Zac Efron may be the future but he isn't embracing social media. Zac Efron toldPeople that he doesn't actually want people to know what he is doing all the time.
"I don't have a Twitter, a MySpace or a Facebook or anything like that," says the star of the new comedy 17 Again. "I kind of value in people not knowing where I am or what I'm doing."
To demonstrate his take on the typical posting, he says with a laugh: "I'm on the toilet. Still on the toilet. Guys, dot-dot-dot, out of TP. Still on the toilet."
There may not be much reason for Zac Efron to be on Twitter right now since pretty much every step he makes is already covered. Other stars using social media tools like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook like the ability to get out ahead of - or repudiate - what the tabloids and blogs are reporting.
Social Network Users Concerned Media is Watching Them
The BBC reports that a Press Complaints Commission survey found that 80% of those polled said they would be more cautious about what they posted on social media websites if they knew they were being watched by the media.
Almost 80% of social networking site users would be more careful about the details they put online if they knew the media might use them, a poll says.
The Press Complaints Commission said 89% of the 1,000 people polled wanted guidelines on what the media could use.
And 42% of 16 to 24-year-old who used such websites said they knew someone who had been embarrassed by material which was posted without consent.
The PCC is opening talks on how it should respond to the issue.
In a sense they are being watched by the media so they should be more careful. On the other hand a lot of what it is posted to social networks is trivial and unlikely to be of any interest to blogs or the mainstream media.
The study also found people think it is wrong for the media to take information they have posted publicly without their consent.
The poll also found 49% of respondents said it was wrong for the media to use information they had posted on line without asking the consent of the person concerned.
And 58% were fairly or very concerned about the lack of control about how they were depicted on websites.
And of social networking site members, 55% considered whether personal details such as photos might be used by someone else without their consent, before posting them online.
Sir Christopher said the PCC's current code of practice would be able to handle complaints about media outlets using material skimmed from networking sites.
Since this information is posted publicly it is hard to see how the media could be prevented from quoting it. Young people posting information publicly that is inappropriate probably have other even bigger concerns as well such as that an employer or university they are applying to might see it.
Common Craft has another helpful video out. This one explains social media in simple terms. They explain it through the invention of "social ice cream" in a town called Scoopville that lets anyone create a unique ice cream flavor. In Scoopville even the weird pickled flavored ice cream has a few fans. Unfortunately, they left out how easy it is for spammers to sneak unwanted ingredients into your social ice cream cone.
A new Digg-like news website called Newspond has debuted. What's interesting about Newspond is not the site's layout or features or that it is yet another social news (YANS) website. Instead what is interesting about Newspond is the audacious claims Newspond makes. TechCrunch found on Newspond's about page the claim that Newspond says they are the "most advanced news site on the planet."
But they just make ridiculous statements on the website that I can't ignore. The home page says Newspond is "The most advanced news site on the planet." The about page has a huge yellow ball thingy and the same words in 40 point type. It also calls itself "the ultimate hub for the latest news."
What's the technology behind this stunning new startup? Well, within "the heart of Newspond lies a tireless electronic brain" with "highly-advanced machine intelligence" that analyzes news "at a faster rate of speed than any human being could ever dream of."
With that brazen slogan Newspond seems to be taking a page from this awesome over-the-top 1984 Chevrolet Corvette car commercial. The commercial starts with "It began as genius and grew to be legend and has become at long last the most advanced production car on the planet."
More Newspond discussion here, here, here, here, here, here and here. The general opinion seems to be that Newspond is not the most advanced news site on the planet.
Thoof, a social media website, has created a clever viral video modeled on the popular Mac-PC ads. In the ad Thoof does a Thoof-Digg comparison. Thoof is trying to show they are different and that they focus on what you are interested and not what "the herd" is interested in. It would be more effective if the Thoof.com website were actually loading but it has been having trouble the past couple days. TechCrunch says Thoof was launched by the founder of Revver, a video sharing website.
VentureBeat reports that Digg has hired Allen & Company to help it sell itself.
A reliable source just confirmed the company's plans, noting the company has hired Allen & Company, a tiny but influential private investment firm, to help broker a deal. The asking price is still $300 million, the source said.
This will come as no surprise. Rumors of a sale have been rampant for months, although until now we hear co-founder Jay Adelson has been trying to muster up interest in a sale. This is the first time Digg has hired a bank to shop the deal, we're told.
