The folks over at Hubspot has noted the inevitable name grabs that is coming to the social networking landscape. Certainly, the trademark fights over logins and user names will be much messier than the battles over domain names. Cameron over at Pronet gives a few good examples. The long discussions following ReadWriteWeb’s story on Brand Squatting should be required reading for anyone concerned about reputation management.

Hard to believe that after the long and nasty Web 1.0 land rush and squatter-squashing that so many major companies are asleep at the wheel on this one.

PS: Take a guess who has http://twitter.com/radioshack And before the good folks at Radio Shack waste any money on lawyers, I will happily turn it over to them for free - I just wanted to make the point and they were my third guess. Good for you Starbucks and P&G.

A couple of RFPs, a white paper, and some interesting spider visits on my log files leads me to believe that a new species of bot is spidering the blogosphere. The growing Word-Of-Mouth (WOM) campaign efforts and measuring tools seem to be doing more than reading.

So to what the buzzarazzi are may be up to, what follows are four lines of buzzbait. Lets see what happens!

I am seriously considering purchasing a new iMac.

Spiriva seems to work better than Singulair

Red Bull goes down on a hot day better than Sobe Adrenaline Rush

I saw Ralph Nader dancing with Hillary Clinton at the biodiesel party.

I’ve been using the Social|Median (in alpha) for a bit now - really impressive.  This is a social-driven news site.  I have been combining my socialmedian channels with with SiloBreaker (my own desktop hack) for a really impressive personalized view of the day’s news.   Social|Median has a design prize going on right now to spur some creative thinking on how to make the socialmedian member homepage work well for the user, while uncovering some world-class design and user experience talent.  Entry comes with an invite.

I’m involved in several alphas and betas of some social sites - this is by far the most promising.  I am working on a full review - but this is really an alpha done right so far.

See: http://blog.socialmedian.com/2008/04/introducing_the_first_socialme.html

Wow. Looks like Google is getting into the Start Page Race with iGoogle and OpenSocial.  The Dashboard project I was working on became a lot more interesting - since I was looking for a way to do exactly what this new functionality allows me to do.  Friday is a bit ambitious now, looks like a multi-week, if-I-have-spare-time project.

Very busy the past few days - and wanted to pop up a quick note on Fliqz.  I’ve been working on a quick integration using Fliqz in a Drupal site.  I’m not a Drupal developer - we are working mostly on back-end support code external to Drupal. The Fliqz folks are fantastic to work with.  The toolkit and web service is a breeze to use (I am using PHP5 Soap for the integration) and my dumb questions have been answered quickly.

I’m using Javascript callbacks on their uploader to kick off creating the content node in Drupal (the video and thumbnails remain at Fliqz) - so far its been incredibly easy.  The only problem I ran into was that my test files for video were too short.  So if you are trying them out, make sure your video is over five seconds long!

Easy to use, works as promised, smart staff.  Its rare enough these days to be greatly appreciated when encountered.

Liz @ Creative Liberty has a great idea with More than Worthy: Create an online dashboard for your creative project. Using iGoogle to create a dashboard around your important projects. I have to admit not really utilizing my Google pages for much.

Over the next week I’m going to be reviewing all my social apps - part of my spring cleaning. I am wondering what kind of active collaboration tools I can merge so my dashboards become more interactive. I would certainly add to Liz’s idea my Backpack and Google docs I might share.  I’ll update and share on Friday!

For most of us, email was the first “social networking application” we used. Email forwarding, mailing lists, mail groups - I miss the ease and simplicity that was email before spam. The death of email has been proclaimed many times (and one of my favorite blogs is “Death By Email.”)

I’ve been not only watching - but talking to a few folks that use StormPost from Datran Media. They made a tiny little splash recently by announcing social media integration with their newest release. Perhaps the splash should have been bigger, because this tool is impressive. Of course, while their technology is great, they do have a ways to go before they understand social media marketing themselves. Datran purchased SKYLIST - who created StormPost, and with their work on analytics and CoreMetrics I think they are onto something. Lycos, while no longer the player they once was, is certainly betting this solution will pay off.

Datran is growing, hiring, and pushing hard into the social media space. If they go with a light touch, they will make an impressive player in the next generation of social media utilization companies. Remember, the guys who make money in gold rushes are the ones that sell the pans.

CNN ran a story today on smaller social networks: MySpace, Facebook: Big not always better.  A good article, but not a surprising one.  Marketers, spammers, and investors all pant heavily chasing the big guys.  But the people who actually use the web - they go where they are engaged.  My wife - a professional photographer - enjoys scrapbooking and spends much more time on TwoPeasinaBucket than on Facebook.

Remember the Well?  BBS systems?  Before there was an Amazon and a Facebook and a Google, it was all about the community.  And for a lot of folks, the little community sites will be what they value most.  Hopefully, data portability and open social standards will make it easier for all of us to interact with our professional, niche, and big|box social networks.

I’d been tracking PageOnce since news of their funding (for a “Net Valet Service“) hit the streets last November. PageOnce is supposed to be a PageFlakes for your entire electronic life within reach. Credit cards, bank accounts, Ebay bids - everything. Unlike Mint, the goal is to cover as much of my life as possible.

These days I get a creepy feeling just entering my social security number. Handing my credit cards over to a beta site was just a little too unnerving. I started out with something tame - but would prove its functionality. I entered my Starbucks Card number and within a minute my balance popped up next to the little Starbucks icon.

Other reviewers have likened this new app to the iPhone - it is killer. But what I want to be able to do is just not view - but to manage! For example, showing the different interest rates on all my credit cards, allowing me to select the right one to fund my Starbucks card right there on the page.

And I can track almost all my social networking profiles and accounts here as well.

Techturf has some negative impressions, and I agree with some of the reservations Pamela has over the aggregation trend as a whole. Privacy and data portability will continue to conflict, and you do need to be careful out there.
But hey - my American Airlines miles, Facebook stuff, and latte balance all in one place. This is a good start.

PS - Need invites? Track me down here. Be nice and digg or stumble me first

You can still flog it in Seattle, but a fake blog in the UK may get you more than a embarrassing moment. SEO Chicks lets us in on the new Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008. ChrisG recaps the Walmart and Sony fiascos that would fall under these rules. At the very least, these fake blogging miscreants will be ‘named and shamed’ - Britain being one of the few countries left where this is actually punishment.

Of course, Morocco is even less tolerant - if you happen to create a fake Facebook profile of a crown prince. Then you get flogged for real!

Ironically, at the same time that more attention is being paid to floggers, the very value of content is being questioned. Sarah Perez questions whether content itself is becoming a commodity. Perhaps, as health search engine Hakia is gambling on, reputation and credibility is becoming the true coin of value.

When I look at my own browsing, linking, and reading habits, I find myself actually depending on the reputation of others. The number of Diggs something may have influences me less than if someone I am linked with has bookmarked/shared/dugg/recommended. Between fake blogs, borrowed content, and creditability gaps, perhaps we see a growing need for that gatekeeper some thought was no longer needed.

An editor.