Entries Tagged 'Social Web' ↓

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Has Social Media changed the rules of the game

Sachendra Yadav has posted this question on LinkedIn and collected the responses on his blog. For me the rule of the game remains the same and for me there is no thing such as social media marketing. I belive connecting with customers and social media is just another tool, very powerful but still a tool.

Marketing overall remains the same, conveying your poroducts and services to your customers. But when TV came it shook up the marketers who didn’t knew the complexity of this medium and now when Social Media is making the buzz, it’s a challenge again for the marketers to learn about the tremendous complexities of this medium and the people consuming this medium.

Instead of re-inventing the products and re-inventing the relationships with the customers - we are focusssing too much on marketing and that too the tool of marketing i.e Social Media. The need is also to identify your customers - potential and current and to understand their environment. TV & Internet are not just medium - they are environments and these environment are evolving at a supersonic speed.

Do you know the environment and it’s habitants ?

Roderick Ioerger has explained few points nicely about the marketing and the social media -How did we get lost in the noise?

Popularity: 19% [?]

Josh Bancroft is starting to hate the term social media. I too feel like John, that it’s the most overused and abused term these days. Well, then as an Internet Professional with 11 years of experience, can I attempt to define it myself. At least I can try.

John, Steve, Robert & others ….please correct me if I am wrong. I will spam you on twitter when I am ready with my post

Definition of Social. (Oxford)

Social a. 1) Living in an organized community; of society or it’s organization.

Definition of Society (Oxford)

Society n. organized community; system of living in this; people of the higher social classes; mixing with other people; group organized for a common purpose.

Definition of Media (Oxford)

Media  see medium, - n.pl. the ~, newspapers and broadcasting as conveying information to the public.

What is Social ?

Anything associated with a group of people can be termed social. So the traditional producers of the mainstream media are not outside the scope of society. Though we like to blame the politicians and media for everything, they are the part of the very society that we live in. With that scope anything would be social media. Wait a minutre….

No, sorry !!! that can’t be. Because there are two ’social’ words in this world, when scientists and anthropologists use it, it becomes a technical word and everyone is in it. But when a man on the street uses it in his (any form of ) expression, it means ’social’ but ’social’ which has ‘me’ in it or ‘people like me’ in it.

What is Media ?

Media is produced by two types of people Professionals & Amateurs. The sleepy MSM guys have always worried about ‘the generation’ or ‘the creation’ of the media, but have conveniently forgotten ‘the platform’. The harmless looking wordpress, drupal, wikimedia and so many others online platforms are the real social culprits. But also remember… anything amateur is not social and anything social is not amateur.

Now lets look at the definition of Social Media @ wikipedia:

Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and "building" of shared meaning, as people share their stories, and understandings.

Sorry to say this is not the definition of Social Media. By this term even any form of Online Community can be termed as a Social Media. Any user generated content is not equal to social media. And if this is the definition of social media then anything and everything is a social media.

• Is publishing agent like wordpress - a social media ? By the above definition it is.
• If I produce random ‘Lorem Ipsums’ on my blog - is it a social media - By above definition it is.
• If there are no visitors to my blog, have a started becoming social or am I the part of social media - by above definition it is.
• Are sites like Digg or Delicious mean social media, By above definition it is.

Definition of Social Media.

Remember two things the definition should not just include the wide scope of ’social’ but also the limited scope of the ‘media’

"Social Media is an alternative to mainstream media powered by public through social participation and interaction to produce content in various traditional & evolving forms and/or formats." - Santosh Maharshi’s very private definition (not yet socially accepted)

Now many of you won’t agree with me, so please feel free to discuss and dissect my definition. Let’s try to find a meaning. Why ? Because what’s the use of defining at all when you can put everything from twitter, to faebook, to wikipedia to youtube all on the same ’social media’ table.

