Archive for March, 2009

  • Case study: Amnesty UK ‘Campaigning with Social Media’

    Made by Many has worked with Amnesty UK since January ‘08, and helped them design and build ProtectTheHuman.com – their digital activism community. ProtectTheHuman.com is a social platform that asks users to carry out a range of online actions in support of Amnesty’s campaigns, and to upload video and photos and bookmark content from all over the Web.

    You can read more about it here – in Charlotte’s blog post when the site launched. And you can also read about how Amnesty have used Protect The Human to campaign against the proposed extension of detention without trial to 42 days, and in support of US death row prisoner Troy Davis.

    Since just before Christmas we’ve been working with Amnesty UK’s web team on a project to optimise the use of external social media services. This involved an audit, mapping and optimisation exercise of all official (Amnesty-run) and supporter-run groups and pages on Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Bebo and blogs. We then followed this with planning for specific campaigns: Obama’s First Hundred Days and End Violence Against Women.

    The case study below provides some real data (often missing in social media case studies) that shares what we all did and how well it worked. Please take it, share it, use it, re-tweet it and spread it all over the place. We also have some exciting new releases to make to the main Protect The Human website in the next few weeks, and another case study (Obama’s First 100 Days) to share.

    Campaigning with social media

    View more presentations from madebymany.

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    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    31st March 09

    4 comments

     Great Stuff

  • Crowdsourcing a crowdsourcing list

    Anjali announced earlier this week that she’d just created a crowdsourcing wiki. She’s too modest to tell everyone how successful it’s been, so I’m doing that now. It has turned out to be an incredibly useful resource – so useful in fact that with no promotion, media or blog coverage it hit the front page of Delicious, from where it was picked up by ReadWriteWeb. We’ve now been deluged with requests for new accounts. What a fantastic example of ‘earned media‘: in this case it’s convened a community of people interested in crowdsourcing very rapidly at no cost. Nice one @Anjali28. You rock.

    Here’s a link to Anjali’s original post.

    5 Comments

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    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    27th March 09

    5 comments

     Made by Many

  • Spooky gallery of Twitter horror-avatars

    For some reason – probably the fact that it’s a close-up of a single, leering eye – Shane Richmond’s Twitter avatar really stands out. Of all the people I chat with on Twitter, his seemed the most grotesque, the most horrifying and I let him know this. Shane disagreed and challenged Teh Twitter to find examples of scarier avatars, even recommending a few.

    We decided on the spur of the moment to investigate further and we now present our first gallery of Twitter horror-avatars. We created a hashtag – #horroravatar (and another for avatars that didn’t quite make the grade called, predictably, #horroravatarnot).

    Please keep sending us links to the scariest Twitter avatars you can find, or use the hashtags.

    Visit the Flickr page on Made by Many for links to the owners of these faces…

    3 Comments

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    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    24th March 09

    3 comments

     Made by Many

    Social Web

  • Crowdsourcing Examples

    Crowdsourcing is something that keeps coming up in our work at Made By Many, and I’m sure in a lot of other places as well, given that the power of the internet is growing ever stronger. It’s always useful to see and learn what other people are doing in terms of harnessing the power of online communities. So I’ve created a wiki that lists all the examples of crowdsourcing that I could find listed across the internet. Here it is.

    There were a number of places that were very useful as I went about the process of collecting this information, such as Peter Kim’s wiki of social media marketing examples and the Mobile Youth blog. There’s a full list of these on the wiki itself, so go and check it out. And keeping in the spirit of crowdsourcing and wikis, if anyone here is interested in contributing examples that aren’t already listed, give me a shout and I’ll set you up as a contributor.

    For more about crowdsourcing, check out Jeff Howe’s blog – the guy who is credited with creating the term ‘crowdsourcing’.

    4 Comments

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    Anjali Ramachandran By Anjali Ramachandran

    24th March 09

    4 comments

     Great Stuff

  • Is your attention worth more than mine?

    Today, most advertisers pay the same amount to serve 1,000 ads to a hyper-connected super-influencer as they do to my granny (granny only rarely uses the Web and has relatively few followers on Twitter). The CPM, or ‘cost per mille’, is undifferentiated from user to user – despite the fact that some users are very much more influential than others: the value is crudely determined by the advertiser, the site and the quality of your sales team.

