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I am excited to inform you of a major Near-Time update that provides integration with widgets and other Web services. This will enable you and your team to create "user generated solutions" on the fly. A widget is a micro-application that you can embed in your Near-Time wiki or weblog. 

Enhancements include:

• real-time chat from Meebo, Gabbly, and Skype widgets
• video and widget aggregators
• polls and surveys from SurveyGizmo, Poll Daddy, and Wufoo
• maps and mash-ups from Google and Trippermap
• news and information from Yahoo! Finance and Forbes
  
  

Near-Time will be certifying widget providers to ensure that you and your members have access to best quality widgets.  You can submit other widgets by clicking here

How do I find that lost image?  The image picker now allows you to search, view, and select a thumbnail of that image before it is inserted to the page.  Here is a quick snapshot from one of my wikis.   

Is it really 90-9-1?

The 1% Rule is a theoretical internet concept which states that the number of people who create content on the internet represent 1% (or less) of the people actually viewing that content.

(From Wikipedia)

Maybe closer to 50-50? 

Forrester came out other metrics in April on how web audiences consume and in

Judging from their survey- I think Web 2.0 participation is the swell of active participation.   Active participation includes collectors of RSS feeds, videos, social bookmarks and joiners who use social networking sites.

According to Google’s Search Product Manager:

The average number of searches per unique visitor
done in one day on Google:

  7 

The average number of pageviews on Facebook or
MySpace per unique visitor:

  100  Source: http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/2007/04/forresters_new_.html 

Can marketers take advantage of this?

Marketers, Integrated Marketing, Advertising, and PR are all scrambling to figure out how to be involved in the conversation of communities like Facebook and use emerging technologies like blogs and wikis for their overall web-marketing strategy.

A McKinsey QuarterlyGlobal Survey just released a new study on "How companies are marketing online" that provides some insight into how top executives see coming for the Web 2.0 conversation. 

What are the emerging technologies marketing departments using?

McKinsey Quarterly’s Global Survey found the following adoption rate in the enterprise:

32 Blogs External blogs are available on the public Internet. Key employees can write about industry trends, product updates, the goings-on at the company, upcoming events and so on. It can be a way to create a dialog with customers, as well as build brand and increase search engine optimization (SEO).

15% Wikis Wikis are websites that allow users to simply create, edit and collaborate on content. 

15% Widgets- micro-application that you can embed in your webpage or blog

I saw an interesting piece in the NY Times Arts & Leisure section this weekend ("The Author Will Take Questions Now")
examining the go-to-market strategy for Amazon AND the Google Search Results Page (SERP).   

The head web strategist at Harper Collins admitted she would rather have the author promote themselves online.  It proves as a nice complement and the Publishing company can steer clear of the online marketing.

In response to this demand, Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired, recently started another venture (http://www.booktour.com).  BookTour.com is a site for authors to market their books online along with their book signing/reading schedule.  

Is this the next chapter of the Long Tail?  Anderson, in "The Long Tail", explains how Amazon matches its profits from the best-seller list with backlist of millions of books.

Authors want increased attention.  When you don't make it into the Sunday Book Review- don't sweat.  Maybe you can have your book announced instead on thousands of blogs, social networking sites, and Wikipedia!   

For example, one article might bring 10,000 hits from the Book Review.  By contrast, you need 100 hits from 100 other sites to reach the same amount of traffic for you book!    And- as an added bonus... you might be in the top 5 for your target keywords on Google. Check out SEOMoz for more on Search Engine Optimization

McKinsey Quarterly surveyed over 500 German employees on their use of participatory media- defined to include blogs, wikis, and social video.  Simple questions such as, "Why do you upload videos?"and "What motivates you to post to the wiki?" offers great insight into harnessing the collective-intelligence of the company.   More than half of the contributors to a cable company wiki mentioned motivations such as-

• Reputation building
• Team spirit
• Community Identification

Managers within the companies also pointed to the social networks and company e-mail system to identify the social mavens  or thought leaders to take charge on the wiki.

The leadership from within the company created better-quality posts and also boosted overall participation within the company.

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