Innovate

Cow Based Economics

2012-02-27T01:24:00.001-08:00

SOCIALISM

You have 2 cows.

You give one to your neighbour.

COMMUNISM

You have 2 cows.

The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM

You have 2 cows.

The State takes both and sells you some milk.

NAZISM

You have 2 cows.

The State takes both and shoots you.

BUREAUCRATISM

You have 2 cows.

The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away.

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM

You have two cows.

You sell one and buy a bull.

Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.

You sell them and retire on the income.

ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND (VENTURE) CAPITALISM

You have two cows.

You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.

The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.

The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more.

You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States , leaving you with nine cows.

No balance sheet provided with the release.

The public then buys your bull.

SURREALISM

You have two giraffes.

The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION

You have two cows.

You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.

Later, you hire a consultant to analyse why the cow has dropped dead.

A GREEK CORPORATION

You have two cows.

You borrow lots of euros to build barns, milking sheds, hay stores, feed sheds, dairies, cold stores, abattoir, cheese unit and packing sheds. You still only have two cows.

A FRENCH CORPORATION

You have two cows.

You go on strike, organize a riot, and block the roads, because you want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION

You have two cows.

You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.

You then create a clever cow cartoon image called a Cowkimona and market it worldwide.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION

You have two cows, but you don't know where they are.

You decide to have lunch.

A SWISS CORPORATION

You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you.

You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION

You have two cows.

You have 300 people milking them.

You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity.

You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION

You have two cows.

You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION

You have two cows.

Both are mad.

AN IRAQI CORPORATION

Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.

You tell them that you have none.

No-one believes you, so they bomb the ** out of you and invade your country.

You still have no cows, but at least you are now a Democracy.

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION

You have two cows.

Business seems pretty good.

You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.

A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION

You have two cows.

The one on the left looks very attractive...

Posted via email from Life's Like That

Morals Test

2012-02-27T01:14:00.001-08:00

Morals test

What would you do?

This test only has one question, but it's a very important one.

By giving an honest answer, you will discover whereyou stand morally.

The test features an unlikely, completely fictionalsituation in which you will have to make a decision.

Remember that your answer needs to be honest, yet spontaneous.

Please scroll down slowly and give due considerationto each line.

THE SITUATION:

You are in London.

There is chaos all around you caused by a hurricane with severe Flooding.

This is a flood of biblical proportions.

You are a photo-journalist working for a major newspaper, and you're caught in the middle of this epic disaster.

The situation is nearly hopeless.

You're trying to shoot career-making photos.

There are houses and people swirling around you, some disappearing into the water.

Nature is unleashing all of its destructive fury.

THE TEST:

Suddenly, you see a man in the water.

He is fighting for his life, trying not to be taken down with the debris

You move closer... Somehow, the man looks familiar....

You suddenly realize who it is.... It's the Muslim Cleric, Abu Hamza,

The one-eyed, hook handed bastard who hates non-Muslims and wants the UK to become an Islamic state!!

You notice that the raging waters are about to take him under forever.

You have two options:

You can save the life of Abu or you can shoot a dramatic Pulitzerm Prize winning photo, documenting the death of one of the country's most despised, evil and powerful men!

NOW THE QUESTION:

Here's the question, and please give an honest answer...

Would you select high contrast colour film, or would you go with the classic simplicity of black and white?

Posted via email from Pot Pouri

Reflections: Online Information Conference 2011

2011-12-11T05:37:00.001-08:00

Pretty exhausting, incredibly insightful and hugely enjoyable: that would sum up my three days as Chairman of this year’s Online Information Conference 2011, held at the Olympia Conference Centre between 29^th November and 1^st December. The last time the event will be run at this venue, but more about that later.

It was impossible to be everywhere and hear all of the presentations, so my reflections are by necessity limited to what I personally heard, saw or facilitated. To provide some overall context, the conference provided a forum dedicated to learning, debate, professional development, technology reviews and assessments, expert discussion and case-study presentations on what I would broadly describe as the ‘Information Professions”. There were four themed tracks:

Going mobile: Information and Knowledge on the move
Social Media: Exploiting knowledge in networks
Building a framework for the future of the information profession
New frontiers in information management
Search and Information Discovery

The conference opened with a keynote presentation from Craig Newmark on the topic “Effective Social Media: Past, Present and Future”.

Craig is possibly best known as the founder and inspiration behind Craigslist, the largest online local classifieds and community moderated forum service in the world. He modestly refers to himself as a “Customer Service Manager’ for Craigslist, which he himself describes as diminishing role. His time is increasingly devoted to his philanthropic efforts, as defined by the Craigslist Foundation (“….a connector to bring together nonprofit leaders, business, government, philanthropy and craigslist community members to take greater responsibility for where they live, play and work”), and the recently launched Craigconnects (“Using technology to give the voiceless a real voice, and the powerless real power”).

Craig covered quite a lot of ground in his presentation, from the earliest examples of “social media” as defined by Gutenberg,Luther and the role of the printing press in achieving massive social change, to today’s use of social media and the internet to engage with and connect people and groups with similar interests.

His focus is now very much on the nonprofits sector, where he spends about 60 hours of his working week. He referred to the scope and depth of the nonprofits sector as a “sea of help”, but pointed out that many of these people and organisations need help themselves in making more effective use of social media. He identifies Craigconnects as being a “hub”, helping nonprofit organisations that have similar aims and objectives to connect and collaborate together. He also sees social media as a way of getting more people involved in legitimate nonprofits, and to maybe identify the fake nonprofits, i.e. those that spend most or all of their income on themselves.

Another key theme to emerge from Craig’s keynote was the issue of fact-checking in the news business. Craig was keen to emphasise that he was not a journalist or an expert in the news industry, but felt that the disinvestment in investigative reporting and fact-checking had eroded the trust in news media. Craig was no doubt referring to the US press, but it seems to me there is some resonance on the issue of trust with the UK press, as reported via the Leveson inquiry . In fact, “trust” was a recurrent theme in both Craig’s keynote, and the keynote for the second day of the conference by Rachel Botsman (see later reference), and as Craig noted: “Trust was the new black”.

The key elements of the fact-checking debate is described in more detail in this article by Craig, recently published in the Huffington Post. However, perhaps more memorable and particularly poignant is one of Craig’s remarks I noted from his keynote: “The press should be the immune system of democracy”.

A pre-conference podcast by Craig is available from the Online Information website.

Rachel Botsman was the keynote speaker on the second day of the conference. Rachel is a social innovator who writes, consults and speaks on the power of collaboration and sharing through current and emerging network technologies, including how it will transform business, consumerism and the way we live. She is the co-author with Roo Rogers of: What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. TIME magazine recently called Collaborative Consumption “One of the top 10 ideas that will change the world.”

Rachel is based in Australia and couldn’t be with us in London, so we had a 35-minute video that Rachel had produced especially for the conference, followed by 20 minutes of questions and answers via a live link-up with Rachel in Australia.

The keynote was broadly based on the book (a highly recommended read). It gives a stark perspective of western societies’ 40-year addiction to hyper-consumerism, and the impact this is having on people, society and the planet’s resources. The key question is whether we can continue as we are for the next 40 years or more, or whether we have to consider other economic models. I’m guessing that the broad vote is for the latter, which is why we’re witnessing the explosive growth of what Rachel refers to as “Collaborative Consumption”

Collaborative Consumption is the process of sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting and swapping, reinvented and massively scaled using internet and social network technologies. Rachel described three main systems:

Product Service Systems

Based on the idea of paying for usage of a product without needing to own the product outright. Car sharing or bike sharing are typical examples. Witness the huge success of bike sharing schemes such as London’s Barclays Bike Hire.

Redistribution Markets

Redistribute used or pre-owned goods from where they are not needed to someone or somewhere where they are. Examples of this type of market include Freecycle and Craigslist .

Collaborative Lifestyles

It's not just physical goods that can be shared, swapped and bartered. People with similar interests are forming groups to share and exchange assets such as time, space, skills and money. Examples include The Tuttle Club , The Cube and Landshare.

Rachel was keen to emphasise that these new and emerging peer to peer (P2P) models, utilising the power and reach of the internet and social networks to massively scale, can and will co-exist with the traditional business to consumer (B2C) services. Though there is evidence that some B2C corporates are adapting their services to deliver the same sort of flexibility offered by the P2P market. For example BMW’s recently announced car sharing scheme.

Rachel’s video included a few case studies of how “micro-entrepreneurs” are creating products and services by renting selling or trading “idling time” – i.e. the time that a product or service is not being used. This could be the car that sits on the driveway for 22 hours out of every 24, the spare room that only gets used when there are visitors, or that power-drill in the tool cupboard that has only been used for 3 minutes. Services such Airbnp (room renting), Zipcar (car renting) or TaskRabbit (paying for someone to do a chore) were all mentioned. Rachel had asked the founders of TaskRabbit what was the most requested task. The answer – perhaps unsurprisingly – was assembling IKEA furniture! So, if there are any budding IKEA experts reading this – get yourselves registered on TaskRabbit and start earning some extra money!

Inevitably the issue of “trust” came up, as in who would we trust to drive our car, or stay in our house? Evidence from the many P2P services that have sprung up over the past two years would indicate that broadly speaking, people are good and considerate and that there have been very few instances of theft or vandalism (though not to trivialise the impact this may have had on the victims). Rachel went on to say that we will increasingly come to rely on our “Reputation Capital”, as an indicator of trust when transacting products and services in this emerging (and potentially huge) P2P market.

Reputational Capital might typically be defined or influenced by our engagement with online and offline communities and marketplaces. As such (and as I noted in my closing remarks), we’re increasingly familiar with “social media”, “social networks” and “social business”, we now need to seriously consider “social reputation”, i.e. how we act and behave online. Our own Reputational Capital will be a valuable commodity that we all need to nurture and protect as we become increasingly reliant on the internet as a marketplace.

I’m not sure if Craig or Rachel will be reading this blog, but if they are, grateful thanks from me, the organising committee and the delegates for your excellent and inspiring keynotes.

In the interest of brevity, I will limit the remainder of my reflections on the overall three days of the conference to a few bullet points. These are based on my personal observations or comments from the delegates.

There was a huge volume of “tweets” on Twitter – more than I’ve seen at any previous conference. The conference hashtag was #online11. Twitter was used by the conference delegates to share what they were hearing and seeing, and as a channel for raising questions to the presenter (there was a Twitter Moderator at all of the sessions to ensure any questions were picked up and answered).

We wanted to encourage more interaction with and between delegates at this conference. There was a “speed networking” event, facilitated by FutureGov Consulting and utilising the Simpl.co website for submitting new ideas or offers of help. This didn’t quite go as planned, mainly because it was scheduled against too many other events. A lesson learnt for next time.

Some great audience participation at the “Essential Competence – Demonstrating Value” session facilitated by Ian Woolerand Sandra Ward, where delegates were given real coins of the realm (pennies) to vote on a range of options for measuring the value of information and knowledge services. All of the coins were returned afterwards (clearly an honest crowd!).

David Gurteen ran one of his eponymous Knowledge Café’s. It was well attended and we received some good feedback. Speaking to a few delegates afterwards I was just slightly surprised that none of them had previously attended a Knowledge Café – which is a fairly well-established process for encouraging conversations and networking. At least they will now be able to take this process back to their respective organisations. Some photos from the Knowledge Café.

The was a lot of interest in the “Going Mobile” track. Maybe these statistics from a recent article in The Wall go some way to explaining this:
- 35% of UK mobile users access social networking sites on their phones (European average is 23%)
- Mobile social networking use in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK nearly doubled in the last year, with 55m mobile users accessing Facebook, Twitter, etc., in September alone.
- 26% of mobile social networking users reported receiving coupons, offers, or deals on their phones.
- Growth in the number of mobile users accessing social networks on a daily basis has surpassed the growth of total mobile social networking adoption
- 71% of the European mobile social networking audience, accessed Facebook via a mobile device in September—the largest mobile audience of any social network—and an increase of 54% in the past year.
- 47% of UK mobile users are using smartphones (European average is 40%)
- 45% of the UK mobile users are using apps, (European average 35%).

There was a lot of interest in “Big Data” (part of the New Frontiers in Information Management Track). I moderated a number of these sessions, and came away with the impression that there is a lot of ‘activity at the coal-face’ in this field, but still relatively few examples of how business or user value is being created or delivered. For me, still on the hype curve, but some promising developments on the horizon.

Digital content (presentations, video, audio) from the conference is gradually being uploaded to the Online Information website and a live stream at Wavecastpro – so keep an eye out for new content appearing.

I’ll just round this off by mentioning that next year Online Information will be moving to a new venue at ICC London at ExceL, scheduled for 4-6 December 2012. This offers state of the art conferencing facilities, a much improved delegate experience, and better integration between the conference and exhibition elements. Something to look forward to in 2012.

I hope those who that attended the conference found it as informative and exhilarating as I did – I await to see the feedback with some anticipation.

For anyone else, I hope this brief summary might give a taster of what it was all about, and perhaps you might be tempted to attend next year’s event.

Until next year – have a great Christmas and a happy New Year!

Stephen Dale

Chairman, Online Information Conference 2011.

Nobel Peace Prize Winners - Three Incredible Women

2011-12-11T05:23:00.001-08:00

Nobel Peace Prize Winners - Three Incredible Women

I was privileged to be in the audience yesterday at the Oslo City Hall for the CNN interview with the three Nobel Peace Prize Winner Laureates; Yemen's Tawakku Karman, Liberia's Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and her compatriot Leymah Gbowee. The first time the prize has been awarded to three women.

Well worth watching the interview, not only to get a true sense of the incredible achievements of these three ladies in making a stand against oppression, corruption and terrorism, but also the robust response to some slightly naive (condescending?) questioning from the interviewer, Jonathan Mann. You do not tangle with these three ladies! I personally felt very humbled by what they have individually achieved - well deserved winners of this prestigious award. #ciscopss #nobel #oslo

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/12/10/world/europe/norway-peace-prize-women/index.html?hpt=hp_c1

Proof they actually exist....

2011-11-20T10:55:00.001-08:00

Truth can be stranger than fiction!

See the full gallery on Posterous

Posted via email from Pot Pouri

Social Media: Exploiting Knowledge in Networks

2011-09-29T00:55:00.001-07:00

There are still some places available on the "Exploiting Knowledge in Networks" training event next week, Tuesday 4th October.

The training focuses on use of Social Media tools to support Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and self development. The following is brief synopsis of the training and what will be covered:

Introduction:
There is a desire to develop more effective knowledge sharing and a culture of collaboration in most organisations, but little recognition of what this means in terms of staff development and overcoming barriers to change. The enormous growth of social media tools and social/professional networks over the past few years has created new opportunities and new challenges for people and organisations who want to embrace this dynamic world of social interaction and fluid knowledge flows. However, It is not widely recognised that collaboration and knowledge sharing are skills and practices that rarely get taught. It's something we may learn on the job in a hit or miss fashion. Some people are natural at it. Others struggle to understand it.
This one day course provides a practical and detailed introduction to social media and social/professional networks that will enable delegates to have a greater understanding of their context for use and deployment within their organisation and for personal and professional development.

