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The power of a blog is its network of users, and Web users are becoming accustomed to a culture of participation. Just as blogging is changing publishing, social networking is going to change blogging. So it's appropriate the these products are getting new social features.

They are developing an open source community, profiles and blogging platform that I think will change community software the way Wordpress (Buddypress’ parent project) has changed blogging.

Expression Media is quite different from Aperture, Lightroom, and iPhoto (). Where those products combine image management and image editing, Expression Media focuses mostly on media management. It does a good job of managing your images, but it can also track movies, audio files, text and HTML files, fonts, and PDFs, as well as documents created with Microsoft Office, Adobe's Creative Suite applications, and QuarkXPress (

. (It does have some limited image editing functionality, but it really can't do much more than simple tonal correction, red-eye reduction, and cropping.)

The heart of Expression Media is the catalog. Each catalog is a visual database that contains information and thumbnail images of the files that it tracks. The program doesn't store your files in the catalog,

Photoshop Lightroom, Adobe’s first attempt at a photo-management and -editing tool for photographers, was a solid application when it was first released in 2007. Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 () is even better.

Many of Lightroom 2.0’s improvements are small ones in the areas of usability and productivity, but together they make managing your photos much easier. Adobe has also significantly expanded Lightroom’s editing functionality (particularly with the the new Adjustment Brush and advanced filtering capabilities), so users can now do without a separate photo editor such as Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

Many of the improvements are small ones that focus on usability and productivity, but they add up to real improvements that make it easier to manage photos

Adobe has also expanded Lightroom’s editing functionality significantly, making it less likely that you’ll need an external photo-editing program (such as Adobe Photoshop () or Photoshop Elements () to work on your photos.

organizational capabilities

Adobe Bridge is an organizational and image-browsing powerhouse that’s been shipping with Photoshop since the inception of the creative suite. However, in previous versions it was sometimes painfully slow and the workspace wasn’t friendly as it could have been. That’s all changed in Photoshop CS4 ()—Bridge got a makeover, a speed boost, and a new Review Mode that’ll make photographers squeal with joy.

ou can navigate through your hard drive and view files as scalable thumbnails. To see larger previews, click an image and it’ll appear in the Preview panel (or just press your keyboard’s spacebar for a full-screen preview). At the top of the window lie several new navigational aids including Forward and Back arrow buttons

Using Bridge to import your photos (done seamlessly via a separate app called Adobe Photo Downloader) can be a huge timesaver as you can make it do all kinds of housekeeping chores for you. For example, you can set it up to automatically rename your photos, add keywords, a description, and copyright info to each and every one. It can perform a backup as part of the import process and burn a DVD for off-site storage. This valuable function of Bridge has been carried over from the previous version.

It is easy to wonder who in the world would make another social network now, for there are already tonnes of them around and to top it none of them are making any significant money. In my opinion, Buddypress gives options that large blogs didn’t have before, that it is to build a community around itself. The network is essentially a mini community of users, contributors in that particular niche. For instance, a few food bloggers can come together and make afood community filled with blog recipes, profiles, photos of their food, etc. using Buddypress. While they used to earlier connect using Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. for these, having a community site simplifies things and is more engaging. Of course, this is just an example, and it’s scope if limited only by imagination. And that is the major USP of Buddypress.

Running a community oriented site is a lot more hardwork than running a blog. The success of Buddypress has to be tied in with the success of publishers because that is how Wordpress grew, and that is how the developer community will take notice which makes WP what it is.

For starters, setting up an account on one of these sites is very easy to do, and once a user is done the page they come away with is essentially a WordPress blog all their own. Or so it seems - in fact, if you are running this program on your own server and domain, these mini-blogs and site content will turn your visitors into content generators for you. If, for example, you have 50 people who are very interested in what your company sells, and you gain them as members, they will write on occaision in their blog, and those blog updates are fresh content for Google. If the posts are particularly good, people will link to them, and all that link juice will come back to improve the rankings on your site. In a way, it is a brilliant way to get content developers for your site who will work for free.

“BuddyPress will completely transform a vanilla installation of Wordpress MU into a fully functional social network platform.”

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