Frustratingly, I can’t see a way to embed it into this post…
Hi Jenny
Thanks for looking at our Buzzdaq, it was a great idea to add an embed code. If you take a look now, you’ll notice we’ve added one one on there now!
Nice one Refreshed Media.
Work
Embedded buzzdaq
Buzzdaq
This is quite PR-y but a nice idea none-the-less.
Refreshed Media unveil their latest digital breakthrough called Buzzdaq, which … allows visitors to see, at a glance the most mentioned words from hundreds of specially selected blog and news articles.
All feeds are taken from the blogs or news items of sites relevant to the internet community… These are drawn from an RSS feed and displayed through the Buzzdaq application which can then be bookmarked to share with others.
Frustratingly, I can’t see a way to embed it into this post, but you can sample the delights of Buzzdaq on the Internet World website.
I’m wondering whether something like this could be used to measure the buzz around specific conferences (related post: I want it ALL (in one place)!).
Is social media inherently useless?
There have been a couple of posts commenting on the apparent uselessness of web 2.0/social media web apps recently.
Mike Ellis commented that:
None of these tools (Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr etc) actually adds anything… All of these tools do add huge amounts of noise, but to me none of them add signal… they’re not doing anything useful for me.
And then godofbiscuits79 commented that Google Reader is ‘not bad though fairly pointless’.
The last comment I’ll put down to web 2.0 naïvety (godofbiscuits79 is my little brother – it would be wrong of me not to take the opportunity to tease him a little about this) but both these comments got me thinking.
Genuine human relationships are essentially useless. Most of us don’t form connections with people because of a transactional value (apart from some business contacts perhaps). My relationships with my friends are based on shared interests or opinions or outlook on life. Sure, some of those relationships come with benefits (like knowing music industry people who can source tickets to sold out gigs 
), but these relationships still only last if there is some genuine connection between the parties involved.
At the moment, most of the ‘friends’ I have in online social networks fit into the description above – they are people I share interests, opinions or outlook with. This means social media for me is essentially useless as it facilitates relationships that are essentially useless. But that’s what I like about it the most.
PR, Social Networking & Blogging in Practice
I was at the PRWeek PR, Social Networking & Blogging in Practice conference yesterday.
To be honest, I was sceptical beforehand and my scepticism was at first confirmed by being one of only about 5 people with a laptop, and there being no free wi-fi. Am I too ‘un-conferenced’ these days?
Anyway, in actual fact the day turned out to be extremely useful with a consistently high calibre of speaker and a few genuinely interesting case studies.
Abbreviated notes and comments:
- The established media clearly don’t ‘get it’ if they think (according to Shane Richmond) that bloggers are official spokespeople for the brand. But hey, it’s something we need to be aware of
- Applying a persona to your programme may help focus and inform the nature of engagement
- Apparently the mobile internet isn’t worth talking about
- Some established media giants might actually think people will always read print newspapers
- I like what Kodak are doing with 1000 words & 1000 nerds. After all, experience IS the product
- Oh how I love stats
- Penguin are doing some really exciting things with social media – engaging interest groups and facilitating user-generated content, merging on- and off-line
(Wondering how they’ll respond when faced with the same challenges the music industry are currently facing. Hoping book publishers will learn from music publishers mistakes) - Will McInnes twitters, and said some interesting things like:
- Negative reviews generate conversions AND reduce product returns (because expectations are lower)
- You demonstrate confidence by linking to competitors
- Fake people are so much better than real people
And he also wrote up his thoughts from the day here.
- 12-14 year olds trust unknown peers more than experts and they are source agnostic. And deys de future, man
- Authority is now with the ‘louder voice’ rather than seniority
Designing experiences (to make products)
Transcendent product design is a matter of philosophy and approach. The reason product development has gone wrong is that people stop at the worst time—when the solutions are most convoluted. What Eastman knew, what Jobs knows, is that you have to go beyond; you have to think about the experience people are having.
Circle of choice
If you tell people how to consume their content, they will ignore you… Let people do what they want to do and try to be in their circle of choice.
From Campaign Reporting in Under 140 Taps (New York Times)
See also: Being useful to the network
