It was with shock that I returned home from a night out last night to hear the news of Russell's passing. How terribly, terribly sad. Most of all for him, as he'd seemed buoyant, healthier, and content when I'd last seen him several months ago when he was in town - he was happy that work was busy and rewarding and was having fun with it but most of all was thrilled about how things were going with his girlfriend, Ellen.

I've known Russ for what seems like ages now (in a good way) though in fact it's only been about six or seven years since the early days of "commercial" blogging when he started working on various projects at and around Corante. He was a diligent, committed, and prolific journalist who had impressively and more ably than others been able to make the transition from the old-school way of doing things to the new. He had his quirks, as we all do, but I greatly valued that he was good-natured, collegial, reliable, quick to adopt, trustworthy, eager to learn, and earnest in his interest in helping others better understand what he wrote about.

He was also, it should be said, a kind and thoughtful soul and it was the rare conversation in which he didn't ask, with sincerity, about what he knew of my life, e.g. our new babe, and we didn't talk as seemingly old friends about our lives and respective paths. I can't say I knew him very well, of course, but in our half-dozen get-togethers over the years and dozens of conversations I got a good sense of the man: he cared about learning and sharing and his bearing was earnest and ego-less and we'll miss him for that and more.

We wanted to let you know about a discount to New Comm Forum, the annual event event put on by our friends at the Society for New Communications Research. The conference, which runs from April 22-25, will feature many of the field's leading observers and is an important event for those looking, in the words of SNCR, to "better understand new communications tools, technologies and emerging modes of communication, and their effect on traditional media, professional communications, business, culture and society."

Check out the event's website and, if you're interested in attending, be sure to use the code supplied below for a special discount.

EARLY BIRD PRICING - NOW UNTIL FEB. 15th

NewComm Forum Conference - $995.
Pre-conference or post-conference session - $195.
SNCR Jam only - $75.

REGULAR PRICING - AFTER FEB. 15th

NewComm Forum Conference - $1095.
Pre-conference or post-conference session - $249.
SNCR Jam only - $75.

CORANTE READER DISCOUNTS

NewComm Forum Conference - save an additional $100
Use discount code: NCF08100

Pre-conference or post-conference session - save an additional $45.
Use discount code: NCF0845

We've been remiss in letting you know about two new independent blogs we've helped launch in the past month or so.

The first - the ConversationHub - is a companion blog to Supernova 2007, the latest edition of Kevin Werbach's excellent conference on all things connected. As the conference site says: "Supernova examines the effects of an increasingly connected world on business, life, and public policy. As disparate physical and social networks link with one another, a new societal network is rapidly evolving... The New Network is greater than the sum of its parts. It challenges us to re-create everything from the software and hardware we use...to the business models we employ...to the information and entertainment we encounter...to the ways we work and play."

Visit the ConversationHub and you'll find several dozen leading thinkers and doers, led by a few notable ringleaders, weighing in on the themes and trends of the day in technology and business. We encourage you to tune in - feel free to comment and even suggest topics and ideas for posts.

The second blog - Mobile Messaging 2.0 - convenes about a dozen top observers of the mobile messaging space for an intense discussion of the industry and where it's headed. Among its contributors are leading commentators, journalists and players in the field - tune in and you'll find them touching on topics such as mobile device design, messaging platforms, market pressures, user-generated content, interface design, and much, much more.

Also, if you visit the site, which is sponsored by Airwide Solutions, this week, you'll find live coverage and commentary from Global Messaging 2007, to which several of our contributors have traveled to hear about the latest developments from a broad spectrum of the industry's players and providers.

[Update: the Enterprise 2.0 Rave is now a virtual event - for info on the updated program check out the Rave's website.]

We are producing an Enterprise 2.0 RAVE at the Hudson Hotel in NYC on May 21-22, 2007 for Longworth Venture Partners - the organizers of the event.

If you are a practitioner looking at deploying web 2.0 tools within your enterprise or actively working on Enterprise 2.0 pilot projects, you should not miss this 24 hour brainstorming session specifically designed for practitioners like yourself.

