The new logos are just a preview of AOL's revamped look and are meant to replace AOL's swoosh triangle for good. The AOL "running man," however, will stick around the brand in some form, although the company isn't saying exactly where he will show up.

But the updated logos are a little off-putting to some. Noted technology blogger Om Malik of GigaOM posted his gut reaction Sunday night, calling them out as "lame," "ambiguous at best," and "as sexy as the obese, shapeless humans living on Axiom, the flagship of the BnL fleet in Pixar movie WALL-E." Ouch!

But it's easy to see where he's coming from. After all, some of the logos look more like the sorts of doodles you would find gracing high-schoolers' notebooks - like the hand doing the "sign of the horns" hand gesture. Really. "Rock on!," shouts the logo, but it reminds us more of a middle-aged heavy metal fan reminiscing about their youth than the young, hip company AOL desperately hopes to become.

Then there is the pink glob. The best way to describe this logo is a fluffy wad of bubble gum. A green scribble looks like someone had trouble getting their ballpoint ink pen going and a generic blue swirl seems to signify nothing but a lack of imagination. What content sites are these logos even associated with? Your guess is as good as ours.

CNET calls the goldfish logo "cute" (sarcastically?), but AOL isn't trying to build the next LOLcats empire, so maybe they should have forgone "cute" for something a little more meaningful and modern.

But that's just our opinion. What's yours? Let us know in the poll below.

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.

Some Personal Branding Background

Personal branding is inherently somewhat egotistical, but not necessarily more so than networking at a conference or sharing business cards. The influence that personal branding online can have has continued to grow as people change the way they seek and consume information. Just over a decade ago, social circles were limited to face-to-face interactions and numbers in a phone book. Now, you can have a much larger reach and audience online. Think of personal branding simply as conducting some marketing as the president of Brand You.

The key to successfully branding yourself online is sharing. This could include contributing valuable information to an online conversation, creating original content, passing along great content from others or sharing knowledge from your experiences. Whatever your interests, social networking provides the opportunity to connect with others who share those same interests and want to hear what you have to say. The tools you can use are nearly infinite, but some of the larger social sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are great places to start if you're not already there.

Where a Domain Fits With Personal Branding

Whether you're just starting out online or you're a social media power user who has more social profiles than you can keep track of, a domain is an essential part of owning your brand online. Domains were around long before social networking sites, but many people have never owned one, and they're more relevant now than ever. Owning a domain is very affordable, at under $10 per year, and well worth the cost as long as you put it to use. If you don't already own yourname.com, do a domain search to see if it's available. If yourname.com is already taken, the .net or .me extensions are also great options for a personal site. If all else fails, you can use a middle initial, nickname or other variation. Once you've found the perfect domain, consider registering other extensions (.net, .org, .tel, etc.) as well and redirect them to your primary domain.

Once you own your domain, you might wonder how best to use it. The option that comes to mind for many people is to build a website. If you have some knowledge of HTML or a website-building program, then creating a basic website is relatively simple. Content management systems like WordPress and Joomla are increasingly popular among people who want to build personal websites or blogs without learning HTML or Web coding. Here are just a few ideas of what you can do with a personal website:

• Showcase your work in an online personal portfolio.
• Build an online resume that highlights your strengths and creativity.
• Make a website that features your hobbies and interests.
• Create a hub that links to all of your social networking profiles.
• Start a blog about a professional field or subject that you have expertise in.

If you don't want to create a website or blog with your own domain, there are still many other uses for it:

• Brand yourself with custom email (you@yourname.com). You can even hook up services like Gmail to your domain using MX records, if you don't want to use separate email hosting.
• If you already have a blog set up with a service like Blogger, Posterous or WordPress.com, use URL forwarding to direct visitors to that blog when they type in your domain.
• Forward your domain to your Facebook, Twitter or other primary social networking profile.

Regardless of what you use the domain for, connecting your name to your online presence is important. When you connect with someone in your everyday life, you can share your domain name rather than having them search for you on Facebook. Use your domain on business cards, resume and other professional materials. Whatever the purpose, your domain can be an essential part of your online identity, without you having to rely on numerous online profiles. As Marshall Kirkpatrick puts it, "I'm in charge here at Marshallk.com and that's the way I like it."

