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I've been accused of tweeting too much more than once, but I've finally discovered the perfect excuse: I'm going to claim that someone is turning my every tweet into a cookie like this and donating it to a starving child.

Ok, so I'm probably not going to use that excuse because one shouldn't joke about starving children, but I still want my own box of Twitter cookies. [I Am Baker via Craftzine via Unplggd]

Send an email to Rosa Golijan, the author of this post, at rgolijan@gizmodo.com.

"The internet has not become the great leveller that it was once thought it could be," according to Harvard academic Ethan Zuckerman.

Mr Zuckerman was speaking at the TED Global (Technology Entertainment and Design) conference in Oxford.

He said that the web was now contrary to the original utopian vision and users focused on information from a handful of wealthy countries.

"It's making us 'imaginary cosmopolitans'," he told delegates.

Social networks, he said, made the problem worse with the majority of people sharing information with folk who share their world-view.

"We think we're getting a broad view of the world, because it's possible that our television, newspapers and internet could be giving us a vastly wider picture than was available for our parents or grandparents," he said.

"When we look at what's actually happening, our world-view might actually be narrowing."

Mr Zuckerman, an entrepreneur, blogger and researcher at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said that it was his aim to change the situation and realise the original vision of the net.

Blinkered

He pointed to research that showed the focus of media organisations had also narrowed in recent years.

"When I was growing up in the US in the 1970s, 35-40% of an average nightly newscast focused on international stories," he told the audience.

"The percentage of international news in an average newscast is now 12-15%."

He said the internet - and its global reach and infrastructure - could address that gap, but many people chose not to engage.

"The promise of the internet - the idea that everything is just a click away - is that in Britain I can read newspapers from Australia, India, Nigeria, Ghana, Canada, at no cost and end up with a wider view of the world. The truth is that, on average, I won't."

He said that in the UK, more than 95% of traffic to the most popular news sites is to domestic sites.

And he saw the same pattern across the world.

For example, he said, most US news focused on North America and countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, where its troops were based.

This problem is compounded by social networks, he said.

Tools like Twitter trap people in so-called "filter bubbles", a phrase put forward by political activist Eli Pariser.

"The internet is too big to understand as a whole, so we get a picture of it that's similar to what our friends see," said Mr Zuckerman.

"If you turn to your friends, eventually you get the wisdom of the flock."

True colours

He highlighted research done by Twitter, which found that almost a quarter of its US users were African-American

"That was pretty surprising to most American users, who assumed that Twitter was just used by nerdy white guys," he said.

And research by scientists at tech giant IBM had shown that the popular topics of conversation between white users and African American users were very different, highlighting the fact that networks reinforced a certain world view.

For example, he said, cookout was a term mostly used by black twitter users, whilst oil spill was a predominantly white topic.

"The wider world is a click away, but whether we mean to or not, we're usually filtering it out," said Mr Zuckerman.

However, Mr Zuckerman said there were solutions that could realise the original vision of the internet and contribute to a greater understanding of the wider world.

Of particular help, he said, would be finding mechanisms to amplify the voices of thousands of bloggers, particularly those in countries under represented in mainstream media.

Crunch time

Mr Zuckerman admitted he had a particular interest in this, as he is one of the founders of a not-for profit network of bloggers called Global Voices, which aims to fill in the gaps in global media coverage.

These networks may be hidden from the wider world until times of crisis, he said.

For example, a network of Madagascan bloggers called Foko club, originally set up to teach high school students English suddenly rose to prominence in 2009 when the president of the country was overthrown and most media organisations were barred from the country.

"Foko were reporting breaking news with their blogs and cellphone cameras," he said. "If we want a wider world, we'd find ways to raise voices in places we don't often hear from, like Madagascar."

He also highlighted a project in China called Yeeyan, which uses a network of 150,000 volunteers to translate and publish 50 to 100 articles each day from western publications, such as The New York Times

"Where's the English-language version that's giving us insights into what's being said in Chinese media?" he asked.

However, he said, to truly realise the vision people needed curators to collect the content together and who bridged different cultures to put content into context.

These bridge figures and xenophiles could then act as "trusted guides" to unfamiliar content.

"My challenge is this: it's not enough to make a personal decision that you want a wider world," he said.

"We have to figure out how to rewire the systems we have. We have to fix our media, we have to fix the internet, we have to fix education."

In addition, he said, the net needed new translation projects and tools along with new mechanisms for discovering content through serendipity.