I have even tried to apply my definition to some of the categories :

• Online Answers - it’s an online knowledge community not social media. But still it gives threat to ‘Ask The Experts’ columns in newspapers
• Social Bookmarks - Not a Social Media - it’s social bookmarking service and act only as the distributor.
• Blog - When I am talking about my life and my friends, it’s personal and not a substitute of media . Only when I start entertaining or informing people and start getting visitors on my site then it becomes social media. So by my definition, a blog with no visitor is not yet social and not yet social media.
• Micro Blogging - Sorry it’s not a social media it’s a social media distributor and opinion agent. It’s like a cafe where you discuss today’s top stories.
• Social Networks - Social Network are a big platform threat to Media, it’s trying to become everything - it’s a cafe where you can publish and discuss both. So if you are just friending, it’s not a social media but when you are friending, entertaining and informing - it’s a social media
• Wikipedia - Yes it’s a social media. It has not just replaced the traditional encyclopedia publishing but it’s also a valid alternative source of information for dictionaries, newspapers, magazines and various other publication. No other web venture has displaced so many traditional publishers (/media)
• Online Video Sharing - Yes it’s a social media. You get entertained and informed that too socially. But guess what, if your newspaper starts publishing all the stories in video format - is it a social media - NO. When you start publishing all your recorded TV episodes, is it a social media NO.

Now I am really dissecting ‘online video sharing site’, let’s have a look. And I need just two more examples…

• Online Video Sharing site - without any social features (comments, forward this, tags, email this, etc, etc) -Open to public for posting. It is still Social Media if it informs or entertains as it would be a valid alternative to mainstream media
• Online video sharing site - with all the social features (comments, forward this, tags, email this, et, etc) - but only journalists can post their videos. Sorry this is not a social media site

Open Request To All :

You may be mad at me due to usage of ‘alternative to mainstream media’ or not being able to include Twitter, Digg or any forum or any blog or in the ’social media’ circuit. But I have used the stricter version on purpose, otherwise what’s the use of defining something which is anything a definition of social media which cannot be distinguished from others. At the same time I admit, this may not be 100% perfect, so please challenge my (limited) wisdom and thrash it like anything. I would be more than happy and open to modify, so that I also have the clarity and smartly answer this question when I am asked to.

Popularity: 50% [?]

Gerrit Visser on SmartMob talks about Robert Scobles keynote presentation at The NextWeb Conference where he talked about the user experience of social networks: Here is one user experience issue, friends divide and there is more on Robert Scobles blog:

“But when ICQ was launched, the experiences of people started to diverge. ICQ users with a hundred friends had a different experience than those with only two. With the new web, version 2.0, this diversion becomes more significant. Scoble proved this by showing versions of Google Reader, Twitter, Pownce, Friendfeed and Upcoming, one version with only one friend and the other one with Scoble’s famous collection of friends. 1000+ on Google Reader, 500 people on Upcoming, 3000 Powncers and over 17,000 Twitter contacts. So we got to witness two extremes here, one with no activity and the other version that was flooded by updates. Those are totally different user experiences, the consequence is the friend divide.

This same problem was experienced by me when I was working on a social network platform few years back.

Day 0 (W.r.t Users)

On the day 0 of the registration what should be the user experience like?. The recommendation engine can of course recommend certain people & features, but what if user chose to skip those. If the user provided some information at the time of registration it becomes easier for the SNS provider to recommend people, content or the features. But most of the times, users do not provide any information besides the user name and email ID and it would be a disaster if the SNS provider makes all the information mandatory for the registration.

Exposing random people, content and features doesn’t help. The success of the most successful SNSs can simply be attributed to ‘Invite Friends’ module.

On a detailed profile, the known people based on profile information such as home town, work city, interests, etc all form the discovery connectors and some times they are more important than the discovery itself.

Hand-Holding

In India, where more and more people are logging on to the Internet everyday, for the first time in life they will be straight away exposed to the Social Network. I am sure more than half of the SNS population in India doesn’t know what SNS means - they know it as Orkut and Facebook that’s it. For such users, launching yet another SNS with upload photos, upload videos, find friends doesn’t mean anything. You need to properly hand hold your users, what is the next step, what you can do here and why you should do it over here. I think LinkedIn does it best in terms of hand-holding the user. I also liked MySpace Tom who was my first friend there. It can be really scary if you don’t have any friends on Social Networks or places like Twitter, it feels like a terrified kid trying to cross the bussiest highway on the planet

Mimic / Imitation Effect

On any Social Networks, users copy each other and that’s how they influence each other and do some activity more compared to other activities available on the site. Users may not understand the real use of that activity initially but discover cool tools and features through this mimicing. For example, on Orkut they scrap or write testomonials on Facebook they poke each other, write on walls or send each other applications and widgets. But if there are no such tools or the unique twist on that social network, people tend to wander and get lost. It is very important for a newbie to know what others are doing or what’s popular on the system, jump into it and discover people or content through it.

