HARTIG.se

I’m reading here and there bloggers writing about the conference Museums & the Web (MW2010) that just took place in Denver, while they actually didn’t attend the conference.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that, since Internet basically enables sharing and interacting with various sources without leaving your desk. Also, bloggers rarely relay the information or link to content without enriching the reader with their own thoughts on the subjects treated.
But reading these otherwise pretty good blogs (Buzzeum is a must-read for the french-speaking museum professional) made me react. That’s probably because boths are french, while french institutions were almost totally absent from MW2010. I started asking myself:

1- What do you actually miss by not being physically present to an event, what are the limits of your interaction with what’s being said there, and how does that affect your understanding and appreciation of the material made public ?

2– ”Sharing” and ”Social” are the words generally used to describe the radical changes of the last 10 years in business and communication. Therefore, is it okay to just consume content one-way, and neglect the social aspects of building collaboration networks with collegues worldwide ?

These are open questions. I guess the answers differ a lot depending on one’s ethics or expectations/ambitions.

Jennifer Trant and David Bearman, the duo behind Museums & the Web, wrote this in their introduction to this year’s papers:

“(…) a technology of collaboration is not a collaborative; that requires the parallel construction of the social ties, patterns of communication and expectations that bind people together in a common enterprise.”

My guess is that Jennifer and David had in mind the community around Museums & the Web (more than twitter) when they wrote this, and lots of efforts have been made in making the conference’s website a functioning social space, a hub, enabling as well social interaction as browsing through resource archives. Indeed, you can find there many great papers, free to download.
Here is my personal selection:

Ailsa Barry’s paper on how the UK’s Natural History Museum created NaturePlus, a “personalised visitor experience that drew on its expertise in developing integrated virtual and physical offers, and that used the latest social media platforms for delivery“. A real case study about a very interesting solution.

Graham Davies and Dafydd James’ paper on “Measuring the popularity of Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales’ Web site“, about how they extracted useful insights from quantities of datas and metrics. Most interesting maybe are the questions raised there, about metrics in the age of global web presence (being no longer limited to the museum’s own website).

Nancy Proctor’s paper about designing content for mobile platforms for museums. I was so impressed by her presentation that i sent this tweet: “@NancyProctor has the blueprint for the successful “un-tour”. Not joking. She really does. #mw2010″.

Matthew Petrie & Loïc Tallon wrote a data-savvy paper about “Comparing Visitors’ and Museum Professionals’ Evolving Expectations of Mobile Interpretation Tools“. Lots of facts, lots of charts, lots of insights.

Richard J. Urban and Michael B. Twidale’s paper about collection dashboards gives an overview on the latest in information visualisation. Very interesting cases there.

You can also read notes taken under special events like the round tables or the un-conference, where people gathered according to their interests to discuss a specific question. If you search a little, you might even find an archive of all the tweets with hashtag #mw2010, presentations on Slideshare or even videos on YouTube or Vimeo. And of course pictures on Flickr.

Maybe should some of the talks be videotaped next year, a bit like what the talented people at Disruptive Media have been doing for a few years here in Stockholm. DM’s conferences are videostreamed with the possibility for watchers to interact directly in real time with the speakers, the public or other online watchers. Livestream, which features a chat was the tool used.

The best way to interact, without any doubt, is to be physically present (and pay your fee, so that more conferences can be organized). Of course, there are plenty of other occasions to build your networks, meet great people and get inspired than Museums & the Web, but it is without any doubt the most international, most advanced and most fun of all conferences available today for the cultural heritage professional.

With 33 people representing 18 institutions and a few commercial companies, the Dutch were the 3rd largest representation (after the USA and the UK) at the Museums & the Web 2010 conference that took place in Denver last month. Compare that with France or Sweden, both represented by 1 person from 1 institution. Also, the Dutch were submitting 8 sites to the jury of BoW (Best of Web) Awards, out of a total of 87 sites, and got one winner (MuseumMarketing). Add one great presentation by the people of the Architecture Institute and a showcase of Van Gogh’s letters in the exhibition room, and this year’s conference was nothing short of a triumph for Dutch institutions.

Some other continental Europeans -excluding the UK here- managed to get some attention, like the Italians with 2 different speakers, the Germans with one awarded site and some speakers, and the Spanish Catalans from Barcelona, with 3 sites in competition that gave one winner (Museu Picasso). But this was nowhere near the dominance of Dutch among non-english speaking countries. You simply just couldn’t go anywhere without bumping into a smiling and pleasant Dutch.

