As marketers, your job is to be creative, creative, and more creative. Before a campaign is even launched, you’re already looking for ways to further the creativity and boost performance. Add to that those ideas that are churning around in your head about how phase 2 of said campaign can be even more creative, or the upcoming summer, or those year end goals, or, or…

No one ever said that being the marketer in the company was the easy job, and you’ve always got to be on the lookout for inspiration. Now besides the big ones; Christmas, national holidays, etc., when was the last time you looked to the calendar for inspiration?

Audiences respond well to creativity, especially when there’s a bit of factual information wrapped around it, so why not surprise and delight them with some offbeat holidays? Be it a social media item, an newsletter lead in, etc., put your creativity to use, and celebrate the oft less celebrated with your audience!

Coming up in June:

First Friday in June (June 1): National Doughnut Day

Yes, there is a national doughnut day, and no, Homer Simpson has nothing to do with it. Originally founded to recognize the Salvation Army “Lassies” who bravely took to the front lines to provide doughnuts and a morale boost to the troops.

If you’re in the food service industry, this should be a no brainer. If not, there are plenty of pop culture references to celebrate doughnuts. Alternatively, here’s a golden moment to bring a box of doughnuts to the team and feature a group photo on your social media channels. To boost fan interaction, toss out the, “What’s your favorite breakfast food?” question, or perhaps find out what their favorite Homer Simpson moment was. These questions might not have any specific relation to your product, but you never know what customer insight you might gain, and be able to use in the future.

June 5: World Environment Day

Supported by the United Nations, World Environment Day is used to spotlight important environmental issues. Each year, the organization takes on a different theme, with 2012 focusing on the Green Economy.

Did you miss Earth Day? Is your organization leading the charge on green technologies? A hot topic, and a dedicated day – this is your opportune time to focus on what your organization is doing to help the environment. Furthermore, this is a great time to point your community towards outside resources that support this theme.

June 6: Yo-Yo Day

Celebrating the birthday of the Duncan Toys Company founder Donald F. Duncan, Yo-Yo day spotlights, what else…the timeless classic Yo-Yo. Speculation places the Yo-Yo approximately at 3 to 4 thousand years old, with civilizations including the Greeks and Chinese spooling string and shooting the moon. And sorry Mr. Ma, but this day is not about you.

There are a number of ways you could go with this one. If you’re a solutions provider, the “Ups and downs” of everyday business life could be a focus. Likewise, an, “At the end of your rope?” theme can draw customers in. If you’re in the entertainment biz, perhaps talking about one of the oldest amusements on the planet might be the way to go.

June 9: Donald Duck Day

An internationally beloved cartoon character, June 9 celebrates Mr. Duck’s first appearance in “The Wise Hen,” June 9, 1934.

Be careful with this one, as Mr. Disney and his organization aren’t exactly keen on copyright infringement, but there’s no stopping you from celebrating! As kids (and grownups) who doesn’t love a good animated cartoon? Use this date as a chance to celebrate your inner child and what keeps you motivated, innovating, exploring, etc.

Little known fact: Donald Duck’s middle name is Fauntleroy. Who in your organization has the most unique middle name?

June 10: National Iced Tea Day

In 1904 tea plantation owner Richard Blechynden was set to sell his wares at the St. Louis World Fair. Unfortunately, it was an extremely hot day, and fair goers were in the mood for something a bit cooler than a cuppa. Blechynden took a risk, poured his hot tea over some ice, and thus – Iced Tea was born.

Iced Tea makes us think of the lazy, hazy days of summer. And although summer hasn’t officially started yet (see below), National Iced Tea day can be a great time to kick off your summer campaigns, or start reinforcing previously stated messages. Food industry marketers can seize this moment and offer deals to patrons, “C’mon in for a free Iced Tea on National Iced Tea Day,” etc. As the invention of Iced Tea arrived under adverse circumstances, you can always play the “necessity is the mother of all invention” card as well. If you’re particularly brazen, you can go out on a limb and bridge the gap between a century old beverage and semi-centarian musician Ice T.

June 13: Sewing Machine Day

The first records of a functional sewing machine date back to 1830, when Barthelemy Thimonnier created a machine that used a thread and a hooked needle to create the same chain stitched used in embroidery.

