[Updated at 1:05 p.m.] Mariner Energy, owner of the production platform, said in a press release that no hydrocarbon spill has been reported after an initial flyover of the incident. "Mariner has notified and is working with regulatory authorities in response to this incident," the statement said. "The cause is not known, and an investigation will be undertaken. During the last week of August 2010, production from this facility averaged approximately 9.2 million cubic feet of nat..   show all text

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Of all topics, this is one of the perennials. People want more traffic, more attention, more awareness to their blog. It’s fair. We work hard on our blogs. We want more attention and traffic. If your business depends on volume, this is especially important (for instance, if you’re using ads). Getting traffic is a tricky business, and it requires a lot of experimentation. I’ll tell you what’s worked for me, so far, and I’ll tell you what you might try. Maybe others ..   show all text

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People are increasingly sharing different types of information on Twitter. For example, Tweets point to web pages, photos, videos, hashtags, people, check-ins, and more. Exploring Tweets is a great way to discover new and interesting information. And with devices of all shapes and sizes connecting to the Internet, we’re constantly looking for new ways to make this easier. To date, we’ve created applications for a variety of mobile phones, giving you instant access to Tweets and grea..   show all text

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Are you addicted to Twitter? Do you have an iPad? Even if the answer to both is “no” right now, after you see Twitter for iPad, those answers are going to change — quickly. Yes, the wait is over. Launching tonight in the App Store is Twitter for iPad — the first official native iPad app from the company. We all knew it was coming (Twitter even said so a few months ago), but it has been a long wait. It was definitely worth it. Like most people, I wander into hyperbole fro..   show all text

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It’s late in another summer, and another thought “leader” has said that the blame for the lack of female speakers (or success) should be laid squarely on the shoulders of women. While there have been several great direct responses to this latest link frenzy, I felt that instead of participating directly (like I did last summer), the best commentary I could make is to outline how as a conference organizer I successfully garnered approximately 50% female speaker rates for all th..   show all text

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I am a huge fan of Om Malik. I just read his post on Apple’s Ping service, and have a difference of opinion. Om points out that it’s great that Apple is finally adding a social layer to their iTunes store. He goes on to mention that it’s about time, because Amazon has done a great job with this, and has enabled social commerce like letting bloggers become affiliates to sell products that Amazon offers (I am an Amazon affiliate, for instance). But what I might have missed in th..   show all text

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If I were MySpace, I would be shaking in my boots. Earlier today, Apple launched iTunes 10, the latest rendition of its wildly popular music software. Really though, iTunes 10 is just a vessel for Ping, Apple’s new music-centric social network. Available immediately to iTunes’s 160 million+ users through the desktop, iPhone and iPod touch, Ping is a social network where users can follow their friends and their favorite artists. As Apple CEO Steve Jobs described it, Ping is Facebook ..   show all text

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Target will be the first retailer to sell Facebook Credits in its stores come Sunday. The Facebook Credits gift cards will be available in $15, $25 and $50 denominations at all 1,750 Target locations and at Target.com. The cards will soon make their way to two or three additional national retailers, according to USA Today. Facebook Credits is a virtual currency redeemable for primarily in-game Facebook purchases. In Farmville, for instance, gamers can use Facebook Credits as a currency, in lieu..   show all text

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This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. In addition to writing for their human readers, web writers and bloggers have to consider the digital web crawlers employed by search engines like Google. Your business can’t skip the task. Since most would-be readers use search engines to find blog posts, you need to make sure that Google ranks your site highly whe..   show all text

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Travelers and city adventurers looking for a better way to harness geolocation data for their own amusement, get ready: Gowalla is releasing a brand new beta feature designed to crowdsource the best a city has to offer. Gowalla Highlights is a web-based product that currently consists of 18 place-based questions that query members about their favorite date night locales, watering holes, spots for people watching or celebrity sightings, etc. The power of the product is in the aggregate. Gowalla ..   show all text

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We’re a little too focused on collecting humans like marbles. Our fans. Followers. Subscribers. Impressions. Once upon a time, numbers like gross circulation mattered a bit more, because the available channels and paths for information were somewhat limited. So by putting yourself visibly in one of them, chances were pretty good that you’d actually be seen, and command a fair bit of someone’s attention, at least for a few moments. Now? Not nearly. Clicking “follow”..   show all text