While i was wondering about the reasons for this orange invasion, i got my hands on a report (in english) by Knowledgeland and the DEN Foundation. Titled “Business Model Innovation – Cultural Heritage”, this booklet of about 100 pages is aimed to “provide cultural heritage institutions with better insight into obstacles to be overcome”. It is correct to say that this document is the official position of the cultural authorities of the Netherlands on the following subjects: business innovation models, organisation, ICT (Information Communication Technology) infrastructure, copyright (the report itself being under CC) and revenue models for the cultural heritage sector.
Saying that i am positively surprised by what i read in this report is a severe understatement. The tone is direct, the analysis constructively critical and the authors made an effective use of descriptive schemas that pleases my communication planner’s heart. And since the material there is free to “copy, distribute, forward and remix”, here are a few quotes from the booklet:

The digital collections represent significant potential economic and social value, provided they are made accessible in the best way possible.

Got that? “(…)made accessible in the best way possible“! Value=accessibility. Good point. Next:

The more heritage institutions move outside their comfort zones, the greater the value that is created.

What? Are you Dutch people saying that value is created when institutions dare trying new things, like experimenting and taking risks? Wow… This is of course already obvious for most businesses, but it was so far something very highly unlikely to be heard from anyone working within the cultural heritage sector.

It is not the quality of the information provided that determines the success of the service, but rather whether or not the customer feels well served.

Seeing visitors as “customers” and the museum’s prestation as a “service” is already a revolution in itself… i’m not sure lots of institutions are ready to think this way. But they sure should. Everyone, starting with the visitors, would win from this attitude.
In my opinion, the most revolutionary chapter of “Business Model Innovation – Cultural Heritage” is the last one, about just revenue models, because the solutions proposed imply a radically revised way of thinking the role of cultural institutions and their material. Here is a quote:

Content is no longer available in just a single format. In the future scenario for heritage, the museum is part of a whole world of values.

This needs further explainations, and i will do that in another post. But boy, it’s very clear how more mature the Dutch cultural heritage institutions are today, compared to most of their french or swedish colleagues. That is not only in their approach to digital media but also in their attitude toward their audiences and how they understand their own role and mission.
In the light of this document, it’s no surprise the Dutch made a spectacular participation at Museums & the Web 2010. So, my advice is: keep your attention on things coming from the Netherlands, these guys are ahead and showing the way.

The Dutch sites nominated to Best of Web Award 2010:

Huis Doorn Photo Collection
Vincent van Gogh – The Letters
Collectie Gelderland (Gelderland Collection)
Waisda?: Video Labeling Game
QiGame
Amersfoort op de Kaart (Amersfoort on the Map)
Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (Dutch National Museum of Antiquities)
MuseumMarketing

About fans, loyalty and (not) monitoring your brand on social media…

THE STORY:

A few months ago (october 2009), i allowed an update of TweetDeck on my mac. I was surprised to see that, along with a few new functions, i now had slightly different version of my favorite twitter desktop client, themed after the american band Blink-182. It was trashy, with ugly colours, a background that made messages unreadable and menus playing stupid sounds every now and then. Plus a link to the band’s site.

The ugly Blink-182 skin for TweetDeck

I spent a few minutes trying desperately to find a way to 1) disable the sounds 2) remove this skin that i never requested. In vain.
OK. I thought: if i can’t figure it out myself, why not ask directly TweetDeck? Since Twitter is a fantastic tool to connect people and companies, and since TweetDeck is clearly the branch’s leader, they surely will come to my rescue.
Here is what i wrote:

In the meanwhile, my more old-school side made me turn to TD’s site for support. All i found was an anouncement about the release of the Blink-182 TweetDeck, irritatingly enthusiastic. (http://blog.tweetdeck.com/custom-made-blink-182-tweetdeck)
I scrolled down the page and got some trust in reading angry posts by other users, like these two:

Jul 08, 2009 DO NOT WANT said… 0.26.4 installed it automatically! Without asking me! FAIL! So angry right now with tweetdeck. I don’t want this. I never asked for it. Where’s the setting to get rid of it!?! So annoyed. Tweetdeck was great with the whole FB integration and seeing FB status updates. But you guys had to ruin it. I hate Blink 182. I don’t want that all up in my screen. Get rid of it now, or at least let us change it.

Jul 11, 2009 rpmkel said… does anyone know how to get rid of the Blink182 background? I don’t understand why Tweetdeck assumes that everyone would love this. It loaded automatically and it’s unclear how to remove it. This is no way to do product upgrades. Pls help.

