I love the design of the iGoogle Carbon footprint page.

As well as the nice design, they have added some very smart features, and use a good mix of media to make the page interesting and informative.

Sky have got involved with their “Green Shoots” competition.

It’s a great way to increase awareness – getting people involved by encouraging people to create their own content, and it’s also an excellent branding campaign for Sky.

It’s clear to see that Google have Sky in their pocket (or vice verca); the Sky search and SkyCasts are powered by Google search and Google Video respectably.

But it’s nice to see them using their powers for a good cause!

I love the fact that it can be integrated into webpages; there are sleek plugins available; we used some for a pilot project on the PushOn Online Marketing Blog in combination with a mobile phone application Shozu which published images straight to our Flickr account. The images can also be automatically re-published to the PushOn blog, or PushOn MySpace page.

The freedom of instant one click publishing via mobile makes it great for commentary on events, however the fact that it’s so easy to do, means that it’s very quick and easy to publish crap. Big Brother have a Twitter feed, and there have been notable instances where people have said something silly and ended up in a lot of trouble.

Jaiku is a similar application to Twitter, and has had good feedback.

I think I like this ‘micro blogging’ malarkey, it’s good for sending a small amount of information quickly to multiple people with similar interest.

Jack Lail thinks it’s a bad, bad thing, but he likes it, he’s written an interesting post on the subject of Twitter.

Incidentally, I’m trying out a tool which publishes a note on your Twitter account when you post a blog entry… I’ll let you know if it works!

This is a new social media optimization tool, that helps people add MySpace friends to their profiles.

This tool is useful for people who use their MySpace profile to promote their business or band, without spamming the typical MySpace users who purely use it to contact their friends and associates. MySpace is a great tool for keeping in touch; but spamming can be a problem.

As Social Media Optimization is relatively new, and the scope of Web 2.0 projects is constantly increasing, best practices and Social Media Marketing etiquette will also evolve.

Here are a couple of suggestions from an article by Kent Lewis of Search Marketing Standard:

• Respect the community
• Building and maintain a consistent and robust profile (or brand)
• Engage in the community by commenting, contributing and sharing regularly
• Don’t include blatant self-promotion
• Don’t post biased information
• Don’t breaking community rules
• Don’t spam

Learn more about Social Media Optimization from Wikipedia, or a brief summary of it from PushON Online Marketing specialists.