The deal has been finalized for a sum of $315 million, of which $300 million will be paid in cash.

Co-founder of The Huffington Post, Ariana Huffington will be made the President and Editor-in-chief of the new company, the Huffington Post Media Group, which will include all the content on AOL properties as well as the Huffington Post.

News of this deal has caused quite a ripple in the stock market as far as newspaper publications are concerned. Stocks of Gannett Co. rose by 46 cents or 2.8% to $7.12. The New York Times rose by 29 cents or 2.7% to $10.90 and Media General Inc. rose by 58 cents to $6.01.

This could be because it is widely expected that the deal between the Huffington Post and AOL will improve the value of leading branded digital properties, according to John Eade the Chief Executive of Argus Research.

The merger is expected to generate a user base of 117 million visitors a month in the U.S. and will reach 270 million users worldwide.

However, regular readers of The Huffington Post and a number of other online blogs have not greeted the news with as much enthusiasm as Wall Street. Readers are primarily concerned that corporate ownership will mean that the blog will no longer continue to provide unbiased, liberal information, but will instead lean towards right-wing journalism to satisfy their corporate owners.

One commenter on the post announcing the merger said “With an influx of corporate money, will the bloggers now be paid? And if they are paid, will that payment affect their ablilty to write articles that able to tell the truth as they see it, or will they only be allowed to participat­­e on Huffington Post if their writing meets corporate guidelines on what is considered to be acceptable­­?”

Others have threatened to leave the site en masse on one day, even going so far as to state that loosing a few thousand dedicated readers was probably calculated into this merger decision, so the user attrition should be bigger than AOL would have anticipated.

The deal should be finalised by the end of the first quarter of the year or early in the second quarter.

The Blogetery platform, which hosted over 70,000 bloggers, is believed to have contained a link to terrorist material and a hit-list from Al-Qaeda posted on the site.

The parent company BurstNet said that bomb making instructions had also been posted their.

The company received a notice regarding this from law enforcement officials. Blogetery.com shut down their platform without any notice to their users.

BurstNet has said that “The posted material, in addition to potentially inciting dangerous activities, specifically violated the BurstNet acceptable use policy.”

CNET.com reports that Burstnet received news about this material from the FBI on the 9th of July. The material is believed to have contained the names of various Americans on the Al-Qaeda hit-list. There were also messages from Osama Bin laden and other terrorist leaders.

While BurstNet has said they received a ‘Voluntary Emergency Disclosure of Information’ notice from the FBI, the FBI has not confirmed this. They did however clarify that they have not ordered for any site to be shut down as that can only be done by a judge.

While BurstNet claims this is not the first time their platform has been misused, several theories are floating around regarding the reason for the closure, including the possible presence of child pornography.

Another online service IPBFree.com was also shut down one week after Blogotery.com.

According to sources, the Blogotery server is connected to an online magazine ‘Inspire’ which is believed to be a recruiting platform for terrorists and contained an article ‘Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of You Mom.’

The sudden closure has obviously displeased users.

In order to do this, users will have to enable the feature on their blogs first and generate a secret code. The code will obviously be unique for each user.

Once the code is ready, the bloggers can make a call from a telephone, enter their secret code and then record their blog post by simply speaking it into the telephone mouthpiece!

First time users will have to visit their dashboard, go into ‘My Blogs’, locate the blog to which they wishe to add a post and click ‘Enable’. Then onwards, they can call the phone number listed on the screenand enter their secret code at the appropriate time. After that the user can follow simple instructions provided by WordPress.

If users give out their secret code, others could make use of this code to post updates to the associated blogs. To rectify such a situation, the user would then have to log back in to the ‘My Blogs’ dashboard on the WordPress site and use the ‘Regenerate’ link.

Users can completely disable the service by using the ‘Delete’ link below the secret key, if they should wish to do so.

The voice recorded message can also be posted to Facebook, Twitter and other social sites using the ‘Publicize’ feature.

The maximum amount of time presently allowed for a single recording is one hour. However, this may be changed, at a later stage depending on the feedback and user stats available. If there is silence for a period of 10 seconds the recording will automatically end.

Users do not require additional space upgrades to use this facility. Normal call rates will be applicable.

With the help of this facility, users can post updates to their blogs without having to go through the bother of typing out everything they wish to say. Also it is like reaching out to several different people by making just one phone call.

Users access various social activities such as social networks, blogs reading a message board etcetera at least once a week. However the site which has really done very well for itself, is without a doubt Facebook.

According to the Nielsen report, commissioned by women-focused blog network BlogHer and NBCU’s iVillage, Facebook is now catching up with TV in terms of popularity in the U.S.

While 55% of the population is believed to watch TV daily, 47% of the population visits Facebook daily. In fact, Facebook is now much more popular than other channels of information and entertainment such as radio and newspapers, which are accessed by 37% and 22% of the population respectively.

One of the major factors which draws people to Facebook, could be social gaming. Nielsen reports that 32.7 million people are now playing social games like Farmville daily. This figure is equal to the number of daily newspaper readers and double the number of magazine readers.

Other forms of social media such as blogs are not so popular, however, and attract only 11% of web users daily.

The survey was answered by 800 teenagers between 12 to 17 years of age and 2,253 young adults between 18 and 29 years of age. This is the section of the population that is a key indicator of future technology trends.

The study reveals that while blogging was a popular activity in 2006, with about 28% of the users indulging in it; in 2009, only 14% of teenagers and 15% of young adults were participating in blogs.

In the past, MySpace, which was then the most popular social network encouraged blogging, but Facebook which has now taken over the number one spot among social networks, advocates the use of short status updates. It has been found that in 2009, only 48% of young adults used MySpace, compared to 73% who used Facebook.

The study also reveals that Twitter has not yet caught the fancy of teenagers like Facebook has managed to do. Only 8% of teenagers use Twitter and the vast majority (66%) of teenagers prefer text messaging.

That social networks are growing, in general, is obvious from the fact that in 2008, about 42% of those surveyed used more than one social network, while in 2009, 52% did so.

Among adults aged 30 or more, only about 40% used social networks in 2009, while blogging activity among them increased marginally from 7% to 11%.

Blog subscriptions were found to be far more popular through email than through RSS.

In fact, Hubspot noticed that the average number of email subscriptions was almost 12 times the average number of RSS subscriptions. They investigated this trend within a number of different industries, and found that the trends were more or less consistent across the board.

