I picked the video because it shows how social media is changing the way major announcements are made. For most of the last century, major public statements were made through news releases and press conferences for the media. Today, news releases aren’t just for journalists anymore, and they are coming in more flavors (many press conference free):

• Social media releases 
• E-mails sending journalists to custom landing pages
• Blog posts
• Tweets with links to YouTube videos (which are so much easier and cheaper to produce than yesterday’s video news releases but without the potential ethics headache)

Indeed, the world of public relations is in a flux as practitioners experiment with these new distribution channels to find out which ones serve best the audiences they want to reach.

The jury is still out on whether Conan’s choice of a YouTube announcement (preceded by a hint on Twitter that one was coming) will help him make “Conan” a hit. Yes, ”Conan” is the name of his new show not “Conaw” as you might think from watching the amateur-style video!  

What do you see in the future for news releases? Share your predictions in the comment section below.

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The programmer, Austin Heap of San Francisco, developed the software, called Haystack, to open up social networking sites the Iranian government was blocking, such as Twitter and Facebook, to allow people on the ground in Iran to organize inside the country and communicate with the world.

People in Iran can run Haystack on their computers. It directs the requests from the computers in Iran through servers elsewhere in the world, hiding them in a stream of innocent-looking traffic and protecting the identities of Haystack’s users.

Patrick Meier, director of crisis mapping for Ushahidi, a group of digital activists doing cutting-edge work in crowdsourcing and open-source interactive mapping, was quoted in the article about how the software unlocks the advantage a swarm of people have over a repressive government: speed.

“The technology variable doesn’t matter the most. It is the organizational structure that will matter the most. Rigid structures are unable to adapt as quickly to a rapidly changing environment as a decentralized system. Ultimately, it is a battle of organizational theory,” he said.

Meier’s organization began as a volunteer-produced website created in the aftermath of Kenya’s disputed 2007 presidential election. As a tool, Ushahidi—which means “testimony” in Swahili—collects eyewitness reports sent in by e-mail and text message and places them on a Google map to create a temporal and geospatial archive of events.  Since its development for Kenya, the open-source technology has also been to:

• Shape the disaster response to the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, saving hundreds of lives
• Map violence in eastern Congo
• Expose election tampering or voter intimidation in places like Burma and Sudan
• Track pharmacy stockouts in several East African countries
• Record xenophobic violence in South Africa
• Monitor elections in Mexico and India

So far Haystack is only serving Iran, but Heap said in the article that he hopes Haystack will unleash citizen swarms on other repressive regimes.

“We will systematically take on each repressive country that censors its people. We have a list. Don’t piss off hackers who will have their way with you,” he said. “A mischievous kid will show you how the Internet works.”

What do you envision crowdsourcing and citizen swarms being used for in the future? Please share your ideas below.

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More than 30 large websites secretly changed their designs overnight to begin using the new button on its launch day. Among those sporting the “Tweet” button Tuesday morning were:

• Arizona Republic/azcentral.com
• CBS Interactive
• CNN.com
• Detroit Free Press
• HuffingtonPost.com
• SFGate.com
• Sky News
• The Cincinnati Enquirer
• The Des Moines Register
• The Indianapolis Star
• The Tennessean
• TIME.com
• USA TODAY
• WUSA 9

According to the Twitter blog, “when you click on the Tweet Button, a Tweet box will appear—pre-populated with a shortened link that points to the item that you’re sharing.”

Previously, online readers who wanted to share an article via Twitter had to copy the link, paste it into a URL shortener, and copy it back into a tweet. The new feature is more user friendly and doesn’t take readers off the site. It also allows publishers to suggest other people to follow and Twitter tracks how many times a story is tweeted.

The new “Tweet” button will likely make Twitter an even more powerful tool for attracting online traffic. As it is, Twitter reports nearly a quarter of its tweets contain web links.

Check out Twitter’s YouTube video below for more.

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With people increasingly using text messages, Facebook, Twitter, and other new media tools to seek help in a disaster, the American Red Cross sponsored an Emergency Social Data Summit in Washington, D.C., yesterday on ways emergency managers, government agencies, aid groups, and concerned citizens can harness social media “to reply to these digital cries for help more effectively.”

