andresvarela's posterous

Antidote to non-flash-mobs

Instead of Beyonce / T-mobile set-ups where non-spontaneous passers-by dance around for a mass of invited press -if you *must* commission the kids from fame to promote your brand, why not do away with pretending that these are members of the public swept away by the moment...

Why not have 200 storm troopers get down?



Thanks as ever to Mediaczar for tweeting this bit of footage...

FREE THE POSTCODE!

Unlike zipcodes in the USA, postcodes in the UK are held in a database which you have to pay the Post Office to use.

They sell it to companies -which leaves those without such deep pockets out in the cold.  Lost, you might say.

The freethepostcode.org project crowdsources data collected from volunteers' iPhone and Android mobiles. The aim is to create a public domain postcode database for anyone to use.

You can easily add a couple of postcodes yourself using their free software.  Know the postcode of your office? Use the GPS-linked software to tell freethepostcode.org which coordinates correspond to it.  Sitting in a restaurant which you think people should be able to find?  Ask the waiter for the postcode and your mobile will do the rest.

Download the software now and of course you can always check out the public-domain list of mapped postcodes.

Video: worthwhile internet development

While the developed world uses the internet for navel-gazing facebook, blogs and tweets (ahem) Rwanda has more ambitious plans: using it to skip industrial revolution and go from an agrarian to information economy. Don't get me wrong, I love my tweetdeck, but there are other people out there lookin to save an entire nation.  Short documentary (once you're past the gorillas) mirrors my experience over there. 

This guy gets it, so what can we do to help?

Well, if you're like me and have skills which don't translate to what's needed, take a look at http://www.kiva.org/ to lend money for a month or two to change someone's life.

Some Twitter Social Network Analysis

Friend, influencer, twitterer Mat Morrison over at Mediaczar has just published some really interesting work on networks which exist between Social Media 'influencers' at http://mediaczar.com/blog/2008/12/some-twitter-social-network-analysis/

Check out the festive cranberries...

My fourpenneth...If one is looking for *influencers* then one must surely track the *influnces*? I might follow Stephen Fry on twitter but if he gives an opinion about Nokia or Microsoft that doesn't mean I'd give the comment any more weight than I would if it came from someone else.

I'd suggest that one crude way to track influence in twitter would be to look at retweets, and as a case study I'd suggest tracking the transmission of Mat's article/meme/retweet.  

We can assume that the first person to twitter about this article is you. So from that point in time, who else sent out a tweet with its URL and the abbreviated variations: http://tinyurl.com/5ruc8d, bit.ly, budurl, eweri, hex.io and so on...

By looking at the timing of the postings you can get a reasonable idea of who influenced whom. It's quite likely that there'll be posts made by people completely unconnected within twitter, which would indicate that their influences come from elsewhere.  

Also, you may find people who are connected, but in fact their 'influence gradient' (should I trademark that) runs in a counter-intuitive way: for example where an apparent 'follower' posts before the top 50 influencer they're connected to, suggesting that they're picking up on memes outside of twitter, before they're being broadcast by a guru...like Mat.