Most of us are familiar (addicted to) many social network sites by now. I’ve worked my way through the years and fashions, from Friendsreunited, to Friendster, Myspace and finally, for now, Facebook and Twitter.

Sitting alongside the standard social network sites and the consumer generated media are a number of interesting applications. These allow us to do more with the information that social sites and media sites make available, to add to it, to organise it and to feed into it.

Many apps are fun, more are simply annoying, but once in a while we stumble across one or two that might actually useful.

In no particular order I give you my current favourite web based social media apps and mashups.

Google Latitude

The latest craze in the social network sphere is GPS. Google have launched a new update to the popular Google maps app that lets you view the position of your friends via your mobile phone or PC. Use it to see who’s just round the corner and available for a drink, or to find out if that late for work colleague really is stuck on the train.

Tabbloid

First there was printed news, then printed news went online, then tehre was consumer generated media online, and now you can have your online only consumer generated news sent to you electronically each day as a .pdf to read in print. New skool news, old skool format…are you keeping up?

Trendrr

Data fiend? Just can’t get enough stats and charts? Simply type in search terms you want to compare and Trendrr pulls information from news sites, social networks, search engines, aggregators, and other sources. It populates hundreds of preset charts, tables and graphs. Sit back, browse, find what you need and share. It’s the no sweat approach to online data analytics. Information is largely simple, but can be interesting.

Digg

Digg is old news, but it serves up new and interesting news. Can you Digg it? Yes you can and thousands do. Many news sites offer a Digg function where you register your interest in a story, alternatively you can do this through the Digg site. The more people do this the higher up the ranking the news goes.

TweetNews

This site combines articles appearing on Yahoo news with what’s being talked about on Twitter. A simple search function provides insight into the level of comments on Twitter, looking at the relationship between the two could push stories to the fore as soon as they break.

Cursebird

When is comes to social networking apps there’s the good, the bad and the ugly…and then there’s Cursebird. This application pulls feeds from all non private Twitter posts (that’s most of them) searches them for expletives and collates them in real-time. Useful? Not really. Funny…you bet your @ss. Office safe..unlikely.

Some other sites of note

Yammer

Like Twitter but for business. Yammer focuses on organisation, and only individuals with the same corporate email address can join a given network

Twittersheep 

Enter your Twitter username to see a word cloud based on the bios of your twitter flock.

Tweetlater

Set up your tweets now for automatic posting later.

Wordle

Quickly generate a tag cloud from any URL page

Social Mention

Who is being mentioned where in social media, quick multiple media type search.

We'd be intrested to hear about the latest sites and social media apps that you're using.

There are many sites and technologies out there which search and aggregate news content and most do it pretty well.

Various news search engines have come and gone over the years, or adapted and presented the news in a variety of different ways, the most well known examples being Google news and Yahoo news. They both use a similar technique to sort out what news is newsworthy - the process by which news is pushed to the top of the agenda is based around proprietary algorithms that take into account factors such as recency and topicality (number of similar stories).

 

Sites such as Digg and Newsvine take this concept further.  They don't rely on search and feeds, but instead use the power of human referrals.  As readers express interest in an online news article, through a simple click ('digging' the article), it rises up the agenda and therefore in importance on the site. The user can be passive, sitting back and reading items pushed towards the top of the listings, or they have the power to influence what others read by effectively 'voting'.

 

Both models have many benefits, which is why they are successful.  But, such models struggle to identify the breaking news as it breaks. Both systems are held back because of the time it takes to gain the weight of numbers to push a story to the fore - be that the bespoke algorithm of the search site or number of votes on Digg type sites.

 

But recently, more and more prominence has been paid to the fact that true social networks, such as Twitter can break and develop news stories.  The plane ditching in the Hudson River, the Mumbai hotel attacks, and the China earthquake are both well known examples.  Here's Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC's technology correspondent, explaining how Twitter broke the news to him

of the plane incident and the renewed concerns over the health of Steve Jobs of Apple.  In previous articles he has discussed Twitter's influence in both the the China earthquake and the Mumbai attacks. 

 

The problem as he explains in the Mumbai article is how do the audience know who to believe?  What's truthful, and what's not? Who is credible and who is not?  Who can we trust, and who should we ignore?

So what is needed is an online news sourcing and aggregation system that leverages the immediacy of topics posted on social networks and the quality and detail provided by more formal media outlets.  Tweetnews is the first system aiming to do this.  It works by looking at tweets on twitter and comparing these posts with news available from Yahoo News. It also provides search functionality. It’s a refreshing take on news sourcing and classification in the online world.

