Todd And - The Power To Connect has released a nice list of the top 150 marketing blogs. The rating is based on different criteria like Google PageRank or Technorati. Interesting read…

Not just one but 12 blogs support Puma's promotion efforts for this year's soccer World Cup. "Adopt a German" features the blogs of 12 young Germans from different cities. The hip youngsters offer their very personal view of Germany and the World Cup through their blogs and thus present a fresh, unconventional and innovative image of Germany and Puma. The hip dozen travels across Europe to convey the message and help feeding the feeds. By the way, chief ambassador Franka Potente functions as testimonial and welcomes visitors - in German.

via cscout.com

Washington Post reports that Blogging, Social Networking and Local Search are responsible for highest growth rates on the internet while overall growth is slowing down. According to the latest data provided by market research firm comScore Media Metrix, Google’s blogging service Blogger.com increased its user base by 528 percent in one year or from 2.5 million to15.6 million unique visitors. While overall internet growth went down to 4%, social websites that demand and offer more interaction with the user seem to be the new drivers of internet growth. According to Gary Arlen, a research analyst and president of Arlen Communications Inc., blogging finally fulfils the original promise about participation of the user: "This medium empowers users in such a way that they can do what they want and be heard."

Just read on Micro Persuasion that Nike launched a basketball blog. This could be a potential platform to gain credibility and connect with basketball fans. Right now the blog still smells too corporate, I guess. The overall look and feel is a bit unexciting and the font is hard to read. Nike's blog still lacks comments and therefore my impression was it feels rather cold and uninviting. However, I agree with Micro Persuation: the photos are really nice and big which might help connecting with basketball fans more than anything else.

There are quite a few online project and team management tools out there (also called hosted services) that let you manage your tasks in many ways. Vastly acclaimed Basecamp by 37signals is probably one of the most user friendly ones featuring management of your team, your clients, projects and to-dos including timesheets. It also has a nice, very intuitive collaboration tool called Whiteboard that lets you simply note down your and your co-workers ideas on a piece of virtual paper. We are currently testing this tool with some of our clients and I will probably write more about our learnings shortly.

Veetro. It also features the basic stuff, of course, and adds billing to the set of functionalities. My first impression was quite good as Veetro has a very nice user interface. The desktop can be arranged by dragging and dropping small applets onto your dashboard (technical remark: yes, it's fully AJAXed). The flipside, though, is the speed. Where basecamp comes with desktop-application-speed, Veetro is slow. There were also some error messages when I tested it. Prices range from free to $39.95 per month and user for teams of two and more.

basecamp always comes with unlimited users and clients but you are limited to the number of projects you can handle at once. Unlimited Basecamp is $99 per month. So far I would recommend Basecamp but you can try both free of charge and compare them based upon your needs.

An interesting initiative has just been brought to life by Coca Cola introducing quite a new form of corporate blogging. Torino Conversations covers the winter Olympics from the perspective of six students picked by Coca Cola marketing representatives in six countries. The three teams, each comprising two junior journalists visit the various sports sites, talk about everyday kind of events, interview athletes and more.

The first two to start are the Chinese and American blogger, Du Wei and Katie Foley. It seems they have all taken a very personal and individual approach posting everything from pictures to podcasts. PR-Blogger, a German public relations blog says Coca Cola invested in this test project to become more familiar with modern media such as blogs and podcasts. The project has been labelled a “small step” by Knallgrau.at, the Austrian agency responsible for the web technology used.