Late last week I was flicking through ABC’s iView service and stumbled across the documentary (under the ABC Docs section) entitled ”
How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer“.

I figured it would have something to do with the 6 degrees of separation concept and decided to set aside any misgivings I had based on the title and watch a bit of it to see if it had anything of interest.

It turned out to be a great program, focusing in part on Duncan Watts’ academic work on social networks. I’d thoroughly recommend checking it out if you’re interested in social networking.

As an aside, I’m with iinet for my home broadband, and iView is “free” (i.e. bandwidth consumed watching iView is not counted in my monthly download allowance).

A friend of mine recently launched Open Australia, which is a fantastic resource for anyone interested in politics, and more specifically the actions and activities of their federal MP.

The effort is volunteer run, and I think provides immense value to Australian citizens. One of the volunteers, Matthew Landauer, posted a very interesting note on Twitter the other day, mentioning a talkback page in relation to the work he was doing to add links to Wikipedia, pointing people to the relevant Open Australia page on various politicians’ pages in Wikipedia.

To my mind, what Matt was doing makes perfect sense, and I think greatly benefits Wikipedia readers – the Hansard is quite opaque and difficult to access, especially online, and Open Australia makes it much more accessible and useful. However, some members of the Wikipedia community felt that perhaps this was spam. A very interesting discussion ensued.

It is worth a read by anyone considering engaging in Wikipedia for their organisation. I’ve heard some PR/comms folks say “let’s just put up a page on Wikipedia”. This doesn’t work, and the dialogue on that talk page is immensely illuminating (in a positive way).

I truly admire the Wikipedians and the open-ness and transparency of this process (at least in this case – I’m aware of other cases where there may be issues, but I digress).

My summary of some of the discussion points:

• The links were being added by someone related to the project (I’m not sure if full disclosure was an issue here – I suspect even if disclosed it would have been considered an issue). It seems that the activity would be fine if it was someone unrelated to the project doing the linking.
• Questions about whether the links be considered an implicit endorsement by Wikipedia of the site
• It doesn’t matter if your effort is volunteer run, non-profit or otherwise – such activity may still be considered spam.
• Is the site political? The question arose due to the commentary on the site (as Open Australia itself is clearly non-partisan).
• A core question is “does this provide value to readers?” References made to IMDB and other sites where, even though commercial, the value is significant.
• Members of the community even created templates to support the linking, once the value proposition was confirmed.

With regards to value, I immediately thought of a recent post by Seth Godin: The web doesn’t care:

When I first started talking about Permission Marketing ten years ago, marketers asked, “sure, but how does this help us?”

A decade later, marketers look at Wikipedia or social media or the long tail or whatever trend is finally hitting them in the face and ask the same question.

… The question to ask is, “how are people (the people I need to reach, interact with and tell stories to) going to use this new power and how can I help them achieve their goals?”

The upshot? You can’t just wade into a social media space and plaster your “message” around, you must provide value to the community, and do it in accordance with the social norms and etiquette established in that community.

It seems, at least for now, that the Wikipedians have agreed that, on balance, the links to Open Australia provide enough value to leave them in. This is good news, IMO, because as I mentioned I believe Open Australia is of great benefit to the community. I do hope it stays that way :)

Beth Kanter interviews David Neff:

Good advice. I think the “experiment” tip is essential. Clay Shirky, in his Web 2.0 talk, mentions “failing informatively” – I think experimenting with the sites and spaces, before you put your brand into them, is a great way to “fail informatively” with minimal brand risk.

That may mean setting up a dummy profile to play around with the technology, or it may mean setting up a personal profile and connecting with friends and colleagues – getting a sense of the space and learning the ropes while you’re there.

• Twitter is an Event Aggregator – Interesting use of Twitter – posting news related to the “Super Tuesday” primary voting in the U.S.
• Companies must listen to the Web 2.0 world – I don’t like the “avoid risk” case for social media strategy; I prefer to focus on opportunities. This article provides an overview of the potential risks. I’ve found that blogs can be a bell-weather for broader constituent sentiment, so worth watching.
• Internet fundraising trends 2008 – A collection of predictions for fundraising and donating in 2008, incl. a spot from Priscilla @ Solidariti and Seth Godin.

