Internet Yellow Pages

The variety of social and digital media platforms is growing at a phenomenal rate. Almost every day I hear about a new tool or application that is the ‘next big thing’. It is hard to keep track of everything that is happening and to keep up to date.

A quick tip is to refer to ‘Go2Web20’ to update yourself with the latest buzz tools: http://www.go2web20.net/

This tool provides a comprehensive directory of Web 2.0 platforms and gives you a synopsis of functionality. It's a great reference tool.

Wikipedia becomes elite-ist

I’ve just come across this article in the New York Times about how Wikipedia is considering changing the rules to editing and posting of information.

In essence, the online encyclopedia is considering permitting only registered users to edit and post content. According to the article, because of ‘vandals’ changing facts on certain entries ‘"Wikipedia appears ready to introduce a system that prevents new and anonymous users from instantly publishing changes to the online encyclopedia."

This will mean a much smaller group of people responsible for published content. This raises a few concerns for me.

Firstly, it means the wide range of content will be reduced as the collective input will be smaller. Even if the content continues to be as wide ranging, it will surely take longer for the smaller group of people to come across new or interesting content. Secondly, we are relying on a smaller group of gatekeepers to decide what should / shouldn’t be published, what is fact or isn’t accurate and eventually what we actually see. Finally, part of the success of Wikipedia is based on user generated content from anyone who feels they have something interesting to share with the world or have a particular passion for a subject/issue. By introducing this type of ‘censorship’, is Wikipedia being elite-ist?

Social networking sites on the rise...

ComScore has just released its worldwide traffic stats for social networking sites for November (this does not include December). The top 20 sites and their unique visitor numbers are below:

Interesting points to note:

- The presence of regional sites like Baidu Space, hi5 and 56.com (China) and Orkut (India)
- Blogs are still very popular. Blogger tops the chart with an estimated 222 million unique worldwide visitors in November (up 44 percent from November, 2007). - Facebook is expected to dominate soon with 200 million unique visitors (up 116 percent).
- Facebook stands out as the social gorilla taking share from not only other social networks but blogs and other social media as well.
- Yahoo’s Flickr rises to No. 7, enforcing the popularity of photo sharing

Top Social Media Sites (ranked by unique worldwide visitors November, 2008; comScore)

1. Blogger (222 million)
2. Facebook (200 million)
3. MySpace (126 million)
4. Wordpress (114 million)
5. Windows Live Spaces (87 million)
6. Yahoo Geocities (69 million)
7. Flickr (64 million)
8. hi5 (58 million)
9. Orkut (46 million)
10. Six Apart (46 million)
11. Baidu Space (40 million)
12. Friendster (31 million)
13. 56.com (29 million)
14. Webs.com (24 million)
15. Bebo (24 million)
16. Scribd (23 million)
17. Lycos Tripod (23 million)
18. Tagged (22 million)
19. imeem (22 million)
20. Netlog (21 million)

Top 5 Top 5’s

This time of year everyone is making lists of their most memorable moments of the year. So, here is my top 5 top 5 lists for 2008:

Top 5 news stories (for me):
1. The devastating Sichuan earthquake on May 12 2008
2. Barack Obama showing us all that ‘he can’ on November 4 2008
3. The collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 13 2008
4. The siege of Mumbai on November 26 2008
5. Russia’s attack on Georgia whilst the Beijing Olympic Ceremony was in full flow on August 8 2008

Top 5 memorable 2008 events (for me and in no particular order):
1. Beijing Olympics opening ceremony
2. Obama wins US elections
3. The credit crunch
4. George Bush dodges journalist shoe thrower
5. Lewis Hamilton winning the F1

Top 5 2008 buzzwords:
1. ‘Change’
2. ‘Credit Crunch’
3. ‘Rickrolled’
4. ‘Tweet’
5. ‘Social media’

