It’s been a while since I’ve written a full blog post, while looking down at my last couple of posts which have simply embedded videos. And when this latest idea came to me, I felt guilty for once again taking the “easy” route of just republishing information. But this one is too good to pass up.

At Enquiro, we have something called TED Tuesdays. We take our bagged lunches and sit down in our boardroom while watching the latest and greatest from …TED. This past week we watched David Pogue’s rant and rave on mobile phone technology. Pogue, a technology columnist for the New York Times, gives us a presentation that resonates with anyone who has ever owned a cell phone, and he delivers it his way, with humor and musical style.

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams spoke at a recent TED conference about the founding of what has become today’s most exciting social networking tool. Williams, who was also involved in the founding of Blogger, describes how Twitter arose as a side project at start-up company Odeo.

What struck me is how much of Twitter’s current functionality has come about through user involvement. For example, the @username syntax for responding to a tweet started and spread from within the Twitter user base and was only later incorporated as a standard.

The TED video notes other examples of user-generated applications with Twitter such as the Summize, a real-time search engine which has since been purchased by Twitter,

Today is a bit of a milestone for several of my students in their Internet Marketing class as they set up their very own blogs. Blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger make it really easy to get off the ground with blogging. But one of the most difficult questions students seem to face is the question of what they should blog about.

Blog Broadly or Target Precisely?

Like me, you probably have a lot of different things you’re interested in, things which aren’t necessarily related. How do you combine these into a single blog? Or do you start several blogs?

With Marketing Finger, I chose to go down the wider path. I could have gone broader, though, opening it up to be more like a journal. My Phoenix On Mars blog, on the other hand, gets a lot more specific.  It relays stories about NASA’s latest lander as it digs its way down to Martian ice.

As our Internet Marketing class takes these first bold steps towards publishing on the Web through blogs, students are getting a chance to develop an online voice, connect with other like-minded people.

Check out Ben’s article on The Welder’s Misconception, David’s Flaction, Karina’s blog about handbags, Ashley’s Misadvantures, and Andrew’s Naturally Artificial blog.

To finish off, here is a video which kicked off today’s class, a presentation by Kevin Kelly at last November’s TED conference.  Kevin reflects upon the next 5,000 days of the Internet, how everything will contribute to and connect to the “One”.