Outcomes:

An understanding of social media tools and social networks, and their context for engagement and knowledge sharing
An understanding of on-line privacy, reputational risk, and the dichotomy of personal and professional identities
An understanding of the barriers to knowledge sharing and collaboration and how these can be overcome
An understanding of the principles for creating a personalised social media toolkit to support on-going learning and collaboration
Programme:

Overview of the social web
Risks and rewards in the use of social media
Creating and maintaining your personal profile
Social media tools and their context for knowledge sharing
Listening and observing; an introduction to aggregation, sentiment and tracking tools
Developing your social network and making connections (includes Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+)
Communities of Interest/Practice for personal and professional development
Practical exercises and examples of Social Media in action

If you'd like to book a place on this training course, go to the TFPL website and click on the "book" link. If you'd like more information about the course then please contact me (e.g. use the comments facility in this blog).

If you can't make the 4th October event, the course will be repeated on 6th March 2012 and 2nd October 2012.

Posted via email from stephendale's posterous

A letter to Mr Cameron

2011-08-20T10:58:00.001-07:00

Dear Mr. Cameron

May I suggest that as a punishment for all these hooligans on our streets you put all the criminals into nursing homes and allow the nursing home residents to go into prison.

This way us pensioners would be able to make ends meet,

have free unlimited access to central heating and hot water, medical requirements and hobbies.  Each of us could  have secure furnished rooms equipped with our computer, TV and radio and be allowed free daily phone calls and all this with the benefit of constant video monitoring so we could be helped instantly should we fall or need assistance.
Our bedding would be washed twice a week and all clothing ironed and returned to our rooms. We would not have to shop for food as all our meals would be in house, delivered to our cells.  We would be relieved of finding the money to pay for all the increases in our bills.

We know we would be allowed family visits in a suite built for that purpose.  In addition  have access to a library, gym, swimming pool, gardens education and spiritual counselling, should we need it.

Sadly this enormous change would result in the criminals getting inferior food, being left alone all day unsupervised with no computers and internet access or free phone calls.  However, they would get a weekly bath and hardest of all they would have to pay the enormous sum of between £700-£900 a week  for these privileges – but no doubt you would find a way to subsidise this for them.

Also on another subject Mr Cameron, whilst writing I would like to know the real reason why we can no longer have the Ten Commandments posted in a courthouse or in Parliament.  Is this because you cannot possibly allow commands such as ‘Thou shalt not Steal’, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ and ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness’ to be visible in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians in case someone is offended!

May I suggest Mr. Cameron that as a starting point to correcting all that is wrong in our society, you pass a law that all schools teach the ten commandments in an effort to re-educate our society in the basics of  respect, discipline and morality, and that you stop worrying about offending people of other faiths or no faith.

I feel sure Mr. Cameron, that  if you could see your way to implementing some of these changes, you would be assured of the grey vote at the next election.

Yours respectfully.
S Dale

Posted via email from Pot Pouri

A letter to Mr Cameron

2011-08-20T10:53:00.001-07:00

Dear Mr. Cameron

May I suggest that as a punishment for all these hooligans on our streets you put all the criminals into nursing homes and allow the nursing home residents to go into prison.

This way us pensioners would be able to make ends meet, have free unlimited access to central heating and hot water, medical requirements and hobbies. Each of us could have secure furnished rooms equipped with our computer, TV and radio and be allowed free daily phone calls and all this with the benefit of constant video monitoring so we could be helped instantly should we fall or need assistance.

Our bedding would be washed twice a week and all clothing ironed and returned to our rooms. We would not have to shop for food as all our meals would be in house, delivered to our cells. We would be relieved of finding the money to pay for all the increases in our bills.

We know we would be allowed family visits in a suite built for that purpose. In addition have access to a library, gym, swimming pool, gardens education and spiritual counselling, should we need it.

Sadly this enormous change would result in the criminals getting inferior food, being left alone all day unsupervised with no computers and internet access or free phone calls. However, they would get a weekly bath and hardest of all they would have to pay the enormous sum of between £700-£900 a week for these privileges – but no doubt you would find a way to subsidize this for them.

Also on another subject Mr Cameron, whilst writing I would like to know the real reason why we can no longer have the Ten Commandments posted in a courthouse or in Parliament. Is this because you cannot possibly allow commands such as ‘Thou shalt not Steal’, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ and ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness’ to be visible in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians in case someone is offended!

May I suggest Mr. Cameron that as a starting point to correcting all that is wrong in our society, you pass a law that all schools teach the ten commandments in an effort to re-educate our society in the basics of respect, discipline and morality, and that you stop worrying about offending people of other faiths or no faith.

I feel sure Mr. Cameron, that if you could see your way to implementing some of these changes, you would be assured of the grey vote at the next election.

Yours respectfully.

S Dale

Posted via email from stephendale's posterous

Think differently about the world and you will always do well

2011-08-02T10:12:00.001-07:00

Loved this from Toby Moores, (now DR Toby Moores) - which I'll add to my list of favourite quotes:
There is no point in being in a straight foot race with people who are faster than you. But if you fire the gun you will always have a job and if you hand out trophies you will always be on the podium.

If you are prepared to think differently about the world you will always do well.

There's hope for me yet then!

Posted via email from stephendale's posterous

Call for input on 'Apps' for Online Information Conference 2011

2011-07-21T00:27:00.001-07:00

We are finalising the programme for this year's Online Information Conference (29 Nov to 1 Dec). We have lined up a number of internationally recognised keynote speakers for the five main themes for the conference:

Going mobile: Information and knowledge on the move

Social media: Exploiting knowledge in social networks

Building a framework for the future of the information profession

New frontiers in information management

Search and information discovery

Details about the programme and speakers will be announced shortly on the conference website.
We are still seeking some input to the 'Going Mobile' track, and specifically on the creative use of Apps for mobile devices (e.g. smart phones or tablets). If you have delivered an app that can demonstrate value to the user or more effective and efficient services for the provider, and you'd like the opportunity to showcase the app (or apps) to our global audience of information professionals, then we'd like to hear from you. Typically the app might be:

an e-book lending service
a location-based app for reporting problems
an app for paying for a council service, e.g. parking.
an app for health
....or something that no-one else has thought of!

Please respond to this post if you have a story to tell and would like a featured spot in the conference.
Many thanks.
Stephen Dale
Conference Chairman

Posted via email from stephendale's posterous

Google+ the Facebook killer?

2011-06-29T03:00:00.001-07:00

Google has announced details of it's latest foray into social networking with Google+. The core components appear to consist of :

o Circles (equivalent to groups) - where information can be shared privately. With Circles you can put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another and your boss in a circle all on his own!

o Hangouts - lets friends know that you're free for a video chat or impromptu virtual meet-up.

o Sparks - a sort of activity stream subscription feature, It looks for videos and articles that it thinks you'll like, based on what your interests.

There's also a Google+ mobile app available in the Android Market, which will no doubt soon come to Apple’s App Store.

It seems that Google have put a lot of thought into making all of this hang together in a seamless and natural way, and this is clearly laying the foundations for Google's future presence in the social web. It will certainly make Facebook sit up and take notice, but I'm not sure whether it will pull many users away from Facebook. However, I do believe there is room for more than one social media behemoth in the market, and for the significant many who dislike Facebook or find it overly complex, Google+ offers a compelling alternative.

Google+ is currently in an invitation- only “Field Trial” period, so only a select few can access the service at this time. Google+ will be going live to the general public soon, the company says.
Amplify’d from www.digitaltrends.com
At long last, Google has announced its newest foray into the world of social media with a new service called Google+. But this time, Google could have a winner.
Google turned the world of social media on its head today with the much-anticipated unveiling of the “top-secret” Google+ project, a massive new type of service that essentially turns all of Google into one giant social network.
While Facebook, with its 700 million users, is a vast social network, made for connecting with as many people as you can get to accept a friend request, Google+ aims to redefine the way people connect online by letting users create a variety of smaller groups, called “Circles,” which allows people to share information and content with only the friends or colleagues they choose.
“We believe online sharing is broken. And even awkward,” said Google’s President of Social Vic Gandora in an interview with TechCrunch. “We think connecting with other people is a basic human need. We do it all the time in real life, but our online tools are rigid. They force us into buckets — or into being completely public.” By comparison, he says, “[r]eal life sharing is nuanced and rich.” With Google+, Google has tried to adapt the richness of real life interactions into an online software.
Like Facebook’s News Feed, Google+ gives users a dashboard with a flow of updates from their friends. Shared content, comments, photos etc are divided into “Streams,” one for each Circle of friends. Users can customize their security settings to allow some contacts to view personal information while hiding it from others.
Google+ can also be controlled through a newly redesigned navigation bar, which will appear at the top of the page of any Google product. Through this, Google+ users can access their profile, check notifications, and instantly share content to their various Circles.
Google has also built in a friend-finding feature called “Sparks,” which acts as a kind of search engine for hobbies. So if, say, you’re interested in single malt Scotch whisky, simply enter in “single malt Scotch” into the Sparks search bar, and Google will deliver content it thinks you might enjoy. (Google’s recently-launched +1 Button plays a role in what makes it to the top of these lists.) Find something you like, and simply click on it to add it to your list of interests. You can also connect with fellow enthusiasts in the “featured interests” area, and see what they are chatting about.
Next on the staggering list of Google+ features is what Google calls “Hangouts,” which is a group video chat feature. A Google+ user can simply launch a new Hangout session. Friends are alerted, and are free to join in. Up to 10 users can be in a single Hangout at a time. Any more, and they’re placed on the waiting list.
The final major feature to Google+ is its mobile functionality. The Google+ mobile app is currently available in the Android Market, and will soon come to Apple’s App Store. The Google+ mobile features include “Huddle” for group messaging, as well as an auto-upload feature that automatically adds any photo or video taken on your smartphone through Google+ to a private folder in the cloud. These files are then accessible the next time you log on to Google+ on a computer, and can be shared for up to eight hours after upload.
Google is currently in an invite-only “Field Trial” period, so only a select lucky few can access the service at this time. Google+ will be going live to the general public soon, the company says.
From what we’ve seen so far, Google+ seems like a giant leap in the right direction for Google — and far more robust than Buzz or Orkut. Obviously, there’s a lot here to sort through, so check back soon for more on Google+
Read more at www.digitaltrends.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a1693q

Social Graph and Open APIs

2011-06-20T05:46:00.001-07:00

Apple seems to be doing alright with it's proprietary and closed social graph; the rest of the pack continue to add value to their networks using open APIs to share social network data. So it appears there really is room for two quite different business models. However, as many social networkers have found out, there's no harm in having a foot in both camps!
Amplify’d from www.businessinsider.com
Viadeo, the European counterpart of LinkedIn operating a professional social network of 35m members, is about to release its public API by the end of this month.
Most of analysts or observers just do not care, considering open APIs as hacking news. They are wrong : open APIs are questions of survival for social web services.
The war of social APIs
Facebook paved the way of releasing open APIs to provide third parties access to its sensitive data. The open APIs have now become the standard for all social web apps : LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter, Orkut, Plaxo… Twitter would have been a completely different company without its open API which drove the emergence of multiple clients and the integration of tweet functions in almost every web service.
At that time, the Facebook open API was the pillar of a risky strategy.
Let’s get back to the original sin. In early 2007, Facebook adopted this anti-Apple strategy of not keeping the core of its value (people’s networks) in house. Several millions of websites now interface with Facebook to personalize and socialize their web experience. This deep ecosystem is probably what strengthens Facebook the most and what makes the company a long-term leader. To go further (and a little provocative) I would even say that Facebook has a strongest long-term position than Google, because of its social graph.
There are not so many visionaries like Zuck to bet this way. In Facebook’s situation, the obvious by-the-book mainstream strategy (by that time) would have been to keep its zillions of users captive and feed them up with ads.
If you allow your users to go away with their network, you take the huge risk of easing your competitors : someone builds a better platform than yours and siphons your users and their friends.
Another risk is to be accused of privacy breaches. Think about this : when you share your pictures, posts and personal profile with some friend on Facebook, you do not imagine that your friend can give all your data to another web service. This is the principle of social APIs : bring your friends with you anywhere.
Fortunately for Facebook, the privacy debate is close to be over now and the generation Y has no concern for this matter.
Read more at www.businessinsider.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a15kea

1000 Social Media Statistics

2011-06-16T04:06:00.001-07:00

One of many websites and services offering social media statistics. Add this one to your bookmarks!
Amplify’d from www.b2bsocialmediaguide.com
In March this year, we launched our social statistics pages, offering all the statistics we can find on the web relating to social media, neatly categorised with their source and date.
And as promised, we have been updating these every Friday since then and we have now collected 1,000 social media statistics. We’re pretty chuffed with ourselves actually.
The stats can be found below:

Blogging statistics

Facebook statistics

Groupon statistics

LinkedIn statistics

Myspace statistics

Social photo statistics

Social media usage statistics

Social gaming statistics

Twitter statistics

Social video statistics

Wikipedia statistics

Social advertising statistics

Tibbr statistics

Read more at www.b2bsocialmediaguide.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a15cra

What is Web 3.0?

2011-06-02T09:39:00.001-07:00

A good - if slightly over-simplified - introduction to the semantic web (though personally I dislike thinking of it as a chronological sequence that started with 'Web 1.0'). Also beware this selling services from EPN (Dutch company).
Amplify’d from www.neowin.net

Some could argue that the concept of Web 3.0 has been around for quite some time although in truth, no one can really pinpoint the exact evolution the World Wide Web will take. We saw Web 1.0 in which simple HTML pages were put together to display information that was primarily meant for academics at first before moving onto the general public and the internet became a 1990s and indeed 2000s phenomenon.

Web 2.0 was a concept that many could both see and not see coming. Advances in website design primarily by those that pushed the boundaries and the introduction of techniques being used such as XHTML and CSS made sure that webpages were becoming more complex. But that alone was not the only factor; the use of Flash on the internet as well as AJAX made webpages alive with interactive information. They were more accessible to the user, displayed information in a more understandable way and most importantly changed the way we look at the internet. What we didn’t necessarily expect however was the growth of social networking. Having online friendships, connecting with people on Facebook including old friends and perusing Twitter for the latest real time news is a totally different world from the 1990s. The recent case of a resident living near Osama Bin Laden’s compound reporting what was happening before the story broke around the world is a testament to how our views have changed. The world is connected.

