social media / glossary

List of "buzz" and social media words:
NBZM_GetSmartGuide.pdf (application/pdf Object)

social networks / list of create-your-own-social networks

Nine Ways to Build Your Own Social Network

Some advice and profiles on the following social network companies: - Ning, KickApps, CrowdVine, GoingOn, CollectiveX, Me.com, PeopleAggregator, Haystack, ONEsite

All of these provide platforms for groups to build their own networks.

analytics / crazyegg

Crazyegg - visualize your visitors

A 24 hour fabricated test on this blog

This analytic software tracks where people click on a page. That's it. The value is that you can see where people click, at what frequency, and the program also keeps track of where the "clicker" entered the site from (whether from google, from a direct link, from within the website, etc.)

Widgets / Clearspring

NBC is using Clearspring to create widgets like this clip from Saturday Night Live. This lets people share the clip by posting it as a link to the video on NBC's web page, to the video file itself, or by embedding it as below. The service also provides analytics on how and where your video is being shared.

Clearspring - Services for Building, Deploying and Tracking Widgets

commentary / social media vs old media

90-seconds from "MediaSnackers" describing the new media landscape.


FYI (From Web Strategy by Jeremiah)
MediaSnackers are:

Folks who consume small bits of information, data or entertainment when, where, and how they want. If you want to be part of their lives you’ve got to respect them. I’d argue that the folks who created this video emphasized too much that mediasnackers are the youth only, because business folks of any age are busy, get information from multiple sources, and need filters.

Resources / analytics for social media?

Interesting tools to track "buzz" and measuring more that just website audience.

From Liberate Media blog: Social media tools

(I've quoted pieces of the text below)

The first link is a Mashables page where you will find tools for web traffic visualisation, blog and RSS feed analysis, market research data and site rankings, analytics software packages and log file analysis.

The next link is 26 must-have buzz monitoring tools, all of which are free of charge.

.....

Want to track your website? Well you should! On this page there are 69 tools to do just that.

If you just want to concentrate on blogs here are some tracking tools and six key ways to measure it.

If you have a found a discussion in the bloggosphere and you want to follow it try one of the following tools.

Twitter is very popular at the moment and numbers 4 and 5 in this blog post will help you monitor conversations and visualisation.

More reputation and social media tactics tools can be be found in our rescource.

blogs / journalist blogs

Lists from cyberjournalist -

Blogs published by News Sites

Blogs published independently by journalists

blog / Twitter for Journalism?

On Twitter and election/campaign coverage: Twitter: Campaign Reporting in Under 140 Taps

And on Twitter for journalism form Poynter: Experimenting with Twitter: How Newsrooms Are Using It to Reach More Users

Washington Post online editor's twitter
New York Time twitters articles

Blog tools / Blogfuse

Publish Your Blog to Facebook | Blogfuse

Creates a modular facebook application for RSS feeds. Can be swapped out for another application seamlessly (users don't have to add a new application if it is changed).

Free trial, cost = ?

Blogs / Public sector tips

The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0 (pdf file) by David C. Wyld, Southeastern Louisiana University

Paper on government and corporate blogging. See pp. 38-39 for expanded guidance on tips listed below (parenthetical comments mine)

(From executive summary)

10 Tips for Blogging by Public Sector Executives (generally applicable to all bloggers)

1. Define yourself and your purpose
2. Do it yourself (ie. other people shouldn't blog FOR you)
3. Make a time commitment ("Remember, in the blogosphere, 10 days without posts could mean the death of your blog...")
4. Be regular (read: Post interesting content regularly)
5. Be generous (Focus on others and other areas, not just yourself)
6. Have a "hard hide."
7. Spell-check (no spelling or grammar errors - and if you find them later, correct them)
8. Don't give too much information
9. Consider multimedia
10. Be a student of blogging (read other people's blogs regularly, too.)

News Media and Social Media

For the 2008 election season, many news agencies joined forces with social media environments. Mashable.com reviews are also linked.

Facebook and ABC News

On Facebook/ABC News debates, facebook users participated in polls and online debate amongst themselves.

