Reportedly, many places block Facebook, including entire countries, and MySpace is blocked by many of these same places… plus hordes of well-meaning parents. There are perhaps just as many proposed workarounds for users to bypass the blocks. But for the world wide social web to work out, including monetization aspects, it will have to work in enough places to be considered ubiquitous. Adsense is pervasive today, and is not generally blocked in the way that social networks are. This situation is probably due to it’s origins, function, and the fact that it is not seen as linked to some of the issues such as malware and productivity loss that cause social networking sites to be blocked.

The evolving integration of the social web puts choices into the hands of website owners trying to see the ROI (return on investment) of adopting and adapting the technologies to their websites. The technology is not yet available to the public, and competes in various ways with OpenSocial, OpenID, MyBlogLog, and other services as the effort to evolve identity management on the web continues. If one’s website audience primarily accesses the site at work locations that might block social networking sites, form a social network integration strategy and implementation plan that accounts for these hurdles.

How will webmasters decide what works for them?

The effort to implement “social connector” technology on a website, plus the possibly-problematic ability of these technologies to to integrate with each other, may have the war of the social web won based on webmaster adoption. What platform will bring them the most reward (users, money, attention, etc.)? The ROI of time and money, plus compatibility, becomes important.

The first major text-ad service, Goto.com (which became Overture and was bought by Yahoo!), has given up it’s first place market position to Adsense. Being huge, successful, and in first place (and then getting bought) does not mean ultimately winning the war. The battles now in the social platform space include fighting to be the preferred (or only) identity-holder for people when they are online across the entire social web. The “first place” position of social networking sites & services is in flux this year. And the ability of each site to monetize it’s social base, and thus survive, may rely on sharing their success with thousands of website operators.

The near-term winners will likely be those that have a compelling ROI for website and social application owners, enough to get them to make the effort to write for a particular social platform. Facebook Connect seems to have this ROI coming out of the gate.

The popularity of social networks varies by country. The adoption of social networks within and by website owners may follow similar patterns. And, like sports popularity varying by area, with baseball, soccer, football, basketball, cricket, and others all competing for similar passion & purchases from fans, it may simply be a multi-player game with multiple fields.

Photo (c) 2008 Chief Social Officer

I also added in some information about social media marketing. Which is, of course, what the post on Knol is doing. In trying this platform and others (especially new ones), there is the opportunity to further build on the brand, which in this case is myself, providing illuminative Chief Social Officer advice for the entire world. (Or, at least those who are online.)

Below is an extract and a link to the definition on Knol:

Social Media

When content interacts via relationships & sharing to influence even itself

What happens when you take stand-alone media and add sharing and collaboration? The result allows participation and conversation which builds new meaning around the content.

Social media can be explained as a term in several ways, and also expanded by its use in terms such as social media marketing and social media consultant. This writeup starts first with some elementary definitions, and then goes to examples, to allow an understanding of this term.

Continue to read the rest of the definition.

The modern version is quasi-physical, in most cases, as there are real people with real names that are linked together via relationships. Whether poking each other on social networking sites, or chatting via instant messaging, there is a basis in real relationships with real people in the majority of one’s online social wealth.

A bit more on defining the term, via what it allows… on Scales for Social Capital in the Online Era there is the indication that it creates benefits derived from relationships created by interactions of social actors. These individuals form “a network of individuals—a ’social network’—resulting in positive affective bonds. These in turn yield positive outcomes such as emotional support or the ability to mobilize others.”

This type of capital is not limited to one network, as it can bridge social networks. Bridging’s basic definition applies to when individuals from different backgrounds connect, and this is also extended to cover those that occur between social networks.

Utilizing tools such as facebook may have taken off in part because building social capital takes time, and it is easier to leverage the base of a large social network. Other newer tools allow quick building of the same. Even within networks, there is contrast between “introduction-model” sites such as meetup.com, and microblogging sites such as twitter.com, The first is designed for real-world useful social interaction and one for, well, short bursts of content (useful or otherwise).

