TechCrunch is running the post linked below on a few services that let you pay to have people blog about your product. They make a good comparison to payola in the radio biz. You can make the opposite arguement that you're free to pay people to endorse your product so why can't you pay to have them blog about your product. Well, you can and these guys will help and maybe it's big business.

The explosive growth in community over the past years has been mostly in self-organized social networks. It worked like this – a few people have a common interest and, facilitated by technology, their friends and then friends of friends join in. Before you know it curious web users with the same interest find and join the community.

I just spoke at an Austin meeting of the International Association of Business Communicators and had a lot of fun. My presentation tracked with our new 'book' or so far 'series of chapters' on how professional communicators should think about the many new features of the web.

Whether you like Web 2.0 as a name or not, you know there is a ton of value behind it. If you don't know what it is, check out Tim O'Reilly's definition here

So, if you're tired of 'Web 2.0' you'll really hate 'Enterprise 2.0' but again there is a ton of value here. You just need to find the value that matches your business goals. Here is one definition and here is another.

IBM is developing on Drupal and for anyone who has or is considering using Drupal as a platform this is great news. Great news? Why should you care that IBM thinks Drupal is powerful, extensible and (read here) and the best option among similar applications? If you've deployed open-source applications for business you know the answer – it takes adoption by leading companies for the majority to come along. Drupal has a great community and a growing number of service providers – people who cut their teeth before there were professional opportunities – so the timing for adoption like this is good. I look forward to more news like this and more imaginative applications of Drupal. If you are not familiar, check it out.

The blog for Dell that we've been designing launched this week. Check it out at http://www.One2One.dell.com http://direct2dell.com. This is a first for Dell and a forward move among corporate leaders, Sun's Jonathan Schwartz is only Fortune 100 CEO that I know of who blogs. The idea behind the blog is 'one2one' or direct communications between the people behind Dell's products and the customers who buy them.

I’ve been thinking about support services for open source projects lately for a few reasons:

1.) We have some apps built on open source for clients and the support of these apps as they get used by thousands of people is not insignificant. Two years after launch you have training for new employees at our clients’ offices and questions from the growing stream of new users.

2.) Some of our clients will not consider an open source solution because they would prefer to pay for guaranteed 24/7 support (which no agency could competitively develop for our small client list).

Here is a Flash site we launched last week for our client, The Texas Cultural Trust. The Trust raises money for various arts initiatives across the state including the state agency, the Texas Commission on the Arts. The site promotes a particular event that raised a little over a million dollars last year and they expect will be even larger this year.

The focus of the site is the high caliber of artists involved with the event. We knew that if we could show that world-class artists are involved with the event and the organization, sponsors and donors would be attracted. If you check out the ‘Honorees’ section you’ll see all of the artists who have participated over the years. The main sponsor of the event is AT&T.

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006893.html

Robby and I have recently done one site integration with Google Maps http://www.coolgolfsite.com/ that creates over 8,000 maps of golf course locations in the US - before Yahoo maps was available - and I

One of our clients is a NYC publisher and this book is their largest project of the year. The book will not be published until September but the site launched a few weeks ago and will be running a trivia contest and advance reviews on the book – from journalists and users – all the summer.

This is another example of a site in which we have integrated a blogging platform with a Flash site. So the client and designer have maximum visual control over the Flash sections of the site with motion graphics and type and then the client and user have maximum control/flexibility over the blog sections of the site where content is user-contributed and updated frequently. A regular user would approach the site through the main navigation, going to what content interests them, but if you want to break it apart into Flash and html: • http://interpretationofmurder.com/ - Flash with most of the navigtion leading to other Flash movies • Go to 'Tour & Reviews' / 'Reviews & Reader Comments'
The images are courtesy of the New York Historical Society with the exception of the illustrations which were drawn here in Austin by Erin Morril.