The reason I ask this question all relates to a recent blog post produced by Scott Gould. In his video, he discusses how we are building out communities (i.e tons of followers) but not making real connections count towards our goals and objectives in our businesses.

I think we all know deep down that our social networks are crammed full of spammers and non-essential updates.

Often, we choose to get influence and recognition by “showing how many followers we have on Twitter.com”.

It doesn’t work that easily for real-life business owners, they aren’t quite in tune with how to use social networks and as such have a couple of hundred people following their updates.

But wait, they have an advantage……

One thing that has always interested me in the area of social media, especially as an online entrepreneur, is the relationship between the many different roles that we take on in life.

Everyone has heard about the girl who got fired because she slated her job on Facebook. Whether we like it or not stories like this are bound to keep appearing and it’s something that we should all take time to think about as we post more and more of our lives online.

At the most basic level, people generally assume at least two identities: a personal and professional personality. Whilst you are essentially the same person in both circumstances, different traits will shine through in different situations.

For example, you are going to communicate differently when at work talking to a client or your boss than you are when chatting with a few close mates in a bar.

For years, Adobe’s Flash Player ruled the web. Only a few years back, Flash websites were all the rage – from corporate sites right down to the smallest personal sites. Better use of HTML and CSS recently has virtually wiped websites made entirely from Flash off the web, with only the occasional web template or promotional movie website still using it.

But, as the number of websites entirely made of Flash decreased, Flash began to gain a bigger prominence through multimedia. YouTube, and almost every video site which has followed, have opted to use a Flash-based video player, giving Flash a market share on the web that Silverlight can only dream of.

However, despite its widespread use, the dawn of HTML5 called for an open technology for video on the web. There’s another debate entirely on what that standard HTML 5 video format will end up to be, but that’s beside the point.

Yelp.com, a popular online business directory which was founded in 2004 by Jeremy Stoppelman (CEO) and Russel Simmons (CTO) has become a hot discussion topic in the last week.

A class action lawsuit filed on Wednesday 23rd February 2010 claimed that “a Long Beach, Calif., veterinary hospital claims it was “victimized” by Yelp sales representatives asking for payment in exchange for the removal of negative reviews” according to reports from CNET.com.

Overall, how has this recent lawsuit affected small business confidence in Yelp.com?

Will many small businesses continue to be enticed by the 25m unique visitors at Yelp.com (measured by Compete.com for January 2010)

Editor’s Note: Please note that this was an agreed promotion between Tomorrow’s Web and the Dare 2B Digital event organizers, which we were not paid to write about. We will be promoting more of their content in the future to help support an important initiative.

Dare 2B Digital (D2BD) is hosting a web conference in Los Altos Hills, California for young women in the grades 7-10. The conference is focused on showing girls how technology intertwines in everyday life, and help create a jumpstart in Computer Science or Electrical Engineering careers.

The event will consist of speaking sessions, workshops, demonstations, and discussions between experts in the field. Its not just for girls; parents can come and enjoy educational workshops to learn how to help their daughters succeed.

From a press release given out by D2BD:

“The Silicon Valley is admired throughout the world for our spirit of innovation, our passion for learning and our track record of successes – and women inside our local companies have played a crucial role in all these areas,” said Anne Hardy, Chair, Dare 2B Digital Steering Committee, vice president technology, SAP Labs. “Many local companies rely more and more on computing technologies and therefore computer scientists. Dare 2B Digital exists to insure that the pipeline of women that will continue to shape our local companies and their successes is filled.”

Visit Dare 2B Digital’s website to register or find out more! (Hurry, the conference is on February 27, 2010)

Here’s the full interview, if the audio doesn’t work use the link provided to download the .mp3 file:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4770413/sprouterinterview.mp3

I spoke yesterday via Skype with Erin Bury, community manager for the online entrepreneurial social network Sprouter. Sprouter is a messaging service which is very similar to Twitter, but asks entrepreneurs “What are you working on?”. It allows you to share conversations with other entrepreneurs and investors about anything you need help on from funding opportunities down to how to get the right business structure.

According to Bury, the founder Sarah Prevette created this idea out of a failed startup she’d created which was a “Digg.com for teens”. Erin told me that Sarah Prevette had the idea to create a network for entrepreneurs like her to really find a place to work productively on finding solutions to their problems.

I find the idea very fascinating, although I was very adamant towards the end of the interview to put forward a couple of pointers on a recent “Profit Magazine” article which interviewed Sarah Prevette (listen from 13 minutes onwards to hear that!).

For more information on Sprouter visit:

http://www.sprouter.com