With the decline in the numbers of television viewers in recent years, networks are in search of a sure-fire way to guarantee an audience for advertisers. They should look no further than Scripps Networks, which on june 19 debuted a TV show created in a most unconventional way. HGTV (Home & Garden TV), owned by Scripps, unveiled “Rate My Space,” a show spawned from the community website of the same name. Launched in February 2007, the site, also powered by HGTV, invites…

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The most influential mashup this year wasn’t a Beatles tune remixed with hip-hop lyrics. It was an online street map of Chicago overlaid with crime statistics. Chicagocrime.org, which was created by the journalist Adrian Holovaty, was one of the first Web sites to combine publicly available data from one site (in this case, the Chicago Police Department’s online database) with a digital map supplied by another site (in this case, Google).

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Creative people want to express that creativity. Meanwhile, they need to make a living – possibly by finding an audience for some buyable form of that creativity. This is an old predicament, but the Internet enables new experiments in resolving it – like the Swap Meat, a project of a Web site called Coudal.com.

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Disappearing are the bold-colored suit jackets, poufy hairdos and stilted smiles that, for decades, have been plastered across newspaper pages pushing real estate to potential homebuyers. In their stead: informal blogs, online video tours and sophisticated consumer targeting.

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The 7 Biggest Legal Risks to Your Company When Using Social Media – Advertising Age – TalentWorks.

Amusing but spot on awareness article…

Searsmont, a quiet midcoast town huddled along the St. George River, seems an unlikely source for a World Wide Web-based furor. But it was here, in a house near the Fraternity Village General Store and the Searsmont Volunteer Fire Department, that Lance Dutson fired up his computer, danced his fingers along a keyboard and fashioned a web log that…

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Dieting is in many ways a solo endeavor. But as with many other activities, people have gone online in search of a support community as they strive for a common goal. Atkins, the weight loss program that includes a book and other dieting products, realized that consumers using the program were getting together online and talking about their attempts to lose weight, so the company created a social network to bring those conversations within the Atkins brand.

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Social computing technologies are an increasingly vital part of consumers’ lives. Industry analyst Forrester Research reports that use of social networking sites grew a whopping 90 percent from 2006 to 2007; in the same time period, blog consumption grew by 83 percent and the number of consumers relying on RSS feeds to distill content jumped fully 300 percent. Consumers are talking to each other.

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Cisco Systems Inc. has been designing a new kind of operating system. But not like what Microsoft Corp. sells. The U.S. network-equipment maker, ending months of speculation prompted by the purchase of two San Francisco start-ups last year, is shedding light on a plan to provide technology to media companies grappling with trends such as social networking. At the core of the effort is what Cisco calls Eso – for entertainment operating system…

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The tools of social media – blogs, mash ups, podcasts, wikis, and widgets – sound more like characters from a fantasy novel than business tools. But these tools are what will shape Internet marketing in the years to come. Already, hundreds of millions of people belong to social networks, thousands of blogs are created daily, and YouTube videos often rack up millions of hits over a few days or weeks. The cultural phenomenon that is social media caught much of the business world by surprise. Marketers are now scrambling to understand what it is, what means for their businesses…

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