Anyway, Gary is one of those guys who defaults to seeing the good in everything and has a knack for seeing potential in things that others take for granted. So today, he was struck with inspiration during a conversation with Adam Hirsch , a writer over at Mashable.com and out sprung the video I’ve embedded below. Check it out and tell me with a straight face that you aren’t excited about it.

So, tomorrow reach out to someone; call an old friend; write a blog post thanking your readers for stopping by or thanking those people who have positively influenced you to get you where you are today; twitter a thank you to everyone you have following you, after all you invade their computer screen multiple times a day! Tell other people why the people you follow or the people who follow you are the best. Sell your friends to the world; if you scratch some one else’s back and boost their personal brand, I guarantee it will come back to you twice as strong one day!

This is Gary’s original post with the above video:

I want to try to get the WHOLE INTERNET COmmunity behind this mission I have to make sure that tomorrow people write and talk abd blog and twitter and just flat out SING about people that are AWESOME and GOOD. It is time that we take control of the fact that WE are the media and pump out a day tomorrow that will make NOISE across this WORLD! Please take the time tonight to gather your thoughts as you come up with ideas on how to spread the word about AWESOME people! I am looking for blog posts, twitters, powncers, facebooking, digging, flickring, stumpling on all things that are good about PEOPLE!
Please tag all work “GPD08?

So reach out and touch someone and help push the idea that social media can rally people around a positive message and help draw the world closer together. We walk around with our iPods in everyday and toon out the rest of the world because we are too busy jamming in our heads while we twitter about traffic… well tomorrow is the day to show that all this technology can build us up together rather than separate us across a digital divide.

Tomorrow I’ll post my thank you post for GPD08. (Good People Day 2008!)

This might be one of the coolest ideas I’ve ever seen and it may have been done before, I don’t know. All I know is that it is incredible. Basically, this guy named Jake tied a disposable camera to a bench on a city street with this note:

Good afternoon,
I attached this camera to the bench so you could take pictures. Seriously. So have fun. I’ll be back later this evening to pick it up.
Love, Jay / The Plug

So he left for the day, and this is what happened

Very cool to see what happens when people act as random photographers. It would be really cool to do something like this in each major city and make it a website.

| View | Upload your own

I came across this on this French site. the original post is:

Pour comprendre le microblogging (phénomène Twitter), la dynamique des sites sociaux, le user-generated content, les objets sociaux, et le futur de l’interaction Web + Mobile, voici le slideshare qu’il vous faut !

Créé par le fondateur de Jaiku, une plateforme de microblogging comme Twitter, cette présentation éclaire bien des choses.

Bonne lecture.

French => English translation (done by myself, so if you identify any errors, please let me know)

To understand microblogging (phenomenon Twitter), the dynamics of social sites, user-generated content, social objects, and the future of Web+Mobile interaction, here is le slideshare that you need!

Created by the founder of Jaiku, a microblogging platform like Twitter, this presentation explains many things.

Enjoy!

• The Behance Network is an interesting online hub for the wide variety of designers and other artistic creators out there. It allows you to upload designs for your own portfolio and get feedback from the community and also has job listings and a collaborative tips section that encompasses everything from print to digital to web design. I am not a designer but I spend quite a bit of time around a few of them so I have started to appreciate design work a lot more than I used to and I think this site is really pretty cool for stumbling upon a variety of designs that are very well done. I cannot speak to the benefits of the job listings or the tips sections as I am not in the industry, but it seems to me that they are very well laid out and easy to navigate. if you are not in the industry, check out the site and just peruse the galleries for some really cool designs! Or if you are a designer, try out their portfolio features and let me know what you think!

• A few weeks ago, I was cruising the internet and I stumbled upon an ABC News site called i-Caught that is a place for everyday people to upload their own media for possible inclusion in ABC stories. It is essentially the same model as every other video sharing site out there except this is targeted specifically towards developing news and relevant information. I have not been able to figure out yet what level of censorship they have, but I’m sure that the site is moderated to some extent. There is a page called TalkBack that allows users to submit questions and content to specific ABC programs for contribution or comment. I think this site is a pretty good idea from the MSM as it tries to adapt to the YouTube era. However, I do wish they had spent a bit more time of designing the site…it is very nice that the ads are limited and all focus is on the video content but check out the i-Caught logo. It looks exactly like what you see on sites that make fun of Web 2.0 logos, like this logo generator or this page of hilarious mock logos. Other than that, this site is a pretty cool idea…there are others out there too, like this one from MSNBC, but I think ABC has the best handle on how to harness the community. In fact, if you look at the actual URL for their site, it is http://ugv.abcnews.go.com/ I’m guessing the “ugv” at the beginning means User-Generated Video…kudos to ABC on slowly starting to figure out the world of social media.

• I am a big fan of the band The Spill Canvas and a few weeks ago I went to their website to buy their latest album (see RIAA, just because I download albums I would never buy anyway doesn’t mean that I don’t ever send my wallet over to the band I like!). Anyhow, I was poking around the site and found a really cool page promoting their album which happens to be called “No Really, I’m Fine.” Well on this page, there is a a bar that asks “How are You?” and when you enter in your response, it will display it to other site visitors as “No Really, I’m yourresponse”. (see screenshot to understand a bit better) While this does not really have off-site impact, I think it is an awesome way to get fans engaged in the site. It is a page out of the twitter playbook that asks “What are you doing?” but it tailors perfectly with the band’s site.