The relationship networks that are built through different types of sites are not the same. It is useful to recognize how they are different as you consider the effort expended in building personal or organizational capital.While smart people such as Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam are focused on real-world social capital, there is the hyper-rapid growth of online social capital, as reported in this article.

Online Social Capital and Reputation Managment

Once you have online influence, it becomes as asset to manage, in the sphere of online reputation management. Newbies - people have a handful of online friends and a small network - have less to worry about than people with 5,000 or 10,000 people who are tuned into their online activities & ideas.

Can celebrities really do social media & networking? No, not in the current “traditional” method of social networking, or at least not for the long-term. It’s not really feasible, because as a personal-interaction-based form of communications, it requires hundreds of responses per day. It is possible to engage, but not via having others post for the person, as that quickly becomes apparent for it’s “fake” quality.

Banking

There is no “Central SocialCapital Bank”, and one’s network is quickly spread across the hundreds or thousands of sites. As opposed to the bank model, you can’t build up this type of wealth and have it sit. It exists by being used, but necessarily by being spent.

[More on this to come - this post will be continued and expanded with content that was not ready at the time of publishing ]

What catches our attention easily? Something familiar.

What also catches our attention? Something different.

Recently I’ve seen - randomly - cases where two familiar “things” were together, but they were different things.  This caught my attention in a halting sort of way, positively changing my train of thought and action.  It wasn’t only online that this happened, but it can apply very well to people trying to create buzz on the web.

A definition of juxtaposition from reference.com refers to placing things close together or side by side, epecially for contrast or comparision.

What I’ve run into lately is juxtapositional contrast… things that are different that contrast each other. Some of these things are social things.

Social Juxtaposition - placing contrasting stuff (i.e. media) together in a social situation.

In promoting - a cause, a product, a service, an idea - it is challenging to stand out from all of the other promotion, especially in a crowded market.  For example, trying to showcase one’s awesome website design skill is shouting into a concert of voices saying similar things about their own design skills.  How to differentiate?  Add some juxtapositional zest.

We’re talking fairly uncontroversial stuff here… but what is new now for marketing online via social web promotion will be how to allow for contrast that gathers attention in positive and perhaps conversational new ways.  This technique would also fall into the social viral engineering category.

For one example of differentiation, that perhaps is more in the techie appeal area… as blogging became popular and then crowded, some bloggers turned into or started as video bloggers to get attention, and some now are doing live video shows.  Beyond simply live with a web cam, the cutting edge now for some is live video from mobile phones in interesting locations… allowing several contrasting juxtpositional intersections:

• Some of the audience will be in different time zones and countries, allowing for a “it’s morning here” vs. “it’s midnight here” feeling of contrast
• Some live feeds (Ustream, Mogulus, others) allow for real-time chat in the same web browser window, sometimes in contrast with the video stream.  Sideways chat traffic can also enhance the video, but a lot of time it goes off in other directions, which via social interaction actually seems to keep interest when the video has normal lulls in activity.
• Using tweets to alert the people following you on Twitter.com that you’ve just started an interesting live video stream… this is in contrast to the alternative of stuff like work, or cleaning the dishes, or whatever one was doing before being interrupted.
• Finding locations that match - or contrast with - the subject of the video stream.  Try interviewing someone on a seesaw (aka teeter-totter) about some otherwise dry subject like project management and deriving earned value.  Or, now that in the northern hemisphere the pools are starting to open up, interview someone who’s in the water.

So interrupting this post now is a short clip taken earlier today of some recreational water activity.

As you are probably reading this sentence while watching the some of the clip, you’re going to try and link the context of the video with this writeup. And, your mind will automagically create some thought to link the video with what you are reading… maybe the water… the idea of video blogging…. or perhaps wondering if this writeup is leading to a marketing pitch. Or, maybe the link your mind creates is that this subject is confusing you a little too much.