Now I realize that bridging the gap between your brand and a sewing machine might be a bit of a stretch, but only if you make it. Sewing Machine Day is a perfect time to delve into the world of rapid advancements in technology, and how your organization has contributed to making the world a better place. Perhaps something along the lines of, “Stitching it altogether,” can highlight your organizations’ services or products?

A sidenote: Thimonnier’s factory was burned to the ground by a mob of French tailors who feared job security as a result of this new invention.

World Juggler’s Day: Saturday closest to June 17

Just as the name suggests, World Juggler’s Day is set to recognize the skill and talent of those that keep multiple objects spinning, rotating, and otherwise defying gravity.

While the holiday is meant to celebrate those that can keep balls, pins, flaming batons, etc. in the air, there’s a very clear tie in here to celebrate just about anyone who works for a living. We’re all juggling multiple projects, tasks, appointments, people – let your community know about it, and better yet, what or how your products can better help them manage this balancing act.

Summer Solstice: June 20

Sometimes referred to as Midsummer (as in A … Night’s Dream), the Summer Solstice is the longest day of the year, and is the official meteorological beginning of the summer season.

Chances are you’ve already begun your summer campaigns, but June 20th is a great time to reinforce these messages. Perhaps a midsummer promotion is more to your liking? Celebrate the summer with fans with a, “20% off all purchases on Midsummer with the promo code Puck” and see who catches your literary reference. Leading up to the day, if your product or organization has something to do with the outdoors, you can always remind your audience that after this day, the days start getting shorter again, and which of your products they need to get the very best out of the summer.

Take your dog to work day: June 22

Established in 1999 by Pet Sitters International, Take Your Dog To Work Day is aimed at highlighting the fact that canines make for great companions, and encouraging their adoption from humane societies, animal shelters, and breed rescue clubs.

All memes aside, who doesn’t love a cute pooch? Take your dog to work day can be another great opportunity to highlight staff members, and their canine friends of course. Do you sell a physical product? Could a staff member’s dog have a good time with it, react to it, roll it around the office? Capture these moments and share them with your fans. You never know, you might end of with a new company mascot. But don’t take my word for it, have a view of Beast’s page and let the creativity fly!

Camera Day: June 29

While there’s no official record of who started Camera Day, June 29th can serve as good a date as any to celebrate the camera.

If your industry is in any way related to photographic images, this is an absolute do-not-miss. If you’re not related to a camera in any way, does your organization have an app? If so, there’s a camera sitting right next to your app. Likewise, chances are your social media channels have a number of images, either of your product, consumers, office team, etc. Camera Day can be a great way to encourage your customers to share their stories and include a picture (or 20). Action sports video camera maker GoPro capitalizes on the power of imagery every single day with their “Photo/Video of the Day” series – do the same here and encourage your fans to contribute with the content, perhaps even offering a prize to the top shutterbugs.

I’m sure one or more of these offbeat holidays have touched a nerve in your creative center, and now it’s only up to you to put this spark of inspiration to good use. Be they social media items, blog content pieces, a lead in to a newsletter, etc., surprising your community, and providing them with a bit of factual information, all the while driving your message home is a win/win situation for both parties!

Chris leachman via shutterstock

Andrew Keen. The writer and broadcaster who managed to irritate a large group of people on the Web with his last book, “The Cult of the Amateur”, was in London to talk about his latest work.

Keen is often drawn out by the media as a counterpoint to tech utopians, someone to pooh-pooh the optimism of the Web. Indeed, his Twitter bio dubs him “The Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley”.

It’s simple to cast a devil in opposition to current theories but this is not always helpful when it comes to discussing the realities of human activity on the Internet.

Keen’s latest book, “Digital Vertigo”, proves that he is a more subtle and thoughtful writer and shows off more of his skill as a historical author looking at our technological progress. It’s probably not going to be a text that people look to for a dose of ire.

We meet at a hotel in London and the author is chipper after a trip to the gym and keen to get into his schedule of interviews with media outlets. Not at all the grumpy luddite that he is often mistakenly cast as.

TNW: So what is this new book about?

It’s a book that tries to describe and expose the truth about our infatuation with social networking with websites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

It’s not a positive review of those services but it’s not an entirely negative one either. It suggests that we’ve fallen in love with social networking, but that love affair may end badly.

TNW: That’s a bit of a stark warning, but it would be reactionary to cancel accounts and leave social media en masse. What are the reasons for falling out with these platforms?

I gave up Facebook and it cheered me up enormously. More and more people say to me that they don’t like Facebook and they wish they weren’t on it, so there’s no reason why you can’t give it up.