• AbbyMe is an awesome site that allows you to send audio messages to people’s phones by typing in whatever text you would like them to hear. The computer voice is actually pretty good and you can enter in more than one number at a time so if you need to send a quick message to lots of people it makes it very easy to do. Of course, I’m sure the most common application is for prank calls (4 of my coworkers and I just finished up a 30 minutes funny phone call round of sending each other very inappropriate messages…all in good fun, of course!) but it could have some really good real-world uses as it gets fine tuned. If they develop a mobile version of it, it could be used to send audio text messages, etc. Definitely a fun site to play around with that someday might develop into something super useful!

As it was announced on Tuesday, Google had a lineup of nine rather lackluster parters on board for the launch: Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.  While the idea is amazing, it left many people wondering if it had any chance of success since everyone is on Myspace and facebook…how many people do you know on Hi5?  But today, the rumors became official and the stars aligned, bringing some real weight to the new OpenSocial platform.  MySpace, NewsGator, Bebo, and SixApart are now confirmed as a partners on the platform.

This is huge news: not only is MySpace the largest social network but Bebo brings in quite a few young professionals who are ‘too old’ for facebook but ‘too cool’ for MySpace, NewsGator brings the cross-platform information aggregation, and SixApart includes TypePad, LiveJournal, Vox, and MovableType.  This officially closes the gap between blogging, content hosting, and social networking.  This is the Holy Trinity of user-generated social media.  I am a diehard facebook user, but I have to say, they made a mistake walking away from this deal: they are the only major player not on board and i think it is going to cost them in the long-run.  This is the Open Social Graph that has been so long sought after and theorized by all of us ‘web 2.0′ people.

It sounds sort of like I am spreading the gospel, but I have a feeling that this is going to revolutionize the networking world.  Good job on Google’s part, releasing the dud list and letting it get kicked around for awhile before they let the cat out of the bag on the big guns!  Kind of like the nerd at school who lets the bullies push him around for a bit before he lets loose some intricate plan to get the upper hand.

Google has set itself up for a huge success and a massive push to diversify its business sources…now it just has to pull it off.

 UPDATE: (11/1 9:06pm)  Maybe facebook wasn’t courted for OpenSocial?  The jury is still out…

As a part of this, ‘News Feed Optimization’ has become a rising concept in the online media world: some have proclaimed it to be the new SEO; the best way to thrust your online presence into the forethought of the online masses. (see Inside Facebook or the follow-up post from Dave McClure) The News Feed has become the newest testing grounds for facebook advertisers who supplement their $1,000,000/yr sponsored groups with feed updates about new products, contests, and upcoming movies.

An open, seamless way to transport your personal data, is the next big ‘thing’ for social networking, but this is probably still aways off in the future, so in the meantime we get intra-network aggregation where we can see the activity that happens all across our ’social graph’…with News Feed it is like a giant spider web and we get to set the preferences so that we only detect the biggest vibrations from areas we want to know about.

However, with the rise of News Feed Optimization, we will see new players using this mass-notification tool to force feed us content that might not be the type of information we were planning on getting, or would have preferred to get. The same thing has happened with e-mail, blogs, blog comments, MySpace messages/bulletins, text messages on cell phones, and just about any other conceived method of user communication. Of course, I’m talking about the prevalence of spam: the scourge of the known internet that new laws or government policies will never be able to actually eradicate. It has become an expected variable in our online worlds; we all run spam filters for our email, popup blockers on our web browsers, Askimet for our blog comments, and sometimes we just get a dog for the door-to-door salesman. Now, as with all new communication tools, it seems that spam has begun to infiltrate the News Feed via another new facebook feature: facebook Polls.

When a user creates a poll, it gets posted in the news feed of all users in a specified demographic until a specified number of respondents is reached. This is an awesome low-cost data-gathering tool (it could use some upgrades and expansions, but it is a good first step), that is used by many groups, including student governments who now have a new tool for gaging student opinion on their respective campuses. Yesterday, I noticed a poll in my News Feed that was touting some new dating site while trying to pass it off as a new facebook feature. The response options were all positive for the site, and I didn’t think much about it at the time other than “Wow, that is a badly constructed polling question.” However, today, I took a greater notice when I had another ‘advertising poll’ in my Feed about a different site (see screenshot from my News Feed approx. 9:00 pm CST, 9/8/07).

It seems to be following along the lines of other forms of spam: Sex Sells. But I guess, there really is no need to re-invent the wheel on this one. This just made me realize that with user-controlled tools that affect the News Feed flow on a massive scale to users across the facebook network, it ipens a whole new world for spamming people in their ambient online surroundings. I didn’t take much notice to the first poll because it was an isolated occurrence, but a second Spam Poll in less than 24 hours?…seems like the start of a trend, because I doubt I’m the only person out there to notice them.

