7 Dec 2010

A Day in the Life of Social Media on Vimeo

Great visualisation of the impact of social media and its implications for organisations.

27 Nov 2010

What if... Twitter had been around during the American Revolution? [COMIC via @mashable]

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25 Nov 2010

Monopoly Gets an Unofficial Social Media Edition

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Plenty of satire in the Social Media Edition including some digs at MySpace, which replaces the Jail, and features on a Technorati (Chance?) card that reads: "Your video has become MySpace video of the week. No one cares. Don't do anything."

17 Nov 2010

The Future Will Be Personalized

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This graphic from Gravity CEO Amit Kapur (who just launched the Twinterest game) sums up very neatly what's happening to information consumption. He sees things as a kind of arms race between tools that make it easier to create and tools that make it easier to filter. It's pretty obvious that social filters via Facebook and Twitter are taking more and more attention. But Kapur thinks they are now beginning to suffer from the same information overload as portals and search engines. Hence the need for more personal filters that capture your interests better than your friendships and relationships do -- matching your DNA to content's DNA. (Amazon has been doing something like this for me with books and music for a decade or so.)

27 Oct 2010

Understanding the Web, for Fans of Charles Dickens

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The author of 'Everything Explained Through Flowcharts' goes through how you might explain the Internet to a 19th century street urchin and uncovers an uncomfortable truth.

20 Oct 2010

This could be big: Twitter Can Predict the Stock Market Six Days In Advance

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Researchers at Indiana University have crunched sentiment analysis data based on Twitter conversations and spotted a correlation between the general mood and movements in the Dow Jones Index.

As one of the commenters points out, if they were confident about this wouldn't they have left academia, gone into the markets and kept quiet about their findings?

The paper itself is not for the faint-hearted but introduced me to the notion of the 'self-organising fuzzy neural network'. I'm still fuzzy myself about whether Twitter is such a network but next time someone is rude about tweeting I'm considering saying 'are you comfortable dismissing the value of 'self-organising neural networks' and seeing what the response is.

17 Oct 2010

Very unofficial royal portraits by contemporary artists commissioned by the Guardian

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Some stunning work including Prince Harry as a crocheted baboon and the Prince of Wales as a collection of stamps.

17 Oct 2010

Facebook is for sharing, Twitter for clicking, according to SocialTwist study

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SocialTwist study of referrals via the 'tellafriend' widget shows that while Facebook is way out in front when it comes to first port of call for sharing links (78% vs MySpace's 14% and Twitter's 5%) the average Twitter link is clicked on 19 times against under 3 times for Facebook.

15 Oct 2010

Wave5 survey shows dominance of social networks in participation

Growth in blogs, picture- and video-sharing sites is faltering as the gravitational pull of social networks gets stronger according to the Wave 5 study published by UM. This one illustration summed it up for me (the scale is based on the percentage of respondents using a particular social medium to get something done):

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11 Oct 2010

London about to be hit by graffiti knitting epidemic, according to Guardian

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Yarn-storming started in the States in 2005 and is gaining a grip in Britain as knitters attempt to beautify public spaces. One 'yarn-achist' quoted in the piece covered an entire bus in Mexico with a hand-knitted cover.

Mark Jones's Space

I'm a journalist based in London working for Reuters News. Any opinions expressed here are my own.