Most of these posts were 3 months old, so i hoped the problem had been solved by now. But the newer posts were not that nicer, with things like: “I’m done with TweetDeck if I have to look at these ugly mugs one more day” or: “I had to uninstall Tweetdeck to get rid of the annoying Blink skin. There seemed to be no other option. Byeee!” and: “I won’t be using Tweetdeck until I am able to choose my OWN theme.”

These are all real threats to ditch the product if no attention is shown.
Time for my contribution to this forum. So i wrote about the same thing as in my 2 tweets. I almost instantly got an e-mail form TD. Alleluiah!… well, NOT. I was informed my comment was considered spam and would not be published.
I fought back with a tweet:

I then wrote more whining on the forum.

Oct 11, 2009 Matthieu said… Auto-update installed this ugly skin of a band i hate, with no possibility to take it off. This is such an insult that i’m erasing tweetdeck from my computer. Now i’m wondering: why do you guys have a feedback-page if you’re not even taking the critics in consideration?

The situation was quickly getting on my nerves. In my anger, i forgot addressing the message to TD’s twitter account. So this one followed:

I expected a quick answer, having in mind Domino Pizza, all the wonderful cases we always hear about, or my wife’s recent struggle with some electronic shop, with a happy ending. Disappointed by the TD’s failure, i decided to give its competitors a chance, starting with Seesmic Desktop.
As i was trying to get familiar with that new tool, i got a tweet from a Blink-182’s fan.

WTF?! Are Blink’s fans monitoring the twittersphere while TweetDeck is not? Well, they are, obviously.
I explained my point of view to the predicating fan, so he would understand that there was not a chance in the world he would convert me to his fake MTV-formated rebel-wannabe popshit band for uninspired hormone-driven teenagers.

Then i tried to forget about all this and move on. But i don’t like Seesmic. Of all the twitter-clients i tried, TD is really the best i found. I was so pissed that it took me almost 2 months to get back to it. This time, i downloaded a new version, without any branded skin. Good.

Yesterday i went back to the forum to see if tweetdeck had woken up and solved this issue. Here is a selection of what i read:

“Oct 21, 2009 Mindbus said… Why enforce a skin that users do not like. Do you want happy user of tweetdeck to use other software…
“Nov 01, 2009 DLuxe1 said… This is some BULLSHIT! I didn’t ask for a Blink 182 branded tweetdeck. DO.NOT.WANT. And no option to get rid of it either? Ya’ll are smokin that good stuff aren’tyou?
“Nov 21, 2009 thatryanguy said… I didn’t download this, but downloaded an update, and now I can’t access my twitter feeds. Thanks for making sure I never pay for anything Blink-182 again. Get this shit out of here.
“Dec 05, 2009 BLINKSUCKS said… Tweetdeck is awesome, Blink-182 is not. Bad move forcing this down our throats, give us an option to turn this s*** off
“Dec 15, 2009 Ted Perlmutter said… Why does #tweetdeck not make it easy to uninstall the loathsome blink-182 background. Bad publicity for the band and tweetdeck.
“Dec 29, 2009 Drew said… I would seriously pay a fee to remove the Blink 182 theme.

I also found a page (http://blog.tweetdeck.com/auto-upgrade-stream-crossing-issue) that i had missed at the time of my failed update, where TD humbly asked for forgiveness, blamed some technical mistake, finishing on a promise:

“So again, really sorry for the confusion. This won’t happen again.”.

Reactions were generally very positive, as this one :

Jul 08, 2009 Charbrown said… Great to know Tweetdeck is responsive and humble. (…) Thanks for the fast fix and your great attitude. I was accusing TD of spamming one minute and completely cool once you admitted a very human mistake.

But the mood changed after a few days:

Jul 12, 2009 Ambersonian said… Blank tweetdeck is all I get, even after uninstalling/reinstalling like 10 times. Ridiculous!! The “logout” button doesn’t even work. (…) WTF Tweetdeck? Seesmic here I come…which sucks. I loved Tweetdeck.

Worst of all, it seems that the problem of updates installing the branded skin by default was never fixed:

Nov 17, 2009 Blink 182 FAIL. said… Thanks a lot tweetdeck – you VEEEERY NEARLY lost me there. If this blog post didn’t come up highly in search page results for ‘blink 182 tweetdeck’, I would never have used your program again. I was one of the ‘few’ who were affected, and only updated it last week, after choosing not to for ages. WHY DID YOU NOT FIX, AFTER KNOWING SINCE JULY YOU WERE CAUSING THIS PROBLEM? WHAT A FAILURE! Will try downloading ‘vanilla’ now, and see if I shall stay with tweetdeck or move on to new things. Either way, I am massively unimpressed, and don’t understand. (…) Heard of the K.I.S.S philosophy? (Keep It Simple, Stupid!!!)

