Ashton Kutcher Thinks Social Media is “Like a Manifestation of God”
August 10, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Ashton Kutcher, who, these days, is very much unironically being called a “social-media influencer,” has been gearing up for his return to television since joining the cast of “Two and a Half Men” late last spring. Some finer points about his new role have begun to emerge and media commentators are already remarking on the “meta” aspects of his giving life to an “Internet mogul” christened — a la Hollywood — Walden Schmidt.
In an interview he gave to Details Magazine, Kutcher himself described his new character as being “somewhere between an alien and Jesus Christ,” claiming he couldn’t “be more specific than that.” In another choice description provided by the one-time Michael Kelso, Ashton had this to say about social media: “It’s almost like a manifestation of God… People used to behave morally because they thought God was always watching — in some ways God today is the collective, and the collective is watching.”
By their turn, the Los Angeles Times is reporting that Kutcher’s television comeback, with its steadier schedule, will “allow him to focus on tech projects” at Katalyst Media, the production company he co-founded with Jason Goldberg in 2000; the company has had a social media division since 2005.
Read More:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/gossip/2011/08/ashton-kutcher-two-and-a-half-men-sheen-details.html
Flickr, Twitter, and London Riots
August 9, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
On Flickr, it is now possible to find CCTV cam surveillance images of the London riots that have been taking place since Saturday night. London police uploaded the images themselves in an attempt at gaining assistance from the public in identifying the rioters. On August 5th, Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old with alleged gang affiliations was shot and killed by police in Tottenham, a part of the London borough of Haringey. Reports are suggesting Duggan did not fire at police before being shot.
Racial and class tensions are running high — Duggan was a mixed-race Londoner and the neighborhood where he died by police fire is being described by British dailies as home to the “fourth highest level of child poverty in London and an unemployment rate of 8.8%.” Widespread civic violence first broke out after a peaceful protest against police brutality in Tottenham devolved into the torching of two police patrol cars and a double-decker bus. By Monday the violence had reached London proper and continued to spread on Tuesday to Birmingham, Liverpool, and Bristol. 525 arrests have been made so far on account of vandalism and looting. Police are hoping the Flickr images will help them charge more aggressors.
In addition to helping police identify the rioters, through Flickr, the newly opened Twitter account @riotcleanup — already with more than 85 thousand followers — is ready to help people organize clean-ups around the town once it’s possible.
Read More:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-14462271
http://www.voice-online.co.uk/article/man-shot-police-was-friends-nightclub-stab-victim
Social Media Intelligence Offers Employers A Way to Side-Step Discrimination Suits
July 21, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Social Intelligence has only been in business for one year but already it’s set to make a big impact on the ways that employers screen prospective hires through the use of social media. Googling a job applicant can upend an employer’s best intentions to perform a thorough and fair job screening because online searches can easily reveal details that are legally prohibited from being asked during an interview — facts about an applicant’s religion, sexual orientation, race, age, gender, or disability. Conducting online research that discloses sensitive information can leave employers vulnerable to discrimination suits.
On the other hand, not conducting an online search leaves undesirable and, quite importantly, legally knowable characteristics about an applicant undiscovered until it’s too late. In its website, Social Intelligence says that its company tracks down pertinent information on job candidates, like public postings on social media sites of “racist remarks or activities, sexually explicit photos or videos, and illegal activity such as drug use,” in addition to those of “charitable or volunteer efforts, participation in industry blogs, and external recognition.” The company’s gambit is to conduct meticulous online investigations on job applicants but only pass on to client-employers information that is legally safe for them to have. According to Social Intelligence, this is an all-around win-win situation.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s outreach manager, Joe Bontke, spoke with the New York Times and told the paper that violating antidiscrimination laws was a real risk for employers. He also gave the folks there two figures: 75 percent of American recruiters conduct mandatory online investigations on applicants and 70 percent of them report having snubbed applicants because of the information gathered through those investigations.
Read More:
http://www.socialintelligencehr.com/home
Quepasa Pays Myyearbook $100 Million in Merger Agreement
July 20, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Quepasa, the social network with its sights firmly set on a Latino audience has just paid the sibling trio from New Jersey, Geoff, Catherine, and David Cook, $100 million for their fraternal creation, Myyearbook.com. The payoff is considered part of a merger agreement between the two companies.
