The Daily Dozen ? The 12 Tech, Social Media And Marketing Stories You Just Can?t Miss

Every day while researching the latest trends for clients or finding stories for the blog, I come across some brilliant reads that I bookmark and keep for myself to read when I have a bit of spare time. Rather than being selfish and keeping all that great content to myself, I decided to start a feature here where I share ten must-read social media and technology stories of the day.
Most of these will go beyond breaking news and will be insightful posts, articles or videos that are worth starting your day with.

Google have been coming under lots of pressure in recent months from lots of different angles and now one of their founders Sergey Brin has gone on a pretty major rant against Facebook and Apple for locking down parts of the internet and not allowing Google Spiders to access them.

Everybody knows that networking is a good help in business but this article in the New York Times takes a good in depth look at how important a role the scene in Silicon Valley played in the success of Instagram.

Jason Calcanis is always somebody who will have a rant on his blog and in emails on a weekly basis but this week?s one is well worth reading as he makes a great case for Apple becoming a trillion dollar company off the back of mobile payments.

More news on the Google being mildly evil front. This time MG Siegler has a look at why splitting their stock could be seen as evil as the founders try to gain ultimate control over the company for the long run.

CAPTCHAs are those annoying little letters that you have to fill in to prove that you are a human but one company has found a way of making these easier to understand while also delivering a nice simple brand message. Win win.

There has been a lot of fuss about the Facebook Instagram deal and one of their competitors (Camera +) have come up with a brilliant little description in their app page on the iPhone.

This citizen journalism app lets you create the news and decide which story matters. This is a space that is really hotting up at the moment and this app looks to put even more power in the hands of the reporter on the street.

Start ups have a language all of their own and Virgin have come up with a brilliant series of translations that will have you laughing all day long about the rubbish that gets talked on the scene.

Nice take over on GigaOM about how Apple slams Amazon for behaving just like Apple. You don?t become the biggest company in the world by being nice guys all the time.

The race has always been on for developer talent all over the world but suddenly it is all changing?In Silicon Valley, designers emerge as rock stars

So ad dollars are starting to move from the desktop to mobile devices and this brilliant article takes the example of Google and looks at how this is all going to play out in the long run.

People on Twitter are always obsessed with getting as much exposure for their tweets as possible and this article does a great job of summing up how it all actually works?Whether tweets live or die depends more on network, competition for attention than message or user influence

This is a brilliant piece of advertising that has it?s tongue very firmly in it?s cheek. Nice tag line too.