at TechCrunch, our 10,000th post since the blog launched in June, 2005. This morning when I logged onto Wordpress (the blogging software we use to put out TechCrunch), I saw this message: “You have 10,010 posts.” It made me smile.
Even though there are a [...]

Check out these fun Easter Eggs that appear on the side of Google search results for terms like Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa Gifts, Christmas Sweaters, Hanukkah Sweaters, etc.
Sure draws the eyes to those ads. I wonder what those images do for the click rates. But I’m sure it’s all just good holiday cheer. More here and [...]

Whether you’re new to the world of authorship or a veteran trying to make the most of Web services and applications, there are a number of online tools for writers of all types. From blogging platforms to networking hotbeds, and job boards to real-world gatherings, and more, the supply of utilities is comprehensive, to say [...]

PDFs have always been one of my biggest computing nemesis: they slow my machine down to a crawl when opened and eat up a lot of disk space when saved. Gmail has just added a solution to address this: its own viewer that lets you view PDFs in your Web browser. It’s blazing [...]

Making the rounds quickly on Twitter this weekend is Tweetwasters, a site that gives you an idea of how much time you’re really ‘wasting’ posting messages and status updates to the popular micro-sharing service. Users are calculating away and tweeting about it, ironically spending even more time on Twitter (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
There’s [...]

The new version of WordPress - version 2.7, codenamed “Coltrane” - is now available, and I’ll skip to the part I think users will like the most: no more manual updates. That’s right, the new WordPress now has an automatic update system which will notify you of new versions and let you upgrade your blog [...]

The economy is still looking grim. Not making any money and not having an identifiable business model should probably mean you’ll have to make do with what you have and not expect anyone to pour any money into your startup, at least for a while.
Some startups, however, are still making it happen. Microblogging service [...]