Web2.0 Wonders

Social Networks for a Good Cause

If we found a way to contribute to the society without leaving our home, we would do it in an instant. I know I would. The new Facebook Missing Children application is just one example of such an opportunity. Once downloaded, the application displays information of missing children on the user's homepage, capturing the attention of your friends to identify and hopefully help missing children reunite with their families.

The parents of four-year-old Madeleine McCann have expressed their support for the charity Missing Children initiative: "We would urge the millions of Facebook users around the world to keep looking and to do what they can to help bring these children home."

Social network sites have the power to access millions of internet users around the world, crossing countries, borders and cultures. Using this medium to raise awareness, spread the word and hopefully even trace links to thousands of missing youngsters out there, fills me with satisfaction. Imagine, just by adding this application, you can help save lives, a donation truly rewarding.

Investing in the Public's Judgment

Kluster recently launched Knewsroom, a community-directed daily news publication site. The evolved news site motivates frequent user activity by purposing a cash incentive to participate. Muhammad Saleem writes on ReadWriteWeb more about the features of what may become the next user generated newspaper of the future.

Investing or betting on stories, topics or categories that may reach the FrontPage of the daily Knewspaper, appears like a stock market approach to socially drive content.

"Just like on Wall Street, your return on investment
is determined by the risk you take. You can invest in Topics -- which are kind of like mutual funds (lower risk/lower return), or you can bet on Stories -- which you can think of as individual stocks (higher risk/higher return). Of course, you can diversify and do both. Like everything else at Knewsroom, it's entirely up to you."

While the power to shape what is being published and read stays in the hands of the community, the quality of content may be subject to other circumstances. There can be two ways to this; either content suffers from the compromised judgments of users' wanting to "win", or rather simply because of the substantial monetary worth that is of gain, the quality of content will be carefully directed and managed by users of the Knewsroom community. 

In addition, Mohammad raises a good point that the service's current hybrid may just be a setback, meaning by the time stories hit the next Knewspaper issue, it may already be old news for us active social media readers, diminishing the value of a daily newspaper style site.

Let's keep our fingers crossed for Knewsroom to evolve and overcome these obstacles. I invest in the public's judgment to master the rules of the site and use it well. 

Combining the New with the Old

Reddit, a popular social media news site, is planning to launch YourWeek, a PBS weekly public television program and internet show. YourWeek will showcase top stories, user videos and basically what was hot on Reddit in the previous week. The Reddit pilot episode will be available around June 6th, 2008 for download, through the YourWeek website and Reddit blog. If the show gets picked up, it will premiere on TV this fall.

Reddit a new media pioneer promoting on an old media channel, may just be a winning combination. It reminds me of the old wedding custom for good luck, combining "something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue". In fact, Wikipedia, defines new media as the "marriage of mediated communications technologies with digital computers".

So as social media is an emerging medium for mass communication, combining television to the marketing mix, has the potential to not only convert those unfamiliar with the Reddit site, but also helps strengthen existing relations as the Reddit community will gladly join in on all the fun.

Good Luck guys!