Reddit - Read it

Reddit is my personal favourite website at the moment. It is both a social media platform as well as a news source and the host of a good majority of the original comedy content, which is then reposted throughout the web and other social media platforms such as Facebook. 

Reddit also allows you to see into people's lives that you wouldn't otherwise, with the site hosting "AMA's" or Ask me Anything's" with celebrities or people of interest, where they are brought down to level and answer interesting questions which may not otherwise be answered.

There aren't profile's per say, like Faecebook, but comment and link karma, where you're "upvoted" or "downvoted", this generates popularity. 

If the majority isn't your thing also there are sub-reddits for pretty much anything, opening it up to even the most niche of interests, it really is a great and diverse community.

As you can tell, it is a hard website to define, so here is a video, which also contains an interview with the 2 founders of the website Steve Huffman & Alexis Ohanian;

Here is a link to an AMA that Bill Gates did last week

And if you're a bit too lazy or not familiar with the Reddit layout, here's a recap of what we learned from Bill.

There is also a Social Media sub-reddit, which is where I have a look from time to time on what's going on, this week I read an interesting article on how to increase social sharing of boring press releases.

Social Technology trends

This was an interesting look at some upcoming trends expected in 2011, but in fact none of them became a reality in that year!

1 - Augmented reality grows up: After the hype and the lame advertising stunts, we're finally going to find genuine uses for augmented reality on your smartphone. Download the Plane Finder AR app, for instance, and you can point your iPhone camera at the sky and discover individual aircrafts' flight numbers, speed, altitude and distance. That's tons of fun, even if the paranoid are claiming it's the terrorist's wet dream. Then there are the applications being developed for Layar, on Apple and Android devices, which superimpose a layer of information on what you see through the phone's camera. My favourite: safety information about local buildings, which the Rotterdam fire brigade call up whenever they are called to control a fire. Genius.

2 - Rentalship taking over from ownership: You're streaming music through Spotify or Zune, and accessing movies through internet-based "rental" services such as Blinkbox -- so the need to acquire the physical item becomes an irrelevance. Now that attitude is moving to non-digital goods, and web-based services will proliferate to help you borrow things you don't, if you're honest, need to own. Need use of a car? Borrow one through Zipcar or Streetcar. Girlfriend needs a designer handbag? Rent one from BagBorrowOrSteal.com. Building a bookshelf? SnapGoods will help you rent a neighbour's drill for a day. And lo, consumerism takes a thump.

3 - Social TV: The next billion televisions will be internet connected. That's going to turn TV viewing into a much more social experience -- with comments from your friends' tweets and Facebook updates not only adding instant feedback to real-time broadcasts, but also helping program your set to record the shows it thinks you are most likely to enjoy, based on what your friends enjoy. Steve Jobs is naturally hoping to dominate this revolution with his Apple TV device, but he'll face competition from the likes of Boxee, as well as new services such blinkbox and Starling.tv, which lets viewers chat, play and generally interact with one another while watching Mad Men. Farewell, then, linear TV -- and if you do know any schedulers, be nice as they scramble for new careers.

4 - Epic visualisations will turn data into information: We're in a world ever more saturated with data: Eric Schmidt, the Google boss, recently estimated that we're now generating five exabytes (or billion gigabytes) every two days, which is the total amount we produced in all human history up until 2003. So how do we make sense of all these zeroes and ones? Simple: we develop visualisation tools that help us spot the patterns, and produce stunningly sexual images at the same time. Already smart design-led companies such as ITO are visualising real-time transport data so you can save precious minutes on your journey home; and the clever people at McLaren are using their Formula 1 expertise to map airports with sensors so the resulting screen images let you predict exactly when your plane will start taxiing. Over the next year, expect dataviz porn to go mainstream as more industries use it to make sense of rough numbers.

5 - Money goes mobile: It's your music player, your video camera and your geolocation-based check-in tool -- so why shouldn't your smartphone also be your wallet? This year mobile payments will take a leap closer to mainstream acceptance, as services such as Zong and Boku convince us that it's safe and convenient to spend money using your phone number. The social networks too are moving fast into financial services -- from Facebook Credits to Twitpay, which lets you make payments via Twitter. In Kenya, already 10 million people are using a service called M-PESA to transfer cash -- so it's no wonder the traditional banks are getting nervous. Hurrah: finally the bank manager's days are numbered.

6 - Artificial intelligence finally gets smart: OK, on behalf of the futurists' union I accept that we may have oversold this one a few times in the past. But trust me, this year AI will take a big leap towards cracking the "is it a machine or a person?" Turing test. From cars packed with "intelligent" safety features so they autonomously adjust the steering, to advertising hoardings that target you personally based on your gender and estimated age, we're going to find machines understanding our desires and needs more than ever.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-01/11/david-rowan-predictions-2011

A Blog about Blogger

Blogger

On August 23, 1999, Blogger was launched by Pyra Labs. As one of the earliest dedicated blog-publishing tools, it is credited for helping popularize the format. In February 2003, Pyra Labs was acquired by Google under undisclosed terms. The acquisition allowed premium features (for which Pyra had charged) to become free. In October 2004, Pyra Labs' co-founder, Evan Williams, left Google. In 2004, Google purchased Picasa; it integrated Picasa and its photo sharing utility Hello into Blogger, allowing users to post photos to their blogs.

On May 9, 2004, Blogger introduced a major redesign, adding features such as web standards-compliant templates, individual archive pages for posts, comments, and posting by email. On August 14, 2006, Blogger launched its latest version in beta, codenamed "Invader", alongside the gold release. This migrated users to Google servers and had some new features, including interface language in French, Italian, German and Spanish. In December 2006, this new version of Blogger was taken out of beta. By May 2007, Blogger had completely moved over to Google operated servers. Blogger was ranked 16 on the list of top 50 domains in terms of number of unique visitors in 2007.

Here's an interesting presentation from Evan, going through his life, what inspired him, and his general thought process of how he's got to where he is today. I found it very interesting that even though the internet wasn't around him as much as it would be today, he grasped and learned so much about it, before it was the norm.

Evan Williams, the mind behind Blogger has now gone on create Medium, which is his new platform of blogging and something to keep an eye on in the future.

Role of A Social Media Manager

 The No. 1 thing is that social media is social, and it’s about engagement and brand loyalty. We’re never going to get to a place where you can put 100 dollars into that machine and get 150 out, because social is dealing with human beings with an interest, and you’re never going to control that. You can do your best and you can do things that are tried and true, but at the end of the day, it’s kind of like gambling.”

I particularly found this article to be a very interesting insight from a manager who has been in the early days of social media marketing and has since seen it develop.

It used to be laughed at as a serious job, but now has a main focus and as the industry has developed, the skills necessary to keep up with it, but mainly keeping a high standard and quality, have grown with the marketers themselves. The industry has taken shape and is only going to continue to grow, and become a main component of a company. 

The article is a primary resource into the industry and poses some interesting points. The bulk of which are criticisms of companies not understanding what it takes to upkeep the social side of things, and that social media marketing is tickling with people's interests, so it's a delicate thing which can go wrong quite easily, damaging the brand of a company.











Source:
Link to the article http://digiday.com/brands/really-like-social-media-manager/