ARE MUSICIANS TAKING ON SOCIAL NETWORKING ON THE WEB?

If You Would Like to Connect With Some of the Top Musicians and create your own Social Network at the same time; Then Read On…

If you are one that loves music, and would love to network with these artists, then you just may have your opportunity. Many of the artists, such as 50 Cent, Ludacris, Kylie Minogue and many more have decided to move away from the vast space of MySpace, to a new alternative site, a site that is destined to be a star on Web 2.0. This site is Ning, a place where you can connect with some of your favorite artists.

How Does Ning Work and Will It Benefit My Viral Marketing Campaign?

Ning was founded by Marc and Gina Bianchini in October 2004 to provide an opportunity for you and me the ability to create our own social networks for anything and everything. Ning is the power behind the largest number of the Internet’s social networks, and social networking is all about viral marketing.

You will have the opportunity to use the latest and greatest in social networking, features that are truly customizable by you to fit your needs. This is a platform that provides all the features you need to be a success in the social networking arena. The only thing you need to bring to the table is your time and determination. With this you will be able to build your own social network. This is not a prefitted site, this is one you create yourself.

What is the Purpose of Ning?

The founders first started Ning on a very simple premise, they wanted to provide a way for anyone to create their own social networking site. They were expecting some amazing results and they got that and so much more! They have artists, athletes, musicians , educators, journalists, students, alumni, hobbyists, and any other group of interests you can imagine. The diversity of these groups is amazing and quite profound.

As you check out the Ning website, you will find a very informative FAQ section, where you can learn about their Network Creators community.

Are you a business or company that wants to promote your private label? If so, check out Ning for Business.

You will find these features on the Ning website as posted there:

# Members can invite new members, meet new people, and make new friends on your network.

# Full message center with address book importing from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Hotmail.

# See your network members when they are online now.

# Customizable profile pages just for you.

# Photo slideshows, video players, music players, and network badges, that can be embedded anywhere on the Internet, seamlessly funneling new people to your network.

# Set your own different privacy settings for every photo, video, group, or blog post they contribute.

# RSS feeds of your network’s features, such as members, discussions, photos, videos, music/podcasts, and blog posts.

# Got a logo or brand? Add it to make your network totally unique.

# Choose your own theme from the options provided then customize them to make them your own.

# Public or private, that is totally up to you!

# Choose how your photos, video player, music players, and network badges appear on your site.

# Do you want to ask your members some profile questions before they join? You get to create this, and the questions will be private as well as the answers, for your eyes only.

# Do you juse Facebook? Enable “one-click” Facebook Promotion so your members can add photo slideshows, video players, and music/podcasts from your network seamlessly into Facebook.

# You have the ability to moderate photos and videos before you post them.

# Choose from a set of supported languages (English, Chinese, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish) or translate your social network into any unsupported language by changing one file in the code.

# Member profile questions created by you for your network.

# Member blog posts with photos, files, and widgets.

# Manage blog posts and moderate comments.

# Choose the option to publish in the future.

# Ability to customize the appearance of member profile pages.

# Option to add widgets to profile page.

Take advantage of this great social networking platform and create for yourself an even bigger and better network and keep your viral marketing campaign on fire!

Hey You! Give Me A Hi5

Another Social Networking site to check out!

Hi5 has just announced the birth of its developer platform as a well supported open social network. This is extremely popular in Latin America, and has become a founding member of a non-profit organization “OpenSocial Foundation”, which was announced last week by Google, MySpace, and Yahoo.

Hi5 has a very interesting platform in which this is the first OpenSocial supporting network that offers API messaging.

This means that this site can include invitations, notifications, friend updates, and any other methods that will benefit your viral marketing techniques. This is a function that is not currently being offered on MySpace.

Mark Pincus of Zynga, who is a maker of social gaming, makes this comment to the press, in where he stated: “ “hi5 is taking the right approach to launching their platform. By opening some reasonable viral channels and making the social map available to developers and their users, hi5 is highly likely to become one of the biggest application platforms and see widespread user adoption. This is key for social games, such as Poker and Triumph, which quickly enables users to start and play games with their friends.”

