I've been reading more about spam and phishing in abbreviated links (and hence, Twitter) and I think that social media in general is becoming more and more spam-filled every day. "I think we're all aware that there are an especially large number of hucksters out there," wites Ian Delaney. But why? It's easy to fake, you can easily fake click counts, reads and comments, you can scare the uninformed with them, and people keep falling for 'easy'. I like that last point the most. "You wouldn't stand for a ‘top five reasons why' post in your favourite newspaper, so why are these silly lists continually at the top of social media tracking charts? I think it's because we all want easy rather than hard, even though hard might be better for us." Actually, you would stand for those silly lists in newspapers; we see them all the time, and even sillier 'easy' items like poll results and celebrity tracking. We've always had spam and phishing in traditional media, it's just that we called it advertising and telemarketing. [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Twitter, Marketing, Spam]

Every social media guru thinks they have the secret to influence and virality. Me, I have my doubts. I am more inclined to believe that, in a network, there isn't a core influencer, as Duncan J. Watts argues. So how do these gurus find evidence of influence? They study what amounts to mass media - new York Times cover stories, say - and find in their network effects evidence of influence. But, of course, the influence is a vestige of the mass media being used to launch them in the first place. And as such, it is pernicious and nit helpful, just a way to allow the already-powerful to extend their power. But hey, where there's a guru there's always a secret sauce - can't have one without the other. [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Networks]

The flaws in this Pew study of news sources don't just taint the research, they destroy it. (Contra Delaney: when you have a bad and biased survey, you don't somehow by magic get a "gist of the results can't be ignored" - you just get bad data). When you ask a bunch of media people where they heard about a set of mainstream news stories covered in the mainstream news media, they will most likely answer "newspaper", "television" or "radio". A much better survey would be to collect a random set of people, to ask them "what's new?", and then ask them where they heard that news. You will get a very different set of 'news stories' (compare the gtop blog posts as ranked by Nielsen with the top news stories). And, therefore, a very difference set of news sources, since the blog post material wasn't even covered in the newspaper. (Can I say QED on this one?) [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Video, Research, Web Logs]

Sure, everyone can aggregate feeds now - but is it the aggregation you want, or the commentary? What I found, when I referred people to Edu_RSS during my hiatus of 2006, is that people weren't very happy with it. Some (well, Harold Jarche) even called it 'sterile'. If it's just another headline reader, who cares? (Similarly, if you're reading this newsletter just for the links, you're using the wrong technology - get a Twitter account and start following people, opr build an aggregator like this one; your best reason for reading OLDaily should be the value-add - the seeking of trends, the finding of contexts, the analysis of opinion (hopefully more considered than 140 character snark)). [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Twitter, RSS, Edu_RSS, Newsletters]

Ian Delaney reports on the release of a report called Learning 2.0 by the CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing), not to be confused with the other Learning 2.0 report (see below). He summarizes, "there's a big need for change when it comes to professional development. Individuals need to do more to take the initiative, since they're ultimately in it for themselves. Their own preferred learning styles might mean that the current provision their company offers is utterly useless. They'd learn more from reading books, or blogging, or going to excellent networking events." [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Learning Styles, Web Logs, Networks]

Pretty accurate observation, in my view: it is well worth tracking the way 'brand' has taken over search results. And I think networks are the best (and only) route to this: "So the next Google. Not only will it be better at searching - we're only impressed by the current Google because the competition is so absolutely dismal. It will also be about expressing diversity rather than hierarchy. About delivering the truth in all its facets rather than the definitive answer. It won't produce a list; it will produce a crystal." [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Web 2.0, Google, Networks]

Interesting discussion of the future of blogging. "The future of blogging must be connected to why people blog now," writes Ian Delaney, and also why they don't blog. Many aspiring bloggers underestimate the workload - and so future blogging may resemble more micro-blogging (such as twitter) or passive blogging. [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Web Logs]

Discussion of a deal by Technorati to include Technorati links in the press releases issued by P.R. Newswire. "It will apparently allow companies to very swiftly measure the impact of any release because any links to them in the blogosphere will be cataloged automatically." More to the point, it is essentially the treating of P.R. Newswire as though it were a blog. Which means an essential tripling of superfluous adjectives in the blogosphere. P.S. hard not to notice the United Business Media logo that accompanies the story - you can be sure that the press releases will be commented on by a flock of affiliated bloggers. [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Branding, Web Logs]

How to crank up your internet (not just tubes any more!). First, change your start page (oddly, 80 percent of internet users never do). Pick a content page like NetVibes and then fill it with content. Add some widgets and some feeds to RSS contents. Then cue in some personal organization tools, like Google Calendar and Orchestrate (a personal to-do list). Create an address book (don't use Plaxo, it spams your contacts). Connect to Flickr for your photos (and I would suggest Slideshare for your slides). And while you're at it, set up a display to view other people's photos - something nice every day. Get set up on Google spreadsheets and documents, so you've got some serious content capacity. Or use Zoho, which bundles all these together. Your web could be doing so much more for you - but you need to stop thinking of it as some place where you go and read stuff. [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Flickr, Books, Google, RSS, Spam]

Whee! Yay us! "Canada has the highest number of blog readers per internet-head of any of the other countries measured in recent comScore research conducted in North America and Western Europe." [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Research, European Union, Web Logs, Canada]

Fascinating. "46% of the online population in Asia have a blog (compared to just 8% of US web users)." [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Web Logs]

Another of those diagrams that tries to make the essentially messy clear. I don't know - to me this just looks like buzzwords in boxes. But not every diagram speaks to everyone, I guess. And I guess I'm just not sufficiently into Enterprise 2.0. A better read? This set of links about Web 2.0 in schools. [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Schools, Web 2.0]

The correct answer is, of course, that Web 2.0 is a little of all of those definitions (as one commenter offers, the idea of trying for a definition at all may be misplaced, a la Wittgenstein). My own definition, if it could be called that, identifies the salient features of a network (like this) found in the new internet technologies and offers four standards of good practice: openness, diversity, autonomy, and connectivity. Of course, these are rough approximations too. Don't forget to read the comments; lots of great ideas. Via Assorted Stuff. [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Web 2.0, Networks]