social networking and visualizations

22nd April 2008

I am on friendfeed.com, why aren’t you yet?

Hello readers, browsers, info-snackers, crawlers, and spies. I want to let you know there is a better way to follow what I am doing besides just following my latest posts. Do you want to see what I find interesting on the internet and bookmark? Do you want to see my micro-blogging on twitter? Do you want to read my reviews on yelp? Do you want to see my netflix queue? Do you even care?

Well, the amazing thing is, is that this service is free and you and your cohorts can use it to follow and be followed and updated and joined in the conversation that is going on all around you that is, for the most part, external to the blogosphere. It can be a great tool for businesses to manage their brand as well, even though I think a simple google alert can do that just as well for a neophyte web 2.0 adopter.

Friendfeed is what I am talking about. And it may very well be the harbinger of death to the blogosphere as we know it, at least comments wise.

So, I hope I have convinced you to at least check it out. No, I am not getting paid to push friendfeed on the masses, I just think that the masses will find it extremely useful and engaging, if not downright addictive and distracting. Check out their FAQs page if you are still skeptical.

BTW, barack is winning PA and winning the democratic nomination, for better or worse.

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12th March 2008

I was Skeptical of Twitter at first… but…

Twitter saves the day in the following video as alex harris (http://www.alexthinks.com) hitches a ride to SXSW using the service.

Twitter according to Alex Harris from michael galpert on Vimeo.

Very briefly:

I use twitter to track:

- traffic around the beltway

- keywords of interest that people are using (like iphone for instance)

- engage influentials in conversations

- follow interesting peoples’ thoughts

- follow news makers and news stories

- rant at the world without imposing on the world

More on twitter.com in future posts. In the meantime, start following my twitters at twitter.com/constantskeptic

and no, I am NOT getting paid to push this service, since it is after all, free.

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7th March 2008

it is official - Google is no longer top doggy

While it is true that Google has had a comfortable lead among search engines across the world (check out Alexa’s stats), Yahoo has been quietly number one for some months now.

Here is the graph for the traffic rank which rates the popularity. You can see yahoo.com has been number 1 for the past six months while Google is faltering, if you consider second and third most popular site in the world as faltering.

yahoo vs google

Why is Yahoo more popular?

1. Maybe yahoo is paying alexa.com to up their rankings. This can be evidenced by the static flatline at number one while google’s line looks like real data.

2. I noticed that Yahoo’s image search yields much better results than google. Try it out yourself.

3. Yahoo provides news and updates on their news page, while you have to go to igoogle to get the same content rich information. I don’t think that it is necessarily a bad thing that google.com is purely search. It has been working for years, but maybe the model is changing… maybe users want to get all of their information in one place without having to necessarily search for it.

Hat tip to GigaOM for the inspiration behind this post.

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6th February 2008

The new influencers - what shapes the way you think?

Humans by definition are irrational creatures, therefore human behavior is hard to predict. The same is true with online activity.

The good thing for marketers and social engineers alike is the fact that humans are not only irrational but habitual as well. So if you are habitually erratic in the same ways over time, patterns of movement, interaction, and development take shape.

For instance,

My daily routine includes:

- commuting approximately one hour to work and 1.5 hours home.

- going to work and returning around the same time Monday through Friday.

- twittering my updates at least 10 times daily, usually when; i arrive, take a break, find something interesting, leave work, and arrive home for the evening.

some variants that affect my personal entropy include:
whether I ~~decide~~ get tempted to buy coffee or not….
whether an accident occurs on the dc beltway or not (which affects travel time)
whether I choose to eat out for lunch or stay in my office….

I wonder if just by tracking someone’s RSS feed of their twitter updates, are their patterns of activity that can be tracked over time and then predicted out according to time of year (school year vs summer vacation, winter vs summer, etc.) If you know of any data visualizations out their that maps twitter activity please drop me a line at theconstantskeptic at gmail.com

and remember this:
change things up a little bit from time to time, because you never know who may be following you in the real world or otherwise….

NOW to get on to the new influencers:

1. companies that create rich infotainment style commercials that engage the consumer.

2. apple (many a band’s career has been launched by having their song featured on an ipod commercial - think of feist)

3. messages that are contagions through humor and vicarity (can you put yourself in the message’s shoes?)

4. Multimedia content is replacing text as the new media that really affects consumer’s attitudes… (the new emerging youtube meme of online users)

5. social networking sites and news aggregators sites as new venues to spread product information (think digg.com, del.icio.us, and stumbleupon.com)

6. Controversial representations of social taboos that are cross-cultural. (nudity, sex, extreme violence, abortion, genocide, war, suicide, etc.)

7. Hidden agendas inserted within online content. (paid for posts by companies to sell products, advertisements masked as academic research results, take a look at fark.com for other examples of this)

8. Content that is high in quality and believability. (the important thing is to make sure you or your message appears authoritative, regardless if you really are or not)

I have noticed that the items that are most contagious and (dare I say) viral, are things that are culturally, linguistically, and politically independent of geographic location.

So, as you stumble around the internet, what affects the way you think about the content you are viewing?

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30th January 2008

The constant skeptic’s political leanings finally revealed

Through my evil myspace account (that I never log into… ever) I found this link to electoral compass.com

You answer a series of political questions relating to things like gun control, abortions, the Iraq war, etc. It takes about 2 minutes to fill in, and then stupendousness… it generates the following map:

So as you can see, I am pretty much a centrist, which would put me as an independent/progressive. I hope I don’t represent the girth of the nation because then the election will be nail biter again.

del.icio.us Tags: constant skeptic,political maps,visualization,electoral compass,ratings,stupendumundo

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22nd January 2008