All kinds of usefulness: 11 Twitter & Social Media Tools To Try In 2011 | From Social Media Today by Adam Vincenzini

It's hard to keep up with all the tools available to help maximise Twitter and other social media platforms.

But, over the last few months I've been testing some of the new ones I've stumbled across, getting a feel for the ones that have the potential to be the most useful.

Here are the ones I'll probably use more over the next 12 months and perhaps you might give 'em a whirl too...

Note: Most of these tools are free to use or have adopted the 'freemium' model.

11 Twitter & Social Media Tools To Try In 2011

1. Twoolr - complete Twitter statistics

If you are familiar with TweetStats.com you'll think that this is quite similar, but Twoolr provides some additional metrics and insights that TweetStats doesn't.

Twoolr will tell you how your account is being used, when you are most active, what you are tweeting about and which links you are sharing most frequently.

Best bit

The network tab tells you who you are communicating with the most and in what context i.e. @ replies, RT's and #FF's

Invites

I have ten invites to Twoolr in BETA available if you'd like to give it a go.

2. MentionMap - conversation visualisation tool

I think PR people will really like this one.

MentionMap provides a 'live' analysis of what a particular person is talking about on Twitter and who they are talking to.

When you take a look at a blogger or journalist's MentionMap you can get a really clear idea of what they have been tweeting about of late.

Best bit

It's physical output allows you to get a feel for that person at a glance as opposed to trawling through a bunch of bland raw data.

3. The Archivist - tweet library and analysis

The Archivist does what is says, but also provides some really useful insights and data visualisations around the Twitter activity for a specific subject / search term.

Hashtag analysis is really handy with this tool, especially if you want to keep a running tab on how many mentions it is getting over a period of time.

You can also download all the data in an excel file and use as you wish.

Best bit

The data dashboard is really handy, giving you information like the most used associated words and weekly frequency mapping.

4. Qwerly - people search for the social web

This was launched recently and has been billed as the best people searching tool yet if you want to get a feel of someone's social media presence.

It is also handy as a reference guide for your own contacts, listing the contact details you have for everyone you are following and the networks they are using.

Best bit

The most popular users is pretty cool, showing who has been searched for the most.

5. Hash Tracking - hashtag tracking and analytics

What I immediately liked about this tool is the quantifiable value it represents.

While most Twitter tools profiled here are free (or adopt a freemium model), this one is priced in a way that makes it an easy sell internally if you did need to obtain deeper results.

You can try Hash Tracking out now but you'll have to wait a bit until the paid options go live.

Best bit

I assume the best bit will be the reporting, especially as it can feature 100,000 tweets associated with the hashtag in question.

6. TLists - Twitter List search engine

This allows you to search public twitter lists by keyword / topic, bringing up the most relevant results.

The associated stats TLists provide are great, giving you an idea for how frequent each list pushes tweets outs and what sub-topics they mention.

Best bit

It is really simple to use.

7. TouchGraph - visualise the connections between related websites

This will give you a picture of the sites connected to you, your brand and your website giving you a visual representation of what a google search for that term might look like.

This is useful if you want to get a picture of where else you are being mentioned outside your 'owned' web properties.

Best bit

The Facebook specific search option does the same job for you and your friends and who has the most photos toegther which is pretty nifty.

8. FeedLooks - Google reader on steroids

It is always hard to imagine anyone out-googling google, and while I don't think this will get anywhere near achieving this, FeedLooks functionality will probably be borrowed by google at some point.

The interface is clean, items are sorted into 'old' and 'new' as opposed to 'read' and 'unread' and Twitter feeds can be integrated into the dashboard too.

Best bit

A rating next to each post gives an indication of its popularity / hotness, helping you browse and identify content more efficiently.

9. Address Book One - bringing all your contact together

The amount of ways you can communicate with your contacts only gets bigger and bigger, and consequently more difficult to manage.

This tool is worth a look if you want to centrally manage all of your contacts across all the platforms they are involved in.

It will import address books from Facebook, LinkedIn etc and arrange them on a snazzy dashboard.

Best bit


I've only just started using this one, but the search option seems especially useful if you need to track down someone's contact detail

10. StatPlanet - the infographic creator's best friend

Want to create maps and graphs? Then this is well worth a look.

