There is a great article in the new Fast Company Magazine all about the do it yourself social network “”Ning”.

The article begins by letting us in on a little secret:

Here’s something you probably don’t know about the Internet: Simply by designing your product the right way, you can build a billion-dollar business from scratch. No advertising or marketing budget, no need for a sales force, and venture capitalists will kill for the chance to throw money at you.

The secret is what’s called a “viral expansion loop,” a concept little known outside of Silicon Valley (go ahead, Google it — you won’t find much). It’s a type of engineering alchemy that, done right, almost guarantees a self-replicating, borglike growth: One user becomes two, then four, eight, to a million and beyond. It’s not unlike taking a penny and doubling it daily for 30 days. By the end of a week, you’d have 64 cents; within two weeks, $81.92; by day 30, about $5.4 million.

Yeah we all remember that little game, “I’ll give you $1 Million today or one single penny and double everyday for a month, which would you rather have?

Me? I’ll take the “Viral expansion loop” - but I want to call it the “Viral Spiral”.

This article goes on to explain how the viral loops (spirals) work as an accelerant for internet businesses - take Google, PayPal, YouTube, eBay, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Flickr as good examples.

So where does Ning fit in?

Well they use this concept on steroids! What they’ve got going is a “double viral loop”.

Only Ning, Andreessen declares, benefits from a “double viral loop,” which spreads two ways, because every network creator is a user and any user can become a network creator. Say someone sets up an Angelina Jolie net with 10 members, which grows as each person draws in others. Then an adoption site breaks off, a Jon Voight hate group rises up, and a Brad Pitt love club forms. Meanwhile, a Lara Croft nostalgia net launches, spawning a legion of soft-core cyberporn spin-offs. Soon you have 2, 3, 10 networks — all expanding simultaneously. Meanwhile, the original group is attracting even more users. Ning swells like a river fed from an ever-growing number of tributaries.

You can read the rest of the article here

One of the greatest opportunities you have to market your website online is by using social bookmarking sites to, yes to bookmark your website. There are a lot of choices out there for this and a few rise above the crowd. One of those is Ka-Boom-It.

Ka-Boom-It is a Social Bookmarking site for news and information. They are VERY Internet Marketer Friendly. You can post your News stories, Blog Stories, New Websites, and more. Make Friends (Ka-Boomers) and have fun. Just about the only thing they ask is that you limit your sales page posts but do not discriminate. They don’t allow porn or hardcore adult sites. (They will be deleted, and this is a good thing).

So let me give you a little strategy. You post a compelling article on your blog, full of keyword rich content. (I will talk about this in a later blog post). This blog post (or sales page) gives the now pre-screened reader information about your product or service with a call to action. Now you bookmark this page at Ka-boom-it.com.

Within this bookmark you get the opportunity to add keywords that are relevant, a title (should contain your keywords), a article summary and a link to your website.

This becomes a part of an overall strategy to create relevancy, inbound links, generate traffic and interest as well as ultimately incresing your bottom line.

By far Youtube outweighs the competition when it comes to user generated video content on the web. I use Youtube as a video protion device but I used Brightcove.tv to host the videos that I used on my sites. Why? I felt that the player looked nicer and the video looked better. Now brightcove has annnounced that they are pulling the plug on user uploads. On November 27th I received the following email:
Dear Brightcove.TV member,

Beginning December 18, 2007, we plan to end support of direct consumer uploads to Brightcove.TV. As a result, you will not be able to upload new videos to Brightcove.TV after December 17, 2007. But videos you have already uploaded to Brightcove.TV will remain available on the site and through your Brightcove.TV channel. Videos you have embedded in other sites and blogs will also continue to play.

The good news is that if you create a business account, you will still be able to upload video to Brightcove.com and have those videos appear on Brightcove.tv. That is good news. With the Brightcove pro service (I use a free version) you can create a great video player to use on your site (see: Tiffany Miller Mosaics as an example).

When asked by Tech Crunch’s,Erick Schonfeld, Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire why he decided to throw in the towel on Brightcove.TV. His response:

We are not throwing in the towel on Brightcove.TV, we are eliminating its use as an end-user sharing service. Note that the vast majority of programming on Brightcove.TV are professional channels published by media businesses that use our overall platform for their websites and syndication. It will continue to operate as a content showcase of pro publishers using the Brightcove Platform.

