Kerio Workspace has some features in common with collaboration solutions such as Basecamp, but without the project management features. It has more in common with file-sharing solutions such as ShareFile and with enterprise microblogging solutions like Flowr. When I spoke with the developers, they described Kerio Workspace as an email replacement and called it, only half in jest, “SharePoint meets Facebook.”

The idea is that organizations will use Kerio Workspace to organize and track changes to documents and other content files. As one might expect, it has a system for tracking changes, and social elements like a “news feed” where co-workers can post what they’re working on. It also lets users create internal “web pages” to display documents, audio and video, and users can specify if they wish to receive alerts by email.

Workspace 1.1 has added several new features, including:

• A touch-based mobile web interface for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry smartphones.
• The ability for users to create templates by copying existing page layouts and/or content.
• Drag and drop file uploading.
• Enhanced administration and security options.

Kerio Workspace 1.1 can be hosted in-house on your organization’s servers under Windows, Mac, Linux or VMWare. Pricing starts at $150 for a 5-user license. Additional user licenses are $30 each. Hosting is also available from resellers at additional cost.

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• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

With the rise of services such as AudioBoo, voice memos and voice notes are increasingly becoming a useful mobile productivity and publishing tool (see Aliza’s post, “How to Use Audio Microblogging for Your Work” for a roundup), and are beginning to outpace Apple’s in-house app in usefulness and features.

The latest to join this space is YiqYaq’s Soundbiter for iPhone, a free “rolling recorder” that’s constantly capturing your sonic environment, enabling users to “bite” the last minute of recorded audio for editing or publication. Indeed, Soundbiter actually seems ideally pitched at roving journalists wishing to capture soundbites for later publication.

As well as the continuous recording mode, other features include:

• A sound editor with waveform cropping and previewing.
• Uploading to the Yiqyaq’s companion RadioWeave “personal radio” publishing service.
• Tools to add metadata, such as tags, images and location data
• Automatic sharing of a clip with a user’s Twitter followers.

The relationship with RadioWeave is an curious one; though pitched at “bloggers, bird-watchers, concert-goers, life-streamers and journalists,” the company is blending user-submitted clips with professional audio content as a kind of personalized radio stream.

Constantly Recording Your Context

Regardless of the RadioWeave integration, the constant recording concept is interesting in of itself, and suggests a useful precedent for any number of mobile applications. Rather than having to load task-specific applications, what if your device was constantly recording its location, camera data, audio environment and applications simply dipped into that pool of data to edit, share or annotate? A little like the conceptual “blind camera” that records context rather than images.

In any case, Soundbiter is a richer and more useful alternative to the iPhone’s voice recording app. iPod touch users will need to use an external microphone — a perfect excuse to get hook up that pro XLR microphone!

Download Soundbiter for free at the iTunes App Store.

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• Mobile Q4: All Eyes Were on Android, 4G and the Rising Tablet Tide
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You and your team might be looking to a corporate microblogging platform to resolve some sort of communications issue. In this post we are going to take a look at how you can implement corporate microblogging for maximum benefit.

Run a pilot. Both Yammer and Present.ly have free versions, which make running a corporate microblogging pilot test for your organization a no-brainer — you aren’t dinging anybody’s budget to try it out. For the pilot, I advise choosing one project team — preferably one with vocal participants who are going to give feedback on the merits (or lack thereof) of the microblogging platform you are piloting.

Positively contrast microblogging vs. email. Failures in email communications abound in many geographically dispersed teams– and not all of those failures are technical in nature. I recommend auditing your team’s prior email communications to see where a corporate microblogging solution could augment and even replace email for project communications.

Communicate the successes. Changing from a communications medium like email requires some selling throughout the process. I’ve worked on communications software rollouts; you aren’t going to be able to escape those users who don’t want to change. This is the kind of user who needs to see your project team’s growing usage of corporate microblogging and its benefits.

Fit microblogging into an overall communications plan. Typically, project teams have just email and maybe instant messaging available to them. Above and beyond that, the organization might be using SharePoint or some sort of document management system. Making the jump to a new tool requires a plan; don’t just implement new tools for the sake of new tools. I often recommend a communications plan (informal or formal) that defines appropriate communications channels for team members..

Find a champion. As I mentioned in my previous post “Corporate Culture, Not Technology, Drives Collaboration“, rolling out a new technology like corporate microblogging requires management support to champion the cause.

