A defining characteristic of the semantic web is that information should be stored in a machine-readable format.

To shore up its readiness, Google bought Metaweb in July, 2010, thereby gaining Metaweb’s open-source database, Freebase.  Freebase has 12 million web “entities”, from science to celebrities.  It behaves almost like a person, combining bits of information

Better than Google, we could ask the web questions and get sensible answers.  We already have that in Wikipedia, but it is a single site.  Freebase includes such wikis, but tags items so that computers can understand what they are about, and then relate them to each other by meaning, rather than by ranking.

An example given in New Scientist (31 July 2010) is one entry for “Chicago” which is about the city; while another “Chicago” is about the stage show: “Freebase’s tags and links will help Google develop smarter searches (p.20),” asserts the article.

Naturally, Google is not the only Web 2.0/3.0 player to realise the attractiveness of the semantic web.  Twitter has and “annotations” system that allows tweets to be tagged with information that does not appear in the message, but can be read by computers.  (Remember the hidden HTML codes that were used in the early days of Google as a means of optimising an item’s ranking on that site?)  Facebook has changed its Open Graph settings to allow a semantic element.

It’s hard not to agree with New Scientist that, “The moves by Facebook and Twitter could change the very nature of how we interact with the web.” Software writers will be able to build apps that search for bars and cafes that your Facebook friends have enjoyed (not just visited).  This feature makes the semantic web very attractive to advertisers.  It will extend the effectiveness of some of the applications discussed in the previous blog on this site.

Most of all, it will extend the current trend among web designers to include Facebook’s “like” button to encourage links from Facebook pages to improve their visibility.  But, as New Scientist notes, Facebook’s “like” button doesn’t solve the incentive problem:  “If you can find a way to attach tags to users’ blogs and tweets, you will have a much richer source of data.”  That is what a new recommendation service, GetGlue is all about.  It’s a bit like Foursquare and Groupon, except that it is a network which focuses on entertainment, rather than products and services http://getglue.com/ .  You can check-in and rate things or discover new popular choices, see what your friends enjoy, and win prizes.

If website owners can be persuaded to tag their content for semantic logic, surfers and advertisers will be able to more accurately pinpoint meaning-specific facts, opinions and connections between consumers and their interests.

P
 
  It would be a bit cheeky for me to claim proudly that Fiona Mackenzie, founder of Undercover Strategist is one of my Protégées.  Still, she did complete a diploma in public relations which I set up when I began at AUT University.   Now she and I are in contact again, through our mutual interest in social media.  Fiona has presented some fascinating suggestions via her site Undercover Strategist.   I acknowledge her superior expertise in this field.  I expect some of the readers of this blog will also be interested in the following summary of her ideas on how to better your competition in the e-marketplace.  

1. Set up Google Alerts Google Alerts are open to all and take just a few minutes. Go to www.google.com/alerts, enter your competitor’s name, choose “Everything”, and add your email address.

2. Join their mailing list (but delete them from yours) Fiona says: “Okay, this might seem mean, but all’s fair in love and war.”

Use a non-identifying address (Gmail or Hotmail) and subscribe to their list.

   3. Monitor changes to their website Fiona notes: “This is perfectly legit, but seriously sneaky.”  You can use the free application at www.changedetection.com and enter the pages of your competitor’s website. Enter your email address and Change Detection will tell you each time they make changes to their page.

 4. See what Keywords competitors use One of the easiest ways to do this, according to Fiona, is another free tool, SEO Digger (http://seodigger.com/)  Enter your competitor’s URL and click search. Ignore the ranking information which is US-based data.

 5. See who links to competitors Use Google or Bing to search for backlink checker tools. Remember, Google assigns PageRank (its proprietary quality score) on the basis of those links

 6. Torpedo rule-breakers
Google and Bing both have strict rules when websites are constructed to make them rank better.  E.G. Uploading a website a second time under a new domain name is a breach of duplicate content rules.  Keyword stuffing is also frowned on. 

