How far do you have to go these days to prove that you are who you say you are? That is the question I have been thinking about all day after I saw this Tweet from Chris Pirillo yesterday morning.

“Surprise! @johntesh is following more people than are following him”

Of course the first thing I did was visit John Tesh on Twitter. But when I got to his page I was skeptical. Sure, I see John Tesh’s image as the Twitter background. And I see the name John Tesh in the “About” box. But populated in his Twitterstream is simply a bunch of one sentence titles with TinyURL links. At this point my skepticism turned to doubt. This must be some person who for some reason felt he would latch onto the super popular John Tesh brand and link to his own blog.

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If you could leverage the vast memberships of social networking sites and marry it up to the interest of top local and national merchants, would you do it? Would you want to provide that type of opportunity for special deals and instant rewards for your community? Of course you would.

That is exactly what One Big Planet is doing. With their proposed “Acquire, Generate, and Retain” life cycle, they may just change the way people think about loyalty programs. According to this article in DM News, “The platform creates branded portals for organizations and online communities through which members can shop, make dining reservations, print coupons and book flights, among a host of other commerce tools. OneBigPlanet also incorporates social networking tools, which allow members to add each other as friends, make recommendations and rate merchants. The company tracks user preferences to target e-mail and on-site offers.”

Will communities and companies embrace this all-in-one hub of great deals and instant savings? Is this a situation where you need universal participation to truly make this site worthwhile for the majority of users? There is no question One Big Planet can scale up. But can it exist in its infancy stage?

The launch of One Big Planet is an interesting one and on paper, a good one. So good, in fact, that there is bound to be competitor sites that come up with similar offerings. Then, the real question will not be whether people embrace this new all-in-one portal model, it will be which one do they like best?

I cannot imagine Google, with their iGoogle, AdSense, and GMail products, not to mention their involvement with Open Social, would miss an opportunity like this.

With the increased exposure on “You-Generated” content these days, you will be hard-pressed to find a presentation on marketing these days that does not refer to social media.

But although most talk about the penetration of RSS, blogs, wikis, and bookmarking, few ever define this new type of web user as a generation.

In this presentation, however, there is a slide (above) that refers to “The birth of Generation C”.

Does this really mean anything? Do attributes like “Creativity” and “Conversation” really define a generation. Or are they simply vehicles to express the needs of Generation Me? Read more…

With WikiMapia, you can now merge the user-generated input style of a Wiki, with the satellite imagery of Google Earth. What this allows you to do is view the world (or a specific place) with all types of descriptions via written word, pictures, even videos.

It seems that Google Earth has enabled another way to explore the world and this time we are even closer to having the entire world in our hands…er…on our screens. View a specific location and everything that goes with it. You can even view it on your computer or even on Java J2ME-enabled mobile phones and PDAs.

The world is getting described with words, sounds, and moving pictures: void of political influences and biases, created by the people, for the people. With other Wiki sites like Wikipedia, hordes of people spend countless hours adding and correcting content with the only incentive being “getting it right”. Frequently, information of a subjective nature are scrutinized and inevitable removed.

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