QVIews

Over at Common Craft, a web log devoted to innovative uses of social software for business, Lee LeFever has some really interesting observations on how ‘social networking sites’ like Ryze, LinkedIn and Orkut differ from the earliest form of online communites, which were discussion boards and email group lists. A participant in many early online…

After years of being sneered at by the New York Times, Houston finally got a chance (registration required, articles only free for a few days after publishing) to prove its worth last week when one of their travel writers made a special trip down to check out the recommendations he’d read on the Houston. It’s…

eBay commissioned a study from AC Nielsen last September, with the research being completed shortly after their purchase of a minority ownership in Craigslist community was announced. The research was probably commissioned before the stock purchase, but signifies their their continuing thirst for knowledge about how online communities are evolving. The only source I’ve found…

The new mantra of marketing is ‘be useful’ (to your customer). My friend Viki Collier has been very useful by introducing me to a useful book: Common Errors in English Usage is a fun book with a great web site. Where else are you going to learn: The center of a wheel is its axle.…

Sometimes it feels like I’m watching society evolve as I read about new social networks built by online activities. Many of these experiments flourish and fade like Friendster but with every experiment, we learn more about ourselves and what new connections we can achieve. One of the best ways to follow the trends is to…

"Brand" is a highly misunderstood term in marketing, rivaled only by pseudoverb "branding." Smart marketers on the whole should avoid these terms, unless like Dan Herman, they are willing to help us understand them better. Even experienced marketing experts can benefit from Dan’s penetrating analysis of brand-building in his paper at MarketingProfs: Ten Ways to…

I can’t help myself. About a year behind  the trend, here’s a Friday cat-blog post. In this case, I’ll definitely label myself a late adopter. Guess you could say I’m thinking inside-the-box today! However, neither Cutie nor I leave the box in very good shape.

Now there’s a place you can go and see what all the excitement was about. There’s a new web site, http://viral.3dge.net/, which collects emails which have been popularly forwarded around. Some of these are marketing emails, but many of them are wonderful jokes, clips and observations that just need to be shared. It’s a wonderful…

The Springwise newsletter is a wonderful trend-tracking resource because it takes the point of view that its readers are business people looking to catch a few trends for profit. And they can distinguish a good idea from a bad one…from a renewed one. Their lead article this month is about a new online community called…

Over at Fast Company, today is the last day to enter this year’s Fast 50, but even if you’re not planning to enter, you ought to visit the web site, browse the entries, rate them and enter comments. The competition was made a little less structured this year, and the diversity of entries is very…