Valleywag reported the $300 million rumor last month. Separately, it reported Digg chief executive Jay Adelson's attendance at Allen & Company's annual Sun Valley, Idaho get-together of the rich and famous, noting the company might be looking to find a buyer among one of the many media company executives in attendance.
Has Digg waited too long to get its $300 million? Probably not. Tech bloggers have been focusing much more on the social networking big dogs lately but Digg still has tons of traffic. Digg has lost some of its appeal because of competition but someone will likely pay the big bucks for all this traffic.
Who would want it? Mashable is betting on a big newspaper conglomerate like "Gannett, Tribune, or Cox Newspapers." Valleywag mentions Barry Diller's IAC. Matthew Ingram suggests that Google may buy Digg - you can ridicule (or praise) him for it here. Microsoft is said to be selling at least some of the ads on Digg so maybe that's something Google would want to takeover. Microsoft may also want to buy Digg to keep Google away from it.
Digg itself has a lot of comments about a potential sale. There doesn't seem to be quite as much interest in blogging this particular rumor. Some of the other rumors this year were very heavily blogged. Maybe everyone is just about rumored out for 2007.
Richard Farmbrough, a 45-year-old technology project manager living in England, is said to be the person with the most Wikipedia entries. Wikipedia is often accused of containing innacurate listings and was even made fun of by Stephen Colbert who coined the term Wikiality. In an interview with Smith Magazine, Farmbrough says he thinks Wikipedia can be a better source of information than a library in some situations.
Do you think Wikipedia is a better source of information than going to the library?
Farmbrough: In some ways. The question only makes sense if you state who is looking for what, and which library is involved. For example, if you have a university library available to you, you will get more and better information on most subjects, except, perhaps, popular culture. If you only have a small-town library, you can probably find out as much or more from Wikipedia on many subjects, but it will be "chunked" differently -- it might not be easy to learn calculus, certainly not Linux or Anglo-Saxon from Wikipedia (although, there are sister wikis which address these types of needs). The Wikipedia community has a strong belief in maintaining the goal of building an encyclopedia, rather than a how-to resource, a dictionary (though there is also Wiktionary) or "an indiscriminate collection of information."
Some of Wikipedia's seven million articles are debated or contested as people often have different takes on what the facts are. However, printed media - books, magazines and journal - may also carry the bias of the author(s). Most of the Wikipedia entries do try to source the facts in the article by linking directly to each source in the References section.
Some who disagreed enough with Wikipedia have even launched their own wiki encyclopedias, like Conservapedia. Stephen Colbert's clever wikiality term now has over 400,000 results on Google. There's even a Wikiality encylcopedia that's dedicated to truthiness.
With all the buzz around Digg one would have thought they reached the one million user plateau many months ago. That's not the case. Only just now is Digg reaching one million registered subscribers. The announcement from co-founder Kevin Rose can be found here.
It's now been more than two years since the first story was submitted and dugg on Digg. Since then you guys have helped Digg move from a personal project amongst a group of friends to a huge online community. Now, your contributions in submitting, digging, and commenting on content have propelled Digg to a point I never dreamed of - as of today Digg has one million registered users.
I'd like to let this post serve as a thank you from me to you - the Digg community faithful. You've not only made it possible for the Digg team to continue the Digg concept in new and exciting ways, but you've also driven us, with a sense of pride and excitement that genuinely makes going to work a lot of fun.
Digg is planning a party in the Bay Area to celebrate with this tentative date - Thursday, April 19th in San Francisco.
The reason Digg has unblocked the site is because Digg has new spam armor according to TechCrunch.
The reason? Based on a conversation I had with Digg founder Kevin Rose recently, Digg thinks they are winning the war over the problem of "grouping" behavior (where groups of Digg accounts are controlled or effectively controlled by a person or group and can push stories to the home page). The changes they've made to Digg over the last few months, Rose says, allow them to monitor grouping behavior and stop it before it can drive a story to the home page. Thus, there is no real need to ban any particular site from Digg. They are confident that if a story from a previously banned site makes it to the home page, it deserves to be there.
Spam and fake stories are a couple of the biggest problems that social media website face. Sometimes Digg users will quickly point out that a story is a fake to keep people from Digging it. There was a fake story on Digg recently that said Britney Spears has committed suicide. Fortunately, the story did not get very many Diggs because some Digg users quickly pointed that the story was a fraud. This help from users may just as crucial as any new spam fighting algorithms Digg develops.
Digg has a post that announces "features o' plenty" on Digg.com. These new features include special Digg sections for videos and for podcasts as well as top ten lists for both videos and podcasts.