Search engines take breaches of their rules seriously and penalties for bad infringements can be severe, including getting struck off the search engine index, which leaves room for another website to fill the gap on the front page.

“With a bit of skill and luck, perhaps it could be yours,” says Fiona.

Fiona’s experience includes online retailers, business-to-business service providers, telecommunication businesses and a long gig in web design for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.   Here are a couple of links, if you’d like to know more http://www.undercoverstrategist.com/blog/website-traffic-competitor-traffic 

http://www.undercoverstrategist.com/blog/free-ebook-how-to-spy.html

 

 
It’s not simply the rash new words that define social media, but the growing power of social media marketing and loss of privacy that are highlighted here.

Since 2003, the editors have apparently added 2,000 new words to the Oxford Dictionary.  These include terms such as: “microblogging, social media, netbook, tweet-up” and so on.  www.independent.co.uk (arts-books section)

There’s no way they can keep up.  Hence, they have yet to add my new word “Foogletweet”.

It’s my gift to the new language of a new culture evolving in a new world of vast communities, bigger than nation states.  I blanch at the oft-repeated truism – if Facebook was a country, it would be the world’s third largest by population.

One of my worries is that voluntary membership of these communities puts internet users under the governance of private companies, taming the anarchy deliberately built into the world-wide-web.  Membership places at risk our privacy.  Remember the uproar over Google Buzz which automatically shared Gmail users’ lists of friends?

Google still wants to move into personal social media to remain a world power on the social media planet.  Rumours abound of the company’s pursuit of a “Google-me” project to do battle with Facebook.

Without a beachhead in that battle zone, Google may be hard pressed to hold its own in the social media world order (Fortune, Aug 16, 2010, No.11).  The cover story for that issue carries the title “Is Google over”.  Inside, the journal suggests that search engines are being overtaken by more personal social media, such as Facebook.  For instance, Google now occupies around 10% of the time we spend online, while Facebook eats up 17%.  People are more likely to seek the advice of “friends” on shopping and travel than “googling”.

Responding to this new demand are the online capitalists – the e-marketers.

In New Zealand, GrabOne, has combined advertisers’ acumen through email offers to a growing list of subscribers.  But the e-marketplace is rapidly becoming crowded.  I keep running into people who "check in" regularly to Foursquare with their location.  (See this blog, 28 June, 2010)  Foursquare claims three million users worldwide and offers subscribers a system to find where their friends are, and to earn points or badges for privileges, such as discounts and new products and services.

Its rival Shopkick  
www.shopkick.com/ is offering a free smartphone app that will give you “rewards for simply walking into the store”.  It promises users discounts off in-store purchases to encourage them to visit its retail location advertisers.  Another similar service, Groupon, uses the phones’ GPS to recognise when their owners walk into premises that have specials the phone users don’t even know about.  Groupon's “Deal of the Day” offers subscribers, “One ridiculously huge coupon each day, on the best things to eat, see, do and buy in your city.”  www.groupon.com/


This automated use of location-sensitive devices is rather like inertia selling, and it also appears to threaten our privacy.  


In terms of loss of privacy, there is no greater threat than Facebook, which has  access to 500 million users, which it is able to offer advertisers through its new service, Places.  The company is introducing that app in the USA for some smartphones including the iPhone.  Places offers Facebook users the chance to share, “where you are, what you're doing and the friends you're with right from your mobile”.

NZ Herald (20 Aug 2010) tells us that Facebook is being cautious about privacy, laying out a long list of ways users of Places can avoid having their whereabouts broadcast to the world without their say so.  http://mobile.nzherald.co.nz (technology section)

It was bad enough when speed cameras and Google-earth caught people in one-off private moments, but the idea that these “virtual countries” with no elected government will know where we are is unnerving.  If they are also tied into impulse consuming, based on our whereabouts, they are more like the “foot-in-the-door” of the old style vacuum cleaner salesman.  Is that what you want?


Posted by Joseph Peart, 23 Aug, 2010.

 
 
It’s not simply the rash new words that define social media, but the growing power of social media marketing and loss of privacy that are highlighted here.

