Community Guy – Jake McKee

Blog Business Summit

Blog Business Summit – a conference for “corporate blogging”. Looks like a neat event, and they have an interesting blog.

Blogroots.com

Blogroots.com

This blog is a public project to track news in, around, and about the weblog world. The blog is a combination of remote post excerpts from numerous weblogs and local posts contributed by members.

Social networks used for marketing

SmartMobs.com has an interesting look at some concepts for using social networks for marketing.

Decline of Brands

Wired always has the most interesting articles. This one about the Decline of Brands is really good.

The world, it seems, is disappearing beneath a deluge of logos.In the past decade, corporations looking to navigate an ever more competitive marketplace have embraced the gospel of branding with newfound fervor. The brand value of companies like Coca-Cola and IBM is routinely calculated at tens of billions of dollars, and brands have come to be seen as the ultimate long-term asset – economic engines capable of withstanding turbulence and generating profits for decades. So companies spend billions on brand campaigns and try to indelibly mark everything in sight, from the ING New York City Marathon to the Diamond Nuts cup holders at SBC Park.

Internet users want to be heard

Interesting study on internet users

In its latest study of Americans’ online habits, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that a substantial chunk of internet users want to voice their opinions online. Websites that want to remain relevant should strongly consider building in ratings systems that allow visitors to leave input about what they find on the site.

I also found an interesting report on how Americans are using the Internet in their daily lives while I was checking out the article above.

The vast majority of online Americans say the Internet plays a role in their daily routines and that the rhythm of their everyday lives would be affected if they could no longer go online. Yet, despite its great popularity and allure, the Internet still plays second fiddle to old-fashioned habits. Fully 88% of online Americans say the Internet plays a role in their daily routines. Of those, one-third say it plays a major role, and two-thirds say it plays a minor role. The activities they identified as most significant are communicating with family and friends and finding a wealth of information at their fingertips. And 64% of Internet users say their daily routines and activities would be affected if they could no longer use the Internet.

Amazon adds social functions

An interesting article on new Amazon features:

Amazon.com has quietly introduced a new feature on its Web store that lets customers post photos alongside product reviews–its latest effort to build a sense of community among customers.

The e-tailer introduced the feature, called Customer Images, last month for certain product categories including electronics, apparel, sporting goods and musical instruments. It added kitchen items, tools and hardware on Tuesday. The feature is in beta, meaning the company is still testing and tuning it.

Speed up Dreamweaver

I thought that if you’re using BlogFusion, you might be interested in this. When you start to open bigger files, Dreamweaver starts to drag. Here’s a great article on how to speed up the app.