In September Voloper released Phase 1 of its Social Media strategy: the Social Media ToolKit. The Social Media ToolKit gives you a centralized control panel for configuring which social media widgets you're pulling into your own web site. In Phase 2, Vol...

Most large cities have at least one free weekly newspaper. New York's Village Voice is probably the best known. Detroit's Metro Times, Seattle's Seattle Weekly, and Toronto's Now Magazine are some other well known examples. These things have been kicking around for over three decades. In the mid-1990s these established weeklies faced some colorful competition in the weekly newspaper space. The competition eschewed the established weeklies' left-of-center/progressive political news and editorial writing and concentrated on one key area: entertainment listings. Market research indicated most people were picking up the weeklies not for articles about public health care, "top ten most censored news stories of the year", or the plight of Central American farmers. People simply wanted to know what was going on for the weekend: concerts, new restaurants, new movies, etc. The competitors saw a niche, filled it, and quickly grabbed a lot of eyeballs. Bringing it home Consider there are lots of web site owners who are quite active in their given industry and are in a good position to bring eyeballs to their site by offering an event listing service. For example, an artist materials supply web site might maintain listings about art events and art classes. A web site for a doctor might list local health related events for patients and local/national events for doctors within his/her specialty. Voloper, of course, provides a module that makes getting in the listing business quick and easy. Voloper's Dynamic Calendar module lets you create an attractive multi-view calendar, displaying listings. You can set up categories for events and sort your events under the categories. On the front end, users can click on a category and quickly filter events by category. You can even let site visitors post their own events (increasing visitors and stickiness).

The trend in blogging today is collaborative blogging, opening up blogs to a team of authors.