Today’s online communications tools including corporate microblogging offer many benefits compared to corporate network-only email, faxes and telephone calls. However, your successful implementation of a corporate microblogging platform requires planning and strategy to ensure its adoption offers productivity to your team and a remedy to lingering project communications issues.

Have you implemented a corporate microblogging solution? Share your war stories, tips and advice below.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast
• Communications, Platforms, Privacy Ruled NewNet in Q4

As with classic email lists, Convos allows group members to send and reply to messages via email. But Convos has a larger feature set than standard email groups, including:

• A web interface where members can see and update what the group is working on. This password-protected, advertising-free web site includes panes to compose and display messages, upload files, manage tasks and schedules, and create and view on-screen pages. The interface has a custom URL like “group_name.convos.com” to which you can add your own logo.
• A system for creating and getting RSVPs for events.
• A system for posting comments and questions (which can be anonymous if desired).
• The ability to add subgroups, which could be useful for organizations with a committee structure.

But although Convos has a task module, it isn’t really a project management system: Its content is not organized by projects. If you need to manage projects, you’ll notice what Convos doesn’t have:

• The ability to group tasks together as part of larger milestones.
• The ability to assign tasks to specific members.
• Project management features, like Gantt charts.

Convos also doesn’t have any Twitter-like microblogging status updates. The Convos web interface looks a bit like a simplified version of Peago, which I recently reviewed. And it has many of the same limitations: It’s Flash-based, built in Flex and Silverlight, which means it’s not suited for corporate environments that limit Flash, or for mobile devices. Convos also shares with Peago a navigation structure that can be confusing; you can simplify the display by turning panes on and off, but the interface can get pretty crowded unless you’re using full-screen mode in a large monitor.

Convos has several pricing plans, ranging from a free version that allows five group members and 50MB of storage for files, to the $100 per month “Large” plan that allows 4GB of storage for unlimited members and subgroups.

Convos bills itself as “professional online groups.” If you need more than something like a Google Group can offer, and don’t mind the limitations of a Flash-based interface, then Convos may be for you. But if you need to manage projects, you’ll probably be better off with a full-featured project management system.

Have you used Convos? How do you communicate with groups?

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• Report: How Mobile Cloud Computing Will Change Tech

Create a Microblog

Before you start, bear in mind that your microblog does count against your blog’s storage and bandwidth quotas. Creating a microblog with TypePad follows the same well-documented and usable process as you use to create a new blog. There’s a new Pico theme for microblogs, which comes in tan, dark blue, dark gray and white. (I expect that if this offering takes off, then SixApart will add more microblog themes beyond the Pico theme.) Here is an example of that theme in white:

Manage a Microblog
After creating my microblog, I was greeted by a nicely designed user interface:

When you create a microblog, your categories don’t propagate over from your existing TypePad blog, so you are going to have to create them for your new microblog. The rest of the features should already be familiar to you as a TypePad user.

You also have the option to publish your posts to Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed via TypePad. Personally, while I try to keep Facebook for friends and Twitter for professional networking, I was happy to have the options to publish my blog posts to these two social networks, and the “post from anywhere” capabilities include support for email, iPhone, and the TypePad Blog It bookmarklet.

TypePad and Microblogging

TypePad has always been leader in blog publishing and management tools, and SixApart’s first steps into microblogging further builds on its platform. Well-managed blogs are a necessity for web workers who want to contribute to the real-time web. TypePad offers a set of tools that even non-web savvy users can use to create professionally designed blogs and microblogs. A well-done microblog can complement a web worker’s web presence and online brand. This new feature provides a low-maintenance option for web workers who want to use the same platform for all of their blogging efforts.

This latest TypePad feature release is well-executed and a natural fit for the app, and is further testimony to a growing yet versatile platform for blogging. I look forward to seeing future feature releases.

Have you tried microblogging with TypePad?

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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
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• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Jeff Pulver, the conference organizer, credits Twitter with everything that made the event happen, from the positive feedback that led him to set a date for the event, to obtaining the majority of commitments from speakers and panelists, to publicizing it almost entirely via tweets and retweets.

In my post “How Twitter is a Communications Game Changer,” I talked about the random but significant changes Twitter was causing in terms of the way we communicate and the tools we use. The 140conf — as it was called on Twitter — was the embodiment of a Twitterstream; it was Twitter in the flesh. Here are some of my observations from the conference:

1. We were all forced to speak in “tweets”

The format of the conference was 20 minutes for panels and between 10 and 20 minutes for presentations. There are now many conferences that enforce an abbreviated presentation time such as TED and Ignite, but this format still proves a tremendous challenge for many people. Pulver recommended that nobody rely on presentation slides, for example, and without fail, every speaker who decided to stick with slides dragged the pace of the day down, particularly when the technology inevitably did not work. Concise soundbites ruled the event. Pontification was revealed as the snooze-inducer that it is.

