Monthly Archives: October 2009

Trendmap is wonderful

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Oh my gosh, what an amazing thing. Trendsmap is incredible. 

What does it do? Shows trending words / topics on Twitter on a map. Simple. 

The truth of Twitter applications and services is that there are so many out there I don’t keep track of them. But Trendsmap stopped me in my tracks. 

Things I learned in five minutes that speak to why this is such a wonderful tool: 

What everyone is talking about on Sunday in the UK (roasts and Chelsea feature large). 

Simulataneously, in LA where I’m at for part of today, people are still thinking about breakfast and discussing rumours about Maya Angelou’s health (it was just a rumour she’s fine). 

If the geo-location is accurate then it seems like Twitter is something you use in the north of the city – nothing is trending in the poor neighbourhood of Compton, for instance… 

Zooming out I can start to see where Twitter is being used a lot in the world and where not (African Tweeting is largely limited to South Africa, South American Tweeting is a Brazillian thing…). 

In Iran they are tweeting about protests and nukes… 

You can also track topics globally – the hot topic of Glasto tickets for next year in the UK is attracting a wee bit of interest elsewhere too… 

Hats off the Trendsmap – this looks like a massively interesting and useful way to make sense of real-time Twitter conversations. 

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The RSS channel-level image (Scripting News)

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One of the things about Twitter that really works are the 48-by-48 images they call avatars. They quickly become symbols for the person. When someone changes their avatar it’s surprisingly important. I changed mine from King Kong to Don Quixote and people started treating me better. Not kidding. People really want me to use my face, but it bothers me to look at my face all the time. When I figure out how to have two views of myself, one for me and one for everyone else… Anyway. Permalink to this paragraph

via scripting.com

Your avatar really matters. Of course it does.

Maybe we need to think about that a little more…

(via @adders)

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Identity, social graphs and engagement

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I may have dreamt it. 

Sometimes in the flow of reading even a hyper-connected gent like myself can mis-place a valuable insight-laden scrap of information. Usually between Delicious and Google I can lay my virtual mits on anything I read within minutes a most. 

But not this one… 

A while ago I thought I read that a community manager for Reuters or a similar organisation had talked about using the social graph of commenters to prove that they were real people people and not spammers looking to drop links or sundry crappiness into a discussion. The idea was that your social graph – say your Facebook Connect profile – proves that you are a real person. 

(If you know what I mean – please do mail/txt/Tweet me… I would love to read about it again.)

It’s a really fascinating idea. The flipside of the erosion of privacy perhaps, is that what you do online, the graph/web footprint/web shadow you create can prove who you are. 

Reputation as an identity credit rating, sort of… 
The other thing that having an online identity does, of course, if you display it, is make you a little bit more polite. Trolls tend to prefer anonymity – they moistly don’t like it when their friends/family/employers can see the vileness of their online hating laid bare. 

Via Mr Tinworth I see that Typepad have data showing that if you can sign in to a system with your identity from elsewhere you’re more likely to leave a comment. Very true, and many’s the time I’ve given up on leaving a comment on a Moveable Type platform after growing weary of trying to prove my un-bottishness… As Typepad put it: 

“Based on some impressive performance on the beta blogs, we have added a few popular social web icons — TypePad, Facebook, and Twitter — on the comment forms. We tested this design in beta for a few weeks and saw a dramatic increase in the commenting activity. By encouraging people to sign in and become a “real” person, we have seen a significant increase in comments.”

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News from the Herd: How bloggers make some people see red

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My own most memorable experience of this was from a marketer (not one of my clients I hasten to add!) who started yelling in a meeting that people who are on Twitter are sad and should venture out into the fresh air a bit more (I thought it best not to talk about the iPhone…)

via thisisherd.com

Interesting post from Dirk about how social media can make people very, very angry.

People sometimes wish social media would go away. It’s understandable, not everyone appreciates the web’s disruptive power turning their world upside down.