Why Create a Personal Brand Online?

Personal branding has a great number of applications, particularly in the professional world. If you're searching for a job, having a well-rounded online presence is an increasingly important factor that many companies consider. Businesses often take more than a peek at what comes up in Google search results for candidates, whether you think they should or not, so use your domain name to rank well in Google to put the content that you want potential employers to see front and center.

Similarly, use your domain and social media profiles to network on a professional or personal level with others who share the same interests and goals. If you have consistently useful knowledge and content to contribute online, you can come to be known as an influencer and thought leader in your field. If you aim to start your own business or new project, having an established presence and network of online connections that trusts you can make a huge difference in your ability to succeed. Regardless of the direction you take with personal branding, a domain name is a great place to start and can serve as the backbone of your online presence.

Have another innovative use for your domain? Please share it in the comments.

All Your Profiles, One URL

If you maintain a personal brand or even a brand for a company which has a presence across numerous social networks, you can now point your fans, followers, and customers to a specific domain name that you own - and one that doesn't say "GizaPage" anywhere in it. For example: socialmedia.brandname.com. This page can now be customized to blend in with your own branding by changing the background, the color, the font, and the layout.

As you expand your presence to new social media properties, you can easily add them to your tabbed list using GizaPage's well-designed dashboard interface for page management. You can also rearrange the order of the tabs so your Facebook appears in the line up ahead of your MySpace page, for instance.

The GizaCard

To draw people into your social media world, GizaPage has also added a new feature called a "GizaCard" that displays the icons for all the social media profiles you set up along with your name or brand name. The card can be embedded on any site, blog, or online profile that supports embeds. With one click on the card, your entire social media lineup loads within a new web page so visitors can browse through all your profiles at once and friend or follow you on the sites they choose.

Not only is the GizaCard convenient for you and your site's visitors, it's also worth noting that GizaPage hasn't mucked up the card by slapping their own branding on top of it. Nowhere on the card is "GizaPage" mentioned - it's simply a tool that links you back to their service.

Stats and More

After implementing these new features, you can then take advantage of GizaPage's newly launched statistics section which details page views, visits, and other useful stats that can help you determine the success (or lack thereof) of your various social media profiles across the web. In the future, the company plans on ramping up this section to become more robust, possibly charging a premium for access to the more detailed stats.

All of these upgrades are available now for free except for the subdomain feature. That will cost $4.99 per month in the future. However, GizaPage is offering it for free for a year if you sign up by July 31st - if interested, you can do so from here.

12seconds.tv, a video messaging service that lets users record quick videos only 12 seconds in length, has been popular among Twitter users since its launch in summer of 2008. With the service, you can send out a tweet to your Twitter friends once you've posted a video on the site. That's precisely the functionality which appealed to marketers looking for an entry point into Twitter. The only question was how do you get 12seconds users to tweet out videos about the brand?

The solution that 12seconds.tv is introducing today is called the "12omercial." And yes, like it sounds, it's a Twitter commercial made using the 12seconds service. Here's how it's going to work: brands and companies will sponsor 12seconds users to create 12omercials on their behalf. The videos created by the users will be a response to a question asked by the brand. Once recorded, the 12omercials are automatically posted to the Twitter streams of the users involved. Those tweets will include a link back to their video.

The first brand to participate is LG who will begin using the platform to promote their new phone, the Versa. The question they're asking is "what's your Versa vice?" Or, in other words, what's that thing you do with your mobile phone that you know you shouldn't? Is it text-messaging while driving? Checking Facebook while in a meeting? The answers to this question will be varied and perhaps even humorous (or so the company hopes, that is).

Play Along, Win Fabulous Prizes

You may wonder what incentive 12seconds users have for creating these user-generated commercials for these companies. Fortunately, they won't be paid to do this. We say fortunately because once cold, hard cash becomes involved, too many people looking to earn a quick buck would end up creating these "12omericials" and then would clutter up our Twitter streams with their spam. 

However, users will be encouraged to participate - they just won't earn actual money by doing so. Instead, the creation of a video will equate to a sweepstakes entry where they have the chance to win some sort of prize, as determined by the brand. What the prize will be will change with each promotion, but with LG, it's a trip to Las Vegas.

