The Knowledge » Social Media

#socialmedia Daily

TechDept — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:17:30 +0000

paper.li organizes links shared on Twitter into an easy to read newspaper-style format. Newspapers can be created for any Twitter user, list or #tag.

A great way to stay on top of all that is shared by the people you follow – even if you are not connected 24/7 !

By paper.li 2010

Vintage Facebook, Skype & Youtube posters

TechDept — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:13:04 +0000

by Moma Agency 2010

A Book Attracts Loads of Facebook Fans. But Why?

TechDept — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:54:34 +0000

Book authors have been searching eagerly for ways to harness social media to promote their works. So it would seem that Gregory Levey had stumbled upon the magic key after the Facebook fan page of his book “Shut Up, I’m Talking” went from having just 700 fans to 692,000 in a matter of months — more than New York City (570,000 fans) or the George Clooney fan page (613,000).

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he wrote in a recent essay on a Web site for authors about the explosion in his book’s popularity. “Who were these people?”

By Pradyna Joshi for The New York Times, August 29 2010

Icons of the web poster

TechDept — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:16:16 +0000

A large-scale scan of the top million web sites (per Alexa traffic data) was performed in early 2010 using the Nmap Security Scanner and its scripting engine.

We retrieved each site’s icon by first parsing the HTML for a link tag and then falling back to /favicon.ico if that failed. 328,427 unique icons were collected, of which 288,945 were proper images. The remaining 39,482 were error strings and other non-image files. Our original goal was just to improve our http-favicon.nse script, but we had enough fun browsing so many icons that we used them to create the visualization below.

By David Field and Brandon Enright for nmap.org

A teens-eye view of social media

TechDept — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:46:57 +0000

Seventeen year-old Becca Taylor, who spent her work experience
week with us, gives a personal perspective of social networking,
and how it affects her world.

The use of social media by teens has increased rapidly throughout the last 6 years. But why is social media the new hot topic?

Which Social Media sites?

For me, Facebook is the main site I tend to use, as well as my friends.

I think different social media sites are aimed at different age groups; Bebo aiming at a younger audience, as Bebo is a lot easier to use, while Twitter and Facebook are aimed at an older audience as the layout is much more sophisticated.

YouTube has a very high percentage of users, this website is well known around the world, it is easy to use and you can watch pretty much anything you want to.

I don’t really tend to use YouTube a lot, it isn’t something I’m interested in, I think a person’s personality influences the amount of time spent on YouTube as some people don’t enjoy watching pointless video clips.

Getting connected

Undoubtedly the use of mobile phones and computers is essential to today’s teenager, for me, the use of my mobile phone is important, teenagers want to socialise every day and having a mobile phone allows you to do this, whether you’re on the internet or simply just text messaging.

Really the use of text messaging is no longer needed, unless the person you’re contacting isn’t online.

These social sites are free to communicate; therefore it makes more sense to use these websites instead of spending money on credit to text or call.

Not only is it cheaper, but you know your friend is available to talk to if they are online, whereas with a mobile phone, you don’t, their phone could be switched off, have no signal or not with them.

Without communication each day with the people I enjoy talking to, would for me, be a big deal, and I’m sure most teenagers would agree.

People who don’t have Facebook may feel left out and excluded, for young teens, Facebook is a big conversation starter. But are people who haven’t got Facebook more secure than people who have? Is Facebook just a way of making people feel involved?

Ads and celebs

There is a lot of advertisement used on these social websites, for example on twitter, there are banners, encouraging people to ‘stalk’ celebrities.

However Facebook is more self-involved, there is only a small amount of advertising on each page, mainly advertising games for your own entertainment or promoting the use of Facebook on mobile phones. These adverts are shown on the right side of your profile, out of the way from your own information.

As a teenager myself, I believe this is a disadvantage for the companies that are being advertised, as people don’t pay much attention to them, they are small and insignificant.

Bebo, a page aimed at a younger age group, has a strange variety of adverts, such as ‘Capital One credit cards’ and ‘ cheap breakdown cover’, obviously this advert is not aimed at a young audience so children using the Bebo site will pay no attention.

MySpace is again, very involved in celebrities, most actors, actress’s, bands, solo artists and authors have their own MySpace page.

Before logging on to your MySpace this is obvious as there are a lot of banners and boxes advertising celebrity pages. I believe that these are noticed as they are large, bold and striking – this catches the viewer’s eye and encourages them to read the advertisement.

For these websites to advertise celebrities so much isn’t necessarily good, some people don’t enjoy hearing about celebrities, they don’t want to hear what colour their hair is that day, what they are shopping for or what time they sat down for dinner last night.

I believe this is why people prefer Facebook. Facebook lets you choose if you want to read about celebrities, you don’t get pointless celebrity trash shoved in your face.

Are social networks taking over?