Blog followers in most of the industries, such as consulting and business services, medicine and biotech, retail, real estate, banking and finance, education and even non-profit and government organisations, follow the same trend of having higher email subscriptions than RSS subscriptions.

There are some exceptions to this rule, however. These were seen in the software industry and in the online marketing and SEO sector, where the difference in numbers is much smaller, and both email and RSS subscriptions are running neck-to-neck.

The technology industry also exhibits a similar trend. Though, the total number of email subscriptions here is much lower than the number of RSS subscriptions. Individually, almost 50% of the tech companies in Hubspot’s survey had more RSS subscriptions than email subscriptions.

One possible reason for this reverse trend is that these industries are more technologically advanced, and so, RSS may be used more effectively by their employees than by others.

RSS may eventually overtake email subscriptions as the medium of choice for blog readers once other industries also become more tech savvy.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has laid down new guidelines which will come into effect from December 1 2009. These guidelines are being revised after nearly 30 years during which the world has obviously undergone a sea change.

Until now it had not been necessary for bloggers to reveal that they were being paid to reveal their views on a product. This is now about to change and the policy will include celebrities as well as research firms, and popular social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook etc.

The penalty for flouting this rule could be as high as $11,000 per violation.

With consumers increasingly depending on the internet for purchase information, various consumer groups have been demanding such a policy. According to Jack Gillis of the Consumers Federation of America, unless this connection between bloggers and the company is disclosed, consumers can get mislead.

The guidelines , do not however lay down any rules about how this disclosure is to be made. That has been left to the parties concerned, as long as it is clearly mentioned.

The FTC has stated that “bloggers who make an endorsement, must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.

Some of the inducements received by bloggers in the past range from an evening of pampering with manicures, pedicures etc. by Proctor and Gamble, Acer Laptops from Microsoft in 2006, and the use of a Ford car for 1 year.

These new guidelines have generated mixed results. While some bloggers are in favour of such legislation, others have criticized it as being misguided, foolish and even dangerous.

Internet giant Google has reacted quickly to this change, to ensure that they don’t get into any trouble with the authorities or become a scapegoat to set an example to other publishers and advertisers.

Google already label most of their ads with an ‘Ads by Google’ tag. In the future they will overlay an “i” icon in the bottom right corner of rich media ads, which currently don’t include the usual proclaimation. This icon will expand to read “Ads by Google” when the user hovers over it and link to a page providing more information about Google’s advertising practices.

Hubspot conducted the survey across 1,531 of their customers, most of them being small or medium sized business. Of these 1,531 companies 795 of them used blogs, while the remaining 736 did not do so. The results showed that the companies that used blogs definitely had better search marketing results than those that did not.

While the companies that used blogs received 55% more visitors or traffic to there sites, they also received 97% more inbound links and an astounding 434% more indexed pages.

In most cases, the more visitors a business receives, the more sales they are eventually likely to make.

Link building, which is usually considered to be the most difficult part of search engine optimisation, is also made much easier through the use of blogs. The fact that 97% more links can be obtained through the use of blogs is significant enough to justify blogging for any business.

It is also very important to have as many indexed pages as possible, as that will increase the chances of a site being ranked higher, and thus appear on the first page of Google’s search results. This means that in all, maintaining a blog makes the likelihood of clients finding a business through search much higher.

The study reveals that 55% of women make use of blogs in some manner or other such as posting comments, publishing articles, reading articles ands so on, while about 53% of women make use of social networks.

Interestingly, however, it was found that most of the women who use social networks, (75% of them) do so only as a means of communication, to keep in touch with family and friends, rather than as a way of collecting any kind of information.

On the other hand, blogs are used by women mainly as a source of information or advice regarding the purchase of some product etc.

Thus it seems that most women use different aspects of the web for their personal lives and for other business like decisions.

Since women are believed to be responsible for almost 85% of purchasing decisions in the U.S. this information is something which advertisers and marketers should take note of.

Also about one third of the women surveyed prefer to remain with one single social network, and surprisingly only about 20% of women were found to use Twitter, while the women who blog also use other forms of social media.

Apparently, women are now using traditional forms of media less than before. 30% are watching less TV, 31% are using the radio less, 36% are reading fewer magazines and 39% are reading fewer newspapers.

This change in habits is significant as at least 45% of women said they made purchase decisions of certain articles after reading about them on blogs.

Female bloggers are also in the habit of sharing their good and bad purchase experiences on blogs, hence sales persons and advertisers would do well to pay attention to their women customers.

Read the full 2009 Women in Social Media Report
(1.9MB pdf)

The study was carried out by Technorati asked bloggers to list the sources they refer to the most for information. While 61 percent of bloggers surveyed said they referred to other blogs, 46 percent said they were influenced by the mainstream media sites.

Credibility is an important quality for blogs, and it often decides the number of links a blog receives.  If a blogger is found to be writing untrue and baseless posts, eventually other bloggers will stop linking to that blog. On the other hand, if true and relevant material is published on a blog, more and more bloggers will link in to that blog, thus bestowing more power and authority on that blog.

Based on the results of their study, Technorati has created the ‘Technorati Attention Index’, rating the top 50 mainstream media sites that were linked to by bloggers in the past month. The index will be updated every month.

The top 5 sites this month are:

• YouTube
• The New York Times
• BBC News
• CNN.com
• MSN

In comparison, Techmeme’s Leaderboard rates the following  as the top five non-blog sources for bloggers:

• CNET News
• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal
• Reuters
• Computerworld

The complete list of top fifty sites rated by Technorati is available here.

Officials say they will ban the publication of blogs related to certain topics that they consider inappropriate.

Although government sources say they are in the process of “regulating” the system, it is obviously a way to censor information.

At the present moment, about 25% of the population of Vietnam, that is over 20 million people use the Internet, and blogs have become an important source for people to learn the latest news, as there is a lot of control and restriction on traditional media.

The guidelines being issued through a government document state that only “clean and wholesome” language should be used and bloggers should follow Vietnamese law. Users are also prohibited from discussing topics of national security, state secrets and any other subject which may incite violence.

Internet Service Providers will be held responsible for the matter published through their websites, although international service providers such as Google and Yahoo! have not yet been approached officially.

If the government gets its way, the service providers will have to report to them every six months and also provide information about bloggers on request.