But Web 3.0 is different. The idea behind it puts webpages in the spotlight of being clever. At the moment a webpage does what its coding tells it to do and nothing more but as Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web puts it, Web 3.0 will be a collection of changes with one aspect being a Semantic web. This is where more information is available to be read by machines of that specific webpage therefore resulting in a better browsing experience and even being able to perform particular tasks on the user’s behalf. In other words, it’s a web which can bring numerous answers together into one understandable reasoning. Try for yourself and compare the results that you get, there are several semantic search engines around, the one I used was DuckDuckGo. Do a search for Wikipedia and notice the difference in results. While the search engines still have a way to go, it highlights the change of focus on information.

An example of this could be that someone wishes to get opinions of a movie that they’re thinking of going to see. A webpage could be able to intelligently search, similar in a sense to how a search engine works at the moment, to look for the same type of metadata to provide an overview. At the moment, many movie review sites use different rating mechanisms that make it difficult to truly compare properly.

Could this be practical though? People have a tendency to lie in the real world and very often over the internet. People have in the past placed misinformation on webpages and its coding. In a system which tries to make sense and even compute some data, it would be very difficult to weed out. Think of GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out), a thought process often used with data programs such as Excel, what you put in is what you get out.

How much can we protect personal data? A lot of news stories in the past few years have focused on the lack of privacy people have on Facebook or at least the difficulty in understanding it. Using that as an example, imagine semantic search engines being able to look into this information and use it in a general pool. To what extent can we use that information?

Web 3.0 isn’t just about intelligent data though, it’s about emphasising that computers could become personalised to the user’s needs. An internet that is focussed on the individual and can deliver results relevant to them in a much more efficient way are both features some expect to see. On close inspection, you realise that we already have technologies which are beginning to step into these ideas, such as behavioural advertisements and personalised homepages. But it’s a question of having that implemented across a large extent of the internet, not just on certain webpages.

How Web 3.0 ends up in practice may be somewhat different from the theories that currently exist to try and predict how the use of the internet will change. Some argue that Web 3.0 is an unrealised idea and that we’re comfortable living in a Web 2.0 world. However things take time to change and it may be years yet before we see another monumental shift in the way we use the world’s network.
Read more at www.neowin.net

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a14dlw

Who Will Win the Facebook and Google War?

2011-05-16T11:33:00.001-07:00

Like two sumo wrestlers srtruggling to get the first fall! I have to laugh about Google's corporate motto "Don't be evil" - maybe this needs to be amended to ...."except to Facebook".

And Facebook are just as bad - pretending to care about their user's privacy when their previous track records shows blatant disregard for it.

As for us users, the best thing to realise is that there is no such thing as privacy on the Internet. If you want privacy cancel your internet contract and throw away your mobile phone. In the mean time, stand back and watch the wrestling!
Amplify’d from latino.foxnews.com
Ali-Frazier. Yankees-Red Sox. Celtics-Lakers. The sports world has often seen knock-down, drag-out battles between titans. But seldom do massive companies zero in on each other.
In the latest salvo of an increasingly nasty war, Facebook hired public relations firm, Burson-Marsteller to try to covertly get journalists and bloggers to write negative articles about Google's privacy practices relating to its new social media feature.
The feature in question, Social Circle, allows Facebook user information to show up via a Google search.. While Facebook says Google is infringing on its users privacy, some say, Facebook railing on about the abuse of its users privacy is like the pot calling the kettle black.
"The competition is between the new and the old -- between Facebook as the early leader in the social Web, and Google as the dominant player in the content Web. Everyone else, such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Twitter, will play a secondary role," adds Valdes, "and will start lining up on one side or the other."
Lance Rios, Founder of Being Latino: As stated in the movie 'The Social Network', "the internet isn't written in pencil, it's written in ink". As so, we can never expect for anything to be fully private in any capacity, ESPECIALLY when it comes to social networking sites. What Google is doing is wrong and intrusive and I see it to be a direct violation of our rights and believe that they will soon be reprimanded.
While this specific incident will not be the last of companies trying to invade our personal lives, I do think that it will set off a red flag, leading many companies to be a little more conservative about how to approach people and their privacy.
Louis Pagan, Content Director for Hispanicize: This is not shocking to me. Google is making use of already public data...the big 'problem' with social media is just that - the media that you put out there is public. If that's a 'bug' in social media that needs to be fixed is another conversation. Unfortunately, the public is slow in learning this.
What I find disturbing about this story is the sneaky tactic that Facebook used to bring this to the public's attention. Back door deals, and back door conversations are suspicious in their very nature and should be taken with a grain of salt. It seems that Facebook wanted this story to go viral and wipe their hands clean from it.
It's like a cold war between the two companies, and the coveted prize is user data.
Julio Ricardo Varela, Founder of Latino Rebels: As a prophet of social media, Facebook made a huge error by turning this over to a PR company. It surprised me, since they are all about transparency, but in this case, they acted just like any other technology corporation.
The Google tactics don't bother me at all. My profile is protected on Facebook but I also allow some of my information to go out into cyberspace. From a marketing perspective, being linked to Google creates a greater opportunity for someone new to click on your profile. Makes sense to me.
In the end, this is moot, since Facebook will buy out Google in three years.
Read more at latino.foxnews.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a1349r

Happy memories of Punch and Judy

2011-05-02T11:07:00.001-07:00

Had a great Bank Holiday weekend watching a show about a dysfunctional family, complete with husband and wife battering, child cruelty, and assault on a police officer. We had such fun, and everyone laughed when the baby was thrown out of the window. Ah yes, good ol' Punch and Judy. It's somehow comforting to know that the story hasn't yet been 'sanitised' by the politically correct lobby (also known as the British Taliban), and is much the same as when I first saw it as a toddler - all those hundreds of years ago!

For those ignorant of such quaint customs, the story is roughly as follows:

The show starts with the arrival of Mr. Punch followed by the introduction of Judy. They kiss and dance before Judy requests Mr. Punch to look after the baby. Punch fails to carry this task out appropriately, sitting on the baby in a failed attempt to "babysit", and even putting it through the sausage machine. He then drops it out of the window onto the floor. Cue little child who rushes to pick it up and on tippy-toes tries to hand it back to Punch - but can't quite reach. Cue slightly taller child who similarly fails. This sequence continues until finally one of the older children in the audience finally has sufficient height to hand the baby back to Mr Punch. Judy returns, is outraged, fetch's a stick and the knockabout commences. A policeman arrives in response to the mayhem and is himself felled by Punch's slapstick. All this is carried out at breakneck and farcical speed with much involvement from the gleefully shouting children in the audience. Enter Joey the Clown who suggests it's dinner time. This leads to the production of a string of sausages which Mr Punch has to look after. Cue even greater audience participation with the arrival of the crocodile, which Mr. Punch does not see until the children shout out and lets him know. Punch's subsequent struggle with the crocodile leaves him in need of a Doctor who arrives and attempts to treat Punch by walloping him with a stick until Punch reciprocates. Punch then counts his "victims" by laying puppets on the stage only for Joey the Clown to move them about behind his back in order to frustrate him. A ghost appears and gives Mr. Punch a fright before it too is chased off with a slapstick.

In the version I remember, a hangman would arrive to punish Mr. Punch, only to himself be tricked into sticking his head in the noose. This seems to have been expunged from this most recent performance, so I guess we have moved on with the times. Maybe later versions will include an ASBO or community service!. Anyway, great fun was had by all, and I'm so pleased I haven't succeeded in growing up yet!

Posted via email from stephendale's posterous

Data is the new oil

2011-04-26T09:00:00.001-07:00

Loved this abstract from a blog by 'media futurist' Gerd Leonard:

Getting too little or bad data -- or not understanding it-- will literally mean running out of gas in the middle of the desert. Therefore, the mission is to keep it all fueled up. And just like oil, there will be a myriad of issues (hopefully, not wars) that will arise with the responsible and fair practices of drilling, pumping, shipping, refining and dispensing of data.

An excellent metaphor for the crazy world of data!

Posted via email from stephendale's posterous

Cascade data visualisation

2011-04-23T23:19:00.001-07:00

Cascade - data visualisation of the impact of a single Tweet; shows sharing activity to construct a detailed picture of how information propagates through the social media space. Cool!

http://nytlabs.com/projects/movies/projectcascade.mov
Cascade was developed by R&D using open source tools including Processing and MongoDB.

Posted via email from stephendale's posterous

Online Information Conference 2011 - Call For Papers

2011-04-17T23:48:00.001-07:00

ONLINE INFORMATION CONFERENCE - CALL FOR PAPERS
Have you submitted a proposal yet? The deadline of May 6th is approaching fast.
Here's why you should submit a proposal:

Show case your work with 700 delegates from over 40 countries and be seen as a pioneer and leader in what you do
If you have been part of a successful (or unsuccessful) project with innovative best practices, lessons learned, hints and tips, then we want to hear from you
Benefit from the extensive marketing campaign and promotional exposure/recognition you will receive from being part of one of the largest conferences serving the information industry.
You and your organisation will be listed in the printed brochure (sent to 22,000) and on the website (emails to 24,000).

Join a roster of industry authorities and use this opportunity to raise your profile. Previous keynote speakers to the programme include:

Dion Hinchcliffe, Co-Author of 'Web 2.0 Architectures'
Charlene Li, Co-Author of 'Groundswell'

Dame Wendy Hall, Professor of Computer Science, University of Southampton
Nigel Shadbolt, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Deputy Head Research, University of   Southampton

Blaise Cronin, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Clay Shirky, Author of 'Here Comes Everybody'

Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia
Dr David Weinberger, Co-author of 'The Cluetrain Manifesto'
Dr Jakob Nielsen, described as 'The king of usability'
Dame Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive, The British Library
Selected speakers receive a FREE place to the 3 day conference and co-located exhibition, worth over £900
For information on conference themes, making your submission and review criteria please click on the links below
I look forward to receiving your proposal
Stephen Dale
Chairman
Online Information Conference 2011

Making your submission

Review criteria

SUBMIT YOUR PAPER HERE

Please note: Deadline for submissions is Monday 6 May
Posted via email from stephendale's posterous

Nobodies are the new Somebodies

2011-04-13T10:20:00.001-07:00

I loved this post from Josh McHugh which I've 'clipped' in its entirety. I think that many of us who have lived through the frenzied first years of the social media revolution can empathise with the message here. Yes, we all want to be influencers, but for the majority (including me), we have to be content with being 'Nobodies'. But, taking the concept of the 'long tail', there are many millions of nobodies out there, which collectively can have as much (if not more) influence than the 'names'. (Stephen Fry eat your heart out!). You just need to find and nurture them.

Apart from which, Kawasaki's new book (Enchantment) is now top of my reading list!

Yours,

A. Nobody.
Amplify’d from blogs.forbes.com
I recently interviewed Guy Kawasaki at an event hosted by INFORUM at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club.
I’d heard from an entrepreneur the previous week at South by Southwest that Kawasaki is an absolute terror when you’re pitching him, so I was pleasantly surprised when he turned out to be as genial a guy as you could hope to interview.
Kawasaki’s new book, Enchantment, contains a lot of wonderfully anti-Machiavellian advice not just for entrepreneurs, but for nonprofits and pretty much anyone hoping to get the kinds of things done in life that require the cooperation of others. The pearl of wisdom underlying the entire book: “Be a mensch.”
But the section of the book that had me underlining, circling, and festooning its margins with post-it notes comes where Kawasaki deftly unhorses a marketing orthodoxy that has launched a million PowerPoint decks, a thousand marketing plans, and scores of recent startups: “Engage the Influencers.”
Kawasaki’s counterpunch: “Nobodies Are The New Somebodies.”

This is not likely to be a welcome message to the marketers and would-be audience-builders currently scrambling to throw enticements at Twitter users with high influence scores.

Social Media Influence Scores: Return of the Velvet Rope
One big problem with an approach that focuses disproportionately on established online influencers: there may have been 5 minutes at the dawn of Web 2.0 when you stood a solid chance of Robert Scoble or Ashton Kutcher replying to one of your tweets. But that moment has passed. You can ask Ben Stiller. Just don’t bother asking him over Twitter.
Want to know how to engage an “influencer” who has a PeerIndex or Klout score of 85? Have your manager call his agent. Don’t have a manager? Child, please.
Hanging your marketing strategy on getting retweeted by the likes of Kanye and Rainn Wilson is like pasting a Powerball ticket to the first page of your business plan. Because guess what? Those influencers are busy – converting the hard-earned attention of their thousands or millions of followers into cold hard cash.
Egalitarianism Pays
“You still have to pay someone to suck up to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal,” Kawasaki said. “But you should also be sucking up to Lonelyguy15.” That’s because you never know who will end up becoming your project’s most impassioned and effective cheerleaders. Indeed – to cover his bases, Kawasaki sent advance copies of his book not just to the 100 or so usual traditional media gatekeepers, but also to 1,500 bloggers, Tweeters, and other assorted “nobodies.”
Heresy, perhaps, to a generation of marketers steeped in the sociological topology frequently ascribed to Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.It may be unfair to Gladwell, but for better or worse his book popularized the notion that success in marketing depends on identifying a relatively tiny group of key influencers in any given sphere and winning them over.
Past Results Do Not Guarantee Future Performance
For theoretical validation, Kawasaki looks to sociologist Duncan Watts, author of “Everything Is Obvious” and, recently, co-author of a wonky, mythbusting research paper titled “Everyone’s An Influencer.” The gist of that paper: a person’s past success in causing actions on Twitter is a bad predictor of future success, and it’s probably not worth your time and effort to try to court the historically influential users.

The alternative approach that Kawasaki embraces: spend your time reaching out to a larger number of hoi polloi – those “nobodies,” and identify and nurture the most valuable members of your audience as they emerge. They will love you for it.

