Thankfully, the Age of Mass Marketing, in which each of us was converted into a fraction of a Nielsen rating point, is pretty much a memory.

Marketing is no longer a one way street. It no longer happens to us. It happens with us. Voices carry across the Internet as they once did across town squares.

Welcome to the Age of Conversation, or more precisely, welcome back. The 19th and 20th century was largely an aberration – growth of our population outstripped our technological ability to retain the most fundamentally human characteristic of the marketplace – the ability for individuals to talk to each other and have their voices heard.

Are you looking for a great read?

Over 100 individual voices from different perspectives in marketing have come together from around the world to share their thoughts about this new era, what it means and how to flourish within it. The result is The Age of Conversation.

The icing on the cake is the whole thing is for charity. All proceeds after printing and shipping costs go direct to Variety, the Children’s Charity to support children in peril around the world.

The Age of Conversation started from a blog conversation between Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton. They’ve made a Herculean effort over the past few months to gather contributing authors together and to produce a really unique compilation. I’m not more than a couple dozen pages into it so far and I already feel the inspiration has been well worth the $9.99 for the eBook and then some.

You can find out a lot more about how The Age of Conversation came to be on the blog, and you can buy the book here.

P.S. – My contribution to The Age of Conversation is on page 11 and is called “Speaking Through Action” If you decide to pick up a copy, I’d love to hear what you think of it in the comments here.

I’ve been missing-in-action here for quite some time, and I’d like to thank everyone that emailed to check in and all of you that have kept a spot for me in your RSS reader through it all. I appreciate it. A combination of some insane virus that’s been stalking me like The Terminator and a heavy project load brought blogging to a sudden standstill.

I’m still catching up on my project load, and although I’m not quite back in the game I’m at least at the table fumbling for the dice.

MyBlogLog just rolled out some nifty new tagging features today and in the process decided to slap some of their most ardent supporters and advocates in the face.

Thanks folks.

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The W3C recommendation for HTML 4.01, refers to links as “one of the primary forces driving the success of the Web.”

The ability to link to external resources is so fundamental to the Web’s success all you really have without it is an online library. Links make the Internet a social network. They are the basic building block of online social transactions.

Optimizing a website for social media isn’t all about creating linkbait. It’s about making your website as socially connected as possible. Although the importance of inbound links is well known, outbound links are also a powerful tool in the webmasters’ toolbox.

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U.S. Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is embroiled in controversy over how he obtained his MySpace page.

Although some of the details are under dispute by both parties, it seems that generally what happened is…

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PlugIM is a Digg-style social media site for internet marketers. There is a lot of great stuff there and I’ve been looking for a Google Toolbar button so that it would be easier for me to submit stories to it as well, but came up empty and so I’ve created one.

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May Day 2007 started out as a typical day at Digg. Hordes of diggers were recommending tales of Ubuntu, Apple and Wii. Weary search marketers were cursing as usual at seeing their perfectly legitimate pieces of diggbait buried by mysterious hands.

Then all of a sudden it hit – the perfect storm.

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Ever wonder what those little boxes are in StumbleUpon next to the profile names?

The blue boxes indicate how many fans a stumbler has. If a box is empty, it means that that they don’t have any fans. The boxes progressively fill up with blue as they get more fans. Once they have about 35 of them, the box becomes filled completely.

So what, you ask?

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All of this talk of Technorati favorites due to the Dosh Dosh experiment got me searching for a Google Toolbar button so that I could easily search my Technorati favorites and add new sites to Technorati from the Google Toolbar.

Since I couldn’t find one, I rolled my own.

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Maki over at the wonderful blog Dosh Dosh has been running an experiment that has to do with the Technorati bookmarking system.

In a nutshell, Technorati tracks popular blogs in two ways: “Most linked to”, and “Most favorited”. While it can be extremely difficult to rank in the “Most linked to” list, the “Most favorited list” is a lot easier. Right now, you only need about 130 people to add you to their Technorati favorites to make it into the top 100.

Sounds intriguing, eh?

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