I received beta codes for both socialthing! and Ping.fm through the social web, yet both experiences couldn’t have been more different, and yet so similar at the same, again proving that the social web is about interactions that are platform agnostic in intention, but directly tied to the platform or forum that becomes the channel. We met Matt Galligan, founder and C-E-Oh! of socialthing! at SXSW for an interview about the launch of the beta, and how they see themselves in the social media space. After the interview, he gave us a few beta invite codes as well as an invitation to the socialthing! party later that next evening (which we greatly enjoy Matt, thanks!). I received my invite code to Ping.fm from reading my twitter feeds, and although I wasn’t fast enough to get the codes that @chrisbrogan provided, Sean at Ping.fm was kind enough to shoot me off one and I am stoked that he did.

After only a couple of days on both, I am really excited about what I see. To me this is the closest combination to my killer social app that I have used. It is the Pushmi-Pullyu of the social web.

Ping.fm was very easy to hook up. After acquiring my credentials, It was a very simple process to associate my variety of “channels” into my Ping account. I am especially happy that they have added an AIM component as well, so that I can use iChat as my broadcaster. Ping.fm solves attempts to solve the problem of multiple social applications by allowing me to “ping” all of them from one interface, and an interface of my choice. I can text or email into my ping account and have it distributed to my many social footprints.

socialthing! approaches the problem from the other direction. After signing into socialthing! one of the first things i notices was the clever UI that they have used to associate my Twitter, Facebook and Flickr accounts. Once connected, socialthing! provides for me a Lifestream, an aggregated view of the services I have identified, and allows for a display order that is either time based or user based. A side benefit of socialthing! was that I quickly saw how many “friends” I had collected on Flickr that now, unintentionally, were clogging up my Lifestream. A quick run through of my Flickr friends will clean out those that no longer participated in an active conversation with me, or were no longer of particular interest.

I was recently having a conversation with Brooke, a banker friend of ours, and explaining to her  my perspective on social media applications like socialthing! and Ping.fm. The combination of these two applications fit neatly into her “moment of clarity” when she proclaimed social applications to be a social GPS of sorts. The push distribution of Ping.fm and the pull of socialthing! combined with the triangulation of the content and context of the messages provide for a time, a place, and a perspective based on your knowledge of the author. It tells you exactly “where they are” in a near real-time fashion.

I am clearly going to continue using these services, and will speak with both companies to see if we can acquire a group of invite codes for our readers. Are you using either platform? What are your thoughts? We would love to read your comments. 

It’s probably no secret to readers that I am a producer for the PodShow network. My show, American Cliche, has been part of their stable of shows for almost two years. During the bulk of that time my main contact there was Richard Brewer-Hay in their talent relations department. Richard was my favorite person at PodShow. Besides being a fun guy to be around, I always knew that when I asked him a question he would tell me the truth, point blank. I respect Richard a lot.

In January I got a call from him letting me know that he was leaving PodShow to start eBay’s blog. I was excited for him because it seemed like a great opportunity, but I didn’t really understand the scope of the project. To be honest, I feared this would be a tool of the PR department to try and falsely embrace the conversations happening in social media. However, today I read an interview on Fortune Small Business with Richard. Apparently eBay has agreed to a hands-off approach on the blog. Richard has complete freedom to write whatever he wants, unedited. It was also interesting to learn that he has “all-access” to every facet of the company from the CEO on down.

What does this mean for eBay? It has long been a concern of sellers that their voices have fallen on deaf ears.  In fact, to show their disapproval of fee changes, many top sellers staged a boycott a few weeks ago. According to Richard, eBay Ink, will be direct line of communication for eBay’s users to voice concerns and get a peek behind the scenes at every level. While the blog has yet to launch, it will be interesting to see what the content looks like. Will it really be unedited? There will no doubt be guidelines that Richard will have to follow in terms of what he writes. Or will there? Maybe eBay will use the Robert Scoble/Microsoft model and allow him to exist as an island - far removed from the sharp claws of the PR department.

