SEOMoz yammers it up during Whiteboard Friday to talk about visualization.  I think visualization is one of those new and sexy fields that you’ll hear more and more about in the near future.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Visualization from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

12seconds is updating their iPhone app to take advantage of the new OS 3.0.  The app, which should be available soon, will allow you to send short video messages directly to your friends via twitter.

Back ‘dat thing up and pick up some great tips about landing page design through CopyBlogger’s Landing Page Makeover.  Their most recent tutorial covers CarsHelpingAmerica.org.

If you’re a fan of Indie Rock, I highly recommend The Veils – Sun Gangs. Rock out this weekend.

The fine folks at the Red Cross are working diligently on crafting a Social Media Policy Handbook.  They’ve got a great start and are light years ahead of even most for-profit businesses. As it should, its available online for your viewing pleasure.

Staying with the non-profit side of things, NPR has a great feature of The Extraordinaries.  Its a micro volunteering iPhone app that allows people to give small blocks of time (< 5 min) and knowledge to a non-profit. Some of the first tasks available are tagging images for the Brooklyn Museum building a map of childhood playgrounds.  It’s a beautiful concept.

SEOMoz updated their SEO Best Practices to account for new industry data.  They clear the air and a lot of confusion in regards to new search engine optimization standards.  The synopsis is H1 tags are not all that necessary anymore, stop trying to sculpt PageRank with nofollow, use footer links, java and flash sparingly, traffic to a site doesn’t determine its ranking and quite a bit more.

Smashing Magazine compiled a great list of web design checklists and resources that will help improve your writing skills.

Rumor has it that Google is experimenting with product ads that would would work very similar to AdWords, but display an image ad along the right hand side of the SERP when the user searches on a particular term.  These ads would run on a pay-per-action basis rather than a pay-per-click (PPC) basis.

Elizabeth Gilbert TED Talks video in which she talks about life after your greatest successes are believed to be behind you, the art of showing up everyday and how you should put down your ego and realize that your genius is on loan from the universe.  It’s well worth the 20 minutes.

Facebook has decided to post its payment terms to the Facbeook Governance page and is open for user feedback for the next 3 days.

While the initial payment system on Facebook will only be a beta test, the company is expected to finalize testing and roll out an official payment API in the coming months.

Could this finally signal the payment system that Facebook promised us back 2007?  I can already see developers salivating.

San Jose Mercury News to Charge For Online Content — congratulations to the SJMN for trying something, my regrets that it’s this. This business model didn’t fail in 1998 because there weren’t enough people on the Internet, it failed for the same reason it will fail now: you have a generic product and a cheaper substitute will win.

The weekend starts Friday at 6pm and wraps up the evening of Sunday, May 31st.  The founders have put together a Facebook group to bounce around initial ideas, but project votes won’t be made until Friday evening.  This year the plan is to have multiple projects simultaneously move forward at the same time.

To give you an idea of the type of projects that get launched in a weekend, take a look at San Francisco, Phoenix, New York and Lexington.

Startup Weekend is limited to the first 100 people that sign up, so be sure to grab a ticket now.  Help support and grow the entrepreneurial spirit of Memphis.

Jeremiah Owyang speaks with Blake Cahill on what he sees the future of the social web is going to bring us. He theorizes that there will be 5 era’s of the social web. He believes that people will start to own the market instead of companies and that communities will continue to take charge over brands. Here’s a break down of each era.

1. Era of Social Relationships – Simply connecting with others online (i.e. – facebook, myspace, twitter)
2. Era of Social Functionality – An era we entered in 2007 where third-party applications could be built on top of social networks to allow the user to do something extra. Jeremiah believes we’re still in the early days of this era.
3. Era of Social Colonization – Your entourage of friends come with you wherever you go online or with your mobile device. You will make decisions based on what they’ve purchased and what they recommend.
4. Era of Social Context – Content (web, advertisements, TV, etc) will be tailored to your preferences. The more data that a user reveals about him or herself, the more relevant the content they receive. Brands will offer added benefits to those who have favorable preferences to their products or services. He predicts the death of the registration page.
5. Era of Social Commerce – Communities will come together and define entire products and features they want. These groups will then bid out their wants to competing brands. PR models will flip and agencies will now represent groups rather than companies.

