Social Platforms & Social Media In Business

A recent survey of U.S. journalists by Brodeur reveals that over 75% of reporters turn to blogs for information when doing research for stories and that “blogs are not only having an impact on the speed and availability of news, but also influence the tone and editorial direction of reporting.”

I find this easy to believe! The news content that social media produces is very different that information a reporter would find by doing old school offline research. Blogs as sources are attractive to journalists because:

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Simon Owens has had it with MySpace and has declared January 30 “International Delete Your MySpace Account Day”.

If you’ve experiences the annoyances of MySpace, you probably don’t need much convincing to delete your account, but in case you’re still teetering on the verge, Simon’s outlined his main motivators for giving MySpace the boot:

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Ashley Spencer, age 29, passed away on Tuesday, January 8 in a car crash, leaving her husband (Peter), brand new baby (Lucy) and a toddler son (Toby).

Almost immediately word spread throughout Ashley’s Twitter community and with shock and grief her online friends rallied together to do what they could for Ashley’s family. Together, in only 10 days they raised over $8,000 to help with the funeral costs and any other needs her family may have.

It’s amazing that so much can be done in such a short about of time. What is even more amazing is that most of the people involved in this initiative were either online friends of Ashley’s or didn’t know her at all, but only heard about her death through the web grapevine.

Some people may be wondering– “Why would you do something like this for someone you only knew through Twitter?”

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Every one who has done some reading in the area of SEO knows of the supposedly magical properties that .edu domains have with search engines such as Google. The theory being that Google weights .edu domains a little more heavily, since they are less likely to be commercial, and thus less prone to abuse.

Digg (not surprisingly) doesn’t care about the TLD extension of a domain, as I found out this morning when I tried to submit this humorous series of Lyndon Johnson Pictures that had already done quite well at Reddit:

I have seen this happen quite often lately when trying to submit things to Digg that are front paged at Reddit. There is a large and ever growing list of banned domains at Digg (for spamming the submission process or for being a constant source of duplicated content), but this is the first time I have ever seen a .edu get the banned treatment.

There is obviously opportunity here if you happen to find popular content at Reddit (that happens to fit your business or niche of course, unless you have a catch all site where anything would fit) that resides on a domain that is banned by Digg. Of course, beware of content theft, but that goes without saying. = )

Compete has just released a list of the top moving sites of 2007.

From the social platform genre, we have CafeMom, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Squidoo, Webkinz, Six Apart, and WordPress, among others.

Are there any surprises in this list?

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Perhaps you’ve heard your friends or colleagues make references to their adventures, exploits, or business endeavors in Second Life and have wondered “What is the DEAL??? Isn’t that a pretend world? Why are there so many people spending so much time and money in there?”

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Sometimes you need something besides Akismet. I have Defensio on a few sites. But I’m testing the new version of WP Spam Hit Man. So far I’m extremely happy.

So what does it do?

Sometimes you get some comments which from very beginning you know they are spam. It is because spam bots used certain words inside them and in many cases - a lot of those words. You can’t ban then entirely because some of real people still use those words - maybe not in that amount - but still. Here where WP Spam Hitman comes in. It allows you to write as many words or regular expressions you want and set a number from which you are pretty sure that some comment is a spam.

Then it checks every comment/trackback/pingback and count how many hit point that comment gets (so for instance - how many usually-spam words it contains). If a comment gets enough of those hits - certain action will be performed.

You can simply delete the message and never think about it again. You can also mark it as spam or throw it into moderation.

Go get it.

If you are like me you are always looking for ways to increase productivity so I can spend more time building relationships that are so key to business. Well Post Ideas just became an instant hit on one of my blogs and hopefully will be putting on any of my team oriented sites. It’s just perfect for keeping track of post ideas that I often have and I fail to actually create it because I lose the little post it note on my blog.

Go get it.

A workstream is a live updated record of work you’ve completed. When doing group work with remote colleagues, it allows you to keep track of what everyone else is doing. When working solo, it helps you keep track of your own productivity.

via

I’ve started by creating a top secret workstream on twitter that allows me to keep track of my time, and my progress on various inter-related projects and this is a great way to utilize twitter and it could be super useful in a social way if I actually had multiple members of a team working on these project but instead it’s just me. Maybe my next two person project I will utilize twitter in this unique way.

This seems really geeky to me but I think it’s a neccesary evil for some folks out there. A how-to on creating a facebook application on Ruby on Rails. That’s all I have to say since I’m not that geeky.