So if I am not the in-house “social media expert”, web guy, or IT guy, why do I care about our new blog platform the team is rolling out next week? Well, I am a strategy guy and social media has been invaluable to have real-time conversations with some real smart folks in the community. I have also used social media to create new relationships and make existing ones stronger. Plus it’s real time and productive, I love the efficiency of 140-character ideation.

So I am excited about some new features in our blogs we are rolling out for readers like you and authors like me. Here is a run-down of the feature highlights you should see next week.

For readers (You):

• Post rating - Ability to rate each post. You can tell me if you like the post or if you think it stinks.

• Polls – Tell us quickly what you think. Participating in polls helps us out, too.

• ShareThis – allows you to send a post to the social network of your choice.

• Look & feel – New look and feel that’s easier to read and navigate

• Video content inside posts – No we didn’t have that before… shame. (head shaking). Look Mom, a real video:

• Threaded comments - Comments are still easy to submit and with threading, you can now see where the conversation is going more easily. There’s a “reply-to” option that notifies you if you want to hear about all replies to a post.

• Easy comment authentication – If you are already signed up on OpenID and Gravatar, login and you are commenting. Asking people to exclusively sign up for your site is “so 2008”.

• Improved smartphone view – View the blog better from mobile devices like the iPhone and iPod Touch. OK, I wanted it optimized for Bold, Storm, and G1 Android too, but maybe later.

For Authors (You and I):

• Posting flexibility- I want to blog the moment I get that “big idea”- no matter where I am. I get increased flexibility of where I can post, doing it through ping.fm, iPhone, etc. without a SecureID dongle which I needed on our old system. This means I can more quickly start conversations and blog more often and spend less time doing it. I used to go from a)Word to b)LiveWriter to c)LiveWriter and fix broken content to d) old platform tool to e) fix broken content in old platform tool to f) publish. This removes most of those steps.

• Improved rich media tools- I won’t even bore you with how many steps I would need to go through to post media. Don’t get me started. I can do it now and do it fast. You want videos and audio, we got it.

• Comment SPAM filtering- I used to get 50 per day. That’s real productive. I’d hate to look at my inbox in the morning. For the last time, no, I don’t want Cialis or oil paintings.

• Robust tracking & measurement- Let me know what interests you and what doesn’t. Simple. You don’t care, I don’t write.

So we hope YOU like the new blogs and features. Please tell us what you think; we’ve made it much easier to do so.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.