Popularity: 50% [?]

Barcamp Bangalore 6 is happening on 19th and 20th April at IIMB. Visit the website and checkout how you can contribute - by attending, by volunteering or simply by blogging about it. Such camps are collective and democratic effort. Come here, share your experiences, learn from others or just mix and connect with some like minded people. You can visit the Sessions page to know about what will be discussed and who are all going to talk at this event. But of course you will come across many more interesting people and can have a nerdy chat or fume about Bangalore Airport, Autowallas and traffic conditions also.

Now my story:

There are many exiting techie events happening from a quite some time now. But due to my work schedule and maramari in Mumbai, I was never  able to make it to any such events. Now that I am in Bangalore and life is much more peaceful, wanted to attend and did some twittering around to find about such happening stuff in Bangalore.

And guess what ? -  some good friends immediately replied back with a twitter. First was @aDese (blog) who had desiged a poster for Barcamp Ahmedabad and she informs that  Barcamp Mumbai Edition 3 is coming up on 29th. You should also visit her interesting blog and know her success story through such Ahmedabad event.

The second guy who replied back to me was @adityamishra (blog)who is actually the planner of Barcamps in Bangalore and Mumbai. Not only did he quench my thirst for info, he was also kind enough to connect me with others.

Thanks Aditi and Aditya, it’s nice to meet you and yes yes now I admit that Twitter is some serious stuff too.

Popularity: 68% [?]

Nice article by Anupreeta Das on Gaurdian on Social Networks & Monetization. Social Networks are now entering into a maturing phase and monetization can no longer be treated as future promise. Not just social networks, but the viral widgets providers have started making money (for themselves). Investors who would put money without realizing the roadmap and monetization strategy would be the victims of SNS gold rush and I really hope it doesn’t become yet another bubble.

Social Networks are the future gateways of the web, like we had directories and search in the past. Social Networks can also be about communication, engagement and content, it may not necessarily be the gateway for the more useful or day to day stuff in life - booking airline tickets and all. SNS like Facebook are already bombarded with Apps & Widgets and having too much on a Social Network is not a good thing. People are enjoying the novelty today but some are already experiencing the social network fatigue also.

The semantic web may be the answer going forward for Social Network too. The intelligence and discovery tools are the most important factor for any social networks. What we have right now is that I do a certain patchwork and spam my friends through Widgets and other playful stuff. Sometimes it is fun and sometime its not.

Coming to Monetization - Monetization in the current scenario is mainly limited to context and the behaviour. The content and the behaviour is very tough to analyse in the present scenario . The information from profile, relationships and conversation is very limited. On any social network the most difficult task is to find out the profile information of the user (and the right profile information). If you don’t get that right you do not get any click throughs. Behaviour again is challenging if people are just spamming each other and doing random stuff. The last but no the least - Conversation - well it has gone really really micro and super super random (see twitter).

Ultimately it comes to analytical study of your users - how to make sense from 100 widgets, 1000 friends and 10,000 scraps/guest books or Twitts. Signal Vs Noise

Popularity: 56% [?]

Times : From MTV Insight Studio’s book, The State of Cool:

Only 1 pc of young visitors of UGC sites actually upload any fresh or orginal. 90 pc are passive participators and 10 pc participate (in any form ) and leave comments

There have been previous study in the past which had the same observations about the UGC category in general. For people who work on UGC they know for real that it is always under 2 to 5 percent. It has become sort of a thumb rule - 2% UGC rule. But this is not a problem, the UGC should focus on overall growth and invite a steady flow plus incremental growth in these numbers

Youth across India spend up to Rs 9 billion in pocket money every day and only mobile phone is a item where they have 100% ownership

I hope this report should have come 10-20 years earlier, I would have shown this to my parent and prove them how I was below poverty line in terms of pocket money.

I hardly see anything happening in India in terms of personal electronic devices. In any of the metro’s you can see 100s of hawkers selling of cheap FM, MP3 players and myriad of other stuff which is mostly imported from China. But most of the electronics manufacturers have not ventured into personal electronic items - even though it has a great potential.

