The Starbucks mermaid has ditched the text and gone minimalist chic.

The Seattle-based coffee chain unveiled a new logo Wednesday to mark 40 years of brewing. The revamped look features the familiar mermaid, but eliminates the company’s name. The change marks a major milestone for the java giant as it joins companies like Nike and Apple as a company that doesn’t need words for instant brand recognition.

In a message to customers, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said of the logo’s evolution: “Throughout the last four decades, the Siren has been there through it all. And now, we’ve given her a small but meaningful update to ensure that the Starbucks brand continues to embrace our heritage in ways that are true to our core values and that also ensure we remain relevant and poised for future growth.”

Full story at Seattle PI. — Thanks AllTop for the picture and tip on the story and text.

What’s the value of a song?

Jammie Thomas-Rasset has spent the last few years in court debating that question. The Minnesota mother of four is being penalized for illegally downloading and sharing 24 songs on the peer-to-peer file-sharing network Kazaa in 2006, but how much she owes the record labels has been in question.

The jury in her third trial has just ruled that Thomas-Rasset should pay Capitol Records $1.5 million, CNET reports, which breaks down to $62,500 per song. It’s a heavy penalty considering the 24 tunes would only cost approximately $24 on iTunes, which was Thomas-Rasset’ argument, too.

Thanks to Thomas-Rasset’s colorful case, she has become the public face of the record industry’s battle with illegal downloaders. In her first trial, in 2007, the jury demanded she pay $222,000 for violating the copyright on more than 1,700 songs by Green Day, Aerosmith and Richard Marx, to name a few. (Marx said he was “ashamed” to be associated with the “farcical” prosecution of an illegal downloader.) Thomas-Rasset maintained she wasn’t the computer user who did the file sharing, and her legal team cited an error in jury instruction to secure a second trial in 2009 that ended with a much harsher result: an astronomical fine of $1.92 million. However, earlier this year a U.S. District Court judge found the $1.92 million penalty against Thomas-Rasset to be “monstrous and shocking” and “gross injustice” before lowering it to $54,000, or $2,250 a song. Thomas-Rasset and her legal team decided to appeal that decision, too….

Still, Thomas-Rasset and her legal team are already making plans to appeal, setting the stage for a fourth trial. “The fight continues,” promised Thomas-Rasset’s lawyer Kiwi Camara. Even if Thomas-Rasset were to win the next trial, the RIAA would likely appeal that decision to ensure that copyright infringement without penalization won’t happen. This story has the potential to drag on well into the next decade — when for $1.5 million, all of Thomas-Rasset’s four kids could finish law school and take up the fight on her behalf.

Photo and text above courtesy of Y! News. See the full story at Y! News.

Technorati.com is the leading source, next to Google in my opinion, for indexing blogs and blogs posts around the web. In their own words, “The leading blog search engine, Technorati.com indexes millions of blog posts in real time and surfaces them in seconds. The site has become the definitive source for the top stories, opinions, photos and videos emerging across news, entertainment, technology, lifestyle, sports, politics and business. Technorati.com tracks not only the authority and influence of blogs, but also the most comprehensive and current index of who and what is most popular in the Blogosphere.”

Taken from Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2009, here are 10 facts that you might not have known about the online culture of blogging:

1. 77% of Internet users read blogs.
2. There are currently 133 million blogs listed on leading blog directory Technorati.
3. 60% of bloggers are between the ages 18-44.
4. One in five bloggers update their blogs daily.
5. Not so surprising to me: Two thirds of bloggers are male.
6. Corporate blogging accounts for 14% of blogs.
7. 15% of bloggers spend 10 hours a week blogging.
8. More than half of all bloggers are married and/or parents.
9. More than 50% of bloggers have more than one blog.
10. Bloggers use an average of five different social sites to drive traffic to their blog.

For more interesting ideas about the web and where things are going, see this web/technology clog that I just found: http://thefuturebuzz.com/.

Linked-In

So, without further wait, here are the 10 interesting facts about Linked-In:

1. Having been created on May 5 2003, Linked-in is older than Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.
2. There are more than 70 million users worldwide.
3. Members of LinkedIn come from more than 200 countries from every continent.
4. LinkedIn is available in six native languages – English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
5. 80% of companies use LinkedIn as a recruitment tool.
6. A new member joins LinkedIn every second.
7. LinkedIn receives almost 12 million unique visitors per day.
8. Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are on LinkedIn.
9. Recruiters account for 1-in-20 LinkedIn profiles.

And I thought this one very interesting:

10. Oracle’s Chief Financial Officer, Jeff Epstein, was headhunted for the position via his LinkedIn profile.

Statistics from LinkedIn press centre and SysComm International.

