Webnomena

First, I stopped using my favorites, then Digg, Delicious and other social rating/bookmarking websites,  now I found myself using less and less the RSS reader, Google or Netvibe. I find great content on Twitter, Twitter search Trending Topics and recently even greater quality content using Twitter based search tools. These are services that mine links from Twitter updates, using different algorithms and post them in an organized fashion. I will refer to these as real-time news search services like Feedly, Microplaza and others.

RSS readers limitations:

Limited selection – it takes time to find and build selection of great blogs.  What if the selected blog did not produce any good content lately?

Scalability – it requires the time to organize feeds into tabs or folders. Also some readers, after adding more content grew slower (some more than others).

Social rating/bookmarking websites

I do use delicious for bookmarking of great information and some time for search but I rarely visit the Popular Bookmark page. Submitting content to Digg is too slow and I think that rating is not as powerful as retweeting.

Email subscription

There are some blogs that I follow constantly and I find the email subscription option to work best. This way I know for sure that I’m not missing new content on a daily basis.

The new feed

I now count on Twitter and a growing number of real-time news search websites to feed my curiosity with links.

Feedly – the irony is that Feedly is actually taping into your Google Reader feeds and tags, but it also brings content from other sources including Twitter. You can even see Hot topics via Twitter i.e. trending tags and hashtags. Read more here

MicroPlaza – this service looks at popular links posted on Twitter by the people I’m following (my timeline view). You can also see popular links posted on the public timeline. There is a new feature called Tribe, it is in the work but this option allows me to filter/organize popular links by grouping (enrolling) different people whom I follow on Twitter, into different Tribes. I wish I could use Twellow or WeFollow to speed up organizing my personal list into categories and use them as Tribes in MicroPlaza but this is still better filter than TweetDeck grouping option. In MicroPlaza I only see the popular links from the tribe and not other useless chatty noise – this is a great filter . There are more features and I do plan to cover this service more thoroughly in another post but here I want to focus on the new Trend.

There are growing number of similar services out there. I’m monitoring an additional one but I won’t mention the name yet (giving them a chance to improve). The key feature for me is the quality of the links. How good is the information that the service successfully managed to mine from all the noise on Twitter. The speed is important too. So far the two mentioned above are doing fantastic job.

Using Twitter timeline for the content source pool, employing millions of human web crawlers, filtered by the people I trust (follow) and other mining technics seems like an improved method for finding the best content out there. It truely gives me an edge over RSS feed reader.

Did you stop using your RSS reader too?

I owe it to Sagee Ben-Zedeff for helping me to become aware of this change in my habits and the new Trend. This is another great thing about Twitter – I now reflect more rapidly:)

Search is infrastructure

Should we start looking at investments in building and maintaining search engines similar to other investment in infrastructure systems? I see two similarities. The first is that it is the next important thing in our digital lifestyle today after the hardware and software that connect our computers together. The second is because of the huge cost required for building and maintaining one.

The next most important thing

If you stop for a second to think about how many times a day you employ a search engine to accomplish a task you’ll notice that life could be way harder without it. If you need to find a place, a person or a  job online search is your starting point. It is the same case when looking for information about a disease, a company or a product. Modern search engines also helps to find directions, contact info, stock quotes and many more. I can’t think of a day without using a search engine (Google or others). When I think about infrastructure on a large scale I think about roads, train tracks, ports, and utilities. Metaphorically search engines take us from one place to another and if done right can save us a ton of time and energy. If done poorly it is a big waste!

Do you think like me that search engine have an impact on the world economy?

The mighty task

The web is big and expanding. In February of 2007, the Netcraft Web Server Survey found 108,810,358 distinct websites (not pages). In March of 2009 Netcraft found 224,749,695. New blogs are popping up every day and blogs post in some cases multiple times a day. Recently with the introduction of microblogging services like Twitter and other personal life streaming tools, content is growing even more rapidly. The information is also dynamic: websites go down and pages are being constanlty modified. Blogs allow people to leave comments over time. Content is way more than text and includes video, audio, and images.