I’m not a Luddite though, I’m not suggesting we should give up all these networks, I’m suggesting though that we need to use them a little more carefully because at the moment, many of us are doing it in such a way as to reveal everything about ourselves, to turn ourselves inside out and lose something about what it is that makes us human.

TNW: Should we be looking to the past in order to create a better future online?

The book suggests that history is repeating itself. At the beginning of the industrial revolution we had a similar infatuation with the social, with radical visibility, with transparency and one of the men who articulated this love of transparency was the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who invented the Panopticon. This building where we could be watched all the time.

Bentham argued that it would make us more virtuous, more hard-working and essentially happier. Bentham’s philosophy, utilitarianism, is also one of maximising our happiness. I remind the reader that this happened in the industrial revolution, did not have a happy ending and what we’re going through now, with this idea that we should always be visible, always online, watched and watching everyone else is leading us in a similarly dark direction.

I have three fears, about being watched. The first is of course government, the old 1984 argument and governments both in the democratic West and in totalitarian or authoritarian cultures like Iran or China, are using the social web to spy on their own citizens.

I’m also concerned that commercial companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter are aggregating our personal data and one way or another passing that on to advertisers, because it maximises their value. It’s not because they’re evil, but because they’re commercial companies that want to maximise their revenue.

The third group that concerns me is all of us. To paraphrase Walter Kirn, the American novelist, ‘we’ve all become little brothers, spying on ourselves’. So in many ways in the twenty-first century I’m less worried about Orwell’s big brother, and more concerned with all of us, watching each other; a culture of ‘little brothers’.

TNW: How does Jeremy Bentham translate into today’s social media landscape?

The contemporary Jeremy Benthams are American social and media theorists like Jeff Jarvis and David Weinberger. Weinberger is a very decent man, but he believes that transparency will make us more generous. Jarvis thinks that transparency will break down taboos like social unacceptance of homosexuality.

I don’t think that this transparency does make us more generous, it doesn’t break down taboos.

In our culture which tends to be not very generous and tends to be very snarky and often worse than snarky, social media, this perpetual personal broadcast platform is actually in many respects bringing out the worst in all of us.

When you go on Twitter you see lots of examples of homophobia, racism or hatred against a political group or cultural group. I’m not saying that technology makes us bad. Technology is a mirror, but in today’s world the social web is a mirror of who we are as a species and when we stare at it, we’re not looking at something that is generally is very generous, forgiving or attractive.

TNW: Do we not have the personal choice not only to leave social media platforms but also to monitor or adapt the things we do and say there?

I’m not arguing that this is Orwellian, I’m not suggesting that we are literally forced to be on these networks and to give away all of our most intimate details. The truth is that sociologists and cultural anthropologists are finding that people are revealing more and more about themselves and that privacy is increasingly being jeopardised, if not dying.

People say you don’t have to be on these networks if you don’t want to. In some ways that’s right, but in another way these social networks are becoming the de facto platforms, the front doors of the Internet – and everyone needs to be on the Internet.

So Facebook’s attempt, the reason why it’s become a hundred-billion dollar company, the reason why it’s so valued and critical is that we have the shift from what people call the economy of links (which was a Google-centric Internet) to an economy of ‘likes’ (which is a Facebook-centric Internet).

So, to enter this world, to go on more and more of these networks, whether it’s the gaming platform of Zynga or social location services like Highlight or Glancee, you have to be on Facebook.

So, not being on Facebook is a kind of sacrifice. I’m not on it and it’s easy for me to not be on it because I’m making a statement. But for most people it is a sacrifice.

I would argue that there are very few people who can afford not to be on Facebook, either the extremely rich or the extremely poor, but for most of us, Facebook is becoming an essential platform to build our brands, to build our identities and to network; both professionally and personally.

TNW: What are the connections between the discussion you set out in the book and Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo?

The book works off the central metaphor in Hitchcock’s movie, Vertigo, which is a warning about falling in love with the beautiful blonde who doesn’t really exist. It works off the metaphors of falling in love with a corpse and indeed making love to a corpse, which is what Vertigo is about.

The reason I make Vertigo so central in the book is firstly because it’s set in the Bay Area and it provided me with a series of narrative opportunities to integrate the movie with real life. It allowed me to describe how the Bay Area and Silicon Valley has changed so dramatically in the last 50 years.