As I noted in my Exciting or Scary? Rise of Social Media Swarms, we’re in the middle of communications renaissance. For the first time in history, each person has a voice that can be heard worldwide and then amplified exponentially if his/her conversation creates a buzz that turns into a swarm. In a disaster situation, these swarms could help rescue and comfort disaster victims … or could attack and amplify the shortcomings of relief agencies and their people.

I found out through Twitter last week that the Red Cross was inviting the public to participate in the summit remotely via U-Stream and Twitter. I immediately signed up and decided to tweet the event live (using the event’s official #crisisdata hashtag). I am so glad I did. I found the summit speakers and Twitter conversation fascinating.  Below are the 30 tweets I found most compelling about disaster relief in a Web 2.0 world (i.e., my picks are not relief operations oriented).

Public Outreach

• @sophiabliu Emergency mgt always focus on managing / controlling public and info, the convo should shift to coordinating and collaborating #crisisdata
• @GlobalGiving RT @JustinHerman: “If a tool is not used properly it becomes a weapon.”#CrisisData “A weapon against you, your org and your personnel.”
• @CyberlandGal: #Socialmedia can show to world than your #PR message is spin and/or wrong/out of date #crisisdata
• @PPRedCross “Managing expectations and managing your reputations within those expectations” #crisisdata loaded statement
• @MelyMello @jack_holt of DOD: People who r given the opportunity to help in a crisis are able to heal faster than those not given that opp #crisisdata
• @Jack_Holt: #crisisdata Crisis comm is a matter of making information easy to share thereby making it easy to care.

Social Media

• @SECPRGuy: Nice answer RT @ikepigott: “Social media empowers the public to be part of the response team, instead of victims” – @CraigatFEMA #crisisdata
• @cspenn: Really good point: phones have a busy signal to tell you you’re on your own. Social media doesn’t
• @gislio: @ikepigott I read somewhere that research showed over 90% of disaster-crowd data was correct…is media that right? #crisisdata
• @dariasteigman @ikepigott Eveyone can fact check. As more eyes on-the-ground, the better the data should be. #crisisdata
• @CrisisSocMedia Crowd sourcing: connecting those with needs with those with resources ~ @PatrickMeier #crisisdata #Russia
• @CrisisSocMedia “Crowd feeding” – the crowd will always be there: connecting the crowd with each other ~ @PatrickMeier #crisisdata
• @krobertory Same information from a trusted source (community of friends) has more impact then public official. #CrisisData

Twitter

• @CyberlandGal: Hashtags need to be established before an event or VERY early so people can track & find info #crisisdata
• @gwynnek Tweak the tweet is an awesome-simple-idea. People structure their crisis tweets via hashtags. #syntax #crisisdata
• @CrisisSocMedia @EmergCommNetwrk Folks in emergency management puzzle over how to get more followers, yet rarely follow back: be social.
• @EmergCommNetwrk “You can’t lead if nobody is following.” @krobertory // Q: How are agencies growing list of followers on Twitter? #CrisisData
• @CyberlandGal: Twitter would likely go down in a major crisis. After all, it couldn’t survive the World Cup #crisisdata
• @140Care wow. that is so big. RT @CyberlandGal: 28% of people would send responders message on Twitter during an emergency #crisisdata
• @jordanv What would 9-11 and Katrina have been like with Twitter? Scary but exciting to think what we could have done – #crisisdata reflection

Facebook

• @CyberlandGal In disasters people turn to #Facebook to check on family & friends #crisisdata
• @akmcquade 75% of people expect a response within an hour of posting about an emergency because these are their friends. #crisisdata
• @akmcquade social media during an emergency isn’t a response *alternative*, it’s a smart way of reaching many people who care w/ 1 click #crisisdata

Mobile

• @MarieNCGH – All you need is one working cellphone in a shelter to report data for hundreds. #PIO #crisisdata
• @geoffliving We keep talking social media, and we should be talking mobile #crisisdata

Equity

• @cherylble: #crisisdata using socmed tools can be good, but remember our mission is 2 help both the haves and havenots. Tech has the ability to divide
• @CyberlandGal Quest: How 2 deal w/equity & #pr issues in 3rd world crisis. Can’t just focus on elites w/ #SM access but if don’t, word spreads #crisisdata
• @ArkRedCross Social media’s beneficial unless you live in an area underserved with internet or widespread access to computers and smartphones #crisisdata

Technology

• @digitalsista: “technology is easier to fix that human behavior” as said by Red Cross CEO that’s my hashtag #NoTechFix4HumanBehavior #crisisdata
• @kc5fm Remember that technology is also limited by the user. If they don’t have chargers or power, that CELL PHONE will soon die. #crisisdata

Which key tweets did I miss? Help forward the conversation and share your favorites in the comments section below.

