This Week in Social Media News: 6 Items Worth Exploring

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.

What’s New This Week?

SlideShare Announces Zipcast for Live Web Meetings: This new tool allows you to run live video meetings alongside your SlideShare presentations. The video quality is basic but it’s easy to use. Zipcast is integrated with social media buttons, offers a live-stream chat feature and allows up to 5000 participants. Zipcast’s basic public meetings are free and there’s a paid ad-free version which allows password-protected meetings. This could be an interesting way for some businesses to start web broadcasting. How will you take advantage of this new platform?

Call a live virtual meeting to review your SlideShare presentation by video and use the chat feature to communicate with the attendees.

Gist Acquired by Research in Motion (Blackberry): Blackberry users can look forward to more social navigation on their phones. How important is your phone becoming for your social networking?

Gist provides a web-based experience and enables users to build stronger professional relationships.

Twitter Announces Translation Center: Twitter is already available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. This new feature allows Twitter to crowdsource translation to be able to roll out other languages faster.

Passionate Twitter users can now help Twitter launch additional languages.

Digg Stops Accepting RSS Submissions: Digg has retracted the automatic submissions of posts via RSS, a new feature it announced less than a year ago. Will this impact your social bookmarking?

The rules for social bookmarking with Digg have changed.

TED Launches TED Conversations: “This is the first time online conversations have an expiration date, which is designed to keep conversations, Q&As and debates on-topic, relevant and accessible for time-strapped visitors.” Will you be joining in discussions here?

Join "conversations with notable TEDsters like Seth Godin, game designer Jane McGonigal, Tim O’Reilly, economist Dan Ariely and other speakers, TED conference attendees, and TED community members."

Here’s another new social media tool worth a look:

Bump: Create a profile on Bump to connect the license plate of your car with an email address so others can communicate with you.

What social media news caught your interest this week? Please share your comments below.