But the real truth is I’m a huge Hitchcock fan and whilst I’m a writer about technology, I find straight books about technology very dull. So I wanted to integrate Hitchcock’s Vertigo into my book to make it more interesting, to make it more compelling and to get people to think beyond websites. I think after a while those books get very dull.

TNW: Is there an association between vertigo as a phobia and how you perceive social media?

I’m less interested in the heights phobia of vertigo and more in its dizzying quality. The consequence of having vertigo is that you feel dizzy, the world revolves quicker and quicker around you.

When you’re on Twitter, particularly on real-time media, when you’re watching those millions of tweets flicker across your screen, it does give you a very dizzying sense of the nature of the world. I like the idea of social media making us dizzy.

Somehow separating us from the concrete, from what we traditionally called reality.

TNW: Can creativity survive in a digital social world?

Creativity is critical, not just from an artistic point of view. It’s the key thing in our society, it’s the thing that generates innovation.

The really creative people are the Steve Jobs’s, the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Larry Pages. So the real challenge in an enterprise sense is whether social media is going to trigger the kind of innovation in business that most people would like.

I don’t think that’s the case. I think that companies need to be very careful about how they leverage social media technologies within their enterprise. When employees are watched all the time and everyone’s continually discussing things, when you have endless real time, online meeting through networks like Yammer and Chatter, I think real creativity could be a casualty of all that.

TNW: Is history doomed to keep repeating itself? If this tech revolution echoes the industrial one before it, why can’t we do something to change and avoid past mistakes?

I think some cultures are more sympathetic than others to understanding that history repeats itself. I’m half-English, half-American so perhaps janus-faced in the sense that America is forward-looking and Britain tends to be more backward-looking. The book hopefully is janus-faced in the sense that it’s historical but also futuristic.

I think we need to learn from the past, but at the same time I would argue – and I don’t think that the book suggests that today’s challenges are the exact repetition of the industrial one. Big brother is different to little brothers. The industrial revolution is not identical to the digital revolution. The nation-state of the industrial world is being replaced by the global village of the digital world.

But it does help to understand what’s happened in the past. One of the things that concerns me is that there are some digital utopians who always say the same things. ‘This is the first time this has ever happened in history’, ‘We’re in uncharted territory’, ‘Now we can finally realise ourselves as human beings’…. And the point in my book is that this has been said before, it was said two hundred years ago and it ended in many ways, tragically. We need to learn from history and we need to understand that nothing is ever really new.

TNW: Who is the audience for this book and why are some of the people featured by their Twitter handle while others are not?

Hopefully that added to the entertainment in the narrative. One of the people who is represented by their Twitter symbol is Reid Hoffman who is one of the most powerful, articulate, successful and I think brilliant figures in Silicon Valley. On Twitter he’s @quixotic, so it’s hard to resist using that perhaps slightly ironic title.

The book is designed as a broad introduction to social media. It’s not really for Silicon Valley insiders. It’s written for an audience that enjoys cultural criticism, that wants to understand the Internet and social media in a broader social, cultural context. It’s written for people who like movies and most of all it’s written for people who like a good read. My focus was on writing a narrative that was entertaining and engaging.

TNW: How do you manage a critique of a system that you are part of yourself?

My first book was an attack on amateurism, that was defiantly amateurish. This book is a critique of connectivity, which is intricately connected.

My first book I wrote a book against blogs and my editor said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to have a blog’. So I had a blog and of course it was rather silly because you really shouldn’t write a book against blogs and have a blog of your own. I never enjoyed blogging, I don’t like the idea of giving away my content for free.

This book is more complicated. The narrative is actually partly developed around my own ambivalence to Twitter. The first chapter in particular is about both the temptation to use Twitter, my need as a writer to use Twitter, but also the fact that I’m rather awkward and that it makes me very uncomfortable to be continually on Twitter.

I’m on Twitter but I’m not on Facebook and I made a conscious effort to become a Facebook resister partly because I think that’s consistent with the message in the book and I can avoid those kinds of questions in interviews but also because it just annoyed me.

This book isn’t simply an attack on social media. Though there is an element of that, I do argue that social media is caused by our narcissism and it’s ugly and inane and I’m in some ways as guilty of that as anyone. But it’s not simply that conservative critique.

It’s not just because we are narcissistic, it’s bound up with deeper structural shifts in the nature of our economy and society.