Continuing presence: Reporters on each candidate's campaign have Facebook accounts and post blog entries, status updates, geographic moves, and short videos, as well as links to ABC news articles. Users continue to participate in polls and conversations and have related widget on their profile page.

• About, from Broadcasting & Cable
• ABCNews on Facebook
• Mashable coverage

MySpace, (AP), MTV

MySpace and AP covered debates hosted by MTV with candidates that included questions from audience through both the MTV and MySpace websites (instant messaging).

Continuing presence: All debates are viewable on the MySpace and MTV sites (the entire debate, but also in smaller bytes by candidate response), along with places for continuing discussion amongst users.

• Myspace page
• MTV site
• Mashable coverage

Digg and CBS

CBS articles related to the 2008 election will have Digg counts (how many people have given the article a vote of confidence) and will carry additional election-related content from Digg on their site.

-- This doesn't exist yet, as far as I can find. See Mashable coverage for more information.

Youtube and CNN

CNN ran a republican and a democratic debate using questions submitted to YouTube by users. YouTube has invited users to post video responses to debate.

Continuing presence: All questions and answers are available on YouTube in single question-answer pairs. Video responses to the debate are also available.

• Republican debate
• Democratic debate
• Mashable coverage

commentary / What is social media?

What is social media? Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger

Old media versus Social Media

syndication / Mochila

Mochila: The Media Marketplace. Buy. Sell. Earn.

Web-based media marketplace for syndication of print, audio, video, and photo content. Content providers can control which regions or publications may use their content. Members include AP, Abril Group (Latin American communications group), Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH, Metro international (newspaper in europe, north and south america, asia), MSNBC, Russian News & Information Agency RIA Novosti, Washington Post.

commentary / The Future of Social Media Web Sites

From The Future of Social Media Web Sites
by Mikhail Tuknov

As for the social media sites themselves, the most effective means of ensuring continued popularity is through social media optimization. There are a number of ways commonly used to do this but five rules have been particularly effective in attaining this goal. Formulated by Rohit Bhargava, these rules are: Increasing the linkability of your social media site, making the tagging and bookmarking process easy for your audience, rewarding inbound links, helping your content travel, and finally encouraging mashups, which are web applications that combine data from more than one source into a single integrated tool.

More on these five rules

Blogs / International Journalist Blogs

• Cyberjournalist.net - Blog re: citizen journalism and blogging as means of information sharing. Also covers new media applications.
• "The International Center for Journalists, a non-profit, professional organization, promotes quality journalism worldwide in the belief that independent, vigorous media are crucial in improving the human condition." Hosts International Journalists' Network, an online resource for training, ethics, bulletins, etc.
• Free Media Online, supporting free media worldwide, providing and linking to free news and resources for independent journalists.
• Wired Journalists is a site for people who want to learn to be better journalists - it has about 1500 members and links to journalism sites of interest.
  

Social bookmarking / who enables what

I did a little survey of news sites on the internet and which social bookmarking icons or links they provided on a new news article. I removed social bookmarking sites that appeared fewer than 3 times (Mr. Wong, Muti, Fark, Socializer - I forgot to remove Mixx - tables are really hard to change, so I left it). Note that all of these sites are in English.

News Site	Del	Dig	Fur	FB	red	SU	Mix	Y!	NV
NYtimes.com	x	x		x					x
bbcnews international	x	x		x	x	x
washingtonpost.com	x	x		x	x	x			x
ap.com
reuters.com	x	x		x			x	x	x
timeslondon, global edition	x	x						x
cnn.com	x	x		x	x	x
bloomberg.com
dw.com	x	x	x					x	x
msnbc.com
theonion.com		x			x	x
abcnews.com	x	x	x	x	x	x		x	x
radionetherlands
international herald tribune	x	x	x	x				x
independent online (South Africa)	x	x		x	x	x			x
Sports illustrated online				x
times of india
cnet news.com	x	x
guardian.co.uk	x	x		x	x	x		x	x
christian science monitor	x	x

Key: Del.icio.us [Del] Digg [Dig] Furl [Fur] Facebook [FB] reddit [red] StumbleUpon [SU] Mixx [Mix] Yahoo MyWeb [Y!] Newsvine [NV]

Digg / social bookmarking

Digg / All News, Videos, & Images

Digg lets users vote for recent articles online. The "vote" is called a "digg" and the number of "diggs" an article gets in a certain amount of time determines where it fall on the site's home page. Articles that ARE dugg and are visible on the front page of digg.com have been shown to get a lot of traffic.

