Over the past couple of weeks, it is pretty likely that you have seen the news of the FAA fining Southwest Airlines because the company flew airplanes early last year which had missed mandatory inspections. You can read the news at a variety of sources, but what I think is really rather impressive is how Southwest has harnessed the power of social media to really position itself in a manner that allows it to broadcast its message easily and directly to its customers.

Why haven’t we seen a huge internet uprising against Southwest’s inspection fumble? Because Southwest has launched its own PR battle before any misinformation even had a chance to permeate the web. They have done this by having one of the best corporate social media engagement plans I have ever seen. In case you have not seen it, check out the Southwest corporate blog called Nuts About Southwest and take a look at the content they are posting. Simply having a blog is not really anything special: many companies have a corporate ‘blog’ and some of them really do a pretty good job creating either a team blog or a CEO blog, etc.

But Southwest’s is just beyond the basics. Plain and simply, their blog is everything a blog should be and this is what they are doing to harness their community as a source of feedback and as a mass media outlet:

Structure:

• Design: It is simple, clean and uncluttered. They have a large graphic at the top to tie the blog name “Nuts about Southwest” back to the in-flight experience with a bag of peanuts. Their logo is present, but not obtrusively so. The only thing I dislike about the header is that they use two font sizes in the title, but that is just because I am a bit of a typography nerd. But overall, they only have seven modules in their sidebar which makes the site appear very inviting and simple.

• Digestability: Their posts are reasonable length and have consistent formatting and text colors.

• Memorability: Easy, accessible URL. The site for this blog is http://www.blogsouthwest.com/ I really do not know if there is a simpler URL to remember for a blog by Southwest, and that makes it really easy for people who may not use RSS readers to navigate to the site and spread the word to friends.

Portability:

• Syndication: This site is super accessible for anywhere. In the sidebar, there are two buttons for subscribing to either the RSS or ATOM feeds for the site which are simple, straight-forward, and easy to find.

• Sharability: At the bottom of every post is the ShareThis button, allowing you to email any post or share it via any of 17 different social sites from Digg to Live Spaces. This is very important because I hate having to use an external tool to send content from a site. The easier it is for visitors to spread your content, the more likely they are to do it.

• Simplicity: User-friendly post URLs. Each post has a unique URL and many sites will have it be some obscure string of alphanumerics, but this blog uses %date%title format for creating individual URLs which are relatively easy to read and makes it easy for people to see the title of the post wherever they see the URL.

Content:

• Variety: This is a team blog which brings Southwest employees from all over the company to the table in order to open a dialog.

• Timeliness: There was a post on the Southwest blog explaining the airline’s commitment to safety on the same day the story of the FAA fines broke. Immediate response and accurate information are key in making bog content relevant. Since the news about the fines, their blog has had multiple updates with various peaces of information relating to their safety policies, actions taken regarding the inspection mishap, and linking to the CEO’s media appearances.

• Relevance: They are not blogging about high-level financial data, the intricacies of in-flight navigation equipment or promoting themselves as the best airline in the world. Instead they are focusing on things that the average flyer might find interesting and helpful. It provides some insight to behind-the-scenes aspects of the company and surely some of the posts are part of a broad public-image campaign, but each of them is succinct, well-written, and impacts consumers in some way.

Engagement:

• Openness: Southwest has left the comments open on the blog and encourages people to leave their thoughts and feedback. This is really pretty amazing for a big company that they trust their community member enough to allow them to freely express themselves on a branded site, unfettered. This is a vital part of developing an actual sense of openess with a corporate blog. Google has a great blog, but their comments are closed so despite having the most widely read corporate blog in the world, they have no on-site community to back it up.

• Responsiveness: It would not do much good to open up reader comments and let everyone run rampant unless you actually plan to read them and engage the community. In many blog posts, representatives from Southwest post responses to questions, comments and concerns. Without this kind of company response, visitors would never even bother to comment becasue they would know it to be a futile effort.

• Transparency: It is made very clear when Southwest representatives post in the comments by placing their job titles in the signature of the comment. This is one of the most important parts of community involvement: if it were discovered or suspected that staffers were posing as members of the blog’s community, the backlash would be irreparable. If you have to lie to your community, then it is time for a re-evaluation of your entire operation.

