• The Behance Network is an interesting online hub for the wide variety of designers and other artistic creators out there. It allows you to upload designs for your own portfolio and get feedback from the community and also has job listings and a collaborative tips section that encompasses everything from print to digital to web design. I am not a designer but I spend quite a bit of time around a few of them so I have started to appreciate design work a lot more than I used to and I think this site is really pretty cool for stumbling upon a variety of designs that are very well done. I cannot speak to the benefits of the job listings or the tips sections as I am not in the industry, but it seems to me that they are very well laid out and easy to navigate. if you are not in the industry, check out the site and just peruse the galleries for some really cool designs! Or if you are a designer, try out their portfolio features and let me know what you think!

• A few weeks ago, I was cruising the internet and I stumbled upon an ABC News site called i-Caught that is a place for everyday people to upload their own media for possible inclusion in ABC stories. It is essentially the same model as every other video sharing site out there except this is targeted specifically towards developing news and relevant information. I have not been able to figure out yet what level of censorship they have, but I’m sure that the site is moderated to some extent. There is a page called TalkBack that allows users to submit questions and content to specific ABC programs for contribution or comment. I think this site is a pretty good idea from the MSM as it tries to adapt to the YouTube era. However, I do wish they had spent a bit more time of designing the site…it is very nice that the ads are limited and all focus is on the video content but check out the i-Caught logo. It looks exactly like what you see on sites that make fun of Web 2.0 logos, like this logo generator or this page of hilarious mock logos. Other than that, this site is a pretty cool idea…there are others out there too, like this one from MSNBC, but I think ABC has the best handle on how to harness the community. In fact, if you look at the actual URL for their site, it is http://ugv.abcnews.go.com/ I’m guessing the “ugv” at the beginning means User-Generated Video…kudos to ABC on slowly starting to figure out the world of social media.

• I am a big fan of the band The Spill Canvas and a few weeks ago I went to their website to buy their latest album (see RIAA, just because I download albums I would never buy anyway doesn’t mean that I don’t ever send my wallet over to the band I like!). Anyhow, I was poking around the site and found a really cool page promoting their album which happens to be called “No Really, I’m Fine.” Well on this page, there is a a bar that asks “How are You?” and when you enter in your response, it will display it to other site visitors as “No Really, I’m yourresponse”. (see screenshot to understand a bit better) While this does not really have off-site impact, I think it is an awesome way to get fans engaged in the site. It is a page out of the twitter playbook that asks “What are you doing?” but it tailors perfectly with the band’s site.

• AbbyMe is an awesome site that allows you to send audio messages to people’s phones by typing in whatever text you would like them to hear. The computer voice is actually pretty good and you can enter in more than one number at a time so if you need to send a quick message to lots of people it makes it very easy to do. Of course, I’m sure the most common application is for prank calls (4 of my coworkers and I just finished up a 30 minutes funny phone call round of sending each other very inappropriate messages…all in good fun, of course!) but it could have some really good real-world uses as it gets fine tuned. If they develop a mobile version of it, it could be used to send audio text messages, etc. Definitely a fun site to play around with that someday might develop into something super useful!

• Steve Forbes is predicting that the 2008 presidential election will consist of Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, and Michael Bloomberg.

• MySpace has hit 200 million users. This is big news…that is more people than the individual population of every country in the world except Indonesia, the United States, India, and China. I couldn’t find any verification of this outside of Mashable, but it seems to be on par with their historical growth pattern.

• Tila Tequila is getting her own show on MTV…nevermind the content: the underlying breakthrough here is that she got famous because of MySpace. She was a not-so-famous Playboy model until she was one of the first few hundred thousand people on MySpace and she posted a few scandalous pictures and invited a few thousand people to the site. According to Time, she gave the site the kick it needed to jump from obscurity to the ‘cool kids’ table’…and now she has over 2 million ‘friends’ on the site and markets her music to them, and sells it exclusive on iTunes. This makes her the first person ever to rise from total obscurity and establish a multimedia ‘empire’ via social networking tools. This is a big deal…but the only story that will be in the news is the show’s content.

• Facebook has finally gotten to making the application login page more user-friendly and less buggy by transforming it into an AJAX popup window: apprently this isnt widely launched yet, but it is coming down the pipeline.

Update: Altered formatting to make it more ‘list-like’ -ac

This week, I’ve come across quite a few high quality sites, but I’ll only go in depth on a few of them here and perhaps detail others later in the week.

• Ziki is a new take on a personal homepage, with it’s own flavor. Rather than try and position itself as a one-stop-shop of online content for your browsing, where it would be up against some stiff competition from iGoogle and Netvibes, Ziki is instead your personal homepage for other people to access. It contains a short bio about you, and provides links to your blog/website and your profile on a multitude of other sites, including LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, etc. In addition, after you tag your own page with up to five keywords so that other Ziki users can network to you, you can turn on the search engine optimization feature. Ziki guarantees the placement of your Ziki page in the top results on all the major search engines, so when other people search for you, they will land on your Ziki page and be able get basic information about you and navigate to all your other profiles across the internet without having to dig further into the search engine results. Definitely a cool tool for those who want to be easily accessible via the internet! For an example, check out my Ziki page here.