Since 2003, the editors have apparently added 2,000 new words to the Oxford Dictionary.  These include terms such as: “microblogging, social media, netbook, tweet-up” and so on.  www.independent.co.uk (arts-books section)

There’s no way they can keep up.  Hence, they have yet to add my new word “Foogletweet”.

It’s my gift to the new language of a new culture evolving in a new world of vast communities, bigger than nation states.  I blanch at the oft-repeated truism – if Facebook was a country, it would be the world’s third largest by population.

One of my worries is that voluntary membership of these communities puts internet users under the governance of private companies, taming the anarchy deliberately built into the world-wide-web.  Membership places at risk our privacy.  Remember the uproar over Google Buzz which automatically shared Gmail users’ lists of friends?

Google still wants to move into personal social media to remain a world power on the social media planet.  Rumours abound of the company’s pursuit of a “Google-me” project to do battle with Facebook.

Without a beachhead in that battle zone, Google may be hard pressed to hold its own in the social media world order (Fortune, Aug 16, 2010, No.11).  The cover story for that issue carries the title “Is Google over”.  Inside, the journal suggests that search engines are being overtaken by more personal social media, such as Facebook.  For instance, Google now occupies around 10% of the time we spend online, while Facebook eats up 17%.  People are more likely to seek the advice of “friends” on shopping and travel than “googling”.

Responding to this new demand are the online capitalists – the e-marketers.

In New Zealand, GrabOne, has combined advertisers’ acumen through email offers to a growing list of subscribers.  But the e-marketplace is rapidly becoming crowded.  I keep running into people who "check in" regularly to Foursquare with their location.  (See this blog,     )  Foursquare claims three million users worldwide and offers subscribers a system to find where their friends are, and to earn points or badges for privileges, such as discounts and new products and services.

Its rival Shopkick  
www.shopkick.com/ is offering a free smartphone app that will give you “rewards for simply walking into the store”.  It promises users discounts off in-store purchases to encourage them to visit its retail location advertisers.  Another similar service, Groupon, uses the phones’ GPS to recognise when their owners walk into premises that have specials the phone users don’t even know about.  Groupon's “Deal of the Day” offers subscribers, “One ridiculously huge coupon each day, on the best things to eat, see, do and buy in your city.”  www.groupon.com/


This automated use of location-sensitive devices is rather like inertia selling, and it also appears to threaten our privacy.  


In terms of loss of privacy, there is no greater threat than Facebook, which has  access to 500 million users, which it is able to offer advertisers through its new service, Places.  The company is introducing that app in the USA for some smartphones including the iPhone.  Places offers Facebook users the chance to share, “where you are, what you're doing and the friends you're with right from your mobile”.

NZ Herald (20 Aug 2010) tells us that Facebook is being cautious about privacy, laying out a long list of ways users of Places can avoid having their whereabouts broadcast to the world without their say so.  http://mobile.nzherald.co.nz (technology section)

It was bad enough when speed cameras and Google-earth caught people in one-off private moments, but the idea that these “virtual countries” with no elected government will know where we are is unnerving.  If they are also tied into impulse consuming, based on our whereabouts, they are more like the “foot-in-the-door” of the old style vacuum cleaner salesman.  Is that what you want?


Posted by Joseph Peart, 23 Aug, 2010.

 

You are not alone

8/13/2010

 
While this phrase brings to mind X-files, what it means to social media researchers is that the web has ensured that no one ever needs to be lonely.  Online networking has seen to that.

Before considering how genuine or how close your internet friends really are, you might think about whether that matters.

One of the benchmarks for friendship networks was set by Robin Dunbar, evolutionary anthropologist, Oxford University, in his book, How many friends does one person need?  Dunbar theorises that there is a "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships" – sometimes known as Dunbar’s number.  He suggests that the primate brain can only manage 150 genuine social relationships.

Interestingly, Facebook’s owners say that the average number of friends for any member is currently around 130, which is not far from Dunbar’s number.