THE CONCLUSIONS:

Sooo… what did i learn from this that i wanted to share with you?
Besides the obvious problem with the unwanted skin, I think TweetDeck broke some serious rules for a successful communication there:

• Practice what you preach.
  As the specialists they are, TweetDeck should be using twitter as a brand monitoring and customer satisfaction canal. Or it at least has a very selective approach to which problems it chooses to address.
• Be consequent in your attitude toward your customers.
  Providing your users with a platform to discuss your product is good, but expect some of them to voice critics or complain. Not getting involved there is plain stupid. It’s just like saying “hey angry guy, complain here if you have to, might calm you down, but just be aware we don’t give a shit whatsoever”… No way to treat distrusted customers, really.
• If you make a promise, hold it.
  Accompanying apologies with public promises, like “this will never happen again”, but without fixing the problem makes the apologies sound very fake.
• Delivering good products is sometimes not enough.
  Music fans are active on twitter as we’ve seen, but don’t expect the same loyalty from fans of your products: if you make them disappointed, they will turn to a competitor. In my case, it’s the lack of alternative to TweetDeck that brought me back, but my confidence in the company is shattered. And all this happened because of a function (the Blink-skin) fixing a problem that never existed, since the looks of TD’s interface was never an issue.

My ambition here is to give you a broad overview of available search engines types today, with a selection of the most popular ones for each category. For advices and knowledge on search engin optimization (SEO) or search engine marketing (SEM), i suggest you should contact Simon Sundén eller Jesper Åström, both of the Stockholm-based agency Honesty.
The number between brackets after the site’s address is its popularity ranking according to Alexa, as of January 2010. Now, here is the list:

GENERALIST SEARCH ENGINES
google.com (1)
Google primarily provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of tools and platforms including popular products like Gmail, Alerts, Analytics, Translate, Maps & Earth. Most of its web-based products are free, Google focusing on online advertising through its AdWords and AdSense platforms to generate income. Google has also made strong moves into the web-based apps space with acquisitions including YouTube, DoubleClick, Feedburner, Orkut, Picasa, Blogger, Jaiku, Panoramio and Jotspot (now Google Sites). Google also develops its own products, like the browser Chrome or the communication and collaboration platform Wave. Google owns the Android mobile phone platform.

yahoo.com (3)
Yahoo! Inc. (Yahoo!), incorporated in 1995, is a global Internet brand. Its best known products are its web portal Yahoo!, its search engine Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Mail, the RSS mashup visual editor Yahoo! Pipes, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Personal.
Yahoo! also owns many popular websites, such as Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming, MyBlogLog or Zimbra.

bing.com (21)
Bing is a search engine from Microsoft officially released on June 3, 2009. It combines technology from the Farecast and Powerset acquisitions, as well as new algorithms and a more colorful page design, to attempt to understand the context behind the search, which Microsoft claims gives users better results. In addition to its tool for searching web pages, Bing also provides diverse search offerings, such as Images, News, Local, Maps, travel, Videos, Visual search, Twitter search, etc.

ask.com (55)
Ask.com is a search engine founded in 1996, actually ranking #4 behind Google, Yahoo and Bing. It was originally known as Ask Jeeves, where “Jeeves” is the name of the “gentleman’s personal gentleman”, or valet, fetching answers to any question asked. The original idea behind Ask Jeeves was to allow users to get answers to questions posed in everyday, natural language. It supports a variety of user queries in plain English, as well as traditional keyword searching.

a9.com (6783)
Amazon’s service A9 makes use of various search engines for specific uses. OpenSearch and can be viewed as a search federator. Product search is the search engine driving the shopping experience for Amazon.com and its partners. Clickriver is Amazon’s answer to Google’s AdWords.

cuil.com (12317)
Cuil is a stealth search engine startup which claims that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google. Cuill has told potential investors that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google’s, based on new search architectures and relevance methods.

others: whatseek.com (1482), primosearch.com (4492), gigablast.com (28669), zuula.com (27349), duckduckgo.com (49402), hakia.com(61162), yauba.com (148417), yebol.com (121301), faroo.com (204455), …

