The 3 Best social media stories from the past week.
Posted in 3 of the best on July 8th, 2010 by Glenn White
Sorry for the lack of 3 of the Bests! I have just returned from a lovely holiday (thanks for asking). Hope you enjoy this weeks 3 best social media stories and 3 other things to get you giggling. We have the government trying to use an online social platform to give them ideas, Twitter trying to find a revenue stream and a psychic octopus. What more could you want!
3 of the Best
Top World Cup Players on Facebook, Day by Day
I spend a lot of time looking at graphs and tables of statistics, so when I see a great visualisation of data it always grabs my eye! The NY Times have been tracking all of the World Cup players mentions on Facebook across each day of the tournament. They have then visualised it with this player graph, the bigger the player the more they were mentioned. Really interesting stuff and as this is the first World Cup since the mass popularity of sites like Facebook and Twitter I would be interested to see if anyone has managed to pull out anymore interesting information.
It looks like Twitter may have finally found a revenue stream of sorts. They have launched @EarlyBird a Twitter account to get exclusive timed deals and offers. It looks like Twitter will be trying to partner with big international brands to offer a few big deals a day.
It will be interesting to see how this takes off, there are currently no offers on it but it already has over 10,000 followers. In theory Twitter could expand this out and have separate Twitter accounts for music tours or clothes shopping discounts. Perhaps Twitter is finally starting to find a way of making money!
Nick Clegg calls for ideas on to laws to be repealed
The government is asking for our help and ideas on if any laws need to be repealed or abolished. Anyone can submit an idea to the Your Freedom website and the users can rate and comment on them. The idea is the government will take some of the most popular ideas and use it to inform their judgment later in the year.
They wont out right appeal the highest voted idea and in many ways that wouldn’t be the best idea. One of the highest rated suggestions is to decriminilise cannabis, it will be interested to see if the government looks at this issue or ignores it just like President Obama did when he asked for questions from the public.
I’m not saying cannabis should be re-classified but if these forms of public participation want to show they are more than just paying lip service, they will certainly need to show at least some sort of due-diligence on the most popular suggestions. Equally I hope people realise that this is to help the government make an informed decision and find potential new ideas, it is not a referendum!
3 of the Rest
Paul the psychic octopus predicts World Cup defeat for Joachim Löw
Clearly the biggest news this week was Paul the psychic octopus predicting a loss for Germany! He has been wrong before though, ironically it was also in a Germany vs Spain match. This time however he learned his lesson and backed Spain! Check out this video of how he made up his mind!
Disney Imagineer Tony Baxter: The Importance of Being Twelve
A really interesting interview with one of Disney’s top Imagineers. Creativity is such an important to skill, especially for someone building theme park rides! Having personally just returned from Disney World (Don’t mean to gloat!) it was pretty fascinating to see some of the work and thinking behind what goes into making it all so…”magical”.
The internet was clearly created for this kind of blogging! I don’t think I need to say much more, this website does exactly what it says on the tin.