The director of the state-run Bach Khoa Internet Security Center said they would manage the system through “random checks”. They would be creating a legal corridor, thus enabling the bloggers to decide what is right and wrong, and inform the government when violations are found.

If these suggestions are passed into law, violators would face up to $12,000 in fines or 12 years in jail.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, was quite impressed by Twitter’s speed of status updates and its growth rate since 2006, when it was launched. Thwitter currently has about 6 million registered users.

Had the deal actually taken off, it would have been a marriage between one of the most popular social networks and the fastest growing and most popular micro-blogging site.

Facebook had reportedly offered Twitter $500 million, mainly in stocks and a certain cash component. While this might seem like a very good offer for Twitter, which is currently valued at around $98 million, what the actual value of Facebook stocks would be in today’s market remains debatable.

The price offered is surprisingly one of the reasons for the failure of the deal.

Although Twitter has no source of revenue at present, its team of executives and investors felt that they must try to build up their own revenue sources, as they had done with the network of users. They also believe that in spite of the economic downturn, they stand a good chance of being able to generate revenue.

Twitter has placed a senior executive in charge of trying to find potential sources of revenue, such as introducing ads into the service and levying fees on business customers.

Another reason the deal may have failed to materialise, could be concerns regarding additional costs, which Facebook would have to incur, in order to pay for SMS messages sent through Twitter. It has been estimated that if all of Facebook’s 120 million users were given access to Twitter, the SMS costs would be in the range of $75 million annually.

While the deal has been called off, for now, Facebook might make another attempt to acquire Twitter, at some time in the future, and other websites or even major mobile networks may now show an interest in Twitter.

Twitter users in and around the area started sending eye-witness accounts of the events on a minute by minute basis. Almost 70 – 80 tweets were posted within 5 seconds, and since Twitter has over 6 million users the news was spread really fast.

In fact, even some of the major Television and radio stations such as BBC and CNN used information sent through Twitter and photos posted on Flickr by ordinary citizens who were present at the spot, such as the ones shown above and below here:

Users not only sent out details about the terrorist attack, but also messages asking people to donate blood at the major hospitals, along with the contact numbers to help out in the crisis. Some people also used the site to reassure their near and dear ones about their safety.

Flickr and Twitter were not the only sites used. A new entry was created on Wikipedia, which local users added details to, as they occurred. Somebody else actually pinpointed the location of the buildings where the mayhem in progress on Google Maps.

While the BBC, CNN and every major newspaper has dedicated a lot of space to the events still unfolding in Mumbai, people increasingly seem to turn to user-generated content on sites like Twitter to get the “real”, unfiltered information as it happens.

Important Note: Please remember that these same tools of communication can be used by the terrorists to keep in touch and convey the latest information to each other. Also if citizens post too many details about the rescue operations in progress, the terrorists can benefit from this information, and change their positions or tactics if necessary. Users must therefore exercise caution regarding the information they send out.

In the first incident, a blogger reported that Apple was launching a laptop for just $800. This was a lie, of course, but was inadvertently repeated by the New York Times, giving far too much credibility to that lie.

What one blogger wrote may not have carried much weight by itself, but something written in a reputable publication such as the New York Times, which has a huge circulation, was read by a very large number of people and also believed to be true.

Given the present market conditions, most readers thought of this as a very good offer, and rushed to buy this new laptop. This initially raised the price of Apple’s stock, but when the truth came to light, the prices dropped sharply.

Only two weeks later, a young 18 year old blogger reported that Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, had suffered a heart attack. This not-so-innocent lie was again unwittingly repeated by Henry Blodget on the CNN website and soon Apple stock holders were running for cover, thus causing another dip in the stock prices.

An investigation is being conducted, to see if the blogger was trying to make some money by manipulating the stock prices. So far no evidence has been found to prove it. While those in favour of non-censorship of blogs, have so far maintained that blogging is a harmless activity, and allows one to express ones thoughts and feelings without interference, these incidents will force free speech proponents to look at another aspect to blogging, wherein lies can be intentionally spread and eventually cause untold harm.

The more important lesson, though, should be learned by so-called “journalists” at the major news channels who print any random gossip without even investigating how true it is.

The new Blog Search homepage is very similar to Techmeme and Memeorandum. Top stories relating to a wide variety of currently popular issues ranging from politics to business and technology to entertainment are grouped together and then categorised into one of the 12 categories:

• Top Stories
• Politics
• US
• World
• Business
• Technology
• Video Games
• Science
• Entertainment
• Movies
• Television
• Sports

Memetrackers usually get breaking news stories and emerging trends on blogs much before other major sources such as newspapers, television or radio. Most memetrackers automatically monitor several news sources at the same time, identifying, pooling and analysing different blog posts and then grouping them together, thus allowing users to vote for or read about topics that are of interest to them.

Google’s new technology may help Google News identify interesting stories that run across several websites. However, it is not clear whether Google Blog Search is more efficient and informative than other memetrackers. That will ultimately depend on the frequency with which updates are conducted and the sources they will be tracking.

While Google is believed to have a wider network than other memetrackers, spam posts have already managed to enter their homepage, which is obviously not a good sign. The search giant will have to work hard if they wish to overtake the already established leader in the business, Techmeme. Last year the New York Times tried to do so, but didn’t quite succeed.

Time and again the site has been the first to report some world event or breaking news. The latest example of this quick reporting is the earthquake which occurred around Los Angeles on Tuesday morning.

The first update from Twitter followed only seconds after the event occurred. By the time the first official news of the earthquake emerged, about 4 minutes later, there were already thousands of Twitter updates.

Most news agencies that get their information from the Associated Press or similar news wire services, received their first feed about 9 minutes after the incident, by which time Twitter users had started twittering the information to their contacts from wherever they happened to be at that point in time.

It is only fair to mention, as pointed out by Zoli Erdos, that the news agencies have the added responsibility of verifying the facts of an event before reporting them, and they also have to give in-depth reports, all of which takes time, while Twitter does not carry that burden on its shoulders.

Twitter says that it is the real-time aspect of sending and receiving their updates, whether they are related to world events, or personal notes between friends or professionals, or any other form of communication, that is their motivating factor.

