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Social media gurus: We all know one. If you’re lucky, you know only one. They are the attendees of tech parties, the “Twitter consultants,” the armchair generals of the Internet, and their numbers grow by the day. Yet most of them couldn’t distinguish a line of code from a badly punctuated haiku. What’s to be done with the social media experts? Accept that their blathering may contain some wisdom? Or require technical exams for all Twitter users with more than 1,000 followers? You decide! And make the NMDs among us take our “technical” quiz. Sponsor There is always grave danger when amateurs turn overnight into experts. This sub-professional clown town is where B movies and Soulja Boy come from. It’s also the birthplace of every blowhard who tells you you’re “doing it wrong” without any technical knowledge or original thought to back it up. Sometimes, it’s not such a bad thing – in fact, there are a great many non-technical social media folks who are doing a great job of creating quality content and helping brands get themselved situated on the Web. But most of the people I can think of who fit this description have been doing their thing for so long that they’ve had to pick up a few technical tidbits along the way to ensure their continued success and to ensure they weren’t sounding like idiots. However, I hold the strong opinion that if you’re working in technology – even as a PR flak or social media consultant – you should be able to understand some of the terms, concepts and people that make your business possible. Otherwise, you risk your own reputation by taking the chance that you’re scarily wrong or laughably vague, and you risk gumming up the works for your clients by not knowing how to communicate with their audience, many of whom are very technical folk. Ultimately, taking the time and effort to understand the technology you use is simply a matter of taking pride in your work, just like the barista who knows all the ins and outs of the perfectly pulled free-trade organic espresso or the skilled sommelier who, though he may not make the wine himself, knows everything about who did and where and how. Take this quick survey, my social media gurus . (Techies, don’t take the survey; you’ll skew the results.) If you can’t work out the answers, you might be sounding like an idiot – I tell you this because I’m your friend and I care about you. And remember, when you cheat, you’re only cheating yourself, so no Wikipedia for you. Let me know in the comments what you think about the issue. Am I being an elitist prig? Did I not take my rant far enough? How much do you think a social media expert should know about tech? Would you work with someone who couldn’t sail through this “technical” survey? View Survey Discuss

Phonebooth.com , a VOIP service for individuals and small businesses, just launched a free version of its service. Phonebooth, just like Google Voice and Ribbit Mobile , provides its users with a free local phone number that can be forwarded to any cell phone and landline. Phonebooth also offers voicemail transcriptions. What makes it stand out from it competitors, however, is that it offers an auto attendant feature that allows you to route callers to different employees. Sponsor It’s worth noting that Bandwidth.com , the company behind Phonebooth, has been providing infrastructure services to other VOIP services, including Voxeo and Yext, for more than three years. The company’s VOIP network delivered almost 4 billion minutes in 2009. Bandwidth began a beta test of the paid version of Phonebooth.com last year and now has over 1,000 customers. Features in Phonebooth’s free version : Free local phone number for your business Includes an auto attendant (Press 1 for Sales, Press 2 for Support…etc.) Unlimited extensions for your employees or partners Read your voicemail, with VM-to-email & text transcription 200 free minutes of inbound calling (6¢ additional) Includes new Contact Us Plus feature A Free VOIP Service that Will Grow With You Starting today, Phonebooth will offer a free service geared towards individuals. The company also announced the general availability of its $20/month/user option, which offers a fully featured phone system in the cloud. One of the advantages of using Phonebooth over similar services like Google Voice or Grasshopper is that the company allows users to upgrade their phone system over time. Once your company outgrows Phonebooth’s basic plan, you can easily switch to a higher-end phone system (Phonebooth on Demand) with hardware IP-based phones. Phonebooth’s users will be able to choose local numbers from virtually everywhere in the U.S. (the service us U.S.). Sadly, though, there is no way to make your Phonebooth number appear on the caller ID for outgoing calls from your landline or cell phone. Phonebooth doesn’t currently offer any mobile apps, though the company told us earlier today that mobile apps are definitely on Phonebooth’s roadmap. Contact Plus Widget In addition to the free VOIP service, Phonebooth is also launching a new widget for small businesses – Contact Us Plus – that allows potential customers to use Phonebooth’s VOIP service to initiate a call right from the website. In addition to initiating phone calls, the Phonebooth widget can also feature additional contact info (Twitter account, email etc.), as well as your address and a map. Phonebooth’s users can also opt to show phone numbers for different departments in their company in the widget. Discuss

