To advertise their 2010 Toyota 4Runner, Toyota decided to take the suburban out of the realm of the soccer mom and reconnect it with its old hard-core off-road fans. To do that, they took it to Trail Tracker.

Trail Tracker is an interactive community website created by Toyota for off-road aficionados. It creates a forum for users to find and share their favourite trails anywhere in the United States. Drivers can search the user-generated database of off-road obstacle courses and dirt trails, look at detailed trail overviews, and then download the route to their dashboard GPS devices. (more…)

Pluck, a social media platform brought to you by Demand Media, the leading distributor of social media, announced today the integration of Twitter into its current platform giving participants the extended functionality of interacting with friends and family on other sites. (more…)

The Boston Globe has settled on a platform by Pluck to help the paper make the most of user-generated content (UGC) hosted on its subsidiary website Boston.com. The Boston Globe has recognized the need to have a much stronger online presence and the need to be able to interact with users, the Pluck platform will allow Boston.com to do all this and more.

Pluck, a subsidiary of Demand Media, specializes in driving traffic to clients’ websites using a variety of social media strategies. Boston.com will be using a product called Sitelife, a complete social network. Sitelife allows a company to have all the tools of a social network, customized to their needs. This is a great benefit for companies that want to host their own networks and not just exist within a bigger social network such as Bebo or MySpace. (more…)

Entrepreneur and investor Josh Hannah has joined Matrix Partners as general partner for the Menlo Park, California venture capital firm. Hannah co-founded online gambling site Betfair.com, which now says it manages more than $50 billion in annual transactions. He also bought do-it-yourself site eHow and restructured it around user-generated content in 2004 before selling it to Demand Media two years later.

Matrix partners says he will focus on “Internet, software, and other consumer technologies.” He has a particular interest in user-generated content, online betting, and companies that are willing to take an innovative approach against established tech giants.