No Shortcuts
Where Watts’ paper leaves off, a recent post by Altimeter Group’s Brian Solis, author of the definitive social media tome Engage, picks up the thread in his blog post “Don’t think About The Score”
…focusing efforts to boost scores is as shallow as it is restricted. If you invest in the value of the community and seek to improve the experiences of those to whom you’re connected, your influence and presence is in turn symbolic of something that escapes a number.
As Kawasaki puts it, “enchantment is a process, not an event.”
Solis’ prescription: listen well, be consistent and generous with attention and recognition, connect people with content that interests them, and you will gradually create a thriving fanbase around your cause or project. Trying to game someone’s influence-scoring system or to use it as a shortcut is simply short-sighted, because influence scores, while instructive, are trailing indicators, not predictors.
Create Your Own Influencers
This process-heavy reality may seem like bad news for those who hoped influence scores would be their social media silver bullet. But there is a silver lining. It turns out that celebrating your project’s most enthusiastic fans regardless of their influence scores and making them the stars of the community has the flattering (though ancillary) side effect of – you guessed it – eventually raising the influence scores of everyone involved.
Read more at blogs.forbes.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/byxyc

Infograph on Open Government Projects

2011-04-13T04:18:00.001-07:00

Govloop (a US-based community for public sector staff) had produced a useful Infograph showing all the 350+ open government projects, clustered according to the sponsoring agency. Something that could be adopted maybe for UK open government projects (or has this been done? Show me!)
Amplify’d from semanticweb.com
GovLoop.com has shared a great infograph that answers the question, “How Many Open Gov Projects Are There (and How Do You Find Them Fast)?” According to the post, “Last year, former Deputy CTO for Open Government Beth Noveck reached out to GovLoop Founder Steve Ressler about leveraging the energy of community members to complete a gargantuan task: read through all of the Open Government Plans and compile a list of the hundreds of projects named within them. We had already created a dataset with all the Open Government Plans (which happens to be our 3rd most popular dataset, by the way), so we felt up to the challenge.”
The story continues, “Fast forward to a month ago. By now, Beth had departed the White House…and Angie finalized the dataset with all 350+ open government projects. So Beth connected us with the GOOD guys (and I mean that literally – special shout out to Casey Caplowe and Oliver Munday). Our goal was to create a useful visualization that made it easy to find the data and they’re kinda known for their great infographics.”
The final result: “an infographic that helps you find all 350+ open government projects by agency with a few quick clicks. The circles/numbers represent the numbers of projects at an agency – click on them to see a list of the projects. You can also find projects according to the three open government pillars: collaboration, transparency and participation by clicking on those words in the vault.”
Read more at semanticweb.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/byx4h

Google bonus linked to +1 success

2011-04-07T23:44:00.001-07:00

I've never been quite clear why Google thinks it has to be a social network. Let Facebook and Twitter get on with doing that - after all they're never going to be able to deliver anything that can dislodge users from those networks - both of which have a critical mass. I assume that they're not foolish enough to think that the +1 thing (similar to Facebook's Like) is going to pull people into the Google network.

It would be far better (IMHO) if they concentrated on building some cohesion between all of their excellent (and mainly free) products, (Google Apps, Picassa, YouTube, Reader, Blogger, Sites, Groups etc.) in order to create a compelling (and simple to implement) Enterprise 2.0 offer for business.

I just hope none of their employees are banking on getting a bonus this year (or next)!
Amplify’d from www.businessinsider.com
Google's +1 social search service has a couple of legs up on these other social initiatives. First, it's refreshingly simple -- unlike Wave, for example. Second, it's an add-on to Google's core business of search, so it probably won't be allowed to wither and die quietly.
But it probably won't be enough to stop Facebook and other social services like Twitter from grabbing an increasing share of attention and time from users. And where the users go, eventually the ad dollars follow.
Google is still a great place to find general information, and adding a social element will make that information better. But it won't replace the interactions between friends, colleagues, and respected strangers that take place every day on Facebook, Twitter, and other rising social sites like LinkedIn.
Read more at www.businessinsider.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bybw0

LIS Research Coalition - Online Survey

2011-04-01T07:46:00.001-07:00

It is now over two years since The LIS Research Coalition was established (see the history page) and a review of its value and impact has been launched.

To encourage a wide contribution to this review, the Coalition has designed an online survey that can be accessed at this link.

The survey will take no more than 15 minutes to complete. It will ask you to comment on your familiarity the Coalition’s work, your assessment of its activities and achievements so far, its value to your work, and your comments on plans for the next 12 months.

As an Information Professional I am pleased to support this review and urge you to respond to this survey, which will remain open until 17.00 on Friday April 8th 2011.

Please encourage your colleagues and networks to respond too.
The review is being undertaken by external consultants Sandra Ward, Beaworthy Consulting and Ian Wooler, IDW Ltd.

Posted via email from stephendale's posterous

How to enable the new Google + 1 feature

2011-03-31T06:52:00.001-07:00

Google’s +1 search product launched yesterday, its very own version of Facebook’s “Like” button or Twitter’s “Tweet this.” The +1 button will allow you to share search results and adverts on Google.com. When other users within your Google Chat contacts, people in your “My Contacts” group in Contacts, and people you’re following in Google Buzz and Reader search, the results will be marked similarly to the way they are now with Twitter shares.

Details here on how to enable this feature.
Amplify’d from thenextweb.com
By now you’ve heard about Google’s new social search feature called +1.The idea is that you’ll end up getting better results when your friends share good results with you. So, by clicking a +1 next to a Google result, you’ll be sharing your preferences as well.
Thanks to Google’s notoriously slow rollout of new features, there’s really no telling as to when you’ll get the +1 feature for yourself. Fortunately, Google is providing an opt-in to at least speed up the process somewhat, via its Google Experiments page.
All you have to do is head to that page, then select the +1 button “Join This Experiment” option. Once you do, you’re presumably added to the list of people who want to take part in the feature, and it should speed up the process for you.
I say speed up the process because a few of us here at TNW have opted in, yet we don’t have the service enabled. So, chances are that Google will be rolling it out to those opt-in persons first. In fact, there’s even a caveat from Google on the page:
Please note, it may take a while before you see the button in search results, and it may occasionally disappear as we make improvements.
Once you do have it, this is what you’ll see:
See more at thenextweb.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bxbtj

Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes

2011-03-25T00:14:00.001-07:00

Bringing statistics alive through visualisation. An awesome display using statistics to explore the differences of health and wealth in the world.

Posted via email from stephendale's posterous

Twitter celebrates its 5th anniversary with a new video

2011-03-23T00:28:00.001-07:00

Posted via email from stephendale's posterous

Founder of Digg resigns

2011-03-20T03:39:00.001-07:00

Kevin Rose, founder of the Digg social media website has resigned. Confirmation if any were needed of the fickle nature of social web users. However, user loyalty was sorely tested by the radical new design of the site which appeared to have been implemented with minimal consultation or collaboration with the users. A case of voting with your feet I guess, and proof that incremental design improvement (as in Facebook) is less risky than evolutionary change.
Amplify’d from www.onlinesocialmedia.net
It was only a few weeks ago that we reported on social media site Digg and its new look after it went through a redesign in an attempt to rejuvenate interest. When the social news site was founded it quickly gained popularity but it’s no secret that the site has struggled to keep up with the likes of other social media sites and now, only weeks after its revamp, its founder Kevin Rose has resigned.
When the new-look Digg was first unveiled in August many users were unhappy with the changes and stopped using the service and despite the more recent changes, the company has failed to stop its decline. Kevin Rose issued a tweet to confirm the news, which partly read, “I’ll continue advising Digg / on the board of directors and taping Diggnation (as I have been since [Matt Williams] joined).”
Read more at www.onlinesocialmedia.net

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bvggm

Google going in Circles?

2011-03-14T23:45:00.001-07:00

More intrigue about Google's supposedly new social networking service "Circles". There was previous speculation that they were working on a 'Facebook killer' social networking service called "Google Me". The same thing? I would imagine they'll want to kill the hype after the raging success of Google Wave. Seems we may have to wait until May to find out more.
Amplify’d from www.newjerseynewsroom.com
Is Google making another attempt at joining the social networking field? Maybe. Maybe not.
Google said it was not launching anything this week at the high-profile South by Southwest Interactive event in Austin, Texas. Moreover, such a product is not even under development, according to the people supposedly developing it.
A report on Read Write Web said the service will offer photo, video and status message sharing. Everything users share on Circles will be shared only with the most appropriate circle of social contacts in their lives, not with all your contacts in bulk.
They said the service has been developed with extensive participation by Chris Messina, the co-creator of numerous successful social and software phenomena online, from BarCamp to Hashtags.
But Messina had another opinion. He said that he “didn’t know what the story was talking about.”
Google has launched many different social efforts over the years but has remained far behind Facebook and Twitter in its efforts. Reports emerged last June that Google has been working on a secret social project called Google Me. In December a screenshot was leaked to TechCrunch showing a new toolbar item on Google.com called "Loop."
According to All Things Digital, Tim O’Reilly, a well-known technology pundit, had seemingly confirmed the existence of Circles by tweeting “I’ve seen google circles, and it looks awesome.”
O’Reilly later deleted the tweet and clarified via email:
“It’s not a product, per se, and it’s not a new social network. Just some research-y thinking about how you could better manage social data. Exactly what Chris said. I got fooled by the RWW story into thinking that they’d turned it into something they were going to announce. There’s no story here. Just some labs stuff.”
After the ReadWriteWeb report came out, Google rebutted its claims: “We’re not launching any products at SXSW.”
Thenextweb.com supports the theory that Google Me is imminent. They reported on Friday they received word that Google was to launch a new social network from Google I/O in May at the company’s annual developer event. With a March roll-out highly unlikely, it suggests that Google Me/Google Circles will indeed launch in the coming months.
Read more at www.newjerseynewsroom.com

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The Seven Principles of Knowledge Management

2011-03-11T08:02:00.001-08:00

What would we do without serendipity? I was looking for something else on the internet just now and (re)stumbled across this from Dave Snowden. It's from a blog he produced in 2008, but as relevant today as it was then. Worth sharing I thought.

Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted. You can’t make someone share their knowledge, because you can never measure if they have. You can measure information transfer or process compliance, but you can’t determine if a senior partner has truly passed on all their experience or knowledge of a case.

We only know what we know when we need to know it. Human knowledge is deeply contextual and requires stimulus for recall. Unlike computers we do not have a list-all function. Small verbal or nonverbal clues can provide those ah-ha moments when a memory or series of memories are suddenly recalled, in context to enable us to act. When we sleep on things we are engaged in a complex organic form of knowledge recall and creation; in contrast a computer would need to be rebooted.

In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge. A genuine request for help is not often refused unless there is literally no time or a previous history of distrust. On the other hand ask people to codify all that they know in advance of a contextual enquiry and it will be refused (in practice its impossible anyway). Linking and connecting people is more important than storing their artifacts.

Everything is fragmented. We evolved to handle unstructured fragmented fine granularity information objects, not highly structured documents. People will spend hours on the internet, or in casual conversation without any incentive or pressure. However creating and using structured documents requires considerably more effort and time. Our brains evolved to handle fragmented patterns not information.

Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success. When my young son burnt his finger on a match he learnt more about the dangers of fire than any amount of parental instruction cold provide. All human cultures have developed forms that allow stories of failure to spread without attribution of blame. Avoidance of failure has greater evolutionary advantage than imitation of success. It follows that attempting to impose best practice systems is flying in the face of over a hundred thousand years of evolution that says it is a bad thing.

The way we know things is not the way we report we know things. There is an increasing body of research data which indicates that in the practice of knowledge people use heuristics, past pattern matching and extrapolation to make decisions, coupled with complex blending of ideas and experiences that takes place in nanoseconds. Asked to describe how they made a decision after the event they will tend to provide a more structured process oriented approach which does not match reality. This has major consequences for knowledge management practice.

We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down. This is probably the most important. The process of taking things from our heads, to our mouths (speaking it) to our hands (writing it down) involves loss of content and context. It is always less than it could have been as it is increasingly codified.

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Clay Shirky on managing net generation workers

2011-03-10T00:57:00.001-08:00

Clay Shirky, author and professor of new media at New York University discussese the unique challeng of managing millenial employees.

Note: the "net generation" is the demographice cohort following generation X, with birth dates ragning from early 1980's to 2000. This group is also commonly referred to as "generation Y", or "millennials".

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A gentle introduction to Twitter

2011-03-09T09:20:00.001-08:00

A gentle introduction to Twitter.

Thanks to @carlhaggerty for spotting this, and to @nancywhite for a great double act!

Nancy & Suzy_INTRO TO TWITTER from CommunityMatters on Vimeo.

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Mozilla launches 'open' app store.

2011-03-07T23:07:00.001-08:00

Web applications are simply Web sites with an accompanying configuration file. This file contains extra information necessary to install the Web app, which in some instances may make it available when there’s no network connection.

Google’s Web app specification makes a distinction between installable Web apps and hosted Web apps. The former rely on Google Chrome Extension APIs and only run in the Chrome browser. The latter are simply what we know today as Web sites and they can be accessed by typing the appropriate URL into one’s Web browser.

Mozilla’s scheme differentiates between published applications and bookmarked applications. The former rely on Open Web App APIs. The latter are just Web sites, what Google calls hosted apps.

These two approaches are not quite compatible, though efforts are being made to make them more so. Google Chrome Web apps are only available from the Chrome Web Store and can only be installed in the Chrome browser. Mozilla Open Web apps will be available from anyone who bothers to set up a Web store using Mozilla’s specifications and can be installed in any compatible browser.

And as we all know, Apple apps will only work on Apple devices.

This could be a shrewd move by Mozilla, and will please the advocates of open standards.
Amplify’d from www.theregister.co.uk
Firefox daddy Mozllla has released early code in its campaign to create a completely open alternative not only to Apple's app stores but also Google's fledging Chrome web store.
Mozilla's Labs has delivered the first developer release of its Web Application project. The goal is to serve up web-based apps for any device and any browser.

The first build includes a spec to describe a web application, a set of new browser APIs that includes the ability for a website to "install" itself in a browser, and documentation on how to build what Mozilla calls a free or paid "directory of applications".

In coming weeks, Mozilla plans to follow up with more browser- and device-friendly developments.
This will include "a deeply integrated 'in browser' experience" with find, install, launch use, and manage flow; synchronization of web apps to your mobile device; support for native browser controls, and integration with the operating system; and support for widgets and notifications.
Mozilla's project is a strike back at the notion that mobile and web apps should be based on APIs that are device or platform specific and served up from walled shops.
It's a philosophy lamented by web-daddy Tim Berners-Lee, who called out Facebook, LinkedIn, and Friendster for helping kill the ubiquitous web by using this model to lock-up data behind their walls.
Supposed bastion of web openness Google recently jumped on the train by rolling out a web app store that only works with its Chrome browser.
It's Apple, though, that has really caused problems, popularizing – among hardware companies, service providers, and business and consumer startups – the whole notion of an online store that serves up paid applications to a particular device.
Mozilla's Web Applications model takes development in a different direction. The open sourcers state a Web App store built using its architecture should exclusively host applications built on HTML5, CSS, Javascript, and other "widely implemented open standards in modern browsers - to avoid interoperability, portability and lock-in issues."
The idea is to be able to things like launch a Web Application with a single click or share your contacts with Web Applications using any device or browser.
Jay Sullivan, Mozilla vice president of mobile, announcing the project in May 2010, singled out the Apple model as being opposed to what Mozilla has in mind. Developers want app ubiquity for their software, he said.
"Web developers are expressing interest in an app store model for the Web that would enable them to get paid for their efforts without having to abandon Web development in exchange for proprietary silos, each with their own programming language and SDK, variable and sometimes opaque review processes, and limited reach," Sullivan said. ®
Read more at www.theregister.co.uk

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How books used to be made

2011-02-27T04:15:00.001-08:00

Thanks to my colleague - Conrad Taylor - for pointing me at this. A fascinating video showing how books were made before the introduction of digital typesetting and electronic publishing. As Conrad observes in the comments: "Some ...assume that the digital age has replaced the printing press. Not so! Most books and magazines are printed by offset lithography. So things are digital up to the point where the litho plate is imaged — but intricate, complicated and huge machinery takes over from that point onwards!"
However, my recent foray into e-books (having just purchased a Kindle) does remove even the heavy machinery dependency. With more and more content available in electronic form, I'm wondering whether the printing press will be obsolete within 50 years?