To illustrate their point, Twitter even put up a graph displaying the timeline of when news of the California earthquake was delivered on various channels:

Specifically the parliament will be discussing a bill by which they can then enforce the death penalty for certain ‘crimes’ that up until now, have attracted a lesser sentence. Details on the bill can be found on a site promoting human rights for Iran:

http://www.iranhumanrights.org/main/library.html

Of particular interest to the Iranian law enforcers will be people who set up weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy. Apostasy – the abandonment or forsaking of religious faith, vows or principles – is considered a particularly intolerable crime in the extremely religious state.

Bloggers who commit these so-called crimes will be categorised as enemies of the state (Mohareb) or enemies of God on Earth (Mofsed fe-al-arz).

The official agency says that the bill is intended to “toughen punishment for harming mental security in society.” In other words, they will further reduce the levels of tolerance in the country.

At present they ‘only’ arrest bloggers who may dare to challenge the government in any manner.

According to Amnesty International, 317 executions were carried out in Iran for various crimes last year, which is close to double the number of executions in the previous year when they carried out 177 executions.

It so happens that blogging has become a very popular activity among youngsters in Iran, who often try to challenge the old school of thought, which is extremely conservative.

According to The Committee to Protect Bloggers, Iran is one of the worst places to live in for bloggers, as they are constantly harassed, even to the extent of imprisoning bloggers and students.

The web intelligence company Hitwise has now released some data that should come as a big surprise to most people. According to a study carried out by them recently, in the space of just about 3 years, the viewership for blogs in U.K. has gone up by 208% compared to just a 70% increase in traffic to traditional news and media sites.

It was found that between May 2005 and June 2008, the percentage of web traffic which accesses blogs has grown from just over 0.3% to 1.19%. That is approximately 1 in 84 internet visits.

Of course this is a growth of blogs and personal web sites in general and not of any single blog.

The increasing popularity of blogs is very well illustrated by the fact that during the announcement by 3G iPhone – the iPhone site received more hits from blogs than from traditional sites.

When compared with the growth for readership of blogs in the UK, the growth for readership of blogs in the U.S. is rather poor. Although it is generally assumed that Americans are very aware and concerned about the social media, it has been found that only about 0.73% of internet traffic in the U.S. showed an interest in going to blogs and personal web sites.

Twitter, the fast growing social networking and micro blogging site, has been banned in Dubai. The official reason given is that its content is not consistent with the religious, moral and political values of the region. The event however, seems to have been triggered by equally interesting event…

James Karl Buckley, a student of journalism at the University of California in Berkeley, was arrested last week by the Egyptian law enforcers for photographing some noisy demonstrators. Buckley who had access to Twitter through his mobile phone, typed in the word “ARRESTED” and sent it out through the ubiquitous mobile messaging service of Twitter

Buckley’s message reached all his contacts in the U.S.A. and many anti-government bloggers in Egypt, on whom his journalism project is based. The next day he not only had an Egyptian lawyer hired by UC Berkeley, but also the support of the U.S. Embassy, and he walked out a free man in no time.

Web 2.0 sites like YouTube and Twitter are gaining tremedous popularity in the East as a vehicle for repressed individuals to broadcast their plight and gain international sympathy. Protesters in Tibet used YouTube to show the world Chinese governmental heavy-handedness and an individual in Egypt used Twitter to draw international attention to himself.

These social media websites are turning into a real threat to the oppressors. It is just easier for certain governments to ban such sites in order to prevent the spread of any anti-government propaganda, or a threat to their sovereignty.

Internet users in Dubai saw a notice saying “Site Blocked” when they tried accessing http://twitter.com. Interestingly enough, the government was also polite enough to say “If you think this site should not be blocked, please visit the Feedback Form available on our site.” One does wonder how safe anyone who questions such a government’s motive, by filling in this feedback form, would actually be?

It is highly likely that the creators of Twitter plan to start monetise the fast-growing and already popular social media platform by displaying ads on a commercial scale and what users have seen may be the initial preparations for doing so.

Since its inception in March 2006, Twitter has followed the policy of ‘build an audience first’. Due to this Twitter has developed a very loyal fan following, as a social networking site, but is yet to make any money. So far Twitter has provided its services free of cost, and if they are to continue doing so, they may have to monetise it in some way, shape or form.

Running ads within the twitter streams is the most obvious way for them to monetise the service. Another idea for monetisation would be to charge users who wish to include links within their Tweets.

Twitterific, a desktop application built to interface with Twitter from Macs, already includes ads in the Twitter timeline in its free version. Biz Stone of Twitter however, denied that Twitter has been testing ads, when asked by Silicon Alley Insider. He said, “We’re not putting ads on Twitter.com. As far as I can tell, a customised background image had some folks confused and speculating.”

Conceptualisation of a Twitter stream with ads

coComment allows users to keep track of all the comments and discussions they are participating in or observing on the web. Users get notified when someone adds to their comment stream or discussion. And, if they’re bloggers, the users can display the comments they make elsewhere back on their own blog.

Farhad Divecha: Let’s start with a quick introduction of what coComment is all about…

Matt Colebourne: Certainly, we are one stop shop to track, manage, share,and explore conversations on the Web. We can keep track of all the conversations that an individual is having, and so they can place comments on 50 different sites, local forums and whole bunch of different places. We will follow all those conversation and they will receive updates. We would also allow them to share those conversations with other people via, say their Facebook profile or any other profile for that matter. Currently we have about fourteen and a half million that we are tracking on a thousands of different sites.

Farhad: So could you essentially pick conversations from a number of places and syndicate or show them on any other place that you wanted to?

Matt: Yes, exactly. And all of your conversation will show up on your profile page on coComment.

Farhad: Can users then decide who can see these conversations and who cannot or is everything just public information?

Matt: Users can decide. The new version gives users the opportunity, should they wish to control who can see everything they say.

Farhad: Let’s talk a bit about the social aspect of this. I find this concept quite interesting because one of the problems that I personally face, and in fact quite a few of the people I have spoken to recently also face, is the problem of too much social variety. We all have profiles on a number of different networks and blogs that we visit regularly.

You start talking in one place about one thing; you like the discussion there and you might share it with a few friends by then starting a new conversation elsewhere about the same topic. A little bit down the line you see somebody else talking about the same topic, and you pipe in there. Soon you have participated in a conversation on the same topic in 10 different places with 10 different people, and you start losing track of what you have said. How does coComment’s offering tie in that social aspect and does it rely in some ways on everybody who is conversing with you also using it?