"That's what I am trying to do - I need your help," he said.

TED Global runs from 13-16 July in Oxford, UK.

Antenna Might Cut Calls

A recent opinion poll by Lightspeed Research for Oxygen media reported nearly 34% of the women in the age group 18-34 surveyed revealed that logging in at Facebook was the first thing they did every morning, even before brushing their teeth or visiting the washroom. The results are not awesome considering industry statistics show over half the young adults in the age group of 20 to 30 do not brush their teeth early in the morning.

However Facebook’s increasing success at eyeball retention at over 6 hours per day, compared to 2 hours per day for Google, Yahoo and other social media sites, has had others in a tizzy since it was revealed by Nielsen statistics earlier this year.

Facebook’s coup at eyeball retention had ad-men scurrying towards the site where youth would spend a quarter of their lives socializing with friends on the net and which has rapidly overshadowed the popularity of friends at the club. Now YouTube has announced a new format called ‘Leanback’ in which the viewer will be fed HD videos of his or her choice, one after another, so that they do not have to surf the website to select programs of their choice.

In May of this year, Google, the owners of YouTube, battling to retain the largest chunk of online ads, revealed their plan to unleash internet-focused television, with new features of browsing on auto feed without the use of remote when Sony launches its new range of products in the fall this year.

YouTube, though the biggest of the video sites, hopelessly languishes in eyeball retention amongst the video segment, perhaps because it does not look at solutions from the user's point of view. The problem with its thinking is that viewers will never give up the choice to eject dumb program mes from their screens and YouTube has no mechanism in its site to ensure viewer popularity other than celebrity videos.

As a matter of fact, YouTube's video selection for featured videos and promotion of those selected as featured presentations, leaves a lot to be desired. When compared it to smaller presentation sites like SlideShare or Scribd, which also feature YouTube videos, the shortcomings are obvious.

There is no mechanism by which a video uploaded on YouTube gets a decent viewership unless actively promoted. Whereas a SlideShare upload would give a reasonably well done video a few hundred views per day for the first week, and Scribd would ensure at least half the eyeballs were on the video, but on YouTube, such a video would go virtually unnoticed unless actively promoted by search engines.

Maybe key words get lost in the maze of YouTube, or perhaps the site is too big and unwieldy with its 4.6 billion streams for one to categorize and feature in its pages for easy public viewership. It's possible it needs its home page load to be re-distributed by category-wise inner pages or a development of category-based communities like the other presentation sites have.

Whatever it may be, YouTube will have to look into the micro-features of its site and facilitate social interaction to increase the eyeball retention, instead of adding auto feed formats to surf videos. For apart from watching music videos on auto feed, it is very difficult to conceive that other videos shall suit the user’s mood, tastes and needs on a pre-set basis.

http://technorati.com/business/article/youtube-steps-up-bid-for-eyeball/page-2/

Matt Brittin, Google’s UK chief executive, has said that there is still room for different social networks other than Facebook, while failing to deny rumours that the search company is developing a new entrant: ‘Google Me’.

Gmail users will now be able to add logos to their email signature following improvements to Google’s web-based email service

The travel news of the day is clearly the announcement of TripAdvisor's deal with Facebook, and the introduction of the new TripAdvisor "Trip Friends" feature.

The Boston Business Journal went so far as to claim the Facebook-TripAdvisor partnership was "game changing," and we think they're right.

It changes the travel search paradigm. It's also a major and logical step for the review giant, because research and anecdotal evidence has shown that travelers increasingly prefer to seek advice and information about a destination or property from friends, friends of friends, and family rather than a "results neutral," impersonal search from Google.

Facebook's "Cities I've Visited (CIV)" application drives the process, and it's hugely popular. The Boston Business Journal reports that the three year old application has more than five million monthly active users, and highlights over one billion destinations that CIV travelers have visited.

It works this way. Sign into TripAdvisor, and there's a button that connects to Facebook. Then enter your TripAdvisor request, say San Francisco. Any Facebook "friend" that has been to San Francisco or who has identified it as a favorite will show up, and from there it's possible to ask about hotels, cool clubs, restaurants, etc.

PhoCusWright , the travel industry's leading market research company said that TripAdvisor's move is a "first for travel...the tip of the iceberg."

Travel then is no longer about destinations, it's about travelers sharing information about hotels, flights, activities and interests.

While travel advice has always been available from friends and family on Facebook and its "CIV" platform, the beauty of this is that one never has to leave TripAdvisor, so all the hot tips and advice from people who lived and loved in San Francisco are shared and saved to a special folder.