Search consists of many steps and usually it starts with crawling – getting the data. This is a mighty task that requires building an army of web crawlers to spider the web. It requires a crawling plan using sophisticated algorithms looking for new content and also for keeping the stored ones up to date. It requires huge number of storage place and heavy computation resources.

The other tasks include indexing, lingual processing and ranking (for relevance and popularity). If you are interested in learning how Google scale this process by breaking down tasks even further read the following blog post about Google Architecture.

It is impossible to compare but it seems like building and maintaining a large scale search engine is as hard as building a new power station and probably costs as much too.

Do you think like me that search engines have an impact on our energy resources and our environment?

Question and concerns

The purpose of this section is getting you thinking about my analogy and what it might mean.

The Monopoly question – do we need more than one?

In some aspect the search engine industry fit the Natural monopoly dual definitions:

1. “…it is the assertion about an industry, that multiple firms providing a good or service is less efficient (more costly to a nation or economy) than would be the case if a single firm provided a good or service.”
2. “It is said that this is the result of high fixed costs of entering an industry which causes long run average costs to decline as output expands”

Google could be explained as a natural monopoly.  It now has now more than 70% market share.

The first definition raises the question: why do we need to more than one?  The second could explain why only one may survive.

If you noticed in my language here I leave plenty of room for alternative options – it is on purpose. I know software and technology too well to surprise me. IBM was almost invincible at the time, Sun was not far from it too. Even Microsoft does not look as intimidating as it use to be. And if you believe that real-time search is the future than you already know that maybe there is no need for deploying such a huge crawling tasks in order to find great content.

I personally don’t have much concerns about Google as a monopoly now. As a consumer I don’t feel any pricing power:) but maybe the companies that pay for ads do.

I do have concerns about the cost of maintaining a search engine or duplicating the effort in a large scale.

High Energy cost

Here is an excerpt from Data Center Energy Forecast – Executive Summary – July 29, 2008.

“As of 2006, the electricity use attributable to the nation’s servers and data centers is estimated at about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), or 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption. Between 2000 and 2006 electricity use more than doubled, amounting to about $4.5 billion in electricity costs. This amount was more than the electricity consumed by color televisions in the U.S. It was equivalent to the electricity consumed by 5.8 million average U.S. households (which represent 5% of the U.S. housing stock). And it was similar to the amount of electricity used by the entire U.S. transportation manufacturing industry (including the manufacture of automobiles, aircraft, trucks, and ships)”

Google is making an effort to reduce the cost of their data centers’ energy bills. My concern is that having multiple search engine companies around seems as wasteful as pooling multiple power lines to every home. I also think that the energy consumption should be distributed across the globe since the search engine serves the entire world and not only one country.

Yet, what will happen if Google goes belly up?

I know that this seems radical and almost unimaginable at this point but what if one day advertisers will find another place to buy ad-space other than SERPs? Our lives are so dependent on Internet search technology that if no one can pay for the cost of maintaining one that could be a big regression with direct impact on world economy.

Should we do something?

Regulations

One way to deal with Natural Monopoly is to turn in into some sort of Government-granted monopoly. In this case it is not the government but some sort of world organization that can enforce regulations and demands like:

• More energy efficient data centers
• Improving crawl technics (Cuil claimed it has one)
• Crawl to cover more ground -  deep web
• Accounting governance and building cash reserves.

I know that this is radical – please remember, the purpose of this article is not to support going back to controlled market but to get us aware of the cost, power and dependencies associated with search engines.

How to break Google the right way?

I read somewhere that maybe Google should be broken up by the functionality it provides like search, email, maps etc… Another way to break Google is to take away the crawl and leave the rest. Something like the Yahoo BOSS model. The crawl should be done by a single non profit organization founded by multiple governments (i.e. tax money). In the same way as we pay for our education system (I know…it is not that great). Again, just think about it differently for a moment:)

The New Deal

I know that this is the most radical idea in this post but if search engine is such an important part of our infrastructure should our president, Barack Obama, include it in his 21st Century New Deal? At the least listing maintaning search engine as another infrastructure system. Maythe one that function relativly the best at this point.