 

TweetNews has the potential to break a story in minutes, rather than later in the day or in the morning print run.  What's your view on this development?  Would you be comfortable to trust the sources of your news from systems like this?  Will it make you consider again how you use services like Twitter?  And how do you think this will impact on the traditional press clippings agencies and online aggregation companies?  As ever, we would love to hear your thoughts.

Sometimes you just have to let it all out... Here's an interesting rant about ROI by Gary Vaynerchuck. He talks directly to the marketing and advertising community, but I think what he has to say is relevant to PR.

In a stalling economy, where marketing and PR budgets may suffer, you need to get more bang for your buck. You need to maximize your Return On Investment.

Major newspapers and magazines are suffering declining readerships, though advertising in them can still cost a small fortune. Audiences are becoming more and more fragmented as the number of media outlets and formats grow: it's getting harder to reach them through traditional channels.

However, every cloud has a silver lining. The eyeballs haven't gone away, they've simply moved to other media channels. There's a major movement to online media and also of course to social media. The fragmentation of the audience actually provides those in advertising, marketing and PR with the ability to more precisely identify, target and reach the right audience.

Going online, undertaking sophisticated pr planning, carefully researching and targeting the correct audiences and focusing your spending and campaigns better will provide optimum 'bang for buck' and ultimately a great ROI.

It's time for a little interactivity.

As an agency we work for a number of clients large and small, some projects are complex and multifaceted, some simple and very focused. Most studies have the commonality that we track message pickup. The average message pickup varies dependent on a number of factors, not least by industry. Check out the Metrica numbers report for some specifics.

In the meantime...what do you feel the optimum number of messages to clearly communicate for an organization is? Too many and focus is lost, the key messages might not come to the fore, some messages may not get picked up at all. Or, maybe too little and the organisation may be viewed as a one trick pony, or the message simply becomes a tagline?

For the results of this poll please go here.

I've talked occasionally about the fact that the lines between mainstream media (MSM) and consumer generated media (CGM) are blurring. Recent news shows that sometimes the two are not always good bedfellows.

The Associated Press recently sent take-down notices to a few influential blogs such as the Drudge Report stating that content which included more than four words of original AP copy be removed from the site as it was in breach of their ‘fair use’ clause and of copyright. When four or more words are used the AP requested that bloggers pay $2.50 per word.

Bloggers fought back, suggesting that use of headline and linking to an article on the AP was driving readership for the company and that the AP was foolishly biting the hand that feeds.

Bloggers pushed for a boycott of news content from the AP, others suggested removing links to AP pieces, reducing AP site traffic, others listed AP pieces that had used their content and suggested billing the AP for the content.

The fracas drove great publicity for the blogging community and bad publicity for the AP. See a great roundup by the Washington post here “AP, bloggers clash over wire content use”. The AP also posted a release suggesting that an agreement had been reached. Unfortunately, the headline includes more than four words so I won’t be referencing or linking to it...oh, ok here it is. And that it is clarifying guidelines for permissible use of its coverage.

It’s clear to see that not only does CGM content challenge copyright issues and business models which can’t keep up with the pace of the online environment, but that bloggers do have a voice, the kind of voice that can effect reputation and affect change.

This weekend I’m embarking on the Brit Butt 1200+ mile 36 hour endurance motorcycle ride. It’s somewhat like a treasure hunt. Riders are given a list of destinations, each worth points, just before the start. Each rider must then plan his/her own route around the UK trying to get as many points as possible. The winner is the person with the most points and the highest mileage after getting back to base. 

In order that family and friends can track progress, I’ll be using phonelocator an application developed by my team mate. It links the GPS capability of our phones to send coordinates via the mobile internet to a website which plots our position on Google Maps. We also have intercoms in our helmets to communicate and these are blue-toothed to the SatNav and our phones…you might say that as well as being consummate geeks we’re hyperconnected. 

So what and who is hyperconnected….IDC recently published a white paper on Hyperconnectivity in which they describe the hyperconnected as:  

“Those who have fully embraced the brave new world, with more devices per capita than the other clusters and more intense use of new communications applications. They liberally use technology devices and applications for both personal and business use.” 

The modern business and personal world is full of hyperconnectivity, wireless laptops, web enabled phones, Blackberries, Skype, LinkedIn, Bluetooth, Second Life, online gaming, social networks and blogs. The modern world sees us networking our personal and business lives as well as our gadgets. News is travelling further faster, both simple personal news via updates on Twitter, Facebook and business news, read online, on the move, commented on, Dugg ranked and rated.  

When an issue breaks that effects your corporate reputation the proliferation of publicly available communication may seem scary, but it also provides more avenues to evaluate the situation and guage public opinion which can be used to help refine the right approach. Aren’t us hyperconnected geeks great?