Erin Andrews has advice for celebrities who decide to use Twitter. Andrews has a huge following, and she explains how famous people need to have thick skin to handle all of the tough comments thrown their way.

“There’s so many great things you can do with Twitter: get a message out; try to help people in need. I think the biggest thing you have to know with Twitter, and anything else from a blog to a newspaper, is that you just have to have a thick skin,” she said during a media luncheon for the 25th season of GameDay in New York last week. “You just have to let it roll off. You can maybe cry about it privately with your family. Talk about it by yourself. But you just can’t respond. It’s too dangerous.”

Tweet at your own risk.

Here are some tips for creating your online dating profile. The article is aimed more towards advice for women, but men can benefit from some of the tips as well. Online dating is becoming more and more popular, so everyone should check it out if you’re looking for love or even a hookup.

Read the whole article, but here’s one of the tips:

7. Don’t Provide A Laundry List Of Things You Don’t Want

“No ultimatums,” says Davis.

Starting out with “Don’ts” and “Nevers” makes you sound negative and also tends to induce oversharing. If you say you could never be with a guy who isn’t as loyal as Lassie, odds are someone will read between the lines and figure out your last boyfriend cheated on you.

This is pretty good advice, as many profiles created by women seem to have plenty of ultimatums.

Another tip we think women should consider involves picture of their dogs. So many women seem to be obsessed with their pets, and then litter their profile with photos of the dog. Really? Unless the guy is a real dog lover, this is going to turn him off. Let him meet your pet and then see how it goes, but pictures of dogs, particularly those tiny designer dogs, are going to chase many men away.

Our world is getting smaller and smaller, but not just because planes are getting faster and more people than ever live in the cities. One reason the world is getting smaller is because everything is shared, no matter where you go or what you’re doing. Even things as simple as movies and music collections can be shared easily through the use of companies like www.directstartv.com and a variety of platforms all over your home.

While some people think that media sharing is somehow brought about through fairy dust or phases of the Moon, this is just silly. In reality, it concerns a completely non-magical cloud and the settings on a variety of devices you might already have in your home. While it can be a bit of work to set up things initially, ultimately, your reward will be a lot of easy transferring.
Let’s look at how your media files get shared through various devices.

Apple’s Home Sharing

Apple is well known for making everything work with everything else for the most part. While the Apple Store occasionally has an issue with buying something on one platform and sending it to another, this is a fairly small issue that can easily be worked around. Ultimately, most Apple products perform extraordinarily well together and share efficiently.

For instance, sharing media files with Apple products such as the iPod, iPad and iPhone is a fairly simple matter. Since the later versions of these products are all equipped with wireless capabilities, all you have to do is enable file sharing in them and in your iTunes account. From there, assuming you have the right operating system installed for all of your hardware, sharing is as simple as clicking on the album or song you want to listen to.

Naturally, additional steps are required to store songs or other files on a wireless device in order to take them out of your home network’s range. However, they’re pretty simple, and the transfer process takes mere minutes if your connection is solid.
 
Home Streamers

There are a lot of different products that allow you to play your favorite media files without having to use your computer for such a task. While you can always hook up your computer to a TV and essentially use it as an external monitor, most people’s home theater setups are a lot different than their computer area setups.
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Groupon is evolving from a crowdsourcing engine to drive customers to restaurants and retailers to a more targeted, time-sensitive tool.

Groupon Now offers two simple buttons – “I’m Hungry” and “I’m Bored.” The idea is simple – to match people in real time and place to establishments looking to get rid of excess goods. Here’s an example:

It’s only 11 a.m. Mason clicks the “hungry” button, and his phone transmits its location to Groupon’s servers and then displays a list of deals from nearby restaurants. Across a bridge spanning the Chicago River, the Asian fusion restaurant Thalia Spice is testing Groupon Now by offering $20 worth of food for $12. A block to the north, an eatery named @ Spot Café is dangling a $10 coupon for $6. Each restaurant has specified that its discount is good only during select hours on that particular day, when a few of their tables would otherwise be empty.

And that, Mason declares as he taps his phone and purchases $8 of savings from Thalia Spice, could turn Groupon into a combination Yellow Pages, Valpak coupon packet, and price-conscious concierge for millions of consumers. “People could end up being driven to eat by what they find on Groupon and when they find it,” he beams.