• Acknowledgment: Southwest has recognized that they do not blog in a void and they depend on other sites for a symbiotic trade of traffic. As such, they have included a “Link Luv” blogroll which links not only to other travel sites, but even the blogs from other airlines. Nothing says self-confidence by making it easy for people to look at your competitors’ web properties; you have to be pretty confident that they will come back.

These are just general characteristics that I feel take a corporate blog from a press release posting board to a truly engaging dialog with a community. What are some other examples of great corporate blogs, their attributes, or other general features I’ve left off?

Over the next week or so, I’ll also take a closer look at how Southwest is using a wide approach to social media by deploying in other mediums including YouTube, twitter and facebook. Any other suggestions?

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I came across this on this French site. the original post is:

Pour comprendre le microblogging (phénomène Twitter), la dynamique des sites sociaux, le user-generated content, les objets sociaux, et le futur de l’interaction Web + Mobile, voici le slideshare qu’il vous faut !

Créé par le fondateur de Jaiku, une plateforme de microblogging comme Twitter, cette présentation éclaire bien des choses.

Bonne lecture.

French => English translation (done by myself, so if you identify any errors, please let me know)

To understand microblogging (phenomenon Twitter), the dynamics of social sites, user-generated content, social objects, and the future of Web+Mobile interaction, here is le slideshare that you need!

Created by the founder of Jaiku, a microblogging platform like Twitter, this presentation explains many things.

Enjoy!

And now, it looks like I’m finally getting ready to wrap it up! After getting a degree in political science last month, I started down the path of actually doing something with my life and looking for a job, when I happened to stumble into a couple really great opportunities. I’ve spent the last month doing special projects for the Department of Student Life here at MU (though in reality, it seems that I am the designated : “I-find-cool-stuff-on-the-internet-to-distract-everyone-else-from-work guy” for the student Design Center) and it has been a great interim job. However, I’ve just confirmed my first post-college job and I am really excited about relocating and jumping into work!

As of next Monday, I will be starting work for Outrider, a strategic marketing company based out of St. Louis. I will be coming on board as a Social Media Specialist and working with a small team of other people in the social media area to develop integrated online media strategies and marketing plans for clients. Anyone can see the world is shifting to a more online-centric, social place and the best evidence I can find of this is in the way I came into my new position.

A few weeks ago, I was reading Jeremiah Owyang’s blog and saw a post on people who were “on the move” in the social media industry. I thought, well what is wrong with a little bit of self-promotion? So I left a comment, which you are free to go check out for yourself, basically saying “Hey, I haven’t been on the move…but I would like to be!” And as a result of this, Lisa Young from Outrider reached out to me with some information about the company and the industry as a whole..then I spent a day and a half pouring through Google and every other internet tool I could think of to absorb as much information as I could about the company. Well over the past few weeks, about 97.4 emails, and dozens of hours spent researching different aspects of the company and industry I decided that I really wanted to come on board with the firm and so…here I go!

So now I am looking for a sublease in St. Louis for a few months since my lease in Columbia isn’t up until July and double rent is never fun. So as I pour through craigslist (does that count as another variable in this giant social media equation? I think so…) looking for a new home, I’m pretty excited about joining the Outrider team next week! And if anyone knows of anyone needing a roommate in St. Louis, let me know!

When I was writing the post, I got most of my information from a TechCrunch post about Madonna leaving her record label:

So in my writing of the post, of course I linked to the article with a hyperlink in my posts’ text:

And because I used their article and linked to it, I included a trackback to that article in the trackback bar at the bottom of my blog editor. Your form might look a bit different or be placed somewhere else; these screenshots are from the online admin interface for a self-hosted Wordpress site. Also, notice here the site is listed as ‘already pinged’ because I took this screenshot after I had already written the post:

This basically just lets the address you entered know that you used it for something (aka: you ‘ping’ the address) and typically your ping will show up somewhere after the article you linked to. Some sites mix the trackbacks in with the comments and others (like TechCrunch) list the trackbacks before the comments. Normally, all it does is show the title of your blog/post, like this one:

The above screenshot is still below the original article and still send traffic my way every once in awhile.