So far, hi5 has announced that almost 8,000 developers have registered to build some great applications on this site. They are able to do this through their canvas pages.

According to Mashables edition on March 31, 2008 — 06:10 AM PDT — by Adam Ostrow — he stated; “One additional stat from hi5 that piqued my interest: despite having a reported 80 million users, hi5 claims that it has only 25% active user overlap with any other top social networks. This isn’t especially surprising given the network is usually cited for being popular outside the US, but highlights the significant reach OpenSocial offers.”

There are several categories and groups to be found on hi5, and according to Adam Ostrows article, they are;

Alumni, Schools and Education (336883)

Automotives (17163)

Business (22215)

Cities and Neighborhoods (70942)

Companies and coworkers (16651)

Computer and Internet (19928)

Countries and Regional (23975)

Cultures and Community (63502)

Entertainment and Arts (72743)

Family & Home (13821)

Fashion and Beauty (31554)

Games (34396)

Government and Politics (16056)

Health and Wellness (9560)

Hobbies and Crafts (29674)

Music (161750)

Pets and Animals (17226)

Religion & Beliefs (36762)

Romance and Relationships (206525)

Science and History (7972)

Sports and Recreations (91579)

Other (194086)

We need to welcome our new neighbors in our Internet Community, and their company name is Zloop.

According to Mashable: ZLoop provides nearly unlimited enterprise-like collaboration and social interaction functionality in a free, mass market solution everyone can use.

Who In The Heck Is Zloop?

Zloop is social interaction site that allows an unlimited amount of loops whether they be in your business, friends, family members, any type of group you want to put together. There are many social interaction websites that are fun, like Facebook or Myspace, but they aren’t great for creating real productivity. Ning is a great site for community interaction on a single basis, but for group interaction, it’s not the best solution. This is a new beginning as far as online collaboration tools are concerned.

On Zloop, anyone can join, create their own social network, and allow anyone .to enter. This can be a group that is based totally on business, or just casual family. That is the great feature about Zloop, you can transform it into whatever you want it to become.

You Set The Terms For Membership In Your Loop

Because it will be your site, you set the criteria as far as members and user contribution. You decide what content is shared, including files, notes, images. This is a site that functions on the functionality of the group instead of relying on third party applications or widgets.

You will also find that this site is easy to navigate through, encouraging activity on all levels. This is going to be a great productivity tool over the networks for collaboration. Ning will not be focusing on this aspect, rather keeping it on a simpler level.

This is so easy to use that anyone can do it. Each member will establish own account, then once invited to a group, they can join it. Each member also has the option of starting their own loops. This is really a great interaction tool to help your business grow.

What you will be getting from your loops is more relationships, which in turn creates centralized aggregation with identity management and privacy in your interaction. This provides you a fantastic model for bringing together many through daily interaction.

How Does a Loop Work?

You will create your own loop which will be your own online community. You can use your loop as a folder for interaction with others in your community. You can have a loop as large as 10,000 people and as small as 3. This program is designed to support many hundreds and even thousands throughout the coming years. You may have some that are continually active, and some that may sit inactive for a while, but will keep a record of your past interactions.

How Does Zloop Work for Relationships?

As you and I know, relationships are your communication with another person, and Zloop gives you a place to foster these relationships, keeping tabs on colleagues, staying in contact with friends and acquaintances. You also have the options to interact with one another with multiple content types.

Can you imagine trying to navigate between hundreds of different loops, trying to keep relationships going in every direction? You wouldn’t be able to do it if you had to do this independently, however, Zloop provides an inbox that lets you know about any activities happening in any of your loops. You will be able to respond instantly as well as interact in any of the activities. You will also have the ability to control what information you receive from your loop.

What About Privacy?

You will have the ability to create any identity you choose, and submit your information to each loop according to your wants and desire. Each loop is a single network, and your interaction will remain only in that loop.

