Through the Web 2.0 Looking Glass
How can you turn a leaderless communications swarm into a collaborative online community that achieves results? That's the zillion dollar question for 2012. As my runner up for January 2012 video clip of the month below shows (and anybody who has been following the news knows), self-directed communications swarms fueled many of the top news events of 2011. While my runner up for video clip of the month above is inspiring, especially on the New Year, my … [Read more...]
With East Africa facing its worst drought in 60 years, I wince more than ever at a quote by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg: “A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” What Zuckerberg's assertion means on a societal level—such as during a regional famine overseas—is the topic of my August 2011 video clip of the month. It features Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble: What the … [Read more...]
My February 2011 video clip of the month features the founders of the nonprofit Ushahidi (Swahili for "testimony" or "witness") discussing the revolutionary free and open source software they created for crowdsourcing and democratising information. If you haven't been following Ushahidi and crisis mapping, you've got to check the video out. The Ushahidi story is amazing. Ushahidi collects eyewitness reports sent in by e-mail and SMS/cellphone, allowing … [Read more...]
My January 2011 video clip of the month is a MSNBC news report about an unprecedented plan to use crowdsourcing to stop war and war crimes in their bloody tracks. The plan, the brainchild of American actor George Clooney, is using commercial satellite images and the Internet to monitor the border between northern and southern Sudan. Oil-rich South Sudan is set to vote Jan. 9 on a proposal to become independent from North Sudan, a move the former U.S. Director of … [Read more...]
My December 2010 video clip of the month is a flash mob surprising dinners in a mall food court with a breathtaking rendition of Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus." Regardless of your religious preference, you've got to love the great performance and the reaction of the people around them. I picked the video because it's a wonderful holiday example of how two relatively small organizations in Welland—a town of about 50,000 in Canada near Niagara Falls—hit a home … [Read more...]
My October 2009 video clip of the month features TED's Chris Anderson giving a fascinating talk on a new phenomenon he calls "Crowd Accelerated Innovation." Web video is driving the global phenomenon, a self-fueling cycle of innovation and learning that he says could be as significant as the invention of the printing press. By watching his video, Anderson says, "you're part of the crowd that may be about to launch the biggest learning cycle in human … [Read more...]
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 press releases and press conferences for the media. Today, press releases aren’t just for journalists anymore, and they are … [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 both major … [Read more...]
My July 2010 video clip of the month is a recently updated video by Erik Qualman, author of the Socialnomics – Social Media Blog, demonstrating social media’s explosive growth in recent years. The video is a follow-up piece to his original social media revolution video from last summer. While some of the information is similar to last year’s version, Qualman has updated the data and included new figures for the first time. A few of the highlights … [Read more...]
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg created a stir this week when she boldly said, “"E-mail—I can't imagine life without it—is probably going away.” Speaking at Nielsen's Consumer 360 conference on Tuesday, Sandberg said only 11 percent of teens use e-mail daily and instead use SMS and social networking. "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but in consumer technology, if you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow,” she said, “you look at what … [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 BP is … [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...]
My May 2010 video clip of the month is an interview Chris Brogan gave for the LikeMinds conference in the United Kingdom. Brogan, arguably one of the top social media experts in the world, discusses his vision for social media's future. Here's the YouTube video: … [Read more...]
Remember Google Wave? Last November I was pretty excited to get an invite to join Google's experimental real-time communication platform (which is still in preview and not released to the public). After I got the invite, I immediately logged on and played around a little bit—but largely by myself. With Google Wave, collaborators share e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking merged into topical waves. Since I didn't have any collaborators, … [Read more...]
My March 2010 video clip of the month is a spoof of the NBC sitcom "The Office" that students at the University of Denver produced to show their frustrations with technology in the classroom. The video features “Michael,” a technology professor who hasn't kept up with the latest technology and is trying to wing his technology lectures. At one point, he hands out floppy disks so outdated his students’ laptops don’t even have drives to read them. Later, he … [Read more...]
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