This was a post I wrote in about 10 minutes or less before I went to bed that night and had no intention of really putting a lot of effort into and it was just because I included a trackback when creating the post that I now regret not really putting some work into it! See, my blog is no Engadget but I get a couple dozen hits a day or so from various sources so it doesn’t take much uptick to get me a bit excited about my traffic. This post is the highest traffic post I have ever had with over a thousand pageviews since I posted it and about half of those came in the day or two right after it went up. But you can see that even just a few days ago I had a pageview come in from that site:

And you can see the huge spike in traffic that post got me in this partial graph of my site traffic (most traffic directly from TechCrunch and another site which linked to me via TechCrunch):

So you can see that trackbacks are really easy to use and can make a big difference in your site traffic. I didn’t include all the screenshots and this story to try and be impressive (because in the grand scheme of things,I am not even in the top 1,000,000 on technorati yet!) but I think it makes it easier to explain the potential benefits of trackbacks if you can see tangible results!

I hope this helps answer some questions people have along the lines of “What are trackbacks? How do I use them? and Why should I use them?” but if I left anything out or oversimplified soemthing, please let me know and I will update this post as needed.

(As a note: I am adding trackbacks to the original TechCrunch article again and also to my original post so you can see another example of what they look like on various sites)

But I just realized how amazing this little blast of inter-connectedness really was!  So far today, I have doubled the number of people I am following and the number of people following me has also doubled since this morning (and I has the 233rd person to comment on Jeremiah’s post!).  Also, I tweeted about the new facebook feature that is a phonebook with all your friends already in it…which then got Nick O’Neill interested, so he posted about it on his blog. (And I see Nick’s article about Twitter got linked in an update on Jeremiah’s original post!)

Anyhow, this site isn’t exactly a Top 100 domain on the internet, but I generate anywhere from 30-50 organic hits a day (I count organic as not linked from my facebook, myspace, twitter, etc).  Well, because of this twitter-madness, I have also doubled my site traffic between Nick’s post, my rather inconsequential comment over on J’s site, and people linking through various twitter-related outlets!  I’m far behind keeping my site up-to-date because of the madness which is finals+graduation, but I think it is incredible how much effect this has had just on my little microcosm of the social graph!

Well, Jeremiah, maybe this is the jolt which shakes up and explodes the twitter community!

Then, in late October, NBC also decided to cancel its YouTube channel which was created back in June 2006 for its short clips…but all anyone ever watched was SNL shorts/skits. With that channel, NBC had made YouTube legit in the marketplace and helped lock up the Google acquisition, not to mention it gave NBC street-cred (web-cred?) with online content users (aka everyone under 35). In lieu of it’s YouTube channel, NBC revamped its websites for content: the streaming full episodes are awesome quality (though I wish I didn’t have to switch back to full screen after every commercial break) but if you want a case study for disaster, check out the SNL video page.

Over the past 30 minutes or so, I have browsed the user comments on the site and have seen two positive ones that were about a clip being funny. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of negative comments ranging from the mundane opinions to extreme rants which reminds me of the Wal-Mart vs. Target facebook model discussion Jeremiah had going some weeks ago on his site (and facebook group): Wal-Mart had thousands of negative comments on their facebook group and the hits just kept coming. This is exactly what is happening to NBC on its own site. Some of my favorite comments:

“This site is worthless….now if the clips we want to see aren’t available on this site we cannot see them anywhere. You guys suck.”

“I just want to watch the Lazy Sunday video. It’s fine if you don’t want it on Youtube, but then at least make it accessible somewhere else!”

“IM GOING TO YOUTUBEEEE”

“This site is a joke. Guess what? It’s 2007…YouTube is your friend…viral marketing is good.You think that by controlling the content and then bombarding people with advertising that nobody wants to see is the answer…bad move. $100 bucks says your back on YouTube in a month after this fails miserably.Hire a 4th grader to run your online marketing.”

“your website is a good reflection of where your sho is going.”

“My hatred is palpable for this failure of a website.”

“Even the time is wrong.”

“you know things are f’d up when the ads don’t even work.”

“The fact that every clip starts with an ad proves that you guys suck!”