We've all heard stories of how new technologies have backfired on people in the workplace, the home and the classroom -- how employees, students, spouses and others have been tripped up by their own Facebook or Twitter entries. Social networking and other technologies may have revolutionized how we communicate, but they're also posing new pitfalls and ethical questions for companies -- especially within the media industry.

The latest high-profile example is Octavia Nasr. CNN's Middle East affairs senior editor was fired recently after publishing a comment on Twitter expressing admiration for a recently deceased and very controversial cleric in Lebanon. (Disclosure: The author of this piece is a former CNN employee.)

Conflicting Urges Over Twitter

Before her dismissal, Nasr tried to clarify her statement, saying the reaction to her Tweet "provides a good lesson on why 140 characters should not be used to comment on controversial or sensitive issues, especially those dealing with the Middle East."

Twitter's 140-character format is "for making Henny Youngman-like one-liners," says blogger Chez Pazienza. "That's what it's there for; you don't really try to communicate any genuine emotion via Twitter. It's a ridiculous conceit to do that."

But Pazienza, a former CNN producer, points out the network encourages its on-air talent to Tweet. "They have to push social networking," he says. "And what they do is [say]: 'Go on there, go, we trust your judgment.' But then they turn around and say, 'You know what? She didn't use her best judgment on this, and it made us look bad.' And that's just dumb."

Employers "Can't Keep Up Anymore"

Several years ago, Pazienza was forced out of CNN after company executives discovered his blog, deusexmalcontent.com -- a website he started during a medical leave from the company. "I said...it's a hobby, it's something I do on the side," he remembers. "I'm not paid for it: I'm not out identifying myself as a CNN employee."

But Pazienza's bosses argued his sometimes controversial blog entries might reflect badly on the network. "I said, 'No, I don't think so, because quite frankly that's my own thing, and I don't tell people where I work, and I don't think you should have control over every single facet of my life simply because you give me a paycheck.'"

Pazienza says it's naive and/or disingenuous for organizations to presume their employees aren't using Facebook, Twitter and other social networking. "The technology has out-advanced them, and that's the problem," he says. "It's at the point now where they can't keep up anymore. It's wrong now to expect that you're going to find people who have not left a digital footprint that includes everything from embarrassing, compromising photos to political and social opinions...especially the kids coming up through the ranks now."

Part of the problem is that many corporate cultures have not yet caught up with how people use the Web -- and how it's redefining communications. "We have taken the level of publishing, what was a once-expensive process, and made it inexpensive," says Shaun Schafer, a professor at the Metropolitan State College of Denver's journalism department.

He adds: "I look at the people we have coming out right now as journalists, especially our public relations grads. If they put social networking or social media down on their list of skills, they're already a leg up on where they're going next. It certainly is changing the approach in how we think news is getting out."

Social Media Needs to Be More Than PR

Some companies have strict policies on their employees' use of the Internet and social networking. But Schafer notes there are ways around such restrictions. "A lot of people in corporate positions...might have a Facebook page that's for anybody who wants to connect," he says. "But then they have another one that's just for friends, and you may not know they have this second page. I think that's probably shrewd and much more reasonable."

As companies jump on the social media bandwagon, some are discovering their online audiences expect more than just public relations. "The very nature of....all of these social networking sites, these outlets, is that you're encouraged to speak your mind, to voice your opinion, to be heard," says Pazienza.

"[If] you go on Twitter and Facebook and you say nothing, then you look like an idiot; then you look like an old person trying to co-opt modern-day technology and you look like a fool doing it," notes Pazienza. "You only follow somebody because they're going to either have useful information, or they're going to say something once in a while that gets your attention."

That personalized usage of mass media has also dramatically changed the media industry itself. "Look at how radio has become so fractured," says Schafer. "There was a time not too long ago that anybody you stopped could probably have told you 10 songs in the Top 40. I don't know if I even know one song in the top 40 at this point. I'm still consuming radio, probably at about the same amount that I always have, but there's somebody out there to serve my [specific] interests so I'm not really looking for that common ground, and I'm probably not alone in that."

Forcing Transparency

Social networking and the Internet are forcing organizations to become more transparent, as more information from a variety of sources becomes available to anyone at any time. And that transparency, Pazienza says, extends to employees.

"People can now see the clock ticking," he says. "They can see the inner workings. And trying to hide and pretend that there are just machines back there who don't have opinions, it's completely unfeasible."