Summary

The points that I like you to take from this post are:

• Search engine is more than software
• The tasks of building and maintaining new search engine on a large scale have an impact on society
• Search is a global problem
• We are heavily dependent on this technology
• Google is a monopoly – for good and bad.
• Maybe it is time to rethink the old way of crawling the web
  • How much data is collected but never used (SERP #200)?
  • Can people replace crawling (Social search engines/Twitter)?

Picture credit to my favorite artist Ron Shoshani

Social media may sounds too simple: sharing, caring, and link love. It is tempting to jump right in, getting on-board without planing. Although  that might work well for the individual, I don’t recommend it to the business. The company should think about goals, content, expectations, and strategy, before making the leap in. Here are 10 questions that the company may start with.

10 practical questions about Social Media

1. What should an established company blog about?
2. What should a start-up company blog about?
3. What should both company types avoid writing about?
4. Should you be on Twitter (a question for the CEO/Founder)?
5. Should you have a personal Twitter account in addition to the venture account? Should you use both in conjunction (a question for the CEO/Founder)?
6. Whom should the corporate invite to write on its blog ( from within and the outside)?
7. How does a thought leader looks like?
8. How do you project an Executive Presence on social media channels?
9. Assuming value using Social Media, how long do you expect till it materialized (a question for the venture leaders)?
10. What do you expect to drive using social media tools: leads generation/traffic, brand marketing/monitoring/web presence, relationship building/corporate development, else?

Is this how a thought leader looks like?

In order to come up with the right strategy for an effective use of social media, these questions, among others, should be discussed. Participation in Social digital media is an on-going effort, one that requires an investment of company time and resources. It is a cross-functional effort with multiple stakeholders. Having clear expectations for the effort level required from each organizational function, is crucial.

I think that it is possible to come up with  good answers to most of the questions  above (and I don’t claim to be a Social Media expert).

Other questions are still open and will require more research:

Are social media values quantifiable? How? What are the measures?

Large corporation should invest time searching for social media measures and ROI. A large corporate, with Marketing budget that could be allocated across multiple channels, will have to identify and monitor different indicators  in order to justify an investment in social media. Even prior to adding social media channels and tools, the company must evaluates its commitment level for participation in social media.

For a small start-up company where Social Media is, by large, the cheapest way around for building presence in the market (for both targeting investments and market penetration) the ROI question is almost irrelevant. The investment is small in compare to other means of branding and the results are potentially dramatic. A single lead can make a critical difference to the start-up survival chances. Being reviewed by an influencing blogger can drive traffic and product adoption. Getting feedback or advice from fans and followers may get the company/product on the right track.

Prior to adding social media to the mix, no matter what type of organization you run, think about the 10 questions above (and some more). There are great resources out there that can help you to start on the right foot. The best advice I should give you is to start reading blogs.

What other questions about social media should be asked?

Btw, the picture above was taken by me while visiting the Sidney Zoo in Australia (2005).

Headup – the semantic web Firefox addon

I recently started using Headup. I’ve been looking for this kind of addon for some time now. When bits of information are missing from peoples’ profile pages, product specs, media, and other online content it is crucial to combine multiple data sources to piece together a complete picture. Headup does this!

Using its smart semantic mapping of entities and relationships Headup gathers and links information from multiple online sources. To complete the picture it then personalizes the results using your presence on multiple web services like Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc.
Headup is not only innovative in its semantic approach to linking data, it also integrates nicely with your Firefox browser and offers you a few ways to access the data it discovers. One example is Google searches: After installing Headup you can expect to see your search term annotated “Headup:[search term]” with a thin orange underline at the top of Google’s results. When your mouse hovers over the term a click-able circular plus sign loader will allow you to open Headup’s overlay  interface.

 

The starting point – googling eagle eye.