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Google Wave was supposed to be the hot new social networking platform and for a time you were considered special if you had been one of the lucky ones to receive an invite. The only thing is many people, including me, couldn’t find a pratical “real work” use for it.

With Google Wave, collaborators share—in real time or over time—e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking merged into topical waves. Waves are kind of a cross between chatting and threaded discussions on a blog.

Google said on its blog on Wednesday that it is halting Google Wave development. 

Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

That means after 2010 Google Wave will be kaput. I, for one, will be sorry to see it go—I did see a lot of potential in it—but I’ll be so busy following conversations on Twitter (what I found to be the hot new social networking platform) and tweeting to miss it.

What do you think killed Google Wave? Please share your ideas in the comments section below.

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The video, funded by Levi’s jeans (which is featured prominently at the end of the clip), has racked up more than a million viewers since its debut on YouTube July 20. It features actor/model Michael Johnson wearing Levi’s jeans and a plain T-shirt on a 14-day cross country trip past American landmarks both major and minor. The video is popular because of a unique visual effect created by a combination of stop-motion and time-lapse video.

The actual cost of the video hasn’t been released, but producer Blake Heal told ABC News that the project was created on a shoestring budget and edited in an RV along the journey. It will be interesting to see how this presumably small investment translates into Levi’s sales.

The recent Old Spice Guy commercials on YouTube increased sales of the Old Spice brand by 107 percent. Like “Guy Walks Across America,” they didn’t shove the actual brand—Old Spice—down viewers’ throats and were incredibly fun to watch. More importantly, every viewer wanted to watch them (they weren’t interupting anything), and they were completely free to broadcast (not hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars). 

Indeed, social media is changing advertising, and we’re only just beginning to see how dramatic that change will be.

What kind of social media advertising campaigns do you predict will grow out of this precedent? Please share your ideas in the comments section below.

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Twitter introduced the new “Who to Follow” feature in a blog post yesterday:

The algorithms in this feature, built by our user relevance team, suggest people you don’t currently follow that you may find interesting. The suggestions are based on several factors, including people you follow and the people they follow.

The new feature is a little bit like Facebook’s “Friend Suggestions,” which uses your information to recommend people you are likely to know personally who you can “friend” on the social network. Twitter’s “Who to Follow” feature, however, finds strangers with similar interests whose tweets you might never have found otherwise.  After all, Twitter has more than 100 million users, so it’s impossible to just run across all relevant people. 

I’ve already used the feature to find dozens of Twitter accounts I’m interested in following. Just about all the recommendations have been solid (I suspect, though, this feature might not work so well for people who are not already following people who discuss topics they find interesting). The only downside I see is finding enough time to check out all the matches made in Twitter  … and still have some time left to tweet!

Have you found any interesting new people to follow using the new feature? Please share your experiences below.

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The video features Beth Kanter and Allison Fine, authors of The Networked Nonprofit, with research on the successful social media strategies of contest winners. It also features Scott Beale from the Atlas Service Corps, a non-profit which has won five online competitions and over $400,000—all with a staff of only five people!

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A few of the highlights include:

• If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest country in the world.
• 50 percent of mobile Internet traffic in the United Kingdom is on Facebook.
• Amazon sold more electronic books for the Kindle than physical books on Christmas.
• 96 percent of millennials have joined a social network.
• Social media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the web.
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the United States met via social media.
• Facebook tops Google for weekly U.S. Internet traffic.
• Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears have more Twitter followers than the populations of Sweden, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway and Panama.
• The fastest growing segment on Facebook is females 55 to 65 years old

Here’s the YouTube video:

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To my surprise, however, @Verizon, the official Verizon corporate Twitter account, and @VerizonSupport, the official Verizon customer service Twitter account, weren’t acknowledging the outage. Take a look at the side-by-side screen shots below of what @VerizonSupport contained in response to customers (including me) sending out public tweets asking for information (you can click on the image to view a higher-resolution version).