I hope they do this right. eBay has a real opportunity here to engage their customers. In fact, the best thing a company can do in the digital age is make their customers feel like part of the dialogue. How transparent will eBay actually be? That remains to be seen. However, the fact that Richard Brewer-Hay is leading this charge gives me confidence that it’ll be done right. You can bet that a lot of eyes will be on them as they launch eBay Ink. If it goes well, expect to see more following suit. 

Have you ever wondered what the blogoshere looked like? 

Discover Magazine published an article about Matthew Hurst’s study on visualizing and mapping of the blogosphere.

Discover Magazine says “The blogosphere is the most explosive social network you’ll never see. Recent studies suggest that nearly 60 million blogs exist online, and about 175,000 more crop up daily (that’s about 2 every second). Even though the vast majority of blogs are either abandoned or isolated, many bloggers like to link to other Web sites. These links allow analysts to track trends in blogs and identify the most popular topics of data exchange”.

The visual study plot s the most active and interconnected parts of the blogosphere from collected link data over a period of six weeks. Green links represent one-way links (that is, blog A links to blog B), and blue links indicate reciprocal links (blog B returns the favor).

1 - On the map, white dots represent individual blogs, sized according to number of links. This one in particular represents DailyKos which is visited by 500,000 people every day.
2 - The popular site Boingboing, a “Directory of Wonderful Things”.
3 - LiveJournal users (an isolated, close-knit online community of bloggers).
4 - The blue blob represents a balanced sociopolitical discourse (most links are reciprocal).
5 - An outlying island of blue represents the linked-up world of bloggers who traffic in the latest news and gossip from the world of pornography.
6 - A group of sports enthusiasts in the outskirts, many of whom, unlike the lonely pornographers, have links back to the central hot spot of the blogosphere.

Christopher Smith and I leave for Austin Saturday morning just after 8 AM. This trip will culminate in several weeks of work in scheduling interviews, reaching out to companies, finalizing our production schedule, choosing sessions, RSVP-ing for parties, and tying up loose ends at the office. In short - we are ready to take SXSW by storm!

While I don’t want to jinx it by giving out names, I can tell you we have several top names in the Social Media and Online Design space lined up to get in front of our lense. Once we arrive in Texas that list is going to grow even bigger.

In addition to the celebrity interviews we’ll be doing, Christopher and I will be checking in each day with video updates and near-real-time blog entries. If there is a big announcement at SXSW, you’ll read about it on this page.

For those of you attending SXSW and would like to get together, please email me at SParent [at] MediaTrust [dot] [com]. We’ll be there from Saturday, March 8th until Thursday morning, March 13th.

I look forward to seeing you down south! 

Richard McManus of ReadWriteWeb put together a great presentation about how he defined the Web 3.0. 

I highly recommmend taking the time to look at the deck linked to below. In his presentation he characterizes two things VERY nicely.

1. He defines the term Web 2.0 as an era, like the dotcom era, that graduated the web from ‘read only’ to ‘read/write’ (slide 3). This is a key developmental ‘era’ as it leverages the crowd to load the web with valuable information that can later be translated, analyzed and made more consummable by v. 3.0.
2. He makes the distinction that in Web 3.o, web sites will become web services as sites become less important. He emphasizes that the data behind them (if structured) becomes the critical element. When this data becomes structured and machine-readable, the semantic or thinking web kicks in to make this data smarter as the transactions between people and computers are recorded and analyzed with the purpose of delivering user or scenario centric information.

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Do you share his perspective on the New New Web? Wed love to hear your thoughts.

Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action — and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons.

About Howard Rheingold

Writer, artist and designer, theorist and community builder, Howard Rheingold is one of the driving minds behind our net-enabled, open, collaborative life. Read full bio »

As Howard Rheingold himself puts it, “I fell into the computer realm from the typewriter dimension, then plugged my computer into my telephone and got sucked into the net.” A writer and designer, he was among the first wave of creative thinkers who saw, in computers and then in the Internet, a way to form powerful new communities.

His 2002 book Smart Mobs, which presaged Web 2.0 in predicting collaborative ventures like Wikipedia, was the outgrowth of decades spent studying and living life online. An early and active member of the Well (he wrote about it in The Virtual Community), he went on to cofound HotWired and Electric Minds, two groundbreaking web communities, in the mid-1990s. Now active in Second Life, he teaches, writes and consults on social networking. His latest passion: teaching and workshopping participatory media literacy, to make sure we all know how to read and make the new media that we’re all creating together.

