In other words, “Thous shalt make content king” – the final commandment in BusinessWeek’s 10 Commandments of Web Design.

BusinessWeek.com surveyed a range of top web design experts and compiled their insights into a list of 10 contemporary design commandments. Browsing through the list, it becomes apparent that any web master would do well by following three simple guidelines: keep it simple; focus on the content and get social.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch is reporting that New South Wales Department of Education in Australia has accepted a bid to switch over the email accounts of 1.5 million students over from Microsoft Exchange to Gmail (via Google Apps).

NSW DoE was unahppy because their 2004 MS Exchange installation cost 33million and took 3 years. It’s unclear why the system took so long to setup. The Gmail roll-out will increase current email storage allocated for each student from 35MB to 6GB.

The move represents a big win for Google – which is breaking into Microsoft’s mail and office collaboration market, at every scale. Last year Macquarie University elected to shift the email accounts of its 68,000 students and recent graduates onto Gmail. This new instillation will create what’s being reported as the single largest private deployment of Gmail. On the other end of the scale small and medium business are also increasingly switching away from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, to SaaS services like Google Apps, and Yahoo’s Zimbra.

Boon or bane? Email has radically transformed the way we communicate. Indeed, most knowledge workers would find it difficult to survive without the ease, reach & convenience of email.

However, email has its dark side too. Spam, lack of security and the sheer volume of email can make it as much a hinderance as a boost to productivity. The NPR website has a useful collection of articles and audio clips of how to tame the email beast.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will be deciding on a proposal that could see a huge increase in potential internet domain names. Icann is the primary regulator of the internet’s domain name system.

Currently, strict rules govern the registration of top-level domain (TLD) names such as .com and the individual country extensions (.com.sg; .com.my, etc). This Thursday, Icann will be voting to relax these rules to allow any string of characters to be used as a TLD.

This would allow thousands of new top-level domains to be created. Companies could then turn their brands into truly international domain names. This branding opportunity won’t come cheap, though – it is expected to cost at least “several thousand” dollars to register such a domain name.

Another issue could be conflicting claims to a name. Large companies would likely have the resources to secure names based on their intellectual property. Smaller companies may well face an uphill battle trying to secure their more localized brand names if conflicting claims do arise. In any case, it will be all the more important to officially register your various brand names and trademarks with the relevant national authorities.

Refer to the Icann website for the final draft report on this proposed TLD policy.

A BusinessWeek article reports that LinkedIn successfully raised $53 million in additional funding from VCs. This effectively values the professional networking site at more than $1-billion.

LinkedIn is one of the few social sites that has figured out how to profit consistently from user-generated content. It is expected to generate $100-million in revenue this year and its user base is still growing aggressively. Compared to the other social sites, its average user is also older and richer.

LinkedIn expects to use the extra cash to develop new communication and collaboration tools for its members and to fund expansion into new markets in Europe and China. While its current membership base is heavily US-skewed, the site does already have a significant global footprint. Singapore-based members are estimated to number well over 50,000 – making LinkedIn a useful networking and research tool for smart local businesses.

In 2005, BusinessWeek ran a cover story predicting that the emerging phenomenon of blogging would have a significant impact businesses on communications. Three years on, the story “Blogs Will Change Your Business” remains one of the magazine’s most read articles online.

However, while blogs certainly have become an important medium, it is just one of the do-it yourself “communication multipliers” to have emerged on the internet since the article was published. Social networks like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn are have burst onto the scene as have a myriad of smaller social connectors and collaboration tools.

BusinessWeek thus felt compelled to update their story and review some of the Social Web developments they did not foresee in their original article. Beyond Blogs is well worth a read for an overview on how these emerging social media tools are having a very real impact on business processes today.

We Are Smarter Than Me
How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business
Barry Libert & Jon Spector
Wharton School Publishing, 2007

This book is a product of what it preaches – authors Libert & Spector apparently compiled their text with the help of thousands of contributors who chipped in with case studies, examples and the like. The authors dub this process “crowdsourcing” – the act of tapping on the resources of numerous external contributors.

The authors aim to explain how you can successfully leverage the potential of crowdsourcing in your own business.

I just received an email from a recruiting firm inviting me to submit my CV to their database. Nothing unusual – most executives do routinely receive such solicitations from a variety of headhunting firms and job boards.

This particular invitation did immediately catch my eye, though, because it originated from the CEO of Heidrick & Struggles (H&S) — an exclusive global recruiting firm that traditionally focuses on high-level, C-Suite recruitment. High-end firms such as H&S have thus far not relied too much on online marketing or engagement techniques.

However, the message in this e-mail made it quite clear that H&S has realized that it cannot ignore the growing influence of online communities and social networking even amongst the senior executive levels.

In recognition of this, H&S is launching what it believes to be the future of the CV – something it calls VisualCV. Essentially, it is a multimedia digital resume that allows you to easily include images, recordings, documents and video to showcase your professional track-record. This VisualCV can also be embedded into social networking tools like your LinkedIn profile, Facebook page, personal blog or email signature.

H&S dubs this their “Facebook for the seven-figure set”. This is further evidence that web engagement is getting ever more pervasive – no matter who your target audience is, you’d better ensure that your message can be found on the web!

Are you getting a little jaded with your normal browsing experience? Try roaming the web in 3D with SpaceTime, then. Or satisfy satisfy your urge to click with Hyperwords – a browser plug-in that turns every word on any webpage into a hyperlink.

A recent Economist article reports on these and a number of other interesting new techniques under development that promise to radically transform the web browsing experience.

The election before the election is finally over – Barack Obama has secured the Democratic party’s nomination with Hillary Clinton expected to formally stand down her campaign sometime today. The pundits are falling over themselves to analyse how the relatively unknown freshman senator managed to overcome Clinton who entered the primary race as the prohibitive favourite.

Form a small business perspective, one of the more interesting take-aways comes from Steven Strauss in TheStreet.com. He likens Obama to an unknown, under-funded start-up going up against a gigantic, well-known and well-resourced institutional brand (Clinton).

So, how did the little guy prevail against the established goliath? By being unique, playing smart and competing to his strengths. Read Spencer’s full article for the details.