Using Social Media to track Hurricane Gustav

I love hearing interesting ways people are using Social Media, and the Ning site put up today to help report news on Hurricane Gustav is a brilliant use of the tools available. The site will aggregate content from a variety of sources, including; Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Utterz, Technorati, etc.- all you have to do is tag the item gustav.

Kudos to Andy Carvin for starting it and for everyone participating/contributing to help educate folks in the affected areas as well as keeping us connected so we can mobilize when needed.

We are all praying Gustav dies before hitting land again, but if it should continue on - here’s hoping we are better prepared to take action and respond quickly.

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Social Media Now: The Social Edge, Debating Viacom’s Value to YouTube

It hardly signals the end of the line for social networking hubs like Facebook and MySpace, but it may be the beginning of the end. I’m talking about the potential impact of a Mozilla skunk works project to embed social networking functionality directly in the Web browser.

There’s a lot of buzz among the meme-makers. At Techcrunch Michael Arrington calls it bad news for start ups like Flock with ambitions to build social browsers. That would certainly appear to be the case, particularly since Flock is built on top of Mozilla, although for the moment the window is wide open for socially enabled browsers. Speaking of windows, Microsoft must also be developing similar functionality for Internet Explorer.

At ZDNet Larry Dignan raises an interesting question about the potential impact of social browsers on the economics of social networking hubs:

Another interesting thread will be how this works for big social networking sites that depend on page view growth like MySpace. If I can track all my social contacts in my browser will I visit MySpace?

Technology, functionality and ease of use will ultimately tell the tale of which implementation wins the day. For now the Mozilla effort, called The Coop, is an experiment, existing publicly only as a prototype which I intend to begin playing with today. But as a general matter the more social enabling included in a piece of software, the more valuable and sticky that software becomes to users.

Embedding social networking directly into Web browsers reflects the typical evolutionary path of Internet functionality away from hubs and central servers towards the edge where individuals have greater control over their user experiences. And it’s hardly the only sign of  the decentralization of social networking. Kristen Nicole has a piece at Mashable about OtherEgo.Com–a revamp of the social network formerly known as Rantiq. Kristen identifies the killer app hidden within the new service–the ability for users to make all their social network profiles available in one place–but criticized the company for making the feature hard to find and inconvenient to use:

Surprisingly enough, the ability to add other profiles, OtherEgo’s major differentiator, is not prominent on their site at all. The link to add a profile is rather low key, and any added profiles actually show at the very bottom of the page. Another concern I have is the ability to add anyone’s public profile to your own OtherEgo space by simply inserting the URL. Those things aside, it’s an interesting (but not totally convenient) way to keep your social networks in one place.

On his blog, Internet Outsider, former Wall Street wunderkind Henry Blogett called attention  to a report from Vidmeter suggesting that YouTube’s success is not predicated on copyright infringement. Blodgett draws the following conclusions from the report:

• Traditional media videos make up only a small percentage of YouTube views.
• NBCFoxTube, the hypothetical consortium, even if successful, won’t dent YouTube’s growth.
• Online video viewers usually watch short clips, not full shows.

But Pete Cashmore at Mashable offered a more detailed reading of the report, one that pokes holes in Blogett’s over hyped reading:

Well, bear in mind that since it’s unfeasible to crawl all of YouTube, they stuck with a sample size of 6,725 clips. This was not a random sample - it was taken from the most viewed list. Of those, 9.23% had been removed due to copyright violations, and the removed videos only accounted for 5.93% of video views in the sample. Viacom removed the most clips: about 40% of the videos removed were from Viacom. What’s more, Viacom clips accounted for 2.37% of all videos views counted.

There are lots of ways to interpret this, and we actually think it’s risky to draw conclusions. The thing is, Vidmeter only counted removed clips, since they’re unable to count the total number of copyrighted clips that haven’t been taken down. They also used the most viewed list as a sample, meaning that it’s not necessarily representative of what’s going on elsewhere on the site. And Viacom’s 72 videos in the sample still accounted for about 38 million views.

Couldn’t have said it better myself, Pete. The complete report is available here. 