Accordingly, Quepasa is putting up $82 million in stock and $18 million en efectivo (cash, guys). The siblings’ social network is geared at teens and has a strong focus on games. Calling it like it sees it, comScore ranks the New Jersey group’s site as the most heavily visited online place for teenagers. For its part, Quepasa calls West Palm Beach, Florida home and was founded in 1997 by Jeffery Peterson; its current CEO is John Abbott.
AllthingsD is reporting that last year the combined revenue of the merging companies came to a grand total of $33.6 million. As part of the deal underway, Geoff Cook, Myyearbook’s CEO, will now be Quepasa’s COO. In a release, John Abbot had the following to say about the new partners’ contribution: “By emphasizing social discovery, focusing on the people users want to know rather than the people they already know, the service has built a large and growing user base, especially in the teen and young adult demographic.”
Read More:
http://webcast.broadcastnewsroom.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=1598261
Social Media Inside the Courtroom
July 14, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Last week, what Time Magazine has called “the first major murder trial of the social-media age” came to a close with a not-guilty verdict for Casey Anthony, a woman accused of murdering her own two-year-old daughter, Caylee Marie, in 2008. Besides the intensity with which the case was followed online, the case’s very beginnings are found in the social media world. As it was pointed out in Time, the first person to give notice of Caylee Marie’s disappearance was her grandmother, Cindy Anthony, and she did so by way of a MySpace posting that dates to July 3, 2008. In the post Cindy Anthony wrote that her daughter Casey was not allowing her to see Caylee. It would be three more days before Cindy contacted the police about the unknown whereabouts of her granddaughter.
But that’s not where the case’s connection to social media ends. Walter Pacheco, who writes for the Orlando Sentinel, just wrote a piece concerning the Casey Anthony defense team’s innovative use of Twitter, Facebook, and blog postings: use the postings to create a public opinion analysis and refine trial strategy with the findings. Certainly, the analysis was not the only factor to deliver the defense team’s unexpected victory, but the method is now tied to a winning trial.
Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2077969,00.html#ixzz1S7t01kN4
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2015603216_anthonytrial14.html
Privacy Revolution @ Google+?
July 13, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Although Google+ has been greatly lauded for tackling (and side-stepping) certain privacy issues that have plagued Facebook for the eons it’s been since its 2004 inception, what is actually being referred to here is a revolution of social networking heads of state. More specifically, the fact that Larry Page, Vic Gundotra, and Sergey Brin, all three top-billing execs at Google, and numbers two, three, and four, respectively, on the Google+ rankings, have upped their privacy settings by concealing the number of people they have in Circles (friends) and the number of people that follow them. By concealing the numbers, they’ve lost their place on the rankings.
No one is thinking this is a coincidence, most especially because Google+’s most popular user, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, had the idea to change his Google+ account’s privacy settings at the exact same time and in the exact same way as the Google captains. There’s no official word about what prompted the apparently unified front to act as it did, or how Zuckerberg benefits from relinquishing a prized number one spot on his big competitor’s network. Nathan Olivarez-Giles, who covers the Los Angeles Times’ tech beat, is positing that the privacy revival at Google+ might be Google’s attempt to bring “content and interaction” into focus instead of “popularity,” which in some ways is at the very heart of Facebook. But his theory still doesn’t explain Zuckerberg’s involvement.
As things stand, the new number one is the technology writer Robert Scoble. (The new number five is Tom Anderson).
Read More:
Google+ Running a Pilot Program for Business Profiles
July 7, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Christian Oestlien, a Google+ advertising lead, published a blog post yesterday giving notice of Google’s policy of temporarily “discouraging” businesses and “non-user entities” like teams, locations, or organizations from joining its new social network. The reasoning behind the unexpected stance is that Google is working on the construction of an “amazing Google+ experience for businesses” that will be completed before the year is over.
To that end Google will be operating a pilot program on Google+ with selected marketing partners. Acknowledging that the way “users communicate with each other is different from how they communicate with brands,” Oestlien said that Google wanted to “create an optimal experience for both.” In an appended video, he added that such an experience would include “rich analytics and the ability to connect [the Google+] identity to other parts of Google that businesses might use on a daily basis, like AdWords.”
In the meantime, Google will be taking down non-user profiles already up on Google+. While they wait for what’s coming, business and other entities not falling under the “user” category can go to http://goo.gl/zq95C to request inclusion in the pilot program.
