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Social Media Trader

Helping webmasters, bloggers and businesses make the most of social media sites - with in-depth analysis, original articles, resources guides and statistical data

10 Amazing Visualizations of Social NetworksJuly 30 2008

Social networks are dynamic and constantly evolving. While we can easily identify our friends and acquaintances within a network, it’s much harder for us to comprehend how members in a social network are connected and how those connections influence a particular network.

Fortunately, there are now a number of people that have taken the time to create stunning visualizations of various social networks that give us a better understanding of how networks function. We take a look at our ten favourite visualizations of social networks.

Fidg’t’ : Visualize

The Fidg’t Visualizer allows you to play around with your network. You interface with the Visualizer through Flickr and LastFM tags, using any tag to create a Magnet. Once a Tag Magnet is created, members of the network will gravitate towards it if they have photos or music with that same Tag.

ICCARUS: scouta.com

Click here to watch the video.

A 3D visualization of real-time data from scouta.com. It shows the relationship between members, friends, groups and items.

How to Network Like Paul Revere and Quincy JonesJuly 2 2008

You might not think that an American revolutionary war hero and a legendary music producer would have much in common, but both Paul Revere and Quincy Jones understood the value of social networks.

Paul Revere and William Dawes were both sent to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams that the British army were coming. Both men were from a similar economic and social background, yet it is Revere who raised the militia and later had a poem written about him. A Harvard Business Review article suggests the reason behind Revere being remembered and Dawes being largely forgotten is due to the type of social network each man had developed.

I recently watched an interesting BBC4 documentary on legendary music producer, Quincy Jones. Jones produced the biggest selling album of all time (Michael Jackson’s, Thriller) along with the second biggest selling single of all time (We Are the World). As Lionel Ritchie explains in this clip, part of Jones’ success was due to ability to connect people together, “…there’s a giant address book you see him on the phone and he’s just calling and he knows just who to call to get that done…” [3:22 in the clip]

Building your network is more than just pressing a button to add someone on a social netw

Social Media Websites Banned WorldwideJune 21 2008

For many countries with strict censorship laws, social media websites and blogging platforms are an unknown quantity. Using IBM’s ManyEyes tool, we’ve created a map of the most censored social media websites around the world.

Unfortunately, this list is probably only the tip of the iceberg. Most of the reports of censorship are based on stories by major news outlets. If we have missed any sites or countries then please leave a link in the comments section to an article with more details so we can update the map.

Also, please feel free to embed the map on your own site. You don’t need to attribute a link to this site, but it would be nice if you could link to one of the following sites:

globalvoicesonline.org
committeetoprotectbloggers.org

We only looked at platforms and not individual sites. While some of the sites are no longer banned, we thought it was better to include any that have been banned previously.

Click on the map below to interact with it. (You can also use the ManyEyes tool to update the data yourself).

Here is a table listing which sites have been banned by each country.

Country Banned Websites Brazil YouTube, Wordpress China YouTube, Wikipedia

5 TED Talks on Collaboration and CommunitiesJune 15 2008

What do some of the world’s greatest thinkers and doers think about collaboration and communities? We’ve compiled 5 interesting videos, so grab your popcorn, sit back and enjoy.

New babies and work commitments have meant that this blog hasn’t been updated as much in the last couple of weeks. Normal service will resume tomorrow.

We’re testing out apture for this post. Click on the links and you should be able to see either a video, wikipedia entry or photograph. Here’s a brief description of the service from the apture site:

With just one line of code, publishers and bloggers can quickly and easily turn flat pages of text into a compelling multimedia experience. Apture gives content creators the power to find and incorporate relevant multimedia items directly into their pages. Readers can then access these items without ever leaving the page, providing them with a deeper and more meaningful web experience.

Let us know what you think. Do you like additional media being on the page or do you find it distracting?

Robert Wright: How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict
Author Robert Wright explains “non-zero-sumness” — the network of linked fortunes and cooperation that has guided our evolution to this point — and how we can use it to help save humanity today.

What is the Future of Social Networks?June 14 2008

Who says only prophets and fair-ground psychics are able to predict the future? Understanding the future is beneficial to most industries in order to cope with technological and societal change. We take a look at what the future landscape of social networking might look like.

Future forecasting

“Futures Studies, Foresight, or Futurology is the science, art and practice of postulating possible, probable, and preferable futures and the worldviews and myths that underlie them. Futures studies (colloquially called “Futures” by many of the field’s practitioners) seeks to understand what is likely to continue, what is likely to change, and what is novel. Part of the discipline thus seeks a systematic and pattern-based understanding of past and present, and to determine the likelihood of future events and trends.”
- Wikipedia entry

Herman Kahn of the RAND Corporation, used scenarios to predict how a nuclear war could be “won”, while the Ministry of Defence’s nightmarish vision of the next 30 years includes: “information chips implanted in the brain”, “electromagnetic pulse weapons” and Flashmobs “rapidly mobilised b