Bloginar February 13th

Automattic/ WordPress (Toni Schneider, Chief Executive Officer), KnowNow (Todd Rulon-Miller, Chief Executive Officer) and Sphere (Tony Conrad, Chief Executive Officer) are getting together February 13th at 10:00 PST (12:00 CST & 13:00 EST) to talk about some ideas for marketers to maintain continuous awareness of, and communication with, the markets they serve. Anyone can join the Webinar which is free and graciously sponsored by the AMA. Some details can be found here. This should be a good event for:

• CMOs and VPs of marketing with responsibility for brand and category success
• VPs and directors of corporate communications and media programs
• VPs and directors responsible for market and competitive intelligence programs
• Individuals responsible for driving measurable metrics such as market share, share of wallet, products per household, and customer defection/churn
• VPs and directors of e-commerce who are looking to leverage Web 2.0, enterprise RSS, enterprise social software, and/or publish-subscribe technologies to gain competitive advantage

Hope you can join us.

TIME Person of The Year

What strikes us most about YOU being the Time person of the year is that in coming so far into the future, we’ve really gone back to the past. Back to a time when all a card needed to get to you, besides postage, was your name and town, when the local librarian held the next book in the series you were reading and the waitress placed your order as soon as your smiling face came through the door. Back to a time not only when you liked your neighbors, but you relied on their collaboration.

In opening up this great big world of social connections we’ve made it possible for all our little preferences and opinions to be known by those who matter. Only this time it’s not the limited number of people in our small towns, but the entire networked world. Web sites greet you by name, hold onto your wish list, stock your favorites and show you what your friends bought. We link in with networking sites, hook up with dating sites, tune in with video sites and out with music sites.

Email is still the killer app. And probably always will be. But blogs may be catching up. If it weren’t moving so quickly, there’d probably be a better way to quantify it. And it would look something like a time when more people were given the means to speak their minds than any other in history. A time when information flew so fast and furious, from link to link, it took on a life of its own. It’s always hard when you’re living through something to imagine what will be said in retrospect, but it feels like we’re living through a great age for speaking truth to power. It’s part of our heritage to give people a voice and a chance to do good and for that we’re glad TIME chose YOU as the person of the year. We’re part of a great melting pot of people and ideas. Every vote, every voice, every opinion matters. Each one of us is unique with something to contribute. Blogs give us a way to have our voices heard with the potential to make a difference and as we know from the past, great things can be accomplished when we set our hearts and hands to work in earnest.