META SEARCH ENGINE
A meta-search engine is a search tool that sends user requests to several other search engines and/or databases and aggregates the results into a single list or displays them according to their source. Metasearch engines enable users to enter search criteria once and access several search engines simultaneously. Metasearch engines operate on the premise that the web is too large for any one search engine to index it all and that more comprehensive search results can be obtained by combining the results from several search engines. This also may save the user from having to use multiple search engines separately.

dogpile.com (2043)
Dogpile is a Metasearch engine, returning all the best results from leading search engines including Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask, as well as authority sites Kosmix and Fandango.

ezanga.com (8029)
eZanga’s proprietary technologies push the limit of Meta search by retrieving search results from multiple search engines, then re-ranking and displaying the most relevant results without duplication.

leapfish.com (10523)
Leapfish is a multi-dimensional information aggregator and search portal in the world that seeks to gather, organize and render the most relevant information from the internet’s most valuable destinations for each users search, in one single simple shot.

scour.com (11783)
Scour is a social search engine that “scours” multiple other search engines, with the goal of offering the most relevant search results. This is achieved through a combination of proven search algorithms and real user feedback. Scour also incentivises users to interact with points redeemable for Visa gift cards. It recently incorporated results from Twitter and OneRiot, making it a real time discovery engine as well, and further benefiting the engines result capability

clusty.com (18691)
This search tool from Vivísimo offers clustered results for a selection of searches. Metasearch the whole web, or use tabs to search for news, gossip, images, or products. Options to search Wikipedia, blogs and Slashdot.

mamma.com (44998)
Mamma is a “smart” metasearch engine – using multiple search engines, all at the same time. Founded in 1996, its one of the first and still one of the most popular search engines on the web today.

HUMAN SEARCH ENGINE
A human search engine is a search engine that uses human participation to filter the search results and assist users in clarifying their search request. The goal is to provide users with a limited number of relevant results, as opposed to traditional search engines that often return a large number of results that may or may not be relevant.

dmoz.org (695)
aka Open Directory Project, Searchable people-reviewed web directory categorized by language, subject and location. Edited and run by volunteers, supported by AOL. 80 languages.

mahalo.com (1079)
Mahalo.com is a human-powered search engine (web directory) launched in public beta in october 2007. Mahalo now offers other services as Mahalo Answer (community generated question & answers), Mahalo How To (instructional Q & A), Mahalo Tasks (allowing community members to help improve Mahalo’s site in exchange for payment in ”Mahalo Dollars”). Mahalo means “thank you” in Hawaiian.

chacha.com (1506)
ChaCha mobile search uses paid human guides to answer questions sent via SMS text message in conversational English. The service matches queries by sending them to the most knowledgeable guides in that topic, who then answer back via text message. The mobile search model is now used for ChaCha’s desktop queries as well, whereas ChaCha’s original model used human guides to search with users in a chat-like session. The previous model was discontinued in favor of the universal mobile search model in April 2008.

webworldindex.com (14900)
An established web directory of quality web sites organized by topic, offering free and premium business listings. Suggest your site for possible inclusion.

sproose.com (150483)
Sproose is a user powered search engine that allows users to contribute to the ranking of web pages by voting for pages they find useful. Sproose also enables users to browse pages that have been voted and/or tagged by other users making it easy to discover new and interesting pages in a social network environment.

REAL TIME SEARCH
Real-time web is the concept of searching for and finding information online as it is produced. Advancements in web search technology coupled with growing use of social media enable online activities to be queried as they occur.
A traditional web search crawls and indexes web pages periodically, returning results based on relevance to the search query. The real time web delivers the most popular topics recently discussed or posted by users. The content is often “soft” in that it is based on the social web – people’s opinions, attitudes, thoughts and interests – as opposed to hard news or facts.

tweetmeme.com (584)
Tweetmeme is a combination of Techmeme and a standard Twitter aggregator. The site monitors Twitter tweets for links and determines which ones are becoming popular, then posts them on a constantly updated page.

topsy.com (3277)
Topsy, which launched on May 26, 2009, is a real-time search engine, with a focus on social media sites like Twitter. The site’s underlying technology examines popular links as well as the influence of each person citing a link. Topsy augments traditional search engines by finding information that people are talking about.

oneriot.com (15563)
OneRiot, a realtime search engine, helps users find the news, blogs and videos that people are buzzing about. Using PulseRank, a realtime ranking algorithm, OneRiot delivers search results as they emerge, ordered to reflect current social relevance. By indexing pages shared by Digg, Twitter, and wider social web users – including the contributions of OneRiot’s own three million-strong panel – OneRiot realtime results answer the question: what is happening right now?