On the other hand, there are contacts both below and above that number with whom we may not have a close relationship, but because of social networking tools we are able to keep in touch much more easily than ever before.  What is more, those “weak ties” may have more influence on our lives than you may think.  One researcher who has found that weak ties of friendship are highly influential on your opinions and your success is Mark Granovetter (American Journal of Sociology, vol 78).  For instance, people get jobs through opportunities passed on by affiliates rather than close friends.

Other studies demonstrate how use of Facebook increases self-esteem.  Nicole Ellison of Michigan State University is quoted in the New Scientist, 10 July 2010, as saying “Support and affirmation for weak ties could be the explanation” (Ellison et al, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Vol. 12).

Perhaps not surprisingly, there is growing evidence that making friends and influencing people go hand-in-hand online. The New Scientist article quotes a series of experiments by Michael Kearns of the University of Philadelphia, which found that well-connected individuals had greater influence than others in the online world in the same way as their counterparts do in the real world.  (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 106, p.1347).  The researchers found that those with up to 300 friends were rated increasingly popular, but after that number their social appeal seemed to drop away.

Facebook’s own research backs up the correlation between subjective well-being and web-based social networking.  Contentment from site use is attributed by Sandy Pentland of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the ability of networkers to broadcast to their social group which, he says, means we may never feel alone.

So you can now get back to those emails and respond positively to those sent from members of Linked-in asking you to join their network.  But when you get to 300, you can relax, or unfriend some as you befriend others.  Good networking.

Posted by Joseph Peart
 
Generals and chief executives should read Adbusters and watch Juice TV (MTV).  They will find that there is a deep vein of discontent throughout global communities which expresses itself in the dissident glossy magazine Adbusters (which challenges our consumer society) and ‘gangsta rap’ (which reflects the violent life of back street USA)… but then you knew that, didn’t you?

For me, those were Social Media well before Web 3.0 or the interactive web.

Of course, it is Social Media, web-driven, that this blog is concerned with, and I now regret spiking the news item that announced at the end of May 2010, that the American Army had arrested Bradley Manning for the leaking the video of an Apache helicopter killing unarmed civilians in Iraq.

I feel cheated because I saw the significance, but thought it would keep. Now it has hit the mass media (seven weeks after appearing in the Economist, June 12th 2010) and I am denied my scoop.

Manning is reported to have lifted 260,000 diplomatic cables and other sensitive intelligence onto a disk labelled “Lady Gaga”, while he lip-synched the words of her songs to pretend he was listening to the cd.  He released these items to Wikileaks, run by Australian former hacker, Julian Assange, who was home educated by a mother who felt that school would suppress his individuality.  President Obama has shrugged off the seriousness of this incident, but the FBI and others may still try to prosecute Assange.

So while it is the interactive web that excites advertisers and the uniformed services, the anarchy that the web provides was evident long before Google or youtube www.youtube.com

Even popular music (not Lady Gaga, but gangsta rap) has been shown to promote lawlessness, according to Sid Kirchheimer, who researched the connection between video viewing and risky behaviours (Kirchheimer, WebMD Health News, March 3, 2003)

Kirchheimer asked: Does rap put teens at risk? And surveyed 522 black girls between the ages of 14 and 18 from non-urban, lower socioeconomic neighborhoods and found that those who watched lots of gangsta videos were:
ú       Three times more likely to hit a teacher
ú       Over 2.5 times more likely to get arrested  
(Retrieved by J Peart 29 July 2010 from http://www.webmd.com/)

Perhaps Adbusters is more responsible.  Its editorial statement reads: “We are a global network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society”(https://www.adbusters.org/ ).

Also on the website, there’s a rather sweet misspelling which promotes the print version of Adbusters, and reads: “The Revoltion Issue #91 SEPT/OCT 2010”


WikiLeaks itself saw this moment coming in a leak on 18 March 2008.

The item with that date begins with the portentous introduction: “This document is a classified (SECRET/NOFORN) 32 page U.S. counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks.  (retrieved by J Peart on 29 July 2010 from http://wikileaks.org/).

