Social media sites are growing at lightning speed, partly because it’s now so easy to implement your own network. Dan Farber points out Ning is about to reach 500,000 communities soon, and Peter kim lists 234 Social Media Marketing examples.
A pretty amazing example of the power of social media showed up in the [...]

Here are just a few of the interesting bits of social media goodness we read last week. Missing something? Add your own links in the comments, or email your favs for the next round of social media now.
Blog World 08 kept everybody hopping last week. See the Tweetstream at #BWE08 to see what people were/are [...]

Of course everybody has been talking about Hurricane Gustav, and a flurry of resources emerged to track the storm and communicate with friends and family. Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb created a fine collection of resources both for Hurricane Gustav and the next ones…
In a New York Times article, Clive Thompson
writes about “ambient awareness”, a [...]

Here’s a bit of what’s going on in Social Media of late. Feel free to add your own links in the comments section, or send us you suggestions for the next issue of Social Media Now.
Jeremiah Owyang shares his thoughts on how a you should look at Twitter before deciding to promote your brand there. [...]

Social Media Now 9-11-08
Here’s a bit of what’s going on in social media of late. Feel free to add your own links in the comments section, or send us you suggestions for the next issue of Social Media Now.
Chris Brogan shares his best advice about social media.
The Dontgo movement showed that the Republicans can get [...]

Here are some interesting links we’ve come across in the past week. Have you got some favorites to pass on? Share them in the comments section!
John McQuaid is thinking about hyperlocal in his post ”The Big Die-Off, And The Long Tail Of Hyperlocal”.
Josh Bernoff discusses the benefits and drawbacks when politicians delve into [...]

The blogosphere is full of cynics. And there’s plenty of cynical response on the Net to Forrester’s report on adult social media behavior. The report, which is geared to helping marketers integrate social media into business strategies, proposes a “participation ladder” as a metaphor, with six rungs stepping up from “inactives” at the bottom to “creators” [...]

Maybe it’s because I started my career in the community newspaper business, but for whatever reason I love local news. When I  travel I make a point of seeking out small papers in tiny communities across the world and voraciously devour all the details of local land use battles, trash schedules and school sports. Working [...]

Yesterday’s reaction to the News Corp/NBC NewTube announcement ran the gamut from typical big media hating (Thomas Hawk’s headline: NBC Universal, News Corp YouTube Killer Will Fail) to typical big media cheerleading (Mark Cuban’s headline: Why the NBC/Newscorp Video Venture is a Great Idea).
Sure, there are plenty of reasons for any 50/50 JV between competitors [...]

No doubt Twitter was the story of the week. In fact, given the character limits on Twitter messages, there were probably more words written about Twitter on then Internet this week than there were words written in Twitter messages–from raves about Twittermap, a mash up of Twitter and Google Maps–to a big media wrap up [...]

There are two classic ways of thinking about start-up opportunities. The first imagines solving a specific problem, the second imagines building a better mousetrap.
The mousetrap model has largely fallen out of favor, particularly among media technologists. After all, the history of new media technology is a tale of worse mousetraps (VHS, redbook CD, lo-rez MP3) [...]

The idea of MySpace launching a news aggregator is hardly surprising. After all MySpace parent Newscorp is not only one of the world’s largest newspaper and TV news companies but also one of the most creative. (FoxNews changed the tone of TV news forever. I’m certain Newscorp is more comfortable than most with blog-style news that mixes [...]

Eons, Jeff Taylor’s social network for aging boomers, raised $22 million yesterday. The second round investment was led by Charles River Ventures joined by Intel and Humana–one of the company’s initial sponsors. Eons’ original investors, General Catalyst Partners and Sequoia Capital, participated as well.
For the traditional media business, boomers remain a cash cow. Aging boomers [...]

USA Today took a bold leap across the proverbial Social Media chasm today with the launch of their redesigned Web site. (Letter To Our Readers, New Features Explained) Opinions are mixed with more negative than positive reactions - Don Doge points out that most readers don’t like it, Steve Rubel says it does [...]

There’s an old saw in the technology business which says if you want to make money in a gold rush, sell tools to the miners.
Certainly that’s a formula which worked for Cisco during the Internet explosion of the 1990s, and it seems to be a policy the company plans to pursue with social media. This [...]