TNW: So what does all this mean for the future of social media?

I think we are going to hit a wall. The issue of how much social media can speed up, how much more data we can consume and reveal to the world is not infinite. We don’t work under Moore’s Law. Humans aren’t chips, our brains are not able to keep up with that kind of technological development.

I think the most interesting thing on the horizon is the increasing relevance of artificial intelligence. I think the next big thing will be thinking machines. Machines that are harder and harder to distinguish from human beings.

That’s the solution to Moore’s law not applying to the human brain. But from a human point of view I’m not convinced that that would be a good thing for human beings when we are dependent on robots to look after us. I’m not convinced that that’s a world I would want to live in.

You can see a summary interview about Keen’s new book recorded at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam earlier this year, below.

Digital Vertigo is not like most technology books. The presentation of information follows Keen on a journey through his thoughts and research on the current state of social media in the light of historical events. The spinning narrative that also entwines the storyline of Hitchcock’s film can make the book a vertiginous read in itself.

One thing is for certain, this book is nothing like the fiery polemic that was the Cult of the Amateur, and so instead of annoying the hashtags off every Web-loving digital utopian, it should provide some room for thought and a deeper consideration of what we all think we’re doing here in this virtual place.

Last month, Facebook introduced a feature called “trending articles” that stuck a slideshow into your news feed of popular news articles via your friends that you might have missed.

It looks like videos are now getting the same treatment, as some users have just noticed “trending videos” in their news feed as well.

Based on what your friends are watching, using apps that are connected to Facebook’s Open Graph of course, you’ll be shown the this slideshow of videos to check out:

This is obviously Facebook’s way of re-surfacing content that you might have missed due to the real-time nature of the news feed.

Some folks were pretty annoyed with trending articles, so it’ll be interesting to see how well this does. It’s great news for apps like Viddy and Socialcam, since its content will be shown more than ever before.

I have no idea what Airtime is, but perhaps Sean Parker will get some mileage out of this feature, too.

It’s safe to say that most of the popular Open Graph actions will get this same treatment, especially music. It’s like trending topics on Twitter…but with actual content.

Now that Facebook is all grown up, it’s nice to take a stroll down memory lane every now and then. Thanks to a tweet from Matthew Keys, we’re reminded of just how far Zuckerberg’s company has come since its early days.

In an article on The Harvard Crimson, dated February 9th, 2004, the publication discussed the new site launched by the young student Mark E. Zuckerberg:

After about a week of coding, Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com last Wednesday afternoon. The website combines elements of a standard House face book with extensive profile features that allow students to search for others in their courses, social organizations and Houses.

Just in case you’ve never read this article before, it’s chock full of interesting quotes from Zuckberg on the launch of Facebook’s original incarnation. Especially this one:

I’m pretty happy with the amount of people that have been to it so far. The nature of the site is that each user’s experience improves if they can get their friends to join it.

The amount of people at the time of the article? According to The Harvard Crimson it surely wasn’t anywhere close to a billion:

As of yesterday afternoon, Zuckerberg said over 650 students had registered use thefacebook.com. He said that he anticipated that 900 students would have joined the site by this morning.

Zuckerberg anticipated 900 users by the morning the article was published, but did he anticipate the 900M that the company boasts in 2012, as well as going public? Who knows, but one thing we do know is that in 2004, he was just focused on keeping the site fun:

I’m not going to sell anybody’s e-mail address. At one point I thought about making the website so that you could upload a resume too, and for a fee companies could search for Harvard job applicants. But I don’t want to touch that. It would make everything more serious and less fun.

Keeping the fun intact will be hard to do with public investors watching your every move, but somehow I think Zuck can handle it.

National Geographic was Instagram’s very first big brand partner and so it seems quite fitting that the media giant is using the photo sharing app for the very first time to let viewers in on an Everest expedition.

With a National Geographic expedition team expected to reach the summit tomorrow morning, it’s the magazine’s Twitter and Instagram followers who will be the first to know the exact moment it happens, 3G network allowing.

Following the team from the moment they set out, National Geographic has given its audience the chance to take a front row seat, watching the expedition as it unfolded, with a sense of immediacy that only social media can provide in real time.

The magazine is going all out with its tech integration, keeping its iPad audience up to date with exclusive content, following mountaineer Conrad Anker and his team as they make their way to the top of Mount Everest. A dedicated section on its website also features a fair share of content, including dispatches, audio and video posts, and even a Google+ hangout, which took place at Everest Base Camp.