    It’s true that there are snazzy behavioural targeting technologies that allow site owners to gain a higher degree of individual insight – for example, by tracking which sites and what type of content they have been visiting and consuming before arriving at yours – but the basic, flat-rate same-CPM-for-everyone is still the prevailing model for monetising online visits in the UK and US.

    One of the most interesting ideas discussed at last week’s SxSW was the idea of ‘Personal CPM’. The idea was mooted in Charlene Li’s talk on The Future of Social Networks as a natural consequence of:

    “Social networks becoming like air – not as in ’sites’ like MySpace and Facebook, but in terms of relationships and connections being available anywhere and everywhere”.

    The trend towards greater interoperability and technologies that allow us to port and share our online identities and social graph in more sophisticated ways across any and all of the digital services we use mean that it is only a matter of time before a site we visit knows how influential we are as individuals.

    How? By understanding a very great deal more about us as individuals from our social behaviours: namely, our social identities, contacts/network and activities. From this, as Charlene says below in an earlier video interview about the social algorithm, machines will be able to understand who’s important to us, what’s important, when and where and serve up more relevant and interesting recommendations.

    Of course, this will rely upon us opting in to share a whole lot more of our data, but there are huge incentives to do this. In a few years social technologies will be baked into everything around us and a social algorithm for sharing our data with this dynamic, smart-cloud will be like an invisible passport to access content and services wherever we are. Can you imagine stopping to log in to each individual service when *everything* is connected? And how many of us are already treading a dangerous and slightly chaotic line between public and private on Facebook, Twitter and other services? We certainly need help managing all this stuff, and it seems likely that we’d swap a key to our personal social algorithm for convenience and access. Of course, we’re not about to hand the keys to anyone, we’ll need trusted brokers. Charlene thinks Google is uniquely trustworthy and well-placed to be one of these brokers.

    Screenshot of a slide from Charlene Li’s Future of Social Networks presentation at SxSW09 on Slideshare

    One of the most interesting possibilities of a ‘personal social algorithm’ like this would be the ability of participating sites to analyse the value of your personal network on the fly. Advertisers would get charged more if you were particularly influential and less if you weren’t. Sites would also be able to serve more tailored and personalised ads, and also to show you what people in your network think of the content, services and products you’re looking at. As TV, Web and mobile converge this kind of personal CPM would become quite powerful, with the most connected and influential people generating significantly greater value than others. In this scenario, wouldn’t it be fair for the most connected and influential people to receive a share of the revenue?

    5 Comments

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    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    23rd March 09

    5 comments

     Made by Many

    Social Web

  • Stuff that’s been floating around the office – March 2009

    I know March isn’t quite over yet but if I waited any longer, this list would have grown too big. So here goes:

    1. Informapping: Interested in knowing which parts of the world have the most news stories on a map? Or maybe you want to look at new stories by geographical region? This is for you then.

    2. My Twitter Weighs A Ton: How much does your Twitter account weigh?

    3. Ron Winter – Drums: For all the drum-lovers out there – create a ruckus. (Warning: you’d better have your headphones on or your co-workers are going to give you the look!)

    4. Beautiful Moleskine Art: Because at Made By Many, we all love our moleskines. Plus, some of this art is really good. I wish I could draw like that. Here’s an example:

    b9

    5. New York Times Data Visualizations: One Flickr user has experimented with the New York Times API – and he’s collected all of them on his Flickr page.

    6. TipJar: An employee at Google created this during his me-time. It’s a collection of money-saving tips ranked by the community.

    7. FootyTube 2.0: FootyTube has upgraded and is currently in private beta. The football fanatics may like to check it out.

    8. Breathing Earth: Experience the Earth as a breathing being – see the amount of CO2 emissions across the world. Also includes real-time updates of the number of births and deaths around the world.

    9. 1 Million Tweets: There’s something a bit wrong about this, I feel. Sending tweets on behalf of others, even if you are going to donate 10% to charity, sounds a bit dubious to me.

    10. Dropular: Along the lines of Ffffound, here’s Dropular – so that you can save media bits and bobs you like.

    11. Valebrity: is that the real Britney Spears, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher you’re following on Twitter? Check and make sure on this site.