Another reason users may participate is because there's also the possibility of having their video seen by a far larger audience than just their Twitter friends. It's up to the brand how the content will be used, but there are a number of possibilities. Some companies will be selecting the best videos for use on their own web sites, others may use them in online ads, and there's even a chance that videos could find their way to a TV commercial. (In LG's case, there will be a dedicated mini-site set up for the promotion.)

But What If People Say Bad Things?

As we recently saw with the Skittles social media campaign, when people realized they could get their tweets on the Skittles homepage just by using a particular keyword in their posts, they started to abuse the system. Some people posted really (and we mean really) offensive messages to Twitter just to see those messages on Skittles.com...and perhaps to prove to Skittles that their campaign was a terrible idea.

But 12seconds co-founder, Sol Lipman, doesn't think the Skittles campaign was a bad idea at all. He thinks it was an ingenious experiment and perhaps even representative of the future of advertising. According to Lipman, we're moving past the point when brands want to communicate with customers through press releases and banner ads. It's user-generated content that is the future. And what better way to learn about a brand than through a trusted friend's tweet?

Of course, when you put the power of brand advertising in the hands of the people, bad things can happen. That was certainly true in the case of Skittles, but even so, Lipman argues that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Sure, some people got out of hand, but at the end of the day, people were talking about Skittles. Just because some people did terrible things, it probably didn't mean you started hating the candy or boycotting it. Instead, you just had it a bit closer to the forefront of your mind the next time your sweet tooth kicked in.

Be Brave, Companies - Engage! (It's Your Only Hope)

This radical repositioning about what it means to advertise may actually be a bit too scary for some companies and some will be hesitant to get involved. User-generated content has been known to backfire before. For example, in 2006, Chevy let YouTube users make commercials for the 2007 Tahoe, but what they got were videos about how bad the truck was for the environment. Still, that's not stopping other companies from attempting nearly the same thing. Case in point: Ford. This month, the company will launch their "Fiesta Experiment," a marketing effort that puts promoting the new car into the hands of 100 twenty-somethings who will blog, record video, and post to social media about the their experiences.

In a similar vein, the 12seconds.tv Twitter commercials will offer brands an opportunity to start conversations while abandoning their control over the exact messaging. They may have to take the good with the bad. But in the end, only genuine conversations will convince the jaded, over-saturated customers of today...and especially those known as "Generation Y." As we noted before, that generation especially tends to rely on a network of friends for product recommendations, not traditional advertising.

Check It Out

In addition to being used for branded campaigns, these 12omercials can be created for any promotional purpose. Users can include a URL in the video that links to anything they want - their blog, something they're selling, a charity event, or whatever. A back-end analytics package will help them track the campaign, too.

As far as the sponsored promotions go, each will run for a week. This may change as more brands get on board. LG is up first, followed by Xobni, the social inbox plugin.

According to Evan's email:

Extensions.flock.com has had a bumpy history. There's a fundamental issue here: there are very few Flock-specific extensions, and a great many Firefox extensions that are already hosted on addons.mozilla.org. The architecture behind extensions.flock.com is not mature, and we have historically been unable to devote valuable developer resources to this.  It's unrealistic (and doesn't make a lot of sense) to try to create our own system on the level of addons.mozilla.org until we have more Flock-specific extensions. Our admiration for the work Mozilla has done extends to addons.mozilla.org...AMO really is the best experience for getting extensions. With that in mind, we have cut the fat that is our unwieldy extensions system.

Sorry Developers, We Took Down Your Flock Extensions

The email goes on to inform the developers that the company had removed all the extensions from the site that are not Flock-specific - that is, any extensions that take advantage of some unique feature within the Flock browser itself. In addition, the Drupal back-end from extensions.flock.com has been removed which means no more comments or ratings on posts and no more automatic submission system. Any developer wanting to submit an extension going forward will need to email extension-submission@flock.com instead.

For visitors to the Flock web site, the new extensions page will point them directly to addons.mozilla.org.

According to Flock, the changes will allow the company to move forward focusing only on Flock-specific extensions, and finally, themes. As we noted earlier, customization is an important aspect to the browser experience. Something as simple as being able to skin Flock could make the transition easier for those making the switch.