A recent opinion poll by Lightspeed research for Oxygen media reported that nearly 34% of the women in the age group of 18-34 surveyed revealed that logging in at Facebook was the first thing they did every morning, even before brushing their teeth or visiting the washroom. The results are not awesome considering industry statistics that over half the young adults in the age group of 20 to 30 do not brush teeth early in the morning. However Facebook’s increasing success at eyeball retention at over 6 hours per day as against 2 hours per day for Google, Yahoo and other social media sites has had others in a tizzy, every since it was revealed by Nielsen statistics earlier this year.

Facebook’s coup at eyeball retention had the adman scurrying towards the site where the youth would spend a quarter of their lives socializing with friends on the net who have quite rapidly overshadowed the popularity of friends at the club. Now YouTube has announced a new format called ‘Leanback’ in which the viewer will be fed HD videos of his or her choice one after another so that they do not have to serf the website to select programs of their choice.

In May this year, Google, the owners of YouTube, battling to retain the largest chunk of online ads revealed its plans to unleash its internet focused television with new features of browsing on auto feed without the use of remote when Sony launches its new range of products in fall this year. YouTube though, the biggest of the video. sites hopelessly languishes in eyeball retention amongst the video segment perhaps because it does not look at solutions from the user point of view. The problem with its thinking is that viewers will never give up the choice to eject dumb program mes from their screens and You tube has no mechanism in its site to ensure viewer popularity other than celebrity videos.

As a matter of fact YouTube's video selection for featured videos and promotion of those selected as featured presentations leaves a lot to be desired. Comparing it to smaller presentation sites like Slide Share or Scribd which also features YouTube videos highlights the short comings. There is no mechanism by which a video uploaded on You tube gets a decent viewership unless actively promoted. Whereas a Slide-Share upload would give a reasonably well done video a few hundred views per day for the first week and Scribd would ensure at least half the eyeballs, in you tube such a video would go virtually un-noticed unless actively promoted by search engines.

Perhaps key words get lost in the maze called YouTube or the site is too big and unwieldy with 4.6 billion streams for one to categorize and feature in its pages for easy public viewership. Perhaps it needs its home page load to be re-distributed by category wise inner pages or a development of category based communities like the other presentation sites have. Whatever it be, YouTube will have to look into the micro-features of its site and facilitate social interaction to increase the eyeball retention, instead of adding auto feed formats to surf videos. For apart from watching music videos on auto feed, it is very difficult to conceive that other videos shall suit the user’s mood, tastes and needs on a pre-set basis.

Read more: http://technorati.com/business/article/you-tube-steps-up-bid-for/page-2/#ixzz0tM07ZlY5

Without making a lot of noise about it, StumbleUpon yesterday surpassed 10 million registered users. The milestone was reached upon registration of a user that goes by the name Nellzom, a 20-year old from Colombia.

So how do we know he’s mr. diez milliones?

Because a StumbleUpon community development and support employee stumbled his profile and added the words “Nellzom is officially our 10th Million user! Welcome to StumbleUpon and its beautiful community of users!”.

Thanks to our eagle-eyed reader Paul Sanchez for uhm, stumbling upon it.

Last time we covered the size of StumbleUpon’s user base was in April 2008, when it hit 5 million users and nearly five billion stumbles. It took them another 2 years to double their number of users, but of course there’s no telling how many registered users are still active on the service. Nevertheless, according to StatCounter, StumbleUpon drives more traffic to websites than Twitter, Reddit or Digg, so they must be doing something right.

For your reference: it’s been a little over a year since StumbleUpon spun off from eBay and became an independent startup again.

As the company pointed out in a recent blog post, they have since then released the web bar as well as a new version of the flagship Mozilla add-on, its URL shortener and content syndication service su.pr, a Chrome extension, a revamped ads system, a new look to their site, an iPad app, new badges, and more. In other words, they’ve been busy.

In the blog post, dated May 4, the company also shared some interesting stats:

- 118% growth rate in active users since 2009
- 5.4 billion recommendations since April 2009
- In March 2010 alone, half a billion recommendations
- StumbleUpon users stumble links 25 times a day on average
- Users of the Mozilla add-on stumble something 400 times a month on average
- Over 100,000 Facebook fans

The company can now add 10 million users to that list.

Are you one of them? Why (not)?


http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/18/stumbleupon-10-million/

Hyper-local is the name of the social media game. Location-based services are driving that trend and for a while, it was rumored that Facebook would jump into the game with snatching up Foursquare.

