LOUIS GRAY.COM — Thing Labs, the parent company of Brizzly, one of the more innovative Twitter Web clients out there, unveiled a slew of announcements this morning, with the acquisition of popular iPhone application Birdfeed and WikiRank, a visualization Web app based on Wikipedia data. The acquisitions will help fuel the launch of Brizzly's first branded iPhone application, and a new Brizzly Guide, which extends the trend explanations core to Brizzly since the product debuted with permanent definitions, accessible even after a topic stops trending...

MEDIAPOST — Whatever happened to crowd-sourcing? Crowd-sourcing, user-generated content, consumer-generated content: these were huge buzzwords from 2004-2008. Every brand was talking about the consumer's impact on a brand's ability to convey appropriate messaging. Viral marketing was all the rage, with marketers touting their ability to harness the power of the consumer to create cost-effective, impactful solutions. Then along came Twitter and Facebook. Social media became the darling of the moment, and crowd-sourcing became a casualty of growth. Guess what! The UGC space and crowd-sourcing are still very much alive and kicking (to quote Simple Minds), but...

IMEDIA CONNECTION — Researcher Daniel J. Howard conducted a study to see if small personal interactions make a difference in phone sales. Dallas residents were called and asked if they would let a nonprofit representative come to their homes and sell them cookies, with the proceeds to be used to buy meals for the needy. Only 18 percent agreed. But when the caller started by asking, "How are you feeling this evening?" and waited for a reply, almost double the number of residents -- 32 percent -- agreed to a visit from the cookie seller. Even more astounding? Once someone followed up by paying a visit, nearly everyone (89 percent) made a cookie purchase...

FORRESTER RESEARCH — It’s been almost 18 months since I wrote Hispanic Social Technographics Revealed, which highlighted this consumer segment’s very strong inroads using social media of all types. And in that time, the volume around how, why, and when companies should use social media has grown even louder. Likewise, Hispanics' engagement in social media has grown...

VENTUREBEAT — Qhub, a British startup launched on Wednesday by the founders of the popular question-and-answer site Blurtit.com, is a site for building other Q&A sites. Community Q&A sites, where people answer one another’s questions, are one of the more utilitarian results of the user-generated content trend among startups. Instead of snarky one-liners, members share their hands-on knowledge...