Having a meaningful conversation in 140 characters or less seems at times a tad, let’s say, disjointed. It’s not exactly meaningful. But it is this Twitter like approach that is defining how real-time technologies are deployed in the enterprise. AskMyBrainTrust looks at the real-time enterprise through a different scope. Users are not limited to a set number of characters for expressing themselves. Instead, the service uses a real-time model to elicit meaningful conversations with your brain trust, that inner circle you go to for counsel and feedback. Sponsor With most real-time services, the application provides better value when a critical mass of people participate. AskMyBrainTrust limits a group to seven people. Collaboration is limited only to the people in the group. After the group is formed, a topic is submitted. Idea are presented by members of the group. Each has its own threaded discussion. Members of the brain trust vote on the ideas with the intention of driving the group to a consensus. Real-time services with character limits make it challenging for meaningful communications across a tight group of confidants. Email is even worse. Discussions scatter. Gathering ideas together to form a consensus almost has to be done on a one-on-one basis. Conference calls can sometimes feel endless without any form of agreement. AskMyBrain represents the evolution of real-time technologies. Real-time services like Yammer and present.ly have their own fit for ongoing conversations with any number of people. AskMyBrainTrust is not suited for these kinds of social conversations. More so, it is a service for when you need to collaborate among a small group of people to reach a collective agreement. Discuss

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Conversations in 140 Characters or Less are not Exactly Meaningful

Excuse the pun, but while climate change isn’t usually a hot topic during the winter months, a number of companies have released environmental resources in conjunction with this week’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. World leaders are currently convening in Copenhagen to tackle our toughest environmental issues and provide positive solutions to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. Below are just some of the resources netizens can consult to learn about the issues. Sponsor 1. COP15 Twitter and

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6 Climate Change Resources

To have a successful business in today’s business world you almost have to have a blog. Even in highly technical and professional businesses a blog is still a must have. The possibilities of what blog marketing can do for a company are endless.

A blog is a space where a business can connect to their clients on a personal level. Not only that, but a blog is an ideal place to promote sales and other important events for the business. Blog marketing is an essential tool that allows a business to communicate on the level of the customer. The personalization that goes into a businesses’ blog helps make it unique and possibly unforgettable in the customers’ eye.

Blog marketing is a versatile tool that can be used in many different ways. You can decide to use the blog as a communication forum or as an informative tool or one of many other purposes. With a blog you can communicate without limitations, say whatever you need or want too. You can use the blog to talk more about your business, or about your customers, or you can talk about yourself if you wish. The possibilities are endless and the only limitations are your own creativity.

Many find it difficult to start a blog or learn how to blog so that it makes a difference. Sadly, not everyone will have the time or skill to use blog marketing to the best of its abilities. For those individuals there is help. There are professional marketing services that can provide everything that a business may need for a successful blog.

Blog marketing services can help any business with building and maintaining their blogs. A business just needs to find the services available, choose which one they would like to work with, and then they can help you get your blog running successfully.

Why should you use a blog? The answer is simple: because the blog is a perfect marketing venue. A blog can boost your positions in search results, which increases traffic, and your business will get noticed on social book marking sites. A blog is an easy and affordable way to increase traffic for your business. You should start yours today!

Any website or business can have a huge improvement just by starting a blog. Blogs can be technical and detailed and professional in every sense of the word which is great for some customers. Everyone in a business can come together with a blog. Whatever your business is, whoever you are, you can benefit from blog marketing.

To learn more about blog marketing, or to get started with your own blog today, visit www.Majon.com.

In the mid-eighties, Pierre Bellanger launched Skyrock pirate radio station as a continuation of his efforts with the French free radio movement. A community inclusive of a diverse voices and agendas, Skyrock inspired a generation of 18-25-year-olds who had never lent their unscripted opinions to a mass distribution medium. As Skyrock developed an IRC channel and later its own blogging software, the community evolved into what it is today – the third largest social networking site in Europe. Sponsor Often compared to MySpace and Facebook, most journalists tell the story of how Bellanger has grown Skyrock from a simple radio station into a business that earns more than €38million euros in annual revenue. Nevertheless, perhaps the most fascinating story is the founder himself. Says Bellanger, “We were trying to create revolution. My political act is to create a system of self-expression.” In America terms like “self-expression” and “revolution” tend to accompany arguments for First Amendment rights. In Pierre Belanger’s usage, “self expression” is about using the first-person singular “I” when unravelling events. Belanger’s “revolution” entails a cultural shift in how French public radio media went from being a government monopoly, to being a medium where French youth could narrate the news from their own perspectives. Many believe that Bellanger’s Skyrock community was the precursor to what can now be described as life streaming. In other words, the mass distribution of amateur opinions is considered here as a political act. When asked how Bellanger managed to run a revolution-generating platform as a business he replied simply, “Revolutions are only effective when they’re profitable.” Explains Bellanger, “There is already community dialogue, I want to help brands create a bond with the audience.” While the Skyrock CEO monetizes with banner advertising, one of his major “dialogue-enhancing” campaigns is a Coca Cola-sponsored volunteer listing board entitled

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Social ME-dia with Skyrock’s CEO Pierre Bellanger