 

 

 

 

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Social Media Now: Tag You’re It

While the semantic Web remains a twinkle in the eye of Tim Berners-Lee, social media is enabling development of a messier, more human, but perhaps in the end more useful Web ontology. I’m talking about the impact of tagging which is on my mind this morning thanks to two blog posts.

First, David Sifry’s post on “The State of Technorati, April 2007″ highlights a move among Technorati users in recent months away from query-based search towards tagged pages as the entry point for surfers interested in subjects.

Let me begin by saying the people we serve and their behaviors on our site have shifted remarkably in recent months. In brief, we’ve seen phenomenal growth in the use of our tagged media pages. As the use of tags becomes more ubiquitous across all forms of social media and the publishing platforms that support them, they’ve become the lingua franca of the Live Web - the way in which people all over the world indicate what topics or issues are top of mind and guiding self-expression.

About nine months ago, we began to see a marked increase in the use of those tagged media pages, which back then simply included blog posts and Flickr photos using tags. So, throughout the fall and into December, we introduced a number of improvements and new features to our media pages, including the introduction of a huge range of multiple forms of user-generated content. Today, we include blog posts, photos, videos, podcasts, music, people, and events that share a common tag to give our visitors a view into who’s saying what - who’s doing what - across the Live Web, all in real time.

…the majority of our page views now are no longer just in real-time keyword or blog search, as would have been the case just six months ago, but also in our tagged media pages.

That’s a pretty interesting turn of events. Search, more than any other application, led the growth of Web 1.0. But ironically the more information that becomes searchable, the harder it is for self-directed searches to be specifically useful to any individual. As a result we have witnessed the development the search engine optimization industry, which is helpful to publishers. But also we have witnessed the emergence of social search and tagging which represent a kind of user-directed Web information optimization.

Despite its phenomenal growth, tagging hasn’t delivered its full potential in part because there are too many non-interoperable tagging systems and in part because the process of tagging can be so darn inconvenient. That’s why I was interested to see Stephen Baker’s pointer at BusinessWeek to an academic paper exploring a kind of tag optimization technology. In the paper four researchers at Northwestern describe a system of tag optimization that scans existing tags, ranks them according to effectiveness and suggests the best tags for users to choose. The system, called TagAssist, won the best paper award at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media last week.

The semantic Web may still evolve, but it’s more likely to evolve as a technological response to the social behavior of surfers than as an abstract technological solution to a theoretical problem. Building actionable functions on top of an ontology that people have already chosen sounds like the right development path to me.

A related piece today comes from Arnaud Fischer, programming director at AOL Search & Directional, who gives an overview of the advantages of social search over traditional search.

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Social Media Now: Crowdsourcing a Better Mousetrap?

There are two classic ways of thinking about start-up opportunities. The first imagines solving a specific problem, the second imagines building a better mousetrap.

The mousetrap model has largely fallen out of favor, particularly among media technologists. After all, the history of new media technology is a tale of worse mousetraps (VHS, redbook CD, lo-rez MP3) triumphing over better ones.

But search remains a business sector for mousetrap makers–better algorithms=better search, or so the thinking goes.

If there’s any problem-solving thought going on in the world of search it is a matter of search engine optimization–third party businesses solving the problems of indexed sites looking for boosts in traffic. But what about the problems of searchers who want to ask plain language queries and get better, more contextually appropriate returns from the entire universe of online content not just from the most linked and trafficked sites?

Social search holds out the promise of bringing a little bit of end-user problem-solving into the search business by putting users, not algorithms, at the center of search.

Today there are two piece of news in the world of social search. First comes the beta launch of WikiSeek: Community Edition.  As Michael Arrington explains in Techcrunch, WikiSeek is something of a Wikipedia symbiote–searches only return Wikipedia entries and sites to which Wikipedia links. And at present only 10 links are returned per search (presumably this is a beta restriction). But results can be edited by anyone and that editing includes not only adding and deleting returned links but also altering the order in which links are returned. Can wiki-based search scale? Dunno. We’ll find out.

Meanwhile another company focusing on social search–Eurekster–announced yesterday that it had raised $5.5 million in second round financing (its first venture round) from Technology Venture Partners of Australia and Transcosmos Investments of Japan  Eurekster offers to blog publishers contextual, user-driven search widgets called Swickis.

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