Nielsen’s BlogPulse reports “unprecedented 3% of all total blog content” dominated by Haiti earthquake.

Last week’s devastating earthquake in Haiti has put a spotlight on both profound suffering and incredible generosity. The official White House Twitter feed reports that $8 million dollars has been donated through online channels alone to the Red Cross (this is through $10 cell phone-debit donations by texting HAITI to 90999). Social media channels, especially Twitter, have proved instrumental not only in providing coverage of the disaster, but also in helping to find survivors, locate family members and raise needed funds. More than traditional media ever could, eye witness blog posts, Twitter feeds and video footage have reached and involved more people around the world because they are direct, unfiltered and immediate.

In the world of law firms, two managing partners of large firms here in D.C., Stuart Pape with Patton Boggs and Bruce McLean with Akin Gump, recently announced $50,000 donations towards Haitian relief efforts with additional donations to come from the firms to match employee donations. Such efforts are admirable and generous and worth broadcasting as they encourage further generosity from employees, other firms and clients. Peer pressure can be a good thing at times, and using your firm’s social networks (be they blogs, Twitter feeds or LinkedIn rings) to broadcast corporate philanthropy further supports the causes you believe in.

The rapid rise of blogs has given birth to a new and extraordinarily efficient piece of information design—the tag cloud. A “tag cloud” visually depicts the relative frequency with which keywords are tagged on a site by users. The more frequent, the bigger the tagged keyword becomes. (Visit Wikipedia for a more precise definition.) View full article

Recently, I went to a day-long seminar called wwww.dc to learn about business-to-consumer site design. There must be lessons, I imagined, we could learn about marketing to businesses that are born from consumer marketing. My hunch was confirmed. Here’s what I took away:

A Baseline Measure

The exponential growth of the Web is sobering. In 1997, there were only 100,000 sites. By 2006, over 100,000,000 sites were active, with three to four thousand going online each month. In other words, every 48 seconds a new site goes online. That dramatic explosion has changed the way consumer product and service companies approach their sites.

Build Community (Maybe)

The buzz from nearly every speaker was about building an online community on their sites. In particular, we learned washingtonpost.com creates and sustains a community by:

• Creating live online forums that bring readers of The Washington Post into active, daily contact with the site
• Updating blogs at least once a day
• Being considerate of others by using software filters to shut down offensive language
• Sending out reporters with digital cameras to augment their stories with images that create a more intimate relationship between the reporter or writer and the subject.

What’s the lesson for you?
The only “community” that’s likely to be built on a professional service site is around a blog that keeps visitors up-to-date with changes in narrowly focused fields. In those fields, live, online forums can be winners. But aim for monthly updates, not daily. And, of course, those forums must be advertised online, via email and through traditional channels.

Take another tip from washingtonpost.com and use that digital camera you bought last year. Professional photographers are not required for every assignment. The Internet has become very forgiving of non-professional photography (Thank you, YouTube). And “non-professional” cameras are delivering better and better images.

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