In recent times there has been a small movement against the excessive use of social networks. Has social networking replaced traditional media? Do people log on to their Facebook page instead of flicking through channels on their TV? I really believe this is true, although Facebook advertises television programmes, people still tend to spend their time chatting to friends on the internet.

For me, I believe this is a disadvantage, the useful information shown on television, or in magazines, or in books are no longer noticed by teens, therefore they are jeopardising the opportunity to develop their intelligence and acquire knowledge.

Fears, parents and schools

People are starting to question how right it is to share intimate and private events with such a large number of individuals, many of them strangers.

Cyber bulling has also become a big issue; it can cause depression, self-harm and even suicide, this could be because of offensive websites made about an innocent person, mean comments passed on to an innocent person, posing as someone else or even posting insulting or threatening things on the web.

However, all this can be stopped, there is a lot of help and support to prevent cyber bulling but I believe that social media websites should be a lot more aware of cyber bullying, as they themselves don’t seem to do much to prevent it.

Some parents are worried about their child on the internet, so some have created their own profiles to check up on their children whenever they feel worried. But is this okay? Do children want their parents looking into their business? Do the parents want their children looking in to their business? I know I wouldn’t.

Schools also tend to have a problem with social networks, as they believe it distracts students from doing their work, but some schools believe that it enhances the education of students. As many student use their web pages to discuss work. For example, they could be finding out about missed work, finding out homework information or simply just discussing facts.

Global, local

Social networking is everywhere, but the popularity of sites varies from country to country. It is a global phenomenon and you can connect globally.

But surprisingly teens don’t. This may be because it is seen as dangerous to talk to people you don’t know. Most people from a young age are told not to talk to stranger.

The next big thing

Overall, it is obvious that social networking is becoming more and more popular, whether you like it or you don’t. I believe that the use of social websites could be educating depending on how you use it.
Advertisement on pages is obviously effective but I do think they should be relevant for each site.
I also believe that the use of these websites varies because of the different personalities teens have.
Social networking is fun and entertaining, not only that, it helps you to organise and share your interests.
From my perspective, it looks like social networking is the next big thing.

By Becca Taylor, July 2010

Stickybits

TechDept — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 14:09:32 +0000

Attach photos, videos, music, text, pdf’s, zip’s ect, to and barcode.

When someone scans it, they’ll see what you and everyone else attached to it.
Get notified when a barcode is scanned, has new attachments or even changes location!
Works with any barcode!

By Stickybits, 2010

10 Beautiful Social Media Infographics

TechDept — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:59:48 +0000

Infographics help communicate information in a digestible manner as they creatively present data in an understandable and engaging format. With social media growing at an ever increasing pace, there is now a wealth of data about how people interacting with one another on the web. Naturally, infographics have proven an excellent aid in expressing high volumes of social web information in a clear, visually appealing manner.

By Grace Smith for www.informationarchitects.jp, July 1 2010

7 FBML examples to rock your Facebook fan page.

TechDept — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 08:27:39 +0000

Facebook markup language or FBML for short is used in a variety of places within the social network. Anyone who has written any Facebook applications will already be pretty familiar with its tags, and will probably have used it to write data to walls, or share postings with others programmatically. If however you haven’t yet dipped your toe in the water of the Facebook API, or indeed haven’t actually needed to – there are some snippets of FBML which prove to be mighty useful when creating custom Facebook Fan Pages, and can easily and quickly out of the box be used with the FBML widget, which adds an extra much needed layer of customisation to an existing Facebook fan page. The static FBML widget can be added multiple times, and in multiple places (sidebar and tabs) to facilitate this. Once you’ve added it to your page, simply go to “edit page”, then under Applications click “edit” under Static FBML. This will give you the options you need to paste in your code.

By Web Distortion, March 22 2010

Unilyzer – Social Media and Internet Marketing Software

TechDept — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 08:24:13 +0000

Great for pulling data from sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Digg. In seconds the Unilyzer™ can tell you exactly what you need to know, so you can fine-tune your tweets and videos to generate more traffic.

Visit site

OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED AND WHAT SHOULD I DO?

TechDept — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 10:18:35 +0000

A lot of things have happened during the past few years. New media have become far more than just toys for nerds; they now have an impact on everybody’s life to a greater extent than ever before – from the cell phone in your pocket and industries fighting to survive down to your old high-school friend you block on Facebook to prevent him from bothering you every time you’re online.

We’re currently experiencing a time of change – a change during which a whole generation is evolving; this generation is growing up with an entirely new media behavior. It can’t imagine a world without new media.

Now, also, the marketing industry must adapt, since you can hardly reach this generation using means and methods from the past.

This book helps traditional advertising and marketing people master the step into the digital era, providing tools to create campaigns that reach the people of today.

By Innovative Thunder