My mother once told me I had champagne taste on a beer budget. Maybe I can redeem her perception of me by entering and winning the The Annual Design Within Reach (DWR) Champagne Chair Contest.

Here’s basically how it works: DWR is out to see who can fashion the best miniature chair created entirely from the corks, wires, labels and foil (not the bottles) of up to two champagne bottles and nothing else, no glue, tape, nothing. Why? Who cares, there’s $1,500 at stake! Enough cash to buy a nice armchair, or two—or 15 if you shop at IKEA.

There are other stipulations: Your creation must not exceed the dimensions of a 4″ cube and must be mailed to DWR by end of day January, 15th. And of course, you must purchase a bottle or two of the bubbly. Sound interesting? Here are the official entry rules and regulations.

The 203-acre, 24,000 seat Verizon Wireless Music Center in Indiana is up for sale. No news there, large concert venues have passed their maturation points, expensive ticket sale volumes continue to decline and property alongside the stretch of interstate the music center abuts is in demand. Yawn.

But as I read the Indystar.com article detailing the news, suddenly, there “You” were again (See: Time Magazine’s Person of the Year Award). Right there in the middle of the Indystar article:

Musical acts once needed the clout of major labels to pull off anything larger than regional club tours. Now, because of Web sites such as Purevolume.com and MySpace.com, bands can book and promote their own national tours with little more than a broadband Internet connection and the will to send thousands of e-mails.

Yet another industry example of how “You” are changing the face of commerce one peer assessment at a time—by the millions.

“You” Are Changing
As you consider your next online initiative, product or service launch consider this: Over 50% of MySpace users are over 35 years of age. It’s naive and difficult to imagine a product or service that is not affected in some way by the onslaught of modern-day online social networking.

Spend some time understanding the inherent market share opportunities—and dangers—in these trends. From design to content and methodology, it’s important to embrace tactical marketing and business strategies aimed at capitalizing on this paradigm shift in buying habits. Call it, “You,” “Web 2.0,” “social networking,” or whatever you like—but facing down public opinion is no way to run your railroad.

Influences, Marian Bantjes‘ rich and expressive work, documents all that has impressed and inspired the illustrious career of the peerless designer. In Influences Bantjes reveals her highly-refined sense of form and typographic styling, selecting a reflexive diagrammatic format in which to express it. Her adroit builds of lacy assemblages intricately layered to describe graphics of greater depth and potency have defined a genre.

Take a moment to enjoy this self-described, “lapsed Graphic Designer.”

I’ve never scooped anything—or even almost scooped anything. And this may not qualify either but the notion of it got my adrenaline flowing for 4 or 5 seconds so I bit the blog and went for it.

I’ve often considered TicketMaster to be my archetype for the perfect, quiet, never-investigated monopoly. Well, it appears that TicketMaster may be just an hour or so away from offloading $13.3 million of its hard-earned fee profits into iLike for 25% of the company.

iLike is an iTunes plug-in that offers up music suggestions based on your personal tastes. According to Techcrunch.com and others, the worry seems to be that TicketMaster would help the suggestion process along by adding “buy tickets now” buttons to the product interface.

For more on what little is known about the transaction thus far, check out Techcrunch.com.

Social networking sites such as MySpace.com and YouTube.com are consistently outpacing traditional sites. Recent statistics show YouTube.com has twice as many daily visitors as both Amazon and eBay.

A recent O’Reilly Radar report indicated MySpace.com adds over 280,000 new users a day while a comScore report showed more than half the users on MySpace.com are over the age of 35. This dispels the notion that social networking and user-generated content are something only Millennials are doing; it’s fast becoming the norm for Internet users of all ages. In fact, earlier this year, a Pew report indicated that nearly 50 million Americans have created content for publication online.

The movement toward user-generated content is here. As always, knowing how to engage in communication with your constituents is critical to any marketing plan. Knowing where to engage them is ever-changing.