As I write this, voters are going to the polls in Indiana and North Carolina to vote for the Democratic nominee for The American Presidency. The frontrunner going into the poll is Barrack Obama, one of the fastest rising politicians in the history of the country. His appeal among young and first-time voters has been unparalleled and much of his success within that demographic has been aided by extensive use of social media, including viral videos and a Facebook campaign that has truly defined the service’s seismic potential.

With the help of Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, Obama has coordinated a massive following from the wired community.

Here are some facts about Obama’s Facebook Empire:
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The BBC has an interesting story recording motions by human rights organization Amnesty International to pressure Google to do more in the fight against censorship and abuses online, particularly in its relationship with China.

In the wake of the Tibetan protests and the current controversy and anxiety surrounding the Summer Olympics in Beijing, there has been tremendous pressure on Western nations to voice their commendation of China’s crackdowns on dissent. It appears that the outcry is also being directed at Western Companies who have expansive business in China, including Google who launched Google.cn in 2006.

“Google - whose shares currently trade at almost $600 (£300), more than $100 above its level a year ago - is facing two shareholder motions at its annual general meeting on Thursday.

Both insist the company needs to do more to fight censorship and support human rights.

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While I was browsing through my daily blog reads, I noticed a very peculiar feature on one of them every time I scrolled across their blogroll. I tiny preview window appeared next to my cursor as I went over a link, displaying the content of that site in a clear RSS feed. At the top left corner of this window, you could also toggle a different view that previewed the front page itself. You also had the ability to increase the size of the window without straining your eyes to read the tiny text.

What is this marvelous tool that shows where outbound links are headed without having you leave the original site?

A glance to the lower right hand side of the preview window had the name Snap Shots and a link to their page. This service, found at www.snap.com, is free and with sponsored keywords related to the links appearing in the window, presents an opportunity for bloggers to share ad revenue with the company. Along with the standard window, specialized window types, or shots, can be used for a variety of different links, making your site accessible for your readers.

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The BBC has reported that Web 2.0 is set for a massive boost from major enterprises over the next 5 years, as a new Forrester survey shows that over half of American and European businesses are setting social networking as a top priority. This news coincides with The Web 2.0 conference held in San Francisco last week, which hosted developers and businesses who are introducing new web technologies to maximize customer-employee relations online.

“The report found that consumer giants such as General Motors, McDonald’s, Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance and Wells Fargo Bank will drive much of this growth and have already embraced tools like blogs, RSS feeds, podcasting and social networking.

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Everyone here at Apollo Media is infatuated with Netvibes, the personalized start page service that allows you to organize your favorite blog RSS feeds, Digg stories, Flickr pictures and more into easily manageable tabs. We previously hailed Netvibes as one of our top blog resources, and we were excited to hear about Netvibes Ginger, the newest version of the RSS aggregator.

Simply put, Ginger takes the same features that made Netvibes so accessible and adds more customizable and personal options, so you can integrate your various email and social networking services into one place. For internet addicts like us, these are incredibly valuable additions that save you the time and effort that would otherwise be spent hopping across all those pages separately.

Here is a breakdown of what Ginger is introducing to the social media world:

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The other day we wrote a post about lowering your bounce rate. It explained how different blogs can have different rates according to the scope of their content and how it is displayed on the blog. Expanding on this topic, we thought we would introduce Google’s latest service that will help bloggers set realistic goals for themselves within their respective niche.

What is Benchmarking?

About a month ago, Google announced that they were introducing a “Benchmarking Service” into their Analytics program. Benchmarking essentially allows you to compare your blog’s stats (Visits, Pageviews, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and New Visits data) with an aggregated report on blogs similar to yours in both size and category.

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What is Twitter?

Twitter is the latest social networking craze. It integrates blogging and instant messaging into one easily accessible service. Twitter has often been referred to as ‘micro-blogging’ and ‘social instant messaging’ and involves tiny blog posts (under 140 characters) that let you share and keep of track of you and your friend’s everyday activities. Basically Twitter lets you provide updates between emails and blog posts, as you respond to the question “What are you doing”, or other queries, as you go about your day.

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In the world of blogging, there is great debate concerning which software applications are best suited for publishing on the web. While each of the major blogging platforms offer different benefits, we here at Apollo Media thought we would jump into the discussion with our own two cents.

Here are 10 reasons why we use WordPress as our weapon of choice:

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Last week, WordPress made the newest version of their blogging service available for download. There are a lot of new additions to 2.5, far too many to review in this post (check out the official WordPress Blog post for full details). Instead, we thought we’d briefly go over some of the major improvements that are suited to the average blogger:

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Facebook has recently announced that they will be revamping the design of profile pages on their popular social networking site as an effort to organize the clutter that comes from their users’ diverse activities. Easing the navigation of photo albums, history, friend updates and applications, the development team will be splitting the profile page into threes sections, separated by tabs at the top of the page.

The tabs will be labeled `Wall’, `About’ and `Photos,’ and the content will be divided accordingly. The development team is also hinting that users will be able to create additional tabs. This move is intended to make profile navigations more organized as people add more applications, as well as personal information, on their profile pages.

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