The complete picture – headup-ing eagle eye

I recommend you visit Headup‘s website to learn how to use it but as a whole it’s pretty intuitive and I prefer dedicating this post to the reasons you should get it:

My eight reasons for using the Headup Semantic Web Firefox add-on :

1. Because hyperlinks simply aren’t enough – Relying merely on arbitrarily selected outbound links that send you to find info related to the page you are browsing is limiting. There are more relationships among the different entities on the page that could be leveraged to retrieve associated information. Headup already mapped out these semantic links and makes them available for you in a neat and accessible interface. The experience doesn’t end with search results.
2. Because you can save valuable search time - Both the user interface, and the way information is presented, require less clicks to complete an in-depth search through multiple search sources.
3. Because the information comes to you – Search can be an exhausting task. In many cases it involves either a recursive drilling down into multiple levels, or traversing the search vertical up and down for additional information. Google itself is aware of this potentially laborious process and is making an effort to bring associated information to the first SERP: Recently when I googled the term “movie” I got three results that were movies playing in theaters in my area. Headup provides multiple data types as a default: Using Headup on the “Pink Floyd” will get you a summary relating to the term, the bands albums, see photos depicting it, listen to the bands songs while reading their lyrics, find news blogs and web activities related to it, and much more.
4. Because it brings down the chances you’ll miss key information – “Headuping” people is a terrific way to learn more about them. I “Headup-ed” my friend Bill Cammack on Facebook and immediately discovered that he’s a video editor with an Emmy award to his name. In this case the extra information regarding the Emmy award was brought in from Bill’s LinkedIn profile.
5. Because you can learn and find information you didn’t expect -  If the example from my previous item wasn’t proof enough here’s anoter example: I ran Headup on “Kill Bill” (what can I say? – I’m a Tarantino fan) and discovered this blog post published today (1-2-2009): “More Kill Bill on the way” – Tell me this isn’t cool!!
6. Because it’s personalized – When configuring Headup after download, or later via the “Settings” option, you can choose to connect Headup to the online services you are subscribed to. Headup connects to a wide variety of web services like: Gmail, Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, FriendDeed, Digg, Last.fm etc. The information Headup retrieves from these services allows it to personalize the info it discovers for you: If you Headup a firm you’ll get friends of yours that work there. If you Headup a band you’ll see who in your network likes them. This is another example of how Headup is not just a search tool but a browsing experience.
7. Because you don’t lose your starting point – Headup is designed as an overlay window that keeps your starting web page, and anything else you have open on your desktop, visible beneath the interfaces’ SilverLight frame. Inside Headup you can drill down endlessly, but when you’re done you are back where you started.
8. Because your information is safe – from Headup’s Privacy Policy – “In plain English”:

“We here at Headup treasure our privacy and that’s exactly why we made every effort to create a browser add-on that would live up to user privacy standards we would be comfortable with. We’d be embarrassed to let you download an add-on we wouldn’t download ourselves.”

 

**You don’t need to sign-up for using Headup and your information is stored on your machine only**

 **Bonus: one additional reason – because on some pages it ROCKS! Try it on last.fm and you’ll see why it ROCKS…literally! By the way, the Headup user interface lets you watch videos and listen to music like a regular media player.

My questions for the Headup team

I plan on occasionally checking Headup’s blog for updates. At this point Headup supports Firefox on Windows and on Macs but I know that they plan to support more browsers in the future. I think that at this point the key thing to focus on is that the Headup concept works.

I do have few questions for the Headup team:

1. Do you plan on adding vertical derived classifications? I can see some use cases for health (and maybe even for software development). Just as headup was able to map out “Actors”, “Films by the same director”, “Web Activities”, “Related News”, “Trailers”, etc. for a “Film” type entity. I can see it applied in a similar fashion for a “Health” type entity – retrienving things like: “Case”, “Treatment”, “Clinics”, “Pharmaceuticals”, “News Groups” etc…
2. Do you see enterprise usage for Headup? I still need to give it more thought but having Headup in my email could be cool. Another possible implementation is supporting corporate CMS tools.

Epilogue – Is Headup’s “Top Down” approach the face of the future Semantic Web?