2. Half of the event took place on Twitter

Whether intentional or not, with the advent of Live Tweeting came the inevitable sea of open laptops and glowing digital mobile devices as everyone listened and simultaneously tweeted the interesting nuggets they were hearing. The “#140conf” hashtag appeared and disappeared on Twitter’s trending topics list, clearly demonstrating which sessions were more tweetable than others. While there were some complaints about the event taking place in an “underground bunker,” most people were connected at most times as evidenced by the continuous stream of in-the-moment tweets.

3. The topics were diverse like a public Twitterstream

While others complained about the seeming randomness — and in a few cases repetitiveness — of the content offerings at the conference, and others pointed out that it was in bad need of “curating,” a lot of us felt that it was more like a Tweetstream and possibly even the enactment of @JeffPulver‘s personal stream. He curated with a light touch, which added to the charm and spontaneity of the event.

4. Learning moments came in bursts

I commented to @beckymccray, who had flown in from Oklahoma for the event, that I felt like this conference offered a different kind of learning. Thankfully it wasn’t a “Twitter 101,”  but it also wasn’t a constant echo chamber where everyone did nothing but sing Twitter’s praises. What I got out of the conference was learning about the different ways people are using Twitter around the world and the real-life impact of Twitter and tweeting tools. More importantly, I was exposed to very different views and opinions of Twitter that forced me to stretch my thinking about how I use Twitter and how I could be using it differently or even better for my work.

5. Twitter will not save the world, but…

We all agreed that it wasn’t Twitter that was as important as it was the new and “now” way of communicating. The immediacy, the intimacy, the pervasiveness, the mobility — these are all aspects that Twitter embodies and features that it provides, but it is not all about Twitter. Twitter is our current touchstone, but it is a signal of massive and significant change in our world and in our lives. It is not a fad; it is a revolution of connectivity. And the 140 Character Conference was just a small glimpse of this Brave Now World.

Were you at 140conf, and if so, what did you get out of it? If not, what are you getting out of Twitter?

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• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Are Comments Facebook’s Next Big Service?

Ping.fm, a service that allows you to easily update a host of social networking and social media profiles all at once, seeks to resolve the headache of needing to log into multiple accounts to send the same message to different groups of friends and contacts all over the Internet.

While for some Ping.fm may just be a nice little time-saving utility, for social media and online marketing professionals, this service may well be a killer app.

Ping.fm currently supports more than 30 services, including microblogging platforms such as Twitter, Plurk and Jaiku, social networking web sites such as Facebook and Multiply, instant messaging applications such as GTalk Status and AIM Status, and most of the popular blogging platforms. Once you’ve set up a Ping.fm account and added your credentials for the services you use for social networking and social media purposes, you’re ready to return to your Ping.fm dashboard to send messages out to all of your profiles at once.

Adding your various social networks can be a little clunky simply because you need to have all of your various usernames, passwords and network keys at your disposal, but Ping.fm does a pretty good job of making the process as seamless as possible.

On the dashboard page, you can send out messages, or “pings,” to your selected services. The default setting sends your message to all of your services, but you can also filter profiles by “micro-blogs” or “statuses.” This is a nice feature, giving you the ability to parse your messages into groups, but I must admit that I don’t entirely understand which services fall into which categories (is FriendFeed a “micro-blog” or a “status”, for instance?). A character counter also lets you know the size of your ping, which is vitally important for squeezing your message in under Twitter’s 140-characters-per-tweet limit, for example. And a “Record Video” link allows you to stream a video recording directly through Ping.fm.

A nice feature is the ability to send out messages through Ping.fm “from” multiple locations. A huge array of “Services/Tools” on the dashboard allow you to set up your Ping.fm account so that you can ping via email, SMS, instant message, Facebook app, iPhone app, desktop app, and so on. This serves up enormous flexibility in allowing you to send a single message from anywhere and distribute your message to a large number of profile destinations quickly and easily.

