iconolith

BBC Looks at the Topography of Social Media

The BBC radiolabs website has an interesting article by Jamie Tetlow that describes some of the analysis of social media web sites hey conducted for one of their projects. I was particularly interested in his analysis of the page topography of a select set of popular social media sites including facebook, youtube, dailymotion, flickr, viddler, odeo, bebo, myspace, and lastfm.

Based on a composite diagram of the content “blocks” from each site overlaid on top of each other he deduces the average topography for all the sites. The results are not surprising if you have ever visited any of these sites before.

What does it mean? If you want to get noticed like the popular kids, do what they do? Possibly. There is something to be said for using tried and true methods - standing on the shoulders of giants and all that stuff, but what about innovating and breaking the mold? Not always the safe path to take I guess, but how much benefit would there be in diverging from the sameness of the rest? …and does the social web like the oddball kids that stand out doing their own thing?

Andrew Keen: The Internet is Destroying Culture

Seriously, it sounds like a joke, but it is true. This post by Roo Reynolds reminded me that I had seen Keen on the Colbert Show promoting his book and was left with such an absolutely foul taste of ignorance and elitism that I dare say I’ve ever experienced before. My thanks to Roo for ranting.

OQO Cheaper with More

Not that I want to be an engadget re-blog weenie, but the news is too good not to share. It is always great when technology prices drop right along with form factor. The Model 02 of the OQO is touting a larger hard drive and SSD, improved wireless capability and a faster processor. Along with that, the base model pricing is just at $1299, cheaper than the previous version. I would really like to see the price drop below $1k before I would ever seriously think of buying one, but until then I’m happy to drool.

The OQO press release has more details.

Image courtesy of Josh Bancroft

What is RSS and How Can You Use It?

If you know me and I have trapped you in a conversation about RSS feeds and feed readers at some point… but I didn’t make any sense and sounded like some crazy lady… and you politely smiled and nodded in the hope that I would shut up and talk about something else… maybe this video is much more clear and concise. RSS can really save you time online. Thanks to CommonCraft for creating this.

Click To Play

There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don’t. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don’t know where to start.

Net Neutrailty Again

If you still have friends or family who haven’t heard about the issues surrounding Net Neutrality, be sure that they get the word.

Twingly

Twingly is a screensaver that serves as a visualization of the global traffic in the blogosphere… and very addictive to watch. Normally, I run the open source Electric Sheep screen saver, which is very pretty, but I’m switching over on my main machine to run Twingly. (More at Primelabs)

Note:  does require that you run a current version of .NET, so setup may be a process depending on how up to date you keep your system. [via]

Hurry Up and Wait

The Museum of Modern Beta Betas - Most Anticipated is a list of web apps ranked by popularity by how many are waiting for it. Data is being pulled from del.icio.us and updated every Saturday to keep the list current.

It is a strange thing to see the pre-hype traffic for something that isn’t yet released. There also seems to be many more private betas than I remember seeing before. It is almost as if there is a sadistic mix of Web 2.0 “Lemming Syndrome” mixed with the “hurry up and wait” attitude of the military. [via]

A Series of Pipes

Over the past week or so I have been getting re-acquainted with my Yahoo account ever since Flickr decided I needed to tie my two accounts together. Lo and behold I discovered their mashup service Pipes. I can’t help but think that the name is a wink to Ted Stevens’ tubes - which still makes me turn my head in shame each time I hear it (full context here).

Despite my novice programming skills and lack of desire to read the directions, I was able to cobble together a local search for coffee within 10 miles of a user-provided location - all within about 3 minutes.

More interesting than what individual users can do is that Pipes lets you view the inner workings of Pipes created by others and clone them into other modified mashups.

So maybe there are some tubes in there somewhere. See also: Dapper - the data mapper