socialmention.com (22589)
Social Mention is a social media search platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. It allows users to easily track what people are saying about them, their company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc. Social Mention currently provides a point-in-time social media search and analysis service, daily social media alerts, and a third-party API.

feedmil.com (32184)
Feedmil is a real-time feed search engine featuring a spam-free, topic-focused search for a variety of live streams from blogs, microblogs, podcasts, as well as public and social media.

whostalkin.com (64853)
WhosTalkin is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations by topics, combining data taken from over 60 of the internet’s most popular social media gateways.

collecta.com (71000)
Collecta monitors the update streams of popular realtime blogs and sites like Twitter, Wordpress, and Flickr, and shows results as they happen. Results can be filtered by status updates, comments, stories, or photos. The entire engine is built around the XMPP standard, which pushes out data on a continual basis, so that for every search you end up watching a stream that keeps updating itself.

others: samepoint.com (75097), crowdeye.com (75764), scoopler.com (93981), faroo.com (204455), nibbo.com (254102), itpints.com (995532)

BLOG SEARCH
blogcatalog.com (316)
BlogCatalog is a blogger only social network and blog directory. The site’s purpose is to help bloggers connect, share ideas, and grow through group and general discussions. It also provides a variety of tools, features, and widgets to help bloggers.

technorati.com (914)
Technorati is an engine for searching blogs. It has an active software developer community, many of them from open-source culture. Technorati looks at tags that authors have placed on their websites, which help categorize search results, with recent results coming first. Technorati also provides popularity indexes.

icerocket.com (6663)
Blog search engine IceRocket also provides a Trend Tool, Search API for commercial blogs and a Blog Tracker service.

blogpulse.com (22942)
BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs. BlogPulse applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to search in the highly dynamic world of blogs. BlogPulse is owned by Nielsen.

twingly.com (23122 / 501)
Twingly (launched in February 2007) is a blog and microblog search engine. Beside search, Twingly channels aims at solving the problem of information overload (one of the primary concerns of real-time web enthusiasts) by filtering the flood of news. Twingly Blogstream is a moderated trackback function for large websites, providing measurably higher visitor engagement and greater attention in the blogosphere. Twingly was awarded as one of the top 10 international web products of 2009 by ReadWriteWeb.

blogarama.com (24154)
Lists weblogs by category. Users are invited to post reviews.

blogdigger.com (36224)
RSS search engine, providing full-text search, as well as metadata search on RSS information. It has link search funtionality, as well as searching by date, topic, title and other fields.

other: google blog search, scoutle.com (308020)

PEOPLE SEARCH
123people.com (2085)
123people is a real time people search tool used to find comprehensive and centralized people related information consisting of images, videos, phone numbers, email addresses, social networking, Wikipedia profiles, etc. Users can add information to every single search result, giving it more relevance.

zoominfo.com (2265)
A business information search engine, providing company search, people search and job search. It constructs profiles on people and companies, drawn from the Web, or created by individuals and companies for themselves.

pipl.com (2619)
Pipl is the most comprehensive people search on the web. Unlike a typical search-engine, Pipl is designed to retrieve information from the “deep web”, i-e searchable databases and extract facts, contact details and other relevant information from personal profiles, member directories, scientific publications, court records and numerous other sources.

others: addresses.com (2633), spock.com (7436), wink.com (18405), yoname.com (289436), snitch.name (826716)

VISUAL SEARCH ENGINES
viewzi.com (88718)
Viewzi is a flash-based visual search engine. it lets you visualize your search results in a dynamic way using different views to give a different experience altogether.

spezify.com (147340)
Spezify is a search engine that lets you visualize search results. It mixes all kinds of media such as text, videos, tweets, images  from various sources (Yahoo, MSN,  Amazon, Twitter, Ebay… etc ) and displays on a grid interface where you can scroll both vertically and horizontally to view them.

others: redz.com (39419), mugurdy.com (394828), spacetime.com (455950), oskope.com (677091), search-cube.com (689826)

QUESTION & ANSWERS
Community generated questions & answers.

answerbag.com (1359)
AnswerBag is a social network where people bring questions and find answers. The site is designed to encourage the sharing of knowledge an ideas.

formspring.me (1442)
With formspring.me, you can answer anonymous questions to your friends, embed a customized question box to your website, customize your Formspring profile page, follow your friends to ask them questions anonymously, publish your responses to your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Blogger accounts automatically. Login with only your Facebook account information.

