Social by Social – “A practical guide to using new technologies to deliver social impact”. Buy the book for a tenner and/or download the PDF for free
BBC – The Knowledge Exchange Blog: ugc@thebbc – “a year-long project which produced a huge amount of data, and proved to be the first significant study of UGC at a broadcast organisation”
2009 MTV VMA Tweet Tracker | MTV.com – VMA Tweet Tracker [mtv.com] is a real-time graph of Twitter activity that highlights the social news surrounding the Video Music awards by aggregating the most popular terms being tweeted around this event. Developed by Stamen Design and social media monitoring company Radian6,
Blogging for Artists – An informal talk given to Shropshire Arts Network on September 8th 2009 by Pete Ashton
Culture Wars | About Culture Wars – Culture Wars is the online review of the Institute of Ideas in London. We cover books, films, theatre, art and talk events, with a view to understanding how political and other ideas filter through the culture, and how the arts in turn influence politics and society more generally
Welcome to verifiable.com – “Our goal is to develop a tool to help you communicate data more clearly, efficiently, and honestly. We want to make it easy and fun to produce gorgeous, verifiable visualizations and allow viewers to dig into your data and even build on your work to bring out richer, clearer, or just plain different conclusions”
Monopoly City Streets – Live worldwide game of Monopoly using Google Maps as the game board. The goal is simple. Play to beat your friends and the world to become the richest property magnate in existence” Launching 9 Sept
RSS in the Clouds « Blog « WordPress.com – “Today we turned on support for all 7.5 million blogs on WordPress.com something called RSS Cloud, which is basically a way for people to get push notification that your feed has updated”. Oh, now that is interesting
Embeddable Google Document Viewer – A little known Google Docs feature will let you embed a PDF or .ppt on a website. One day we won’t have to faff around with arcane things like this
Ning Apps – “Today you can choose from more than 90 Ning Apps, and that’s just the beginning. This number will continue to grow as developers here at Ning and around the world build additional Ning Apps tailored around your interests and passions”
Smokescreen § Homepage – “How do we get teens to think about online privacy, trust, and identity? TV, films and books haven’t worked – but a game that simulates the internet, with a gripping drama and fast-paced missions definitely could”. “Smokescreen is a cutting-edge game about life online, on a new social network called White Smoke”. Newness from C4 and Six to Start that looks dead interesting
Soundwalk – “Cutting-edge audio guides in which the listener is able to step into the life of a narrator as they guide you through their neighborhood streets and local hang-outs. SoundTOURS mix fiction and reality in a cinematic experience giving the listener the impression of actually being in a film”
DNA/How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet – Douglas Adams on why being worried about the Internet is like being worried about cups of tea, our emergence from an interactivity drought and lots more besides in a surprisingly short article. All this from 1999, too
D’log :: blogging since 2000 » Spezify – “Spezify has just launched with an impressive and different take on delivering search results. It’s primarily a visual search-engine aimed at designers and creatives, but also slips in relevant text and audio links”. Wow. This is nice
blip.tv (beta) – You can upload videos to blip.tv using FTP and if the connection drops out then you can resume (within 10 mins). This may be useful when working somewhere with a potentially iffy connection
Shift Happens by Mark Ball – “In January I was privileged to be invited to Perth by the Department of Culture and the Arts to participate as a Major Production Fund panel member and to meet with arts organisation to discuss the potential opportunities brought about by the rapid proliferation of Web 2.0 technologies, in particular Social Media tools”. Mark Ball, ex of Fierce and the RSC, now of LIFT talks arts and social media
Social Media Releases for the music industry – MonkeyWatcher – Advice for bands – “send a quick press release by email, and provide a link to a social media release (SMR), or, in other words, a page aggregating the various items you want to share (music, pictures, videos, blog posts, tour dates, etc.)” I get a lot of adjective stuffed press releases from bands’ PR companies too – the essentials with links to further stuff would be so much more useful
Putt’s Law – “Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand”
Population : One – One Person is One Pixel – “Every pixel in the illustration represents one person alive on Earth. The first one is you. The rest are everyone else”. Reminiscent of Stans Cafe’s ‘Of All The People…’. It never hurts to get a sense of perspective once in a while
Birmingham schools named in gang report – Google Maps – Someone’s plotted all the schools named in a report as being “at risk of becoming ‘feeder schools’ for city gangs into a Google Map. No idea which report and the colour-coding is a mystery. Still. As a side note, if anyone knows how to search Google Maps for user-generated maps then please let me know
kala phool – Mother India – 21st Century Remix – The edit and live soundtracking of Mother India which Kala Phool produced last year was one of the best things I’ve seen in the past 12 months. I’ve just heard they’re taking the show on a UK tour between August and October. No dates yet but you heard it here first
nycgo / this is new york city – New York’s official website for visitors was relaunched in Jan 09, partnering with Google, Travelocity, Time Out New York and others
I’m often on the look-out for ways of presenting the concept of what social media ‘is’, especially animated ones (I’m an absolute sucker for animation in its many guises). Here are a few easily-digestable faves:
I only came across this one the other day. It was produced by Michael Reissinger for Scholz & Friends which is a PR agency, hence the slant towards the challenge traditional marketing faces.
Rather more straight-laced and slightly more corporate, again with a PR edge to it. ‘The Online Media’ has been put out by RealWire, a company specialising in online PR, based in Lincoln.
Commoncraft are pretty much the masters of clear, simple visualisations. This isn’t quite their finest but it’s still pretty good and captures something the first two don’t.
I’ll give a nod to Michael Wesch’s ‘The Machine is Us/ing Us too, which sketches the evolution of the web to what is often known as Web 2.0.
If there are any others worthy of a mention please drop a link in the comments.