    12. Twittersheep: So you have X number of followers. Curious about what industries they work in? Twittersheep analyses your follower’s bios and presents it to you in the form of a neat tag cloud.

    13. Aardvark: Currently in beta, this is sort of a mash-up of Mahalo and Twitter. Ask your friends questions via IM or e-mail and get answers back in real-time. Social search is what they call it.

    14. Mixcloud: Another one in private beta, Mixcloud is somewhat like Pandora for the non-US folks, plus radio and the ability for people who have their own shows to broadcast those as well, all thrown in for good measure.

    15. WeFollow: A ‘user-powered Twitter directory’. A bit cleaner than Twellow. Also a bit egoistic, but whatever. I suspect it has its uses for some.

    16. Keep Britain Working: The UK may be one of the two countries most-affected by the credit crunch, next to the US. What are your suggestions to keep the British economy going?

    17. Social Weather Mapping: Twitter-sourced data visualization of the weather across the world. Listen to who’s saying what about the weather on Twitter.

    18. Compfight: Really cool tool to search for images by Creative Commons licenses on Flickr. WAY better than Advanced Search on Flickr. I don’t get the name though. Fighting for CC images, perhaps?

    19. Extreme Sheep LED Art: When I saw this on Friday, it had 1 million views. It’s at 2 million now. So an extra million just over the weekend. See it for yourself and find out why!

    20. Red Riding Hood re-interpreted:


    Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

    4 Comments

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    Anjali Ramachandran By Anjali Ramachandran

    23rd March 09

    4 comments

     Made by Many

    Social Web

  • A community generated zombie documentary

    On the last day of the SxSW Interactive festival a couple of young female zombies shuffled over to us. They’d been ‘turned’ that very morning and were handing out ‘infected’ stickers and leaflets to get people involved in the world’s first community generated zombie film, Lost Zombies.

    The site, LostZombies.com, is a zombie-themed social network built using the Ning platform. The site provides a video ‘brief’ (below) and a time-line for the infection and documentary. Contributors are asked to submit their own ‘proofs’ that Zombies exist – as well as “videos, photos, stories and recreations which we intend to compile into a community generated zombie documentary”. There’s also a grid that displays submitted ‘proofs’ that other users can then create media for.


    Find more videos like this on Lost Zombies

    The site won this year’s SXSW Community and People’s Choice Awards and demonstrates how easy it now is for anyone to use free software to create something niche that really works. We’ll have to wait and see how the film turns out but it’s a very cool idea and if you think about it the horde scenes from zombie movies have always been crowd-sourced.

    Here’s the intro video:


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    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    20th March 09

    0 comments

     Social Web

  • Many hats

    We found this really great hat shop in Austin – Hatbox – where we are attending SxSW. We had some fun.

    8 Comments

    8
    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    17th March 09

    8 comments

     Made by Many

  • SXSW-Free Twitter with Pipes. But what we need is middleware..

    Right, that’s it. I’ve had enough of not being at SXSW and getting assailed with people going to cool lectures, eating Tex-Mex and drinking cocktails. I’ve decided to create myself a SXSW-free Twitter.

    Unfortunately I only have a half-way-house solution feeding the Twitter stream through Yahoo Pipes and hacking out all SXSW mentions.

    For those that don’t know Yahoo Pipes it is a way of producing mashups and filters using a graphical interface for connect up “pipes of data” and little processing units. What i’ve done is taken some inputs for your username and password, built up a URL string for your Twitter RSS and passed it through a filter to strip out those annoying SXSWer mentions…. The end result.. a clean RSS feed. (props to www.techlifeweb.com who did the original Twitter pipes setup)

    Pipes build

    picture-4

    Unfortunately it’s only a halfway house as I can’t hook TweetDeck up to it. What is why we need Twitter-MiddleWare to allow applications to be invented to clean, filter and process your stream but can seamlessly hook together with the same API to allow any end-client to connect. It would require some authentication standards and a way to scale but hey, not too difficult right.

    pipes result

    You can use the SXSW-Free Twitter Yahoo Pipe at http://pipes.yahoo.com/stueccles/sxswfreetwitter

    Anyway for totally SXSW free twitter experience follow me @stueccles

    1 Comment

    1
    By Stuart Eccles

    16th March 09

    1 comment

     Made by Many

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