Of all the great news and views from this past week

Enjoy your weekend!!

Brian’s picks

• Brazilian hackers stalk Twitter, try to wax the unwary – Arstechnica – yikes!
  
• Upcoming Friends & Fans Changes – elaboration on lifting the 200 friend limit, straight from the StumbleUpon horse’s mouth

Thought for the week; there is a lot of noise in social media. It’s also tough to stay abreast in the latest and greatest sites while keeping up in the ones you already know and enjoy. How do you keep up? More to come in a future post..

Andy’s pick

• Alexa Now Discounts Almost All Social Media Traffic – Is This A Good Thing?
• Is Perfectionism Keeping You From Success?

Thought for the week; Do you go to a party, social gathering or business event with a specific plan that gets implemented to perfection and has amazing results? If you do, you are the rare exception. Sure you might have an idea who you want to meet, but ultimately the best results come from being there, right place at the right time, and casual meetings at the drinks cabinet, food bar or outside the WC.

Tim’s picks

• Google Stopwords Patent
• Tracking YoutTube Videos with Google Analytics

Thought for the week: For every action there is a reaction, it doesn’t matter if its asking for a thumbs up on StumbleUpon or a car hitting the wall it’s how we cope with reaction that determines where the chain ends

Shana’s picks

• 
• The Plight of the Social Media Eskimo
• Upcoming Friends and Fans Changes
• Marketing by Color: Don’t Try To Sell Blue Potatoes

Thought for the week; Just like in a community in reality your success in a social networking community relies heavily on an even amount of give or take. Do too much of one or the other and I can guarantee that you won’t get the full effect of community.

Dave’s picks

• coming soon?

Thought for the week; Is coming soon to a browser near you!

Brendan’s picks

• 
• Keep your eyes OFF the search engine rankings
• The Viral Video Guy Gets $1 Million In Funding
• Alexa Now Discounts Almost All Social Media Traffic – Is This A Good Thing?
• Populism to Kill the US Economy?
• The Possible Google Penalties Associated With Bad 301 Redirects

Thought for the week; There’s a good chance that the search industry will be much different five, three, even one year from now. Be sure to make some investments on your future by learning new software, methods, joining new social sites, playing with apps, and reading your feed reader daily. If you find your peers throwing tech slang and mentioning apps that you don’t recognize, chances are you’ve missed the boat or at least a kayak. Stay on top of your game you’ll find it can be leveraged to your benefit and that of your client’s.

Mark’s Picks

• The Rise and Fall of Twitter
• Social Media Stepping Up As Source For Connecting B2B Networks
• Intel to provide Facebook with hardware, Jedi secrets
• 5 Ways to Plugin to Your Identity
• Facebook to let employees sell some stock — at internal $4 billion valuation
• Delicious finally upgrades bookmarks site, now cupcake-powered

Thought for the week; It was great meeting those of you that attended Social Media Camp and the SummerMash in Miami. Wish I could have spent more time with you while there.

This week my thoughts are on introducing your real world peers to your social graph online. Look at how you are incorporating your offline friends into your online world and how it could benefit everyone. When introducing both peer groups, you may also be enriching their view of who you are, so everyone you know can enjoy parts of what you do. But you don’t really want to go this deep into thought do you, so let’s go find some friends to poke on Facebook!

Of all the great news and views from this past week, by far our favorite is the announcement of Brendan Picha (from Squareoak) joining the Collective Thoughts team (welcome aboard Brendan)… Beyond that we have funnies, tri-dimensional conversations and hyper-connectivity to keep the head spinning and the belly aching. Also new this week is Tim’s idea that we each pass along some thoughts for the week… we hope they find you well.

Enjoy your weekend!!

Brian’s picks

• I liked this interesting new real time social browsing
• Still on the fence about the new facebook
• Top underground sneezers

Thought for the week; It’s always amusing to see the criticism of social media. Funny thing is, it usually comes from people that proudly display a few flashy badges that link to their social accounts. Upon further inspection, the critics are barely using social media.

Tim’s picks

• BBC Sematic Site experiment
• Funny Link request
• How to optimise for Cuil
• On the Danger of twitter

Thought for the week: Social Media is much like my leaky roofer, great when it’s sunny but totally useless in the rain…

Shana’s picks

• The Key to Effective Viral Marketing is Emotional Engagement
• Are Your Stumbled Pages Sticky?
• Social Networking: Online Tridimensional Conversation
• Why Reputation Management Matters for Small Business

Thought for the week; Social Media can be very confusing and even intimidating for the Webmaster or Small Business Owner new to Web 2.0. My suggestion would be to start with one Social Networking site/activity and start to know the community. Once you have done that you will be amazed how helpful the Community will be.