The best explanation of how this works is via the demo video and these example here also help tell the story more.

Best bit

The interactive graphs breath life into what would normally be quite static slides.

11. Citrify - web-based photo editing

This is a great tool for bloggers who need to adjust images for posts.

It is also incredibly simple to use and comes without the hefty price associated with Photoshop.

Best bit

The wrinkle removal feature is a god send!

Have you spotted any other tools that you think might be handy in 2011?

If so, I'd love to hear from you.

Adam

COMMScorner.com is the blog from Adam Vincenzini which focuses on social media and PR. Connect with Adam on Twitter or subscribe to his blog

nodes....'Game theory explains why some content goes viral on Reddit, Digg'

By Casey Johnston

A lot of attention has been lavished on ideas "going viral," but this may not be the only way that ideas spread, according to an article published in PNAS last week. With some extensive theoretical work in game theory, two researchers have shown that trendy changes don't spread quickly just because they gain exposure to a high number of people. Instead, the spread of innovations may work more like a game where players are gauging whether to adopt something new based on what others immediately surrounding them do.

The popularity growth of things like websites or gadgets is often described as being similar to an epidemic: a network with a lot of connections between people increases exposure and then adoption, as do links stretching between dissimilar groups. When the trend in question spreads to a node with a lot of connections (like a celebrity), its popularity explodes. While this is fitting for some cases, in others it's an oversimplification—a person's exposure to a trend doesn't always guarantee they will adopt it and pass it on.

"It is not only the intrinsic value of a new technology (or other types of innovation) that makes it attractive. It is also the number of friends who have adopted it," Amin Saberi, one of the authors, told Ars. In instances where there is incentive to make the same decision as people around you, the authors of the paper argue, the spread of innovations may instead follow rules of game theory, which differ in big ways from the rules of viral or epidemic trends.

To demonstrate how this is possible, the two researchers set up a theoretical scenario with several people, or nodes, connected in a network, like friends in a social group. They then instituted a game where in each round, each node had to decide whether to adopt a new innovation based only on the current behavior of their neighbors.

For example, a node/person in the game would look around and see how many of his friends were participating in a trend, say, Farmville. If none were, the odds of the node starting to play Farmville were low; if all were, odds of playing Farmville were high. The game was weighted so that imitating neighbors' behavior had a higher payoff than going against the grain.

With only these rules, a social enclave where everyone has perfect information about what everyone else is doing would never adopt anything new. If people only made decisions based on that others were doing, none of the nodes would ever see changing as the best strategy.

To fix this, the researchers introduced some noise into the situation so many nodes had incomplete information. They weighted the decision so that a node with zero information about what his neighbors did would choose to adopt the innovation, whatever it was (this could be considered an analog to a reality where a person doesn't care what others think and evaluates new innovations based on other factors).

When they played around with the structure of the network operating on these rules, they found nodes with local connections, as opposed to the long-range ones that facilitate epidemics, spread innovations more quickly. Nodes that weren't as tightly integrated to the network and maintained fewer connections let change spread more quickly, while nodes with lots of connections actually slowed the spread down.

The highly connected nodes turned into roadblocks, because even without perfect information on its neighbors' outlook, the highly connected nodes get more external pressure from their unenlightened neighbors. A highly connected node must then be extremely ignorant of its neighbors to adopt a trend, or else must be surrounded by neighbors that have switched over first. This was one of the biggest differences between the game-theoretic spread and the epidemic spread.

The model seems to apply less to individual pieces of content, where simple exposure is enough to create huge growth. On the other hand, it could explain, for instance, loyalty to sites that distribute that content, like Digg and Reddit, or to particular genres of memes. The authors say it also crops up in choices that influence social connections, like the choice between voting Republican or Democratic, or to adoption of technology, like choosing between Verizon and AT&T.

Dr. Saberi gave the following example: "the reason I am using Facebook as opposed to another social network is not just its quality… it is also because I have a lot of friends who are using it"; he notes this could also apply to operating systems. Likewise, while there are many reasons to choose one cell phone carrier or another, features like free calls or texts within a network can influence a group of friends to migrate to the same network as each other.

