N O - U N D O

Well it’s been a while since my last post as I've been rather busy working on enterprise search project which is still on going. Anyways I digress I've been doing some more reading recently on a trip to Malta I read Wikinomics by Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams and I've come to realize that the future is going to be user generated. We will see the rise of all things user generated from Magazines to News Agencies, and as connectivity becomes more and more mobile so updates and amendments will be come more frequent. The news will be almost impossible to censor but it will also be highly influence-able by less than scruples individuals??? Perhaps; but perhaps it will self censor and self correct itself. My theory is this if you have a piece of software that monitors reports and then works out the "true" story by cross referencing the facts that have been submitted.  And since such a site would be community based it would be policed by the community this could be achieved by making the stories submitted public as well as the identity of those who submitted them.

I've been doing research into mapping/visualising social networks in various forms both physical mapping and mapping of relationships between people in order to ascertain something useful and stumbled across this site http://www.lococitato.com/myspacefriends/myspacefriends.html. Its fairly limited to its depth and the amount of data that one can discern from it but it got me to thinking if it was possible to generate such maps as to  identify mavens and connectors as outlined in "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell. Obviously the tool that is outlined in the first link only shows the html links to people who are your so called "friends" but if you were to monitor the traffic between these links we would be able to get a better picture of what kind of relationships people have with each other not only monitoring for frequency of communication but listening for specific keywords and phrases as well. In doing so we would be able to get a clearer picture of which nodes are central to various social groups with specific shared interests. These individuals are ideal candidates to be brand ambassadors as they will do doubt carry some form of social influence that if a product fits into their social demographic would prove to be highly beneficial for marketing purposes.

For some interesting further reading visit Large-Scale Online Social Network Visualization and Semantic Studios 

There's a lot being banded about the marketing and advertising forums about Social Objects and word of mouth these days as agencies struggle to find a grapple hold of something they can use to perpetuate advertising in a vastly "noisy" world. To be honest though they are all missing the point, most blogs and comments I've read make it sound like social object are just random things that happen or something gimmicky, true they can be these things but they are in actual fact more complex than this. Social objects are bits of information or memes that provide the perpetuator with social currency, by this I mean they elevate the perpetuators  social status by passing on the information. In a recent blog by Hugh MacLeod he outlined some situations where social objects occur, what he failed to metion is why they occur.

When societies were developing we became increasingly reliant on each other for survival.  Say Cave person Ugg was very good at finding certain types of berries he would pass on information where to find them to the other people in his tribe his social status would thus be increased as he became more important for the survival of the tribe. He would then stand a higher chance of survival as other members of the tribe would share information and resources with him more readily to share in that social status. Like wise today we share information, advice and or gossip (which elevate the propagator usually on the grounds of "morals").  So in a nutshell word of mouth is a symbiotic process where everyone wins; obviously like with all things some win more than others.