Dave’s picks

• New York Times Wants to Censor and Influence Bloggers?
• Hyperconnectivity shakes up six degrees of separation
• The Use of Fake Avatars In Social Media
• Sentiment analysis in social media
• The 10 Commandments of the Social Web

Thought for the week; I wanted to pass on the words of Chuang Tzu -

The purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish, and when the fish are caught, the trap is forgotten.
The purpose of a rabbit snare is to catch rabbits. When the rabbits are caught, the snare is forgotten.
The purpose of words is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten.
Where can I find a man who has forgotten words? He is the one I would like to talk to.

Brendan’s picks

• Montauk Monster – Viral Content Get’s Scary
• Google SERP Flux Cycling
• 5 Simple Rules for Comment Seeding
• Diminishing values on outbound links

Thought for the week; It’s really, really easy to get caught-up in routine. Many end-up reading the same blogs, talking with the same people, watching the same news channels. From a creative and educational standpoint it’s very important to make breaking your routine a routine in and of itself. Try making unusual connections like how understanding the dynamics of an ant colony can help you understand social voting or if economic trends augment social behavior online. Inspiration for such thinking can come from reading a book you’d never pick up, watching a documentary you wouldn’t normally watch, or attending a lecture you’d never attend. Routine can have the ability to suck the life right out of you so make sure you get out there and embrace the unknown!

Mark’s Picks

• Social Media Camp Miami
• Mashable Summer Smash Miami

Thought for the week; Expanding your social graph to include peers you would not normally meet in an offline world may offer pleasant results. I have expanded my networking from social connections made online to solidifying offline at various MeetUps and conferences. If you are in the Miami area this weekend I will be attending both Social Media Camp and the Mashable party.

It was an interesting week with plenty of drama, humor and even an engagement. We even managed to get nepotistic; who knew we actually read each other’s stuff? There are a few post for the Diggers, SEO types and even some analytics mixxed in for good measure. All in all plenty of good reading for those you you that simply can’t get enough!

Enjoy your weekend!!

Brian’s picks

• Bill and Kimberly get engaged – congrats from the CT gang!
• Flash SEO indexing revisited – Tim Nash
• Summize acquired and integrated by Twitter – Twitter Search

Andy’s pick

• Using KW research to diversify your link profiles – that FireHorse guy

Tim’s picks

• Google Analytics Help: Questions, Answers, Tips, Ideas, Suggestions – Avinash Kuashik
• the Ultimate guide to decoding Digg speak - 10e20

Dave’s picks

• They made us hyper-connected; now what? - Social Times
• Social Media 101; how to get business involved - Mashable
• How to Create Digg-Friendly Content: Cracked.com’s Template – DoshDosh

Mark’s picks

• How Many Veins Have You Tapped Into? – Neil Patel
• World’s oldest blogger dies – Smarter then your average blog
• Comment spamming do-follow blogs 101 – A list SEO

Shana’s picks

• Online SEO Tools – the Ultimate Collection – Search Engine Journal
• Sex, permission marketing and social media – The ultimate Ménage à trois – OnReact

Tad’s picks

• Social media time waster - Chris G
• Real time social browsing - Browzmi
• Google plays with social search again – TechCrunch

…until next week remember;

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions. – Oliver Wendell Holmes

We decided to start a weekly feature here on Collective Thoughts with a link round up of some of the favorite posts the gang here came across. For those of you that simply can’t get enough; here’s what we thought you might like;

Shana’s picks

• What (bad) Cigarettes Can Teach You About (good) Branding – Small Fuel
• What the hell can social media do for me? – Social Desire (guest poster)
• 12 Tips on Creating Content for Social Media – Small business SEM

Brian’s picks

• Summize likely to be aquired by Twitter – Read Write Web
• Be a Plurk Evangelist – Plurk.com Jobs
• The sales guy – the website is upside down 

Andy’s picks

• Clarity trumps persuasion and lifts conversions – Marketing Experiments

Tim’s picks

• You Know Testing is Going Mainstream When... – Website Optimizer
• What Traits Define a Social Media Marketer? – Techipedia
• Visualising CoAuthors in Open Repostory Online Papers, Part 1 and Part II- OUseful Info

Mark’s picks

• FaceBook gunning for Twitter – cNet
• CEO’s aren’t reading newspapers; what about social media? - Media Badger
• How Popular Blogs and Mainstream Media Appear The Same - Web Strategist
• Simple Microblogging Transport Protocol – Ken Sheppardson
• Imagine if we really COULD connect different systems together – Broad Band Mechanics

Dave’s picks

• Get productive with social media (and stay sane) – Life Hacker
• Plurk: A Welcoming Microblogging Community – Inside CRM
• If a thought leader told you to go jump off a cliff - Social Times
• Relationship Building – 6 Tips For Working in Social Media – SEM Clubhouse
• Happy 1st Birthday Sphinn – Small business SEM