I’m organising a panel discussion provisionally titled “The Dark Side Of Social Media”. This is going to be about how Social Media (MySpace, YouTube etc etc) has a ‘bad’ side, and it is not quite the new media nirvana some make it out to be. The Kathy Sierra incident is just once recent, extreme example. For instance consider these issues surrounding social media which remain unresolved: • Child safety remains
Nic Mitham at the K Zero blog (a marketing and branding company) has posted a map of all the real-world brands he could find operating in the virtual world of Second Life. It’s a hard-wired map which would well do with uploading to Flickr so that people could start to tag it with their own knowledge. This needs a little crowd sourcing… Here is the link to the big version.
Hamburg-based research firm Komjuniti has published the first extensive survey of Resident attitudes toward marketing in Second Life. MTV, Coke, Dell, American Apparel – they are all at it. The results [PDF] are that 72% of 200 respondents said they were disappointed with real world company activities in Second Life; just over 40% considered these efforts a one-off not likely to last. Only 7% of respondents in the Komjuniti study
Today’s FT article estimates Twitter is sending – conservatively – 70,000 text messages a day across its service. If, as Ed French commented on this blog, each text costs a minimum of 1p to send, Twitter is burning through 700 quid a day or $1,379.57, or $38,627.96 a month. It could in fact be three times as much if they are using a more robust SMS gateway service which costs
Twitter is a great service. Simple to set up. Easy to use. It’s based on SMS messaging, which is dead simple. But it’s a printing press for bores who tell you they are eating lunch. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s one of the first SMS systems with an API which creative programmers can put to good use. Thus, we have BBC Tech updates, Tube line
Being a journo, for some reason people seem to think I know about content. This means that increasingly I get asked to help the odd organisation out with ideas, content and speakers for events. I don’t do this ALL the time, but once in a while I am tempted to help out, such as with NMK Forum in July. So here are a couple of other events I am programming
“The Trap: What Happened to Our Dreams…” is a new series of films by Adam Curtis (“The Power of Nightmares”, “Century of the Self”) that tells the story of the rise of today’s narrow idea of freedom. It shows how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today’s idea of freedom. This model was derived from ideas and techniques developed by nuclear strategists during
Today I’m off to cover CeBit in Hannover, Germany, (the big electronics trade show) for a few days.
I’m currently doing some blogging for the New Statesman New Media Awards web site. Come on over if you are interested in entering the awards this year.
Mobile Today has a neat graphic for subscriber takeup in the UK: However, where is 3? As Ed Cross says: What it looks really interesting is the total cumulative amount of subscribers in the study to be 66.7 million, this number does not consider "3", lets add maybe another 5 million for their probable share?, Tesco Mobile, Dot Mobile, and any other MVNO's i am not aware of (EasyMobile closed