He he goes on in this blog post that the eight million monthly unique visitors to Brightcove.TV (as reported by comScore) is “dwarfed by the adoption of our Internet TV platform by media businesses around the world.” He counts 4,000 such media publishers, who collectively attract “over 120 million uniques visitors per month across thousands of websites.” Brightcove.TV was always a sideshow.

Even though Brightcove.TV will continue to operate and showcase videos from Brightcove’s partners, it will no longer accept videos from consumers. I am tempted to put it in the deadpool, but will refrain for now. If it disappears completely, or arises Zombie-like in the future, we will let you know.

Usually, I upload my videos o any and every site I can. I will continue to watch Brightcove to see how this develops.

Drop shadows were all the rage in the early 90s print world and have now extended into the web space to become a staple in the Web 2.0 style. . . So says this great article on Metafluence.

Now there are quite a few new design conventions available to web designers in this new 2.0 era.

Gradients, 45° angled lines, glossy buttons, wet floor reflections, and bright colors are all traits common to the Web 2.0.

This article posed a lot of good questions and I believe that they are worth asking. With all the slick new tools available for designers I look forward to a brand new era of design.

Colors are brighter, button have become glossy and the new Web 2.0 sites are not show about using strong colors.

Like the Metafluence article states, I too believe that Apple was really the trendsetter in the aesthetic journey that we see in Web 2.0. Come on. . . Ever since Apple’s aqua interface hit the scene, web asthetic has never been the same.

Read the whole article here

Google may have just come out of nowhere and checkmated Facebook in the social networking power struggle. Oh really. . .

MySpace and Six Apart will announce that they are joining Google’s OpenSocial initiative. Silicon Alley Insider reported the MySpace rumor earlier today. We’ve confirmed that from an independent source, as well as the fact that Six Apart is joining. Per the update below, Google has also confirmed Bebo is joining.

This according to Tech Crunch

Facebook is publicly saying they have not officially talked to Google about OpenSocial. Although sources say that that Facebook and Google have been talking about OpenSocial…including today. So pleading ignorance won’t last as a strategy for dealing with the OpenSocial movement.

You gotta love it. . . intrigue running rampant. Personally, I think it’s so cool that Google is developing this platform! Remember my previous post and my theory about Google’s bid attempt (?) for that coveted piece of Facebook. . .

I’m gonna have to learn how to build apps!

Part of me loves a renegade until they hack into my servers and create an email bomb. . . bastards.

Just ran across this great blog: Tech Crunch and a great article written by Michael Arrington

Today there is a story about a developer who goes by the alias “theharmonyguy” and describes himself as “just an amateur” who evidently hacked into the RockYou OpenSocial application on Plaxo called emote.

At this stage I think it is pretty good to discover vulnerability in these apps. Better now than later!

I really like the idea of OpenSocial. I think the cross platform ability of these apps to perform is a pretty nifty idea. This gets me thinking. . . Google didn’t conceive of this idea after losing a bid against Microsoft to acquire a bit of Facebook, methinks. . . Maybe they just forced up the price increasing the (pre) value of Maka Maka. . .

Ah. . . I deviate. . . Oh yes, OpenSocial hackers. . .

Read the story from Tech Crunch here

Copyright and privacy infringement may be taking place on an unprecedented scale, but that doesn’t mean existing laws are irrelevant

From “podcast” to “poke”, “wiki” to “weblog”, the internet generation has a language all of its own. But since web guru Tim O’Reilly popularised the phrase “Web 2.0″ in 2004, even those who never considered themselves internet-literate have worked the new technology into their daily lives. Facebook, the social networking phenomenon, dominates water cooler conversations everywhere, having gained a staggering 42 million users since its worldwide launch in 2006. YouTube, which was founded as recently as 2005, attracts some 100 million page views a day.

Thus begins a great article in the London Times on the 23rd (October). The numbers are astonishing, yes, but the question still remains, “How do we utilize the possibilities of Web 2.0 for business?

Facebook, which I call a grown up MySpace is pretty cool. Yet it still isn’t easy to reach your target audience, or is it. Creativity is the name of the game. Facebook apps (a product of the web 2.0 consciousness) are beacons of hope in the sometimes confusing new world of web 2.0. Yeah, even though the term was invented in ‘04, no one knew what the hell it meant until yesterday (or so it seems). With the ability to use these mini applications built just for faceboook to do things like show rss feeds of your blogs right on your profile page, connecting with a chosen demographic just got a little easier. No blatent selling, unlike the old MySpace, but be honest and deliver compelling content and suddenly Facebook becomes a great lead generating tool.

To be continued. . .