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If you didn’t think the check-in was a commodity before Facebook launched their Places feature, you likely do now. But Gowalla has known that for awhile, and that’s why they’ve been moving to extend the service and build on top of the check-in. Comments and photos came several months ago. Today brings another nice addition: Highlights. The best way to think about the feature may be to think back to the “25 Things About Me” meme that spread throughout Facebook last ..   show all text

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Google has quietly launched a new feature: search for blogs on any topic. The company announced the new type of search in a weekly round-up of search updates last week, and respected SEO blogger Bill Slawski argues that the launch may be related to a new Google patent. This has the potential to be a wildly useful service. How many of you have had professional or personal reasons to seek a list of the top blogs on a new topic? I know I, and many people I talk to, find themselves in such need fre..   show all text

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Digg has hired Amazon exec Matt Williams to be their new CEO, we’ve confirmed. This ends a months-long process that began with the ouster of former CEO Jay Adelson in April. Founder Kevin Rose has run the company since then. Williams has been with Amazon for more than a decade – since 1999. He is currently the GM of Consumer Payments. But he has held a variety of jobs – GM Webstore, Director Tech Alliances, Director Community & Cross-Merchandising and Director, Auctions an..   show all text

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With the launch of Priority Inbox, a radical new way to sort mail, Google has hugely changed the way you can process and manage email. As Gmail Product Director Keith Coleman says, “Once you go priority, you never go back.” The set-it-and-forget-it solution has actually existed in various states of completion for years, dating all the way back to pre-release versions of Gmail. The feature was picked up again 18 months ago, and today we can finally experience it for ourselves. At its..   show all text

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In the last couple of hours, Facebook has been unstable for many users (including us), according to numerous tweets from those affected. In the last 15 minutes or so, Facebook seems to be completely inaccessible. While downtime happens far more rarely to Facebook than, say, Twitter, world’s largest social network has occasionally had stability issues. It’s a big deal: with 500 million active users, complaints about downtime mount up pretty quickly. We’ve contacted Facebook to ..   show all text

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Posted by Doug Aberdeen, Software Engineer People tell us all that time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, ..   show all text

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Email overload has finally met its match. Tomorrow, Gmail is rolling out a new feature called Priority Inbox that is going to be a Godsend for those of you who dread opening your email. In short, Google has built a system that figures out which of your messages are important, and presents them at the top of the screen so you don’t miss them. The rest of your messages are still there, but you don’t have to dig through dozens of newsletters and confirmations to find the diamonds in ro..   show all text

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Today, Google will begin rolling out Priority Inbox for Gmail, a new feature for managing massive amounts of e-mail. Your inbox will never be the same again. Priority Inbox is Google’s attempt to solve the e-mail woes of Gmail power users. At its core, the feature is an algorithm; Priority Inbox uses information such as keywords, the people you e-mail the most and your e-mail habits to select the most pressing e-mails in your inbox. Those e-mails are brought to the top of your Gmail and m..   show all text

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As millions of students are trudging back to the classrooms this August, Facebook is returning to its roots: colleges and universities. Just in time for the back-to-school season, the company has partnered with social marketing firm Context Optional to build a Facebook Page of resources and information for new and returning students and their families. Students can find out about publicizing events, engaging with their larger campus community and distributing their own content on this page. And..   show all text

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This series is supported by Gist. Gist provides a full view of the contacts in your professional network by creating a rich business profile for each one that includes the most news, status updates, and work details. See how it works here. Today’s CEO is not social. So says Forrester Research’s CEO George Colony. Very few of the CEOs at top companies in the U.S. and the rest of the world have any material presence on the popular social media sites. Colony believes they should be so..   show all text

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A few months ago, I did some research into visualizing how a story spreads across the Twitterverse and how that spread could be visualized. Using a combination of the Twitter API, the TweetMeme API and the Processing visualization library, I was able to graph the spread of a handful of popular links. In the TweetMaps below the circles represent each user who ReTweeted the link, they're bigger or smaller based on the number of followers they have. People who are following accounts that Twee..   show all text

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If you’re a business of one like a consultant, or a smaller business looking to grow your presence, there are some basic steps you might take towards getting yourself into place on the web. In this example, I’ll assume that you have nothing and are starting from scratch, and I’ll list out steps I’d consider taking in order. (Please note: several of the links in this particular post are affiliate links, meaning that should you choose to purchase something via that link, I..   show all text

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