It then goes on to say: “The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD (Department of Defence) or elsewhere in the U.S. government are providing sensitive or classified information to WikiLeaks.org cannot be ruled out.

According to WikiLeaks, the report recommends “The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the WikiLeaks.org Web site”( retrieved 29 July from WikiLeaks).

So if you watch Juice TV, read Adbusters or visit WikiLeaks regularly, youi will have a better idea of the true meaning of Social Media.

posted by Joseph Peart
 
Facebook seems to have survived the storm of protest from members when it exposed their security by enforcing changes that overrode some user privacy choices.  The problem hasn’t gone away however.

New Scientist, 5 June 2010, notes that Facebook chief, Mark Zuckerberg, ignores the human factor at his peril.  The 50 privacy settings with 170 options simply did not consider the human computer interface (HCI).

“It’s a problem for everyone involved in online self-publishing,” Anthony House of Google told an Index on Censorship http://www.indexoncensorship.org/meeting in London, according to New Scientist.  House is European policy manager for Google and admitted, “We need to be more intuitive about human-computer interaction.”  He was referring to the automatic enrolment of Gmail users to the Buzz social network when they failed to opt out as the Buzz introduction appeared on their screen.

When Ann Blandford, an HCI researcher at the University College London investigated, she told New Scientist that she found the meaning of many privacy settings is obscure.  She proposed that we each be able to preview our social sites as if we were a stranger, a nominated friend or a friend-of-a-friend.  “I want to be able to log in as someone else and look at my online profile…” she said (p. 19) – an experience akin to an out-of-body experience!

If that seems slightly weird, how about something really creepy in the same issue of New Scientist?  You can use Lifenaut’s website http://lifenaut.com/  to create a basic visual interface of yourself (your auto-face may speak, wink or blink) which can communicate with your descendents long after you have gone.  You could choose to deploy Image Metrics’ software (at $US500,000 a crack) and create a much more lifelike digital version, which would be less frightening to your grandchildren. http://www.image-metrics.com/project/emily-project 

If you want to see these possibilities in a Scifi story, then watch out for the American TV drama Caprica, which replaces Zoe Graystone with an exact digital copy of her brain implanted into a humanoid robot http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okC5HjMANF4 .

The question is: how private would that digital shadow of yourself be if it is stored in the "Cloud" or would hackers sabotage your loving messages with hurtful fiction?

Submitted by Joseph Peart
 
 
With Gary Mersham as the driving force and my AUT colleague Petra Theunissen, I recently authored my third book, Public relations and communication management: an Aotearoa/New Zealand perspective (2009).

My first book was written with Jim Macnamara who has just published his 12th book, The 21st century media (r)evolution (2010).

On paper, both books comment on social media.  In Jim’s case, he writes about changes wrought by electronic media, from “Web 3.0, the semantic web” to wireless-connected location-aware notebooks and GPS-equipped phones/computers.  

Our words are on paper, but our thoughts are on satellites.

Global Positioning Systems (via satellites) mean that people can decide if they want to be found through applications in the Web “cloud”, such as foursquare or Comob Net and Comob.  Foursquare is a location-based social networking website, and Comob offers a collaborative GPS mapping ap. which you can download onto your iPhone or Nokia.  

Comob began as a digital arts project to explore social relationships.  Foursquare is more blatantly commercial.  It allows you to check-in to places, meet up with friends and discover new places, many of which are retail social venues like bars and restaurants, which register on the site.

Does this mean that we will be forced to give up our privacy, or will it remain under our control?

Well, research suggests that it’s not just social life, but work-life that creates concerns about where you are and what you are doing.  For instance, in Fortune Magazine (June 14) Beth Kowitt reports that a study done for Microsoft earlier this year found 7% of employees felt that their co-workers were not supportive (up from 1% in 2008); and 16% of bosses were seen as not supportive (also up from 1% two years earlier): so “Face time ain’t dead yet”.

Maybe we will be more supportive if remote workers carry their GPS devices around like a home-detention bracelet.  That way, bosses and co-workers could be confident they are in their home office and not at the beach or in a café.  (It might even confirm the stat. in the same article that 9% surveyed said they worked in the loo.)