This could majorly affect users’ impressions of the News Feed unless facebook steps up controls on what you an ‘inject’ into your network’s Feed. If the Feed becomes spam-filled, it loses its relevance and the people who have come to check facebook as often as email will start to wonder if it is worth their time to get spammed endlessly when all they really want to know is if their old roommate has gone from ‘Its Complicated’ to “In a Relationship”. This has to be done carefully, though because it is generally a bad idea in infringe upon the idea of user generated content be unfiltered and open to the masses, but at the same time, facebook will have to protect the masses from the few among them who take that notion to an extreme. It will be interesting to see if new forms of spam are developed for features such as the News Feed, and how facebook will respond. Users have fought the News Feed once, will they do it again?

View Larger Map

17% of respondents said they had looked at a candidate’s profile on some social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook, and 53% of them said they were more likely to vote for that candidate after seeing their profile! 53% of those who had looked is equal to approximately 9% of the total survey sample, which may sound low, but MySpace has well over 100 million users and Facebook boasts 35 million (and growing by approx. 1 million/wk), so a 9% win-over rate is a pretty health showing! (I realize that not all users are in the US, or registered voters, etc…but you get the idea that it is a lot of people)

What might be the most astonishing statistic to come out of this survey is that 62% of those people who browsed a candidate’s profile, were over the age of 30! This is a huge development that shows how much these online arenas will be changing the political world int he near future. The are no longer a child’s playground, but adults are using them too…if it were all college-aged users browsing these profiles, the numbers wouldn’t be very exciting since the 18-27 age bracket is the least democratically involved at the polls. However, the 30-45 age bracket is very active in elections, making these survey results very important to the upcoming election.

One thing to say about this survey, however, is that I haven’t seen the actual text of the complete survey or the methodology behind it, so I can’t vouch for its integrity. And it may well be that people who look at candidates’ profiles were more inclined to vote for them before and that is what drove them to the site…but even if this is the case, this data shows that the face of politics is changing in America.

The emergence of the YouTube debates, the explosion of social networking site users, and the expansion of each candidate’s online presence is a sign that the old-media way of vetting candidate’s is shifting and the public is adopting its own way of doing things. With the hotly contested elections in the recent past, it is very possible that whoever manages to capture the largest portion of that 9% of users could tip the election in their favor by the slimmest of margins…and we are still over a year away from the general election: there could be ways of voter organization and online political advertising that we haven’t even though of yet that could spring up and have a major impact on the 2008 election.

As social networking sites increase in popularity, more and more businesses are striving to maintain worker productivity by simply blocking access to sites such as Facebook and MySpace. This week, an Australian firm released a study claiming that Facebook usage costs Australian businesses $4 billion in lost productivity…Mashable posted a good analysis of the study:

“An Internet security company, SurfControl, looked into the issue, and it estimates that Australian employees spend approximately one hour a day on the social networking site. Using that number, they come up with the slack time costing employers approximately $5 billion Australian ($4 billion US) a year in lost productivity.

How they reached this mysterious number is, just that, a mystery. The study lists that there are 800,000 businesses in Australia, and they are estimating one slacking employee per company. A problem with this estimate is that Facebook only currently lists approximately 224,000 members from Down Under, and then you still have to assume each one of those people is a very active user of the site.

Of course, the fact that this firm sells a web and email blocking system may explain some of it.”

-originally posted by Mashable 

If this is indeed the methodology used in this study, I’m certain that any second-year college student with basic research skills (or even younger, if they have a decent level of commons sense) would be able to point out a plethora of fundamental flaws in this research design. Honestly, even if I ran a company whose business was controlling workplace net traffic, I would not release this study, if only to keep my company’s name off such an ineptly created statistic.

This is merely the latest push to stem the rising tide of social network users. Over the past year, companies all over the world have made efforts to block access to sites like Facebook, in fact, in Britain an estimated 70% of firms have blocked or limited access to Facebook. Despite the efforts to keep them off, however, users are simply getting more creative at accessing the site…the moral of the story is that you can’t fight social shifts: Rock’n'Roll won because of Elvis and the Beatles, user-generated media is winning because of Wikipedia and Digg, and social networking will win because of Facebook and (dare I say it…) MySpace.

It will be interesting to see how the balance is reached in the future between workers and firms each trying to balance their priorities. Maybe we will see a more widely-adopted Google model of running a company…

Yet there are still those people who believe that the power of information should be isolated in the hands of a few, and that the public should be told what is art and what the world around them is like. I stumbled across the clip below from the Colbert Report, which I realize is not exactly an un-biased, ivory tower of journalistic integrity, but the guest, Andrew Keen has this outlandish idea that user-generated media is akin to communism and is destroying our culture.

It truly is one of the more close-minded defenses of mainstream media dominance I’ve ever seen. Even those who have resisted the “Web 2.0″ movement are slowly being sucked into the mix, and it is only a matter of time before we discover parts of the world around us that can be shifted to open-source that no one has even considered to be capable of collaborative efforts. But anyway, check out this video, and then, in fairness, read a few of the posts at Mr. Keen’s blog.