The last question @VerizonSupport answered for the night was in response to @nerdstarresq’s installation problem, even though customer questions immediately before were about the outage. @Verizon was equally Orwellian with tweets, such as “PODCAST: Our Chief Sustainability Officer on Green Is Good radio show: http://bit.ly/c5pNCA^ac” and “Ck out latest Twitter feature on FiOS.When Tweeting via the TV it now says “via FiOS TV” at the end of your Tweet.”

Even though Verizon is in the Internet businesss, its Twitter team seems to be stuck in a  one- or two-way message time warp. As I noted in my Exciting or Scary? Rise of Social Media Swarms, we’re in the middle of communications renaissance. For the first time in history, every customer has a voice that can be heard worldwide and then amplified exponentially if his/her conversation creates a buzz that turns into a swarm. These swarms can attack companies who fail to monitor and address online comments and controversies in real-time:

• Intel was attacked by a swarm of activists opposed to minerals mining in the Congo
• Nestle was attacked by a swarm for using palm oil from companies harming Indonesian rainforests

If either company had joined or initiated dialogue early on before the attacks turned into swarms, the impact might have been mitigated. Big companies (especially ones with tech-savvy customers with high-speed Internet, such as Verizon) should have learned from Nestle and Intel’s mistake and applied the principles of social media to their customer operations.  

In Verizon’s case, being honest, upfront and listening to customers would only have meant a few extra tweets from @Verizon and @VerizonSupport about Verizon’s e-mail being down for maintenance and the company looking for a quick fix to the problem.

Not hard, but that is what bad customer service in the Web 2.0 world looks like.

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After the 2010 World Cup soccer tournament started two weeks ago, the social networking site began seeing huge traffic whenever a big goal was scored. Though Twitter normally sees about 750 tweets per second on an average day, a record was set Monday when tweets were sent at a rate of 2,940 per second just 30 seconds after Japan scored against Cameroon. 

That record, however, was short-lived. Twitter users sent out as many as 3,085 tweets per second Thursday night immediately after the Los Angeles Lakers’ victory against the Boston Celtics in the NBA Finals.

While Twitter, Inc. is probably celebrating the record level of tweets, regular users of Twitter are not. Enormous traffic from the World Cup frequently has exceeded Twitter’s capacity resulting in too many unwanted appearances of the Twitter “fail whale.”

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Speaking at Nielsen’s Consumer 360 conference on Tuesday, Sandberg said only 11 percent of teens use e-mail daily and instead use SMS and social networking.

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but in consumer technology, if you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow,” she said, “you look at what teenagers are doing today.”

Her assertion is big news for businesses and online advertisers because Facebook may connect consumers with brands more easily than e-mail. While ads in an inbox are called “spam,” Facebook users will even sometimes click “Like” on a brand’s Facebook page and volunteer to receive messages directly from advertisers.

Here’s Sandberg’s talk.

Do you think e-mail is going away? Please leave your comments below.

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While BP is on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube, the information and images it’s sharing are either out-of-date and wrong or way too obviously sanitized.  As Glen Gilmore wrote in an excellent blog post on BP and the social media battleground:

Looking at the collection of photos uploaded at the bpAmerica Flickr stream, one might think that BP’s work crews had been sent to the wrong beaches and waters, as the ones shown in their photographs have shining white sand and clear waters…. Nicely-polished productions and squeeky-clean images are precisely the sort of content that makes board members smile – and the rest of the public go elsewhere for their information.

In this case, the public has turned to satirical YouTube videos, such as a Lady Gaga BP gingle and my below two picks for video clip of the month; a BOYCOTTbp Facebook fan page; and a fake Twitter account. @BPGlobalPR pokes fun at the real oil giant’s public relations campaign with tweets such as:

• We are very upset that Operation: Top Kill has failed. We are running out of cool names for these things.
• If we’re being accused of being criminals, we want to be tried by a jury of our peers- wealthy execs who don’t give a damn. #fairisfair
• A bird just stole my sandwich! You deserve everything you get, nature!!! #bpcares
• I’m sorry, are people mad at us for drilling in the ocean?!? Maybe God shouldn’t have put oil there in the first place. DUH. #bpcares
• BP: Cross you fingers and pray for our riskiest operation yet. We sent Terry to get the lunch order.

