Welcome to the new Socialmedia.biz blog!

I’m happy to announce that Socialmedia.biz is now a group blog, with a wealth of tal­ented con­trib­u­tors, as well as a net­work of busi­ness strat­egy con­sul­tants who under­stand the social media needs of large and mid­size companies.

I started blog­ging in May 2001 when Dave Winer, the father of blog­ging, gave me a free User­Land Manila blog. Since then, I hopped to Mov­able­Type and Type­Pad, chang­ing the name from New Media Mus­ings to Socialmedia.biz in 2005 because of the fast-paced changes in the medi­a­s­phere. (Thanks for the 1 mil­lion page views, Ben, Mena and SixApart.)

Today we’re throw­ing the switch on this new Word­Press blog, and I believe this will be the last blog­ging plat­form I move to, bar­ring some unex­pected sur­prise. Word­Press has become an aston­ish­ingly rich open source plat­form, with new advances, tools and wid­gets com­ing at a rapid clip from a global cadre of vol­un­teers. (And, if you’re won­der­ing, we’re using wordpress.org and host­ing it our­selves at Blit­zLo­cal.)

The big changes

You’ll imme­di­ately notice some major changes:

• We now draw on a group of social media experts with deep knowl­edge of social net­work­ing, search, mar­ket­ing, best-of-breed tools and the other stuff that makes social media such a pop­u­lar phe­nom­e­non. Joanna, Ayelet, Chris, Christo­pher, Deltina and David have been blog­ging for years, and they’ll con­tinue to bring their dis­tinc­tive styles to the new Socialmedia.biz.
• We’re going to be doing a lot of exper­i­ments here, using video, wid­gets and Word­Press plug-ins to give read­ers a richer experience.
• We still think of social media in broad terms — informed by devel­op­ments in tech­nol­ogy, video, jour­nal­ism and more. At the same time, we will focus more heav­ily on the use of social media by busi­nesses and orga­ni­za­tions as well as individuals.

You’ll also notice some things that are askew. We’re a small team and so decided to iter­ate and improve the site as we move for­ward. That means that some spam com­ments and ill-formed for­mat­ting were car­ried over when 10,400 posts were imported from TypePad.

You’ll also notice some wet paint in other places. For instance, the videos on the front page, fed by RSS feeds from Vimeo and Blip.tv, aren’t work­ing entirely prop­erly, and the but­tons on the video player are still a work in progress. If you see any­thing that’s both­er­some, let us know and we’ll hop on it.

Hat tips

A few tips of the hat are in order, so please give it up for:

Blit­zLo­cal, a startup in Boul­der, Colo., that is host­ing the site and was respon­si­ble for much of its devel­op­ment, with par­tic­u­lar kudos to Chad King, Den­nis Yu and Austin Stier­ler. I’ll be con­tin­u­ing to work with their dev team as we improve the site.

Chad Capell­man (chadrem on Twit­ter), who served as CSS impre­sario and trouble-shooter dur­ing the launch.

I sub­scribed to Ele­gant­themes for the tem­plates, or scaf­fold­ing, we used to build out the site, at Steve Garfield’s sug­ges­tion.

A spe­cial thanks to Uta Ritke for cre­at­ing the Socialmedia.biz logo­type at the top of each page. And to my read­ers for select­ing the win­ning logo.

Thanks to IntenseDe­bate, now part of Word­Press, for the com­ment­ing sys­tem I’ll be installing.

And thanks, finally, to the Word­Press team for cre­at­ing the most col­lab­o­ra­tive, public-spirited com­mu­nity of blog­ging enthu­si­asts on the planet.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.