Vitrue’s Social Media Index (SMI) assigns brands and products a score based on overall buzz from status updates, videos, photos and blog posts. The company has tallied its results for 2009 and released its top 100 social brands based on index scoring, with last year’s winner — the iPhone — reigning supreme once again.

Although the index focuses on consumer mentions and reactions — as opposed to indexing brand engagement via social media — the list is still a veritable powerhouse of information in terms of consumer buzz and word-of-mouth …

GROU.PS, a do-it-yourself social network focused on moderated online collaboration has steadily gained an impressive amount of users and added compelling features to its application. The social network platform has just hit 2 million users, adding another million members in just 6 months.
And GROU.PS has amped up its offering for publishers by launching Elastic Modules, which gives publishers the ability to change the way the data is displayed to their visitors. To date, the highest reach of look and feel customization was at the template level; the
publisher could only …

We know that some of you have been eyeing the special Meebo features we launched earlier this year on Mashable with envy. Who doesn’t want to add Meebo Chat, drag and drop content sharing, and extra analytics to their site?
Today, Meebo is handing out an early Christmas present — Meebo Bar — and gifting all those extra special features to anyone that wants them on their own sites.
Read more at: Mashable
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Getting people to interact with others and upload content to a community-driven site enough may sound easy, but engagement doesn’t happen automatically. It takes time and work, and much of the right formula is deduced through trial and error.
Here are 10 tips for increasing user engagement that work for news community web sites, but can apply to all types of online user-engagement communities.
Read more at: Mashable
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{Photography by lulugaia}

Email. Twitter. Instant Messaging. Facebook. Those are just four of the most popular ways to communicate online. And actually, the average 23-year-old has 6 different accounts that they check for messages each day. Maintaining and keeping up with that is either basically impossible, or flat-out impossible. That’s where Threadsy comes in.
Launching its large beta today at TechCrunch50 as a free web app, Threadsy wants to take all of your online communication and shove it into a single service. All of the messages directed at you (email and …

Pimpy3wash just finished doing a round of laundry. Hacklab.toilet just flushed and mattsoffice tweeted that the temperature is 83.3° F.
It might seem like just another day in the Twitterverse, where prosaic, personal updates stream throughout the day. Except @Pimpy3wash, @hacklab.toilet and @mattsoffice are not real people: They are a washing machine, a toilet and an array of home light and temperature sensors. Each of them, with help from some microcontrollers, wires and Arduino boards, have been rigged to answer Twitter’s basic question: “What are you doing?”
“It started as a …

task.fm is your digital personal assistant. Just send us an email with something like:
“meeting with bob next tuesday at noon”
“pick up the dry cleaning in 30 minutes”
An alternative to Remember the Milk, simpler.

We’re big fans of TinyChat (in fact we use it to power the Mashable Lounge). Their live broadcasting web-based platform enables anyone with a webcam to create video chatrooms with social integration.
Today they’re announcing some pretty big updates to the service that will not only improve function, but also enhance their feature set. The freshly released updates will let users better control their own live show, benefit from better video quality, private message other chatters, and have access to the previously Mashable ()-only feature that can give your …

The social IM client Digsby can not only connect you to your AIM and your Gtalk accounts, but log you onto Gmail, Facebook and Twitter, too. A recent release fixed its RAM-eating problem , and now it seems that all of that hard work (and RAM-fixing) is paying off. (Read more at: Mashable)
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{Image by digsby}

“Everyone on planet Earth has had their bike stolen at some point in their life. This website is dedicated to cataloging everyone of those stories.”
SomeoneStoleMyBike.com
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{Photography by DreamsJung}

Rafaël Rozendaal‘s website perfectly sums up his entrancing internet art:

Most people know me for my websites. My subjects range from clouds to blood, from hands to farts, from hills to dollars, from doors to fire.

Rozendaal is a forefather of the current single serving sites explosion, and it shows in his work’s standout beauty and interactivity. His homepage documents years of acclaimed work, but in case you’re unfamiliar (or just looking for a simplistic internet retreat), here are a few of our favorites to get you started. (Read more at: …

In this comprehensive and step-by-step web development tutorial, you will learn how to convert a Photoshop mockup of a professional web layout design that features an illustrative landscape header into a standards-compliant XHTML/CSS template.

This is a follow-up tutorial requested by you, the readers of Six Revisions. To learn how to create the Photoshop web layout mockup, head on over to the tutorial called How to Create an Illustrative Web Design in Photoshop. (Read more at: Six Revisions)
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{Photography by Jeff Belmonte}

Take a look through these ten solutions — which range from common, everyday type of Google Maps mashups to heavy-hitting, enterprise-level applications — and be amazed at how very little work can bring big results. (Read more at: E Tag Live)
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{Image thanks to OpenKapow }

Three months ago we reported that Ads Had Come to Twitter and it was a pretty big deal – until Twitter promptly said the word “sponsored” was only appearing on the site in error. Now the “sponsored definitions” of certain Twitter “concepts” have appeared on the site again – and they sure look legit this time.
These first ads probably aren’t going to bring in enough cash to fuel a micro-app acquisition spree by Twitter, but this is the first clear public indication of one way the company is bringing …

Internet history in the making? Maybe.
The creation of something new, a meme to be? Possibly!
Intriguing? Absolutely!
Guaranteed? Yeah, right!
In an few hours (4:00 PM PST, Thursday June 11, 2009) Scobleizer (a.k.a.: Rober Scoble) is launching Building 43, a new project sponsored by RackSpace, and promising to be a lens into what’s after what comes next, some call it web 3.0, some call it web 2010. There will be insights into the companies that are both kool and successful like Zappos, Facebook and the likes, and knowing Scobleizer it will be …

That’s the gazillion dollar question. Using social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to drive engagement, marketing, and customer service is all fine, but the bottom line is whether these services lead to actual sales. Companies who use these services say they do, but a new survey says the don’t.
Last weekend at the TWTRCON conference, a panel consisting of Mike Prasad, Brand/New Media Director at Kogi BBQ; Beth Mansfield, Public Relations Manager at Carl’s Jr.; and Stefanie Nelson from Dell Outlet were asked if they made money on Twitter. …

. . . Of all the digital marketing tactics voted on, here are the top ten:

Blogging (34%)
Microblogging (Twitter) (29%)
Search engine optimization (28%)
Social network participation (Facebook, LinkedIn) (26%)
Email marketing (17%)
Social media monitoring & outreach (17%)
Pay per click (14%)
Blogger relations (12%)
Video marketing (10%)
Social media advertising (7%)

. . . read more at: Online Marketing Blog
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{Photography by Emrank}