Regardless, without creating a time-consuming animation, or slickly producing a video, a clip (taken by chance when stopping to avoid some road traffic) can be used to enhance via juxtaposition someone’s memory of this page. Just use a more exciting or compelling clip.

Furthering this issue one last bit… explaining that I’ve done canoeing and kayaking in that same water will lock in more interest - in a long-tail way - by those people who enjoy those activities. It was this type of contrasting linkages over the last few days that caused me to think how online social web activities are a mesh of random juxtaposed media, to which services (such as friendfeed, mefeed, socialthing, and other lifestreaming services) try to help organize our social clutter.

Yet as always I’ll be looking for and reacting to the interesting social juxtaposition buzz instead of the harmonized feed!

There is increasing buzz this month about online clouds - the services that host our applications, contain our data, and can scale on demand.  Those who recall grid computing or mesh computing or distributed computing will understand the concept behind clouds: computing services as a utility, like electricity or water. 

What is the forecast for clouds?  Growth.  With recent articles on large technology companies getting together on cloud computing, it will no doubt ride the hype curve very rapidly (even amid some tech voices of sanity).

As in a previous post here which included highlights of the advance from yesterday’s best computers to today’s desktop computers, the lower prices now, combined with the scale of global computing data center resources & virtualization, means that computing actually can be a utility. 

In concept, it follows the pattern of the internet - shared resources along with proprietary/private resources, with costs driven lower by higher adoption rates.  Shared costs of email relay and internet traffic routed across servers allowed free email to mostly replace paid email.  But this time, shared computing via a cloud really will change the, um, landscape. 

Why?  Developers.

Many tech-savvy people, based on blog comment posts this week, don’t get the cloud.  They will, one day soon, but it will take an understanding of how development in the cloud can be done more cheaply, with more scalability, distributed globally.  A year from now there will dozens of startups that succeeded in 2008 and early 2009 by leveraging the cloud, combined in many cases with social networks, mashup-ready data, and a keen sense of how to solve problems that are still forming in online user expectations.

As in a previous post here highlighting the big changes of old computers to today’s computers, the lower prices now combined with the scale of global computing data center resources means that computing actually can be a utility. 

Clouds arrive in Hong Kong.

[ Buzzword prediction: clouds will be superceded in buzz-worthiness by what they float in: the atmosphere ]

Too much information running through my brain
Too much information driving me insane

… and this was penned before there was cable TV with 500 channels, mobile phones (with or without text messaging & voicemail), and before there was any of the billions of spam emails (worldwide) per hour! My hunch is that today we have 10 times more information to deal with on a daily basis now, and there is more information arriving with (couldn’t resist) every breath you take.

As the information glut continues, organizations - and people - who succeed and excel will be the ones who recognize the importance of managing information efficiently.

And for those many people who have a portion of their social life online, with many friends, updates, events, and activities, the too-much-information aspect extends into a new term: social clutter.

Socially, many of us now suffer from information overload. For some people, quality time has been replaced by quantity, as we now keep up with more people and have more interruptions in our time with friends and family. Anyone with a mobile phone been asked to silence their ring or set it on vibrate for an event?

It’s kind of like asking people to filter out each of their own social clutter to keep the event from being overwhelmed.

Too much information? Since when?

Our information now is typically electronic data, at one time or another. This is new. Only 20 years ago it was still a very analog world. But now, magazines and newspapers are composed using computers. Digital cameras & photos now exceed film cameras. CD’s that were overtaking vinyl are now being replaced by digital files. And email and online text are essential information sources for most of the people reading these words in this post.

And every year, many of us produce a lot of digital material (emails, videos, photos, slide decks, documents) that we don’t need, yet we have to save it, file it, organize it. We don’t know what we won’t need, so we may try and save it all.