The advantage for restaurants is pretty obvious, but very significant.

Unlike Groupon’s daily deals, which tend to generate a flood of customers, Groupon Now might lure just a few, but at the right time. Rob Solomon, Groupon’s president, says the true promise of Groupon Now is to help eliminate perishable inventory—food ingredients, labor hours, and anything else that’s wasted if not used immediately. “If we can eliminate 10 percent of perishability, we can change the dynamics for small business owners,” he says. Small businesses would become more like airlines, matching supply against demand to maximize revenues. “If we get this right,” Solomon says, “we are going to influence what tens of millions of people are buying at a frequency that we have never seen before.”

Imagine sushi restaurants in particular. Sushi fans are familiar with half-price sushi nights, and naturally the restaurant cycles its inventory to get rid of the perishable food on those nights. But now they can do flash deals during the week – like all-you-can eat salmon sushi if they have excess inventory they’ll have to toss the next day.

These ideas aren’t really that new, but Groupon’s reach and restaurant contacts put the company in a position to take the most advantage of these types of apps.

Mike Elgan calls it, along with a detailed critique that explains why this site has fallen on hard times.

This is one of the many problems cited by Elgan, and this one drove us crazy as well.

Digg was anti-blog
Digg always had an inexplicable bias against blog content. In an age when CNN and the New York Times take blogs very seriously, a site like Digg should simply allow blog posts and let the users decide if they’re “weighty” enough.

This is how Digg alienated the bloggers.

Digg is now a mess. It’s still used to try to promote content, but it’s been gamed to the point that normal people can’t submit a story with any hope of having it take off.

I was pretty skeptical when I heard that Tina Brown would be tapped to resurrect Newsweek as a result of the merger with The Daily Beast. So I was pleasantly surprised to see her convince Andrew Sullivan to move his blog from The Atlantic and to join the Newsweek/Daily Beast family. Sullivan is one of the best bloggers on the web, with significant, organic traffic. He’s an excellent commentator, so he’ll be a great addition to Newsweek as well.

Ms. Brown is off to a good start.

We’ve noticed over the past several months that Google seems to be giving even more weight to porn sites over mainstream sites when tame search terms like “Hot Babes” or “Hot Blondes” are used. Instead of featuring mainstream sites that have bikini and lingerie models like Maxim, you end up with hard core porn sites.

What’s going on here? Google has outsmarted itself, and now the search results are a complete mess.

After Harry Reid failed to get an online poker provision passed in the lame-duck session of Congress at the federal level, several states are now pushing the issue as people realize that it’s foolish not to tax and regulate online gambling.

In Iowa, there’s a new bill that would regulate and permit online poker, and this follows a bill passed in New Jersey that has been sent to the governor. There’s also a push in Florida and California.

Hopefully, cash-strapped states will drive the agenda here, as the federal government won’t act due to the religious right.

The online dating landscape keeps evolving, and Facebook and other social media sites are often leading the way. The latest out of Facebook let’s you set up a notice system so you get notified when someone you are interested in changes their status and is no longer “taken.” This breakup notifier will likely be a very popular feature.

As the Internet evolves and social media continues to take over our lives, brands have a huge opportunity to engage their customers, but there are pitfalls as well. This area is very new, and there will inevitably be pitfalls along the way. Brands can’t just hand this over to an intern who floods the social media world with tweets and updates.

Here’s some useful information from The New York Times:

A new study just released by ExactTarget and CoTweet finds that more than 90 percent of consumers have “broken up” with at least one brand via Facebook, email or Twitter.

The study surveyed 1500 consumers and found the most common reasons given for a social media breakup are that the company sends too many messages (“The stalker”), the consumer receives too many messages in general from companies (“The belle of the ball”) or the company’s communications become boring and repetitive (“The spark is gone”).Around a quarter of consumers are more mercenary and “only after one thing”. They sign up to receive messages from a brand only to receive a one-time offer and then opt out.

Consumers who follow a brand through Facebook and Twitter are also much less likely to formally indicate that they are no longer interested in receiving information from a company and just ignore it (“not returning your calls”).

Basically, brands have to treat social media like any other interaction with their customers. You have to engage customers, not flood them with useless information. Take it easy on the updates, and make them all meaningful.