The Semantic web promises to make information understandable by machines. If you follow Alex Iskold‘s excellent series on Semantic Web on ReadWriteWeb you are aware of the multiple approaches to make this happen. The top-down method implemented by Headup helps brings the future to us a little sooner. I think Headup is giving us a taste of what future browsers will look like in an age when they, and other tools, will be able to understand more than just hyperlinks. When using Headup it feels like I’m doing more than “browsing” or “searching” I feel like I’m experiencing a new web!

One last thing: using Headup for some objects didn’t yield complete results. Don’t judge them too harshly for it, instead please focus on the concept. My experience with Headup so far is that in most cases the relevancy of the information provided was more than reasonable. I think that for a small company just out of Alpha what has been accomplished in the short time the company has exited is impressive and promises that improvements will be fast coming.

I’m using Headup and gave you the eight reason I have for doing so. If you are using it too I’d be happy to hear why…

 

I’ve been running Blogmon since February 2008. You can find more information about this micro service here. In essence it is capable of monitoring blogs and bloggers progress using the Technorati data over time(rank mainly).

Most time we can easily find the top bloggers out there but there are many great bloggers in the middle of the pack or beginners that are marching quickly up the blogsphere. I hope that Blogmon is helping in exposing the rapid movements and progress of few bloggers out there. I some time view it as my own dynamic Favorites that is occasionally reminding me of blogs that are worth more visits. I’m happy to share it with you.

In 2008 Blogmon monitored over 1,000 blogs, some were discovered by me or shared by friends through Twitter and other Social Networks, and others pragmatically by crawling the web. The service reported 658 updates (as of today) through Twitter @Blogmon account along with information about their progress over the year.

Here are Blogmon’s 10 best bloggers for 2008:

Blog	Blogger	Baseline Rank	Current Rank	Gain from Baseline
Startup Meme – Technology Startup and Latest Tech News	Bilal Hameed	1,910,875	11,089	99.4%
Parenting ideas from dads – dad-o-matic	Founded by the legendary Chris Brogan and authored by friends	1,943,068	29,490	98.5%
Doug Haslam	Doug Haslam	1,072,771	18,984	98.2%
Reflections of Time	Milton Chai	4,978,471	93,172	98.1%
Cool Mom Guide	Julie maloney	1,546,784	44,421	97.1%
Enter the Octopus	Matt Staggs	736,965	24,853	96.6%
The Lessnau Lounge – Finding the American dream	John Lessnau	605,911	32,945	94.6%
Six Revisions – Web Development and Design Information	Jacob Gube	17,159	939	94.5%
ToastedRav	ToastedRav Staff	1,245,176	93,172	92.5%
Social media PR from Press Release PR owner Danny Brown	Danny Brown	1,286,970	103,392	92.0%

I have one more super excellent blog on Blogmon top list – yes, good guess:)  Since Chris is well known (yet still is working very hard as you can see below) I wanted to allow room for one more new blogger that is storming up the blogsphere. Yes, Danny it is you – keep the good work going.

Social media business strategy and more

Chris Brogan

1,512

61

96.0%

The idea behind Blogmon is monitoring progress. Most time you can only see a snapshot of the current state not telling about the direction (up, down or stagnant). Blogmon keeps historical information and can compute both the speed and direction (velocity) with the intention of exposing talented hard working bloggers before everybody else knows about them.

Happy new year and have a great #bl09ing year!

Anyway, for a better 2009 (the Creed One lyrics)

  I recently noticed on LinkedIn that one of my old friend is now the CEO and founder of a new start-up company named Datanetis. I sent him an email because I was intrigue and it was also a good opportunity to catch up.  Elery Pfeffer and I worked together few years ago in a small start-up called Nester Software (later the name changed to Plataine) he was a student back then and I was thinking about moving to America. He is one of the brightest people I ever met.  Elery graduated from Tel-Aviv university in computer science and in a country with so many bright people and very few universities, it is as hard to become a student in Tel-Aviv university as it is in one of the Ivy League education institutions over here. Yet the thing that makes Elery a great friend is his strong integrity and generosity. Later he become the President of Nester, I made it to the state and we kept the friendship and mutual respect going.