In the game theory model, networks trend to an equilibrium of everyone adopting the change—not terribly realistic. Still, the model shows that trends may spread quickly based on something other than the brute force of exposure. Even with a more complex, socially influenced process, the popularity of an innovation can grow rapidly.

PNAS, 2010. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1004098107  (About DOIs).

Out My Window in Good Company: TFI :: Future Docs: Creating Documentaries Across Platforms

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Excerpt from the Tribeca Film Institute site:

by Ingrid Kopp @fromthehip

"This is the fourth and final post in a series of guest posts from Ingrid Kopp, the U.S. Director of Shooting People. Ingrid, who leads workshops on film, social media, engagement, and technology as part of her work at Shooting People, discusses how the latest trends in technology are changing and shaping the filmmaking process. Follow Ingrid’s latest Tweets at @fromthehip.

There is a tendency to become rather extremist when it comes to all things digital. Either the web is going to change the world with universal digital access, social media and new platforms and transform us all into creative producers tapping into a global “cognitive surplus” OR it is going to turn us all into stupid, attention-lacking, piracy-practicing drones who revel in LOLCats and expect to get everything for free. The truth is probably somewhere in between. Cory Doctorow says it best, I think: “Technology giveth and technology taketh away.” Whatever your position on digital technology, the genie is out of the bottle and it’s not going to go back in (although it may be at risk of being squeezed in various ways by corporations but that’s a subject for another post) so it seems to me that the important thing right now is to make sure that we are creating the kind of digital future we all want...."

Read full post on tribecafilminstitute.org/blog/106776664.html

Impressive: Remembering Toronto's Fallen from WWII | OpenFile Interactive Map gives name, address, rank & place of death

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From the site:

by Patrick Cain

"In 1942, as losses among Canadian air crew mounted and the failed raid on Dieppe left hundreds of Toronto families with a loved one killed or in a German prison camp, officials started a formal effort to keep track of the city’s dead.

As the war ground on, a file of typed index cards at the city clerk’s office at what is now Old City Hall grew and grew, until there were thousands. Casualty lists were scoured for Toronto addresses as they appeared. After the war, the cards became the research tool for preparing the Book of Remembrance, which is now at Toronto City Hall.

Citizens answered newspaper ads asking for names that might have been missed, and the file grew larger. Eventually, the cards documented more than 3,300 people who were killed in the war and had next of kin in Toronto. They died over Germany on air raids, fighting in Normandy and Italy, or as their warships or merchant vessels were torpedoed. Many were killed in training accidents. One is buried in South Africa and one in Yukon.

In the modern city archives, the cards fill 12 boxes.

I was given access to the card file earlier this year after making an access-to-information request, and paid many visits to the city archives, entering the basic details on each card into a laptop. It turned out that I was committed to what ended up being 55 hours of data entry, working steadily through box after box. Letters and scraps of personal information were a helpful reminder that I was dealing with records of real people, and that the grief over their deaths had once been fresh, and in some cases life-destroying.

I then geocoded each address where possible and transferred the records to KML for display in an interactive map.

A map overlay joins two kinds of knowledge: our existing picture of the familiar city and some new knowledge superimposed on it. Overlays can take many forms but one of the most powerful, and sometimes disorienting, kinds has to do with history. (The author Simon Schama wrote that the attraction of history for him was in the intersection of the familiar and the unfamiliar.)

OpenFile’s map shows, where possible, the homes listed as the next-of-kin address of 3,224 Toronto residents killed in the war. The poppies designate addresses, rather than individual people, so where it is necessary to put two or more people in a household, multiple people share the poppy. Four addresses show three people each and 95 show two. This doesn't necessarily reflect a family relationship, though often it does.

The map is an exercise in recovered local memory. For example, it must have been well known in the neighbourhood west of Queen St. and Spadina Ave. that five local men had died at Dieppe but that experience is hard to reconstruct now except through this kind of project. One was from Cameron St., one from Vanauley St. and three from Augusta St., numbers 20, 26 and 44.