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Fake social media friends to promote propoganda

2011-02-26T00:14:00.001-08:00

For most savvy users of social media, this article won't come as any surprise. After all, the ability to bulk-create false personas has been with the hackers and marketeers (now I come to think of it, an apt bracketing of these folk) for some time. The fact that government might see this as an opportunity to influence opinion is also something that shouldn't really surprise. We might naively think that any government would only turn this power on its enemies, not its own citizens, and in open and democratic societies where government can be brought to account this is probably the case. However, whilst we witness evidence of how social media can facilitate the destruction of power (Egypt, Tunisia - and maybe Libya), we can be reasonably sure that most governments are looking into ways into which it can be controlled and manipulated.

Maybe worth 'de-friending' a few of those people on Facebook that you didn't know but connected to anyway, and as a general mantra - don't believe every blog, tweet and message you receive unless you can validate the source. Who knows, maybe this item is a bluff!
Amplify’d from blogs.computerworld.com
It's recently been revealed that the U.S. government contracted HBGary Federal for the development of software which could create multiple fake social media profiles to manipulate and sway public opinion on controversial issues by promoting propaganda. It could also be used as surveillance to find public opinions with points of view the powers-that-be didn't like. It could then potentially have their "fake" people run smear campaigns against those "real" people. As disturbing as this is, it's not really new for U.S. intelligence or private intelligence firms to do the dirty work behind closed doors.
EFF previously warned that Big Brother wants to be your friend for social media surveillance. While the FBI Intelligence Information Report Handbook (PDF) mentioned using "covert accounts" to access protected information, other government agencies endorsed using security exploits to access protected information.
It's not a big surprise that the U.S. military also wants to use social media to its benefit. Last year, Public Intelligence published the U.S. Air Force social media guide which gave 10 tips for social media such as, "The enemy is engaged in this battlespace and you must engage there as well." Number three was "DON'T LIE. Credibility is critical, without it, no one cares what you have to say...it's also punishable by the UCMJ to give a false statement." The Air Force used the chart below to show how social media influences public opinion.
The 6th Contracting Squadron at MacDill Air Force Base sought the development of Persona Management Software which could be used for creating and managing fake profiles on social media sites to distort the truth and make it appear as if there was a generally accepted agreement on controversial issues. "Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms." What happened to don't lie and the Uniform Code of Military Justice?
Everything revealed after Anonymous leaked emails from private security firm HBGary Federal is disturbing on many levels. However, the Daily Kos said with the Persona Management Software it would take very few people to create "an army of sockpuppets" which could distort the truth while appearing to be "an entire Brooks Brothers riot online."
So again I ask, what happened to number three . . . the rule about not lying that was also "punishable by the UCMJ to give a false statement"?
President and CEO of Plessas Experts Network, Inc, Kirby Plessas pointed out some of the unethical and potentially illegal activities that Aaron Barr's leaked emails suggested like "Chumming and baiting" which sounded like "entrapment of some sort." There would be no warrant for the data collected on individuals which could then be stored for how long? "THIS is the entire reason Intelligence Oversight was created - to avoid this sort of thing from ever happening again."
According to Redacted News, the leaked emails showed how names can be cross-referenced across social media sites to collect information on people and then used to gain access to those social ciricles. The emails also talked of how Facebook could be used to spread government messages:
Even the most restrictive and security conscious of persons can be exploited. Through the targeting and information reconnaissance phase, a person's hometown and high school will be revealed. An adversary can create a classmates.com account at the same high school and year and find out people you went to high school with that do not have Facebook accounts, then create the account and send a friend request.
Under the mutual friend decision, which is where most people can be exploited, an adversary can look at a targets friend list if it is exposed and find a targets most socially promiscuous friends, the ones that have over 300-500 friends, friend them to develop mutual friends before sending a friend request to the target. To that end friend's accounts can be compromised and used to post malicious material to a targets wall. When choosing to participate in social media an individual is only as protected as his/her weakest friend.
Lots of people have multiple online aliases, Facebook or Twitter accounts for both business and private life. What most bothers me is the lying and seemingly unethical means to an end. Although the government says it doesn't approve of censorship, etc, when its secrets come to light, it seems to be Okay with recommending underhanded tactics.
Secretary Clinton delivered a speech called, "Internet Rights and Wrongs: Choices and Challenges In A Networked World." To help promote and support Internet freedom, the State Department intends to award $25 million in grants. While that is great news, the EFF reported, "For every strong statement about preserving liberty, freedom of expression, and privacy on the global Internet, there exists a countervailing example of the United States attempting to undermine those same values."
Secretary Clinton later told "This Week" anchor Christiane Amanpou that most Americans "are in favor of human rights, freedom, democracy. We know that ultimately the most progress that can be made on behalf of human beings anywhere is when those individuals are empowered, when they have governments that are responsive." Clinton added, "At the same time, we recognize that this process can be hijacked. It can be hijacked by both outside and inside elements within any country."
So while the U.S. government can talk a good talk, what it does and what it says often doesn't seem to jive. Gasp, I know, it's not a big shocker but sometimes I find that utterly frustrating. The President wanted an Internet Kill Switch, the FBI keeps pushing for backdoors on all-things-Net. What happened to a code of ethics? Does it disappear behind closed doors, dirty deeds done in the dark and used against the American people who are supposed to be free to express themselves?
Read more at blogs.computerworld.com

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Yahoo! Announces shutdown of MyBlogLog

2011-02-24T08:59:00.001-08:00

Another of Yahoo!'s web services bites the dust. I'm a user of the service, as I am for Delicious, another of Yahoo!'s services that they identified as wanting to off-load in an announcement they made last month (January). It's a pity because I've found both of these products/services incredibly useful. Apart from their utility the other - often unrecognised - consequence of the demise of these services is the loss of several years personal investment in building social equity. So, it will soon be back to obscurity for me!
Amplify’d from news.cnet.com

Users of MyBlogLog, a start-up that Yahoo acquired in 2007 for about $10 million, received an e-mail early today announcing the service's demise.

The announcement is not exactly a surprise. MyBlogLog was one of the Yahoo services listed on a leaked presentation screenshot from December as a property that would likely be sold or shut down as the troubled Yahoo cuts costs.

Ahead of its time in a sense, MyBlogLog built widgets that site owners could install to show which MyBlogLog members read their blogs--the same philosophy that now powers, for example, widgets displaying Facebook members who have "liked" a site. The original leaker of the screenshot was Eric Marcoullier, the founder of MyBlogLog, who no longer works at Yahoo.

The service will be formally discontinued on May 24, and people who have paid for a "premium" subscription to MyBlogLog past that date will receive refunds.

Other Yahoo products that face potential shutdown or sale include Yahoo Buzz, a one-time competitor to Digg, and Delicious, a bookmarking site that still has some very loyal users. Other products, like Fire Eagle and Upcoming.org, were marked for mergers or consolidation; so far, few of the expected shutdowns and mergers have actually happened.

Read more at news.cnet.com

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Android’s dominance in mobile ecosystem should translate to better quality medical apps

2011-02-20T10:24:00.001-08:00

More evidence that open systems and open standards are more likely dominate social business and the socia, web? I think so.
Amplify’d from www.imedicalapps.com
Android was the most popular mobile platform at the end of 2010, according to a press release by Canalys, a technology research and consultancy group. Smart phone shipments topped 100 million units in the fourth quarter of last year, with Google-OS based phones accounting for 32.9 million—almost a third of all smart phone shipments.
This news is good for all interested in smart phone technology, not just Android devotees. Indeed, sales of Apple smart phones almost doubled (from 8.7 million to 16.2 million). The Nokia, RIM (Blackberry), and Microsoft growth lagged behind the overall growth of the market, but still posted respectable sales numbers (Nokia still grew 30% from last year and ranks second in platform sales this year at 31 million).

The story that will continue to be pushed from these data, however, is the explosion of the Android platform compared to its competitors. While Apple’s market share is stable (16%), Nokia, Microsoft, and RIM market shares all dropped to make room for an Android ascent to the top.
See more at www.imedicalapps.com

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Is something wrong with Google?

2011-02-18T06:11:00.001-08:00

URL: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/02/17/is-something-wro...
I think the last two paras say it all for me:

"The risk with Google's steady stream of new features is that most will not click with enough consumers. But it's just as likely that people will tire of Facebook's walled garden and migrate over time to a more open, socially-structured web that exists beyond the Facebook empire. That open web is the realm Google has helped us navigate for the past decade through search.

If the AI platform Google is building piecemeal proves to be as helpful in navigating a post-Facebook web as its search engine was before we all joined social networks, then it's future is far from over. It's only now beginning."

Google is putting its jigsaw pieces to together to create something much bigger than the sum of its parts. The problem for most of us is that we don't what the picture on the box looks like. Maybe the key question is...does Google?
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OFT clears national addressing database joint venture - The Office of Fair Trading

2011-02-16T00:55:00.001-08:00

URL: http://www.oft.gov.uk/news-and-updates/press/2011/18-11
The proposed joint venture combines the spatial address databases of Ordnance Survey and the Local Government Improvement and Development Agency (LGID), to create the National Address Gazetteer, a database of accurate geo-referenced addresses in England and Wales. This data is relied upon by the public and private sector to accurately locate addresses when delivering services such as public transport, road maintenance, utility management and emergency call-outs.
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Stephen Wolfram: Can he topple Google? | Technology | The Guardian

2011-02-12T07:50:00.001-08:00

URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/feb/12/stephe...
I don't know about Google, but Mike Lynch (Autonomy founder) eat your heart out! Having frequently used the WolframAlpha website I can testify to the fact that it is as close as you'll get to a state of the art semantic web search engine. And it's getting better the more data that it indexes and links. Who wants to pay for a half a £millon Autonimy licence when you can achieve much the same for free!
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ID Card Database Destroyed

2011-02-10T09:50:00.001-08:00

May the National Identity Scheme rest in peace. Maybe all those people who were persuaded to fork out for the cost of an ID card can claim a refund (good luck with that!). Is anyone betting that it won't get resurrected under some future administration? I'm not!
Amplify’d from www.homeoffice.gov.uk
A database built to hold the fingerprints and personal details of millions of ID card holders has today been publicly destroyed.
Around 500 hard disk drives and 100 back up tapes containing the details of 15,000 holders have been magnetically wiped and shredded.
They will soon be incinerated in an environmentally friendly waste-for-energy process.
This signals an end to the National Identity Register which was built to hold the details of people who applied for an ID card.
The scheme was scrapped by the coalition government and the cards ceased to be valid legal documents on 22 January.
Home Office minister Damian Green helped shred the last of the hard disk drives at an Essex industrial site today.
'Laying ID cards to rest demonstrates the government’s commitment to scale back the power of the state and restore civil liberties,' he said.
'This is about people having trust in the government to know when it is necessary and appropriate for the state to hold and use personal data, and it is about the government placing their trust in the common-sense and responsible attitude of people.
'This is just the first step in the process of restoring and maintaining our freedoms.'
People can no longer use the cards to prove their identity or as a travel document in Europe.
The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) (new window) has written to all cardholders and informed international border agencies, travel operators and customers of the change in law.
For more information about the decommissioning of the National Identity Scheme and for frequently asked questions, visit the IPS website (new window).
Read more at www.homeoffice.gov.uk

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Why Some Twitter Posts Catch On, and Some Don’t

2011-02-10T07:33:00.001-08:00

If you read nothing else, check out the last para: "If we keep seeing the same links and catchphrases ricocheting around our social networks, it might mean we are being exposed only to what we want to hear...You might say to yourself: ‘I am in a group where I am not getting any views other than the ones I agree with. I’m curious to know what else is out there,’”

A message here for narrowly-focused campaign groups and the limitations of over-specialisation. Serendipity and trusted referrals can broaden your knowledge and enable you to discover new perspectives around your core interests.
Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com

AMID the talk last week of a Facebook revolution across the Middle East, Americans and other English speakers took to Twitter — to post about their love lives.

Hashtags — the community-driven shorthand used to identify conversation themes — like “icantdateyou” and “worstpickuplines” were vastly more popular a few days ago than ones like “Egyptians” or “jan25,” a reference to Day 1 of the Egyptian protests. In just one hour last Tuesday, “icantdateyou” racked up nearly 274,000 mentions on Twitter, with posts like “icantdateyou if all you wanna do is fuss” and “icantdateyou if you look like your brother.”

Alas, poor “Mubarak” rated fewer than 11,000 during the same hour. (Many Egyptians could not post on Twitter because their government had temporarily cut off most Internet and cellphone service.)

Sure, many of us are more inclined to toss off frivolous posts than politically charged ones. But a new study of hashtags offers some insight into how and why some topics become popular quickly online while others don’t.

People generally pass on the latest conversational idioms — like “cantlivewithout” or “dontyouhate” — the first few times they see them on Twitter, or they never adopt them at all, according to the study by computer scientists. The researchers analyzed the 500 most popular hashtags among more than three billion messages posted on Twitter from August 2009 to January 2010.

“Idioms are like a sugar rush,” explains Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell and a co-author of the study. “You see it once, you either use it or you don’t, but the rush wears off.”

More contentious themes like politics take longer to catch on, the researchers found. People tend to wait until they have seen a more polarizing phrase — like “sarahpalin” or “hcr,” short for health care reform — four, five or six times on Twitter before posting it themselves.

We already know that people often influence one another’s behavior. That is the monkey-see-monkey-do premise behind advertising. And it may seem intuitive that different kinds of information spread differently on the Web.

Now, however, researchers at Cornell and a few other universities like Stanford are finding patterns in the way information catches on in cyberspace. Their models could be useful for politicians, social activists, news organizations, marketers, public relations teams and anyone else trying to reach their target audience — or market.

It turns out that the way information spreads online is often more complicated than viral transmission, in which one person passes a link to, say, a YouTube video directly to another person. As with political topics, people often wait until a number of friends or trusted sources have promoted an idea before promulgating it themselves.

The structure of a social network — for example, whether it is made up of close friends and colleagues or of like-minded strangers who follow Lady Gaga — can have more influence than the size of a group, researchers say.

In real-world terms, that means designers of iPhone apps may be better off trying to get a plug from a leading technology blogger than from Ashton Kutcher, even though Mr. Kutcher has more than six million followers on Twitter. A smaller, more connected network might be more likely to respond to a recommendation from one of its own valued members, says Jure Leskovec, an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford.