59% of youth visits social networking sites on the web to stay connected with their friends

Indian youth demands privacy and self-expression. He can post porn on Orkut, vent his anger against politicians and enjoy all voyeuristic pleasure - which is not at all possible in the so-called cultural Indian society. But they also engage into meaningful stuff or just to be in touch with real friends.

Popularity: 62% [?]

While some people are still debating the wisdom of crowd Vs professionalism and proclaiming that UGC is dead. Here is the best example of mass thinking and collaboration. This article on People Power cites numerous examples of how net users are coming together to change almost every aspect of our lives. People see UGC in terms of very limited scope, some funny videos and list of how to types link bait articles. The scope of UGC is not limited to posting content, it’s about helping each other out, sharing knowledge and doing something constructive.

UGC is not a new thing, the Internet itself is example of UGC. Internet is the biggest and the best example of collaborative technology. There is no other technology on this planet where so many people have come together, shared their knowledge and added it to the platform. Internet is still improvising and evolving, because UGC is not dead. When I say the Internet - it’s not just the protocols and the RFC submitted by tech gods, I also mean the tiny little freeware, thousands of open codes on sourceforge, millions of forums, yet another CSS menu and yet another how to stuff on blogosphere. Every netizien is contributing to this platform in his/her own capacity and that’s a wonderful things.

So, when you think of UGC, think of the big C as Collaboration. 

Popularity: 21% [?]

Barry Harrigan cites example of how IT companies are leveraging the social media. It’s a must read article if you watching social media space and want to pick up some real world examples.

Popularity: 24% [?]

Gaurav has written an excellent post on the problem with Indian social networking sites. I agree with Gaurav as most of the Indian SNS ventures are just mimics of the successful implementations in the western world. There is no unique story or experience in offering.

Hey ! you can make friends on Facebook, leave the millions already existing Indians there and join ours. We only have 100 users but what the heck we are truly Indian, buy Indian, be Indian. Is this your communication to your users, why the hell they would leave a robust global platform to be just your users.

Think out of the box and as Gaurav pointed, think about the unique cultural or social scenario in India and don’t look for numbers, look for niche. Satisfy the real needs of the real Indians. Gaurav cited the examples of few such sites like Babajob and Criticat and to tell you what, I have just moved to Bangalore and really looking for a house help through Babajob. Babajob may not get millions of page views as a standard teen flocked SNS, but it satisfies a need and would be easily able to sustain itself. And I think, there goal any ways is to provide services to the people and not to be a mass Internet company.

Indian Social Network, Just Think….

• Would you be really able to compete with Google, Yahoo, MSN, Facebooks and MySpaces of the world by mimicking them. Is that so easy ?
• If the current Indian Internet population is 30 million and majority of the Indian users are actually using the global players’ properties and tools, is it easier to join their SNSs or yours.
• What unique content, experience, connections, networks, super novas, roadmap you have in your SNS which others don’t have.
• Think about the future, what you can do or ride the wave and become a leader but others cannot. What unique advantage you have but others don’t.
• How does your SNS matter in my life, how sticky can you become for me. What is it that users are investing in your site, which would be a loss to your users when they leave your SNS

Popularity: 28% [?]

If you still feel the crowd has almost got no wisdom and only the professionals can rule the world, then check out this post by Danny Dover of SEOmoz where he talks about how a video reached number 1 on youtube and the mobocracy that let to its fall. The problem on social media is more actually from the spammers and not that much from the authentic amateurs. The mob may still behave in a very legitimate way if you allow them to and the right tools to exhibit that behavior. The future of UGC is not Professional Vs Amateur, it would be about why, how and what to control, the moderation features and the mobocratic features which would allow the immediate correction of such exploits.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Came across a nice blog by Christopher Carfi - The Social Cusotmer Manifesto. I am trying to build up a blog about users and how to make your users happy and this blog is something that excites me. We indeed are a social customer,it’s nice to see this blog which treats customers as the social participant and not just a commodity. The whole outlook changes when you say customers and when you say social customer. Social is a very powerful world and brings in thousands of strong qualifiers and attributes which we miss generally, when we are talking about customers. That also means, when you are making products or delivering services - also think if it is good for my customer, is it good for my society.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Steve Rubel writes on his blog why historically most online communities haven’t stuck. He has even pointed out some successful and not-successful examples. I haven been watching this space from quite some time now and have some observations as a user of these services and then actually working on such products. The most successful example of community for me is Slashdot. I think Rob Malda, the creator of Slashdot is a brilliant guy and knows what community and its users really mean

