I’ve always believed we have separate digital representations of ourselves that never accurately depict the person offline. Recently, the National Media Museum introduced the Internet Mirror that takes the first step towards trying to decipher your digital self versus your regular IRL self.

Internet Mirror is a website that asks you seven questions to help determine your “online reflection” or your online personality. It’s based on the Big 5 personality system and the results are compared to more than 6.5 million personality surveys. The short survey asks you questions relating to your online preferences and social networks such as which celebrities you would follow on Twitter to which online news sources you check regularly.

Though the results may not be completely accurate (it surmised that I was a male based on my celebrity Twitter preference) and they offer a small pool of choices to correctly represent my very sophisticated taste in pop music, it’s definitely an interesting look at piecing together your digital self. If you connect your networks, the Internet Mirror also gathers your social media activity and compares it to the average user.

What’s really interesting about this project is that it focuses on the interaction between community, self identity and the Internet. There’s always going to be a number of perceptions of yourself online. Just like in real life where you meet people on your good days or bad days and in coffee shops or in grocery stores, you interact with...

The effect of social media is a powerful, transformative beast. Situations that would have gone unnoticed ten years ago are now at the forefront of our everyday lives, and most would agree that that’s not a bad thing. In the past week we’ve seen some amazingly hilarious and genuinely touching examples of how the Internet is connecting people from all walks of life for causes big or small.

The first has a real sense of humor. When Matthew Inman from the famous cartoon site The Oatmeal was delivered a cease and desist letter from FunnyJunk.com for pointing out on his site that they stole his cartoons, most people would expect him to settle to make it go away. The Oatmeal, for people who aren’t avid fans, just doesn’t work like that though. Inman’s impeccable sense of humor is what keeps his fans coming back, and he seemed damned to succumb to an aggregation site’s absurd request for $20,000 in settlement money for content he had created in the first place.

To spite the people behind the allegations, Inman used his artistic skills and smarts to find a way to get the word out and make an example of the situation. Operation BearLove Good, Cancer Bad was launched on Indiegogo on June 11th with the following premise:

“I'm trying to raise $20k to donate half to the National Wildlife Federation (for the bears), and half to the American Cancer Society (because cancer is shitty).”

On Saturday, Red Bull founder Chaleo Yoovidhya died of natural causes in his home country of Thailand. As the world’s 250th richest man, Chaleo held a 49% stake in Red Bull as well as countless other financial pursuits such as a hospital and a winery. His determination and knowledge was called upon by political parties and his business acumen from being a self made man was nationally famous. He was an innovative and perceptive marketer, building his brand from a small knock-off energy drink into a lifestyle product that sold over 4.6 billion cans last year. There's a lot than can be learned from numbers like that, but what really shines in such a great man's history is not his recent success, but how he made it there in the first place.

It all started in the 1962 when Chaleo, a pharmaceutical manufacturer, created an energy drink prototype called Krathing Daeng, or Red Bull in English. The drink was modeled after a similar Japanese product called Lipovitan-D, but instead of heading to the rich and wealthy city epicenters to market his product, Chaleo went into the countryside. By using bicyclists and locals who distributed samples to truck drivers and other low wage workers, he was able to get the drink into the people's hands who would champion it. The effect was tremendous. By starting in an environment that wasn't over-saturated, he was able to create brand loyalists with little to no advertising cost. These kinds of tactics are popular in emerging brands today, but in the 197...

By now, every local band and aspiring taco truck has a Kickstarter account – which is a wonderful thing! But what about businesses that are already open, but lack the funds to renovate or add a certain element that would increase business, or possibly even save it? New social startup site LuckyAnt aims to fill that void with a concept very similar to Kickstarter. Here's how it works: invest X amount of money to help rebuild/reorganize/rejuvenate a business and in return you receive free product or a special distinction for your donation.

How Lucky Ant Works from Lucky Ant on Vimeo.

What differentiates LuckyAnt from Kickstarter is its localized mission. And although Kickstarter allows you to search for projects nearby, LuckyAnt focuses on the idea that the places you visit everyday might need a little help too. The barista who always knows your order, the guy at the sandwich shop who knows you hate mayo, these people affect and enrich our everyday lives. Everyone loves getting a kick start, but consider the possibilities of also lending your neighbor a helping hand.

During PSFK’s production of their recent report “The Future of Gaming,” they noticed an interesting trend – One-Upmanship. The most inherent of all human qualities, the desire to be better than another, the fuel for the fire of passion – is it not something that we all experience at one point or another?

Harnessing this power is often a difficult feat, but playing off of the Internet’s notorious reputation of anonymity, the folks at Digg noticed and wisely put one-upmanship to good use. Sites like Wikipedia use anonymous updaters to keep their content flowing, but where Wikipedia is more like an Encyclopedia, Digg is closer to a scrolling news feed at the bottom of your screen – their content needs to be streamlined, with no room for error.

By implementing a game-like rewards system, top contributors receive points and badges based on their submissions that are filtered through Digg’s content algorithm, which measures posts based on views and user shares on social networks. The bigger the reach, the better the recognition.