social media
Not the YouTube election, and not the X-Factor election either
May 7th
For a while it was going to be the YouTube election. Then for a while it was supposed to be the X-Factor election. But what happened in the end was a little from column A and a little from column B.
Google Buzz: a serious new fixture in the social web?
Feb 12th
Google Buzz is only two days old and it already has its fair share of critics. But the way my contacts are taking to it so far makes me suspect that Buzz will succeed where Google Wave (arguably) failed.
Using Google Spreadsheets to extract Twitter data
Nov 20th
Instructions for setting up Google Spreadsheets as a Twitter search engine, allowing you to search for tweets containing links or text using the BackTweets and Twitter Search APIs.
Charging companies for Twitter – what could it involve?
Feb 17th
You’re probably aware that Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s co-founders, told Marketing magazine on February 10th that: “We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts” How to decode this quote? It’s fairly vague, but I can [...]
Another Twitter visualisation
Feb 3rd
I promise I’ll stop posting links to these one day. Anyway, this is from a series of Superbowl-related interactive visualisations produced by the New York Times: Unlike the visualisation of #inauguration posts I linked to recently, this isn’t based on hash tags but instead uses moving tag clouds to illustrate the volume of Twitter posts [...]
Presidential inauguration – Twitter visualisation
Jan 23rd
This animated map from FlowingData shows the global location of each Twitter post tagged as #inauguration between Monday and Wednesday this week. Although the world map isn’t shown, over time the US and the UK become almost perfectly defined by the density of Twitter post markers. You can also see outlines of south America and [...]
The end of Web 2.0?
Oct 13th
Even though I’ve been known to use the phrase “Web 2.0″ from time to time, I’ve never really liked the idea very much. It’s useful shorthand for when you’re talking to anyone whose knowledge about the internet is defined largely by current trends and ‘hypes’, but really, what’s ever been new about the idea of [...]
Brands that suck on Twitter
Aug 13th
Here in the UK, Twitter has yet to seriously catch on although many organisations are attempting to make use of it. But the marketing and communications departments of large US companies are becoming increasingly aware of the need to establish a brand presence in Twitter. The case of Janet, who masqueraded as an ExxonMobil spokesperson [...]
My picks from “On the Bus”
Aug 11th
I posted recently about Tweets on the bus, a little site that aggregates all Twitter posts containing the phrase “on the bus”. Since that post, I’ve been following the “on the bus” posts using Google Reader. Every now and again there’s one that makes me laugh. Here’s a digest of my favourite “on the bus” [...]
Tweeting on the bus
Jul 26th
Earlier this afternoon, as I was passing Angel station on a bus, I posted to Twitter. I’ve subsequently discovered my ‘tweet’ turning up at this site – Tweets on the bus. The concept is simple – it collects Twitter posts containing the term “on the bus”, and presents them all on one web page. It’s [...]
Wealth of Networks – a semi-account
Jul 25th
Yesterday I went along to the Wealth of Networks conference at Imperial College. I was only able to attend the morning sessions, but it was a valuable chance to hear the thoughts of various individuals with diverse backgrounds but a shared understanding of the power of networks (in the broader sense of the word). The [...]
Twitter in plain English
Jul 17th
After my previous post on not “getting” Twitter, I’ve spent a fair bit of time getting to grips with it and have been sucked in to a considerable extent. I’ll post more about my road-to-Damascus Twitter conversion in the next couple of days, but in the meantime I’d refer any interested readers to this video, [...]
Microupdates and me (and you)
Jul 15th
Further to my previous post about not ‘getting’ Twitter, here’s an article from the OpenObjects blog with a few examples of how this sort of thing (micro-blogging? micro-updates?) can be useful: http://openobjects.blogspot.com/2008/07/microupdates-and-you-aka-twits-in.html I especially like the Firefox anecdote. I’m starting to get the idea that it’s the ancillary geek-built tools that constitute the real value [...]
Why don’t I get Twitter?
Jul 15th
These days a lot of people like me are addicted to Twitter. Developers across the globe are coming up with interesting tools to visualise, aggregate and automatically syndicate Twitter content (or “tweets”). At conferences and speeches, audiences keep up a constant back-channel of chat using Twitter. I sporadically post to Twitter. But I don’t feel [...]
Missing the point of social media
Feb 5th
Posted by brelson in social media
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I’ve just been reading an article on Netimperative (What’s the future of search?) which features the following quote: …if you find that very negative results at search engines show up following queries for your brand, products, services, you should evaluate if you’re doing enough PR in the social media space to counter it. This statement [...]