Some of the leading thinkers in the space will be moderating and facilitating rich discussions - including HBS prof. Andrew McAfee, Euan Semple, Jenny Ambrosek, Jerry Bowles, Bill Ives, Kathleen Gilroy, Jevon McDonald, Joe McKendrick, Jim McGee, John Musser, Susan Scrupski, and Jason Wood.

If you plan to attend you will get a $250 discount if you use the discount code "bloggers" (without quotes) when registering as a Friend of Corante.

We're helping out on another independent group-blog in the vein of the FASTforwardblog we shepherded into existence late last year. This one, backed by World Congress in support of their conference series and called the World Health Care Blog, convenes leading bloggers from across the health care industry for an intense, centralized discussion of innovation in health care.

Amongst those participating: Derek Lowe, whose excellent blog on drug discovery In the Pipeline just celebrated its fifth birthday; longtime health care blogger Matthew Holt of the The Health Care Blog; new blogger but longtime industry consultant and executive Vince Kuraitis; strategy consultant David Williams of the Health Business Blog; consultant, epidemiologist, and self-described "health journalism groupie" Emily DeVoto of The Antidote; and Tony Chen, lead blogger at Hospital Impact and a business developer for a Chicago area, Northwestern-affiliated hospital and research group.

Check the World Health Care Blog out and please spread the word to those who'd find it of interest. For those interested in health care, you might also check out the conference the blog's a companion to: The World Health Care Congress which runs from April 22-24 in Washington, DC. Amongst those speaking: Craig Barrett, chairman of Intel; Lee Scott, CEO of Wal-Mart; Phil Bredesen, the governor of Tennessee; Michael Critelli, CEO of Pitney-Bowes; Catherine Baase, Global Director of Health Services for Dow Chemical; Adam Bosworth, VP at Google; James Goodnight, CEO of SAS; Janet Marchibroda, CEO of eHealth Initiative and Foundation; and more than a hundred other notable executives, industry players, and policymakers.

Tune in to the blog and you'll also find comprehensive reporting from last week's Barcelona conference where Lloyd Davis real-time blogged many of the sessions including the keynote delivered by Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist and banker who won last year's Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work in micro-lending (see this clip for the gist of his comments including insights on his own country's health care initiatives).

We've been remiss in pointing you to an independent blog we launched in January that's getting a lot of attention: The Future of Communities. The group blog, co-authored by a growing roster of respected commentators in the field, digs deep into the evolving discussion about community building and management and related marketing efforts in the run up to Community 2.0 Conference.

The conference, chaired by Corante president Francois Gossieaux, is the inaugural event for "forward-thinking organizations that recognize the need of harnessing the network effect of community to make smarter, faster, and better business decisions." Amongst those participating in the conference, slated for March 12-14 in Las Vegas: John Hagel, author and consultant; Elizabeth Churchill of Yahoo; Shawn Gold of MySpace; Peter Friedman of Liveworld; Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency; George Jaquette of Intuit; and many others. Find out more here.

As for the blog, well known contributors include Tara Hunt, David Churbuck, Chris Carfi, Chris Heuer, Lois Kelly, Jake McKee, Kathleen Gilroy, Francois, and others.

Recent posts discuss "social browsing", the "meming of life", "collaboration networks", measuring the effect of communities at a macro level, households as the "ultimate in micro-communities", community management "code of ethics", and Kathleen Gilroy's interview with Jay Bryant of TV Guide about its user communities. More here...

The FASTforward blog, which was initially launched as a companion to FAST's early February conference, continues to hum along with ongoing coverage of Enterprise 2.0 issues, challenges, and developments. Tune in and you'll find numerous reports from the conference itself, including coverage of the keynotes and panel discussions which included the likes of Ray Lane, Chris Anderson, John Battelle, Tim O'Reilly and many others.

Also, a pointer for those interested in the several dozen video interviews conducted by David Weinberger and Kathleen Gilroy over the course of the conference.