Elery was kind enough to spend an hour with me over the phone and through GoToMeeting session he presented his new creation. Now, I was even more excited. Datanetis is the real thing! It is not another dot com web2.0 bubble company. The company has a real product with multiple patent pending applications describing algorithms for finding influencers, highly complex (real barriers to entry), and scalable. Datanetis is selling it to the enterprise as a hosted solution and providing new data about whom should the bushiness focus his best marketing effort on – leads to influencer on other leads. And they already have large customers around the world.

Elery view of the new marketing is revolutionary.

“The new marketing is not just about customer’s monetary value but also about the customer’s social value to the organization.”

For someone that has been working building software for the marketing automation industry over 8 years now and is familiar with multiple solutions for finding the right prospect out of many, it was an eye opener. I’m evidencing the progression from mass email campaigns through marketing to target individuals with a matching/relevant offers (data mining, behavioral pattern, collaborate filtering, recommendation engines) to finding customers that can market for you – agents.

Finding subtle connections between individual and causality.

Followers buy only in networks where influencers buy first

Quoting Harvard Business Review:

“The only path to profitability growth may lie in a company’s ability to get its loyal customers to become, in effect, its marketing department”

So who are these loyal customers?

Datanetis’s software is capable of both automatically generating social networks from low level CRM data within the customer database and to mathematically identify influencers and followers. This information could be used to increase the return on every marketing dollar spent on new product adoption(x5-x70), new customers acquisition(x12), churn prevention (x10-x30), conversion, product cross sell(x6), higher product virality, and significant cost reduction.

From Datanetis’s experience, social network marketing using influencers is comprised of two cycles. The first is the closed friends cycle, from the results it seems as if they almost decide simultaneously to follow the leader. This first wave peaks around 4-5 weeks from the beginning of the campaign. The second wave peaks around 9-10 weeks traversing through the rest of the social sphere. This may indicate that the customers are going through different decision making processes at different locations on the social network graph (influencers affinity). This knowledge offers Datanetis customers ways to fine tune their campaigns over time.

In my opinion this disruptive technology will force changing some of the operations and thinking in the marketing department going forward.

Viral marketing is not just hit and run but a multiple acts campaign.

Another interesting finding that Elery shared with me is the lack of influencers trivial characteristics. Any attempt, so far, trying to map influencers based on demographic, product adoption or any other factor distinguishing them from the population failed.

This is what Datanetis found about these individuals only after finding them using their software:

• Social Influencers are not celebrities and resellers
• Influencers typically
  • represent 7-15% of the total population
  • has influence in 3-5 different subject areas

Datanetis successfully executed hundreds of large scale social marketing campaigns and is globally active in Retail, Telco, Gaming, Internet, and Hospitality industries.

Here is what that Elery suggests to the marketers out there:

“Don’t focus only on turning leads into sales, focus on turning influencers into ambassadors for your company.”

The influencers phenomenon is covered vastly on the web ever since the invention of digital social networks and the social graph. From what that I read so far it seems to me that we are still in the experimental/research phase. I was excited about finding a real application with proven method for finding influencers. Maybe Datanetis will help pushing this new science forward.

I’m currently reading a book called Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (1 edition- April 21, 2008). This book was written by two Forrester analyst, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff . In this book the authors are  advising companies about the power of social technologies and how to see it as an opportunity instead of a new threat. The book objective is to educate marketer working for different size corporations about social networks, crowd sourcing, social bookmaking, forums and other people empowering technologies. As I’m reading it I’m realizing that this book is also a very useful resource for entrepreneurs contemplating about building applications engaged in social objects. It is also a good resource for VCs that are about to invest in these kind of endeavors.

In the second chapter of this book the authors suggest a brilliant test to justify the existence of a new social technology. They name it: The Groundswell technology test

This test consists of five questions and in the book the authors ran Twitter through the test. Twitter passed with flying  colors as you can imagine.

