blending the mix

I caught wind of this the tonight and think it is an interesting addition to the ongoing debates of both real time news as well as Twitter.

As Friendfeed is managing to do, Facebook is attempting to do and numerous other sites fail to do, the real-time web (largely driven by Twitter) is moving closer and closer, but the very nature of it – news created by amateurs experiencing the news themselves is somewhat sketchy at best, blatantly false at worst.

At the other end of the scale we have the aggregators who collate news based on the number of links a particulr piece of news has. The more popular it is, the higher it will appear in the aggregator (Yahoo/Google News for example).

But, does the most popular news have the same value to users as breaking news? I would argue not. The problem is, breaking news takes a while to attract links and build up a head of steam to become massively mainstream breaking news, yet Twitter lacks the depth of detail to add detail to the story.

Along comes Vik’s Tweet News – a Yahoo BOSS/Twitter mash-up which compares the emerging news stories on Twitter and compares the to the stories in Yahoo News. If there is something in both Yahoo News and Twitter, chances are its breaking news but with some meat to it – rather than a collection of brief, 140 character messages.

The end result is a tool that tracks breaking news stories ranked by the hyper-time-sensitive results on Twitter, arguably offering faster updates, better relevance and more in-depth coverage than either source by itself.

Related articles:

• FriendDeck: A FriendFeed Search Tool

Greg picked this one up and sent ot through to me the other day. I really like it. Normally, I find that anything with such a dramatic title (and containing lots of scatty images and poorly-cropped screengrabs) is a load of old tosh, but there are some really interesting elements to this presentation.

Enjoy:

I’d like your help. Well, I actually think you need my help. What the hell, we need each other’s help.

My last big post prompted a previously unseen numbers of comments, all pretty much saying the same thing:

“uk business doesn’t get social media, but what can we do to help it get social media”

The one overriding problem was, and will remain for some time, the difficulty in measuring the effectiveness of a social media campaign. Metrics aside, I don’t think that you can in fact standardise social media measurement, but that is another post

So, whilst the issue over metrics remains unanswered (at the moment anyway), the only solution is to prove that other brands are doing what our clients SHOULD be doing and that social media is here and now in the uk and that there is significant value in embracing a social media strategy.

As there are plenty of social media bods, online buddies, friends and other interested people in the same boat, I decided that it might be a good idea to create an online resource where we could all add our own war stories, case studies, relevant ebooks etc. to enable us to quickly and easily pull together some convincing ammunition to persuade our lovely clients that social media works (when done properly, which of course, is what we all do anyway….isn’t it?!)

So, do please visit the wiki, contribute, send me an email paul (dot) fabretti at gmail (dot) com and let’s see of we can’t make something of value from which we can all benefit. Put whatever you like up, within reason, as long as you think that it helps us promote social media.

Link Love to the following people who I think could/should/might like to help:

Jas
Vero
Becky
Chris (aka The Don)
Stephen
Chris
Will
James
Steve
David
David H
Lloyd
Amanda
David K
Simon
Stuart
Steve D
Helen
Andrew
Sandrine
Robin
Stewart
Jemima
Paul
Damien
Tom
Lexia
Simon

I look forward to hearing from you!