Early stage startups in Europe will be the primary beneficiaries of a new €6 million seed fund just announced by Berlin-based Team Europe Ventures . In the past we’ve talked about Europe’s entrepreneurial woes, most notably a dearth of seed funding due to having a culture largely averse to taking risks financially . This new fund is a good step towards changing that trend and keeping more startups from looking for funding elsewhere. Sponsor The €6 million fund (over $8 million) will provide up to €500,000 to early stage startups in the Internet and mobile Internet spaces over the next three years. Team Europe plans to selectively choose four to five startups each year to receive the funding, rather than quickly spreading the wealth around to any worthy recipient. “If we feel that a business will succeed without us, but will be quicker, larger, nicer with us – than it’s a case for us,” said Team Europe partner Kolja Hebenstreit in a press release Tuesday. “Experience shows that decisive decisions are often made during the foundation phase, so we think it’s good to speak with experienced potential partners as early as possible.” Team Europe has also rounded up entrepreneurs from past investments and active angel investors to assist in the disbursement of the funds, including Matthias Spieß of Leipzig-based Spreadshirt, and angel Günther Faltin. “These are all people who are active in the Internet space and with whom we have successfully worked together in the past,” said partner Lukasz Gadowski, explaining the “tightly-knit network of experts” that will help Team Europe pick early stage companies to fund. Hopefully this fund will start a trend among European venture capital firms. As we mentioned in February, many European startups have been looking to American incubators to help them get off the ground. If funds like these succeed, we could see these numbers go down over time, and more successful startups could emerge from Europe. Most VCs in Europe look for proven models and a solid financial foundations, so seed funds like Team Europe’s and organizations like Seedcamp can help startups get a boost into the line of sight of VCs providing second, third and fourth round funding. Discuss

Soon, you will be able to share your location with your Facebook friends. According to the New York Times’ Nick Bilton, Facebook plans to reveal this new feature during its f8 developer conference at the end of April. As Bilton notes, Facebook updated its privacy policy last year to incorporate language about location sharing. Facebook, according to this report, has been working on this feature for over a year. The company will offer location-based services through its own mobile applications and developers will be able to use this data to develop their own location-based apps on top of a new Facebook location API. Sponsor How Will Facebook’s Users React? It will be interesting to see how Facebook’s users – who are famously averse to change – will react to the arrival of location as a status update on the service. According to Bilton, Facebook “has been trying to figure out how to add location data to its service without raising potential privacy concerns or negative feedback from its users, as it has in the past with new features and redesigns.” From Facebook’s Privacy Policy : Location Information. When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post (for example, it is subject to your privacy settings). If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate. When Facebook introduced the newsfeed (which is now an integral part of the service), a large number of users considered this to be an invasion of their privacy. Location-based services have long suffered from the impression that sharing your location online can be dangerous and services like the Foursquare-based PleaseRobMe have only strengthened this sentiment among many users. Even though Facebook offers relatively sophisticated privacy controls, it will be interesting to see if the service’s users will warm up to the idea of sharing their location with their friends. A lot of the success of this service will depend on how well Facebook can educate its users and how it implements this feature and the privacy controls around it. Will Facebook’s Users Care? It will be interesting to see if Facebook’s users are even interested in sharing this information. While services like Foursquare and Gowalla are slowly but surely gaining new users (in part thanks to offering incentives for checking in at various venues), Twitter, which introduced a geotagging API last year and just introduced some location features on its website today, hasn’t seen a very strong response from users and developers so far. Not Competing with Foursquare and Co.? According to the New York Times report, Facebook isn’t trying to compete with location-based networks like Loopt, Gowalla and Foursquare, however. Instead, Bilton argues, the company is far more interested in competing with Google for small-business advertising. This will surely raise additional privacy concerns among Facebook’s users. It’s also important to note that Facebook’s API, will allow intrepid developers (including Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt) to develop interesting location-based services on top of Facebook, however. Discuss

TrendCentral: Bored with the sleek contemporary facade of your external hard drive? Etsy shop CentennialMerchant upcycles discarded VHS tapes into hard drives that can be displayed with geek pride, or camouflaged in a row of other tapes to keep your top-secret information under wraps. Offering up to 640 GB of unique storage, currently the hard drives are available in Star Wars and Top Gun editions, but CentennialMerchant will create custom designs by request as well. VHS Rewind [TrendCentral]