The potential downsides to using Ping.fm are overlap and not engaging with individual social media and social networking communities as they are intended. Overlap comes in the form of having many of the same friends, colleagues and contacts on multiple services; sending them the same message “over and over again” on multiple profiles might only serve to annoy. Additionally, social media and social networking sites are meant to be two-way communications platforms, not one-way broadcasting mechanisms. If people perceive you as being someone who is broadcasting marketing messages and not interested in engaging with individual communities or, even worse, spamming communities with marketing messages and links, that can seriously damage your ability to effectively utilize social media for whatever purpose –- developing relationships, promoting a product or service, burnishing your professional reputation, and so on -– you had in the first place.

Overall, Ping.fm looks to be a simple (in a good way), effective, and easy-to-use service to communicate to multiple online communities quickly.

What do you think of Ping.fm?

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• Social Media Works, Just Not for BP
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

It turns out that Blellow is more than just a name. In fact, it’s an ambitious microblogging platform geared toward the web working and networking set. Note that I used “networking” without the commonly tacked-on “social” in front of it. Blellow is looking to become the LinkedIn of microblogging platforms, as opposed to the more chit-chatty, freewheeling space (crammed into 140-character or less bursts) that Twitter currently occupies.

The idea is that while Twitter and Facebook are now relatively “mainstream” places to keep up with current friends and ruminate about thoughts both big and small, Blellow offers a platform for microblogging professionals and web workers to coordinate meetups, find jobs, seek out projects and engage in professional conversations through the “groups” areas of the site.

One of the first things you’ll notice after you register and login to Blellow is that it feels different than most microblogging sites. There’s a torrent of statistics and communications management tools on the left column, including detailed stats that run down the number of friends, followers, “@” replies and “kudos” you’ve received (which may seem familiar to those of you who spend time using MySpace blogs) as well as data on public and private groups. With regard to kudos, Jennifer Van Grove at Mashable points out that, “Kudos are like credibility, so each time you receive kudos for a job well done, you’ll rank higher in Blellow search results, which could expose you to new clients and more work opportunities.”

Like Yammer, Blellow asks the simple question: “What are you working on?” In response to that question, Blellow allows you to enter up to 300 characters, which may be a more comfortable space to get a fully-formed thought in, as opposed to the 140-character limit that Twitter famously imposes.

Blellow handles public groups in kind of a nifty way. While Twitter uses the hashtag (#) convention to allow Twitter search and other third-party services to track topics, Blellow uses the percent sign (%) for tracking group conversations. For example, Apple Love (“A group for the discussion of Mac OS X, Apple Desktop & Laptops, and of course, the iPhone”), is set up with “%apple” in the post entry field when you visit the group’s page. That means posts entered from the Apple Love group, as well as anywhere else on Blellow in which “%apple” is used, will be aggregated into the group’s stream. This is a smart way, in my view, to allow for the organic creation of mini-communities within the larger Blellow platform. The challenge with any new social site, of course, that offers many features is to get people to use them and to avoid the dreaded “ghost town effect” in which things look a bit tumble weed-y.

Private groups is an area that Blellow is looking to monetize, charging $5 per month for a private group with up to 1GB of storage, or $10 per month for 10 GBs. If Blellow can make headway in signing up groups in any numbers, look for other microblogging sites to follow this model. That said, because strong private group experiences already exist for free in other products like FriendFeed Rooms, it’s likely it will be hard to get many to cough up cash for a private group, at least initially.

The way in which the Jobs section is set up reveals much about who Blellow is targeting, namely web workers and creative professionals. With a default setting of All, there are currently filters for Design, Development, Writing and Other.

The Projects section, an entirely separate area found on Blellow’s top navigation menu, again focuses on web workers looking to make some extra money or to engage in a resume-building project of some sort. Examples of projects – which may be toggled between Paid and Pro Bono – include designing a business web site, building a Facebook app and writing a web site review.

Would you consider using Blellow for business networking or for finding work?

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• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

(via TechCrunch)

Twitter and other microblogging services are radically shifting the ways in which people communicate and share information. And that shift is now entering the workplace on a large scale, particularly for web workers and for companies who are embracing the ways in which microblogging platforms can save time while increasing productivity.

Yammer, which plays off the already classic Twitter call to action, “What are you doing?” by asking, “What are you working on?” is an easy-to-use microblogging service that is tailored to the workplace and organizations in several important ways.

As Hutch Carpenter boldly states, in a piece called Microblogging Will Marginalize Corporate Email, “As more companies take up microblogging with services like Yammer, Socialcast, Present.ly and SocialText Signals, employee communications amongst employees will both increase and divert away from email.”

Carpenter then presents an equivalently bold image to illustrate how he believes microblogging can reduce the glut of email in the workplace.

