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Not everything that goes on in Vegas needs to stay there. Namely the 2008 EPpy Awards. Known as one of the most prized and long-running honors for online content —the awardees were announced during the Editor & Publisher/Mediaweek Interactive Media Conference and Trade Show hosted in Las Vegas.

Online content is a broad topic indeed, so award recipients ranged from newspapers to blogs and were judged based upon their video, news feeds, unique visitors and more.

Web users and bloggers went tête à tête in recent survey of Internet users conducted by the legal firm, DLA Piper. The survey focused on the possibility of instituting a voluntary code of conduct for bloggers and online commentators.

There was a noticeable divide: nearly half of all internet users would support such a code whereas only 34% of bloggers did.

It's said that Las Vegas is the place where dreams come true. And such was the case for sixteen lucky projects who were awarded a total of $5.5 million dollars from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The second annual Knight News Challenge is a contest that funds ideas to transform community news through digital technology It selects recipients whose ideas reflect a focus on mobile technology.

Further proof that innovation breeds more innovation, Reuters has announced that it's making news content available to the developer community through the use of a non-commercial API. The service will be offered via Reuters Lab, a test site where Reuters can showcase some of their latest product innovations and developments and where users can discover, use and comment on products and services still in progress.

Mochila, global online media marketplace innovator has launched Video Player 2.0. Poised to deliver "multiple, related videos revolving within the same player", it aims to be an asset to those looking to improve user engagement and sustainability.

With the ability to support full-screen displays, pre-roll and translucent overlay advertising, audiences are sure to revel in engaging, high-quality videos, while publishers benefit from a free ad-supported video tool for building their business.

Just curious, but do you think even though they are competitors, the top guns at MySpace, Facebook and Google spend all their time on Gmail chatting about when and how they’ll release the news of their latest endeavors to move towards data portability?

Or maybe they have spies in each other’s camps sending smoke signals home at night spilling the beans of latest plans to take over your data profile? Flashbacks to Pinky and Brain cartoons spill over into my daytime routine.

Bob Bickel of Ringside Networks is always sending interesting stuff to my trusty Thunderbird.
His latest exposition is a timely call to arms regarding the Social Web, and is worth five minutes of any Webmaster's time. In essence, Bob's argument is that some version of open social (all rights reserved, Google Corp.) is happening, and that all you Webmasters are going to be dancing in the streets when you see what this thing will do. If, that is, you wake up in time and get to grips with what it means. And part of that, according to Bob, will mean that you're going to have to get savvy with Social Application Servers like Ringside's.

Organizations today understand that a key focus of their marketing activities must be in the social media arena. If they are really smart, they also recognize that user participation is key to successful social media marketing. And what do users like to contribute? Text, video, audio and all the rating, tagging and commenting that goes along with it.

Who better to help these organizations support their social media marketing activities than SaaS User Participation Platform provider Reality Digital? This is a company that not only has the technical experience to create a social media platform with a strong Digital Asset Management backbone, but also has the marketing savvy to understand the key to social media marketing is a combination of user generated and professionally published content.

The first step in creating a genuinely useful intranet is to ban the intranet team from using the word "information".

Any good web publisher knows that it isn’t just content that keep readers reading and coming back for more. Just as important as quality, relevant content, a bad website design will drive your audience away before they get through the door.

Without some sound design tactics you end up putting a lot of work into publishing for maybe a couple of unique visitors a day. If you are attempting to get opt-ins and generate revenue from your site and you miss some key design tips you are going to suffer and your ROI will go down the drain.

But just how do you design a clean, concise layout that is logical but also aids in producing results? We’ve got 5 tips to help you in your endeavors…and none of them require a separate manual to interpret.

On a whole, the art of Web design has begun to be better understood as a necessity in the world of ecommerce and content management. After all, content is only as good as its design and vice versa. Once viewed as something that made your site look pretty but had little significance to the bottom line, web design is now considered an integral part of a site's success.

Ahh, our insatiable need to spend hours viewing online video, whether it be our favorite episode of The Family Guy, or that hilarious commercial on YouTube. Yes we definitely are a world of watchers. And organizations are getting smarter everyday figuring how to use this vice to their advantage.

Online video search engine provider, blinkx, aims to help those organizations by providing the blinkx Advanced Media Platform, a video content management solution that will "unlock the potential of video assets and maximize their monetization".

Can print media survive the transition to the Internet?

It's an awkward question at best, whose answer has seemed quite dismal over the past year. But now, with a struggling economy and fledgling print audience, International Data Group (IDG) has sought a probable answer.

Seems like it was only yesterday we were talking about IBM introducing a Quickr Content Integrator that will help move organizations away from SharePoint. Oh, right it was yesterday...

Today, we see that IBM may actually be wise enough to tackle the SharePoint challenge from both ends. Another IBM partner is helping to bridge the integration gap with SharePoint. The partner -- Mainsoft. The solution -- SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes. If you are one those organizations that has a mixed technology environment -- and you are not alone -- this solution will go a long way to help.

What's the typical audience composition for a Technology blog? We didn't know, so we vowed that we would move mountains to find out. But several months with a shovel in the Sierra Nevadas produced little in the way of usable data. And so we moved on to Plan B, and sought out the services of the Quantcast website metrics gathering service.