blurtit.com (1658)
Free self moderated directory, Blurtit is both a community where people share interests and help each other and a fast-growing database for knowledge of all kinds.

vark.com (21844)
Aardvark is a tool that lets users tap into the knowledge and experience of friends and friends-of-friends. Send Aardvark a question (from the web, IM, email, Twitter, or iPhone) and you’ll get a quick, (hopefully) helpful response from someone with either the right knowledge and experience to help, similar tastes and/or friends in common

others:
askville, yahoo! answers, yedda.com (5281), fluther.com (18872), answerly.com (72671)

OTHER SEARCH ENGINES
omgili.com (2844)
Unlike ordinary search engines that prioritize articles and edited web pages, Omgili only indexes discussion forums. Omgili finds consumer opinions, debates, discussions, personal experiences, answers and solutions.

wolframalpha.com (4402)
Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine, but a ”computational knowledge engine”. It generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links. Wolfram Alpha’s vision is to create a system which can do for formal knowledge (heuristics, algorithms, rules, methods, theorems, etc.) what search engines have done for informal knowledge, such as text and documents.

kosmix.com (7945)
Kosmix is a guide to the Web, more than a search engine. Kosmix lets users search the most popular of topics in an easy to understand presentation, presenting a dashboard of relevant videos, photos, news, commentary, opinion, communities and links to related topics. Well suited for inexperienced web users, Kosmix is a good resource for the most basic of searches.

rollyo.com (31776)
Rollyo offers the ability to search the content of a list of specified websites, allowing you to narrow down the results to pages from websites that you already know and trust.

powerset.com (105714)
Microsoft-owned Powerset is a natural language search engine. In the search box, users can express themselves in keywords, phrases, or simple questions. Powerset is ”aiming to improve the way we find information by unlocking the meaning encoded in ordinary human language.”

goby.com (135050)
Goby is a deep web search engine which launched in September 2009. The site searches selected databases and other sources of information on the web focused on 400 categories of things to do while traveling. Signed in users may also share their results utilizing the Facebook connect api.

almost.at (892485)
Almost.at is a site that allows users to follow events in real time across Twitter, Flickr, and a variety of other online services. It also allows users to specify which Twitter members are actually at an event, rather than just talking about it.

Boring talkshows, CSI-style re-runs and brainless entertainment… all between commercial ”breaks”. Watching TV has become a way to put ourselves in a vegetable-like state on our sofas, softened to the point we’re just vaguely conscious that we are feeding our minds with crap… but hey, what’s the alternative ? Turning off the screen and grabbing a book ? Come on, be realistic. What we really need is fine video with intelligent content that we can passively watch without feeling like we’re wasting our time and brain cells.
Here are a few alternatives :

TED
”TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an invitation-only event where the world’s leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration. Initially an annual conference, the scope of TED has expanded to include a bi-annual global conference, a humanitarian prize, and free audio-video podcasts of extraordinary talks.”

Academic Earth
This organization’s built a platform for video and other educational resources from top universities, think tanks, and conferences. The company has the stated goal of “giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education.”

Fora TV
”FORA.tv helps intelligent, engaged audiences get smart. Our users find, enjoy, and share videos about the people, issues, and ideas changing the world. We gather the web’s largest collection of unmediated video drawn from live events, lectures, and debates going on all the time at the world’s top universities, think tanks and conferences. We present this provocative, big-idea content for anyone to watch, interact with, and share –when, where, and how they want.”

Pop!Tech
”Pop!Tech is a social innovation network and thought leadership forum dedicated to accelerating the impact of world-changing people and ideas. Each year, it brings together some 600 of the worlds leading thinkers in science, technology, design, social innovation, exploration and the humanities for a one-of-a-kind conference. Pop!Tech also sponsors social innovators and world-changing projects around the world.”

YouTube’s channels and shows are also worth giving a try. For example :
YouTube Shows: Great Museums
YouTube EDU Channels: Stanford University

Talking about education, maybe one of these sites has this great lecture you just totally need to watch :
videolectures.net
sutree.com
freevideolectures.com
learnerstv.com
lecturefox.com

Or perhaps one of these universities has something for you :
Yale: http://oyc.yale.edu
MIT: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/av/index.htm
Berkeley: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php

Now, feeling the urge to learn something new and useful, but not necessarily academic ? Here is a collection of sites with instructional videos :
ehow.com
instructables.com
videojug.com
5min.com
howcast.com
graspr.com
learner.org

The british channel BBC has a couple of video archives that are impressive but hard to navigate, and have not been updated for a while :
BBC Motion Gallery
BBC Video Nation

Have fun !