As the volume of online social interactions grow, and with these interactions all saved in the online cloud of data, the social clutter will continue to grow.  What to do?  Use tools, such as filters and folders (online or offline), to be more efficient.  And don’t be afraid to unfriend or unfollow people who are cluttering your life.  More on the social clutter handling in future posts.

Stripping away the more mystical aspects, one could assume that the current path of technology is to create an actual akashic record of all events of our world - everything that can be recorded. Road traffic, transactions, conversations, and with microblogging all the rage… apparently every thought (as in, tweets on Twitter.com and updates on sites such as facebook.com and myspace.com).

What about recording thoughts from within the brain? Possible, as EEG (electroencephalography) and MEG have shown. And this development will continue to develop, as who would not want to control a computer - and thus other mechanical devices - with their brains, as shown in the video below about the Neurosky controller:

Assuming technology will evolve and refine thought-reading further, then it also will allow thought-recording. Initially it would be a stream of simple commands such as “move mouse up”.

But how about the future? Less than 40 years ago the large computers that filled an entire room contained less information than fits on a CD or on a memory card for a camera or mobile phone. Today’s personal computers are 100 times smaller, and 1000 times cheaper, and run laps around their ancestors in terms of speed & performance.

So by one stretch - and it is a stretch - the crude EEG game controllers of today will evolve in 20 or 30 years to devices that will read and extract our ideas and concepts. And there will be storage media to record this brain activity, and likely also record a 3-D representation of real events, continuously. These events would include human activity, and nature, weather, etc. While we may not be able to capture past events or the thoughts of someone like Shakespeare as he was writing, we have already started capturing this arguably permanent record of human consciousness.

Going back to the definition of akashic, it contains: “…adherents describe the existence of various akashic records (e.g., human, animal, plant, mineral, etc.) that in their summation encompass all possible knowledge.” There is a counter-balance in that “the akashic records have been rejected by the scientific community, due to a lack of any independently verifiable evidence.”

Evidence lacking, that is, until the scientific community creates it. Or, actually, as we all create it.

There are an increasing number of social technology conferences, like this one, and anyone who has been reading about web technology in the last 12 months has been reading about the thousands of applications launched in the last year on social networking sites, such as facebook and, more recently, MySpace.

From a high-level perspective, it’s all about information.  Information that flows as data, from the social applications to the servers run by the people who own the application.  Information being data - data about people, data about actions taken by people, and in many cases data relating to monetization.

One way to look at the data interactions is shown in the social application data architecture diagram below.

Non-technical readers can look at this diagram as food for thought: do I know where my data is going?  Will my data be safe?

Technical readers and entrepreneurs can go beyond those questions and ask: what will create a leap of usefulness - and business or social opportunity - in recognizing how this “data footprint” can be leveraged to profoundly change our interactions?

With social applications being about a year old, the chart above will be very dated in another year.  (Additions expected: LinkedIn is projected to have social applications later this year.  White label social platform kickapps supports OpenSocial, and ning does as well.) 

And, over the course of the next year and beyond, the promise of implementing new and unique social data flows will present challenges and opportunities.  While this may or may not be a series, there will be more on this to come in future posts.

My own online social interaction has always had a strong connection to the physical (real) world.  My instant messaging was always with people I had met physically, until it wasn’t.  My email messages were always exchanged with people I had met physically, until (quickly) they weren’t. 

And now, years later, there is a growing churning sea of connection with people I will never meet.  And organizations whose offices or stores I won’t get to visit. Online social has exploded, and offline social can expect to continue to reap the benefits of connections that start online.  Tomorrow I’m attending an event that I learned of through online social networking, because people I had met in the real world were also going.  But, curiously, I met those people because of an event organized via a different online social networking site. 

That type of synergy is perfect, in a way, to illustrate what will hopefully be more than just this short snippet today.  For me, online social works only because it has positively affected my real world.  The same way that I enjoyed going to sites that focused on my interests, such as filmmaking, I now belong to groups with people local to me who want to get together to share those interests.  

