Community 2.0: Entourage on Whrrl

New social net Whrrl (think Yelp! meets Facebook meets Brightkite/Dodgeball meets Dopplr) is trying to gain groundswell with a nifty collabo with HBO's Entourage. Befriend the crew and get personal guides/recommendations/reviews of LA from the characters like they were "real" people.

More examples(+/-) of social media blurring the lines for "fictional" characters (stay tuned for a Case Study and vid of our own activity with Sci-Fi Network's Eureka TV show.

Community 2.0: Hurricane Gustav Information Center

A collective assembly of Gustav Information. Using Ning platform, the site aggregates content from a variety of social media resources, including; Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Utterz, Technorati, etc.- all you have to do is tag the item gustav.



*Hopefully, this will be a merely academic exercise in pre-caution.

via Social Media Club

Mass Interactive: Cymbolism

Cymbolism is a new website that attempts to quantify the association between colors and words, making it simple for designers to choose the best colors for the desired emotional effect. Taking web 2.0 folksonomy to the next stage, users are invited to organize the definition of color itself with word associations and tags.

Electing a US President (in Plain English)

Common Craft strikes again. Swing thought: planners' job is to make strategic complexity as simple and succint as these guys continually do.

Networked Self: Axe on Yahoo! Live

Looks like Axe Brazil is using Yahoo! Live to good effect.


I guess it beats lookin' at my channel

*Unfortunately, the dudes here seem creepy. Put a shirt on!

Politics 2.0: 3Trillion.org

Who needs the lame tax stimulus check, when I got a $3 Trillion gift certificate to spend?




3trillion.org, is a web site that gives you 3 trillion dollars - the money American tax-payers are projected to spend on the Iraq war - and use it in a virtual shopping spree for your friends and family. Lets go shopping!

I picked up a few tchotckes including a space vacation, a Wii, the Yankees, the Beatles catalog, and a lil' somethin'-somethin' for New Orleans.

Mass Interactive: We Think

Vid promoting Charles Leadbetter's new book "We Think".

Only Human

Only Human is a community where people share stories about mistakes they've made in life and their advice to others.

Tom Green Hosts Talk TV Show From His House

Tom Green has been getting all web 2.0 social media on us with a decent enough show that he broadcasts live nightly from his house. The Tom Green channel on the web displays his real home phone number for any and all to call and ask questions on air. Celeb guests like Perez Hilton, Tony Hawk, Dr Drew and Kenny+Speny come on over to Tom's house and bring items for later resale on eBay to raise funds to keep the show on the air. Viewers get to vote on what the funds are actually spent on (necessary vid equipment or a useless stuffed bear, for instance). Podcasts on iTunes, yep. Blog, yep. Mass calls to submit user-gen YouTube vids of you watching him.

All he needs now is a groundswell of viewers and paying advertisers and he has a disruptive model for the giants to be concerned about (or mimic).

Brave New Media: How Facebook Users Spend Their Time

Compete.com blog discusses "how Facebook users spend their time".

Not unsurprisingly, people spend most of their time browsing profiles, but using applications is getting up there in terms of number of users, and the time spent is almost as long.

And speaking of Facebook Apps...Compete data show that Facebook activity grew 32% from May to August, 2007, with more than a third of the growth coming from the new applications.


And furthermore...O'Reilly released a report The Facebook Application Platform and it has good and bad news. Good: there are nearly 5000 Facebook applications, and the top applications have tens of millions of installs and millions of active users. Bad news: 87% of the usage goes to only 84 applications! Only 45 applications have more than 100,000 active users. "This is a long tail marketplace with a vengeance -- but unfortunately, the economic models (for developers at least, though not for Facebook itself) all rely on getting into the very short head."

Here's the distribution of active users among the top 200 developers. (Some developers have multiple popular applications.) As you can see, the drop-off is extremely steep:


Doh! Tim O'Reilly says: "This doesn't mean that Facebook won't become an important platform for developers, just that a throwaway Facebook app is not the ticket to quick riches. Embracing the Facebook opportunity requires more than just optimism."

via O'Reilly Radar and Compete.com Blog

Live Web in Plain English (as Advertisement)

Common Craft strikes again, this time for the new Google Docs app - yet another smart play at making Google your dashboard for digital living (Facebook is aiming at becoming your dashboard for social life).