Already the 3rd version to my so-called “Social Media Compendium”, which has an increasingly incorrect name since it’s just as much about cloud computing and web-based apps & services as it is about the social web.
Download it, read it, use it, share it and send me your comments, advices and corrections.

Social Media Compendium, october 09 (pdf)

I tried here to sum up what i believe are the mechanisms behind the radical and rapid changes affecting our ways to produce, consume and do business.

As i see it, what used to be (even a few years ago) different phases from the development of a product or service to its commercialisation and consumption are now intertwined processes totally dependent of eachother, with virtually no or very little gaps between them.

All the new phenomenons we’re seeing today – “new” in the way that they’ve never been this generalized before – are manifestations of the same power, enabled by technology and engineered by (basic) human social behaviour.

PDF-version here.

That’s how i would sum up this morning at the Naturhistoriska museet.

ABM-centrum (the coordinating office for Archives, Libraries and Museums) had invited 3 very interesting speakers whose experience and style completed eachother very well. The ca. 50 people present in the public got a broad picture of both what is being done today in the most cutting-edge organizations, and insights in what their priorities should be, now or in a very near future.

Johan Ronnestam opened with a presentation that must have felt quite different from what museums’ people are used to. After summing up what the current revolution in communications is all about, and placing it in the context of museums and cultural organizations, he made the audience face questions like “what do you have to offer”, with a strong focus on younger generations’ apetite for entertainment and interaction.

He then gave very practical and useful leads to how museums could use new technologies like augmented reality or 3D printing, and finished by reminding us that our greatest source of inspiration is nature, which sounded quite right being in the museum of natural history’s conference room.

Johan’s presentation on Slideshare (mostly in Swedish)

Next speaker was Sebastian Chan, head of digital, social & emerging technologies at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia. Seb is well-known for his blog, a must-read for anyone working with the culture heritage sector. The Powerhouse Museum has been driving many interesting projects lately and keeps experimenting constantly with its communication, not afraid of making mistakes but always learning from them. The innovation with “social collections” lead to many questions from the audience later this morning, and this will certainly be the subject of another post soon.
Above all, having Seb presenting a few cases and projects he’s been working on for the past years was really mind-blowing, especially compared to how little Swedish institutions as a whole have achieved so far.

Getting there was surely a pretty bumpy ride, but Seb and his team now own a solid experience and deep insights on how to structurally change a cultural institution so that it may survive the coming storms… and his presentation was much more than a weather forecast. He very generously shared his experience and conclusions, in a pedagogical and inspiring way. After the bold visions and advices of Johan Ronnestam, Seb brought the illustration that many of today’s new possibilities can actually be implemented successfully, for the benefit of everyone. His methodic approach is really setting the standards on how to apprehend the new challenges facing cultural institutions.

Seb’s “Key Ideas” list could/should be used as a checklist:

• moving from static site to flexible publisher and platform
• moving from websites to integrated web presence
• putting the users first
• building internal capacity – don’t outsource ideas
• organisational bravery to launch early and iterate
• the web as centre, not peripheral to the organisation

Now, which Swedish cultural institution is smart and bold enough to define its future agenda according to this list? – (om du känner dig träffad, kontakta mig!)

After a short coffee break, it was time for Harriet Aagaard from the Stockholm’s City Library to present her project “23 Things” (23 saker). The staff of the Library had over a period of 11 months the opportunity to get a better understanding of social media and internet through a community built with Ning, where they could share content, hold blogs, discuss topics and much more. Since trying yourself is the best way to learn something, i think Harriet’s initiative was great, and it’s good to see the interest it generated among the library’s employees.

Harriet’s presentation on slideshare (in Swedish)

By this kind of conference, ABM-centrum proves its usefullness and the importance to have such independant cross-bordering work groups, federating initiatives and being the right platform to share experiences.

A schema is quite often better than a long explanation. So here is my schema of the most common social media activities for a company or an organisation (in full version here). Your comments are appreciated.

“With today’s possibilities, only saying that you can write is not enough. You have to prove it.”

That’s more or less what Katja Janford said during Johan Ronnestam’s conference “the Next Event”, a couple of weeks ago. And she is damn right.
So here i am, starting this new blog. I intend to write here about everything that’s happening around my humble person.

Here we go.