Recently I’ve been looking into new web2.0 and, I guess web3.0, and social media trends – sites and services that are popping up like mushrooms after a rain. I’ve found many interesting one and wanted to share a few, and at the same time ask that if you know of anything really cool that you think I might not know about, please send it my way, either by email/contact form or tag them on del.icio.us for:gregoryheller
A few weeks ago Aaron called my attention to esciencenews.com which is a new site populated with articles culled from the net by “the Eureka! news engine, a fully automated artificial intelligence.” The site is pretty cool. Especially if you are a science buff. But if you are looking for news on, say politics, or wine, you are not going to find it there.
Enter the loud3r network:
loud3r.com is a network of sites that use “a combination of human editorial input combined with semantic software to assemble all the best content, from a web-wide perspective, for any given topic. The technology learns from user behavior, allowing the site to react to the community’s interests and preferences. We sift through the bad, so you don’t have to.” It’s in beta and you need to get a beta code for some of the sites, but they seem pretty forthcoming. Topic specific sites in the network include buzz3r.com about web2.0 stuff, vot3r.com about politics, decant3r.com about wine, glaci3r.com about the environment, dapp3r.com for men’s fashion and quite a few others, all ending in — you guessed it — “3r”.
trackur.com is a paid service for automated web reputation tracking. It scours the web for mentions of specific key words, and sends you updates. if you want to track more than one key word/phrase you have to graduate from the free service which allows you to run searches, but only have one saved search, to the monthly paid plans.
twine.com, from Radar Networks “is a new service that helps you organize, share and discover information about your interests, with networks of like-minded people. Powered by semantic understanding, Twine automatically organizes information, learns about your interests and makes connections and recommendations. The more you use Twine, the better it understands your interests and the more useful it becomes.” So far, I really like twine, and I can only imagine it getting better, and me liking it more as more people come to use it. Every day I get a digest of new items posted into the twines I have joined. I’m seeing a fair amount of overlap between items in twine, and some of the loud3r networks. Taken together, and combined with tweets from my network, these services amount to scanning the front pages of newspapers and magazines at news stand.
One thing I would love is a way to marry my del.icio.us and my twine, I don’t want to have to post everything to both places, and while twine certainly has some more robust functionality, I do like del.icio.us for its simplicity. I’m not about to move thousands of bookmarks over to twine manually, and I am not about to give up del.icio.us so I am in a bit of a pinch on how to use each.
One trend that seems to be ascendant right now is “micro-blogging” and it makes sense, with so much competing for our time and attention, who can write long blog posts, let alone, read them. Recent entrants onto the micro-blogging scene include tumblr.com (they describe it as being like a weblog meets scrap book) who’s real innovation if you ask me is a slick UI. Then there is hictu, plurk, moodmill and blogthot. I haven’t really spent much time looking at them. For me at least, they are a bit late to the game. Even though Twitter has been having technical difficulties lately, I can’t really imagine jumping ship to plurk or hictu, or moodmill. And I happened upon tumblr first so blogthot just isn’t going to get my attention. I don’t even know if I will continue to tumbl. One thing to note here is that “tumbling” and “tweeting” sound far cooler than “plurking,” “hictuing,” “moodmilling” or “blogthoting”.
Perhaps add on services are catching up for some of these new microblogging sites, but twitter seems to be ahead of the game there too with numerous tweet searching, scanning and analyzingsites out there, as well as desktop twitter clients. I’ve even got one — mitter — installed on my n810 mid.
If you want to follow along with my tagging, tweeting, tumbling and twining check out:
- http://del.icio.us/gregoryheller/tags/socialmedia
- http://twitter.com/gregorheller and http://twitter.com/civicactions
- http://gregoryheller.tumblr.com
- http://www.twine.com/user/gregoryheller
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