Interviews by David Weinberger, in no particular order:

• Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of "The Long Tail"
• John Battelle, author, blogger, editor, media entrepreneur
• Jeanette Borzo of the Economist Intelligence Unit
• Matthew Brown, a senior analyst at Forrester Research
• John Markus Lervik, founder and CEO of FAST
• Carl Frappaolo of the Delphi Group
• Stephen Gallagher, Senior Director at Accenture
• Susan Feldman, IDC
• Dorothea Herrey of Dow Jones Consumer Media Group
• Bill Inmon of Inmon Data Systems
• Dan Keldsen of the Delphi Group
• Zia Zaman, FAST
• Lydia Loizides, former exec of tech and emerging media at Interpublic Media
• Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School
• Tom Mandel of ConnectBeam
• Kathleen Gilroy, Otter Group
• Hadley Reynolds, FAST
• Jim McGee of the Huron Consulting Group
• Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Media
• James Robertson of Step Two Designs
• Michael Schrage, MIT
• Euan Semple, consultant, formerly of BBC
• Sandeep Swadia, FAST
• David Watson, Digital Media at Disney/ABC

Interviews by Kathleen Gilroy:

• "The meaning of search"
• a montage of statements by conference participants on the meaning and future of search
• Tim O'Reilly:
• Web 2.0 is defined by building systems that get better as much people use them. This means asymmetric competition in the information business. But there are opportunities to work in the global information commons. O’Reilly hosted a panel where he interviewed the search person from Reed and the head of business development for Fast. They discussed producing more contextual search and looking at federated search where the data coming from multiple customers was combined and made available.

• Andrew McAfee:
• Enterprise 2.0 is about new forms of collaboration and unlike previous enterprise computing efforts, e20 enables the expression and capture of judgement.
• E20 will not happen just by building new technologies and expecting people to use them. It is hard to get e20 to become part of the DNA of a company and it will require sustained management and leadership through coaching, rewards and incentives, leadership, and building a culture that is attuned to the benefits of working in this new way.
• E20 is very different from groupware (Notes, Sharepoint) in that it is very unstructured. Groupware often failed because it demanded too many rules and the terms of interaction were defined from the start.\
• Ray Lane on the "interpersonal enterprise"

Wanted to let people know about a blog we've just launched: the FASTforward Blog.

Conceived and produced by Corante and sponsored by Fast Search & Transfer as a companion to their upcoming conference, the blog convenes, for at least the next two months, a top flight crew of leading thinkers and doers for an active and spirited discussion on the next generation of enterprise software applications and issues.

Amongst our contributors are many familiar faces from the enterprise-related blog space including Bill Ives, Jim McGee, Joe McKendrick, Jerry Bowles, Rod Boothby, Kathleen Gilroy, Euan Semple, George Dearing and others.

In addition to the blog, we'll be running interviews, podcasts, and Skypecasts with leading figures from the field as well as with some of the speakers and participants who'll be involved in the event.

Visit the blog, where the discussion is well underway, at FASTforwardblog.com. And click here, to find out more about FAST's FASTforward conference - speakers include Tim O'Reilly, Chris Anderson, John Battelle, Ray Lane, and many other leading players in the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 space.

Flackster's back after an extended break with more wisdom and witticism from Michael O'Connor Clarke. The blog's focus again: the wonderful world of PR and how it's having to adjust to the new landscape of social media.

Renee Hopkins Callahan and gang are blogging the day's great "storytelling" sessions. Tune in to the Innovation Hub for the latest. Speakers so far have included Tim Westergren of Pandora, Jane Fulton Suri of Ideo, and Larry Keeley of Doblin. More to come...

Renee Hopkins Callahan will lead a merry band of bloggers later this week in a blogjam on our Innovation Hub that accompanies the Collaborative Innovation Summit which will be held on October 3rd and 4th in Providence, RI.

The conference, hosted by WSJ tech columnist Walt Mossberg and TED founder Richard Saul Wurman brings together a knockout group of innovators including: Segway inventor Dean Kamen, Titanic Discoverer Bob Ballard, Fast Company co-founder Bill Taylor, IDEO’s Director of Human Factors Design and Research Jane Fulton Suri, InnoCentive co-founder Alph Bingham, MIT Media Lab Biomechatronics Director Hugh Herr architect/artist Michael Singer, and network guru Peter Gloor.

Among the bloggers who'll be reporting from the front lines: Joyce Wycoff, Jeffrey Phillips, Steve Hardy, Boris Pluskowski, Lois Kelly of Bloghound, and Francois Gossieaux. Find out more from Renee's post and be sure to tune in later this week.

