BrightKite: New location based Social Networking site

This morning I was checking my iGoogle and came across the following blog post that reviews a new social networking application called BrightKite. What separates Brightkite from many other social networking apps is that every activity and or event is based around your location which is really cool idea. After watching a video review it also seems to integrate with Google Maps so events and activities are visually plotted out using Google’s Maps API. Sites with this kind of intelligence are definitely the future. And fit into the roadmap of what the semantic web is all about; an internet that offers targeted content centered around what the user wants versus the one size fits all mentality. I've signed up to try the app and look forward to sharing some insights.

Great new book on social media for corporations

Last week I attended a webinar title "Join the Groundswell in Enterprise Social Software" hosted by Lithium and authors of a new Forrester book titled "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies ".

It focused on successful examples of using social media to enhance a company’s dialog with its customers online. The reoccurring theme was that people are already talking about your brand online whether it is on blogs, discussion boards or portals. And the recommendation was to embrace this medium and participate in the discussion versus becoming a spectator. Ultimately doing this will give you a deeper understand of your customers and help to retain and recruit new brand advocates.

There was some great advice for things to consider before adding a community and social networking feature to your site. If you’re currently wrangling with community and social media ideas and want somewhere to start I would suggest doing what I did and ordering the book.

Google to take on Facebook by more open API

It was only a matter of time before one of the top three: Google, Yahoo or MSN did something with respect to Facebook.

Google is apparently working on opening up its API's for existing services even more than Facebook. See this article for more detail.

De-centralized content

With the ever growing population of Web 2.0 community enabled sites on the internet it dawned on me that the same technology employed by sites like YouTube, FlickR, MySpace and others use to get visitors to their sites can be easily harnessed by other Business to Consumer and Business to Business .com's. Working in the agency world most clients generally believe a sound SEO and SEM tactics are the best way to get people to their sites. However what if you created your new website with the same embed tools (blog this, link this etc) that the experts use to enable you content to be aggregated?

As with any technology there are some concerns when you open up you websites content to be de-centralized, and that is loss of control. The other is making sure your site can handle the increased traffic if an article, picture of video goes viral. I recently read an article about the pitfalls of Microsoft enabling all their website content to be syndicated via RSS. The increased traffic almost brought their website to its knees, resulting in a less aggressive RSS strategy.

However the pay offs including improving awareness, increased visitors and your sites ranking are worth the risk. These days it seems if your embarking on a website redesign or build you should seriously consider a strategy to de-centralize some of your content. Whether it be press releases, imagery, documents or rich media such as video and audio. Creating buzz around your content is what it’s all about!