But, that’s for a person.  Organizations are different.  They seem to like to aloof, online available via toll-free numbers, email, and occasionally online chat (but only via their chat).  

Should online social campaigns just be virtual?  Having benefited from the friendships that come from online social groups that meet in the real world, and vice versa, I can say “no, bring them into the real world.”  Brands and organizations looking to to use social media may be slow to understand that while everyone won’t be able to connect in the physical world, it can be invaluable to try.  Mostly they should abandon the thought that a social campaign can be all done at arms-keyboard length. 

Recently I spoke with a new media executive from a major league sports team, and this person was specifically interested in making online social work in close connection with offline acitivities & events.  Right on.  It takes more effort and surely can’t be 100 percent automated, but it also will build lasting involvement.  A sports team understand fans, but other businesses are coming around to an understanding of fans, conversations, and participation. 

This is likely part one of a multi-part series, as I have yet to organize the rest of what I’d prepared - a list of positive ideas and bad ideas for getting the offline and online worlds to mix.  I’d write more now but there is an offline event starting shortly… one where I’m looking to meet some people who are at this point only virtual people I’ve found via activities such as Twitter tweets and online message exchanges.

[for now I’m here on twitter]

Intended or otherwise, your own use of the pages & web properties does affect the measurement.  That usage would be minimal in most cases.  But want about the use by people who are not plain users… by users who know their actions are not transparent?

First, a well-established and well-known quantum physics idea - the Heisenberg uncertainty principle - says that measuring something happening can alter what it is that you are measuring.  A simpler way to envision it in a related way, is that by pouring ketchup into thimble to measure it, and then pouring it out, you would reduce the amount of ketchup that you end up with… because some would stay stuck in the thimble. 

This change means your measurement is off and your cooking might suffer.  Fine for ketchup because you can see it, of course, and work around this to some extent.  But getting down to the level of tiny particles such as electrons means you can’t see that your measurement-taking changed what the electron was doing.

Whew - totally boring science club stuff, yes? 

Not if you think of people as electrons, as then maybe things start to come into focus.  Under the social microscope, some of these electrons know that they are being watched.  They know and believe that their actions - their visits, their votes, their comments, tweets, social bookmarks, clicks - are observable, and also in many cases permanent records of their actions.

Everyone online *knows* they are being observed.  Well, most people do, anyway.  Especially the people who are involved in online marketing. 

So, let’s bring in another aspect named the observer effect, which separate from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has a related aspect: the impact that even observing something can change it.  The actions of animals at night can’t be observed very well without light, and shining a light on them will change their actions.  Taking your temperature with a thermometer actually lowers your temperature because a small amount of your heat is transferred into the thermometer.

Now we’re cooking…

… because we all know that behavior of most people can be affected by observation.  That is, if they know they are being observed, many people will change behavior as a result.  One humorous example relating to this is that people are more likely to wash their hands in a restroom if someone else is there to notice the act.  This wonderful truth was measured via experiments over the years (with another truth being that people often say they washed when they didn’t… maybe 25% were liars).  It could be true that “Self-awareness… may be enhanced by being watched by others.”

So, now what does this theory stuff have to do with anything social online?

Hmm…  in the old days, people consumed media such as newspapers and radio and tv, and it was one-way.  Online new media now has people creating and consuming media, with a touch of competition thrown in.  With sites such as YouTube, by putting all this media in one place, people go to see what’s popular… knowing in many cases that by watching a video they are also voting it up in popularity.  So they tell their friends and others to watch their stuff so it might go viral by rising in the charts. 

And of course, with deep-packet inspection going on, even more observation is happening that what was revealed with the release of private user data in recent times by some major online web properties.  What happens as more users realize that they may not be anonymous, and thus have to think of their next click: ”What will someone else think about my activity?”

Wrapping up, there may be some value to exploring and understanding the play between people’s activities on an individual basis, in consideration that they may be acting differently just because they know they may be watched.