Indeed, while I was at South by Southwest in Austin this past week, I heard people joke around to the effect of, “Wouldn’t it be nice if all emails had to be 140 characters or less?” Services like Yammer and Socialcast help to reduce the burden and overload that email brings to the workplace by providing the simple, flexible communication of microblogging with a number of specific work-related features.

While Twitter offers private accounts, services like Yammer and Present.ly impose a higher level of security by locking each network down to only those people who have an individual company email address.

The additional draw of these services in comparison to Twitter are features such as tagging, archiving, groups, attachments and mobile compatibility.

The combination of content aggregation features and microblogging features also offers a powerful way for groups and organizations to communicate and manage tasks and workflow. FriendFeed Rooms is a great example of this, as it allows RSS feeds, messages, links, images and video to be brought into a “room,” or group page (which may be private/invite only or public), with each new post creating the opportunity for a conversation thread. New activity in the room (new threads, posts, comments or “likes”) can be observed by seeing which thread appears at the top of the page.

FriendFeed Rooms has the power to be a game-changer in the microblogging space, creating an easy-to-use yet powerful communications platform for organizations and web workers while helping to reduce email overload. For example, the contributing writers for louisgray.com (of which I’m a member) use FriendFeed Rooms as a primary point of contact and communication.

ididwork is one of my favorite microblogging services, as it provides a sleek and streamlined approach to short real-time communication and archiving while also providing managers with a great task management feature set. Particularly for distributed work teams, ididwork can provide a basis for communication, information management, and work flow while drastically reducing the headache of wading through hundreds of e-mails each day. ididwork for employees is free while ididwork for managers costs $5 per month.

Are microblogging services reducing the number of your work-related emails?

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

“Web sites don’t really actively manage your online reputation,” I countered.

“Yes, but aren’t there free templates that people can use to set up cheap web sites? And what about hiring someone to create a one-page site?”

“I’m sure there are templates, but I would never recommend to a client today to build a web site like that,” I explained. “And I’d never recommend that anyone just put up a single page.”

My comments didn’t faze the writer, who was determined to present me as a “web expert” recommending cheap and easy web site building solutions for her article.

That exchange got me thinking: How did I – a former web developer – become so anti-web site? And why is a national publication promoting an article advising that businesspeople build web sites for themselves to manage their online reputation, especially when their chosen web expert was telling them, “Don’t do it!“?

Why static web sites don’t really cut it any more

I don’t really think web sites are obsolete. Clearly, blogs are fundamentally web sites, but they are more dynamic and have more interactive features.

My feeling is that static “plain vanilla” web sites:

• have limited impact on your online reputation. Basic web sites, as I’ve defined them, just don’t have as much influence as they once did. They’re being replaced by an array of social media, where your reach can be exponentially greater, with much less effort on your part.
• have limited interactive capabilities. Blogs and blog engines are much better suited for integrating interactive features, embedding widgets, and interconnecting social media accounts.
• are too expensive compared to other available solutions. A simple three to five page web site can still cost at $300-$500, or more, through a web developer. That’s if you can find a reputable one willing to take such a small project. Then there are the “hidden” costs of web hosting and fees for site updates. It all adds up and “affordable” can become “nickel and dime nightmare.”
• are still too complicated for most non-technical clients to build, much less manage. Unless there is a built-in CMS, even a five page site can be nearly impossible for someone without the required  HTML and graphic skills to update properly, even if they have an  expensive authoring tool tool like Dreamweaver.
• have less of a positive professional impact when templated. Let’s face it, a templated static site site almost always looks like…a templated site. Strangely, there doesn’t seem to be a bias against Twitter and MySpace pages that look “templated.” Yet.

What works instead of static web sites today

• blogs or blog engines behind sites. Blog engines are much more flexible these days and for the most part allow easy integration of “widgets” and other tools to incorporate other social media into the blog. You don’t need a developer or designer, or even HTML know-how, to use many of today’s blogging tools. You still end up with a clean, professional-looking blog that you can use to manage both content and comments with ease.
• social networks. Google my name and my Facebook, FriendFeed and LinkedIn accounts show up on the first page. Until blogs and social networks, only my web site showed up and the rest were mentions of me on other people’s sites. It’s nice that other people mention me, but when it comes to managing my online reputation, I can’t control what they say. For businesses, Facebook Pages and Facebook Advertising add a great deal of power to building and managing online reputation.
• microblogs. Soon after I joined Twitter, my account showed up on the first page of Google results for my name and has never left its lofty position. Twitter appears often and high on Google searches.  So people can find you via your Twitter page and then link over to your static web site or, better yet, your blog.

