Worth Tracking...

"In all of the excitement around Crossing The Chasm, Unleashing Your IdeaVirus, Tipping, Blinking, Cluetraining, Groundswelling, Long-Tailing, or what-have-you, a fundamental truth is often forgotten: We're in the business of making a case, persuading an audience, and articulating a point of view." - Phil Gomes, VP with Edelman Digital and senior advisor to the Society for New Communications Research. His blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. Phil currently resides in Chicago, IL.

Shel Israel writes, speaks and does video reporting for FastCompany on social media's impact on business and culture. He co-authors, with Robert Scoble, of "Naked Conversations--how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers," and serves as a senior advisor to several promising social media start ups. He's a senior advisor to both the Society for New Media Research and the Social Media Club and serves on the board of directors for YourTrumanShow a video blogging site. Follow him at Global Neighbourhoods Social Media's impact on business & culture.

The Dark and the Light sides of Social Media...

"In 1999, in a book entitled The Control Revolution, journalist and legal scholar Andrew Shapiro described two futures that the Internet might take. The first was the familiar story of increased individual freedom, as the network gave us greater control over our lives, and over the institutions, including government, that regulate our lives. The second was a less familiar warning—of the rebirth of technologies of control, as institutions 'disintermediated' by the Internet learned how to alter the network to reestablish their control." - Lawrence Lessig in The Future of Ideas (download the book)

Are you trapped in a walled garden? It may appear to be beautiful and fun from inside, but what happens if and when you want to leave? Can you take anything out of the garden that you have collected?

This is the ethical dilemma under continual debate in the cybersphere.

Who owns your social identity when it is made up of scrapbook pages and lists of friends, all housed in a data mine under the lock and key of MySpace or facebook? What happens if you get banned for inappropriate behavior? There are no tools to export your personal data. In other words you have no rights.

The more time you spend in MySpace the more money MySpace makes from advertisers. Do you deserve a share?

Trebor Scholz explains, "What the MySpace generation should know about working for free."

Finding Twitter's tops...

Thanks to Marifer for the tweet about reading The Essential Guide to Social Media, a free e-book by Brian Solis. He blogs at PR2.0, bub.blicio.us, and is among the original thought-leaders who paved the way for Social Media. Look PR2.0 over closely because there are at least 4 more valuable free e-books there to be downloaded and studied (hint: on the right sidebar at the bottom).

Twitt(url)y is a service that tracks what URLs people are talking about on Twitter and posts the top 100 most popular URLs over the last 24 hours on their home page. The 24 hours are constantly sliding, with an advanced algorithm in place, you always see what people are currently talking about. Today one of the rising stars, Twitter: Ultimate Time Waster or Great Tool?, is a recent presentation by Chris Winfield delivered to an SES Toronto audience that he posted on the 10e20 Blog.

"The best way to learn about Twitter is to have Twitter do my presentation," says Winfield, President and Co-Founder of 10e20 .

He tweeted the following series of questions starting at 4:45 PM EST, with no pre-planning or promotion around it at all:
By 6:04pm EST when he asked the final question he had more 275 answers - a presentation in less than 90 minutes. The 10e20 Blog has all of the answers plus a ton of other valuable ongoing information posted by more than a dozen authors who work at 10e20. It's a gold mine!

What is the Whuffie Factor?

Author Tara Hunt says: “Stop! Money isn’t the capital of choice in online communities, it is Whuffie - social capital – and how to raise it is the heart of this book.”

In the Web 2.0 world, market capital flows from having high social capital. Without Whuffie you lose your connections and any recommendation you make will be seen as spam, met with negative reactions and a loss of social capital.

Jeffio explains whuffie...

"I believe the term was originally coined in the sci-fi novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003) by Canadian author Cory Doctorow. In this story, Whuffie is a “reputation-based” currency that replaces money, is constantly being updated and is instantly viewable to anyone at any time."

Tara Hunt who tweets as Missrogue presented the following slides as part of her Fuel conference presentation on Whuffie, in London a few days ago...

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Learning the finer points of Twitter...

I am gaining a much better understanding of the value of twitter, which at first glance seemed to me like a hopeless distraction. The value it delivers is entirely your own personal responsibility. In other words, garbage in = garbage out. If you have intelligent things to tweet about, you will probably start to attract a following of other intelligent persons with equally valuable tweets. So, lately I started to cultivate my twitter connections. This recent tweet...

UstreamTV Twitter show just started - http://www.ustream.tv/chann... about 3 hours ago from web

...points to a very information-laden show that was just starting a live broadcast on the UStream network, all about Twitter. It was hosted by BlogCatalog.com. Not only did I just learn about a social network for bloggers and one of the largest blog directories on the Internet, but I also had an extensive live lecture featuring embedded chat for simultaneous live Q&A with Erica O'Grady, the teacher and other "students." Erica talks about twhirl, a desktop client for twitter, her current favorite among the 48 different clients you can use to track tweets. Twitterholic.com ranks the top 100 Twitterholics based on Followers (don't your thumbs hurt yet?).

Watch the episode and learn more with Erica live every other Monday...
Video clips hosted by Ustream


Her five key values to social networking are the same as the Quaker key values: simplicity, equality, integrity, community and peace. She likes Flock - the browser for people who like to be connected; uses Summize to search Twitter in realtime and Twitzu to blast out event invites to Twitter followers. More Erica O'Grady shows here.

Recommended reading: Tara Hunt on Tweeting for Companies 101

MySpace set to release big changes this week...

Described by some as in competition with Facebook...

Ars Technica reports, "MySpace is kicking off a major redesign on Monday of five key aspects of the site, from the homepage to user profiles to its MySpaceTV Player. With a focus on community, search, and usability, MySpace is re-arming itself in its battle for global social network dominance."

PC Magazine says, "MySpace will roll out the first phase of its redesign on June 18 in five areas: homepage, navigation, profile editor, search, and MySpaceTV player... As part of an ad campaign, an undisclosed major advertiser will take control of MySpace.com on launch day, with the full redesign debuting on June 19, according to the company... searching for people will display profile returns as usual, but results will now include tabs so you can find information about that person on MySpace as a whole, on the Web, within the Music section, or MySpaceTV."

According to Alexa Rankings, Myspace is already ahead of Facebook among the Top 10 Social Sites. Check out the list in the Friday Traffic Report.

Webware's Guide to FriendFeed...

I have been consolidating my footprint(s), handprint(s) in order to seek out greater authenticity. So much hype in Facebook coming from the schemes and dreams of getting rich on auto-pilot... enough already!

Richard Laermer sums it up in 7 Ways to Act More Social, "Friendship has now gone the dinosaur route."

"FriendFeed is a powerful service you can use to follow all the public online activity of your friends. It takes all your friends' activity on Twitter, Digg, del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, and 30 other sites and creates one giant uber-feed that you can display in one place. Furthermore, people can comment on what their friends are doing, and you can read those comments, so the service acts as a good way to discover the things your social network thinks is important." - Webware: Newbie's Guide: FriendFeed