If you were asked what it would take to get Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Aol and other to come together, agree on something and work together to accomplish something that would benefit most of the online world, what would it be? That is a pretty short list of option for sure but one thing has worked: a push to eliminate phishing scams in the e-mail space.

According to Wired

On Monday, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and eleven others outfits announced they had formed a new alliance to combat phishing — a way of fooling email and web users into providing sensitive information, including credit card numbers. The alliance is known as Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance, DMARC for short, and the aim of this sprawling alliance is to lay down new email standards that help stop the nefarious practice.

The past few years have been one of severe upheaval in the marketing world. As we continue to shift from the traditional world of marketing to a mix between the ways of marketing from the past 20 or so years and the digital / social media environment the landscape shifts regularly.

One area of social media that carries a wide array of opinions regarding its use is blogging. I am tempted to put quotes around social media in reference to blogging because social media as it is defined by most today makes many blogs look like the long form journalism of the past. Maybe that point of view is a reason why a recent study by the University of Massachusetts / Dartmouth shows that within the Inc. 500, which tends to be smaller, more nimble and less social media averse organizations, the use of blogging declined quite significantly in 2011. See the chart below for the comparison to blogging’s use by the Fortune 500.