SOCIAL NETWORK - Social Network to promote peace

At one point during the Web 2.0 Summit in

San Francisco this week, I thought I’d fallen into a time warp. I suddenly found myself listening to pitches that might have been appropriate in the 1990s at a mainframe computer convention, not a cutting-edge event like this summit is billed.

First, Adam Selipsky of Amazon spent 30 minutes touting Amazon Web Services, the back-end services that the bookseller first developed for its own operations and now pitches to small and medium-sized business. I could have been back in the days of client-server as Selipsky droned on about retail and payment systems, reliability, support–all the things near and dear to an IT manager. Then he had a spokesman for Zillow.com, the real estate site, come on and talk about how Amazon Web Services had made it easier for Zillow to operate. This was what we used to call the “reference client testimonial” in the old days. Maybe the only departure from a 1990s presentation was the slightly irreverent slogan, “We Make Muck So You Don’t Have To.”

The back-to-the-enterprise theme continued when we moved into the Launchpad segment of the conference, where six finalists vied for “Best in Show.” Spiceworks’ first slide trumpeted “160,000 IT professionals can’t be wrong” as the company touted its network monitor capability, IT asset management, and IT help desk services. Two of the other finalists also touched on those essential-but-less-than-exciting services that distinguished the old IT world. ClickForensics pitched a product to detect click fraud and CleverSet pitched its personalization product, which promises to use all available data and the latest algorithms to make sure that the ads and suggestions served up to the web surfer are the most suitable. Not surprisingly, CleverSet’s immediate practicality won it “Best in Show” and “Most Likely to Exit First,” from the audience, who voted in typical high-tech fashion by clapping.

Full article on http://www.redherring.com/blog/jdreyfuss_redherring?bid=23008

From ABC News, By SARAH LAI STIRLAND

The web-hip “community-driven” presidential debates touted by the television networks have been a disappointment so far. The events may use voter-submitted videos, instant messages and e-mails, but all that packet juice is poured into the same old, tired broadcast formula that appoints journalists as the arbiters of which questions candidates are asked — and relies on the usual small circle of pundits to analyze the answers.

A new effort aims to change all that. Launched Wednesday, 10 Questions is soliciting video questions on four of the most popular video-sharing sites and placing them in a Digg-like tool that lets the public vote them up or down. Ultimately the 10 highest-ranking videos will be submitted unedited to each of the presidential candidates, who can then produce a video response.

“We’re hacking into politics, and using interactivity and the power of online video to involve a lot more people in the process,” says Micah Sifry, co-founder of TechPresident, an internet-electioneering website and annual conference.

Backed by TechPresident with some help from The New York Times’ editorial board, 10 Questions has partnered with top political blogs on the left and right. Sifry hopes that some variation of the community-driven model might be incorporated in the final round of debates between the two major-party candidates in next year’s general election.

“The lessons learned could be used in a lot of ways — the process may be the most important part of this,” says Sifry. “We’re in the middle of a transition: In the same way we watched what YouTube did, and we watched what MySpace and MTV did, they’re going to watch us.”

In the CNN-YouTube debate in July, it was CNN producers who chose the online-video questions to present to candidates. Similarly, in the ongoing MySpace and MTV forums, journalists serve as filters between voters and candidates. TechPresident’s goal is to provide U.S. voters the leading role in controlling the much-touted national dialogue with the presidential candidates.

The project’s organizers are hoping to do that with social software designed to enable “the crowd” to speak responsibly with a collaborative voice. They plan to keep their online voting system simple, and audit the tallied votes.

The point, says Sifry, is to create a large-scale online forum with the same rhetorical attributes that characterize physical town-hall meetings, instead of tweaking a commercial broadcast medium that provides candidates with 30 seconds to advertise their personalities and positions.

The project grew out of a collaboration between TechPresident and David Colarusso, a 28-year-old Somerville, Massachusetts, physics teacher. Colarusso participated in YouTube’s Spotlight feature earlier this year.

Spotlight allowed voters to post video questions for the presidential candidates on YouTube. The candidates then picked which questions they wanted to answer, and posted their video responses online. The feature spanned several weeks.

Both Democrat John Edwards and Republican candidate Mitt Romney posted video responses to Colarusso’s questions. But Colarusso found the candidates’ responses lacking. Both he and other Spotlight participants thought that YouTube should have had a feature that enabled them to express dissatisfaction with a candidate’s answer.

He ended up building the feature himself at a site he established, called Community Counts. He urged CNN producers to turn over control of the video selection in the YouTube-CNN debate to his online community, but was ignored. Community Counts logged 6,000 unique visitors and 30,000 votes by the time the Democratic round of the debate was over. The site’s voting features have now been incorporated into 10 Questions.

In explaining the importance of eliciting the electorate’s input versus that of a few “experts” earlier this year, Colarusso alluded to The New Yorker writer James Surowiecki’s popular book The Wisdom of Crowds. The book posits that if four basic conditions are met, a crowd’s “collective intelligence” will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts. The conditions are: diverse opinion among the crowd’s members, members’ independence from each other, a good method for aggregating opinions and decentralization.

Read the full story on http://www.abcnews.go.com/Technology/Story?id=3751616&page=3

 Some background information the state of social networks in Europe. First, I would like to make a distinction between European Social Networks and Social Networks in Europe. The latter, being Web 2.0 sites which started targeting users elsewhere, and then moved to Europe to gain bigger market share on a global base. They main advantages? They can benefit from massive financing, at least compared to European counterparts, and they already have millions of use.

MySpace.com is an example of  Social Network in Europe. Orkut is another example, with a difference: developed as side-projects by a Google employee, it became so popular in Brazil that some Orkut groups in English put disclaimers, inviting members to post only in English and not Brazilian.

Truly European Social Networks  can be divided in two categories: local social networks and pan-European social networks. Local social networks can be found everywhere in Europe: Neogen.ro, Grono.net, IWIW.HU, Rate.ee, etc. They are extremely successful in their home Countries, and expanding into new ones.

Pan-European social networks are European Social Networks which are successful in several European countries, and were born with this mission. A leading example is NetLog, previously called Facebox, which was the first real champion with many users living in the European Union.

Of course, our own social network belongs to this category. http://www.mypacis.eu/ is a European Social Network with a social agenda: promoting peace by linking Europeans together. It is an open source, integrated and multilingual social network, developed using Web 2.0 tools with a European prospective. At the best of my knowledge, there are many North American sites connecting agents of change and many targeting European users, but no pan-European Social Network hosting volunteering and activism projects all across Europe.

Questions about social networks and other Web 2.0 services “made in Europe”? Let us know!

Frank