In one recent study, for example, Professor Leskovec and a colleague analyzed a set of more than 170 million blog posts and news articles over a one-year period. They identified the thousand most popular phrases in the material and examined how those phrases spread over time via news agencies, newspapers, television and blogs. Content from news agencies tended to spike and gain the most attention immediately, while news that started on blogs or was picked up by bloggers often experienced several peaks or rebounds in popularity as time wore on.

An earlier Stanford study found that bloggers, over time, had more influence than mainstream publications in areas like technology or entertainment.

Professor Leskovec says the studies provide a quantitative way to predict which stories will hold attention and which will fade rapidly, based on who covers the material first. In a few years, he says, “we will be at the stage where marketers will be more mathematical and less intuition-driven.”

The research seems to validate the techniques that many industry experts are already using, says Sunil Gupta, a professor at the Harvard Business School who teaches digital marketing. Marketers are moving from an intrusion strategy of running ads in the middle of TV programs to a more cooperative model in which they try to stimulate discussion across social networks. Automakers that loan next year’s car models to influential car bloggers to test drive are just one example, he says.

“In the traditional world, marketing used to focus on the middle part of the bell curve and reaching out to them,” Professor Gupta says. “Now, the way to reach out to the middle part is through the extreme ends of the curve.” Those extremes, he says, include vocal detractors as well as ardent fans.

But the leaders of online packs aren’t necessarily happy about being emulated, he found in a 2009 study of Cyworld, a social networking site in South Korea where millions of members can buy virtual décor for their home pages.

He found that its members of middling status — having a modest number of social connections — bought more products based on friends’ purchases. But the most active, most connected users made fewer purchases. In other words, influencers value their uniqueness and often resist peer influence.

SO what does all this mean for you and me?

If we keep seeing the same links and catchphrases ricocheting around our social networks, it might mean we are being exposed only to what we want to hear, says Damon Centola, an assistant professor of economic sociology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“You might say to yourself: ‘I am in a group where I am not getting any views other than the ones I agree with. I’m curious to know what else is out there,’” Professor Centola says.

Consider a new hashtag: diversity.

Read more at www.nytimes.com

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Assessing the business benefits of social business

2011-02-06T22:50:00.001-08:00

URL: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hinchcliffe/assessing-the-bus...
The latest surveys continue to show the social computing provides real business benefits, but is it really as rosy as all that? Dion Hinchcliffe takes a closer look at what benefits are consistently reported with Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business while looking at where the actual value lies.
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May the force be with you

2011-02-04T00:34:00.001-08:00

Amusing viral add from Volkswagen

Posted via email from Pot Pouri

Social media users grapple with information overload - USATODAY.com

2011-02-01T23:26:00.001-08:00

URL: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-02-01-tech-overl...
In a way, comforting to know that I'm addressing the right problems with the Knowledge Hub project (http://www.local.gov.uk/knowledgehub). This will integrate data and conversations from many thousands of sources (website feeds, blogs twitter); aggregating the content into common memes, and filtering according to personal profiles. In other words, you get to see more of what you WANT to see and less of the stuff that is irrelevant to you. Beta release this April.
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Mobile Learning - new apps from WolframAlpha

2011-01-29T05:37:00.001-08:00

I've been following WolframAlpha for some time - they have an intriguing (some may say mysterious) business model based on a very powerful semantic search platform with ability to answer any and every question with speed and accuracy. I was intrigued therefore when I came across these (new?) apps, which appear to be opening up an entirley new channel for online/mobile education.

No doubt other players are looking at this market (Open University?) but I think that WoframAlpha are currently ahead of the game.
Amplify’d from products.wolframalpha.com
Gain a competitive advantage with Wolfram Course Assistant Apps. Each app is custom designed
specifically for today's popular courses. Wolfram
Course Assistant Apps use an intuitive interface that guides you through
the coursework to help you solve problems, not just give you the answers.

As the makers of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, we have been providing solutions in education for over 20 years. Now we're combining expert-level data, high-performance computation, and state-of-the-art interface design to give you the power to excel in all your classes—right in the palm of your hand.

See more at products.wolframalpha.com

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Wolfram Alpha announces changes to its API for semantic search

2011-01-22T05:03:00.001-08:00

Wolfram Alpha have announced a big change to its pricing plans which gives non-commercial users 2,000 free calls a month. Also mention of an upcoming data API, which sounds like it might offer a more programmer-friendly version of the results.

Anyone interested in the power and potential of a semantic web search engine should give Wolfram Alpha a try-out.
Amplify’d from www.readwriteweb.com

Wolfram Alpha has assembled an impressive collection of information on everything from chemistry to high finance, but until recently external developers could only access it by paying between two and six cents per query. Today the company announced a big change to its pricing plans which gives non-commercial users 2,000 free calls a month, as well as adding new features like the asynchronous delivery of slower results. With few external applications appearing to use the old interface, can these changes open it up to a wider audience of developers?

The API itself is very similar to the Wolfram Alpha Web interface. Developers pass in a query string, and then get back XML results that reflect exactly what you'd see in the browser for the same search. This makes it ideal for formatting and displaying to users, since you get back plain text descriptions and images visualizing the information. This is exactly how most of Wolfram's flagship customers have been using it. For example Bing displays information from Alpha alongside its own search results, and Touch Press uses it to supplement its interactive books.

This is great if you want to show the information immediately to users, but what if you want to understand and process the data as part of your application? You might want run your own analysis on a company's share price, but you'll have a tough time converting their plain text results into numbers you can feed into an algorithm, and though their Mathematica versions are structured, it's not a simple format to read in. This may not be accidental - their terms of service make it clear that you can't "access, cache, store, retain, or in any way compile any copies or portion of any Wolfram|Alpha content." Wolfram has built up a large and valuable collection of data, and the company doesn't want to make it too accessible for fear that it may be copied. There is a sign of hope though in the mention of an upcoming data API, which sounds like it might offer a more programmer-friendly version of the results.

The easiest way to try it for yourself is through their API Explorer page. If you enter a query, you'll see the XML results appear, along with the URL you'd call from your application to run the same search. The results are split up into sections that Wolfram describe as "Pods." Each one of these corresponds to a different nugget of information related to the terms you entered, and matches the way results are shown in the normal Web interface.

There's a complete reference guide available as a PDF, detailing the options you can specify to narrow down your query, as well as the meaning of some of the results sections.

Stephen Wolfram and his team have created an astonishingly powerful collection of information. As he puts it on the Wolfram blog, the dream is to make this "computable knowledge" available to immediately enhance any program that's connected to the service. Today's announcement is a big step forward to opening it up to far more developers, but it will need much more computer-readable results before it will really fulfill that promise. Do you agree, or am I misunderstanding the power of the API as it is right now? Are there existing applications beyond the handful that Wolfram highlight? Let us know in the comments.
Read more at www.readwriteweb.com

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BBC News - A Point of View: Does more information mean we know less?

2011-01-21T23:24:00.001-08:00

URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12191104
An interesting article - some of which I can agree with (taking on more and more information does not necessarily make us more knowledgeable). I think the state of your mind can influence what information you are able to absorb and make sense of. Maybe rather than talk about 'fasting' the brain the author could have used the concept of 'reflection', i.e. a calm period where you give the brain an opportunity to organise its thoughts.
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World now in third era of cybercrime

2011-01-20T07:28:00.001-08:00

One could ask "what's the connection between Facebook and the Iranian Nuclear Programme?" - Answer - both under attack from cybercrime. Details in this clipping. The quote from the author also worth noting:

"The scale of malicious activity on Facebook appears to be out of control," notes report co-author, Graham Cluley. "The social media site, however, is either unable or unwilling to invest the necessary resources to stamp it out," he writes, the latest in a line of stinging comments he has made in recent months on Facebook's apparent security complacency.

Time for me to check my Facbook privacy settings....again!
Amplify’d from www.pcworld.com
The year 2010 was a hugely significant one for computing criminality and could turn out to mark the beginning of a 'third era' of cybercrime, security expert Graham Cluley of Sophos has said in advance of the company's latest threat review of the year.
The first era was marked by amateur hacking and virus creation on the PC, the second by the fusing of organised crime with the new technologies of the Internet, and as expected 2010 saw plenty on both these fronts in ever more sophisticated and varied forms.
On that score, during the year criminals appeared to migrate to some degree from old-style spam and web exploits to embed themselves in the next e-crime battlefront, social networks.
"The scale of malicious activity on Facebook appears to be out of control," notes report co-author, Graham Cluley. "The social media site, however, is either unable or unwilling to invest the necessary resources to stamp it out," he writes, the latest in a line of stinging comments he has made in recent months on Facebook's apparent security complacency.
But it is the 'third era' that has finally started in earnest that marks out the last year as different, and which can be defined loosely through the sudden emergence of cybercrime as a geo-political theme.
Hillary Clinton railed at China in thinly veiled terms for its supposed involvement in the Aurora attack on US companies, Stuxnet hit the Iranian nuclear program in what now looks like a carefully-crafted targeted attack, and a new UK government suddenly defined cyberdefence as one of its highest military worries.
Topping the year off were the extraordinary leaks of US military and diplomatic data to Wikileaks, and the hacktivism of the Anonymous group which developed the idea of cybercrime as an unconventional political tool.
"2010 was an unusual year. This was the year the gloves came off and it became serious," comments Cluley.
All three tiers of cybercrime - nuisance hacking, the criminal, and now the paid or unpaid political hacker - represent a threat to consumers and companies alike and sometimes telling them apart can be difficult.
A good example of how these different layers can fuse into one crime came with September's odd 'onMouseOver' Twitter worm, which was a social media attack that caught out senior political figures, including Sophos notes, ex-UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown's "wife Sarah Brown, Lord Alan Sugar, and even Robert Gibbs, the press secretary to US President Barack Obama."
One encouraging and significant statistic from 2010 was a spike in the number of arrests for alleged cybercriminal activities, which hit organised gangs as well as loners out to cause nuisance.
Before 2010, Internet crime was assumed to be low risk and the pressure to find the culprits was apparently modest. Now, with cybercrime suddenly deemed important by governments, criminals in developed countries can no longer assume they won't be found out and possibly even, in 2011, extradicted from countries other than the ones in which crimes were committed.
Read more at www.pcworld.com

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10 years of Wikipedia

2011-01-18T11:45:00.001-08:00

In case you missed this - a great Podcast from a number of contributors (including Jimmy Wales) to mark the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia. Follow the link below to get to the podcast.
Amplify’d from www.bbc.co.uk
It started as a hobby with noble aims and has blossomed into the fifth most popular website in the world - with over three million English articles alone, ten million contributors and 175 languages.
Today, it's hard to imagine life without Wikipedia. When you want to know more about anything, what do you do? You turn your computer on, put your query into a search engine, and in the first few hits there's a Wikipedia page. It's easy to see why the English site alone gets over nine million views per hour.

In this documentary, Science in Action presenter Jon Stewart explores this truly global phenomenon as it continues to grow at an impressive rate, despite surviving on only 50 paid staff and being run as a charity.

Why has it become such an invaluable resource? How has it changed over the decade? And is it a reliable source of info and news or a symptom of the spread of mediocrity and devaluation of research?

As it enters its tenth year, we look at the history and evolution of Wikipedia - which by allowing people from opposite sides of the world to contribute - has grown into one of the most popular websites on the internet.

What does the future hold for the site? Will it simply be replaced by another way of sharing knowledge on a mass level? Or will Wikipedia one day contain the sum of human knowledge? And are there any downsides to this democratisation of information?
Read more at www.bbc.co.uk

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Pezholio » Blog Archive » A beginner’s guide to SPARQLing linked data (Part 1)

2011-01-15T09:40:00.001-08:00

http://www.pezholio.co.uk/2011/01/a-beginners-guide-to-sparqli...
A great introduction to the world of linked data, RDF, triple-stores and SPARQL, with plenty of examples of how to construct a SPARQL query for local government spend data. Looking forward to part 2!
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Internet 2010 in numbers

2011-01-13T09:54:00.001-08:00

A useful set of statistics from Royal Pingdom in the following categories:

+ Email

+ Websites

+ Web Servers

+ Domain names

+ Internet users

+ Social Media

+ Web browsers

+ Videos

+ Images

Pie Charts:

+ Web browser market share, December 2010

+ Internet users divided by region, June 2010

+ Web server market share, December 2010

Some of the Many Stats You'll Find:

+ 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day

+ 480 million – New email users since the year before

+ 255 million – The number of websites as of December 2010

+ 88.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2010

+ 100 million – New accounts added on Twitter in 2010

+ 250 million – New people on Facebook in 2010

+ 20 million – Videos uploaded to Facebook per month

+ 5 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (September 2010)
Amplify’d from royal.pingdom.com
What happened with the Internet in 2010?
How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many, many more. If it’s stats you want, you’ve come to the right place.
We used a wide variety of sources from around the Web to put this post together. You can find the full list of source references at the bottom of the post if you’re interested. We here at Pingdom also did some additional calculations to get you even more numbers to chew on.
Email

107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.

294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.

1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.

480 million – New email users since the year before.

89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.

262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89% are spam).

2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.

25% – Share of email accounts that are corporate.

Websites

255 million – The number of websites as of December 2010.

21.4 million – Added websites in 2010.

Web servers

39.1% – Growth in the number of Apache websites in 2010.

15.3% – Growth in the number of IIS websites in 2010.

4.1% – Growth in the number of nginx websites in 2010.

5.8% – Growth in the number of Google GWS websites in 2010.

55.7% – Growth in the number of Lighttpd websites in 2010.

Domain names

88.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2010.

13.2 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2010.

8.6 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2010.

79.2 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).

202 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2010).

7% – The increase in domain names since the year before.

Internet users

1.97 billion – Internet users worldwide (June 2010).

14% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.

825.1 million – Internet users in Asia.

475.1 million – Internet users in Europe.

266.2 million – Internet users in North America.

204.7 million – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.

110.9 million – Internet users in Africa.

63.2 million – Internet users in the Middle East.

21.3 million – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social media

152 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).

25 billion – Number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010

100 million – New accounts added on Twitter in 2010

175 million – People on Twitter as of September 2010

7.7 million – People following @ladygaga (Lady Gaga, Twitter’s most followed user).

600 million – People on Facebook at the end of 2010.

250 million – New people on Facebook in 2010.

30 billion – Pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.) shared on Facebook per month.

70% – Share of Facebook’s user base located outside the United States.

20 million – The number of Facebook apps installed each day.

Web browsers
Videos

2 billion – The number of videos watched per day on YouTube.

35 – Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.

186 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).

84% – Share of Internet users that view videos online (USA).

14% – Share of Internet users that have uploaded videos online (USA).

