When the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, due to come on stream in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days.

This shift from information scarcity to surfeit has broad effects. "What we are seeing is the ability to have economies form around the data--and that to me is the big change at a societal and even macroeconomic level," says Craig Mundie, head of research and strategy at Microsoft. Data are becoming the new raw material of business: an economic input almost on a par with capital and labour. "Every day I wake up and ask, 'how can I flow data better, manage data better, analyse data better?" says Rollin Ford, the CIO of Wal-Mart.

Read the whole story in The Economist

Google is proving to be much more than just a search engine. I think we all have learned to rely on Google for a variety of things that we used to do in much more cumbersome ways, but that we now do effortlessly with this amazing service. Here are some special Google features you may not know about that make things even easier. Trust me, some of these are amazing:

See the whole list of Special Google Features here

All of us use Google search, most of us use it multiple times every day. Some of us can't imagine how we got our work done before we had Google search. But how many of us know how use the 'power features' of Google? Google search can actually do far more sophisticated searches than most people ever attempt. By learning a few very simple techniques you can take advantage of the inner workings of the Google search engine and perform all kinds of advanced searches that will return what you are looking for faster and more reliably. For example:

Search exactly as is (+).
Google employs synonyms automatically, so that it finds pages that mention, for example, childcare for the query [ child care ] (with a space), or California history for the query [ ca history ]. But sometimes Google helps out a little too much and gives you a synonym when you don't really want it. By attaching a + immediately before a word (remember, don't add a space after the +), you are telling Google to match that word precisely as you typed it. Putting double quotes around a single word will do the same thing.

See more Google Search tricks here.

It's inevitable. At some point your company will experience negative feedback. With social media, the likelihood more people will hear about it are higher. What should you do? Here are 5 easy tips.

1. Monitor
2. Respond Quickly
3. Stay Calm
4. Be Honest
5. Be Generous

For more details on each tip, visit socialsmallbiz.com

If you don't know who your target audience is, or what they're doing online, your chances of success diminish. However, when you identify the demographics and psychographics of your audience, your chances for success in the marketplace increase!

Analyst firm Forrester has some very detailed research about how people use social media. This information can really help you put together strategies to target specific audiences.

Read the whole story at socialsmallbiz.com

We all want our venture into Social Media to go perfectly, however sometimes mistakes happen. What should you do if it happens to you? Social Media Today has 3 good tips:

1. Apologize for the mistake (or at the very least the misunderstanding).
2. Clarify the statement (or action). Most mistakes are more miscommunication that an actual mistake.
3. Move On. Don't dwell on the mistake, instead reengage with the community and get back to having fun.

Read on at socialmediatoday.com

Social media users are voting with their pocketbooks. They have learned to trust the brands that they see on Facebook and Twitter, and they are spending their money on these products. This is tremendously important news for online marketers.

People who are Facebook fans and Twitter followers of a brand are more likely to buy the brand's product or recommend it to a friend, according to a new study by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies. The study of 1,500 consumers found that 60 percent of Facebook fans and 79 percent of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend those brands since becoming a fan or follower. More than half (51%) of Facebook fans and 67 percent of Twitter followers are more likely to buy the brands they follow or are a fan of.

Read the rest of the story on WebProNews.com

When you design your HTML email marketing messages, do you take into account that the majority of recipients don't have images turned on by default? According to MarketingSherpa's 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, only 33% of email users say they have images turned on by default in their email clients.

What does that mean? It means that instead of the pretty picture you want them to see, they're seeing some type of missing image symbol. Marketing Sherpa suggests 3 tactics.

1. Consider a text-only email instead
2. Make the most of ALT-text tags
3. Consider using table cells

Read more at the Marketing Sherpa