Top 5 videos (there are many I could have included, this was a hard category):
1. Tina Fey as Sarah Palin (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdDqSvJ6aHc)
2. Sarah Silverman and Matt Damon (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLG3S5WzHig)
3. Jimmy Kimmel and Ben Affleck (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lcmNaXmjvs&feature=related)
4. George Bush dodges shoe-icide (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uIj0YvDBKE)
5. Lewis Hamilton wins F1 on last lap (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5g9ilv0UxM&feature=related)

Top 5 songs (this will reveal lots about my taste in music):
1. Pocketful of sunshine – Natasha Bedingfield (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMRn2JcSrtg)
2. Mercy – Duffy (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE2orthS3TQ)
3. Don’t stop the music – Rihanna (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsRWpK4pf90)
4. Hallelujah – Leonard Cohen (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJTiXoMCppw)
5. Hot n Cold – Katy Perry (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMRn2JcSrtg)

Rockin Robin, Tweet Tweet..

I’ve been using Twitter a lot recently and explored a number of applications that have been recommended to me. Here are my top five, in no particular order:

1. Twitter Grader (http://twitter.grader.com/): This is great to see who the ‘influential’ Twitterati are, or who just spends way too much time on Twitter. Incidentally, I’m 35th in the Hong Kong rankings…

2. Twitter Vision (http://twittervision.com/): I can see in near real time what people are Tweeting and where they are from. I can spend hours watching this and am trying to convince my company to have this running in the reception. Much more exciting than CNN!

3. Qwitter (http://useqwitter.com/): Sign up to this to see who stops following you. You can then send them rude messages!

4. Twit Scoop (http://www.twitscoop.com/): See what the hot topics on Twitter are at any given time. Also, use the search function to search for particular terms and see who is talking about it.

5. People Browsr (http://www.peoplebrowsr.com/): I’m still testing this out, but initial signs look good. It essentially allows you to manage Twitter in different ways and link to other tools.
Have any others you would recommend?

I am loving Twitter and all its uses at the moment, though I am worried when it stops becoming a free service. Somewhere along the line, the guys at Twitter are going to have to start making money from the platform – my guess is that once they have enough loyal customers, they will start charging a nominal fee to use it.

So to do the maths, let’s say the Twitter population reaches 20million. 10% of this 20million are loyal users and will pay a nominal fee to continue using it. Let’s then say, Twitter charges US$10 a month – which most loyal users will probably be happy to pay. That’s US$20m per month….that’s a good business model!

Rise of Asia and the Internet

Thanks to Next Fifty Years blog for bringing to attention this video presented by Richard Sanders, President of Sony BMG International on May 4, 2008 to for Sony BMG's annual Global Management Meeting.



I particularly like the fact that it is much less US centric than many other similar videos I have seen - it focuses much more on the rise of Asia and elludes to its impact. For too long we have had to rely on US centric statistics and look embarrassed when clients ask about the region in which we work and then claiming that there currently are not any statistics for this region.

I hope to see lots more like this.

Social media scorecard

Here are some additional stats from Adult Add Strengths blog that highlight the gulf in Obama and McCains social media presence.

- Barack Obama had nearly 6,000 percent more pages on his main website than John McCain did on his (1,820,000 vs 30,700)
- There’s almost 3 times as many results for Barack Obama in Google images (24,200,000 vs. 8,620,000)
- Obama has 51% more hits in Google Video as there is for John McCain (136,000 vs. 89,800)
- Flickr, the photo sharing site, had nearly 5 times the search results for Obama than McCain. (50,000 photos on Obama’s flickr page and 7,000 contact)
- Facebook had 3,032% more hits for Obama than McCain, Obama’s Facebook page had nearly 4 times more followers and posts than McCain’s page
- Barack Obama’s added 400,000 new friends on Facebook in the last 2 weeks, a 20% surge.
- On Youtube, Barack Obama had nearly twice as many search results for his name as John McCain, and more than 5 times as many videos posted
- On MySpace, Obama had nearly 4 times the number of friends as McCain, and 269% more search results for his name
- On the microblogging site Twitter, McCain put out nearly twice the number of tweets as Obama, but Obama had 5213% more followers, and 1,129% more search results