Bringing Instagram into the expedition mix for the very first time, National Geographic’s follower count shot up by 40,000 new followers in the past 8 weeks of the journey, to a total of well over 60,000 followers today. While the National Geographic Instagram account has been around for a while, this expedition is the first time it has truly come to life.

The images shared are a gorgeous combination of the scenery around them, the people they have encountered, and photos of the members of the team themselves.

The social media journey to the top of Mount Everest will be culminating tomorrow morning (May 25) when the team sets off at around 5am Kathmandu time (GMT+5), and they will be posting photos of the summit, as soon 3G service is available.

This expedition in particular also holds particular significance, as it commemorates the 50th anniversary of the very first American ascent of Mount Everest.

The main reason why we use services like Facebook and Twitter is to stalk keep up with our friends. Unfortunately, there is only so much time in a day that we can dedicate to stalking checking out people’s profiles.

Luckily, Facebook publishes News Feed items when someone changes something significant on their profile, such as relationship or job status. However, that means that you’ll have to be watching said News Feed for the changes. Who has the time for that?

A new tool created by Jeroen Bertrams and Joris Leermakers, founders of Foodzy, will send you an email digest of all of the profile changes for your Twitter and Facebook pals. It’s not as creepy as it sounds…really.

The site is called Networkupdater, and it could turn out to be a massive timesaver for you.

Congrats on the new job!

Unless the people you follow on Twitter announce every single change to their bio on the service, there’s a good chance that you probably won’t ever notice it. Even if they did announce it, you’d probably miss the tweet. That’s the nature of real-time after all.

Networkupdater lets you connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts to the service and then select which people you’d like to be kept up to date on when it comes to profile changes. You can set your emails to go out daily or weekly.

Once you select your friends you can then choose which items you’d like to be updated on:

Even though the Internet makes it easier to keep up with things, we can’t be in two places at once, let alone three. I think that Networkupdater is a handy way to slow down the rapid real-time nature of things so that you can properly congratulate someone for something as importing as a changing jobs.

The service has just come out of private beta and is already tracking over 100K profiles.

➤ Networkupdater

Derwent Capital Markets raised eyebrows when it launched a hedge fund that used analysis of Twitter to predict movements in the stock market. Now the London-based firm is set to open up its technology for anyone to use via what it’s calling the “world’s first social media sentiment analysis trading platform.”

The service, set to launch in late summer, promises to allow investors and stock traders to monitor the global social media sentiment around any stock, commodity or currency in real-time – hopefully giving them an edge when they trade.

Derwent’s technology is based on a 2010 academic paper that showed how information from Twitter could predict how stock would perform. Since then it has been putting the theory to the test via its Derwent Absolute Return Fund. The new platform appears to essentially be ‘Radian6 for traders’, letting anyone put do the same with their own money. It will be available as both a browser-based service and a mobile app.

While the firm isn’t giving any more precise launch details than ‘”late summer,” we’ll be watching this one closely.

The founding developer of the popular blogging software WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, shared some of his thoughts about what’s next for the platform today. WordPress is completely open source, but Mullenweg founded the company behind the business arm of the product, Automattic.

At the paidContent event today, Mullenweg shared that a new “radically simplified” version of WordPress will be available soon.

On his blog, Mullenweg took things a step further, discussing what he calls the “fourth phase of our evolution.”:

WordPress was first for pure blogging, then became embraced as a CMS (though some people still deny this), is seeing growth and innovation in being used as an application platform (I think we’re about a third of the way through that), and just now starting to embrace social and mobile — the fourth phase of our evolution.

Mullenweg aims to help make WordPress “shorter, simpler, and faster”, making everyone in the word a publisher with the click of a button. He mentions the importance of mobile and social being the future of WordPress, and that we can start seeing the direction the software is going in its official iOS and Android apps.

How will Mullenweg re-imagine and “radically simplify” WordPress as we know it today? “Even though I’m thinking about this all the time I don’t have all the answers yet — that’s what makes it fun.” he shares.

WordPress is set to turn 9 years old this Sunday, and it’s amazing to see how far the platform has come. I can truly say that without WordPress, I’m not sure if I’d be writing this post and have the ability to share it with all of you.

We know that Facebook is definitely on to something with its Open Graph initiative. Apps like Socialcam have seen a huge increase in adoption thanks to the sharing of content on user’s Timeline and News Feed. Even Tumblr saw a 2.5X increase in traffic since integrating with the platform.

