Monthly Archives: February 2010

Back in early January, I went to CES and was completely overwhelmed. My constant joke was (and still is) that the so-called booths are big enough to have their own zip code. I took a ton of video footage, convinced I would return home and turn that into a montage that really showed everyone the absolute strangeness of CES.

I failed. I came home, switched out suitcases, and headed back out on the road again pretty soon after returning. However, I discovered a video today from my CES partner-in-crime. I spent most of the event with my friend Jason Griffey, who is Head of Library IT at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga. He’s in the midst of planning a new library building, and the place is going uber-digital. (Someday I should get him to write a post here on digital libraries.) Jason managed to put his own CES montage together and that’s what I’m dropping here.

Enjoy the oddness, the hugeness, and the just plain silly at CES 2010:

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Cheers!
Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

Using social media to save lives, or generally make a difference outside of the online realm, is something we don’t often think about. We theorize about it all the time, for sure. Bu actual execution is far and few between, and hardly makes for interesting news coverage when there’s other things to talk about, such as a phising scam on Twitter or a new tool launched by Google.

Nevertheless, the real-life, game-changing stories are some of the ones that interest me the most. It’s partially because the real-world effect of social media changed my own life, as it offered an outlet to the world when I had few other options. It really is the ability to connect people that are in need of advice or information that lets social media become a powerful tool, and one man is out to prove that to the rest of us.

Jonathan Akwue of Digital Public sought a way to leverage social media for the greater good, connecting people that essentially don’t want to be identified. One group in particular were teen females avoiding or dealing with unwanted pregnancy. It’s a tough topic to tackle, but it was all the more reason for Akwue to turn to social media in order to provide a safe haven for giving people information in an environment that make it easier for an audience to access and connect with.

In this way, it seems like the Internet is a solution for many of our problems concerning limited access to information or the people that may need the information the most. Yet it’s becoming more and more evident that such social media tools can in fact be used for these purposes. The far-reaching effects of social media as we know it have penetrated our culture to the point where it is no longer a foreign concept, and can be readily utilized for the purpose of seeking like minds.

The capacity of the web to develop relationships around niche user groups is another basic we rarely apply to the real-world benefits of social media, but there it is, staring us in the face. Akwue’s desire to reduce teen pregnancies resulted in a delivery method that targeted young teens and mothers in places they were willing to meet halfway, successfully making a difference for many of the individuals involved.

As social media increases its capabilities to improve targeting for the inclusion of geographic data, we’re likely to see more projects and programs that seek to utilize the web for similar just causes. I think we can mark this as a win for social media.

Launched, I believe, only a few days ago, Twitgift.me, a product of the LAC Project, is a new way to send a real gift to your Twitter friends.

You simply choose a gift (which currently consists of chocolate chip, sugar, or peanut butter cookies), enter your own Twitter ID and credit card information, as well as the Twitter ID of the recipient. That’s it. The recipient gets a tweet notifying them of the Twitgift and they enter their own shipping information and can be waiting eagerly for the cookie arrival.

It’s a great concept. After all, sometimes you’ll discover wonderful people on Twitter, but you may rarely see them and never ask for their mailing address. Now you don’t have to; you can just send a Twitgift when that wonderful person has a birthday, needs a pick-me-up, or is celebrating something.

The cookies cost $19 and it looks like there is around $10 in shipping. Twitgift is looking for more vendors to add, so they won’t be an all-baked-goods type of place (not that I have any issues with cookies!).

UPDATE: The nice folks over at TwitGift sent me my own box of cookies after this post. I love chocolate chip cookies, so I couldn’t have been happier. The entire unboxing can be found in a post on my personal blog.

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Cheers!
Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

How much time are we really spending on the social media, and would we even really be able to measure that? Nielsen released its report today indicating how much time we’re currently spending on social media, and it averages out to five hours per month for each user. That’s an 82% increase from last year, with the use of social media continuing to increase over the past three years.

The Nielsen study looked at social media users across ten countries, including The United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France, Japan, Australia, Spain, Brazil and the United States. It was actually Australia that won out, with its residents averaging over 6 hours per month spent on social media sites.

The stats are important to know, especially as social media becomes a hub for all sorts of intersecting channels of entertainment, correspondence and search. Nielsen’s blog post regarding this study also notes social media usage in comparison to other reasons for accessing the Internet, with social media and blogs dominating the list for the month of December 2009. Online gaming and instant-messaging were the next two reasons for logging on, giving us a good glimpse as to the reason why it’s going to be increasingly difficult to look at social media as a stand-alone category for these types of studies.

Online gaming and instant messaging are both aspects of web-based activities that are being categorically rolled into social media outlets. Social media sites such as Facebook are becoming platforms for several other facets of our online activity, whether it be a casual game or a conversation with a co-worker.

As services like Gmail incorporate chat tools, live-streaming communication portals such as Wave, and socially-engineered sharing mechanisms such as Google Buzz, the very definition of what constitutes as social media changes as well. Tack on the mobile factor, and you’ve got a pretty widespread look at what could be considered social media and its point of access.

Pretty soon it won’t be a matter of how long we’re spending on social media, but how long we’re spending on game-apps with social media, or link-sharing. How frequently are we posting to our wall or updating our status? This information will also become important as advertising continues to look to social media, offline and on, for marketing purposes.

Developers of Apple iPhone apps have noticed something new on their end–an Explicit category for iPhone apps. While the new category isn’t available in the iTunes store yet, its presence on the developers side of things suggests that Apple is looking to modify its app store and the criteria that goes along with a given application being accepted into the iTunes App Store itself.

The discovery comes shortly after Apple banned an overtly sexual app that was created for the iPhone’s mobile app platform, despite it being no more explicit than other apps already accepted into the App Store. The app banning was the last straw for many developers that have been seeking clarification from Apple as to what can and cannot be incorporated into a particular iPhone app. With confusion rising around the criteria Apple uses to determine which apps make it through the approval process and which apps are rejected, Apple has been stirring the pot and having to deal with a lot of frustrated developers, more than two years after launching the iPhone.

Some had even hoped that the Explicit category would appear with the latest iPhone device release, tough that didn’t happen. It’s a step that many platforms used for media distribution are hesitant to make, for mobile platforms, on-demand television and film content, and user-generated content. Finding the best way to deal with new and budding platforms as well as the established concept of tiered distribution to fit everyone’s needs is something that has not sped along with the mainstream adoption of certain technology, at least not without being labeled as taboo.

What this particular situation does highlight, however, is the need for Apple to improve its relationships with its developers and end users. The addition of an explicit category could prove to be an acceptable answer for dealing with the plight of concerned parents as well as developers looking for answers.

This is also something other developers and platforms can learn from. Google’s Android platform is open source, meaning it’s a great deal easier to push an app through to the Android market in comparison to the iTunes App Store. The open source tactic has caused its own set of problems for Google, given the security breaches some apps have benefited from for certain banking apps. So it’s clear that an acceptable medium needs to be met. For the time being, we’ll just look forward to the Explicit category from Apple, which would come just in time for the iPad release.