ReadWriteWeb

If you've been following our Weekend Reading series on Fridays for the last few weeks, you've noticed that we've been discussing the importance of personal branding for entrepreneurs. But branding is not only an important facet for individuals; for startups, branding is an essential step toward building a successful business. Mint founder Aaron Patzer, who speaks Tuesday at the Future of Web Apps Conference in Miami, Florida, recently discussed with CNET's Caroline McCarthy how he believes Mint's branding helped it become a breakout success.

Late last night, AOL revealed a sneak peek at their new branding campaign for their soon-to-be standalone content-focused business. The rebranding effort will officially launch on December 10th when AOL begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange as a separate company from Time Warner, its current owner. The new logos - yes, there are more than one - feature a lowercase "aol" on top of various colorful images that range from an orange goldfish to a green scribble. The odd designs are definitely different than AOL's "running man" or "triangle with swoosh" logos of years past - logos that became synonymous with the service that a large part of America once used to go online. But are the new logos any good? Or do they look more like the joke that AOL hopes it's not becoming?

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The concept of personal branding online has become a part of many conversations about social media and social networking recently. The popularity of social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and various smaller niche sites has continued to skyrocket, offering individuals a chance to create a more robust online presence. The age of anonymity online has all but ended, and individuals should seek to gain further control of their online identities.

GizaPage is a new "social network organizer" - not aggregator, mind you - what they do is different. Instead of pulling in your social media posts and updates from around the web into a content stream like FriendFeed, they create a web page which features the social media profiles you link, each in their own tab and each page served from the social network's own domain. It's like loading up a tabbed web browser with links to your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., but all easily accessible from one custom URL (yourname.gizapage.com).

What do you get when you combine a platform for creating user-generated video content with the micro-blogging sensation that is Twitter? According to 12seconds.tv, you get a viable business model for your company, a platform that allows brands to leverage Twitter for communication, and a way for everyday Twitter users to have fun and earn prizes. Does that sound like a win-win-win all around? It very well may be...or it may just be the first example of how Twitter is transforming from a fun, communication tool used among friends to a commercialized platform for mainstream marketing.

In this morning's New York Times, there's an interesting article about the new trend of "ghost Twittering." If you don't know what that means, it's when someone, usually a celebrity, politician, or a "personal brand" of some sort, pays another person or other people to update their Twitter account on their behalf. This "ghost writer" of tweets thus becomes a "ghost Twitterer." While it may make sense for someone like U.S. President Barack Obama to farm out Twitter updates to staff (he has bigger tasks to focus on than tweets), when individual celebs and micro-celebs engage in this practice it seems a bit disingenuous. Is it really so hard to post 140 characters every now and then?

Gartner released a report today that highlights the different ways that companies are adopting Twitter for business use. Although Twitter was originally intended for communication among individuals, a number of organizations have begun to actively participate on the platform. However, not all companies are using Twitter in the same way. Some are tweeting, some are just listening, and some really savvy companies are doing both.

On Tuesday, Flock revealed the new version of their social browser, Flock 2.0. At the time, the company made a point to mention that most Firefox extensions would work in their browser, too, including one of our favorites, Greasemonkey. However, yesterday, Flock Community Ambassador Evan Hamilton sent out an email to all Flock developers about some changes the company had decided to make. The email made it clear that Flock had not just decided to support Firefox add-ons, they were killing all the Flock-specific add-ons, too.

The LiveSide blog today took a look at all the different bits of Microsoft's Live.com search universe and found that while the new look may live up to the stated design principle of "Simple and powerful. Human. Fast." it doesn't provide a common, unified experience. LiveSide found four different search boxes, two different Live.com "orb" logos (in four different sizes), and six different header backgrounds. While the slight differences in design may not be a very substantial issue, it is indicative of the confusion Microsoft has created around their Live brand.

A couple of days ago I received the following email, from a Mr Vladislav Sobolev, who I'd never heard of before:

"Hi,

I am going to launch ReadWriteWeb.mobi, the mobile version of ReadWriteWeb
optimized for viewing on a mobile phone. I am also launching a number of other
mobile sites including buzzmachine, craphound, crunchboard, deadspin,
micropersuasion, scobleizer, sethgodin, and a couple dozen other projects.
Thought you might be interested.

I'm also launching MacManus.mobi btw.

Cheers,
V.S ."