Through the Web 2.0 Looking Glass
My September 2010 video clip of the month features Conan O’Brien revealing the name of his new TBS series using a Sharpie and some white paper in a YouTube video. I picked the video because it shows how social media is changing the way major announcements are made. For most of the last century, major public statements were made through news releases and press conferences for the media. Today, news releases aren’t just for journalists anymore, … [Read more...]
I read a fascinating article in Newsweek today about a 25-year-old computer programmer who created crowdsourcing software that broke the grip of Iran's censors after the disputed 2009 election. The programmer, Austin Heap of San Francisco, developed the software, called Haystack, to open up social networking sites the Iranian government was blocking, such as Twitter and Facebook, to allow people on the ground in Iran to organize inside the country … [Read more...]
Newspapers and news sites played an important role in Tuesday's launch of Twitter's new new “Tweet” button. More than 30 large websites secretly changed their designs overnight to begin using the new button on its launch day. Among those sporting the “Tweet” button Tuesday morning were: Arizona Republic/azcentral.com CBS Interactive CNN.com Detroit Free Press HuffingtonPost.com SFGate.com Sky News The Cincinnati Enquirer The … [Read more...]
You might remember one of the good news stories to come out of January's Haiti earthquake. A Canadian woman trapped in rubble sent a text message to Canadian foreign ministry officials thousands of kilometers away. The message was relayed back to Canadian authorities in Haiti who were able to find and rescue her. With people increasingly using text messages, Facebook, Twitter, and other new media tools to seek help in a disaster, the American Red … [Read more...]
After a little more than a year, Google is waving "good-bye" to Google Wave. Google Wave was supposed to be the hot new social networking platform and for a time you were considered special if you had been one of the lucky ones to receive an invite. The only thing is many people, including me, couldn't find a pratical "real work" use for it. With Google Wave, collaborators share—in real time or over time—e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, … [Read more...]
My August 2010 video clip of the month is "Guy Walks Across America," a viral video on YouTube illustrating how social media is changing advertising. The video, funded by Levi's jeans (which is featured prominently at the end of the clip), has racked up more than a million viewers since its debut on YouTube July 20. It features actor/model Michael Johnson wearing Levi's jeans and a plain T-shirt on a 14-day cross country trip past American landmarks … [Read more...]
Twitter is rolling out a great new feature called "Who to Follow" that offers users personalized recommendations for people to follow on the microblogging service. If you're one of the Twitter users selected early for the roll out (like me!), you'll find the new feature on the top right of your homepage at Twitter.com (when you're logged into an account). Twitter introduced the new "Who to Follow" feature in a blog post yesterday: The algorithms … [Read more...]
The special recipe networked non-profits use to win online contests was revealed in a video the Case Foundation posted on its website last week. The video features Beth Kanter and Allison Fine, authors of The Networked Nonprofit, with research on the successful social media strategies of contest winners. It also features Scott Beale from the Atlas Service Corps, a non-profit which has won five online competitions and over $400,000—all with a … [Read more...]
After my Verizon e-mail went down for several hours yesterday, I checked the Web 2.0 "newspaper": Twitter. I quickly discovered many tweets and even a few blog posts, such as Verizon Email Outage: Twitter and Central for Webmail, about the outage, which appeared to be national in scope. To my surprise, however, @Verizon, the official Verizon corporate Twitter account, and @VerizonSupport, the official Verizon customer service Twitter account, … [Read more...]
Two major sporting events this week created tweet tsunamis that helped Twitter reach all-time records for tweets. After the 2010 World Cup soccer tournament started two weeks ago, the social networking site began seeing huge traffic whenever a big goal was scored. Though Twitter normally sees about 750 tweets per second on an average day, a record was set Monday when tweets were sent at a rate of 2,940 per second just 30 seconds after Japan scored … [Read more...]
British Petroleum's (BP's) failure to adequately enlist social media in the communications battle over the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill made picking a single video clip of the month too difficult. So I've chosen two BP commercial spoofs, both highlighting BP's growing credibility gap as it desperately tries to control information and ignores the new (social media era) communication rules: collaboration, openness, transparency, and timeliness. While … [Read more...]
Today, we are on the verge of a massive shift in the way we communicate and inspire action. Social media is creating a new kind of communications fluidity, a fully immersive experience enabling conversations to be hijacked in ways unimaginable in decades past. Up until the 1980s, totalitarian governments, superpowers, media cartels, and leading brands had dominant control over national and even global dialogues because of superior resources … [Read more...]
My membership in the "exclusive" Google Wave club is over. Google announced yesterday that it is making the invite-only, real-time communication tool available to everyone, including Google Apps users, at wave.google.com. Like last year's Google Wave introduction, the announcement took place at the Google I/O Conference. With Google Wave, collaborators share—in real time or over time—e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking … [Read more...]
YouTube turns five years old this year. The domain name YouTube.com was registered on Feb. 14, 2005, and the website launched in beta form that May. Here's one of the videos the company has made to celebrate the milestone and its influence on early users—in this case, Federic Alvarez, a 30-year-old filmmaker from Uruguay behind the YouTube smash sci-fi short, Panic Attack: … [Read more...]
I was in for a shock last week when I visited the website of a non-profit whose website I recently redesigned in WordPress. Instead of seeing the non-profit’s website, I found a page full of ads reading at the top, “This page is parked free courtesy of [a different web hosting firm than the one the non-profit uses].” Using Network Solution’s WHOIS behind that domain? page, I discovered the non-profit’s domain registration information … [Read more...]
Google released a Living Stories plugin and theme for WordPress yesterday enabling anyone who publishes through WordPress to organize coverage of an ongoing event on a single dynamic page. Living Stories is an experimental format for displaying news coverage that Google created in partnership with the New York Times and Washington Post. Google software engineer Eric Zhang wrote about the process of developing the plugin on the Google News … [Read more...]
Ning--the popular service allowing users to build their own social networks,--is making massive staff cutbacks, increasing its fees for premium services, and cutting off its free services. All Ning users who have been getting their social networks for free of charge will now be asked to start paying fees or phase off the Ning platform. Ning claims more than 46 million users spread over 300,000 social networks. The vast majority of its users are … [Read more...]
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