However, that doesn't appear to coming true any time soon with Foursquare raging along.

What might have tipped Facebook's cap is their acquisition of Nextstop, a service that's only a year old that allows users to browse and create their own local guides and recommendations.

In an announcement on its website, Nextstop wrote that it will shut down on September 1, but will be releasing the Nextstop database under a Creative Commons license so that the guides survive.

Nextstop is pretty simple. It's bread and butter is focusing on creating simple, yet creative guides of local destinations and hotspots. It provides a range of community features such as badges and guide recommendations. It could be equated to be similar to Yelp than Foursquare, but the premise is pretty much the same.

While Nextstop will be going bye byes, the real steal here is the talent and technology that Facebook will acquire as a result.

It'll be interesting to see how Facebook integrates Nextstop into it's service and whether or not the social media king will start to knock off some of it's much smaller, social content competitors.

Read more: http://technorati.com/blogging/article/next-stop-for-nextstop-is-facebook/#ixzz0tAJD0LPG

Google has acquired social search service Aardvark, says a source that has been briefed on the deal, for around $50 million. We first reported on the discussions between the two companies in December. Those discussions have now turned into a signed deal, says our source, and will be announced today or tomorrow.

Aardvark, founded by ex-Googlers, has raised around $6 million in venture capital to date. The service lets users ask questions and get immediate responses from their friends and friends of friends.

Earlier this month the company published a research report that included some key stats about their business:

As of October 2009, Aardvark had 90,361 users, of whom 55.9% had created content (asked or answered a question). The site’s average query volume was 3,167.2 questions per day, with the median active user asking 3.1 questions per month. Interestingly, mobile users are more active than desktop users. The Aardvark team attributes this to users wanting quick, short answers on their phones without having to dig for anything. They also think people are more used to using more natural language patterns on their phones.

The average query length was 18.6 words (median of 13) versus 2.2-2.9 words on a standard search engine. Some of this difference comes from the more natural language people use (with words like “a”, “the”, and “if”). It’s also because people tend to add more context to their queries, with the knowledge that it will be read by a human and will likely lead to a better answer.

98.1% of questions asked on Aardvark were unique, compared with between 57 and 63% on traditional search engines.

87.7% of questions submitted were answered, and nearly 60% of them were answered within 10 minutes. The median answering time was 6 minutes and 37 seconds, with the average question receiving two answers. 70.4% of answers were deemed to be ‘good’, with 14.1% as ‘OK’ and 15.5% were rated as bad.

86.7% of Aardvark users had been asked by Aardvark to answer a question, of whom 70% actually looked at the question and 38% could answer. 50% of all members had answered a question (including 75% of all users who had ever actually interacted with the site), though 20% of users accounted for 85% of answers.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8511553.stm

Paypal is the world's leading online payment service

Indian users of online money transfer service PayPal face a long wait after the firm abruptly suspended personal payments because of regulatory issues.

Last month's move followed questions from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) about whether PayPal complies with laws on cross-border money transfers.

Neither PayPal, which is based in the US, nor the RBI was able to say when the issue might be resolved.

The affair has left many Indian users of PayPal frustrated.

'Fast-growing market'

PayPal says in its blog that its personal payment service for India would be suspended "for at least a few months".

The company could not give figures for the size of its business in India, which is believed to be relatively small. However, PayPal spokesman Anuj Nayar told the BBC that India was a "fast-growing market".

The problem is over the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, which came into effect in India in August 2008.

The RBI says that under this act, any money transfer scheme has to be authorised by the Indian authorities, which PayPal is not.

The RBI would not give details of its discussions with PayPal, but says it has sent the company some questions to respond to. Government sources in India have said they believe PayPal was aware of the implications the change of legislation would have for its business.

The stumbling block is whether PayPal personal payments - as opposed to commercial transactions - amount to cash remittances. PayPal says it only operates online and it is up to users to get money from their PayPal account to a bank account to encash it.

Some Indian PayPal users are small businesses for whom the system is a quick and effective way to transfer funds.

Angry posts on social networking sites have complained about money being lost because of transaction fees, and of not being able to transfer funds to local banks once the PayPal service was suspended.

PayPal has pledged to sort out these problems and some PayPal users seemed to blame Indian bureaucracy as much as anything else. "Always wonder why regulators in India are keen on blocking stuff," commented one Twitter user.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8511553.stm

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