*Google Docs don't work for Safari...so, ya'll lemme know how it's workin'.

Cult of the Amateur

Dan Meth created this video homage to all the viral video superstars (to-date) evolved from our YouTube era.

Internet People - Watch more free videos

Live Web In Plain English

The Common Craft Show is a series of short explanatory videos by Lee and Sachi LeFever. Their goal is to fight complexity with simple tools and plain language.

Citizen Journalism: Wikiscanner

...reveals that corporations (again) are not model citizens at playing by the rules. The scandal here isn't about "the cult of the amateur" abusing the open format to mislead and misinform (barring a prank or two, like George "Wanker" Bush, which I find funny btw). This scandal is another cautionary tale about corporations and institutions assuming to use social media as another tool to propagate one-way PR agendas the same way they've always done. For these monoliths, Wikipedia is simply another PR channel, seemingly without pesky editors. But there are editors - people. And user-created police controls like Wikiscanner only make transparent what always was - big media machines change the lines of text to suit their goals and this activity is labelled under the guise of "information".

Mass Interactive: Infinite Cat Project

Cats do Web 2.0, too!



MC Escher Cats. Looking at cats. Looking at cats. Looking at cats. Looking at cats. Looking at cats. I think you get the idea... Nice (AND DAMN SIMPLE) way to hook cat lovers into a participatory web game. Kittenwar still reigns, though.

Mass Interactive: GMail Does Web 2.0

Help Google imagine how an email message travels around the world.

Post your clip as a response to this one. They'll edit a selection of submissions together to make a final video, which will be featured on the Gmail homepage and seen by users worldwide.

Respond to this video with your own clip by August 13, 2007 to be considered to the final collaborative video. Learn more about the project at http://mail.google.com/mvideo

Mass Interactive: Diddy Does Web 2.0

Music mogul Sean Combs is looking for an assistant, but don’t send a résumé. The star is accepting only video applications uploaded onto YouTube.

Mr. Combs, known as Diddy, videotaped a help-wanted ad on the popular video Web site hoping to find a helper to replace his former assistant, who did everything from holding his umbrella in the rain to playing chaperone to his hip-hop group Da Band.

While Mr. Combs declined to comment on why he chose YouTube instead of a job-recruiting site like Monster.com, he offered some explanation in the video.

“It’s a new age, new time, new era,” he said in his first posting, a minute-and-a-half clip of him yelling behind his desk. “Forget coming into the office and having a meeting with me and being all nervous.”

Hopefuls must audition by posting a video that is less than three minutes long explaining why they deserve the job. Initially, Mr. Combs opened it to anybody with a camera or a little creativity, but in a second posting, narrowed the applicant pool to only college graduates.


More than 600 people have submitted videos.

John A. Challenger, chief of the recruiting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said Mr. Combs’s online video search is more than a ploy to get attention. More applicants are adding video clips to their applications. “It helps put a face to all the faceless résumés,” he said.

Viewers will pick the finalists on YouTube, but Mr. Combs will pick the winner.

via http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/business/media/30diddy.html?_r=2&8dpc=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1185813074-52mdpT6NH85/h6f6Qj20WQ&oref=slogin

Segmenting the Social Video Platforms

Politics 2.0: Post-Debate, Obama Has Work Cut Out For Him

Riding the tails of Sarah's post on the Democratic CNN/YouTube debates, an article in the Economist showed the Barack is trailing in some key markets where he should be performing strong. For example, in South Carolina, more than half of the states black primary electorate are actually pulling for Hillary over him.


The article goes on to say that this is not for lack of any star power, but his challenge is a difficult one: clearly communicating to black voters that he understands their concerns while also attracting white suburban voters.

This is really shaping up to be an interesting election, especially when compared with the last one where all we had was a choice between the lesser of two evils. Combine this with the fact that, according to CNN, the leading Republican candidate among Republican voters is none of the above, with nearly 25% unwilling to back the leading Rep candidates. And even better, none of them seemed to have gained any sort of clear advantage among the Christian right.

A last comment on the YouTube debates, I'll be very interested to see how the Republicans handle themselves when they get theirs in September.

User-Created: Simpsonize Me!

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