From what I can tell, Zloop may be another great way for you to enhance your viral marketing and create your buzz. Zloop is a new beginning of a more enhanced marketing venue.

You Think Message Dance Is Awesome, Check It Out Now!

I recently wrote a blog about MessageDance. Now I have even more information for you and how to take this great tool to a new level.

You now get to take advantage of MessageDance from anywhere and everywhere on your own blog.

What is Message Dance?

MessageDance began as a portable message wall, such as for comments, guest book entries, like your Facebook Wall.

In my first blog about Message Dance, you learned about the many possibilities of this new message aggregator which was used on Facebook and other social networks. You had the ability to use their new portable You Tube playlist which enabled you to share your videos across the social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. You could use your MessageDance widget to share your updates via email or through MessageDance.com.

GREAT NEWS!

Well, the great news is that now they have progressed out of the message widget and moved up into the world of social media with a slew of sharing options which still include your You Tube playlists.

You are now able to join the world of blogging and use your MessageDance widget to display your blog posts.

You have a variety of ways to submit your blog posts; you can use Facebook message tool, Amazon, Iphone, YouTube, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and your Google Reader! Wow, this is exciting!

You may be thinking yeah…this is just a blogging integration platform which uses the submission process, but you are not correct in that assumption. You are able to create a blog post from many media sites as well as email clients. MessageDance, however, can be your existing blog on two of the major platforms which are WordPress and Blogger. You will also be able to use their media attachment tool which will enable you to turn your content into an incredible rich media blog.

We know in this business that blogs are very powerful, which is why you see so many. If you are a social network user, I am sure you have a blog of some sort. Blogs are a conversation, and they keep us informed on the world and what’s going on. But as you know, this is a big job keeping it updated for your readers.

MessageDance has created a huge theme which allows its users to blog content from any social networking site they happen to be on. You get to take advantage of their blog posting capabilities from all the popular social networking sites.

Watch this great video on MessageDance and learn how simple it is to use.

So what you have now is no longer just a message aggregator, but an ever-growing broadcaster which can be used across a variety of networks. You will love the re-publishing tools which are totally automated.

Continue to watch MessageDance evolve and grow and watch your own viral marketing campaign grow right along with it.

No More Excuses, Now Anyone Can Convert Your Paper to iPaper

I came across this article as I was browsing some of my favorite blogs, and this immediately caught my attention. This is a site that is perfect for those who do not own a scanner or have convenient access to one.

Scribd now has a program they call Convert Your Paper to Ipaper…

which is a way for you to have all your paper documents scanned and published on the Internet, all at no cost to you..yes..you read that right….Totally FREE! All you need to worry about it getting the documents sent to them, then they take care of the rest.

How Can They Do This For Free?

They are able to offset the expense for scanning by the advertisements that are relevant to your documents.

Can You Have Any Type of Documents Scanned?

Scribd can scan almost any type of written document. They use a highly advanced scanning process which is provided by their partners, giving them the ability to scan about any document in high volumes. If you do have any questions however, they are easy to contact and ready to answer any of your questions.

Who is Scribd?

Scribd is a huge, digital library where you can publish your own original content. The focus of Scribd is to provide a way for those who have tons of documents sitting around their home or office, and to have a place to publish these documents for all to read.

What’s Their Plan?

First and foremost they are looking to save a lot of trees, which I am all for. They are also looking to utilize their space to service those who have some very important documents that were created long before the digital era. There may also be some documents that have been lost, out of print, or printed but now deleted. This provides a new life to documents that can be shared among many re-digitized and accessible to all.

The reason I am all for this and ready to support them is they are providing a great service at no cost to you. You no longer have to take the time scanning paper after paper, or the expense of purchasing a scanner, but just stick your documents in an envelope, send them off in the mail to Scribd, and before you know it, your documents are accessible to you on the Internet, never to be lost or misplaced again, nor taking up all that valuable space in your home or office.