MarketingSherpa has released their nominations for the top blogs and podcsts on marketing-related topics. Drawn from a list of more than a thousand nominations submitted by readers, the final list includes quite a few from the extended Corante family and apparently drew more than 100,000 votes in just its first day.

To find out more and weigh in yourself, head over to Marketing Sherpa. The deadline's the 26th so make sure you get your votes in now!

Be sure to tune in to Future Tense where new blog ringleader Giovanni Rodruiguez has kicked off a year-long survey of companies that are successfully implementing and supporting emergent behavior in the enterprise using social-media tools. The first to be profiled: SAP's Apollo Project.

Explains Giovanni: "Led by former VC Jeff Nolan, Apollo is a competitive strategy group at SAP Labs, the enterprise-software giant... Nolan and his group are using a mix of social media tools -- blogs, RSS, and of course, wikis -- to better compete with Oracle, SAP's chief rival..."

While wearing the many different hats of MC, coordinator, wifi guy, podcast traffic cop, and many others at the 2006 Innovative Marketing Conference, I was not able to take good notes of the great discussions that took place at the conference. Thankfully, many others did, and I will try to capture most of them here. I will also elaborate on specific sessions/discussions in future posts.

We're in the closing hours of the conference and should point you to the reams of great content we've captured for posterity:

A Fast Company Blogjam for which a team of bloggers have been reporting on the proceedings. Also tune in there for pointers to a great series of podcasts by Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson.

Heath Row and his Squidoo team have created a super set of lenses on the major themes and sessions of the conference.

The expanding Flickr set of the entire event.

Larry Weber, PR Guru, author and founder of the W2 Group, and Lois Kelly, interactive marketing pioneer and partner at Foghound, will discuss the future of the marketing department in a Skypecast at noon EST today. You can find more information about the upcoming Skypecast here. To join - simply go the Skypecast url at noon and log in with your Skype account. If you do not have a Skype account, it's easy, sign up for a free account, it will take you less than 2 minutes. If for some reason you do not have a microphone, you can also ask your questions by joining the chat room at http://events.corante.com/imc/chat.php.

If you missed some of the Skypecasts that we ran leading up to our Marketing Innovation conference next week, you can go to the event's home page and look for MP3 recordings in the sidebar.

If you have not registered for the 2006 Marketing Innovation Conference at Corante yet, please do so soon! If you need any assistance - contact francois AT corante DOT com.

[Tags: skypecast larry weber lois kelly marketing corante]

Our roster of super speakers for the 2006 Innovative Marketing Conference, co-produced by Corante and the Center on Global Brand Leadership at Columbia Business School, continues to grow with recent additions including Joseph Jaffe, David Sutherland, and Tony Ulwick. Find out more about them and our other particpants via any of the links below.

And register now to join us for what's shaping up to be a great event.

Deepak Advani | Elizabeth Albrycht | Tom Asacker | David Balter | Renee Hopkins Callahan | Christopher Carfi | David C. Churbuck | Bryan Eisenberg | Shawn Gold | John Hagel | Neville Hobson | Shel Holtz | Chip Hoyt | Gwen Ishmael | Joseph Jaffe | Lee Johnson | Max Kalehoff | Lois Kelly | Russ Klein | Kevin Lee | Heidi Lehmann | Max Lenderman | Craig Newmark | Dr. Joseph Plummer | Giovanni Rodriguez | Douglas Rushkoff | Bernd Schmitt | Ruth P. Stevens | David Sutherland | Bill Tancer | Tony Ulwick | Larry Weber | David Weinberger | John Winsor

The deadline for the early-bird price for the Innovative Marketing Conference is here! Sign up today to take advantage of it and reserve your spot.

Again, the two-day conference is designed to help individuals and companies better understand the rapidly evolving marketing landscape and arm attendees with real world case studies, practical tools, and actionable learnings that help their companies more effectively market themselves, build their brands, and grow.

Amongst the many great participants who will be joining us: Russ Klein, CMO of Burger King; Craig Newmark, founder, Craigslist; John Hagel, independent management consultant and author; Larry Weber, founder and Chairman of the W2 Group, author; and Douglas Rushkoff, author, teacher, and documentarian.