The company has announced today that developers will now be able to track all of the activity going on within Facebook with more granularity. If you have an app that publishes Open Graph stories, then you’ll be able to track the unique numbers of publishes, views, and clicks. This type of analytics will help companies hone in on exactly what’s working for them, and exactly what’s going on when they see spikes in usage.

In addition, developers will now see how many unique users have seen and accepted their Facebook authorization dialog. This type of information can help a company figure out why their app isn’t converting to actual new users.

Here’s a look at what developers will see in their Open Graph Insights dashboard now:

Facebook says that these new changes will help developers build great apps that have a better chance of getting accepted into its upcoming App Center.

Open Graph stories show even more promise for developers than the Like ever did, letting people share and interact with actions being taken outside of the social network. For those of you wondering how Facebook will ever monetize its 900M userbase, this is an early glimpse into how it’s preparing to do just that.

If you’ve paid attention to Facebook’s culture at all, you know that one thing has stayed true since its launch. The company has a hacker mentality, and since 2007 has held many official “hackathons” which allow its entire company to collaborate on ideas that they don’t get to work on every day.

Today, the company shared a bit about the history of the hackathon, and it’s an interesting glimpse into the largest social network in the world.

In the early days, the company notes that hackathons happened on a nightly basis. Anyone that has started a tech company knows that sleep comes at a premium and the ones that iterate the fastest, and smartest, are the ones that win.

Here are some interesting insights from an engineering lead at Facebook, Pedram Keyani, including how happy CEO Mark Zuckerberg was with the first hackathon:

In Facebook’s early days, a lot of ordinary nights were like hackathons—when someone decided they wanted to stay up all night to build a prototype, they just did it. But as Facebook grew, people started organizing hackathons as a way to collaborate with colleagues from different parts of the team to get their ideas working fast. I had heard a lot about hackathons before I came to Facebook, and about a month after I joined in 2007, I asked another engineer when the next hackathon would be. He just said, “Whenever someone wants to organize it.” I immediately went to my desk and emailed the company that I was going to hack the following night and, if anyone else wanted to join me, I would get food and drinks. The following night, we had a great hackathon that generated lots of innovative projects and ideas. Zuck came to my desk the next day and told me how awesome the hackathon had been, and from then on I’ve been spreading the word.

In case you wondered what happened after a hackathon, Keyani shares that teams get together and decide which things should move forward and eventually ship:

After each hackathon, we keep the momentum going by holding a prototype forum where everyone who built a project can present it to the company. Prototype forum usually happens a week after the hackathon, so it gives people a chance to fine-tune their projects and prepare them for live demos. Everyone gets the same amount of time at the forum—two minutes—to convince their peers that their idea should ship.

On the eve of Facebook’s IPO, the entire company participated in a massive overnight hackathon, keeping its collective heads down and focused on making the product the best it could be. Products like “photos” came together during such hackathons, which is proof that when a company has a mentality to tinker and think outside of the box, great things can happen.

If you have a company of your own, or would like to join Facebook one day, I highly suggest that you give the post a full and thorough read yourself.

Facebook has a new road show now that it’s a public company, and it wants to find the best Open Graph hackers there are in the UK. During the Over the Air conference in Bletchley Park, the company will be holding an “Open Graph Challenge.”

Members of the Facebook platform team will be there to help out developers who want to create the best mobile, social app that uses Open Graph. In true Facebook form, the challenge only lasts 24 hours.

Winners will get a Samsung Galaxy SII, which is a pretty sweet treat since the whole conference is free.

Here’s how Facebook describes the challenge and what the “best” Open Graph app would look like:

The best Open Graph apps come from applying Facebook’s platform to another data set – be it movies, recipes, books, songs, artists, locations, sports. We recommend you find a domain you’re interested in, and which you can get data for. Then model the data in terms of Objects, and link Objects together using References. Then think of the Actions that a user could take in your app, and which you’d like to see from your Friends in your Facebook NewsFeed.

In addition to the challenge, Facebook will be giving two talks:

The first is an introduction to Open Graph and will show you how to build an end-to-end Open Graph Mobile app in 60 minutes. The second is a look into how we build Facebook itself, our tools and processes that allow us to ship thousands of lines of code to over 900 million people every day.

➤ Over the Air 2012