Apparently, BP’s communications strategies aren’t going to leave the 1980s anytime soon. BP just hired Anne Womack Kolton, a former spokeswoman for Vice President Dick Cheney, to be its public face for the disaster. While at Cheney’s side, Kolton was an ardent defender of secrecy, and she comes from the Brunswick Group, the international communications and crisis management firm running BP’s failed public relations response. While I could be surprised, I suspect this “change” will only lead to more of the same. It’ll be interesting to watch and find out.

I’m so glad I sold all my BP stock earlier this year! Enjoy the videos.

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Today, we are on the verge of a massive shift in the way we communicate and inspire action. Social media is creating a new kind of communications fluidity, a fully immersive experience enabling conversations to be hijacked in ways unimaginable in decades past. 

Up until the 1980s, totalitarian governments, superpowers, media cartels, and leading brands had dominant control over national and even global dialogues because of superior resources and a monopoly over communications channels. A message could be easily disseminated through one-way communications processes without any competition from an opposing product or viewpoint.

By the 1990s, computer power and the Internet were inundating people with more information than ever before, ending communications monopolies and monologues. Communications strategists quickly switched to two-way communications processes and began relying on dialogues with audience segments (about their opinions, feelings, needs, and wants as well as the benefits or barriers they perceived to change) to identify ways to influence and motivate them.

Today, a self-directed communications swarm flowing in infinite directions and loops—but in a synchronized way—is emerging as a new communications paradigm.

Thanks to Web 2.0, ideas are now buzzing into swarms in patterns similar to those of bees. Bees use their “humming” to instinctively move in coordinated synchronous swarms when they are building a new nest or hive. Mobile technology combined with web applications, such as Twitter and Foursquare, enable users to create a buzz that replicates these swarms, allowing people to receive instructions, move in unison, nearly instantaneously, without prior planning or forethought.

Here’s a telling quote out of an article on Twitter’s role in the Bangkok conflict in The Globe and Mail:

Never before has a social media website played the kind of role in a conflict that Twitter has played in Thailand’s nine-week-old anti-government uprising, keeping people informed even as it amplified the hate on both sides of the country’s divide. 

Some say Twitter—or rather its users—may have even saved lives as fighting consumed the streets of Bangkok. 

More clearly, it was used by propagandists on both sides to get their message out, and by ordinary Thais to express their frustrations at the situation and to warn each other about which areas of Bangkok to avoid as the city descended into urban warfare. 

With many websites censored and Thailand’s traditional media deeply divided into pro- and anti-government camps, it arguably became the only forum where you could get a clear picture of what was really going on.

The use of communications swarms is only in its infancy, and it will be fascinating to watch it evolve. Its powerful impact appears to be both beneficial and destructive. Swarms have been used to organize peaceful political rallies, pressure companies to change their policies, report election fraud, and orchestrate disaster relief services. But as The Globe and Mail article points out, social media’s cloak of near-anonymity can lead to vitriolic, often hateful, speech and actions:

Each hateful comment seemed to provoke an even nastier response, and by the time the nine-week-old protest came to an end, each side was cheering acts of violence against the other.

Indeed, Web 2.0 is ushering in an exciting—but sometimes scary—new communications order. Since we can’t bury our heads in the sand and stop technological progess, our only choice is to embrace the chaos and prepare to adapt along with it.

What do you think? Are you tracking or joining swarms? Are you excited or scared? Let us hear from you.

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With Google Wave, collaborators share—in real time or over time—e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking merged into topical waves. Waves are kind of a cross between chatting and threaded discussions on a blog. 

I got my invite last November, two months after Google started rolling them out in September. I wasn’t able to use Google Wave for any real-life business collaboration, so after playing around a little the first month or two, I didn’t really do much with my “exclusive” club membership. Others did, however, and their comments during the preview stage product resulted in Google making a number of important tweaks, including e-mail notifications, read-only wave access and undo/redo options.