Videos Enhancements
Aside from giving Videos their own position in the top navigation, we have added a couple cool features: Top 10 hottest videos, and on-Digg video previews. Simply click any video with a play icon to get lightbox window in which you can preview and Digg the video.
Podcasting
Now you can Digg your favorite podcast series and individual podcast episodes. Not only can you see a list of the most popular podcasts by section, you can also dive into any individual podcasts to see the most Dugg individual episodes. And don't forget - every time you Digg a podcast or podcast episode that is bookmarked in your profile and shared with your friends.
NewTeeVee says the focus on video makes sense but they aren't sure about the podcasting.
While addition of video digging is understandable - watching online video is one of the fastest growing activities on the Internet - it is hard to fathom Digg's efforts when it comes to podcasting. Despite lot of hype, podcasting hasn't gone mainstream. Listening to a podcasts takes a lot more time than reading a story, or watching a 120-second video.
"Digg is about sharing, and if people want to share podcasts, we want to give the ability to do that," says Adelson, and adds that it was one of the most requested features by Digg users. We don't give it much of a chance, but then we might be wrong. However, the podcast digging could eventually result in Digg expanding to say - music or photos. Now that could be fun!
The video and podcasts tools will work only if people go there and they like the videos and pocasts they find -- otherwise they will use other filters to help them find interesting videos to watch. There are several video categories to filter by including animation, comedy, educational, gaming, music, people and sports. However, if people aren't pleased by the quality of the videos in these categories they will use something other than Digg to find videos.
Are some of the most successful websites really just aggregators of massive amounts of stupid content and hideous templates? Aaron Swartz included a theory called "The Stupidity of Crowds" in his post on his Raw Thought blog about the habits of the most successful websites.
I believe in a theory I'll call "The Stupidity of Crowds". Here's
the basic idea: if just one person or a small group of people
builds a website, they have to be at least moderately intelligent.
Buying servers and writing programs is somewhat hard and takes a
little bit of brainpower. This means that the content for their
site will be similarly intelligent and thus it won't be of interest
to the vast majority of Internet users.
The glorious thing about the Internet, however, is that it allows
us to aggregate the combined stupidity of literally millions of
people. No longer do you have to try to play towards the lowest
common denominator -- now you can actually have the lowest common
denominator build your site for you. No single mortal could
possibly come up with the content you find on the average MySpace,
let alone the hideous color scheme, garish backgrounds, and awful
auto-playing background music. No, something like that takes The
Stupidity of Crowds.
The large social media and social networking websites are aggregating a massive amount of boring, mediocre and hideous content. At least these social media sites won't destroy Western civilization. Part of the reason for the popularity is that people know someone who created the a tiny bit of the content such as a profile on Facebook or MySpace. A tiny bit of the aggregated content on Facebook or MySpace can be interesting on a personal level to a few individuals while at the same time being excruciatingly boring to the majority of the people living on Earth.
Memeorandum has added river of news pages for its popular memetrackers. The river of news page for Techmeme can be found here. This five-day-long collection of headlines makes it easy to see what articles and blog posts have been featured on Techmeme. Memeorandum is also offering a Memeorandum river, WeSmirch river and Ballbug river.
Dave Winer came up with the river of news concept. You can more about it in a post here.
The bigger the social media websites or memediggers like Digg and Reddit get the more spam and cheat tools they attract. News.com reports how fake articles from splogs are being promoted on Digg to drive traffic to the splog.
Some marketers offer "content generation services," where they sell stories to Web sites for the sole purpose of getting them submitted to Digg and other sites. This combination of spam and blogs is called "splogs." The stories often feature topics and keywords in headlines that are likely to appeal to the Digg crowd, such as "geeks" and "Apple."
Lazier but still tricky marketers merely scrape content off legitimate sites to put up on their own sites in a technique called "link jacking." In essence, they are hijacking the links that should go back to the original site, experts say.
In a posting last week titled "The Spam Farms of the Social Web," blogger Niall Kennedy detailed how a suspicious item recently made it among the top five stories on Digg before the community "buried" it. The Digg user submission links to a story entitled "Geek's Guide to Getting in Shape: 13 Surefire Tips" written by "Dental Geek" for the i-Dental Resources blog. The blog site has links to other pages with ads that offer content creation marketing services and which collect money for dental plans sold, Kennedy said.
Digg isn't alone in these problems. News aggregator Reddit and Delicious, where users swap Internet bookmarks, are also susceptible, Kennedy said.