“With his last book, Smart Mobs, the longtime observer of technology trends made a persuasive case that pervasive mobile communications, combined with always-on Internet connections, will produce new kinds of ad-hoc social groups. Now, he’s starting to take the leap beyond smart mobs, trying to weave some threads out of such seemingly disparate developments as Web logs, open-source software development, and Google.”

BusinessWeek

LESS Silos = MORE Relevance

Our interactive lives started with random behavior thru surfing the web.The random disconnected web then led us to the second major behavioral change which allowed us to search the organized web. We are now entering the third behavioral shift in our interactive behavior pattern, which breaks down the silos of the internet and connects the thread of relevance to us and everything that we do. Now that we have searched and found. We now want our interests to find us thru more relevance and less clutter. Silobreaker is a new tool that follows these foot steps heading into the new dawn of the age of relevance.

From the mouths of SiloBreaker:

“Silobreaker is one of next generation of online search services for news and current events that delivers meaning and relevance beyond traditional search and aggregation engines. Its relational analysis and explanatory graphics provide users with unparalleled contextual insight into the news stories of the day.More than a news aggregator, Silobreaker provides relevance by looking at the data it finds like a person does. It recognises people, companies, topics, places and keywords; understands how they relate to each other in the news flow, and puts them in context for the user. The graphical search results enables users to quickly and easily understand connections, trends and topics or navigate deeper into the most relevant stories for them. No other news search service provides such an extensive suite of contextual tools in the industry today.Silobreaker pulls content on global issues, science, technology and business from approximately 10,000 news, blog, research and multimedia sources. With the engine’s focus on finding and connecting related data in the information flow, Silobreaker’s user tools and visualisations are ideal for bringing meaning to content from either today’s Web or the evolving Semantic Web, or both.”

This is an interesting tool to use and a great example of the silo “less” interactive world we are heading into. A world of open, modular and interconnected platforms. Let us know what you think of Silobreaker. 

I think it is important to find visual tools that help us connect concept and reality. In this talk by Hans Rosling organized by TED we see the importance of understanding our data and the power of data visualization in our ever increasingly complex world. Rosling’s use of data shows us how a picture says a thousand words and explains to us how important it is for information to be shared, accessible, identified and visualized because information on the internet is cumulatively growing. As we move into the semantic thinking web there will be a need for info graphic visual tools to explain the web’s complex data.

I was reading this article in the Wall Street Journal the other day about people stealing clever lines from someone else’s online dating profile.

“Among the 125 million people in the U.S. who visit online dating and social-networking sites are a growing number of dullards who steal personal profiles, life philosophies, even signature poems. “Dude u like copied my whole myspace,” posts one aggrieved victim.

Copycats use the real-life wit of others to create cut-and-paste personas, hoping to land dates or just look clever.”

Stealing someone else’s idea or work has been around since the beginning of time. You probably only have to look no farther than the adjacent cubicle to find someone that has taken credit for your ideas and reaped the benefits. But, copying and pasting someone’s dating profile really sinks to new lows. How unoriginal a person are you if you can’t think of a few sentences to differentiate yourself? Or, are these people really just being efficient? Is this simply a case of not needing to reinvent the wheel?

As I pondered this article I started to think about how this sort of behavior relates to business on the web. Are there any truly original ideas left, or is everything just derivative of something that’s already been done? Look at YouTube - there was nothing new there in the way of technology, but in the last two years they’ve ingrained web video and user generated content into the mind of millions of people. What made YouTube stand out over something like Google Video?

Is it OK to copy-and-paste someone’s ideas and pass them off as your own? How much needs to be changed, deleted, added, or enhanced before it is considered a new or original work? Does flooding the web with similar products and services help build competition and inspire creativity, or does it just clutter the landscape and make it harder to separate the wheat from the chaff?

I’d love for you to weigh in with your thoughts. 

Photosynth is a truly innovative technology that will drive the semantic web (web 3.0). Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in a standing-ovation demo. Using photos of often snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. We look forward to seeing how bright minds leverage this amazing technology to provide connections among user generated data sets.