My Community Manager

10 Community Manager Tools You Might Not Know by Renee Warren on Mar 01, 2011 Community Managers are often faced with the grueling task of sourcing out the best tools to use for social media. With new platforms launching weekly, it can be daunting. Do you go with a paid version or do you use one of many free tools to save money? World First: 3D Acoustic Cloaking Device Steven Cummer, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University and his lab has just revealed a three-dimensional pyramid-shaped device that can cloak an object from acoustic detection. The cloak has been described in a new paper published in Nature Materials. When sound waves hit an object, they bounce off and return to the point of origin. The time it takes the sound to be emitted and then bounce back can provide information about the object’s distance. Active acoustic location is used in the animal kingdom as echolocation and those same principles have been used to develop sonar for human use.

40 New Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed The long winter is almost over and as the weather gets ever better we at Mashable are hard at work bring you a list of tools and resources for your digital life. Here you'll find stories on how a computer beat Jeopardy champions, pics of the latest toys from this year's New York Toy Fair, and a load of hands-on demos and impressions from the Mobile World Congress. Looking for even more social media resources? This guide appears every weekend, and you can check out all the lists-gone-by here any time. People Can Draw Energy From Other People The Same Way Plants Do A biological research team at Bielefeld University has made a groundbreaking discovery showing that plants can draw an alternative source of energy from other plants. This finding could also have a major impact on the future of bioenergy eventually providing the evidence to show that people draw energy from others in much the same way. Members of Professor Dr. Olaf Kruse’s biological research team have confirmed for the first time that a plant, the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, not only engages in photosynthesis, but also has an alternative source of energy: it can draw it from other plants. The research findings were released this week in the online journal Nature Communications published by the renowned journal Nature. Flowers need water and light to grow and people are no different.

Are We Too Obsessed With Facebook? [INFOGRAPHIC] Facebook profiles are like belly buttons: Everybody's got one. Perhaps that statement's still a bit of an exaggeration, but by the numbers, we (that is, Internet users around the globe) are becoming more obsessed with Facebook by the day. One out of every 13 Earthlings and three out of four Americans is on Facebook, and one out of 26 signs into Facebook on a daily basis. We could rattle off stats like that until the cows come home, but instead, we'd like to show you this fascinating infographic from SocialHype and OnlineSchools.org. Here, in a visual nutshell, are some highlights about Facebook usage, 2010 trends, adoption numbers and a great deal more. Take a good look at this information (or click here for the full-size version), and in the comments, let us know what you think about our global fascination with Facebook.

HOW TO: Create a World-Class Online Community for Your Business Name the companies that set the standards for social media use in business. Nothing coming to mind immediately? Me neither. Telligent, an enterprise collaboration software company, believes that some day the same answer will immediately occur to both of us.