The world of communication and product delivery is changing as the Web evolves and new services are introduced, enabling us to gain faster access to information, download richer media more quickly, and rapidly voice our opinions and feedback near and far in a wide variety of methods, including text, voice, video and imagery. As customers become more savvy and in tune with these new tools, we are also expecting those offering products and services to adapt, and as such, I thought it made sense to put forth what I believe are key tenets of a new consumer manifesto for today’s real-time world.

Who do you feel are the best companies that are really in-tune with real-time consumer expectations? The worst? What will it take for more companies to tune in and take action?

Buried deep in the iPhone OS 3.0 keynote was something which I believe to be very important. Basically, the new OS will offer an improved App Store, which opens many new possibilities for developers and consumers. Developers could sell more things on top of their apps, and consumers would be able to expand their experience with those apps. Apple has promised that improved OS will work within the applications, therefore you can purchase and upgrade new things through the app itself, even while the transaction still goes through the App Store internally. For example, an iPhone game developer could charge for additional game levels or digital content creators, such as magazines could charge for a subscription of 6 issues which ran out after a specific period of time.

What’s the opportunity here for Apple?

This got me to thinking that Apple has the ability and backend already in place to fill the void where Facebook, Google and Amazon have failed us. They could lead a revolution of publishers around the world monetizing content beyond your typical smart phone app. Picture a site that offers digital content subscriptions, collects membership dues on a periodic basis, or provides premium services on their page.  My theory is that Apple could transform your iTunes ID into a single sign-on (similar to Facebook Connect) enabling publishers to charge customers on a recurring basis using a single authorization anywhere digital content is sold.  I envision blogs, podcasts and mobile & social applications. Essentially what I’m talking about is a microtransaction using your iTunes log in.Anyone with a publishers account could now charge and earn significant income from a multitude of sources.

For me, this could do the same thing for online publishers as it did for the struggling music industry and in the same ways it created a marketplace for independent programmers.  Apple is definitely big enough and has the foundation in place to pull it off.

How I envision it working?

Here’s a quick and dirty mockup of how I envision an Apple payment program working on a site such as the NY Times.

Now this is all speculation, but I’d be interested to hear your feedback. Tell me how crazy I am in the comments below.

The mixer that followed gave attendees the chance to speak with both C.C. and Adrian one-on-one.  Both guys were very generous with their time and knowledge.  One Half Amazing gives them a tip of the hat.

Check out the beautiful slides below if you’re interested in hearing what they had to say.

My quick thoughts on why this is a good thing;

• Once the user takes an action, the advertiser doesn’t have to pay to retarget you with new ads.
• The advertiser gets more bang for their buck.  The word of mouth marketing is worth a lot more than a visit to a lame website with only nutrition facts available.  Your entire network now knows you’re a fan.
• If you google ‘Vitamin Water 10′ the only page (besides paid placements) that is related with Glaceau is in position 5 and falls below the fold. This probably has to do with the entire site being in flash, lacking detailed product page titles and basic SEO, but I guess if you can’t own your brand name, then you change the rules.
• Facebook allows you to create almost an exclusive club for the product, providing a stream of new content and interactions with the brand on a regular basis.
• Directing users to your social site allows you to talk to them in the space they spend a lot of  their time without the waste of the usual banner ads.

What do you think?  As a consumer, would you rather interact with a brand on Facebook? If you’re an advertiser, have you tried this approach? If so, how did it work?

• Obsession x Voice = High Quality and Meaning
• Whatever your topic, figure out how to be better at it than 80% of the rest of the world. Pick your obsession and focus on it. Think about that person you wish to write for.
• Give away more stuff than you think is sensible, and make it easy to get to.
• It is okay to have a strong voice about something.
• Don’t become too obsessed with the things you want to make money on.

Listen to the full podcast episode here

All Laundry Detergent teamed up with The Celebrity Apprentice to help create and distribute a viral video that donated 50 cents to two charities every time their video was shared. All is essentially using their budget as incentive to encourage people to share and distribute clips online, but to also build goodwill. The content of the video below is a little long, but overall the theme is pretty good. Since I knew that 50 cents was going to a charity, I was willing to tune in for a little longer.

What a great way to incorporate TV with online video, web, corporate partners and a good cause.

The charities supported were the Guide Dogs for the Blind charity and The Lili Claire Foundation. Razorfish is the agency behind this.