These are a pretty good cross-section of the comments on the site as of this morning. Let me tell you, I am no web developer, but I think I could build a better video distribution site on my own site (via Wordpress). There is no catalog of clips of guide to finding your favorite videos, no way to embed videos on other sites, and when the player does work, they have included front-end advertisements! Didn’t YouTube find the perfect solution to front-end ads, since no one watches them anyway? Oh wait…NBC left YouTube…bummer. NBC has built a widget that you can embed in your website which will display content that NBC will change and update each week. Wait…NBC controls the content? On my site? Hmmm…yeah that’s not going to work for me. Although even if you could control it, good luck finding anything worth displaying: the new site doesn’t have the most recent ‘Digital Shorts’ that have been hugely popular: Lazy Sunday, Iran so Far, and Dick in a Box. The only reason those have been so popular is because they went viral while hosted on YouTube! But good luck finding them anywhere now.

The only good thing I can say about this site is that NBC isn’t moderating the comments. At least they are leaving it open to criticism, which I’m sure is causing quite a few bruised egos around their offices. NBC is completely missing the point on viral marketing and social media: companies no longer control information. Users control everything from what gets watched to how it gets watched. They are really going to have to step up the game on this new site if they want any kind of sizable online presence…and Hulu had better rock…and open up for business sometime very soon.

Tips for NBC:

1) Go back to YouTube…or if our ego is damaged, just rebuild your webiste into a YouTube clone so we can browse, embed, and view whatever content we want.
2) Fire Jeff Zucker…old people only look at immediate, tangible ROI…they don’t understand online community development
3) Scrap Hulu. The name means everything from ‘butt’, ‘cease’, or ‘desist’, depending on what language you are using.
4) Stop whining about iTunes prices. They haven’t nailed down market dominance in the video world yet, but it is only a matter of time and you are going to want to be on board for that. Ever heard of Steve Jobs? He takes no prisoners and once he controls the market, good luck getting into it ever again. Don’t be the Zune of the video market.
5) Heroes is a winner. So is 30 Rock..and I hear some people like Scrubs, too. Run with the good ones, leave the riffraff like Bionic Woman for CBS.

UPDATE: (9:30 pm 11/4/07) TechCrunch just posted a clip of an hilarious iPhone commercial spoof done on Saturday Night Live, but the clip is embedded from YouTube…I wonder how long that will survive before it gets yanked from YouTube only to disappear into the realm of “clips-you-will-never-see-again-because-we-are-afraid-of-the-internets”…

As one insightful TechCrunch reader posted: NBC hates Apple. NBC hates YouTube.

Brad Jashinsky

November 4th, 2007 at 8:16 pm

This post is so great in so many ways. As others have mentioned, you have an obviously hacked iPhone clearly displayed on NBC (Apple’s enemy). At the same time, I just watched the clip not on TV, but on YouTube (NBC’s enemy). Probably the most surprising is that this was actually funny, and yet was allowed on Saturday Night Live.

(via TechCrunch 11/4/07)

UPDATE: (11:50 pm 11/4/07) Now you see it, now you don’t!  The SNL clip is now down from YouTube, and thus TechCrunch as well…judging by user comments, it came down sometime between 8:15 and 9:30 pm (CST).  So now anyone who will read that article over the next few days or weeks will wonder what exactly it was about since they can’t see the clip.  I wonder how many thousands of potential viewers NBC is missing out on just from this one post…

But while word-of-mouth is a strong force in the general marketplace, it is THE force with the college demographic. From the time kids are old enough to understand wrong from right, we start telling them over and over: “Don’t give in to peer pressure!” Generally, we tell them this to keep them away from drugs and alcohol as youngsters, but it seems they never think to resist peer pressure when it involves anything else! How many study sessions or term papers have been procrastinated because a student’s friends decided to go downtown for the night? People frequently observe that as individuals, people are generally pretty smart; it is in groups that the ‘madness of the mob‘ takes over.

