Artesia Spotlight: August 2009

Artesia Spotlight is a monthly review of key news in the fields of social media, user communities and virtual worlds. If you want to be the first to read the news, you can subscribe to receive Artesia Spotlight by e-mail on this page.

Report Spotlight

The number of social networking users has doubled since 2007, according to a new report from Forrester Research. The latest report from Universal McCann has also noted that internet users are increasingly centering their online life around social networks like Facebook and MySpace. They are also choosing to share their content within these social networks instead of specialized content sharing sites like Blogger and Flickr. That is because social networking sites enable users to do more things in the same place, and they also make it easier for users to share their content within closed groups. In fact, a new report by Anderson Analytics has revealed that almost half of social networking site users prefer to connect only with family and real life friends.

Post Spotlight

In his post The Five Ways Companies Let Employees Participate in the Social Web, Jeremiah Owyan breaks down five approaches to social media usage in the workplace (from the extremely conservative to the extremely liberal) and provides the benefits and dangers of each of these approaches. As Owyan writes, choosing the right model depends on your company culture and industry, but as the social web becomes commonplace, companies will probably have to lead towards the more open model, where everyone in the company is invited to participate.

Book Spotlight

Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail, has made his newest book Free: The Future of a Radical Price available for free in all digital forms to illustrate his point that in some instances giving things away can help you make more profit. In fact, the book has made its way onto the New York Times Best Sellers list in its first week of sales despite all the free copies that were given away. Free is based on Anderson's last year's Wired Magazine article Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business.

Other news

• Twitter has released Twitter 101 for Business - A Special Guide, a set of webpages and resources targeted for businesses that are interested in using Twitter. 
• Amazon has acquired Zappos, the online shoe store known for being customer focused and having a unique corporate culture, for 850 million USD.
• Google Friend Connect is now available in 47 additional languages. 
• Open Atrium is a new free and open source intranet platform built on Drupal, a popular open source Content Management System.
• Microsoft and Yahoo! have finally announced a search deal.