I’ve encountered emotional reactions in meetings often. It’s a tough situation to deal with – but I’ve learned to resist the urge to rationalise, to argue and win a point. Sometimes it’s about an emotional moment, and you have to let the temperature die down a little…

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All your ad revenue are belong to web

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Love my old colleague Lloyd Gofton’s fillet’n'Fisk job on the IAB/Price Waterhouse report that showed that online advertising revenue (filleting the report and fisking the la-la-la-it’s-not-happening reaction of the TV-spot primacy crowd).

“The truth is that many media sectors have considered the Internet as secondary or supportive to their traditional mediums. The facts are slapping them in the face yet still there is denial.”

Yes, yes and furthermore yes, Mr Gofton. 

Recently I had cause to write a brief history of the web. Always a laugh, but one happy accident was that I came across a TED video of Kevin Kelly, WIRED / Whole Earth News founder, editor and general genius, talking about “the next 5,000 days of the web”.

I’ve mentioned this video before, but it’s stuck with me these past few weeks, especially his metaphor of what the web is, so I’m going back to it for a moment. He describes it as a single machine which we all access, look in to with our little screens on phones and computers. 

Every two years, the web is doubling in size, Kevin tells us. And as it expands it sucks in everything it touches, connects things, and as it connects them changes the way they work forever. 

Take telecoms. Watch as the web approaches mobile telcos. They pause, try to swerve… 
[Web expands] 
Can’t swerve it. Try to charge people lots of money to use it….
[Web expands] 
Set up walled gardens. It’s like the web only safer and cleaner and you have to put a micro-payment in the slot to access each page…
[Web expands]
Can’t do that web wants to be open. People want it to be open. Sell access to social media as a feature of bundled data…
[Web expands]
Someone starts selling Skype access as a mobile service. Suddenly not only is the idea of a new per-MB data business model disappearing but the beautiful, lucrative pay-per-second voice tarriff is under threat…
[Web expands.] Suddenly everything that telcos did is part of the web. It’s absorbed the-industry-formally-known-as-mobile-operators. 

Apply the same model to music, to newspapers and to TV. Apply it to marketing, for goodness sake… 

All your TV ad revenue are belong to us.

The day digital overtook TV in terms of ad revenue was so inevitable it feels less incredible than it should. “It’s amazing, but we’re not amazed,” as Kelly would say. TV will be assimilated. 

(It’s also happening at the moment with human relationships and our social networks. But you know that, right? Your social world is being assimilated into the machine, for better or worse…)

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The powerful, presence-popping potential of posterous

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If you’re already using Posterous – look away now or be prepared to indulge a passionate newbie… 

For the geekists among ye, there may be a frisson to be rustled up from the fact that this is the first proper blog post I have written via Posterous. Mac Mail seems to make a suprisingly useful blog editor.

I’d been trying to find some time to use Posterous for some time. As is often the case, the moments alone you tend to get a lot of on a long  road trip brought the opportunity. 

That and a session with Arbel Mediav, a colleague at iCrossing LA and a power user of Posterous if ever there was one. 

The incredible thing about Posterous is how it can help you reduce the complexity of multiple web presences. 

By emailing post@posterous.com with whatever message or content it will publish it for you on your Posterous page and everywhere else you’ve connected it to (I have my Flickr, Twitter, blog, FriendFeed and Delicious wired up at the moment). Or you can email wordpress@posterous.com 

Not got a Posterous account yet? You can still email content to  post@posterous.com and it will set it up for you. You just have click on a link it will send to your email later and sort out your password and other niceties. 

Arbel says he’s emailed the Posterous guys several times with ideas or requests and often found that they have already the features he wanted available. 

You can also use Posterous to easily set up Podcasts. Gosh. 

I’ll be looking for ways to use this with clients as soon as possible. I was particularly inspired by an example of using Posterous to curate content from a big community that was featured recently on For Immediate Release: an Austin, Texas newspaper used it to pool photographs from readers of one of the hottest days of the year. 

Posterous is in the best business of all when it comes to the social web – the complexity business. It makes managing the complexity easier and lets you get on with creating and doing interesting things. 

It’s taken me ages to get around to getting immersed in it – should have read this ages ago –  but very quickly I have fallen for it utterly… 

Anyway, by way of signing off, here’s a gratuitous shot of some scary LA hotel lobby art… feeding frenzy anyone? 

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