From the spreadsheet, we ordered the full service files of four people, which led to the stories that OpenFile's Jane Armstrong will share this week:

Private Frank Egerton, killed in Italy, and his brother Sergeant George Egerton, killed at Caen in Normandy. They lived at 8 Foxley St., near Ossington Ave. south of Dundas St. W. A third brother, also in the infantry, survived the war.
Army Lance-Corporal Kenneth Jackson, whose widow lived at 356 Jones Ave., north of Gerrard St. E. Jackson was captured at Hong Kong and survived years in a Japanese prison camp only to die, weakened by malnutrition, on the American ship taking him home.
Naval telegraphist Gregory Clancy, from 72 Woodside Ave., near Runnymede Rd. and Annette St., killed as HMCS Esquimalt was torpedoed off Halifax toward the end of the war.
Each data point on the map includes a rough start on searching for the serviceman at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database. I have filled in the surname, nationality and branch of service in each case, which narrows down the search. It works less well for more common surnames. (The Veterans Affairs database is in some ways better, but the way the URLs are structured made it easier to link to the war graves commission site.)

The addresses on the map are the earliest known next-of-kin addresses on the cards. Typically they seem to have been prepared from casualty lists issued at the time, screened for Toronto addresses.

Cards that showed addresses outside the GTA, obvious workplaces or rural route or general delivery addresses (like “RR1, Todmorden, Ont.”) were not included on the map. I realized late in the process that it was a mistake not to have counted these, but it was in the range of about 100.

On the other hand, addresses on streets that no longer exist were geocoded where possible, and provide a quick tour of how dramatically parts of Toronto were redeveloped after the war. Some of these points look odd to the modern reader, but they are placed as correctly as I can manage, using fire insurance atlases and city directories:

Two people had next of kin who were residents of Centre Island.
Three lived on Applegrove Ave., which once ran west off Coxwell Ave. north of Queen St. E. but was obliterated after the war in favour of a north-south street structure.
Three lived on Empress Cres., part of the lakeshore Parkdale neighbourhood that was bulldozed to build the Gardiner Expressway. As a result, these points are placed more or less on the Gardiner near Jameson Ave. As best I can determine, this is where they belong.
Many more lived in the areas redeveloped to build Alexandra Park, Regent Park and Moss Park on streets, or parts of streets, that no longer exist.
One lived on Division St. which ran between Spadina and Huron St. south of Willcocks St. He is placed more or less on top of a building that’s part of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.
Three lived on Royce Ave., which became part of Dupont St. after the war.
Geocoding is a fallible process, and I can’t promise that each point falls in exactly the right place.

The cards are more reliable for personal and domestic information than military information; I found this aspect of it frustrating. Especially for army casualties, regiments are listed inconsistently. Without the time available to cross-reference more than 1,000 soldiers with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database, I can only present the data as it exists in the cards. Also, while dates were mostly entered in a day/month/year format (31/6/1944), they sometimes turned out to be in a month/year/day format, which if the day falls in the first 12 of the month, is nearly impossible to spot.

If you live in the older part of Toronto, you might want to think about what follows. Last year, in the introduction to a Riverdale First World War casualty map I created for the Toronto Star, I wrote:

The older a house is, the more of the texture of everyday life has flowed through it — birth, death, joy, tragedy. Some people who live in old houses enjoy the traces of people who lived there before, like coal grates and worn floorboards, and others carefully erase them all.

It’s rooted in personal things: our attitude to home, history and culture play a part.

A home pinpointed on the map may be where you now live. Whether you want to know this is for you to decide."

Collaborative Community News Site OpenFile- Amazing - look at We Are the Dead - Remembrance Day Map of WWII Dead

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Math + Marine Biology + Handicraft + Community Art Practice= Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef = Love

  • About

    The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef is a project by the Institute For Figuring in Los Angeles. The Crochet Reef resides at the intersection of mathematics, marine biology, handicraft and community art practice, and also responds to the environmental crisis of global warming and the escalating problem of oceanic plastic trash.

  • Exhibitions

    The Crochet Reef is exhibited around the world in art galleries and science museums. See here for the schedule of current and upcoming exhibitions, and for beautiful reports and images of past exhibitions.

  • Satellite Reefs

    In addition to the “Core Collection” of Crochet Reefs made under the direction of the Institute For Figuring, the project entails a growing collection of “Satellite Reefs” made by local communities in cities and countries around the world.