Yes, I know, I am brutal. My sword is out. Call me Xena. Here is why:
I'm giving warning to a few empty or spam-lurker profiles that I'm watching...

Starting Monday July 7th, I'm visiting every profile on the network next week for a relevance and content check. I'll give you a bright cheery "Hello" comment when I come so you'll know I stopped by for a visit.

This means, if a questionable profile is irritating other users with spammy emails, and/or lurking there with no photo, no relevant content, no blog post and no value beyond a feed or two of ad content, I Am Going to Delete It!

It's really not to be brutal, but to build a great social network of business masterminds who mutually support each other.

Below is a copy of the email you will receive if your profile needs a bit of work.

I'll gladly help anyone who needs assistance as well in getting a great Social profile up and running!

I'll even send you my phone or skype number and walk through it with you by phone if needed. Email me if you want to work on your profile by phone.

If you receive the following friendly email, please contact me immediately so we can work together on your profile, or risk my dreaded Sword of Deletion. Bwahahaha

~ Erika (aka: Xena)

***********************************

Hello,

Just and FYI that your Social Network profile has been brought to my attention as being purely ad or feed-based without personal content.

As we all work together to support our efforts in leveraging social media to increase our financial success, one of the first things to remember is that a social profile that is just for promotion and ad posting, but has little or no personal relevance or value, will also not be considered an authority or a good "social friend".

Charles Heflin connects a great "real world" reference for this Social site blunder as the Uncle who comes to Thanksgiving and tries to sell everyone his MLM course before dinner, during dinner and after dinner.

So... if you could add some photos, (at least one, please!) some more personal blog posts, a bit of personality to your social profile, it will help your business and also allow the other users on this site to get to know you and network with you.

Blank Profiles that are purely ads and feed based, will be deleted by me if they are not updated, because we are building a network here that provides all users with value and support.

We need to know there is a real person and not just a spammer behind blank profiles.

AND, I'm happy to help you get your profile up to par if needed.

thank you!

~Erika

The Web, she is awakening.

The internet as we know it now is evolving into a knowledge-based web that connects everything through semantic intelligence.

Or as Helen Fisher and I would call it: Interconnectedness.

As we have journeyed in the last decade from Web 1.0, the connection of base information into Web 2.0, the Social web that connects people and information, we are currently right in the middle of witnessing major technological and social evolution through the emergence of Web 3.0, where internet communities, people, computers and enterprise will be able to speak the same languages beyond programming silos and communicate through information, media and intelligent thought, and create NEW ideas from this information instantly.

Essentially, the Web is becoming intelligence capable of learning as humans do.

The emerging birth of Web 3.0 is going to shift our current socially driven content, where the online social community grants relevance through social book marking, viral media and content authorship, into a new realm where new content is created through the interactions of the social and mechanical process itself.

This means that what you search for, you are increasingly finding, and what we search for as a Global mind, creates new knowledge not from the content we searched for, but through the SEARCHING itself.

This is already happening through some of the beta techonology that is being released right now, but within the next 12 months, prepare yourselves, and your online business by creating viral and engaging content NOW that is knowledge-based rather than purely information-based.

Yes. This will require some thought. Are you sharing information, or knowledge right now in your content?

Consumers are becoming conscious that information is no longer what drives their searching on the internet, knowledge is. Their desire is to both know and act from this knowing.

It is a deeper understanding of the basic information, the inner Gnosis or knowing of what the information is FOR and how to intuitively implement it within their business, community and life.

What is the internet-based difference between content information and content knowledge?

Knowledge incorporates the knowing or that has formed through connecting so many intelligent web communities and databases in Web 2.0.

Consumers are no longer seeking a one-dimensional information based model, but the knowledge that comes from learning on every level through online content and media.

The written word, video, audio, photo and social inputs create an entirely new form of learning and knowledge absorption.

The main challenge in Web 2.0 has been that computers, people and webs are unable to share information through the silo programming. In other words, a computer cannot read the spoken words in a video, translate them into a word document and distribute them through social networks instantly. The technology to do that is already in place, however, and as we see the desire for more knowledge-based content sharing in the next year, we will witness the emergence of Web 3.0 before us.

Content writers, providers and media will need to be aware of the shifts that are happening with the Web 3.0 trend, and prepare their companies for a web where information becomes new information and knowledge instantly. They will need to develop and acquire the new emerging technologies that reason about meaning, relevancy, theory and know-how apart from documents, data and code in ways that both people and machines can access and work with, understand and acquire new knowledge from.

If they are unable to meet the movment into the knowledge-centric pattern of sharing content and business development, they will be unable to meet consumer requests that are looking for new value creation and novelty in learning.

~Erika

PS- Russell keyed me into this video and I feel it is very relevant to what is happening with Web 3.0 - Really beautiful.

Microsoft left jaws dropping as it walked out on the Yahoo! deal this week. After the sharp Yahoo! stock decline Monday, shareholders may not be off base in their underlying mumble of lawsuits. The press release contained the following open letter to Jerry Yang.

Dear Jerry:
After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!'s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.

In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33.00 offer.

Also, after giving this week's conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a "hostile" bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

• First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!'s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.
• Given this, it would impair Yahoo's ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.
• In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit. Among other things, this would consolidate market share with the already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce competition and choice in the marketplace.
• This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.
• It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google's search services.

Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft's proposal to acquire Yahoo!.

We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.

I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.

But clearly a deal is not to be.

Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.