Matt: No not necessarily; because you can bring people in the conversation using a range of third-party tools such as Twitter but I think what makes a great conversation the first thing is the topic should be something that the audience is interested in, and the other thing is that people who participate in the conversation. For example you could visit a cathedral and just have a look around, which isn’t the most exciting thing for me. However, if the tour guide I appointed was absolutely mesmerising and told me the history of the place and really brought it to life, I would have had a different experience and enjoyed the same activity thoroughly.

For us the question was therefore, if that is what makes a good conversation, how do we bring this model online? We are not trying to build a social network. What we are doing is allowing the natural conversational behaviour to operate on the Internet, allowing people to share stories and getting others to participate.

Farhad: In some ways, though, that still leaves one slight problem unsolved … if you have these conversations in 10 different places, and they might be conversations around a really interesting topic and in each of those places you have two or three really interesting participants with whom you want to carry on the conversation, you still have to go to 10 different places to carry on that conversation, or somehow get all of them to converge in one place.

Matt: Bear in mind that all of those conversation are tracked in a single location, so you are only ever 1 click away from each one. What the system will also do is tell you who your neighbours are, and so therefore point out to you that they are commenting on the four different blogs that you’re commenting on, and therefore you should possibly connect to them. What coComment cannot do is take the user away from the site. So while you can’t bring the conversations together, what you can do is view them all in the same location so that it becomes much easier.

Farhad: That’s good because it does take the pain away to a great degree.

Now let’s talk a little bit now about the reason we actually got in touch in the first place. A post that we published in mid-January talked about the Government of India’s plans to regulate blogging and whether that was a good idea. Also, in recent times we have had a lot of different stories come up in the news from countries like Russia, China and Iraq where people do not enjoy freedom of speech as we do. People in these countries use blogs to voice their opinions and use search engines like Google to find information.

In countries like Iraq where people are not typically connected, even now, to the World Wide Web, and the newspapers are controlled by the government or the dictatorships, people use blogs and the Internet in general to voice opinions that otherwise would never be heard.

How is coComment changing that, or making it easier to give a voice to individuals from the various parts of the world where normally one would never have heard their opinions?

Matt: Firstly the biggest one, probably, is access to a larger audience. What could have been a small cry lost in the wilderness could now be heard by millions if what the individual was saying was relevant.

There is also the bigger issue of freedom of speech. What people who oppose that individual’s freedom of speech tend to use as defence is the disruption created and the impact on other individuals. What we’re doing here is saying “let’s turn things round a little bit.” What we say to people is “let us not impinge on what people want to say,” we say this to publishers, brand owners and corporations as well, “because if the users don’t say it here, they will say it somewhere else, and you may never know about it.”

Rather than censoring on behalf of individuals, we let the other individuals react and take the first person down. We should treat bloggers and their visitors as adult. Users then think about the social consequences of saying something and that makes each user choose what they do or not say. This is a far, far better solution than trying to get an employee or officer or a censor board to moderate on behalf of individuals.

I think we support the freedom of the individual to say what they want and we also support the freedom of the reader to choose what to read.

Farhad: Just playing the devil’s advocate here, one could make the argument that a system like yours could also work very well for those who want to stifle freedom of speech.

Instead of having to monitor a hundred thousand different venues where a person or a dissident could go and speak. Now all they need to do is to come to one place and monitor all the conversations. In some ways, this system is making it easier for dictatorships or governmental regimes who do not advocate freedom of speech and try to thwart it.

It becomes so much easier for the government of China or a dictator or a Communist President to pinpoint who the particular dissident is and where they are voicing those opinions and shut them down by whatever means. And what’s worse is that the means these guys use tend to be a lot more drastic than just banning conversations or user profile or giving them lower trust ranks.

What would your response be to that sort of a counter argument, I mean, it is making things easier, isn’t it?

Matt: We did not make things easier. To be honest with you we do not do anything that could not already be done. We just present conversations in a way that benefit the end user. We have not built anything that can be employed by people who want to abuse freedom of speech to do something they cannot already do.

Farhad: Yes absolutely, you are right there. You have not made it possible, but you have made it easier

Matt: Well we have made it slightly, but bear in mind we certainly mitigated the very small potential for misuse because we don’t require the users to tell us who they are, we don’t require them to be registered for three days and can use the guest id for that period, but also we don’t assume any ownership of the content; The content either belongs to the site that hosts it or to the end user, and what that means is that we believe the content is the user’s content and we will protect their rights to it, and to do whatever they need to with it without heed to any kind of oppressive government.

Farhad: Alright, could you tell me a little bit more about the data privacy aspect. You touched upon this yourself when you said that users don’t need to identify themselves on your website but very often most other websites do require users to identify themselves before they start placing comments also most comment systems will very easily track the IP Address etcetera. So is there some way that users could use the coComment system to hide their identities?

Matt: I wouldn’t say they can actively use it to hide because obviously they’re still commenting on the site and not on coComment. They can essentially use something called meta conversations where the person can write a comment on any website anywhere in the world and it looks like it’s on the site, but actually it is hosted on coComment. Now if they do that those conversations can be public or private. If it’s public, any other coCommenter can see it. If it is private, only the people that you select will see it.

Farhad: When people can see your comments, though, would they also be able to run a backwards check or who is and figure out where you are coming from?

Matt: The point is, that they won’t even see the conversation unless you’ve chosen to let them see it. They won’t even know the conversation is there.

Farhad: But you see, at times with people who want to voice their opinions, they want to share their views but not necessarily be found. Someone who is against the Russian Premier right now, or against the Iraqi government, would want everybody else to hear what his thoughts are but still not necessarily be want to be found.

Matt: In which case this would be perfect. They would set up the system to make the comments public to coComment, make that available to a limited audience, such that those people who are interested get notified and then select whom they want to allow to participate.

Farhad: It would be interesting to know how many people are aware of such things in the third world, and can use it. And with knowledge of such a system whether countries like India and China would even be having debates about regulating blogs because they would then realise that they can’t do much, since there is always going to be a way around it.

Matt: Yes, it is quite a neat way around it, because even though the content appears to be sitting on the site, to end users and the search engines, it is actually sitting on our servers and getting sent direct to the end users.

Farhad: I now have just two last questions – what is the future going to hold for coComment and what do you think is the future of blogging, conversations and social networking online? Which way are we headed? Which way are you guys headed? And which way is the entire blogosphere and the Internet headed, in your opinion?

