- Hyperlocal Labs goes live
Will Perrin introduces the backroom division of Talk About Local where folk play with stuff related to his project to produce interesting new ways to engage with local areas through the web. The first project is Jon Bounds' intelligent blog aggregation and I expect much more to come. Get in touch if you'd like to play. - Facebook? Up 10%. Twitter? Up 16%. FriendFeed? Flat
Robert Scoble has a look at why FriendFeed isn't taking off as well as it should be. Since Scoble uses FF a hell of a lot and acknowledges his use is exceptional this is a useful analysis of how restrictions and possibilities on different platforms chance the nature of engagement on them. My thought, in short, is that FF does all the things people think Twitter should do (groups for one) and prove why Twitter shouldn't do them. - Poptimist #23 – Chartopia
Most inspiring and thought-provoking thing I read this week. Tom Ewing uses the British pop charts as a means to explore serendipity. Lots of intelligent criticism of social media and lots of intelligent praise of social media too. I posted some selected quotes here and hope to return to this again for a more detailed response soon. - Google targeting Local Government websites
Interesting move from Google. There's a push for councils to use Google adverts to "connect with your citizens at the exact moment when they are searching for services" and I'm not sure AdSense is of a quality I'd like to see on a government website, but they also list Google's free web optimization tools in a clear and understandable way, which is dead handy. - Tweeting as play
Interesting attempt to find a middle ground between the cynics and evangelists.
If it is play, why not just say so? Why not just say it’s fun? After all, one of the reasons “play” is always in vogue in certain business magazines is that it really is important to creativity — taking yourself out of the routine makes your thinking less rigid, etc.
- Chris Unitt: How useful has social media been today? – Chris goes through five hours of Twitter usage and lists the useful and interesting things that came to him through it. As he says, it works because he's developed a relevant community of people to follow but that's kinda the point. What you get depends on what you put into this stuff.
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