As of late, many of the biggest stories breaking in the world are being covered by social media users in real time using platforms like Twitter. The recent Chinese earthquake broke on Twitter about a half hour before the major mainstream news channels alerted us to this.

The recent terror attacks in Mumbai followed this model, with eyewitnesses reporting on the happenings before any news organizations were able to get any solid information. However, in situations like these, are there lines that social media users should not cross?
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An interesting little tidbit on both CrunchGear and BoingBoing today: a shill for Motorola has been cruising gadget message boards, blatantly talking up Motorola’s touch-screen Krave, making the company look like total tools to everyone involved.

There are good ways to utilize social media, and bad ways. Getting online and identifying yourself as an employee of a company whose product you’re shilling for (even going so far as to post a link) screams out amateur hour and will provide ten times more bad press on tech blogs than any positive result you get from doing it.
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Legendary basketball big man Shaquille O’Neal, currently plying his trade for the Phoenix Suns, has joined Twitter. And unlike other star turns on Twitter (such as Britney Spears), this actually feels like the Big Aristotle in action, in spite of one pro-Kobe Tweet.

Most impressive is that Shaq has already amassed 12,500 followers after only a week on Twitter, with Tweets like, “I called my main man figs son bcuz da xcellence of a gift lies n its approiateness ratha than its value,” how could you not want to follow Shaq?
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The Shiba Inu puppy cam on Ustream.tv was a phenomenon when I wrote about it 15 days ago. At 1500 viewers at a time and 800,000 total hits, it was a huge hit.

Now, the puppies are getting bigger and the viewership has increased tenfold. With about 15,000 viewers at a time and a whopping 4 million total hits, it’s no surprise that Ustream.tv is hooking up the soon-to-be new owners of the puppies with cameras so viewers can keep up on the dogs.
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Alright, if you haven’t had a look at the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam on ustream.tv, now is the time to have a look. AWWWWW. They are up and playing right now… and now they’re all asleep.

Lifecasting isn’t anything new. Besides Ustream, Justin.tv is a popular place for it. Heck, there’s a show called Big Brother devoted to it that has been going on for ten years, and there’s been plenty of it in the adult world. But it’s never really caught on in the mainstream, and most of the marketing around it has been contained in the realm of self-promotion, as is the case with singer-songwriter Jody Marie Gnant.
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Before, if lines were long or there was voter intimidation going on at the polls, very little was done to record it in real time. With so much happening on election day, local news affiliates may be unwilling to respond to a phone call placed by a voter, or they may feel it’s just how it is and wait for hours or leave.

Now, with Twitter and YouTube, there will be real time recordings of what is going on at the polls, making it so problems, discrepancies, and fraud go documented at the very least.
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A study of over 1,000 social network users by Razorfish reveals that 75% of social network users don’t mind the ads they see on the networks, and 40% report they have utilized the ads and purchased something through them.

However, I’ve noticed many reporting mixed results in their advertising schemes on social networks. Perhaps users don’t mind them because they aren’t that effective? At any rate, Razorfish’s Garrick Schmit makes the essential point about social networking, saying, “Content, in our view, will become advertising.” In other word, the ads and the content of what users are viewing on the network will fuse into one and be the impetus behind social network advertising. See: Facebook Beacon.

When it comes to video advertising–which nobody seems to have perfected yet–users report preferring ads that are incorporated into the video rather than pre-roll ads. This is not exactly a surprise, especially when viewing short ads and taking into account the human instinct of instant gratification.
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Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch is reporting that YouTube is now letting users add a short tag to the end of YouTube URLs that allows users to cut straight to a particular moment in a video. Instead of linking and telling the user to cut forward to a certain time, now the link is smart enough to send you there automatically.

Here’s an example of the best part from this awesome video I saw the other day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0#t=2m07s. All you have to do is add the “t=” and then the time in “2m07s” format. It’s that simple.

Google Video had this feature previously, so it’s a mystery it took this long to make it happen on YouTube.

I have a somewhat dead personal blog that I’m lazy about updating and haven’t spent much time on. I’m not a coding expert, and the front page has about 120 errors right now. When I do write, I don’t often take the time to link to other sites. Often I just splash out some text, throw in a few tags, and put it out there. Thus, only a couple of old articles that I actually worked on get hits, and that usually only adds up to about 5-20 per day. Pretty lame.

On 10/22, my blog got exactly one hit. Over late last night and today, it has received around 600 hits, which accounts for about 40% of the hits my poor little blog has ever received. About 60% of these hits were traffic from links on other sites, and 40% were from search engines.  These were quality, non-spammy hits. How did it happen?
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Semantic web company Semantinet has released a Firefox plugin that uses Microsoft Silverlight technology to bring true top-down semantic web functionality to the pages you view.

Headup is the name of the product, and it scans the pages you are looking at and provides pinpoint icons that users can click on to get more information about topics you are exploring.

For example, if you’re reading about a television show, Headup will give you access to YouTube clips, pictures of the cast on Flickr, how many of your Facebook friends favorited the show, etc. Headup is also functional with Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg, Google, Yahoo, and Wikipedia, as well as many others.
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