Matt: Our opinion is that the whole aspect of commenting or conversations is going to become bigger, because essentially Web 2.0 is about interaction, people interacting online is becoming ubiquitous – even my 70-year old mother is going onto website and commenting rather than writing letters. This space is absolutely exploding, and rightly so, because what it does is it enables people to find out more information, to say what they think about it and defend there views publicly in front of thousands, in a way that was never possible before. That can only be a good thing.

Farhad: Well, it has been very interesting talking to you. I think the conversation has touched upon some very interesting topics. For us here it does not seem as much of a minefield as it does out in the East right now. We take this freedom for granted. I would have been shocked if the UK government or the US or Canadian government ever even considered regulating blogs or any other form of social networking, but there are people out there who see blogging as the only venue to air their views. I hope that this right is never taken away from them.

Screenshot of a coComment user profile

Over 26 versions of the leaked track made it onto YouTube. A whole lot more were uploaded to Daily Motion. File sharing sites also saw a host of uploads and downloads of the track. Most Madonna fans listed on Last.fm showed numerous instances of having listened to the track on their PCs.

Warner Music instantly issued a copyright claim getting the video removed from YouTube and DailyMotion almost as soon as users put it up. They were still not quick in enough for thousands of motivated fans of the Material Girl, who managed to download the video or song from one of the many online file sharing sites currently available.

As of the time of publishing this article, only one video of the track could still be found on DailyMotion. The track included the voice-over of the French DJ announcing the new single at the start.

Incidents such as this will undoubtedly provide the music industry ammunition in their upcoming fight against piracy – they are lobbying the UK government to pass laws that will make ISPs responsible for monitoring Internet access and banning users who repeatedly download files illegally.

Record labels, however, can’t deny the free publicity and excitement generated by such leaks, which might at times make it worthwhile to let the fans get early access to singles from their favourite artists, in the hope that the euphoria will also propel them to rush to the record stores when the CD is officially released.

“This is the first time that publishers have a meaningful way to take their content, be it in video, audio or image format, and put it on mobile”, says Scott Beaumont of Refresh Mobile.

The company, which has won Nokia’s Developer of the Year award for their Mobizines product, have developed an exciting range of new services designed to revolutionise mobile content publication. The new service launched this week brings video, audio and images embedded in RSS feeds to mobile devices.

Bringing Video To Mobile RSS Feeds

The Mippin service takes images embedded in RSS feeds, processes them separately and feeds them back in a format suitable to the mobile device. Videos embedded within RSS feeds get transcoded into 3gp format on the fly. High end devices can then stream that video content. Users with less sophisticated handsets would need to download videos to view them.

Videos are not actually transcoded by Mippin. The system identifies the user parameters and the video information. It then passes this on to BlueApple, who transcode and host the transcoded video. End users, however, do not see this process, and instead view the videos as if they were on the Mippin site itself.

Mippin has trumped the likes of Google, whose service FeedBurner does not currently deliver images, audio and video appropriately to mobile devices. Without Mippin the images and videos contained in an RSS feed will not work properly, and could cause problems loading the feed or even cause the mobile browser to crash if a user attempted to play the video in the feed, unless publishers created special mobile versions of every image, audio file and video stream.

Free Mobile Website Development

The next and even more exciting service from Refresh Mobile will be launched in the second week of March. This new service will provide publishers the tools needed to create a free-standing mobile website without the Mippin branding on it.

Mippin Maker, the new tool will allow a wide variety of publishers to take content from their current site, put it in an RSS feed and convert it into a mobile format in just 3 easy steps. According to Scott Beaumont of Refresh Mobile, “there are 120 million blogs with RSS feeds out there. Through the simple syndication all of these blogs are immediately open to all mobile devices. With the Mippin Maker publishers don’t need an incremental investment in mobile in order to get their content out there.”

While the Mippin Maker will not be suitable for mobile commerce sites, it could prove to be an invaluable tool for the scores of information sites currently online. A tool such as this one could bring us closer to wide-scale adoption of the mobile Internet, as more and more publishers will be able to easily bring their content to mobile, providing users the same wealth of information they are used to seeing on their PCs.

Screenshot of Mippin Maker

View Search Daily News On Mobile

Click the link above to view the mobile version of AccuraCast Search Daily News built via the the Mippin Maker, using the RSS feed from our site. Alternatively, you can view it on your mobile handset by visiting http://mippin.com/searchdailynews.

Yahoo! Buzz

Stories on Buzz will initially be seeded from 100 pre-approved publishers. However, once the system is out of beta more publishers will be invited to share their content and get traffic from the site.

Users can “Buzz” up a story that they find interesting. Every time a user clicks on the Buzz button alongside a story, its Buzz Score is incremented. The search term popularity and the number of times a story is emailed from Buzz also count towards the Buzz Score. Stories with the highest Buzz Score are shown in descending order on the Yahoo! Buzz homepage.

The most attractive thing about Yahoo! Buzz is that the stories with the highest Buzz Scores may be published on the Yahoo! homepage, which can drive millions of visitors to the site in just one day.

Popular stories from each day will be encapsulated on the Buzz Log, the same way that the Buzz Index has been doing for popular search trends on Yahoo! since October 2005.

Yahoo! Buzz is very similar to many other social content websites, e.g. del.icio.us, Digg, Propeller, Reddit, StumbleUpon and last week’s latest arrival, BigNews from Ask.com.

According to Yahoo!, Buzz is unique because their rankings also take into account things like trends in search queries on Yahoo! Search and the number of times that content is shared with friends over email. Internet users are not as likely to be impressed with Yahoo!’s latest offering.

Various generic and niche social news sites already rule this space. Digg receives an estimated 12.5 million monthly users, compared to Propeller, launched by AOL last year, which receives less than 3 million users. Yahoo! Buzz will need to fight hard to wrestle traffic away from these sites, and while publishers might be keen to join, with the hopes of making it to the Yahoo! homepage, users will not be as keen to leave their established favourite social news sites.

The screenshot above illustrates that Yahoo! Buzz is not seeing huge volumes on its first day. While the Buzz Scores of the top stories are in the hundreds, closer inspection reveals that the actual number of votes is much, much lower (read the number of votes below the highlighted “buzz up” button). This could change, of course if the service is properly marketed and diligently promoted for a long time.