This is all to reinforce the picture that people value thier friends’ input over all else. Social networking has enabled an entirely new paradigm for garnering input from your friends. In fact, your ‘friends’ don’t even have to be people you have ever met! Read Robert Scoble’s beliefs about facebook friends for a look at why you can build your online friends network as a diverse rolodex, rather than a tight-knit circle of childhood friends. Facebook has an application called My Questions that allows you to post a question about anything that all your friends can see and answer, thus enabling nearly instantaneous feedback for any decision you might want to make. MySpace has Bulletins that allow for users to pull in opinions from all their friends, as well as having 3rd party services with embeddable polls if you want to get scientific in your opinion-getting. These are just primary services in the two largest social networks…beyond this there are networks, messageboards, review sites, wikis, and product review blogs/podcasts, etc.

But most of these allow you to get input if you know that you want an opinion; none of them reach out and try and tell you why you should/shouldn’t buy a product. For online advertising to be successful in the collegiate market, the advertising needs to turn everyday users into ‘e-vangelists’. If you have a product that will make people sit back and think, “Wow, this is really cool…and it actually benefits me somehow…hmm, maybe my friends will like it too!” you will have it made. This is how my circle of friends began using del.icio.us for sharing links and articles, it is how everyone started using facebook, and it is the same way that iPods became the most ubiquitous product you will see on any college campus in the country. It sort of seems that you need to have an awesome product before you can really leverage the benefits on social marketing…that is exactly the point. If your product is bad, don’t try and force the fit…you will be thrown out of the online community and spurned forever.

If your product isn’t getting the online buzz you think it deserves, jsut back up and figure out how to make it better: how can I make it so people get more functionality from this? How can I make it easier for people to share this product with thier friends? How can I leverage the existing community to provide relevant feedback about my product? Ask these questions, then try again. And again. And again. Stay out of the community…do not ever anonymously plug your own product in a messageboard or on a blog. If you need to comment on something (which I would suggest against), do it with full disclosure.

People care about what they read online and they will respond if they think a product is actually a good fit for them…or they’ll just do it because their friends told them to. Either way, it is good for you. Create a way for people to easily share your product/service with friends..the rest is viral.

The YouTube debates attest to the shifting demands of the younger voters, and so far haven’t really have a positive or a negative impact on any one candidate. (Note: the Republican debate is not scheduled until next month, so this might not be true after that) However, of all the other prime examples of social media’s impact, the outcome has been bad for the candidate in all but 1 example: The Obama facebook app. And of those negative outcomes, Giuliani’s and Obama’s mishaps were quickly brushed under the rug and forgotten about by the general populous. Only George Allen’s colossal collapse has had lasting effects on the political spectrum of the US: he had quite the margin over his opponent, but after this YouTube coup d’etat he began a swift downward spiral that lead to his defeat.

Despite all the buzz about the evolution of politics into a web-centric endeavor, so far the only real evidence of this comes from fundraising results and the huge amount of money that people are donating online. My guess is that more and more people are doing their banking, shopping, bill-paying, and donating online and this is just a natural shift of convenience for most donors. How many examples exist of a campaign really making positive change or causing a shift in real public opinion because of a movement initiated or propagated by social media?

If social media really has a huge positive impact of the upcoming presidential race, I’m wondering why we aren’t talking about the possibility of President Paul. Looking at any graph of online social presence, Ron Paul always comes in as either first or second. One of these graphs that I’ve encountered that I really like because it shows its own breakdown is this one compiled based on MySpace friends, YouTube subscribers, Eventful supporters, Flickr results, Facebook friends, and Digg pages:

I am a huge supporter of online social media and social networking tools, but I’m unconvinced about their effectiveness up to this point. There hasn’t been any evidence that Ron Paul’s huge online popularity has resulted in much of a real-world rally or surge in support. So far, campaigns have not used these tools as real campaigning venues but have instead resigned to use them only as a way for current supporters to show their support in an online world. The problem is that these people have already made up their minds. Sure, it is good to make sure that your supporters are vocal about their support, but the entire purpose of a campaign is to expand your support base, not just corral the base you have.

It is time for campaigns to branch out, grow their brands, actively pursue new supporters, and energize the ones they have. This won’t happen by more of the same-old-same-old. The buzzphrase in the blogosphere these days is ‘Openness’: whether this is referring to sites like facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Hi5 opening up their platforms to independent developers, corporate CEOs blogging about their companies (or just life in general), or the need for a portable online identity, Openness has become the battle cry of the web-faithful.