2+ billion – The number of videos watched per month on Facebook.

20 million – Videos uploaded to Facebook per month.

Images

5 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (September 2010).

3000+ – Photos uploaded per minute to Flickr.

130 million – At the above rate, the number of photos uploaded per month to Flickr.

3+ billion – Photos uploaded per month to Facebook.

36 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.

Data sources and notes: Spam percentage from MessageLabs (PDF). Email user numbers and counts from Radicati Group (the number of sent emails was their prediction for 2010, so it’s very much an estimate). Website numbers from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign and Webhosting.info. Internet user numbers and distribution from Internet World Stats. Facebook stats from Facebook and Business Insider. Twitter stats from Twitter (and here), TwitterCounter and TechCrunch. Web browser stats from StatCounter. YouTube video numbers from Google. Facebook video numbers from GigaOM. US online video stats from Comscore and the Pew Research Center. Flickr image numbers from Flickr. Facebook image numbers from this blog.
Read more at royal.pingdom.com

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Saleforce.com buys DimDim web conferencing company

2011-01-06T23:40:00.001-08:00

Salesforce.com officially announced today its acquisition of Indian web conferencing company Dimdim for approximately $31 million in cash. It is anticipated that Salesforce.com will integrate DimDim's features into their SaaS Chatter product.
The Dimdim web site now allows only existing customers to login, with a note that new registrations are not being accepted. The open source community edition is still available for download from Sourceforge but will no longer be maintained by Salesforce.com. All free accounts are being shut down.
DimDim was (is) a component of the Knowledge Hub (a projects I'm deeply involved with) and would have provided a free-to-use conferencing facility for Gov/Local Gov users of theThe Knowledge Hub when it is launched later this year. The full implications to the Knowledge Hub project are being assessed.
Posted via email from stephendale's posterous

Why You Need a Social Media Policy | Reuters

2011-01-06T23:05:00.001-08:00

URL: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS377155036720110106
The article cites three good reasons to craft a social media policy:

1. Protect your company’s reputation

2. Minimize confusion about murky legal issues.

3. Raise awareness of your brand.

Does your company have a social media policy?
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Exploring the Twitterverse - new infographic by Brian Solis

2011-01-04T05:51:00.001-08:00

URL: http://www.briansolis.com/2011/01/exploring-the-twitter...
A super new Twitterverse infographic from Brian Solis. Also available as a poster (fee required) at http://www.theconversationprism.com/store/
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The Biggest Tech Surprises and Disappointments in 2010 - DailyFinance

2011-01-03T05:45:00.001-08:00

URL: http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/the-biggest-tech-surp...
No major suprises here - Facebook continues on its mission for world domination; the iPad hits the mark for big boys' toys; video game developers are realising that substance trumps presentation (3D is not the panacea for user immersion); Groupon is the one to watch; privacy is an illusion; Google has 'buzzed' off.

I think that about sums up the social web landscape for the start of 2011!
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10 great Enterprise 2.0 presentations

2011-01-01T02:57:00.001-08:00

URL: http://smartdatacollective.com/hkotadia/31097/10-great-...
A collection of compelling presentations, covering Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, socialmedia, the Cloud, mashups, Knowledge Management , Information Management....and more. A good reference source.
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Living Earth Simulator aims to predict everything that's happening on our planet

2010-12-31T05:38:00.001-08:00

I thought I had stumbled across an old Goodies script, or a pilot episode for Dr Who, but no, this is real. As ambitous projects go, this one must be right up there alongside making Heathrow a world-class airport.

The Living Earth Simulator will collect all the data in the entire world, to predict everything from the next major disease outbreak to the next financial crisis. And taking a leaf from the Large Hadron Collder - we now have the concept of a "knowledge accelerator that can collide different fields of knowledge" - i.e. a "knowledge collider". (Note to self: must add that term to my repetoir of knowledge management jargon).

Call me an old sceptic, but I've yet to see any evidence that collecting more and more data makes us better at predicting the future, or that it is even possible to accurately capture social trends as a mathematical model.

With fairly limited data at my disposal, I'm willing to predict that the UK will come to a grinding halt with the first flurry of snow and ice next December 2011. Of course....lessons will be learnt (maybe from LES?)!
Amplify’d from io9.com
The Living Earth Simulator is quite possibly the most ambitious computer project ever undertaken. This all-encompassing simulation will collect all the data in the entire world, to predict everything from the next major disease outbreak to the next financial crisis.
The Living Earth Simulator could do for our modern world what the Large Hadron Collider has done for the early universe, says project chair Dr. Dirk Helbing. He calls the LES a "knowledge accelerator" that can collide different fields of knowledge to produce a far greater understanding of what's going on in the world around us.
Such a program, he says, could help show us the next epidemic before it starts, illuminate better ways to deal with climate change, and predict when the next recession will hit. According to Dr. Helbing, the answers to all these mysteries can be found by examining the sum total of human activity:
"Many problems we have today - including social and economic instabilities, wars, disease spreading - are related to human behaviour, but there is apparently a serious lack of understanding regarding how society and the economy work. Revealing the hidden laws and processes underlying societies constitutes the most pressing scientific grand challenge of our century."
So where would they get all the data from? Lots of different organizations are already compiling massive amounts of data, and these would help feed into the Living Earth Simulator. Possible sources would include NASA's Planetary Skin project, which tracks climate data on every corner of the globe, as well as more everyday sites like Google Maps and, yes, Wikipedia. Helbing and his team also plan to incorporate medical records, the latest financial information, and, most frighteningly of all, everything that's going on in the world of social media.
Of course, once all that data is together, there's still the question of what to do with any of it. Helbing says this will require cooperation between social scientists and computer scientists to create the rules and programming that the LES needs to interpret the data and create an accurate model of the Earth as it is today. We've only now got the technology advanced enough to pull off such an endeavor, and it will still be very tricky.
Part of the solution, Dr. Helbing explains, is the rise of semantic web technology. This simple but powerful concept makes a computer see information not just as a set of numbers but as specific data in a specific context, meaning computers will be able to tell the difference between the seemingly random numbers making up, say, financial markets and weather reports in much the same way humans can.
An obvious question to ask is just how much the LES will be able to learn about particular people. On this point, Helbing argues that the vastness of the project should protect everyone's privacy, as the LES's aggregative strips out all individual data in an effort to create an overall picture.
Once you collect all the data and program the simulator, actually running the LES is relatively simple. Yes, the project will need huge banks of supercomputers to run the entire program, but the processing power required isn't beyond what we're currently capable of. Computer expert Pete Warden says that, in all probability, we do have the processing power to handle what the LES requires. That said, he's skeptical about whether the LES could actually produce useful results:
"Economics and sociology have consistently failed to produce theories with strong predictive powers over the last century, despite lots of data gathering. I'm sceptical that larger data sets will mark a big change. It's not that we don't know enough about a lot of the problems the world faces, from climate change to extreme poverty, it's that we don't take any action on the information we do have."
To this point, Dr. Helbing argues that the LES will offer predictive far in advance of our previous models, as it would be able to see global recessions and disease outbreaks coming before they really get started. It's a bold claim, and we won't know for sure what the real capabilities of the LES are until the day that it's up and running.
Read more at io9.com

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Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2010

2010-12-30T07:19:00.001-08:00

URL: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_semantic_we...
This seems to be the time of the year for top tens. Semantic in the context of this list is any product that adds meaning and context to data.
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Top 10 Startups of 2010

2010-12-28T04:55:00.001-08:00

URL: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_startups_of...
Seems like a good way to round off 2010 by looking at some of the startups that have identified their niche market and USP. Will these still be around in 12 months time? Who knows, but all credit to them for addressing important consumer and business pain-points in particularly innovative ways.
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Food Court Flash Mob, Hallelujah Chorus

2010-12-24T06:08:00.001-08:00

Another helping of Christmas cheer!

Posted via email from stephendale's posterous

A Merry Social Media Christmas!

2010-12-23T23:27:00.001-08:00

Just loved this! Happy Christmas.

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The deep, profound allure of the beta test

2010-12-12T05:13:00.001-08:00

URL: http://blogs.forbes.com/billbarol/2010/12/11/the-deep-p...
"If it’s new, unproven and likely to be out of business before dinnertime, I want it. If it requires a hefty capital investment, great. If it locks me into a proprietary system that the market is likely to reject, leaving me high and dry, even better. What I’m saying is, bring the shiny, because I really like the shiny."

If this appeals to you (as it does to me) head on over to http://betali.st right away!
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Communities of Practice in Public Service

2010-12-10T06:13:00.001-08:00

Just a blatant bit of self-promotion really. Details of a presentation I did recently on how to create a trusted environement for sharing knowledge. Focus was primariliy on Communities of Interest or Practice, and aimed at third sector organisations. Please also check out the other presentations at this link.
Amplify’d from www.indigoblue.co.uk
Managing User Generated Content
ABOUT
Overview
This seminar looked at the challenges and opportunities of user generated content.
The level of engagement with user generated content across the third sector is highly varied. Some organisations have thriving online communities, others have made costly investments which have failed to live up to expectations, and some have yet to dip their toes into this area.
The seminar, held on 24th November 2010, looked at the practicalities organisations face when implementing user-generated content and the dangers of choosing not to engage at this level.
Steve Dale – Encouraging communities to share knowledge and creating a trusted environment

The difference between a Community of Practice (CoP) and social media is that a CoP has a defined purpose

Social media sites such as Facebook are not trusted, so people are considerably less willing to share knowledge on social media sites

Creating an initial "critical mass":

Hold an initial physical launch in which potential contributors are invited and can register

Use facilitators (different from moderators) to drive the CoPs, these should be selected from active participants

Mix online activity with offline e.g. if no one is responding to an particular thread contact them physically (e.g. by phone) and ask them to contribute

Read more at www.indigoblue.co.uk

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How Google can thrive in the age of Facebook

2010-12-08T09:25:00.001-08:00

Some good points here about the dangers of adopting a 'me too' strategy as opposed to amplifying your own strengths. Maybe Google should stop trying to be a social network and look to providing better integration between its myriad products (vidoes, maps, books, blogs, news, docs sites....etc.). Not forgetting the ace in the pack - Google is an open web environment, whereas Facebook is closed, i.e. information you put in is held hostage forever. Once users' realise that their information has value, they might begin to think more seriously about where they want put it.
Amplify’d from tech.fortune.cnn.com
By some measures. we're hitting an Internet age that leaves Google behind. But here's a prescription to keep search relevant in the face of Facebook's social empire.
Being king of the web is a short-lived gig. Only several years ago the web was navigated by search and Google was the clear king of innovation. Now, as the web takes on an increasingly social structure we seem to be heading into the Age of Facebook.
By some measures, it will be an age where Google isn't welcome. The company has long been seen as a one-trick pony, gifted at search and little else. It's stumbled again and again in social media with Orkut, Buzz and Wave – efforts that were at best mixed successes. Increasingly, executives and engineers in Silicon Valley openly declare that Google can't beat Facebook at its own game. Underscoring the pessimism, several key employees have bolted Google for Facebook in recent months.
Meanwhile, Facebook is expected to earn $3.2 billion in revenue next year, mostly from online ads – which is more than Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) makes on display ads alone. Time is running out for Google to find a way to keep its revenue and profit growing. Doing that will mean thriving in social media. While there's not a single strategy that Google can use to reach that goal, there are several approaches that can help. And early signs are that Google is busy taking those steps.
1. Don't copy Facebook.

Copying Google's search engine didn't work for Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), Ask.com or Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) – it only made clearer that they were laggards. Besides, Orkut was Google's attempt to copy Friendster and MySpace, and while Orkut was popular in India and Brazil, it never gained traction elsewhere.
Instead, Google would be smarter to study how people are behaving as the web evolves and then anticipating how the social web will operate in the future. Google hasn't offered too many details on what kind of social features it's building, but CEO Eric Schmidt has said it won't be a full-on social networking site but a social component built into existing Google products.
This approach has its risks as well. Google has a large installed base of users with, for example, Gmail. Google Buzz, a second-generation social network, failed in good part because of how Google handled the importing of Gmail contacts into Buzz connections.
Since Buzz, Google went back to its drawing board. Since then, one of the worst-kept secrets in Silicon Valley has been what a project called Google Me, an ambitious effort not to launch a new service like Buzz, but to incorporate a social element into all the services associated with a Google account – documents, calendars, photos on Picasa, videos on YouTube. Throw in the Google Music store it's long been planning as well as the ebooks for sale on the newly announced Google Editions and there starts to emerge a critical mass of services that a social layer could be built upon.
2. Focus on Facebook's weaknesses.

A few months ago, a 224-page Powerpoint presenation by a member of Google's user-experience team made the rounds. It thoughtfully made the case that our online identities aren't one-dimensional, that we all interact differently at work, with family, with friends, etc., and that social networks don't reflect that complexity. The presentation was seen as a vulnerability of Facebook that Google could attack.
Facebook responded quickly with Groups, which lets users share different content with various groups of friends. But Google had made its point: Facebook can't do everything, and there is room on the web for different approaches to social media. It made clear that Google would try to focus its strengths on Facebook's weaknesses.
It also explains why Schmidt takes every opportunity he can to swear that Google takes privacy seriously. He's not just regretting the privacy brouhaha that greeted the launch of Buzz, he's taking aim at the loudest and most consistent complaint about Facebook – its cavalier attitude toward privacy.
Facebook has pushed our comfort levels on privacy for a long time. Zuckerberg has argued that in time we'll all grow to accept that there is no privacy anymore on the web. But the reality is, as I've argued before, Facebook can't make its social ads pay without collecting and sharing as much personal data as it does.
3. Invest in a customer base.

So what does Google do if it builds a social component throughout its myriad products and nobody uses it? That was the problem with Wave, a well-designed tool for real-time collaboration that Google quietly killed this summer.