We have a couple more screenshots from the system below:

Error message that shows up when you try to Buzz a story that isn’t integrated into the Buzz system.

Related top stories are suggested when you Buzz! up a story.

Micronet, one of the local ISP’s in Pakistan sent out an email to all users, apologising for the ban on YouTube. User jk on the Pakistaniat blog shares the email contents:

Dear Valued Customer:

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (www.pta.gov.pk) has directed all ISPs of the country to block access to www.youtube.com web site for containing blasphemous web content/movies.

The site would remain blocked till further orders from PTA. Meanwhile, Internet users can write to youtube.com to remove the objectionable web content/movies because this removal would enable the authorities to order un-blocking of this web site.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience.

Best Regards

Manager
Technical Assistance Center
Micronet Broadband Pvt. Ltd.
Islamabad

This isn’t the first time Pakistan has tried to block Internet access and messed up while doing so. Back in September 2006 the government of Pakistan blocked access to BlogSpot, the then most popular blog platform for Pakistanis. This was later reported to be just a technical glitch. Then in March 2007 the national ISP, Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL), ended up blocking access to a large number of popular websites including Google, Microsoft.com, BBC, CNN and Yahoo! in an attempt to follow the Pakistani Supreme Court’s order to filter all websites containing “blasphemous” content.

Religious reasons cited by the government, however, seem to be a ruse to cover-up a political agenda. President Musharraf has been accused of exploiting the religious sentiment of the nation to suppress a number of videos uploaded on YouTube that apparently show evidence of vote rigging in the country’s recent election.

What might have been just another case of censorship in the state that went largely unnoticed outside Pakistan, became an international even when the resulting ban on YouTube got propagated outside Pakistani ISPs, blocking users from accessing the website in most countries across the world.

A post on the Wired Blog explains that Pakistan Telecom complied with the government directive by changing the Border Gateway Protocol entry for YouTube – essentially updating its local internet address book for where YouTube’s section of the internet is. The idea was to direct its internet users to a page that said YouTube was blocked.

Unfortunately, the ISP announced the new route to upstream providers. The upstream providers didn’t verify the new route but accepted it and then passed it along, cascading the bad address around the net, until most everyone using the net on Sunday would have been directed to the Pakistani’s network block. The blunder not only took down YouTube, but also choked the Pakistani ISP, which was quickly deluged with millions of requests for videos.

View NDTV: Should blogs be regulated?

Blogging has given people the chance to express their views and feelings on various issues that they feel strongly about, while at the same time providing a platform of anonymity for those who may desire it.

In the social mileu of India this has created quite a hue and cry as some of the blogs seem to be quite “provocative” or offensive to other people. These bloggers face the possibility of receiving comments on their blog that may use unacceptable language and be hurtful to the blogger.

There is a debate raging, at present, in the Indian sub-continent about whether blogs should be regulated. Whether this is possible at all is also an issue under discussion.

Regulation of blogs, according to most bloggers, would be an infringement of their basic right to freedom of expression. As with all forms of media the idea of such censorship does not go down well with the blog authors. They believe that blogging has provided them with a forum to express themselves freely, which they could not do earlier and this freedom should not be curtailed.

As far as the issue of hurting sentiments is concerned, bloggers believe that people who feel offended always have the option of not reading these blogs. Hence their right to freedom of expression should not be censored.

While it is rather unlikely that the government of India, or any other country for that matter, can do much to regulate all blogging activity, or stop the message contained in a blog from going out before it gets written, the fact that they are contemplating this is cause for worry in itself.

Vikram Joshi, a charming gay professional who authors one of the popular blogs featured in the NDTV program says, “The reason a lot of us write blogs is because the mainstream media does not cover issues we face enough. Blogs have turned out to be the only way that young gay men like me can be heard and reach out in this society. If the government clamps down even on this, they will be stifling our voices and curbing our freedoms once again, which isn’t very different than what happens in dictatorial regimes!”

More than 1.1 million Russians use the online blog site LiveJournal. They have more than 67,500 interest groups and actively comment and post on a variety of topics. On the 5th of September alone, almost 500,000 comments were posted and 1,600 new users joined LiveJournal in Russia.

According to Masha Lipman, a political expert at the Moscow Carnegie Center, “There is indeed a lot of free exchange on the Internet.” Lipman says, “the question in Russia is not that there are no outlets where free expression is possible. The question is that the Kremlin has radically marginalized all outlets that pursue even reasonably independent editorial lines.”

Government or state-owned enterprises control the three main television channels in Russia. Only a handful of TV and radio stations and some national newspapers offer an alternative to the Kremlin’s view on current events and news stories. Additionally, the President, Vladimir Putin, has created an agency to monitor media and the Internet, sparking fears that this will further stifle opposition voices.

Parliamentary elections are due to be held in December, and a Russian presidential vote will be held next spring. As the elections draw near, Putin seems to be methodically shutting down free press. Last month the BBC’s Russian-language broadcasts were chased out of Russian FM radio.

The Russian president was also in the midst of another, lighter controversy last month when a photograph of him fishing bare-chested was published in a national newspaper and then picked up by a number of gay blogs and chatrooms that convoluted the story accompanying the pictures to satire.

The 24 year old, Hamish Jones called the Victorian Transport Minister a “bitch and a fuckwit” on his personal blog, ‘Ranting and Rambling’, back in April. The issue came to a head after it was brought to the attention of the Australian Liberal party director.
While the event in itself is rather insignificant, considering the size of the city of Maribyrnong and the complete obscurity, in the Western world, of the persons involved, it brings to light the fact that even politics has now entered the Web 2.0 era fully. There is no escaping the popularity of blogs and social media as a vehicle for political propaganda.

Politics And Social Media

It’s no secret that most US presidential candidates have used Facebook, MySpace and other social networks to reach the younger, Internet-savvy voters.

In the UK too, political parties have used and misused social networks to a great extent, as was witnessed in last week’s mini-drama when First Direct, Vodafone, Virgin Media, the AA, Halifax and Prudential withdrew ads from Facebook because they were showing up on a British National Party page.

Social Snub

PS: Does anyone find it hilarious that grown people have to resign for calling each other names… who would’ve thought the Australians are just as prudish as the Americans!!

While this growth has been apparent, and talked about to a great extent both in the online and offline media, especially since Google’s high-profile acquisition of YouTube, actualy growth rates have not been pegged down… till last week, when Hitwise General Manager Bill Tancer told a gathering at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo that the market share of visits to Web 2.0 sites has grown 688 percent over the past two years.