1. Twitter’s web platform only accounts for a quarter of its users – 75% use third-party apps.
2. Twitter gets more than 300,000 new users every day.
3. There are currently 110 million users of Twitter’s services.
4. Twitter receives 180 million unique visits each month.
5. There are more than 600 million searches on Twitter every day.
6. Twitter started as a simple SMS-text service.
7. Over 60% of Twitter use is outside the U.S.
8. There are more than 50,000 third-party apps for Twitter.
9. More than a third of users access Twitter via their mobile phone.

And I thought this one very interesting:

10. Twitter has donated access to all of its tweets to the Library of Congress for research and preservation… it’s true. see their own tweet about just that!

Statistics from Twitter and the Chirp Conference.

But here are some interesting fact, taken from statistics of the YouTube press center.

1. The very first video uploaded was called “Me at the Zoo,” on 23rd April 2005.
2. By June 2006, more than 65,000 videos were being uploaded every day
3. YouTube receives more than 2 billion viewers per day.
4. Every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.
5. The U.S. accounts for 70% of YouTube users.
6. Over half of YouTube’s users are under 20 years old.
7. You would need to live for around 1,000 years to watch all the videos currently on YouTube.
8. YouTube is available in 19 countries and 12 languages.
9. Music videos account for 20% of uploads.

And I thought this one very interesting:

10. YouTube uses the same amount of bandwidth as the entire Internet used in 2000.

Get additional fast facts about youtube.com here, or even some cool store items from the YouTube Store…. or if someone wants to get me this cool google maps shirt, I will thank you for 1,000 years.

1. The average Facebook user has 130 friends.
2. More than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) is shared each month.
3. Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application.
4. More than 150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites every month.
5. Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook.
6. There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
7. People that access Facebook via mobile are twice as active than non-mobile users (think about that when designing your Facebook page).
8. The average Facebook user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events.
9. People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook.
10. There are more than 1 million entrepreneurs and developers from 180 countries on Facebook.

To them, tweeting is a sound a parakeet makes. Wallpaper is something you hang, angrily, with a family member. A blog might be something you clear from your drain. And an e-blast … whatever that is, it doesn’t sound pleasant.

Remember when you got your cell phone? Remember when you finally gave in to texting? Do you recall when Barbara Walters first mentioned the Web sensation “MyFace”? The first time you heard the term “adding glitter”? Facebook updates? Twitter?

For many, it’s fun to put their every thought, their every move out there for the world to see. Everyone’s diary is now shared with the world. But, be careful! Your future employers are looking you up online. “I have had friends and fellow employers who have indeed looked up a person’s personal online MySpace and/or Facebook page,” says Caleb Applegate, a businessman working in investments. “In one case I can tell you they were not hired because of what the employer found. I think it is an appropriate way to see the character of a person. A simple interview tells you what you want to hear. A Facebook/MySpace page tells you a thousand different things about the person.”

Some employers are hesitant to check those sites, fearing they might find private information like religious views or sexual orientation that could lead to discrimination lawsuits. Sometimes, though, they receive the strangest applications from young job searchers. “I did recently receive a LinkedIn request from someone wearing a Halloween mask. A little creepy, considering this person is looking for work on a professional site!” says Richard Archambault, an employer in television and film post-production.

Of course, presenting yourself in a positive light on your social networking site can have its advantages. “I always check out prospective employees,” says Tony Hightower, a tax specialist. “In one instance it was a determining factor because it seemed one of the applicants had a lot of friends in our target demographic … I thought she would be able to network better than the other applicants, so we hired her. It worked out, she did bring in a lot of referrals.”

In this case, having a positive social networking presence got the young woman a job. An employer saw that she had a lot of connections that would really boost his business. She wisely left “party pics” off the site and gave off a mature, professional vibe.

Your public networking is just that—public. Remember what your parents taught you: “Mean what you say and say what you mean.” That classic rule still applies online.

While “inappropriate drunk photos” is the number one problem employers find when they look at a person’s social networking page, 22 percent say it’s the “rude comments” left online that kill an employee’s chance of getting hired. “Inside jokes” also don’t play well to the outside world. When applying to colleges or looking for work, consider blocking status updates and putting a control block on public comments others can leave about you.

By the Numbers

• - 27 percent of employers check job candidates’ online profiles, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
• - 24 percent of those said they’d been put off by something they found.
• - According to the Knowledge Network, “Of the people who had not searched for applicants online to-date, 44 percent admitted that they ‘probably would do this in the future.’”

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2009/10 issue of Collegiate magazine.