Flock's Real Message: We're Just A Version Of Firefox

We think Flock's decision to separate their extensions from Firefox's extensions is a good one. Although their email promoted the idea that this just freed up time for Flock to focus on other aspects of their project, that's probably not the whole story here.

Flock wants to appeal to the social media crowd, a group that typically includes a large number of Firefox users. But in the past, Flock had set themselves too far apart from the Firefox community and gave off the impression they were really an alternative browser. Now that Flock has upgraded to the Firefox 3 codebase and lets you use nearly all the Firefox extensions, the message they're sending is that they aren't that different after all, they're just a version of Firefox 3 with nifty social features. In other words, you get the best of both worlds: Firefox 3 and social media integration.

Will this change in direction work and help Flock pick up some steam? It's possible. If you can move to a new browser which works like your old one and take all your extensions with you, the experience is much less painful. Now all they need is some sort of extension import wizard and we'll be all set.

The Live brand confusion is something that Richard MacManus first wrote about on his ZDNet blog in 2006. Why then, hasn't this been fixed yet? It has gotten better -- MSN Hotmail vs. Windows Live Mail vs. Windows Live Hotmail seems have settled on the latter name, for example -- but there is still a lot of overlap in the Windows Live family that makes it confusing for consumers.

When we were briefed a couple of weeks ago about the launch of Microsoft Live Mesh, we asked how the company planned to reconciled yet another file backup service with SkyDrive, Live Drive, FolderShare, SharedView, and Spaces, each of which have some amount of overlap at the service level with Mesh. The answer we got was itself confusing and muddled and basically boiled down to, those services can use the Mesh as their back end platform. The impression that we got, though, was that even people at Microsoft tend to be a bit confused about how the whole Live universe fits together.

The design differences across the Live Search sites highlighted today on the LiveSide blog may be minor, but taken as a whole they're a good metaphor for the branding confusion that Microsoft has created across its collection of online sites and services. If designers in the search division can't get together and decide on a unified design for a single family of Live products, it's no wonder the Live brand on the whole has become so sprawling and muddled.

"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 ."

"Mr Sobolev,

I have not authorized you to use the ReadWriteWeb brand or name, and this is not part of my strategy for mobile.

Therefore can you please transfer the domain name to my control. I will pay you for the registration fees. At that stage I can then discuss with you any potential business arrangement. But as of now, you do not have my permission to utilize the ReadWriteWeb name in any way and I will be looking at further action if you do so. But naturally I would prefer that we come to an agreeable solution.

Please get back to me within 5 working days.

regards,

Richard MacManus
Editor and Publisher, ReadWriteWeb Network

http://www.readwriteweb.com
http://www.last100.com
http://altsearchengines.com
http://readwritetalk.com"

Now, I should note at this point that I am not a lawyer and I have to admit that I have not trademarked the ReadWriteWeb name yet. Perhaps I should, but the advice I've gotten from others on this matter in the past is that because I created the ReadWriteWeb brand and have been using it for 5 years, that would suffice in any challenge.

But back to our dialog with Mr Sobolev, who clearly is beginning to enjoy himself based on his second email:

" Mr MacManus,

I am in receipt of your message. I was led to believe that "ReadWriteWeb"
is not registered as a trademark, which means that anyone can legally use
this name as the name for their website, as well as use it as a domain name
in case the name is available for registration. To further illustrate the idea,
good examples are ReadWriteWeb.net and ReadWriteWeb.org registered
by someone else. As a matter of fact, the name in question has already
been registered in France, Germany, and Poland.

Therefore I believe there are no legal grounds that would require that I ask your
authorization to use "ReadWriteWeb" as the name for my website which
I am planning to launch at ReadWriteWeb.mobi. Nor do I see any legal grounds
that would require that I transfer the above domain name to your control.

In fact, besides the mobile version, my colleagues and I are also planning
to launch a Russian-language version, at ReadWriteWeb.ru. My colleagues
and I run a network of popular Russian websites (about 1 mln visitors daily,
which is about 5% of all Russian Internet traffic), so I have no doubt as to
the Russian version of ReadWriteWeb becoming popular among Russian
readers.

We are not going to use your name or the names of other ReadWriteWeb.com
authors, of course; neither are we going to copy the copyrighted content
of your site. What we are going to do is just use the name ReadWriteWeb,
which we sort of grown fond of. And this, doubtless, is absolutely legal.