Tancer predicts that user participation has not yet gone mainstream, and when it does, there will be an “explosion of new content on the Web”. he projects sites like StumbleUpon, Piczo, Veoh, Yelp, imeem, and WeeWorld to drive the new wave of growth.

The number of weblogs tracked by Technorati has grown to over 70 million, and continues to expand by about 120,000 new blogs per day. The rate of growth has slowed down a bit, and the number of active bloggers – that is – has stabilised.

Japanese is the most popular blog language, accounting for 37% of all posts, ahead of English, which accounts for 36% of posts. Chinese (8%), Italian (3%), Spanish (3%), Russian (2%), French (2%), Portuguese (2%), German (1%) and Farsi (1%) made up the rest of the top 10 blog languages.

Read the full State of The Live Web post

About 6% of blogs were found to host malware. ScanSafe report that the content on blogs and other sites powered by user contributed content is constantly changing, which makes Web security solutions that rely on Web crawling rather than actually scanning the URL each time it is requested can leave users exposed to malware and unwanted content.
Surprisingly, the survey also found that 11.4% of Web filtering blocks imposed by companies were to prevent users from accessing search engines and portals, which is second on to the 23% of Web filtering blocks preventing access to Instant Messaging and chat services.

42% of young workers actually discuss work-related issues on these social media sites.

While some companies might consider this to be a threat to information security, many others will see this as a positive trend as Web 2.0 interactions allow employees to be more resourceful and develop new ideas with external help that is otherwise not available within the organisation (without paying a hefty consultatation fee).

A parallel survey carried out in the US found 43% of the US workforce accessed social media sites from their computers at work. For both groups, sites such as YouTube, MySpace and blogs were extremely popular.

Surprisingly, 29% of organisations surveyed in the USA do not allow use of Web 2.0 social media sites at work.

The sample size for the survey was 2,629 adults in the UK, while that in the USA was 827 people from a variety of industries and organisation sizes.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

Today, the blog has been hacked into, by a French group called the Dark SEO Team.

This was really funny for everyone except for the guys at Google, as even though Matt Cutts admitted today that the whole thing was just an April Fool’s joke, chances are, a good bit of damage has already been done.

McCain’s MySpace profile was built using a template designed by Mike Davidson and used images from Davidson’s server without giving credit. In retaliation, Mike Davidson altered content owned on his server so that John McCain’s MySpace profile claimed the senator supported lesbian marriage.

The modified MySpace profile stated: “Dear Supporters, today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage… particularly marriage between two passionate females.” Unfortunately, this rather hilarious prank has been deleted from the blog already. Technically speaking this is not a case of hacking, as the content was never on Senator McCain’s own server.

Google will use the DMCA as its primary line of defense in the lawsuit filed by Viacom for copyright infringement by YouTube. Google’s legal team are confident that their defense will hold up in court, as similar precedents with Ebay and Amazon were looked upon favourably by the U.S. courts.

Moreover, Google has historically won most court cases where companies, individual groups or public bodies tried to limit content displayed on the search results. The odds are stacked in Google’s favour, but if Viacom flex their legal muscle and build a solid case, this lawsuit could spell disaster for YouTube.

Viacom claim that over 160,000 clips on YouTube contain material that is copyrighted. These clips have accrued more than 1.5 billion views, which can be considered lost revenue for Viacom.

If Viacom can prove beyond doubt that the copyrighted content was placed online and viewed by YouTube visitors, the courts would still need to decide whether YouTube and Google can be held accountable for copyright infringements by their users. A judgement against Google could have a far reaching impact on many other sites and blogs that rely on user generated content, as more webmasters will have to police what users post on their blogs and forums.

Al Gore’s new creation launched yesterday on Sky TV and Virgin Media. Programming for the channel is made up of various branded “pods” of three to eight minutes in length designed to be “snacked on”. If this seems vaguely familiar to the style of programming first made popular by MTV, that’s because it is!

What makes this channel interesting to Search Marketing Agencies is the fact that Current TV has partnered with Google to air a three-minute news bulletin every hour based on what Google users are looking for.

When he was found out, Ryan Jordan admitted that he used books like Catholicism for Dummies as a reference for his writings!

Sites such as Wikipedia have always been susceptible to vandalism and the spread of false information by individuals or groups with a vested interest. This problem has been brought into the spotlight by the case of Mr Jordan, who could be one of many other supposed “authority” writers on the popular site, who actually have no credibility whatsoever.

Sites like Orkut (owned by Google) and LinkedIn have enjoyed popularity with younger business professionals and students for long now. Both Orkut and LinkedIn boast of millions of users actively interacting, trading knowledge and often discussing possible job opportunities. Viadeo, a French company that is already popular in Europe, has just launched in the UK.

Even though social networks and blogs were originally used primarily by teenagers SEO-savvy social network marketers, they have now grown to be the medium of choice for non-intrusive networking and soft-selling by businesses and professionals from all levels of an organisation.

Under current Olympic rules, athletes, coaches and other team officials are barred from functioning as a “journalist or in any other media capacity” during the games. This rule was initially put in place to protect the rights of the accredited media. The advent of blogs and their popularity, though, could turn the Olympics and Olympic village into a virtual reality show, which is something the Olympic committee wants to avoid by having structured guidelines about blogging in place.

The research will be carried out in three stages. In the first stage they will ask for feedback on features and functionality required for corporate blogging, and get recommendations on providers to evaluate. In the second stage a set of specific criteria will be posted on their own blog to collect feedback. The final stage will allow participants to grade current and potential blogging solutions.

Among the companies that Forrester have already interviewed for the study are nine Fortune 1000 firms with their own external corporate blogs: BMC Software, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Sun Microsystems, Verizon and Wells Fargo.

Their argument is that high placement on Digg, or even on popular blog sites might create a temporary surge in traffic, but upon closer examination one usually finds that this traffic shows high bounce rates and almost never converts into a lead or sale.

Anyone who has advertised on any sort of contextual network or even via blanket emailing or mailshot would have been able to tell these marketing geniuses the same without requiring time-wasting studies. The idea behind most of these Web 2.0 marketing channels is to build a brand and raise awareness, rather than just pushing the Web 1.0 mantra of online conversions.