1. Why Communities don’t stick: Because it is very easy for its users to leave the community. Most of the recent examples of communities that you see are actually different variations of six-degree of seperation, about friends and paths to the friends. They started with this ‘Novelty’ of finding out the path between users and very soon the novelty faded for users and the SNS fatigue came in.

2. Build connections not just networks: A network is a technical word for connected nodes (any relations) whereas community, the word itself signifies strong connections between the nodes. So blogosphere is a big network of blogs which may include the splogs and content poser, but it a good share of this ecosystem behaves like a community where the connections are made through blog posts, blogroll or by the bloggers themselves.

3. Where is the Investment: It is very easy to create the network of nodes through a simple stuff like email invites. That’s what most social network thought. So they started having Invite your friends as a standard default page post registration and wanted to mimic the success of myspaces and facebooks of the world. People clicked on invite, spammed their friends on MSN, Yahoo and Google and that’s it. Network was built but not the community. So if your investment in the network is just a email spam, can it be a community - not really. And for that matter, time is also not the investment - would you not join Facebook or the lates in SNS or Community if it offers something more that your current community/SNS site and may be on the current one you may have spent a year or two spamming people and doing nothing worthwhile.

4. Novelty & Fatigue: The current community or the SNS model is driven around Novelty. Novelty is followed by fatigue. Common, how may friends you can have, how many pokes / scraps you can digest, how many supernovas you can follow, how many blind dates you can hunt for, how many forwards you can spam.  Where is the real need, the attachment and the bond that has a reason for you to stay.

5. Relationships & Connections: I go to Slashdot everyday, on any given day there are at least 3 - 4 posts that interests me, I click on them, read the news and go through the comments and sometimes I jump to write my own comments. Even if I am not a contributor, I have a relationship with the content and topics. Because, its about the news for nerds, stuff that matters. This ’stuff’ is the stuff that matters, how strongly your users feel connected and how strong is their relationship with your site, with your site’s content, with your users and with the connections that you provide on your network. That’s what people miss, when they wonder how Amazon or Ebay can be a example of a community. They fail to understand is that it’s something like the ‘tipping point’ where collectively society is showing a trend or a bias, may be at the individual levels but at the end of it all - humans are social animals and its all about community.

6. It’s all about Users stupid: No it’s not about forums, buddylist, email this, comment on this, or the 100 others features you can think of. Your community is built by users and it all depends how you treat your users, how do you communicate with the user and how do you really manage the user experience. So even a site with just plain phpBB installation can be a great example of a community and the other with all the bells can whistles can be a complete failure.

7. It’s also about the Moderation stupid: Slashdot or Digg, it’s all about the moderation. Moderation in terms of real precise filtering or just in terms of vote up/down buttons. It’s very easy to loose the focus and stray away from your path when you are interacting with 1000s of users. It’s also very important for you to manage the experience and the focus of the community site and intervene it between if that focus is lost. Moderation does not mean censoring or blocking, moderation means enabling intelligent communication and to filter signal from the noise. And the most successful community sites actually do it with the help of the users.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Beware of the Grandma :). It’s really touching to know how a Malaysian granny is using web 2.0 in politics to spread the awareness and the message. Cyndy Aleo-Carreira on Profy has the details. Examples like these actually makes you happy how people have taken the internet to the grass-roots levels and how they are using the tools to bring about the change in the society. My vote for the granny. India is such a big country and I constantly complain to myself, why don’t we have such grassroots particpation. Even the intellectuals doesn’t seem to connect over something here. Is it that we are too talkative and less action oriented. Have seen some initiatives like e-panchayat and babajobs but they are very few. I would really like to know if these kind of initiative exists in India and if you are aware about it, please do let me know.

Popularity: 41% [?]