Anyway here are the questions:

• Does it enable to connect with each other in new ways?
• Is it effortless to signed-up for?
• Does it shift power from institution to people?
• Does the community generate enough content to sustain itself?
• Is it an open platform that invites partnership?

Could this be the recipe for viral product?!

We know that a product requires more non-feature requirements like being scalable, having good performance, better than average usability, being secure, supporting global adoption, well designed (looks good) and more to be successful, yet the justification for its existence could be found in the answers to the questions above.

So run your new creation through these questions, find the gap(s) and make it better along these five dimensions.

This chapter on Google Book Search

This book on Amazon

 

I signed up recently to QWITTER , this service tells about people that stopped following me on Twitter. I had doubt about the value of this tool but since it was easy to use I gave it a try. Getting on-board only require your Twitter user name and email for sending you the notifications.The first couple of days I got one or two messages that looks like that:

Hi, kerendg.
<Twitter user name> – stopped following you on Twitter after you posted this tweet:
<my tweet>

Check out <Twitter user name> profile here:
http://twitter.com/<Twitter user name>

Best,
Qwitter

I could not find any logical connection between my innocent tweet and this person abandoning my Twittership.

Anyway, few more days passed and on the election day I was monitoring closely the tags on TwitScoop. At some point I notice the word Miracle on the screen. I clicked to check what conversations on Twitter mentioned this word and in what context.

Well, the conversation where basically saying that John McCain will need  a miracle to win this election.

So I sent a Tweet about this tag….

The following day I got three Qwitter messages that looks like this.

Hi, kerendg.
<Twitter user name> stopped following you on Twitter after you posted this tweet:
my tweet about TwitScoop capturing the MIRACLE tag <the TwitScoop tag>

Check out <Twitter user name> profile here:
http://twitter.com/<Twitter user name>
Best,
Qwitter

OK, now I can see some connection. I can assume that these followers were not too happy with the election results. I can assume that they assume from my Tweet that I’m favoring one party over another. By the way I did not vote in this election (I have to wait few more years to become an American citizen first) and I can’t say that I formed a rock solid opinion yet.

A wise friend once told me that if something happened once it is a fluke, if it happened twice it is a coincidence but if it happens three times then it is a system (or a pattern in my geeky world).

What can we learn from this example:

1. If there are more than one followers that un-follow you after a tweet then there is a chance for causality association between the tweet and the reaction.
2. If this works on the negative way there is a high chance that it will work in the positive direction too. Why only look for connections between poor tweets and people that stop following you. For a single twitter user it is easy to find what he said or did that won him a bunch of new followers. Yet, if QWITTER could tell me what others are doing that suddenly adds to their Twitter followers count I might learn a thing or two. 
3. Finally: It may not be my assumed political opinions that cost me three followers, it could be my insensitivity, sending this tweet in such troubled time for supporters of the other party was probably a poor social media action. I think that I’ve actually learned something from this service.

Your thoughts.

As I wrote in my previous post about the role of social media delivering dramatic news events, this time around we have a real opportunity to experience the election day on an entire different level. We can converse on many social media platforms, we can listen to others talking about this election. We can get alerts, links, comments that will prompt us to react in real-time to news about this exciting day.

This is how I’m going to “watch” the election day:

• Check Twitter VoteReport – you can also set an iFrame page in your Blog or iGoogle (take only the url and remove the iFrame code)
• I’m going to use my TweetDeck window single view – pointing to TwitScoop
• I will double check with Twitter Search Trening Topics just in case the first two missed on something
• I’m going to rely on the people I follow on Twitter to share some news and links keeping me in the loop
• I may search  comments about the election on Backtype
• I can also search for the word election on FriendFeed or join the US Politics room

 

Others:

• http://election.twitter.com/
• http://www.perspctv.com/
• And I’m sure that there are more mashups out there coveing the election day

I will probably open the TV occasionally or read some news on a traditional news web-site. I may even read an article or two from the newspaper. Yet, I mostly plan to experience this event as socially as possible on the new media. I’m looking forward for your conversations.

