You may already be familiar with pockets of streets and local courtyards converted into farmer’s markets, festivals and vendor fairs. The graduate students at Ohio’s Kent State University urban design program, however, have a different idea. As part of The Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative (CUDC), they’ve invested the past few years fusing creativity and functionality into local urban spacing, transforming mundane and under-utilized sections of the city into “pop-up” works of art that serve diverse purposes.

With content curators the new web superheroes, demonstrating the value of text based content, the question becomes, “Are images still content?”

The answer is yes and no, depending on who you talk to. Many would say no, while I personally say it’s a secondary but powerful subdivision under copy content. And partially because of this fact – that it’s still content and content needs are at an all time and growing high – and because image marketing is here to stay, there are a different set of rules image-driven people need to focus on.

User-Generated Content (UGC) is the inclusion in your site of reviews, guest blogs, comments and opinions uploaded by your users and customers. This content can be invaluable to your marketing efforts.

The inclusion of an online forum and comments page has become more common across the web, increasingly prevalent among businesses investing in the future of their online presence. The benefits of UGC can be broken up into three main divisions:

In an online world where it seems that users are asked to review and rate everything from the latest movies and albums to diet programs and cleaning products, it was inevitable that some marketers might want to “game the rating system” by skewing review counts in their favor. One of the most egregious attempts was conducted by Telltale Games, which had employees post glowing reviews of their new Jurassic Park video game on the Metacritic site. Even though the reviews were identified as being written by Telltale personnel, their contribution of high approval scores served to skew the overall average. The inevitable backlash of “Revenge Zeros” proved how counterproductive the entire strategy was in the first place and the game now sits at a meager 2.8 out of 10, considerably lower than it likely would have been had Telltale employees stayed out of the fray.

Polarization seems to be a prerequisite for the viral success of a political video. While the conventional regurgitations of political positions and platforms fail to draw flies, politicians stuffing their feet in their mouths rarely fail to get the YouTube view-meter spinning. For a political video to go viral requires a very precise perfect storm of circumstances: The video must either offend or elate a significant portion of the population; the mass media has to pick up the story; and the amount of online social media chatter has to become pervasive. Whether the video is widely viewed to be inspirational or idiotic has very little bearing on the number of YouTube views.