Building Blocks Of The Social Web

In a brilliant post on nform.ca, information architect Gene Smith of the Atomiq.org blog outlined the 7 building blocks of social software. This pulls together the work of various people including Matt Webb and Stewart Butterfield and provides a framework that I think is valuable in thinking about social software.

Survey: Social Network Users Meet Offline

Jacobs Media has released the results of their Web survey, which found that social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are drivers for first time personal meetings.

Why Average Joes Don’t Blog

Victor Keegan in the Guardian today says To the average Joe, blogs aren’t cutting it. His article is somewhat downbeat about the state of the blogosphere. He acknowledges that there’s quite a bit of activity.

Closed-Loop Marketers More Likely to Reach Goals

As I've written before, I'm a big proponent of using closed loop feedback to improve marketing and lead generation ROI.  I came across a recent report by Aberdeen Group entitled, "Creating a Customer-Centric Marketing Organization," that reinforces the point with broader empirical data. Aberdeen found, "Companies that adopt closed-loop marketing processes are more than three times as likely to report a greater than 50% return…

Google AdWords Gets Update Along w/ Outage

When I saw that Google had announced a new look for AdWords, my heart skipped a beat as I envisioned a sexy new interface that would put Yahoo’s recently launched Panama to shame. Alas, if it weren’t for the announcement, you get when logging in to AdWords, you may not have even noticed a change.