Source: Catalyst House

In 2006 Douglas Rushkoff, when asked The Edge Question, “What is the most dangerous idea?,” replied, “open source currency.”

Well now a new P2P digital currency, called Bitcoin, may provide the ideal medium to engage in commerce outside the official economy and  – it’s decentralized, anonymous, and its supply is moderated by a mathematical formula to automatically deflate it over time. A truly dangerous idea.

So what is a Bitcoin?

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Scott McDonald wrote an intriguing post at Websitemagazine.com that every small business owner needs to consider.  He suggests that its no longer “all about the website”. Well that is not exactly news, except for the highly uninformed, but he raises several great points that provide a quick reference for those struggling to come up to speed with this convergence of “destributed web”.

Scott McDonald:  Remember the day a few years ago when you reviewed your website traffic and discovered that most of your visitors were no longer entering through the homepage? Instead, they were landing on lower-level content or product pages, usually from a search engine.

From that day on, your homepage was no longer the center of your online universe — just one of many points of entry to consider as you fashioned your online business presence.

Now it may be your website’s turn for a demotion. And you can blame it on the distributed Web.

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The number of small businesses using social media to market, brand, advertise, and promote is still surging.

Frank Reed at Marketing Pilgrim writes: “It’s good to see the little guy get more involved with social media. Unlike search marketing (in particular paid search) social media allows for some true creativity and because of its relatively low cost (notice I didn’t say free) the small business has less of a chance of getting burned. I can’t tell you how many times I speak to SMB’s who bemoan how much money they have spent on paid search and have seen no return. Social media opportunities are a breath of fresh air to these people.”

More small businesses use Twitter, Facebook to promote - July 22, 2010 – SAN FRANCISCO / USA TODAY — A surge in social-media use by small businesses reflects a shift in how they operate and their comfort with increasingly easy-to-use technology.

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Source: Mitchell Harper | Mashable

Facebook has extended their ubiquitous ‘Like’ button beyond its increasingly morphous boundaries to… well everywhere (we just got ours).  Combined with Facebook Open Graph this has implications for all small business owners, but not the least of which are are ecommerce businesses. Mitchell Harper, whose BigCommerce software powers nearly 50,000 website shopping carts explains in Mashable the ways of impact now building, while the video we embedded hears NewsCertified Exchange COO Jim McManus describe this latest convergence, of Web and FB as essentially paradigmatic.   -BJK

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5 Ways Facebook’s Open Graph Will Impact E-commerce

After watching Mark Zuckerberg’s recent keynote at the Facebook F8 developers conference, it is clear that Facebook is looking to become the standard in social personalization for everything you do online. And the new social features and direction that they announced will undoubtedly have an impact on the broader world of e-commerce.

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