The hard part – I need to wait few more years before I can vote. I’m only a permanent resident.

Happy election day and I wish America to come up with new president that will lead us through the challenges ahead.

When I was in college I stumbled upon an article about dramatic media news events (printed copy). I can’t remember the name of the article and I could not find it online. The article talked about three dramatic news events: accomplishments, competitions, and coronations. For instance, stepping on the moon was quite dramatic accomplishments. Campaigning for presidency role is a very long competition with several challenging milestones (e.g. debates) and one dramatic end. The inauguration ceremony is an example for dramatic coronations.

 This article was written many years ago way before the term social media was coined. I do remember enjoying reading it because the article captured well the role of TV and traditional mass media in broadcasting these breath taking news.

There are more dramatic events in our life some positive falling under the categories of the three mentioned above and others not so much: terror attack, extreme weather and earthquake to name a few. Social media today plays a significant role in dramatic events. People can participate and augment the news report via sharing, reacting, analysis, celebrating and more. It is a potential outlet for thoughts and feeling otherwise kept inside. It is much easier to share when you see that many more participants do so and so openly. The major dramatic events are not a daily thing (thanks god), yet there are numerous small scale life events that happens all the time.

A birth of a baby or getting married. Some people shared about buying a new iPhone as an accomplishment event (after standing for hours in line I can see that too:). Your product was selected for a voting competition is another. Being listed for the Oprah of the social media is some sort of coronation events or wining a prize. Running a short query on Twitter Search revels lots of  small to large accomplishments. On the negative side by registering to the Missing Persons room on FriendFeed we are now exposed to horrible and terrifying news. If you feel that the news does not following you enough go ahead and follow both traditional and social news about the elections here. It was hard to ignore the World Series tweets even after the Red Sox did not make it there:) . Even personal historical life events like the #badfirstdate are widely shared on Twitter – I had some good laugh reading through. And if there is a need to check the sentiment on Twitter when something new happened try this query. Beware, don’t try it on Monday morning:) I learned about Paul Newman death on Twitscoop. I was an admirer and I wanted to see what others are saying about it.

The social media news world provides the stage for endless additional sources sharing both type of dramatic and not so news events. Beyond sharing, this new media creates an echo chamber where people are commenting, reacting, voting and raising awareness. One would think that an inflation of news event will depreciate the value of a single drama but in my opinion it is the other way around. The social media channels (tools and applications) only amplified the experience of most events.   Sharing something that happened (or happening) in your life (good or bad) on Twitter, your blog or your news feed on Facebook could actually reach a large part of the blog/twitter-sphere. On the other end, participating and discussing world, country, town, friends and family events has the potential for changing the original news.

There are lots of open questions about the new media and its role in general. Here are few questions about its specific role in distributing and handling news events:

• How to make sure that enough context is provided along with the report maintaining the integrity of the news item?
• Can we deal with all these news events?
• How accomplishments, competitions, and coronations looks like in a world of sharing?
• In what ways social media opens up new methods for experiencing dramatic event?

When the news look like a bunch of tags organized in a circle (tag cloud), when what that matters is only the size of the font and the rate of change in size, it is very easy to loose the context. You may not see it now but some of us already getting use to consume the news this way. One day we can see a hashtag like this #theskyisfalling and only later find out that this is a name of a new movie:)

In social media where the word broadcasting was replace with self-casting, or better known as sharing, dramatic events from all types become a daily phenomenon. We are use to expect the traditional media delivering the news with dignity, integrity and respect (we are very mad when it doesn’t). Keeping these traditional values in the new media is crucial for its success (yes, especially for the business). I like to see that social media is taking the news from where mass media left it, using the great power of participation for changing the norm, from passive news absorption to active experience. Social media has the power transforming news to experience and maybe even relationships.

**I’m not an expert in social media and this is probably my first and last article about this very confusing and widly defined subject. Since this blog is about web phenomena (hence the name webnomena) I could not ignore the way I consume and partciapte in the news via blogs, twitter, social network and many other tools.