Over December we have published ten Top 10 lists for the best products of 2009 , in categories ranging from Consumer Web Apps to Real-Time Technologies. Now we’re opening up our selections for you to vote on. We’ve embedded a poll below, with all 100 products that the ReadWriteWeb team selected . We invite you to vote for your favorite web products of 2009. You can select up to 10 products. If you don’t see one of your favorites in the list, note it in the comments and we’ll count that as a vote too. Sponsor We will announce the top 10, along with the full results, at the end of this week. Note: the poll is randomly ordered, but you can also view an alphabetical list below. What are your best products of 2009? (multiple choice) ( polling ) Top 100 Web Products of 2009, Alphabetical Aardvark ActivityStreams Adobe AIR Amazon EC2 Android platform Appsfire Apture Arduino Basecamp BBC’s Semantic Music Project Bing Blip.fm BNO (Breaking News Online) box.net Boxee Brightkite ChartBeat Cisco Collaboration Citysense Clicker Cliqset Collecta Data.gov DBpedia Echo (JS-Kit) Evernote Evri Facebook Facebook iPhone app Fedex SenseAware Feedly Fever Foursquare Freebase FreshBooks Glue Google App Engine Google Apps Google Chrome Google Maps Google Search Options and Rich Snippets Google Voice Hootsuite HP CeNSE Hulu IBM’s sensor solutions ioBridge iPhone platform Jimdo Jive Software SBS 4.0 Jolicloud Layar Microsoft Windows Azure MindTouch Mint Mir:ror MOG Moshi Monsters Mozilla Raindrop New York Times APIs OneForty Open Calais OrSiSo Outside.in Pachube Posterous Postrank present.ly PubSubHubbub Rackspace Cloud Drive Regator Ribbit RSSCloud Salesforce.com Seesmic Shazam SocialCast Socialtext Spotify StockTwits Superfeedr Tornado (FriendFeed framework) Tumblr TweetDeck Tweetie Tweetmeme Twidroid Twingly Twitter Vuze Wetoku WideNoise Wikitude Wolfram Alpha Woopra WordPress Yahoo Query Language (YQL) Yelp Zemanta Zoho CRM Discuss

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Vote Now For Your Favorite Web Products of 2009

A storm of news points to a future of frictionless publishing and subscription, across platforms. Google just announced that its FeedBurner RSS publishing service now supports automatic publishing to a Twitter account. If you’re among the many people who use the service Twitterfeed (like CNN, the WhiteHouse, ReadWriteWeb, etc.) then you may very well find that startup expendable starting now. That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this and a series of related announcements over the past few days. Sponsor The new feature looks relatively sophisticated and will use a new URL shortener, goo.gl . FeedBurner has not proven the most reliable service in recent years and is now part of the ad network AdSense, but the little startup Twitterfeed isn’t always reliable either. It does, though, have more incentive to innovate and work in user’s interests. Ultimately, the service you use to publish content updates to Twitter is just a small part of a much bigger story. The Twitter/FeedBurner integration uses secure OAuth authorization, so you don’t have to give Google your Twitter password. It will check the links coming through that shortened URL for malware and bad sites. Right now other apps won’t be able to use Goo.gl, just Feedburner and Google Toolbar, but that might change in time. Consider this announcement side by side with the WordPress announcement this weekend that WordPress blogs can now be posted to and read from Twitter clients , the rumor today that Facebook is experimenting with its own URL shortener , this afternoon’s announcement that the ability to expose your geographic location is now live in Google Toolbar and now longer a Labs product and last week’s go-live of real-time search on Google. All of this combined says one thing to us: the web is getting a whole lot faster and much more free of friction, quickly. WordPress, Google, Twitter and Facebook will force each other to agree to common standards for reading and writing content updates, those updates will be delivered in real time and the standards will allow an ecosystem of 3rd party client software to proliferate and play along with the big guys. Authentication is being done by OAuth, real-time feeds by RSS, Atom, PubSubHubbub. WordPress is the wild card because it is huge, more supportive than anyone else of Open Source and it could force everyone else to open up to interoperability. The next step? This morning Google’s Marissa Mayer said in an interview that Google is working hard on intuitive search , the ability to show users what they want before they even have time to search for it. Publish once and your content is everywhere, immediately. Open your browser and it will show you just the kind of content you need, from all around the web, targeting your particular circumstances like clickstream, social graph and geographic location. If that’s the kind of platform that’s coming – how will people innovate on top of it? The foundation is being laid right now for a whole new web in the near-term future. Discuss

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Google, Twitter, WordPress & Facebook: Publish/Subscribe Matrix Could Explode Into Glass-Smooth Platform

The U.S. Supreme Court is planning to hear a case that will determine if an employer may view those text messages you post from your mobile. The ruling could have huge implications for workers and the use of applications in the enterprise. Sponsor The case stems from a decision from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that ruled the city of Ontario, California did not have the right to view text messages between city police officers. Privacy in the workplace is always a touchy subject. In this case, Judge Kim Wardlaw said the police officers have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Corporations pretty much have access to your email. Companies argue that liability falls on its shoulders when it comes to employee communications. It is the business that is required to archive emails and fall in line with regulatory requirements. But employees don’t want to feel like they are working in some kind of corporate police state. What are the implications of a Supreme Court ruling such as this? We are seeing a rush of enterprise applications that will fuel communications in the enterprise to a fiery roar. Application that use real-time streams may actually help matters as the dialogue is pretty much transparent. But when it comes to hosted applications, the issues are at best murky, and at worst a minefield of problems. According to news reports a decision is expected by next June. Discuss

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Texting at Work? Supreme Court to Decide About Your Privacy