It seems Google is finally figuring out how to express its new-found commitment to sociability in its products. Google+ is so far proving to be a big success, providing features comparable to Facebook’s and even many that improve on those of its much-touted rival.
Read More:
https://plus.google.com/105923173045049725307/posts/E3mVj6nskaX?tab=mX
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2388192,00.asp
Twitter and Facebook the New Nielsen?
June 21, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Twitter rankings and Facebook Likes have been all the rage for some time now. If someone isn’t bragging about the number of followers or Likes they’ve so far accumulated, they’re probably busy (breathlessly) citing as proof of importance the number of followers someone else has been piling up. Although there’s hardly a soul left who’s not yet taken note of the accommodating nature of Twitter and Facebook data for ranking purposes, there aren’t very many trying their hand at what SocialGuide.com is trying to do: provide TV ratings from the perspective of social media.
Hailing from Brooklyn and founded by Sean Casey, SocialGuide.com has come up with Social 100, a ranking of what’s most popular on TV according to an analysis of Twitter and Facebook comments. Social 100 is published once a week. A “snapshot” of last week’s audience, as created by the start-up, consists of a total of 966,261 unique watchers who posted 2,305,128 comments about 1,930 TV programs. (Only comments posted while the programs are on are counted.)
Mr. Casey has said that these numbers will prove vital to TV producers when it comes time to figuring out audience tastes and ways to elicit responses from viewers. He’s has also stated his awareness of the potential of social networking to tie viewers together through commenting and shared watching. Beyond that, it seems the Brooklyn people are trying to give the Nielsen ratings a run for their money.
Social 100 -> http://beta.socialguide.com/social100
Read More:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/06/socialguide-providing-a-social-feed-for-tv.html
Lady Gaga and Eric Schmidt Invest in Backplane, a New Social Network
June 6, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
The new entertainment- and sports-focused social network in not up and running quite yet, but tidings of its forthcoming existence has just hit the electronic presses courtesy of Evelyn M. Rusli at the New York Times. Rusli tells that Troy Carter, Lady Gaga’s business manager, and his friend (in high-tech places) Matthew Michelsen are the proud founders of Backplane, a new startup set to release an online networking platform very soon.
It seems Carter was inspired by the work that both he and Gaga did for Steve Jobs, which is to say, provide some crucial feedback on Apple’s Ping. Most appropriately, considering Carter’s background in entertainment, Backplane’s platform will focus on enabling a more seamless management of celebrities’ fans across the big online networks. In Carter’s words: “We needed a more concentrated base.” Lady Gaga has a 20 percent stake in the Backplane venture and so far it has raised $1million from investors, among which Google emblem Eric Schmidt is to be found.
Although it is hoped the new network will not prove to be one more means of making fatally clumsy — at least for one’s mayoral ambitions — pseudo-amorous overtures à la Weiner, techies everywhere know that that’s a most unlikely scenario. In any case, as he prepares the big launch of his platform, Troy Carter must still sort out the business of the Lebanese “impounding” of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” at Beirut’s international airport. At least the album hasn’t been officially banned in that country. Good luck to Carter and good luck to the Lebanese fans.
Read More:
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/a-force-behind-the-gaga-effect/
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2011/06/lebanon-l.html
Who Uses Twitter the Most?
June 2, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
As part of its continuing study, “Internet and American Life Project,” today, the Pew Research Center published an update to its reporting on the use of Twitter in the United States. The update detailed that roughly 13 percent of American adults connected to the internet are Twitter users. The report’s findings reveal an 8 percent increase in usage within the last six months.
Starting April 26 and ending in May 22, 2011, the Pew Research Center called Americans to ask, in both English and Spanish, about their internet use. The last time the survey was conducted was in November 2010. This previous polling revealed that only 8 percent of “online adults identified themselves as Twitter users.” Two other important numbers obtained: 95 percent of Americans on Twitter own a cell phone and 54 percent use the handheld device to tweet.
Giving the numbers more perspective and contouring, the Center determined that African Americans and Latinos were the demographical groups most likely to be engaged with the micro-blogging service. Of African Americans online today, 25 percent of them use Twitter; for Latinos the number is 11 percent. Other groups are also showing growth on Twitter: 25- to 34-year-olds have doubled their representation, going from 9 percent in November 2010 to 19 percent last month; by their turn, 35- to 44-year-olds have seen their numbers jump to 14 percent from their previous 8 percent showing.
Read More:
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Twitter-Update-2011.aspx
