In a BBC article coming out of  SxSW, David Sacks, the founder of business social network Yammer, is quoted as saying that social network users are in “the process of creating email 2.0″. Granted, for the most part, people are posting status updates on their social media sites, but I disagree with the comment that Sacks thinks “it’s all people want to do.” Especially when I get up in the morning and take a look at the mounting pile of email sitting in my inbox. [source] Email: sxc.hu While the growth in such services is heralded as the start of the “real-time, pervasive web”, I see it as more of communications 2.0 rather than just email 2.0. Social media and social networks are changing the way we... [Read more]

Both Forbes and MediaPost’s Online Spin newsletter discussed the idea of a “social nervous system” or the concept of the Hive mind that the new social media world has created, and it really got me thinking. There is a palpable, frenetic energy associated with a lot of the social networking going on. There’s always something happening on one of the networks around the world. Chess - image: sxc.huCorporations and businesses are only just starting to twig to the fact that they need to be involved in social media, on several fronts – not just blogging or twittering or having a facebook page. There needs to be a full plan put in place, and it needs to be done strategically. Think about some of the factors that illustrate... [Read more]

Kevin Rose, founder of Digg , has created a powerful little weekend side project called WeFollow.com , a user-powered directory for Twitter. The tool allows Twitter users to associate themselves with up to three tags which identify their expertise. Twitter will then index WeFollow.com the account under the appropriate category on WeFollow.com. It’s all very cool. Kevin is an investor in Twitter, (which goes to prove the deep ties among all of the Silicon Valley/San Francisco boys go), does what he can to help Twitter according to a Digg spokesperson. WeFollow.com has searchers index themselves as experts in a specific topic. For example, I’ve tagged myself “Journalist”, “SocialMedia” and “Alcohol”.... [Read more]

Guy told me this was coming a while back when I’d asked about being able to save certain feeds and rearrange them as I saw fit, so MyAlltop didn’t come as a surprise to me. Tomorrow, the “online magazine rack”, (one which all of my sites are on!) launches MyAlltop , allowing people to create custom collections of Alltop feeds. For me, it’s basically going to be replacing Google reader – at least for the sites I read regularly for news for the sites. I also suspect I’ll discover a whole ton of new sites as well. Alltop Every custom MyAlltop collection is a public page which can be shared with friends and fans. One of the things that you know i s going to happen (and what I did right away) is that people... [Read more]

Normally, planning an event can take months, sometimes as many as 12, but the Writer’s Federation and the Shabeen Club have teamed up to create an amazingly fun event in just two weeks. That meant all of the traditional promotional methods were completely out of the question. So, instead, organizer Lorraine Murphy turned to Twitter to arrange everything. Crime Pays takes place Monday, March 16th at the Vancouver Police Museum. “We had to do it on twitter because it all literally happened over two weeks, from getting the idea to holding the event.” said Lorraine.  “Papers need more notice than that; we didn’t even get in the event listings at the Straight! So [traditional] press releases were of limited use.” Lorraine... [Read more]