• Jimdo is an awesome new tool for building your own website, if you are looking for a solid non-blog feel. It is by far the easiest layout editing I have ever seen for building a site, including software-based programs. You navigate to your page, login, and you see a toolbar pop out on the right side with editing options and tools, but the main part of the screen still looks exactly like your site. As you edit, the changes are visible and all the time, you know exactly what your site looks like as you edit it, without page refreshes or constant saves. As far as simplicity and usability are concerned, Jimdo is truly amazing. You can even edit the HTML aspects of your site’s modules…I have not tested it for embedding objects or tracking codes, but it seems that it would not be hard to do. If you are looking for a place to build a quality personal website without the hassle of programming and ease of use that puts all other sites to shame, I highly recommend Jimdo.

• Collectivex is a really great tool I stumbled upon this week that allows you to essentially create your own small social networking site or an online information hub for a group. You create what they call a ‘Groupsite’ and invite others to come join your group, and with customizable privacy settings, you can make your group as open or as exclusive as you want. Once on your groupsite, members can share files, photos, messages, etc, and there are plenty of upgrade options available a la carte including ad removal, increased storage, etc…and an enterprise edition if you want to use the site to deploy a company intranet. This is really a great site if you want a non-public, group specific way to keep everyone up to speed and plugged in to to information!

• Tractis has been around for a little while and has made its way around the blogosphere a few times, but I just recently started looking into it features and services. Tractis offers an easy interface to construct contracts that you can even personalize with company logos and colors. Also, the site has a large database of templates that are easily searchable in order to quickly find a fit for your needs. With the collaborative features, multiple people can work on a single document and can also subscribe to an RSS feed to track changes or updates to a document. This is a really promising site that I haven’t had a whole lot of time to fully explore (or any contracts to build, for that matter) but it appears to be an awesome online tool for small businesses or entrepreneurs that could potentially save lots and lots of money by doing contracts by themselves.

I am delineating a ‘functional’ site from a ‘content’ site, because most people use them for drastically different purposes. A functional site is one that provides services to you by either filling a need that you have had, or creating a need that you did not even know you had, whereas a content site is one you use to educate yourself in some manner. For example, most people now get directions for car trips from sites like Google Maps or Mapquest, but to learn about cartography, you might go to a resource from EarthSensing that explores all aspects of the science.

This sometimes gets blurred in the world of social networking sites with groups springing up that are essentially information hubs that just happen to be housed on a networking site. For example, Facebook would be considered a functional site, but users can create user-driven content sites within Facebook by launching groups that foster discussion and provide information to promulgate to others who might be interested in the same topic. The difference between these two kinds of sites is very important because they fill two different parts of the internet and people interact with the two of them in vastly different ways, as well.

That was simply my clarification of the different types of sites I keep track of as I delve into the annals of knowledge housed on the interwebs! Anyhow, I recently discovered two very excellent content sites that are worth mentioning:

• Web Strategy by Jeremiah: This is a blog hosted by Jeremiah Owyang, a web strategist in San Fransisco. He provides an excellent look into the world of web-based marketing, but not just from a standard ‘make-a-flashy-ad-and-hope-for-good-click-rates’ angle; he analyzes the best way to create, present, and distribute content. The key word there is ‘content’, rather than ‘product’ because everything revolves around how you come in contact with the market and its members. This blog really is awesome for examining how online strategies are changing the way people interact with others and with the market, so I highly recommend adding the RSS feed to your reader!
• TED: TED is the website for the annual Technology, Entertainment, Design conference in Monterey and its very-appropriate tagline is ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’. This is a really unique conference that has spawned some off-shoots, but the original remains exceptional. Each speaker at this conference only speaks for 18 minutes, but the content is incredible and ranges from art to politics to research methods to music. This site houses an archive of over 100 talks that have been given at the event over the years, and more is being added all the time. Much of it is very though-provoking, and I highly encourage everyone to check out a least a couple videos on any subject. My favorite video at this point is this lecture given by Hans Rosling about the shifting dynamics of the world’s economies, populations, and other vital statistics…but he does it in a very engaging way that keeps a visual appeal with incredible virtual models.

• Vod:pod: This site is similar to del.icio.us int hat it allows you to tag and catalog videos you stumble across on the internet. You can add a button to your browser that picks up the video from the site you are are and puts in on your Vod page…and from there you can add videos to your ipod, share them with friends, and do other things like create your own ‘Top 10′ list. Also, there is a tool that allows you to feed your newly tagged videos to your blog or website with a personalized widget, similar to the del.icio.us tool I have in the bottom right of this page.
• Netvibes: Though still in beta, this site is a pretty amazing tool for creating a personalized homepage. It is very similar to iGoogle but Netvibes allows you a lot more control over the look and feel of your page…you can have RSS feeds and widgets just like iGoogle, but you have much more freedom as far as layout is concerned. Also, there are dozens of themes you can apply to your site, rather than the 5 o 6 that Google offers…and you don’t have the large Google header at the top of the page. It is very rare that I criticize the Great Google but as far as personalized homepages go…well, I think I may switch mine to Netvibes.
• Sonific: Sonific creates a ‘Songspot’ based on your musical preferences that you can then post on any other website or blog. Also, it is focused to indie music and smaller record labels, but the quality is high, and the high quality tagging of the songs makes searching a snap.
• Meebo: Meebo is probably one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time. You can login to just about any IM client on their webpage and chat directly through their emulation. This can also be hosted on your own website to allow others to chat through Meebo. It is approximately 10,000 times easier and more user friendly that AIM Express, the Java-based client for online access to your AIM account.