The News.com story also mentions several websites trying to create systems to cheat Digg. A website called UserSubmitter.com claims to pay people to promote stories on Digg. A website called Spike The Vote appears to be a system that lets members trade diggs. Then there is the Friendly Vote Group, which appears to be a site where people team up to promote each others stories. It is unclear what kind of influence these communities out to game Digg have.
The title of this post sounds like a strange question to ask but Andy Rutledge has a post about how social media can be boring, mediocre and possibly even civilization ending.
Mediocrity is the only possible result of a wide sampling of opinion or input. The only idea that can survive such a mechanism is one consistent with the lowest common denominator. The mob works to ensure that all other results are weeded out. Now, we might think that it is the highest common denominator that is promoted in this environment, but it's just not so. The "highest" anything is largely held by the masses as being discriminatory and elitist. So only the lowest common denominator wins out. The point is that in this sort of environment excellence does not survive.
Excellence is not the sum of opinions. Excellence is not born of consensus. Excellence is by its very nature something far outside the average. In fact, not even good is found in the average. Average is comfortable. Average requires no great effort. Average requires nothing exceptional. Average anything is..., well, just mediocre.
It is worth discussing how much value there is too social sites that let anyone edit or select content. There is truth in the idea that the content selected by online crowds is not always the best -- often it does seem like the worst content -- or the most sensational content -- rises to the top. Businesspundit agrees that social media can produce mediocrity. Businesspundit says the downside of easy publishing tools is that you have to put up with "a million yahoos."
I'm not anti-amateur, I'm just anti-mediocrity. Yes, low barriers to entry allow us to find the diamonds in the rough - the excellent writers and thinkers who otherwise would not have a publishing platform. Unfortunately, it also means we have to put up with a million yahoos who think they know way more than they do. Years ago I heard a minister say "if anyone tells you they have all the answers, run the other way." That's why I steer clear of Web2.0 pundits.
Not everyone agrees that the most popular videos on YouTube.com or the most popular stories on Digg are the best ones. That's why people turn to different blogs and websites for a different filter or a different perspective. Most bloggers are using social media websites as a tool and not as a way of life. Many bloggers allow comments but they certainly aren't turning their blogs into wide-open wikis that anyone can edit.
There is a problem with the argument that social media is anti-elitist because the people using social media are actually the elite. Remember over 97% of humans are blogless and most people in the world don't even have access to social media. Bloggers also do a good job of pointing out experts and some of the most popular bloggers in a particular niche are often experts in their field.
Andy Rutledge also seems to be linking social media mediocrity with the downfall of civilization.
Mediocrity and decadence: these are now our birthright and we work feverishly to ensure that they're the primary features of our social endeavors. This sort of thing has happened before. History is filled with stories of how societies, great and small, have followed this path. We can read about their beginnings and their inevitable endings, in books - and now in the so–very–accurate and august Wikipedia (monument to the wisdom of crowds - /sarcasm).
The waxing relevant engines of our culture are teaching us to follow a pat, clichéd script that has played out over and over again for millennia. Western culture is on the downhill slope and gathering speed toward the brick wall at the bottom. I’m talking about the hill where, at the bottom, lie the heaps of rubble that history refers to: great cultures all. Welcome to culture 2.0.
So, in a nutshell, Andy believes that crowds are grunting masses of baboons, and that anything that surveys a group of people will inevitably result in mediocrity. The great are pulled down amongst the rabble. Pretty depressing, right? At one point, Andy says that "Western culture is on the downhill slope and gathering speed toward the brick wall at the bottom." It made me want to crawl into bed with a copy of Wuthering Heights and a nice bottle of Dom Perignon and wait for the mob with pitchforks to attack my castle.
There is a lot about social media sites that is not praiseworthy. Many of the top 100 videos on Google Video are not important -- like the Guy pwned by girl! video (currently ranked 5th). Sometimes content selected or highlighted by social media sites as "the best" is often very boring, trivial, pointless, tasteless and/or stupid -- but most people using social media sites are conscious of this "reality tv" aspect of social sites. They also know that most of the people using some of these sites are very young. Social media won't end Western civilization and if Western civilization is nearing its end it isn't because of social media. Global warming, pollution, bird flu, crooked governments, censorship, nuclear war, rogue asteroids, exploding calderas are far biggers concerns and you can find them all discussed in blogs and social media websites.
VentureBeat 
Digg has a 
Memeorandum has 
The bigger the social media websites or memediggers like 