These are my links for October 4th through October 7th:

• Social growth takes a breather – Forrester, experts in pioneering many aspects of research into measuring social media, show in their latest research update that in the US, that ‘joiners’ are the most frequent category of users and ‘inactivities’ and ‘spectators’ are on the up whilst ‘creators’ are slightly on the way down. This could be attributed to the final waves of late adopters coming online, however, the general trend of producers and creators growing seems to be flattening slightly.
• Companies Struggle to Keep Social Media Content On-Message – Articles like this really peeve me off. Apparently three quarters of all brand social media messages are ‘off topic’, containing “opinions, personal experience, knowledge of competitors and products, and speculation.” That figures seems far too low. Surely at least 80% (if we follow my 80/20 rule: at value at least 80% of the time, sell no more than 20% of time, or less) SHOULD be off topic. Social media is a way to engage, listen, share and create a valuable space for exchange for the brand or organisation. Messages shouldn’t be totally UNbranded or totally OFFtopic for the organisation’s area of business, but equally social media is NOT an overt brand sales tool.
• Kodak Zi8, FlipCam, iPhone, and Cybershot Horserace – Fab video for those of you interested in purchasing equipment to make online video for your business (or pleasure): Chris Caroll from Visible Gains creates a ‘horse race’ of the best consumer mini video camera formats out there and the Kodak Zi8 comes out on top (yay for Kodak!)
• Half-a-billion users don’t mean API payola – Canonical on why open APIs mean control of audiences and power, but not necessarily profit for businesses.
• .Ly Domains At Risk As Libyan Government Shuts Down Site Without Warning – I picked this up today from a bizarre tweet from Sir Tim Berners Lee, it appears that the popularity of link shorteners (included automatically in popular Twitter management services such as TweetDeck and HootSuite) are falling foul of the Libyan government who are censoring ‘un Sharia’ link content. Be warned! But where to trust – Is.Gd?