Yes, there are very specific cases when only a web site will do for a client, and static web sites still make good archives and basic information destinations. Even I use a five page static “placeholder” site as a destination for my new consulting company.

However, whenever possible, I recommend integrating a blog, microblog and some relevant, strategic social network visibility into the mix to manage your online reputation have a far greater impact on awareness-building.

The main caveats, of course, are make sure there is consistent monitoring in place and a solid policy on how to handle negative statements or conversations about you or your company in the social media. But if you are not there in the first place and are, instead, twiddling your thumbs with a “plain vanilla” static web site waiting for people to come to you, you’re about to get lost in the shuffle.

Are static, “plain vanilla” web sites obsolete?

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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
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The company appears to be pursuing growth over immediate revenue streams, such as the lucrative delivery of SMS notifications and the ability to ‘white-label’ the service with a company, group or organization’s own branding and features. It’s into this latter category that products such as laconi.ca and Folkstr as well as startups like Shout’Em are entering.

The Croatian Shout’Em recently received €350’000 in seed funding to further develop its service, a tool to ‘roll your own microblogging networks. This essentially allows you to host and operate your own Twitter-like communites. I was prepared to be skeptical about a Twitter-clone, but have been pleasantly surprised by how sophisticated and powerful the Shout’Em user experience actually is.

A VC recently told me that startups offering white-label options are generally a sign of an inability to capture a broad consumer audience along with the associated value and volume. However, there’s a place for non-venture funded startups to offer good quality services to thousands rather than millions of customers.

Upon joining the service, users can operate multiple microblogging networks, picking a subdomain of shoutem.com for each and adding from a bunch of a la carte features such as file-sharing, photo-sharing, privacy levels, restricting membership by domain and even choosing feature sets modeled around Twitter and Pownce as templates. More adventurous users can tinker directly with CSS and template designs to bring in their own branding.

Premium services starting at around $10/month allow networks to use private domains, increased storage and bandwidth, inline advertising to generate modest revenue. Upcoming features include SMS notification, Facebook/GoogleTalk integration and an Android application.

It’s an impressive application, rolling up many features offered by Twitter add-ons into an integrated, brandable service. There’s certainly a modest demand for private Twitter-y networks. However, like Ning – the ‘roll your own social network’ platform – it remains to be seen whether white-label microblogging platforms are viable against their large consumer counterparts.

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• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• A 2011 Connected Consumer Forecast
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

One of the big wins for those who really want to fine-tune their blog entries is the addition of an HTML source view to the already-strong visual editor. Combined with the ability to download your blog’s actual template for previews, this makes it possible to have a very good idea of what posts will look like before they’re uploaded. If you’re a WordPress user, you’ll also be happy to see the support for the new comments API.

The built-in microblog viewer sports some polish, such as automatic posting of images to Twitpic and integration with Twitter search. It’s also integrated with ping.fm now, which means you can use Blogo to post to many more microblogs beyond Twitter.

All in all, the new version is a nice holiday upgrade. Purchase price remains $25 with a three-week free trial.

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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

You may have heard about some of the Twitter alternatives like Identica and Yammer. But the Pistachio team has identified a solid 20 applications in this space already – and undoubtedly there are more lurking in the wings. With this overabundance, it’s useful to have some sort of mental framework for organizing things – especially if you’re trying to decide which ones to evaluate for your own use.

The report breaks up the available applications into six groups: pure-play applications, enterprise-built, open source, pseudo-microsharing, integrated microsharing, and self-serve microsharing. Understanding these distinctions can help you quickly narrow down to applications that may be a good fit for your organization. The comparison charts here will help as well.

Key findings of the research here indicate that this is an area poised for rapid growth. With many organizations testing microsharing for a year or more now, we should expect case studies to appear soon. The best thing about this research is that it’s written in a way that enterprise decision-makers will understand – so if you’re trying to sell your management on the benefits (and needs) of microsharing, it’s a great tool.

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• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• A 2011 Connected Consumer Forecast
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

But the question has to be asked: does it matter? If Jaiku had managed to reopen with fanfare a month or two back, when Twitter was having severe uptime problems, it might have stolen the microblogging spotlight. Now, though, with Twitter humming along smoothly, it seems destined to be just another also-ran. While I won’t rule out the possibility of exciting innovations (or the traffic boost that could come from things like integration with existing Google accounts), it remains true that the leading service is the one where conversations are already taking place.

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• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• A 2011 Connected Consumer Forecast