Find out more and register today!

Update: we had previously posted the time wrong for Bernd Schmitt's Skypecast today. It's *11 am EST*, not 12 pm EST as previously stated. For info on logging in and participating see this page.

We're going to be running a series of Skypecast conversations with participants in our upcoming Innovative Marketing Conference, scheduled for June 8-9 in NYC. In the Skypecasts, open to all to attend, we'll be interviewing speakers and facilitators who will be at the conference as well as allowing audience members to ask questions. We encourage all to attend, particularly attendees of the conference who can help shape the event by presenting ideas and suggestions for the event.

Upcoming Skypecasts:
- Professor Bernd Schmitt - Executive Director, Center on Global Brand Leadership
5/12 at 11 EST [We had the wrong time previously]
In this inaugural Skypecast we'll chat with Bernd Schmitt, from the Columbia Business School, for a general discussion on the future of marketing and the topics we'll be touching on at the Innovative Marketing Conference.

Craig Newmark - founder of craigslist
5/16 at 11 am EST
We'll sit down with Craig Newmark for a wide-ranging discussion of the threats and opportunities related to consumer generated content.

See this page for more info and links to the Skypecast pages.

We've added a slew of new speakers to the roster for our upcoming conference on Innovative Marketing.

Amongst them:

• Craig Newmark, founder, Craigslist


• John Hagel, independent management consultant and author


• Larry Weber, founder and Chairman of the W2 Group, author


• Douglas Rushkoff, author, teacher, and documentarian


• Russ Klein, CMO of Burger King


• Shawn Gold, SVP, head of marketing and content, MySpace.com

Find out more and sign up soon to take advantage of our early-bird special for what's shaping up to be a knockout event.

Paul Williams, in his first post as co-editor of the Innovation Hub, tries an interesting experiment - a mindmap of the ideas and themes that the Hub's contributors are writing and thinking about. Among the topics on their mind: risk-taking, technology and its impact on innovation, leadership, customer experience, blogging and much more.

Also worth catching: Renee Hopkins Callahan, a longtime Corante contributor and the co-editor of the Innovation Hub, on the idea of Chief Innovation Officers and knowledge management tools.

Our next hub is live! Today we start rolling out our next "hub", this one on innovation. Edited by two well established and highly respected observers of the practice of innovation - Renee Hopkins Callahan and Paul Williams, the Corante Innovation Hub showcases the writing and thinking of many of the blogosphere's most insightful commentators on innovation, creativity, and marketing and complements our upcoming June conference on marketing innovation.

We should have mentioned yesterday that the new homepage design is just a start and the foundation for other elements we'll be adding back to the page, including graphic elements, means through which we can highlight articles by our contributors as well as comments made by readers, and more. Please send feedback and suggestions to hyltonj@gmail.com with the title "Homepage Feedback".

As you can see, we've just rolled out a new homepage design. Its intent: to give a better sense of the richness and volume of commentary and coverage passing through Corante every day. It also does a much better job of illustrating what's happening at the Corante Hubs, an exciting new direction from Corante we've been tinkering with for the past few months and will now start promoting aggressivcely. Powered by the Corante Network, a growing and impressive collection of some of the blogosphere's brightest minds, the Hubs are designed to...

Civic Minded, a new blog on the broad impact the Internet is having on politics, advocacy, and civic engagement, launches today. Authored by four leading observers of the topic, Civic Minded will explore the practical applications, real-world lessons, and tactical issues that are changing the way campaigns are run, people of like-minded interests organize, and groups take action.

Suw Charman's reporting live in Strange Attractor from the Future of Web Apps, a conference that's convened many leading lights of the Web 2.0 world as well as some 800 others for a day-long discussion of emerging and future Web apps.

Among those whose remarks Suw's shared so far: Joshua Schacter of del.icio.us, Tom Coates of Yahoo!, Cal Henderson of Flickr.