Will we copy your writings? No, we won't. Basically, what we need is a name
that generates traffic, not the writings (I am a bit of a writer myself, you know).

Of course, if you need this domain, we can discuss it. But I must say I am sure
it is most certainly worth a little bit more than the registration fee.

Cheers,
V.S."

OK, so he has backtracked on the content issue -- in his first email he claimed he would use the .mobi domain to run "the mobile version of ReadWriteWeb optimized for viewing on a mobile phone." But in his second email he now says he won't use copyrighted content. Other than that, he pressed forward with his strategy to use the RWW brand for his own gain.

My reply:

"Mr Sobolev,

I have been using the ReadWriteWeb name on my website for nearly 5 years now. It is not registered as a trademark, but you don't need a registered trademark to pursue legal action on a TM infringement case. A trademark is quasi-official on the date you first started using it in business. So you cannot use the name ReadWriteWeb.

If you pursue this strategy of using the value that I have built up over 5 years, for your own gain, then I will have to take legal action.

regards,

Richard MacManus"

OK I have to admit to using some bluster tactics of my own. I have never taken legal action against anyone in my life, so I really wouldn't know where to start. But I figured I would do some big talking of my own. Also, it's quite possible that he is right on the trademark issue, I am not certain of my ground here.

Mr Sobolev's third email read:

"Mr MacManus,

I am afraid you tend to overestimate the effect of taking legal action
against someone who, being a Russian citizen, legally registered
a domain name, with a Russian registrar (so let's make a simple
calculation to find out how much time and money it would take someone
if they were to try and deprive me of my honestly registered domain).

As I have already pointed out, "ReadWriteWeb" is *not* a trademark.
Unless it is a trademark, it does not matter who and when started
using the name first. The domain name was available and I registered it.
Now I have the perfect right to create whatever site I want to unless
it infringes on someone's trademarks or copyrights.

In fact, this reminds me that in 2000, we created a site called Softodrom
(Softodrom.ru, now it's the most popular download directory in Russia,
with 100K+ unique visitors daily, the Russian Download.com so to speak).
And now there are dozens of various Softodroms of all shapes and colors,
and nobody gives a flying dick who registered the name first. Had we
trademarked the name, the situation would have been different,
but we had not.

So I am afraid there is no point in trying to deprive me of my domain
which I honestly and legally registered. I have not infringed on your
rights, nor am I planning to do so in the future. I am just going to put
up a very nice-looking website, very mobile and very readwritewebbish
(it will be optimized to use ReadWriteWeb as the main keyphrase so
that Google indexes it the right way), so that people can visit it and click
on colorful Google ads. No rights infringed, everyone's happy.

Honestly, is it my fault you have not trademarked the name?
By the way, there is also ReadWriteWeb.co.uk (parked). Unless the name
is a trademark, anyone can use it.

Cheers,
V.S."

What next?

The intention was made clear with this bit: "I am just going to put up a very nice-looking website, very mobile and very readwritewebbish (it will be optimized to use ReadWriteWeb as the main keyphrase so that Google indexes it the right way), so that people can visit it and click on colorful Google ads. No rights infringed, everyone's happy."

Instead of continuing this game of email one-upsmanship, I thought I would ask the community what they think I can do in this situation. Clearly Mr Sobolev is winding me up (and my responses could be seen to be winding him up too), but the fact is he is attempting to use the ReadWriteWeb brand to his commercial advantage - by buying a mobile domain and a bunch of international domains for readwriteweb and trying to piggy-back off the brand name and RWW's Google rank. I would term this 'brand squatting' - not sure if there is such a term, but that's what it is to me.

Perhaps it is my fault for not trademarking the ReadWriteWeb name - tell me if you think I should. But even so, I can't go around buying the tens or even hundreds of variations of the 'readwriteweb' domain. So even if the brand does get trademarked, what's to stop this guy from using the readwriteweb.ru domain, using the red color scheme and a similar logo, optimizing for Google like he says he will, and making some fast bucks?

I'm interested in the community's feedback and advice on this issue. What do you think about the trademark issue and Mr Sobolev's claim that he can easily make money off the RWW brand? What can I do about this? Or do you support Mr Sobolev's position? Any and all feedback appreciated.