In fact, it's the Catch-22 that fells many social sites: Nobody wants to sign up unless their friends sign up, and their friends don't sign up because their own friends haven't signed up...
To start a fire under its social offerings, Google may become aggressive in buying startups with a strong social bent. It approached Yelp with little success, and is often mentioned as a suitor for Twitter. This week, Google is reportedly talking with Groupon, a deal-of-the-day site with a loyal customer base.
Viewed from one angle these deals don't make sense because many users of a site bought by Google are already Google users. But from another angle, that's the beauty of it. If Google owned Twitter, say, then users might start interacting with each other in Picasa, or documents. Google has the cash to keep buying other startups – a music site with social connections like Spotify or Mog, for example – until it can nurture a viable user base for its social layer.
It's too early to count Google out of the social web. Its failures in the field to date are ominous only if Google hasn't learned from them. It needs to do a lot of things right to succeed, but if it does, then we may not be calling this the Age of Facebook for very long.
Read more at tech.fortune.cnn.com

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Impact of the new Facebook Profile Page on business social media - San Diego online marketing | Examiner.com

2010-12-08T07:35:00.001-08:00

URL: http://www.examiner.com/online-marketing-in-san-diego/i...
Some useful information about the Facebook Profile page changes. One of the big changes to all this is a change to the way Facebook will roll the change out. Often criticized for making wholesale changes, Facebook will allow uers to opt-in to the new profile page.
See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/hx7j

Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg - a conundrum

2010-11-28T06:09:00.001-08:00

Facbook - you either love it or you hate it. I hate it - but Mark Zuckerberg does at least seem a nice sort of chap. Maybe he'll settle down and get married soon - that will add a sense of reality to his life!
Amplify’d from www.mercurynews.com
His face pale and shining with sweat, words stumbling out in a voice pinched with anxiety, Mark Zuckerberg appeared on the verge of a panic attack in June at the All Things Digital conference, as he fumbled to explain his mistakes in college and in building Facebook.
Less than six months later, in front of some of the most influential figures in the Internet industry at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week, Zuckerberg looked like a different person -- relaxed, thoughtful, even funny -- as he talked about his shortcomings.
"Ah man, I've made so many mistakes in running the company so far," Zuckerberg said, answering a question from an audience member who called him a "celebrity entrepreneur."

"Basically, any mistake you think you can make, I've probably made" -- Zuckerberg paused to smile -- "or will make in the next few years. But, I think if anything, the Facebook story is a great example of how, if you're building a product people love, you can make a lot of mistakes."
Facebook's reach continues to grow. Experian Hitwise said Friday that nearly 1 in 4 Internet page views in the U.S. last week were on Facebook.com. And despite his unflattering film portrait in "The Social Network," Zuckerberg in recent weeks has appeared comfortable talking about his personal life. At a Nov. 3 product announcement, Zuckerberg started out with a story about an exchange with an elderly neighbor

as he walked to work in Palo Alto.
On Monday, with more than 100 journalists massed at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco to hear Facebook unveil its new Message service, Zuckerberg talked about hanging out with his girlfriend's family in Boston last Thanksgiving. Recounting conversations he had there with high school students about e-mail that "make me feel really old," Zuckerberg said they influenced his view about how Facebook should build its Message service.
On stage at Web 2.0, Zuckerberg spoke slowly and thoughtfully, making eye contact with the audience, his palms open with fingers extended as he talked.
Zuckerberg said he thinks "every day" about

building a unique culture at Facebook, and talked about one internal yardstick the company uses -- the number of Facebook users, divided by the number of engineers who work there. For some time, that formula has yielded a number greater than 1 million. The size of that number, Zuckerberg said, indicates that Facebook is in a "golden period" where it has the influence of a big company and the creativity and agility of a startup.
His response to a question about criticism leveled by Jobs that Zuckerberg's demands were "crazy" in negotiating a deal between Facebook and Apple: "It's fine." His take on how big tech companies need to think about social media: "Get on the bus!" He even laughed when co-interviewer John Battelle said, "you're gonna want to stay away from those movies," referring to "The Social Network."
Read more at www.mercurynews.com

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Five Simple Steps To Improve Your Facebook Site

2010-11-27T09:32:00.001-08:00

URL: http://www.thestarphoenix.com/Improve%20your%20Facebook...
Facebook fan pages are a great way to promote your business or organization, are easy to maintain and they keep your personal profile separate from your business page. To its credit Facebook has done a lot lately to make pages more brand-friendly, even website-like. Here are five things you can do to improve your fan page
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Facebook 'threatens' web future

2010-11-21T09:33:00.001-08:00

Some interesting and pertinent points made by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, regarding the 'coralling' and siloing of information on the web. He cites Facebook as a particular example of how they capture user-generated information and hold it hostage. I also think he makes a good point about the increasing and pernicious development of smartphone apps that don't work as web apps - i.e. limited to a vendor's closed operating system, such as the iPhone. I think TBL has a right to be considered an authoritative voice on these issues - he not only invented the world wide web, he's one of the few leading figures who isn't trying to make a fast buck out of it!
Amplify’d from www.theregister.co.uk
Tim Berners-Lee has dubbed Facebook a threat to the universality of the world wide web.
Next month marks the twentieth anniversary of the first webpage – served up by Berners-Lee at the CERN particle physics lab in Geneva – and in the December issue of Scientific American, he celebrates the uniquely democratic nature of his creation, before warning against the forces that could eventually bring it down. "Several threats to the Web’s universality have arisen recently," he says.

He briefly warns of cable giants who may prevent the free flow of content across the net. "Cable television companies that sell internet connectivity are considering whether to limit their Internet users to downloading only the company’s mix of entertainment," he says. And then he sticks the boot into social networking sites, including Mark Zuckerberg's net behemoth. "Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your e-mail address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph," Berners-Lee writes.

"The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site."
This echoes the complaint Google made earlier this month as it banned Facebook from tapping Gmail's Contacts API. Mountain Views won't allow netizens to export email addresses to Facebook unless it reciprocates. But Berners-Lee goes further.
"A related danger is that one social-networking site—or one search engine or one browser—gets so big that it becomes a monopoly, which tends to limit innovation." The threat here is not Friendster. It's Facebook, which now boasts over 500 million users worldwide.
Berners-Lee urges the adoption of more democratic services, including Facebook alternatives GnuSocial and Diaspora as well as the Status.net project, which gave rise to a decentralized incarnation of Twitter. "As has been the case since the Web began," he says, "continued grassroots innovation may be the best check and balance against any one company or government that tries to undermine universality."
"You can’t make a link to any information in the iTunes world—a song or information about a band. You can’t send that link to someone else to see. You are no longer on the Web. The iTunes world is centralized and walled off. You are trapped in a single store, rather than being on the open marketplace. For all the store’s wonderful features, its evolution is limited to what one company thinks up."
He also bemoans the proliferation of net-connected apps on the Apple iPhone and other smartphones. "The tendency for magazines, for example, to produce smartphone 'apps' rather than Web apps is disturbing, because that material is off the Web. You can’t bookmark it or e-mail a link to a page within it. You can’t tweet it. It is better to build a Web app that will also run on smartphone browsers, and the techniques for doing so are getting better all the time."
Dredging up Comcast's BitTorrent busting, he then warns against threats to so-called net neutrality. This includes Google for the FCC filing it laid down this summer in tandem with US telco giant Verizon. "Unfortunately, in August, Google and Verizon for some reason suggested that net neutrality should not apply to mobile phone–based connections," he says.
He also warns against Phorm-style snooping and governments that restrict free speech on the web. But ultimately, he's optimistic. "Now is an exciting time," he says. "Web developers, companies, governments and citizens should work together openly and cooperatively, as we have done thus far, to preserve the Web’s fundamental principles, as well as those of the Internet, ensuring that the technological protocols and social conventions we set up respect basic human values. The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine." ®
Read more at www.theregister.co.uk

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Ten Principles of Communities of Practice

2010-11-17T09:23:00.001-08:00

Thanks to Bill Ives for the blog and to Stan Garfield for defining the ten principles. Great stuff!
Amplify’d from billives.typepad.com
My KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010 Notes: Stan Garfield on Communities of Practice
Here are the ten principles: One - Communities should be independent of organizational structure. They should be based on the content.
Two – Communities are different from organizations and teams. People are assigned to a team. Communities are better with self–selection for joining and remaining.
Third – Communities are people and not tools. You should not start with tech features. A platform is not a community. Readers of the same blog are not a community but that might be a byproduct.
Fourth – Communities should be voluntary. The passion of members should be what drives a community. You should make the community appealing to get members and not assign them to it.
Fifth – Communities should span boundaries. They should not be for a particular group likes Sales or IT. There is a lot of cross-functional or cross-geography learning that would be missed then. Diverse views help communities.
Sixth – You should minimize redundancy in communities. Consolidation helps to avoid confusion by potential members. It also reduces the possibility of not getting a critical mass. Reducing redundancy also enables more cross-boundary sharing.
Seven - Communities need a critical amass. You need at least 50 and likely 100. Usually ten percent are very active so you can get sufficient level of activity with 100 people.
Eight – Avoid having too narrow of scope for the community. Too much focus can lead to not enough members. Stan advises people to start broad and narrow if necessary. Or start as part of broader community and spin off if needed.
Nine – Communities need to be active. Community leaders need to do work, often in the “spare time” at their regular work. This means that the leader needs a passion for the topics so he or she will spend this extra time. There needs to be energy to get things going.
Ten – Use TARGETs to manage communities. TARGET includes: Types, activities, requirements, goals, expectations, and tools. Each of these issues needs to addressed and explained to prospective members. Tools are necessary, but the least important component, so they are placed last.
Read more at billives.typepad.com

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A great example of ROI using the Social Web

2010-11-16T06:17:00.001-08:00

We're getting familiar with the mantra about the need for efficiency and cost savings in the public sector. We also hear about the difficulty in measuring the Return on Investment (ROI) for use of Social Media. Well, here is evidence of both; how an online conference 'attended' (in a virtual sense) by over 1000 delegates over 5 days, saved around £280,000 when compared to running a standard (real) conference.

But apart from the cost savings identified here, we shouldn't forget that the other key differentiator with an online conference is the almost instant access to a considerable volume of knowledge assets, e.g. the forum conversations, blog posts, uploaded documents and presentations, etc. - all available as a permanent digital reference of the event.

Surely some lessons here for anyone thinking of running a conference? Maybe this will be the benchmark for future online events - it certainly demonstrates what can be done with a bit of organisation, and the 'glue' provided by the social web!
Amplify’d from communitiesknowledge.wordpress.com
36 presenters over 5 days, that sounds like a big event.
Well it was the Local by Social Online Conference ran from the 3 to the 9^th of November… And this has been our most ambitious online conference to date, not only in time but the amount of presenters and participants to the online conference.
One thing to point out is that we encourage participation. It’s not like a face to face event where you are an attendee. And going back to the 1% rule or the “90-9-1″ version of this rule. This states that 1% of people create content, 9% edit or modify that content, and 90% view the content without contributing.
The online conference did a good job.   With 242 out of the 1123 participants, making a contribution. Totalling 21%
And a total of 1123 contributions over the 5 days.
I’m not going to forget the Lurkers out there. Because between you and the contributors you viewed 27,360
That’s the equivalent of reading the original War and Peace 22 times
Also the average time spent in the online conference was 14m 20s per day.
When it comes to unique visitors by day we averaged at 427

Wednesday 518

Thursday 455

Friday 341

Monday 415

Tuesday 406

That would have had to be a large conference venue to hold that many people. More than what we could hold at the Local Government Improvement and Development with our maximum of 60 people.
When it comes to travelling to the Online Conference, you probably only had to go to work. Or if your like Ingrid, and mentioned in her blog in her Jim Jams
But what if you did have to travel? Well looking at the Map. I picked the 141 locations that people visited from in the UK. All the way from Stornoway in the North to Truro in the South. Belfast in the West and Norwich in the East.
As a rough estimate the travel distance to Layden House EC1m 5LG if you just calculated it for the 141 locations on a once only return travel it would have been 52008 miles. That’s twice round the World and would have left a Carbon Footprint of 4.55 tonnes of CO2
Twitter was used quiet a bit over the conference with 457 tweets that used the Twitter hash tag for the Local By Social Online Conference #LBYS
And if you’re interested, if this was run as a 5 day Face to Face Conference the cost could have been around £293,000 not only to host it but to get to the venue. This does not include other cost e.g. time away from the office etc.
Estimated cost comparison with a face to face Conference
Five Day Face to Face Conference (estimated costs)

Delegates = 400

Venue Hire = £2,000 x 5 = £10000

Audio – Video for venue = £2,250 x 5 = £11,250

Marketing Materials = £800

Advertisement = £1,500

Delegate Rate @£65 per person = £26,000 x 5 = £130,000

Conference Team Accommodation = £600 x 5 = £3000

Conference Team Travel = £400

Speakers Travel = £200 x 5 =£ 1000

Conference Team (11 days @ £500 per day) = £5,500

(Includes before, during and after)

Speakers time (average 2 speakers) = £2,000 x 5 = £10000

Couriers = £300

Delegate Accommodation (est. £40 per person) = £16,000 x 5 = £80,000

Delegate travel (est. £50 per person) = £20,000 x 2 = £40,000

Total Cost = £293,70

5 Day online Conference (estimated costs)

Delegates = £100

Venue Hire = £0

Audio – Video = £250

Marketing Materials = £250

Advertisement = £250

Delegate Rate = £0

Event Team Accommodation = £0

Event Team Travel = £0

Speakers Travel = £0

Conference Team (15 days @ £500 per day) = £7,500

(Includes before, during and after)

Speakers time (average of 8 speakers) = £4,000

Couriers = £100

Delegate Accommodation = £0

Delegate travel = £0

Total Cost = £12,350

Maybe with these types of events and with the Knowledge Hub coming along next year. We will still be able to share and transfer our experience and knowledge virtually with the restraints on the budgets across the sector.
Read more at communitiesknowledge.wordpress.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/fbuu

Apple’s Ping Social Network Gets Social with Twitter

2010-11-12T01:18:00.001-08:00

Like it or not, we have another social network to embrace in Apple's Ping. The good news is that it integrates with other networks, except (as usual) Facebook, which continues down it's own information cul de sac. I haven't tried Ping yet, but it is installed on my version of iTunes so will give it a whirl. I guess we can anticipate a significant burst in (trivial) Twitter traffic as we discover what music the people we follow are listening to. Oh joy!
Amplify’d from www.blackweb20.com
Back in September, everyone gasped as Apple launched the social network Ping, built inside of iTunes. Of course, the excitement quickly dissipated as everyone realized Ping wasn’t social at all. It was an information silo and didn’t even appear ready for the masses. Facebook and Apple even got into it, resulting in Facebook blocking Ping from full integrating with Facebook. A block that is still in place to this day.
All is not lost, though. Ping is finally starting to show itself to be somewhat social and possibly even useful with deep Twitter integration. From the Twitter Blog:
Starting today Ping, iTunes’ new social network for music, and Twitter are making it even easier for people to share music discoveries with their friends by putting Ping activity, song previews and links to purchase and download music from the iTunes Store right in their Tweets on Twitter.com.
The integration goes both ways. Once you connect your Twitter account to Ping, your activities in Ping will be automatically tweeted to your Twitter followers. I put “automatically” in bold to remind you to check your settings in iTunes and adjust accordingly. You may not want every minute activity you do broadcasted to Twitter.
On the Twitter end, these tweets from Ping will include special links that show you more detail about the song or album right alongside your Twitter stream. You can view the details and even play previews without leaving the Twitter website. I knew this new Twitter was going to end up being useful for something.
What do you think about Twitter integration in Ping? Will it prompt you to give Ping another look? Are you already using Ping? Tell us about it.
See more at www.blackweb20.com

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