social media

  • 02
    Oct 07

    tags

    Quotes of the Day - People who know their stuff

    Three quotes from my feedreader this morning that struck a chord with me:

    • Jason Fried waxes lyrical  about a new UI change on the iPhone:

      Apple recently posted an iPhone update which, among other things, adds an “iTunes” icon to the iPhone home screen.

      I love where they put it. They didn’t put it where consistency tells you to put it. That would be on the left side. They put it where context tells you to put it. On the right side right above the iPod icon. Even the icon’s arrow points right down to the iPod.

      iPhone: Context over consistency - (37signals)

    • Jason Calacanis ponders the wisdom of building applications inside closed systems:

      Does anyone know a business that has grown from Facebook into a real non-Facebook dependent business yet? I think MySpace has built one third party business in Slide.com right? Oh yeah, and Photobucket which MySpace bought. Building inside closed ecosystems is very, very dangerous.... be careful.

      Random Thoughts over some White Tea with Honey

    • Erik Hersman says there is a lot of value in owning detailed hyperlocal data

      One last point worth mentioning is to try and be the owner of the data that you collect for your application. If you are creating a local shopping/pricing site, then try to create the best database of business information, location and ownership in the area. This data is valuable and can be licensed to others, or made available through an API that brings you more traffic or revenue.

      This point can’t be driven home enough. There is very little data/content on Africa available on the web. Whoever captures and creates a database of that information will have an incredibly lucrative product. By the way, this isn’t always easy to do, but then if it was it would already have been done. .

      3 Localized Ideas for African Web Developers

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    posted 08:40 AM
  • 03
    Sep 07

    tags

    Cameron Adams says there are no social networks

    Cameron Adams aka "The Man in Blue" has just made a brilliant post that sums up what the next generation of web applications (I refuse to call it web 3.0, but that is probably what it is going to be called) will be all about. Anyone building social media and applications should take the time to read it.

    There is only one social network. My social network.

    Flickr is part of my social network. Twitter is part of my social network. So is Facebook, Upcoming, MySpace, Last.fm, Corkd, Pownce, Del.icio.us and a host of other social sites.

    The Man in Blue > There are no social networks

    no comments
    posted 08:49 AM
  • 03
    Apr 07

    tags

    Last.fm - social networking for (almost) grown ups

    I have been using Last.fm since October 2004 and over time it has grown into my favourite website ever. Last.fm utilises a plugin that reports the songs that you listen to to a central database that gradually builds up a profile of your music tastes. The geniuses at Last.fm explain it better here:

    Last.fm is the flagship product from the team that designed the Audioscrobbler music engine. More than ten million times a day, Last.fm users "scrobble" their tracks to our servers, helping to collectively build the world's largest social music platform.

    Last.fm taps the wisdom of the crowds, leveraging each user's musical profile to make personalised recommendations, connect users who share similar tastes, provide custom radio streams, and much more.

    My good friend Lloyd Gedye, Mail and Guardian journalist and chief blogger at Isolation.tv, wrote an article for the M&G about Last.fm that appeared in last week's edition and is reproduced here on his excellent blog. He quotes me in the article (thanks Lloyd!), and explains the features that make this an essential service for music junkies like myself.

    Last.fm is also a glimpse into the future of music radio. I spend most of my day working on my PC and listening to my Last.fm friends' radio stations or to custom radio stations that I have built myself. No ads, no irritating "personality" DJ's, certainly no generic Billboard Hot100  tunes playing 8 or 10 times a day. Once wireless broadband becomes cheap and ubiquitous enough I will be listening to Last.fm or services like it in my car too. Traditional music radio stations will gradually lose more and more listeners and either switch to a local talk radio format or die.

    I have "scrobbled" 21 798 tracks since October 2004 when I joined, and as a result Last.FM has built a very accurate profile of my music tastes and interests. I have met a whole bunch of Diesel Whores fans through the service too - its really cool when a kid from Brazil emails you through Last.fm to say he likes your music. Last.fm is free, but there is a $3/month subscription option that gives you more control over your radio stations and a totally ad-free service. I have been a subscriber since late 2005.

    Every track that you listen to is a wiki and can be tagged. This has enabled Last.fm to build up an incredible database of user generated information about artists and songs. Check out this flattering profile of my band that a guy called TenRapid submitted.

    I know this sounds like an advert, but last.fm is so good that I just had to write about it. Try it out - if you enjoy finding new music you won't be disappointed.

    My Last.fm Profile - go on, add me as a friend.

    no comments
    posted 11:37 AM
  • 05
    Mar 07

    tags

    Fidentia, Moneyweb and the people

    Vincent Maher has a fascinating transcript up on his blog of an interview he did with Hilton Tarrent, the Moneyweb production editor. There are some interesting Q&A's regarding the redevelopment of Moneyweb and how they handle moderation of reader comments (always an issue on South African sites), but the really good stuff comes in when they start discussing the reader response to the recent Fidentia debacle, which Moneyweb has covered extensively:

    HT: The response by our readers has been unprecedented. We have spoken at length internally about it, because we were caught by surprise. a large chunk of our readers during the early days were Fidentia employees (there were 1100 of them)

    VM: Do you think this is because people were finding out things for the first time about the company they work for, but from an outside source?

    HT: Yes. That was definitely a major part of it. we pretty much know this because we had letters, emails, phone calls, comments under stories from staff members

    VM: So the Fidentia ship suddenly sprung a thousand leaks…

    VM: What was the feeling among your team as all of this was happening?

    HT: Yeah. One of our major achievements was to get a staff member to write for us from the inside (he also spoke to us on radio): Small voice inside Fidentia speaks

    Another highlight comes later on in the transcript:

    HT: I think the most interesting thing we saw was the creation of original content by our readers, who then posted this as comments

    VM: Like short articles?

    HT: There were those, but users were also creating images, they pinpointed Arthur Brown’s house on Google maps, etc and then posted these to imageshack, with the links posted as comments, here and here.

    These are really great examples of what happens when you let your users take part in the conversation. Hilton points out some of the problems they faced, such as readers impersonating other readers, requests for content to be deleted and the like, but by and large there was a huge positive effect for Moneyweb, and they managed to get leads and further insight into the developing story. People also used Moneyweb and the comments system in ways that Moneyweb had not anticipated, and instead of shutting down comments and restricting what people could do they ran with it and came out on top. Its a great lesson for any media organisation.

    Source: Vincent Maher - Media in Transition » Fidentia scandal sparks an excellent case study in social media on Moneyweb

    no comments
    posted 05:41 AM

Hi, I'm Jaxon Rice. By day I run a Johannesburg based web company called Soup and by night I am the frontman of the Diesel Whores. This is my personal blog. more...

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