Kevin Anderson - veteran journalist, BBC producer, blogger, and podcaster - joins Suw Charman at Strange Attractor , shares his belief that journalism is storytelling at its core, and reveals that his personal goal is to become "the Edward Murrow of the Internet". Says Kevin: "A friend of mine said that he worried that blogging had stopped the development of digital storytelling in its tracks. I initially agreed with him at blogging and social media are driving digital storytelling online more in the last few years than we professionals had done in the last decade." More from Kevin and Suw over at Strange Attractor.

Carl succumbs and joins the cat-blogging masses in a post about his pet Tino: "The evolution of cats has been a tough nut to crack. While it's no great mental feat to tell the difference between Tino and a tiger, it's not so easy to figure out exactly which species are most closely related to domesticated cats and which are more distant relatives. The oldest cat-like fossils date back 35 million years ago, and since then they've rapidly evolved into many lineages that have spread across all the continents save Antarctica."

[Reposting this from the Media Hub]

Corante Hubs and the Corante Network are, as we've spoken to here and here, an attempt to extend Corante beyond its walls, meet media where it's increasingly at (the edge), draw attention to the insights, intelligence, and analysis of talented thinkers and writers across the blogosphere, and serve readers and users with editorial and tools that help them track and understand industry developments and emerging trends as well as save time.

In our hubs, e.g. , that's expressing itself through the editorial coverage and commentary you see on that page - again, intended to distill, explain, and synthesize the writings of our contributors and others about the respective field - and its marriage with tools, either homegrown or in partnership with technology partners, that add value.

Among those we've added to date: the merged "raw" feed from MySyndicaat you see at the bottom of that page (it's got more functionality coming), the related posts feature from Waypath you see attached to blog posts, and the category cloud in the right column that was developed for us by Bud Gibson and his company, The Community Engine.

The new widget, as of yesterday: search, powered by Rollyo, that allows you to search just the blogs of our contributors. We've been working with Dave Pell, the brains behind Rollyo (Davenetics too), to customize it to our needs. Its intent: to reduce the load of having to search the entire Web for relevant coverage by limiting it to trusted sources. Check it out and let us know what you think - we're still tweaking a few things and would love your input on how to make it most useful.

And in general... we've got lots of ideas about how best to serve readers both in the hubs and out on the partner blogs and are currently working on other features we'll be adding to the mix. But we also want to hear from you - please send us your ideas and suggestions - you can do so by leaving a comment here or sending an email to us at -UPDATED - hubfeedback@gmail.com.

Dennis Kennedy pulls together recent articles and resources he and his Between Lawyers colleagues, as well as others, have published or contributed to which explain and discuss how Web 2.0 services might be used by the law profession.

Today we go live with a major new initiative and important new direction from Corante that has us reimagining what Corante is and will be. Months in the making and informed by years spent playing and working in this space, the Corante Hubs and the corollary Corante Network have Corante partnering with scores (and eventually hundreds) of the blogosphere's most interesting and insightful commentators on specific topics in a loosely joined editorial offering (and business model) we believe will keep readers up to date and ahead of the curve while saving them the time we all find so scarce these days. Our first areas of coverage: web, media, and marketing.

We're in session at our Symposium for Social Architecture - tune in at the event's blog.

Danah, in introducing several recent articles she's written on MySpace: "I’ve been thinking a lot about how anti-MySpace propaganda has been rooted in the culture of fear. Given that youth play a critical, but different, role in social software, i suspect that folks might be interested in how MySpace is getting perceived as a scary, scary place..." More here; also, be sure to catch the comments.

Check out today's Science Journal by Sharon Begley for frequent mentions of Corante contributor Derek Lowe and his blog In the Pipeline. The subject of the column: the limitations of DNA-based drugs.

Also worth noting: Matt May, a contributor on our podcasting blog, is speaking today at the Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference on the panel discussion: Music in Podcasts: The Future of Music Licensing. More info here.

And still more: tune in, if you can, to Blawgthink - a two-day event getting underway today in Chicago that's co-organized by Dennis Kennedy of our Between Lawyers blog.

Stowe (Boyd) has the latest on those who'll coming to the Symposium on Social Architecture in November. Joining us at the event, which we're hosting in partnership with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School: Mary Hodder, Kaliya Hamlin, JD Lasica, Chris Nolan, and Andrew Rasiej.