Along this line of thinking, it is time for candidates to open up. While I understand that candidates surely have busy lives: trying to run the country in Washington, while at the same time convincing a few million people that they should like you well enough to entrust the next four years of our country in your hands. Sounds pretty daunting…but when was the last time anyone so much as trusted a stranger to watch a cart in a grocery store? How can you trust someone with the country when you don’t know things like their favorite food or what color car they drive?

It might not seem like it would matter all that much what someone’s favorite food is, but after you learn that little fact, that person becomes a little bit more human in your mind. Candidates are people too, and it is about time that they started showing that to the world. Look at most candidates’ facebook or MySpace profiles and you will see that they are rigid, pre-canned compilations of a stump speech. I don’t think it would kill them to take 5 minutes out of a day and fill out their profiles by themselves…because I know that a candidate wants to fix Social Security, I don’t need them to include it is their ‘Interests’ section of a profile. I would much rather learn that one of them loves watching Olympic curling or some other obscure fact that I didn’t know before.

This goes beyond just profiles…Obama’s twitter updates read more like a press release than an insightful look at the campaign trail. Maybe I’m demanding a bit much, but it seems like he could take 30 seconds of each day to update on everyday life rather than a staffer throwing out the press event of the week. I will praise the Obama camp for at least showing up to the social media party…even if they are dressed a bit funny and don’t quiet fit in with the cool kids, at least they came out to say hello.

The bottom line is that campaigns are dropping the ball in the social media world and whoever picks it up will have the chance to really change the way we deal politics in America. That day is coming though it will be a long time before retail politics totally gives way to online identities, if candidates will put a bit of personality into their online presence maybe they will be able to actually reach out and pull in some new supporters. All those independents in the US already see the public face of candidates every time they turn on a TV or read the CNN RSS feed…they don’t need a second helping of the same thing everywhere else they look.

Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang for the tweet about the above graphic.

I have come to find the ‘ripple’ metaphor to be a good tool in describing the overall effect that the online ’social revolution’ has had. When you drop even the smallest pebble into a body of water, it will cause an initial splash that greatly affects the water immediately around it, but then the actions of those close-proximity water molecules cause the molecules next to them to respond…do that a few thousand times and you get a ripple. As the ripple expands out into the body of water, it affects all the water it passes through, as well as anything that might be on the water’s surface. Eventually, the ripple hits the edge of the pond and bounces back…unless the body of water is so big that the ripple just fades out and disperses. Drop a few pebbles into a pond and you get overlapping ripples that cause all sorts of commotion and waves.

The metaphor paints the picture of various aspects of the external world affecting change throughout the college market. While you might be able to say that it could apply to new products and services dropped into the general market, I’m focusing on the collegiate side of things. The ripples in the collegiate market tend to be a lot stronger than in the general market because students are the most brand loyal, idealistic, impressionable, and forthcoming demographic in the marketing world. Ripples through a student population begin to overlap and get lost in one another, blurring the lines between students’ academic, personal, and business lives; for a student, everything is figuratively portable from one aspect of life to the next, because most do not work 9-5 and leave everything behind on a desk at work. A student takes their work home: a coffee table might be a multimedia work center or a textbook might be used more often as a coaster than as a learning device. In general, students are also willing to try out new things that might still have some bugs or other issues, thus making college students a prime launching pad for startup companies.

When this willingness for experimentation is combined with a general ‘follow-the-crowd’ mentality, you begin to see a place from where just about anything can emerge with minimal encouragement. If you have a product that can’t be successful in a college market, you probably are not ready for prime time yet. (Unless, of course, you have a product that is micro-targeted to a demographic outside the college age bracket).

The point of this extended metaphor is to set the stage for the rest of this series by illustrating how the student life is continually in flux, has no definite boundaries between its segments, and allows for testing or launching products in the most penetrable market on earth. This translates into a unique opportunity for a relatively small development to cause major shifts in a variety of areas such as marketing, social constructs, academic coordination, and external communication: all of which are subjects to be discussed in the coming weeks.

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.