Sincerely yours,
/s/ Steven A. Ballmer

Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation

Hello Everyone,

Russell has posted on the Theme Zoom blog a call with Jon Keel describing how he uses Krakken combined with Theme Zoom version 3.0 to create website blueprints for clients. Jon is already making money with Krakken using as a base what he has learned about the inner workings of silo architecture from the Theme Zoom 3.0 system.

Interview with Jon Keel: Krakken, How to Create a Blue Print NOW

Posted by Erika, the Technology Goddess and author of Social Netowrk Mash

See what went down at the Theme Zoom offices today...

Part ONE (below)

Part TWO (below)

Part THREE- Erika's Reply to Russell (below)

Feeling like a politely worded episode out of the 1960's cult classic "Yippee, Yappee and Yahooey", where three gallant heroes battle a fire breathing dragon among other villains, Yahoo has responded to Microsoft's "unsolicited" bid to acquire Yahoo (as in takeover) with a battle of words. Microsoft Chief executive Steve Ballmer and Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang are dueling in language as the heated letters between the two giants were released earlier today.

The battle for the dragon began last year as Microsoft prepped it's employees to get ready for an acquisition of Yahoo, and was followed up by a US $44 billion "offer" two months ago to buy the company.

Microsoft's "offer" to purchase letter was accompanied with the suggestion that Yahoo! is losing value, market, and page views along with the threat to get hostile with a proxy fight unless Yahoo agrees to the deal within three weeks.

Yahoo! fired back today, highlighting it's value and future growth prospects, along with it's investments as strategic benefits to Microsoft, and placed a stake in the ground with the news that stockholders have deemed the bid seriously undervalues Yahoo!. Yang was careful to note that future transactions are not out of the picture, as long as the price goes up to satisfy stockholders.

March Hitwise results show that Google has 67.25% of the search market, (and growing monthly) with Yahoo at 20.29% (and declining) and MSN also slipping at 6.65%. If MSN can combine with Yahoo they can at least gain leverage as a #2 with more power in the search market share, where as right now Google's complete domination seems set in stone. The question is whether stockholders will be more open to Microsoft's offer if Google continues to grow, putting further pinch on Yahoo! to make a change, any change.

Ballmer will likely grant a counter offer to Yahoo! quickly, since they set a proxy deadline that demands some kind of answer or response from both sides. Corporate relations are rarely sweetened by thumping the prospective acquisition over the head with a club and dragging her back to the cave, the new acquisition might dutifully take care of business but with less heart, and Yahoo! is a company known to be strong of heart. Critical Yahoo! employees may flee if negotiations turn into a proxy fight.

Ok, now for the good stuff. Here is a compilation of all the latest, including letters between Yang and Ballmer. We'll be posting new updates as they break.

I'm just shooting a quick post here to share how Quicken the budget software which has just launched their handy online platform, gets a nod for Social Media skills and politeness. Taking a cue almost straight from Charles Heflin's Social Marketing Blueprint Formula,
Quicken hosts a Facebook profile for their new app along with a contest on Facebook for anyone who joins the fan club. I'm a sucker for contests, so I joined and posted a wall comment. 24 hours later, a Quicken rep contacts me to thank me for the wall comment. Not a generic email, but a genuine person (the guy version of me, actually) who runs the Facebook page for the company. Why is this worth blogging about? Because it's a perfect example of how even large corporations are using web 2.0 skills for very effective marketing and relations. Here is the link to Quicken's Facebook page, where you can see my wall comment. Facebook Profile for Quicken Online

So, I am all alone in the TZ offices and reduced to using my fingers to scrape the latte foam off the sides of my Starbucks cup. It's great, I'm sitting at Russell's control center, typing on his keyboard with my sticky latte fingers. AND I only spilled a "few" drops of coffee down into the keys, so only the T and the Z keys are sticking a little bit.... Oh, that might be from the cookie crumbs. Oops!

Oh well. He hardly ever uses the T and the Z keys anyway, so he can hit them three or four times hard whenever he needs to unstick them.....right?

.

April Fools. Ha.

One of the things I have been pondering this week, is the ability of web 2.0 social networks to empower and create abundance that uplifts the entire community as a whole, and increases understanding between communities globally, by creating deeper individual connections between members. These individual connections stregthen the group as a whole, and radiate outward to other communities members touch. 

Taking this concept into this reality, a non-profit organization called Kiva is leveraging social Networking, mobile storytelling with cameraphones, and the full abundence mindset of web 2.0 potential to create microlending to microbusinesses as Social Entrepreneurs.

Kiva is using a social network to connect small (microsmall) business owners in rural and underdeveloped areas of the World with microlenders who are willing to lend $25 or more at a time to assist in creating or expanding their business. Kiva helps people in need of assistance through local non-profits establish a profile on their network describing their business with photos, update messages, video etc... as available, so that microlenders on the network can view their profile and offer loans from $25.

If it sound micro, think again. Kiva has loaned $26 million in unsecured loans, with 99.9% full repayment.

The bigger view is that Kiva has tuned into web 2.0 as a platform for abundance within it's community, and communities worldwide through the power of it's network. and your network, the one you are co-creating here, is also a platform for abundance.

The individuals who are gathering here are some of the brightest minds and the strongest hearts, with the will to accomplish the endeavor of choice. So my offering to all of you in this wee hour of 3am, is to keep the awareness within you that Russell and Charles have built a beautiful ship for this journey, with the best and brightest on board and boarding. So unpack, decorate your cabins, and begin to chart the voyage together.