Article on Social Bookmarking Etiquette

Language learning / English, baby

Learn English free and chat in English online at English, baby!

Online English teaching community with videos and chat.

social networks / Social.com

Social.com - Discover your Social World!

This site keeps a list of social networking sites by type and content.

site counter / Alexa

Alexa the Web Information Company

Alexa tracks how many people visit a site from the USER end (instead of counting hits from the server's end). It ranks websites based on how many people visit them, and lets you see this content by country.

Method: Alexa gives people a toolbar to install on their web browser. This tracks where the person goes on the internet. While it only measures based on the people who have it installed, it does provide by-country breakdowns of site visits.

Microblogging / Twitter

Twitter

Microblogging site gives you only 140 words to answer the question "What are you doing." You can watch your friends' "Tweets" online or get text messages to your phone.

See WSJ article here: Friends Swap Twitters, and Frustration

Mobile Blogging / Utterz

Utterz

Lets you post to blogs/conversations/other online communities from your cell phone in any media.

Mashup / twittervision

twittervision

Pairs 140 character maximum blogging with a world map, showing where "mini-blogs" are coming from.

"Mashups" take two or more different types of information and blend them based on their XML data. Here, the mini-blog posts have geographic information attached - the mashup shows live blog updates on a globe.

Social Bookmarking / Del.icio.us

• Websites/articles "voted for" by users
• Popular articles rise to the top in realtime
• Different audiences and themes by site: news, general interest, academic
• Users have and can share list of sites they like
  

Social bookmarking is a way to keep track of websites and pages you like. Instead of bookmarking them on your computer, you can bookmark them to the internet. Instead of just seeing your own, you can share them with other people and see their bookmarks.

I defer to commoncraft's excellent video explaining social bookmarking for a nice explanation



My del.icio.us bookmarks are here: crazycoolmint's bookmarks on del.icio.us. When I see a cool site, I click on my "Post to del.icio.us" button and tag the link appropriately. It's interesting to see what other people who have bookmarked the same page as me are also bookmarking. I have found some amazingly useful sites by using other people's research and tags... If they think it's good, it must be worth a click for me. Del.icio.us is text based and only has a few options of how to look at your bookmarks, but its simplicity makes it efficient to use. However, is just one kind of social bookmarking site - will look at more later.

Using new media to look at new media

I have taken on the task of being, in one way or another, a cartographer of new media. Everyone talks about the types of new media - web 2.0 (or 3.0) is or is not a descriptor for the future of the internet. Blogs/podcasts/mashups/[insert flashy newmedia word here] are the new hottest thing or so done before. Social networks and their variations are the hot new places to market or to be criticized for marketing on. Viral marketing is either a good idea or offends users for pandering to them.

And so, I shall try to make sense of it all for people who aren't living in it. I don't speak code - to me, CAML sounds like an animal, and AJAX a cleaning product - although I do acknowledge the value of XML and its derivatives in communicating with such code-y engines.

To begin: XML is a way of labeling information (with meta data) so that information can be queried independent of its layout or it's original use. You could put an article into a folder and remember where to find it if you need it again. However, XML lets you put it into a database to be used whenever you want. Even better, XML is becoming more universally used, so other people can use your article whenever they want. They can access the content (which you created and which stays the same) and present it however they want. And as content moves, its XML meta data stays the same. This video explains it far better than I will, and I defer to it.



In summary? XML lets you label content you create and lets you put that content in lots of different places while keeping its meta data with it.