Air Force Blog Assessment

The image above is of the Air Force Blog Assessment chart, put together by the United States Air Force - not an organisation you would expect to have a great blog engagement policy.

Better, in fact, than many organisations that claim to be experts in this area, as a recent article in Web Ink Now shows:

"In an environment where many corporations are scared witless about social media, here a huge global organization firmly committed to social media communications to spread messages, stories, knowledge and ideals. Capt. Faggard says that the focus is on: "Direct Action within Social Media (blogging, counter-blogging, posting products to YouTube, etc.); Monitoring and Analysis of the Social Media landscape (relating to Air Force and Airmen); and policy and education (educating all Public Affairs practitioners and the bigger Air Force on Social Media)."

The Air Force also has a number of presences on the web, including the official blog, Air Force Live, a YouTube channel, a Twitter profile, and a number of other "new media", including widgets and podcasts.

Take a look at the Air Force's social media policy and see if you can use it to enhance your own thinking around social media with, ahem, military precision.

Top 20 Social Media Sites in 2008

Following on from yesterday's post on the rise of social media, another piece of research just released shows which sites have been visited the most. Comscore has released a list revealing the top Social Networks and Social Media sites in 2008. The graph above shows the total unique visitors for the top 5 sites from September 2007 to November 2008 (click to enlarge).

Although the list doesn't include figures from December, it does list the Total Unique Visitors as of November 2008:

1. Blogger - 221,503,000
2. Facebook - 200,189,000
3. MySpace - 126,168,000
4. Wordpress - 113,661,000
5. Windows Live Spaces - 86,760,000
6. Yahoo! Geocities - 69,159,000
7. Flickr - 63,866,000
8. Hi5 - 58,069,000
9. Orkut - 46,446,000
10. Six Apart Sites - 45,606,000
11. Baidu Space - 40,276,000
12. Friendster - 31,325,000
13. 56.com - 29,171,000
14. Webs.com - 24,230,000
15. Bebo - 24,149,000
16. Scribd - 23,524,000
17. Lycos Tripod - 23,350,000
18. Tagged.com - 22,300,000
19. Imeem - 21,889,000
20. Netlog.com - 21,1777,000

Blogger, Google's blogging platform, comes out on top. But Facebook is rising quickly and if the numbers continue will take the top spot and further stretch its lead over its closest social network competitor, Myspace, which comes in at third place.

Wordpress, a blogging platform that takes a more professional take then Blogger's 'push-button-and-publish' approach, comes in at a close fourth, demonstrating its rising popularity among bloggers.

Scribd, a social network for the sharing and discovery of documents, continues to grow and is likely to become more popular in 2009 as it becomes the premier destination for document sharing.

It's also interesting to note some of the lesser known sites - lesser known in the UK, anyway. For example, 56.com, one of the largest video sharing websites in China, and Baidu, the leading Chinese search engine, each have strong userbases which are only set to rise further as more of China comes online.

Surely it's only a matter of time before Twitter enters the Top 20? What sites do you predict to be in the Top 20 next year?