Google also announced yesterday it is opening up much of Google Wave’s underlying architecture. That means organizations will be able to use Google Wave to develop their own real-time business tools and services—creating all kinds of possibilities for Google Wave to swell into a technological tsunami.

Have you been able to use Google Wave for real-life business collaboration? Please let me know about your experiences in the comments section below.

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Instead of seeing the non-profit’s website, I found a page full of ads reading at the top, “This page is parked free courtesy of [a different web hosting firm than the one the non-profit uses].” Using Network Solution’s WHOIS behind that domain? page, I discovered the non-profit’s domain registration information had been deleted, causing it to be cancelled under Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) policy against incomplete or false registration data.

It turns out a third party had been tapped to register the non-profit’s domain name several years back. When the non-profit moved away from an HTML website with a monthly maintenance fee to a more modern but free WordPress site, some feathers were ruffled, spurring the person to delete the registration information and refuse to take any action to restore it. Since the person was the domain’s owner plus administrative and billing contact, nothing can be done to get the domain back (short of hiring an attorney at great expense).

The lesson learned here is if you work for a small non-profit (or any type of organization of any size) make sure your domain name is registered to your organization and not a third party. You also should:

• Make sure your domain owner contact is one of the highest members of your organization 
• Make sure you list a second contact for site administration who is equally one of the highest members of your organization
• Use one firm to register your domain name and a second firm for web hosting so the people who maintain your website cannot change your domain registration information if they become disgruntled
• Review and update your domain registration information (e.g., contact names, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, etc.) every year

My story does have a happy ending. The non-profit went ahead and registered a new domain name (which is actually more appropriate than the old one) and transferred the website to the new address. Thanks to Twitter’s live search results, search engines are already picking up the domain name change.

Has anything similar happened to you? Please share your experiences in the comments section below.

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Google software engineer Eric Zhang wrote about the process of developing the plugin on the Google News Blog.

“Our next step was to open-source the Living Stories form, allowing publishers to build on it using Google’s AppEngine infrastructure. We then released a version of the code that runs independent of our infrastructure. Since then, a number of publications have shared their ideas for ways we can offer additional tools to help them create Living Stories. The WordPress plugin is a direct result of those conversations.”

Living Stories is like a personalized RSS feed reader, but customized to pay attention to just one story. The story is customized to the user, keeping track of what they have already seen so that it can alert them when new content is available.

Below is a GoogleVideos YouTube video on the benefits of Google’s Living Stories.

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Ning claims more than 46 million users spread over 300,000 social networks. The vast majority of its users are non-profits and other small groups who rely on Ning’s free service.

When the company announced April 15 that it would shift to an exclusively subscription-based model, it said the needs of its free and paid clients were so different that it had to choose one of the groups to be its focus. In the words of Ning’s new CEO, Jason Rosenthal:

“When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what’s working, what’s not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success.

My main conclusion is that we need to double down on our premium services business. Our Premium Ning Networks[...] drive 75% of our monthly U.S. traffic, and those Network Creators need and will pay for many more services and features from us.

So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning[...] All of our product development capability will be devoted to making paying Network Creators extremely happy.”

This is not the first time that non-profits relying on free Internet services have been burned. Last November, Causes, a fund-raising application, stopped working with MySpace, deleting users’ content and communications. Ideablob, a service that created a platform for people to discuss business ideas and awarded cash prizes to the most popular ones, also shut down last November when its parent company filed for bankruptcy. Neither Causes nor Ideablob alerted registered users about their sudden shut-downs.

Ning, however, has alerted users they need to start forking money over for its premium services or prepare for being shut down.  Ning’s premium fees include custom URLs at $5 per month, customer support starting at $10 per month, extra bandwidth and storage at $10 per month, removal of Ning links at the bottom of pages at $25 per month, and an ad-free interface at $25 per month.

UPDATE: Ning announced May 4, 2010, that it had signed a letter of intent with a major educational publisher to keep its service free for educators. Teachers will be able to use a new product called, “Ning Minis,” but it’s unclear at this time what kind of control the company will have over Ning Minis and how much advertising they will contain.

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