I was going through Matt’s post today about BuddyPress, a WordPress MU-based platform which enabled the launch of social network ChickSpeak. Drupal is one of my another favourite open source CMS system which powers many community sites. I have been using Wordpress now for blogging and some of my earlier projects were on Drupal. And I am a fan of both for their unique offering and powerful feature sets.

What are social networks?
According to me a connected community is a social network. So, Slashdot is the oldest social network for me, blogging with a blog roll is a social network for me, digg is SNS, facebook in SNS , orkut is SNS and so on.

But most importantly according to the technical definition a social network should be a site (which can be about anything) which shows your your friends and friends of friends and forms a network.

Why strict social networks are difficult?
To show this path and calculate the relationship between users and show them the shortest path between any two users is the most difficult and intensive task. It can burn your processor and fry up your MySQL servers.

Blogging eco-system was a good candidate for social network
I was of the opinion that there would be some open standard, we all would have a blogroll, share it with each other through some common ‘platform’ and it would form a social network automagically, but that never happened. We could not share ‘friends’ and become ‘FOAF‘ of each other.

But Social Network is again about Content now as search is about Vertical now
Social networks after some time started showing up fatigue as users found out the economics of friending and ‘my network’ or ‘friends of friends’ was not something that would make you a permanent citizen of a SNS. WP&D based systems have the functionalities to enable ‘content’ and to enable ‘niche/vertical’.

Social is Personal again
Now again SNS is about my stuff, my friends, my photos, my choices,  my groups, my videos and all that personal stuff.

Wordpress & Drupal ; why it may work
- WP & D both are most popular content management system around the web. Have thousands of extensions and can be modified not just by a opensource developer but also by a relatively code-challenged person also.
- The developer community of both of these software are almost wanting to change the world. They are not limited by ideas and are constantly improving their codes and adding the new ones
- WP & D are the platform which are not just limited to common / personal use but also have a serious business and commercial use by some major media players.
- The sort of affinity groups that you can create around a custom or niche site is far superior compared to a generalistic social network.
- SNS of now may be SNS portals or gateways for future which would connect or be a distributors of SNS built on WP & D and such.
- There are thousands and millions of permutation and combinations possible on the look & functionality of these WP & D based solutions. Whereas, it will be disasterous for SNS to offer each of these.
- Users have a personality disorder, as more and more people realize that they cannot have a one SNS profile for all their personalities, they will hop on to micro SNS sites rather than a big SNS sites where the boss and the wife both can watch them.
- Problem of plenty, if you have millions and billions of topic - is it possible for a single SNS to cover, No?
- SNS are just new Chat, IM and Email, a place where they converge.
- How many social networks are possible  ? - Go to Dmoz, pick each of the categories and subcategories and multiply them, multiply with number of locations (city, street, buildings…) and now multiply it with number of people on this planet. In short, infinite social networks are possible.
- WP&D offer the plaform for creating this infinite possibilities, may be in future we all will have a mandatory blogs and our friendship will be shown in cross-posting.
- I am not sure of WP, but Drupal sites are interoperable with each other in terms of logins and APIs. If all the WP&D sites start talking to each other and would allow connections through APIs or through Semantics - then they are social network automagically. So Technorati, you already are a SNS of blogs and may be the candidate of becoming a facebook or myspace, when connected WP&D ecosystem is not a dream but a reality
- If future is to be believed Semantics is the key of the web 3.0, so what will happen to search engines and SNS. They will stay ofcourse but the dependency would be less. The WP&D based system will cross-refer and links each other in much more intelligent way. So for a niche segment you may enter any site and just keep on browsing and discovering instead of going to ‘oracle’ on the Internet and asking her every time the difference between the blue pill and the red pill. You will enter into the WP&D matrix and the matrix will guide you on it’s own.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Kiruba Shankar talks about the power of community engagement and cites an example of soul of the night contest by Nokia. I agree with Kiruba on the importance of engaging your users and inviting their participation instead of just the brand exposure. Brands are fighting with each other on exposure - a) against the identity of the other brands b) fighting for the exposure points - print, broadcast and new media. In this scenario a little more is required and some more involvement to be the top recall in users’ mind.

Brands can stretch the idea of exposure and impressions and take it forward to engagement, particpation and involvement. The identity created through the engagement is more powerful and stays with the users for a much longer time.