(These links were posted to my del.icio.us feed on 05-Feb-2008.)

There’s been two big announcements in the world of the social media technology in the past few days.

Google Social Graph API

First came the announcement from Google of the Social Graph API. Ajaxian have a quick code example of what can be done from a technology perspective, and Joshua Porter has two posts looking at the benefits and potential dangers of the API, incl. reference to an excellent (though slightly alarmist, I feel) post from Danah Boyd on the risks, esp. to young people.

I’m on the fence with regards to the dangers. On the one hand I agree with the notion that this information is already public, so shouldn’t be an issue.

But where this argument falls down is that it’s not always obvious when data will be made public – in the past I’ve inadvertently exposed both my mobile number and home address publicly online without realising it – a tool like this may make it easier for unscrupulous individuals to mess with us.

MySpace developer platform

Right on cue, MySpace release the details of their developer API – covered well by Ajaxian.

As the article notes, what’s especially interesting about the API is that they are using the OpenSocial API (which has also just been updated), supported by Google, Ning, Bebo, Plaxo and Six Apart.

I’ve yet to dig into the details of either system, but both announcements are likely to change the social media landscape significantly in the coming months…

Ning have posted an interview with Joshua Forgotson, who created a social network on Ning for Earth Day. He talks about a few of the features they used in the network. It’s a useful introduction to some of Ning’s features. (Hat tip: DamianM via IM)

I was chatting with Penny at Digital Eskimo the other day about some research I’ve been reading on teen behaviour online and off.

She made the connection that perhaps the reason that MySpace’s demographic is fairly significantly (and suddenly) shifting to the 35+ age group may (in part) be attributed to parents joining the service to see what their kids are getting up to?

It’s an interesting thought – I wonder how one might test the hypothesis?

I’ve been invited to facilitate an afternoon workshop on 28 Feb at the Investor Weekly Branding conference, speaking on the topic of social media, web 2.0 and financial services. The session is entitled Impact of Web 2.0 on Financial Services: Beyond Facebook and YouTube and blogs, and the session outline is:

• Learn of various types of social media online communities
• See what consumers are doing to (your) Brand
• Investigate the ROI of social networks and the many revenue streams
• Understand how consumer communities are creating peer to peer financial services
• How to work with social networks now and in the future

The conference will be located at the Swissotel, Sydney (entrance on Market Street just opposite the State Theatre – map).

It seems that the financial services industry is keen to learn about social media – this session occurring shortly before the CPA Australia conference I’m also presenting at in May.

(Big thanks to Laurel for introducing me to the conference organisers – v. much appreciated!)

The latest Edelman “Trust barometer” was recently announced. There doesn’t appear to be a huge amount of difference from this year to last year’s statement, but I felt it had some interesting points that related to the impact social media can have for organisations.

“trust in media is rising because the definition of media has broadened to encompass social media,”

… trust in CEOs continues to lag at about 20% in the United States, versus 43% for an average employee. “Companies need to be engaged at the intersection of the top-down and peer-to-peer models of communication,” said Mr. Edelman, “relying on both experts and empowered employees to supplement statements by the CEO.”

… Only 20% of respondents trust corporate or product advertising.

Each of these continues to point to the role social media can play within an organisation. I think the “trust in CEOs” point is interesting, because a well-done executive blog can help personalise a CEO and increase trust.

Edelman’s comment about “experts and empowered employees to supplement statements by the CEO” is also interesting – again, social media can play a role. Blogging employees are one possibility (and have achieved a lot of value for both Microsoft and Sun in terms of increasing trust).

• 9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers – Darren Rowse writes up his thoughts on the benefits of Twitter. His focus is specifically on bloggers, but still useful for anyone wanting some ideas as to why Twitter may be useful to them.
• what’s new on reddit: new features – reddit will soon support focused, private and semi-private reddits. I think this is important for orgs wanting to use del.icio.us except for the “public-ness” of it. We might see retooling of del.icio.us tools to support reddit if it takes off.
• Zookoda – An interesting looking (free) service – from what I can tell it takes an RSS feed and sends HTML email updates on that basis. Great for promoting your blog or creating quick email newsletters for your organisation. Will need to look into it some more…

(These links were posted to my del.icio.us feed between 19-Jan-2008 and 23-Jan-2008.)