A good overview of the various flavors of crowdsourcing.

Dell continues to extend Direct2Dell to new languges and countries. The Japanese are voracious readers of blogs so I’m looking forward to tracking progress (Dell is a GCI Digital client).

This is really interesting. Real-time brand research. I asked Noah to add “Dell” and he did in about 5 minutes. Thanks.

Japanese and Koreans lead the world in blog reading and commenting, according to Forrester. More Koreans write blogs. Americans likes their video and audio files.

This is a fun IBM “Get Simple. Get Started.” campaign that actually captured my attention for a few minutes. It includes “success stories” from a variety of industries and “live video chat” which is smart.

Nokia’s CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo says: “Our goal is to act less like a traditional manufacturer, and more like an internet company.”

A few of our fashion conscious folks in NYC are talking about this site. It is indeed cool.

With Quantcast we can now search for sites that have particular audience demographics.

Nice collection of enterprise social media hiccups.

News of a possible explosion in Virginia rippled through Twitter on Tuesday — in a preview of what’s to come in breaking news and citizen journalism. Reuters says they are looking for ways to use Twitter in the newsroom.

Leigh asks good questions: Is Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm” still relevant? My guess: it is relevant for high-cost, disruptive technologies (green technologies), bust it no longer applies for lower-cost, disposable technologies (webservices, iPods).

Mashups - custom applications that combine multiple, disparate data sources into something new and unique - are coming to the enterprise, according to Forrester. Huh? This describes a lot of enterprise software that’s been around for more than 10 years.

Assuming the economy is in a recession in the next six months, how would you change your investment in interactive marketing overall? Forrester Research says: “social networking” and other forms of social media.

Being a parent means that using the Internet is practically a requirement, and according to three separate studies about 86% to 87% of parents are now online.

Beware of Romano’s Macaroni Grill’s Chicken Portobello and its 7,300 mg of sodium (or three days worth).

I was on a social media panel last night — an Austin Chamber of Commerce event. 250 people showed up. Thom Singer, the moderator, posted some video from the panel.

Austin Ventures has bet $50 million on top Razorfish executive Jeffrey Dachis to create a social networking platform for corporation. Great opportunity to learn from other social media start-ups about what works and what doesn’t… and do it right.

Good chart from Forrester: 83% trust the word of a friend. 60% trust consumer reviews by people they never met on a retailer’s site, only slightly lower than “a review by a known expert.” 30% trust online review by a blogger, unknown I assume.

The inventors of the web predict its future (And, Gore is not on the list:) — a lot of mentions of semantic web in their essays.

Twitter as of March 2008: total users: 1+ million; total active users: 200,000 per week; total twitter messages: 3 million/day. Twitter is growing fast, but these are still the numbers of a highly-efficient community for technology-oriented folks.

I always enjoy Mary Meeker and her teams’ presentations on Internet Trends. This is the “money slide” from the March 2008 update — “Connectivity Changing — Is E-Mail Becoming Archaic?”

This is thought provoking — now you can start your own YouTube. Unfortunately, it will be a while before you attract 250mm users.

I met the CEO of Ripple6 - Sang Kim. They have an interesting social network building technology for major brands and (now) media. It’s worth a peak.

One of my favorite blogs ReadWriteWeb leverages Twitter for its news gathering. Here are some of their stories.

At a certain point, with billions and billions of Web pages to sift through, keyword search just won’t cut it anymore. It’s a needle-in-the-haystack problem, with the haystacks just getting bigger and bigger every second. Here’s a good overview.

An overview of social media in insurance. A very short overview I might add.

More on insurance and social media from Jeff Jarvis. I can imagine a leading insurance brand embracing social media and positioning itself as the transparent, accessible, innovative insurance firm — imagine that!

I love this simple idea — a “scheduling agent.” My EA spends a lot of time synching my calendar with clients and colleagues for meetings, lunches, etc. Presdo does this for you — no fuss, no mess.

There are some good tips here for marketing and communications professionals at companies with overzealous CIOs and IT groups:). This post may save you a lot of paperwork and approvals.

Analysts say mobile media growth will not happen until after 2010, when the technical and market environment for mobile media and entertainment is expected to improve.

This research and its results are strange to me. It’s not the microsite that is generating traffic. It’s the content and experience. If the content and experience can be accomplished within a brand’s existing site, no need for a microsite.

We advise enterprise bloggers to “scoop their own news.” Miller’s Brew Blog takes it a step further — they scoop Anheuser-Busch’s news. Interesting strategy that appears to be working.

Here are some thought provoking mobile applications — and winners of AT&T’s competitions at CTIA Wireless.

Enterprise 2.0 will become a $4.6 billion industry by 2013 and social networking tools will garner the bulk of the money, according to a report by Forrester Research.

WPP-owned research company Millward Brown puts Google at number one in its annual top 100 global brand power list for the second year in a row with a 30% year-on-year increase in its value. China Mobile is at #5.

Or, how to make your Facebook initiative a success. This is a timely paper from Facebook.

Interesting… In my experience, software companies don’t make good consultants and consultants don’t make good software companies. This business models are very different and trying to do both creates conflicts.

Here are the top 100 tech bloggers/authors, based on the total number of headlines they have had on TechMeme from January 1, 2008 until April 20, 2008. The data and list are probably not accurate. Still, it’s a good list.

Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.

Some good data here on Internet useage by state

Bravo, Allstate. This is the coolest insurance website I’ve seen — it targets the guys and gals you see riding their “hogs”. The user experience on this site is very clever.

You may know it’s tough for brands to monitor Facebook. Essentially, you need to be an advertiser - or know a nice analyst at Facebook - to gain insight on the Facebook conversation. Facebook launched Lexicon, a good first step in basic monitoring.

The NY Time’s magazine is really good this morning. It offers some perspectives and advice to “make your carbon footprint smaller.” Very well done. Read it online.