Could location sensitive software could be the new dot.com bubble, ask investors.  Well, Foursquare is just one of the new start-up companies reported same issue of Fortune under the headline “Web 2.0: the party’s over” (p. 14).  In that article, Jessi Hempel notes Facebook’s $US1.4 billion revenue this year makes its IPO (due 2012?) “…one of the most anticipated since Google’s”.

But the same article notes: AOL’s plans to sell or shutdown Bebo and Rupert Murdoch’s rueful comment about his Myspace purchase that “We made some big mistakes”.  Google is still bullish about Youtube, but “analysts predict that significant profits are still years away” (p.14).

So, where is all this heading?

One answer is provided by Nicholas Carr in his book, The shallows: what the internet is doing to our brains.  Carr suggests that web multitasking and “power browsing” are turning our neural pathways into drains full of trivia.  One interesting stat. is that most web pages are viewed for 10 seconds or less; and fewer than one in 10 page views last more than 2 minutes.  

Imagine what that does to our attention spans….

What was that?
 
Hello, I’m back. 

We bloggers have to imagine an audience to create one.  In my mind, you have visited this site every week and been disappointed to find that I haven’t written a new blog.

I’ve read and viewed heaps since I last wrote, but my job is driven by human imperatives.  They combine to make it impossible for me to complete one of my “slow blogs”, even at 1.00 a.m. when I am sometimes still replying to emails. 

A marvellous website that offers a blog that isn’t a blog is Geeksugar.  It’s not for me, but it has a great name.  It blends celebrity sugar with Geek technonews and offers constant updates that are a bit like a Yum Cha meal…. You keep coming back for just-one-more-thing until you find you have over-ordered and over-eaten. 

Consider one of its latest postings, time-logged 11.00 a.m. Sunday, which reads:
“I'm smitten over the latest site trend: bookmarking and displaying collections of your favorite things in a beautiful, visually stimulating way. Pinterest is one such site, allowing users to create a category and post photos of clothing, products, books, or anything else to create a visually stimulating virtual inspiration board” (Geeksugar). 

The site’s next posting was time-logged 2.00 a.m. Sunday.  Now that’s what I call Yum Cha! 

In my case, it’s more like the slow-food movement, except I am possibly the world’s slowest-blogger.  If I was as clever as the creators of Geeksugar, I could compress that into a great pseudonym, like “Slogger”.  (I’m not sure how well that would go.) 

So instead, I am inviting YOU to send me a blog about social media that I can post, under your name, as a contributor-blogger: No! I don’t want you to think of yourself as a “clogger”, although that is my topic for this piece.  So go ahead: If it is original, relevant and legal, I will publish it. 

However, let’s return to clogging.  The internet is in danger of becoming clogged.  Read on: 

There are recent reports about the limits to the number of domains left on the internet and suggestions that the Web may have to be reconfigured if it is not to run out of domains.  At the same time, New Zealand is vaunting “fibre to the door”, to increase the country’s broadband capacity and speed.  

To make it even harder to keep up with demand for capacity, Jon Fortt, senior technology writer in Fortune magazine declares 2010 to be “the year of the internet video”.  He says that Teleconferencing can cut business travel costs by $US3.5 billion a year by 2012.  Smartphones and camcorders that will fit in your pocket will increase the size of this video tsunami (Fortune, May 24, 2010). 

In the same issue, his colleague, Michael Copeland, argues that the seismic force pushing this wave is actually “folk who sell corporate networking gear”.   

Whatever the cause, the flood of “VJ”s could block organisational networks, just as iPhone is doing to AT&T’s network, says Fortte.  To which Copeland responds that IT knows how to block rogue services. 

What they agree is that some video usage will enhance organisational communication, but it will require investment on capacity and security.  They also agree that it should be well-managed and used in moderation. 

This looks like another job for “super-communicator” – sobriquet, “s’c’ater”, which has a slightly better ring to it than slogger.

 Joseph Peart   [email protected]