Advocate's Studio

Pleased as punch (why is punch pleased?) to announce that my writing and consulting  business and I are featured on JD Supra’s Facebook Page! They asked and I submitted a short video describing who I am, what I do and where you can find me on the Web. You can hit the jump to their page and read a lot of good info on their contributors and what JD Supra is all about. Or you can check out the YouTube version below:

Real-time, social or what have you, even the Federal Government is getting in on the Web 2.0 action! Want your government social media aggregated? Check out govfresh.com – government 2.0. The site collects official government web content streamed from the various social media outlets, including Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and the White House blog. The information is not limited to the White House: there are sources from various federal agencies, the military, political parties and even federal contractors and labs. The information is rounded out with relevant news stories.

The site is clean, with minimal distraction. There are the obligatory sharing icons and buttons for more social media goodness. What a great idea from our tech-forward governing body!

Hat tip to Research Buzz.

… is on Facebook! The Journal has its own Fan Page, with almost 4,000 fans. The site will allow readers to link to articles and a Journal podcast. Kudos to another industry or scholarly publication connecting with its base via the social web!

Just released into public beta on May 8, 2009, Scoopler is a search engine that aggregates and organizes content on various social media and sharing sites across the internet in real-time updates responsive to your search inquiry. Services include Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, etc.  Scoopler accomplishes its purpose by indexing live updates. It ranks the popularity of links within the updates and shows trending memes. Scoopler also allows you to “reshare” or return a link back to Twitter or Facebook or the other services it supports.

With its real-time aspect and easy sharing feature, Scoopler seems another worthy tool to include in your investigative and information-sharing arsenal.

Hat tip to Pandia Search Engine News.

Oh me oh my. So much to write about today and not enough time or space. So, for now, I am going to limit my rantings to updating my earlier blog about LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook and the social networking phenomenon.

Google has just announced plans to implement a service called “Friend Connect” to permit people to employ applications from their usual social networking haunts, like Facebook or Plaxo, while visiting other sites and, ultimately, across the Web. This announcement is hot on the heels of similar announcements by Facebook and MySpace pledging to permit members to utilize their personal profiles and applications on other websites. Google’s Director of Engineering David Glazer indicates that “[a]t the heart of Google’s service is the use of Open Social which will allow third parties to build and develop applications for the site.” Thus, by using Friend Connect, any website owner should be able to add code to his or her site to get a social interface feature without complicated programming. The former “walled garden” approach of the social networking sites, which encouraged interaction only between members of the individual sites, is crumbling and making way for a new social order permitting “socializing” across websites and the entire Internet. As David Glazer adds: “[s]ocial networking is going mainstream. It used to be proprietary, but now it’s going to be open and baked into the infrastructure of the net, not just one site or one source,…”

Damn straight its getting mainstream. Just check out who is maintaining a presence on the big three. Even hackers, the “ethical” ones anyway, have their very own social network, called, what else, House of Hackers.  For an up and coming social networking site that combines wiki’s with passionate discourse under “niche” communities, check out Wetpaint. And here is a top ten list of social networking sites for women. Ladies only, please!

But all is not an electronic bed of roses for the users of social networking sites. For a cautionary message with a legal bent aimed at social networking site users, check out this video at Findlaw.com. In the same vein as those oft-repeated warnings to business users to avoid including anything on these sites that one may not want a prospective employer or client to view, the applicable laws mandate that site users employ the same precautions against defamatory and/or infringing material generally applicable to traditional media in connection with on-line postings. These common sense limitations aside, however, the clear direction of the Internet and the Web 2.0 revolution is the organizing, simplifying and socializing of the vast information repository that has grown in the cyberspace soil. Wallflowers, beware. The future is NOW!

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