The other such recent example which I liked is American Express’s Open Forum. Open Forum is about networking, ideas and expertise for business owners and it syncs well with American Express’s Open for Business which is a special membership program for small business owners. Open Forums has articles, resources, discussion boards, success stories, event calendar, members directory and most of the things related to Small Business and it’s owners. They have also managed to have grab right people to speak on right topics. For example, check out this video interview of Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg who talks about staying focussed on success.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Jemima Kiss writes :

User content is at the heart of Web 2.0, which has spawned hundreds of sites that encourage users to share, discuss and contribute their ideas, photos, videos and digital miscellany. Acknowledging and adapting to this trend has been a key challenge for traditional, professional media sites whose business models have relied on being a one-way, authoritative gatekeeper of information and content. City University’s senior journalism lecturer Neil Thurman has carried out four years of research into the uncomfortable relationship between traditional news organisations and user-generated content. Published last week, his report - ‘Forums for citizen journalists?’ - says that despite a heavy emphasis on UGC, the volume of response from users is typically very low and UGC is also a big drain on resources because of moderation and legal issues.

Talking about moderation issue raised in the study

The moderation is of course the most important issue on any news sites :The reaction to an abusive post is 100 times more on a reputed news site that a open forum or pure UGC sites. The news sites not only get flames from the regular pious users but also from the goverment, legal and sensorship authorities. A celebrity would not dare to sue a pure UGC site but would not leave if it a mainstream media company.

But still the benefits out weigh the demerits of having a UGC as in between you always have some gems who would offer you the true, genuine and unique insight to a particular topic or situation.

Outsource your moderation: Many news sites assign this double duty to their editors to moderate the content and comments. This is painful and not something an editor or media professional would enjoy. Instead of that one should device a policy, hand it over to outsourced moderator and focus on content and quality.

Pre and Post Moderation:There is no ideal method of pre-moderation or the post-moderation. One has to have both so that mistakes can be avoided and corrected. Also don’t fatigue a particular moderator on handling everything that you have. Have different levels of delegations in moderation process, so that you have a basic moderator for 1st level content filtering, 2nd level moderator who may only work on post moderation and other issues and the 3rd level of super-super moderator who acts as an arbitrator for any major disputes and issue with legal and users.

Popularity: 39% [?]

David cites an interesting example of how social media has passed the test through recent elections campaigning in the US and the turnout :

Are social media tools creating high turnout? Absolutely not. There are a million different reasons someone gets motivated to vote, and I doubt any of them begin with the word, “MySpace.” But these tools are absolutely critical to that campaign’s success.

We’ve known for decades, even centuries, that young people filter information through their peers. This filter makes the information more credible and approachable. That’s what social networks do.

While some might think social network utilities like MySpace are just a techie-based wedge to give nerds their own secret club, they’re actually filters that break down barriers of communication. They expand access to information. They give consumers some ownership of that information. And the marketing guru-types will tell you when someone feels ownership over something, they’re more likely to act.

Popularity: 24% [?]

Mashable reports:

LinkedIn is finding new and interesting ways in which to use its data, not for advertising, but for research. According to an O’Reilly report, LinkedIn will be launching the LinkedIn Research Network in order to provide primary research services to financial markets. The new research arm is scheduled to be launched later on this year.

Popularity: 24% [?]

In competition with Facebook APIs, here is the progress report which states that google is releasing the applications built on Open Social API running on orkut. Google is loosing to social networks and there is a buzz that it wants to pick up Bebo for $1b. Myspace also unveiled it’s developer platform 2 days back. And Yahoo is also doing the same through its MyBlogLog API

Marshall Kirpatrick feels MySpace Platform aims to pick up where Facebook left off and FaceReviews carries a detailed comparison of MySpace with Facebook platform. Whereas, Eweek questions the data portability.

Facebook is gearing up to the situation and trying to make its application more intelligent by punishing stupid applications

Popularity: 26% [?]

Folding@home™   is a distributed computing project at Stanford University which aims at researching protein folding and misfolding to gain an understanding of how these are related to disease. Some of the diseases that this research covers are Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and many forms of cancer and many many others.

Via Information Week - Sony Entertainment in offering an environment for distributed computing applications through PlayStation 3  and more than one million PlayStation 3 users are particpating in it.

Popularity: 20% [?]