‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web

We are no longer just consumers of content, we have become curators of it too.

If someone approached me even five years ago and explained that one day in the near future I would be filtering, collecting and sharing content for thousands of perfect strangers to read — and doing it for free — I would have responded with a pretty perplexed look. Yet today I can’t imagine living in a world where I don’t filter, collect and share.

via ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.

This ad agency “website” rocks my world

Some will hate it and some will love it. But many will talk about it:

And yes, booneoakley.com translates to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Elo7WeIydh8. Bold – very bold.

(Saw it here.)

Tinker toys for social networks

My good friend Rastin Mehr and several colleagues are soon to launch the Anahita Social Engine … an open-source framework for building social networks and applications.

Here’s their latest overview presentation:

Director Tom’s recessionary get-a-job strategy

I worked with Thomas Clifford (AKA Director Tom) recently on a corporate film that I was executive producing.

He was absolutely amazing. And he’s done hundreds of films over a 25-year career. And he’s one of the most connected social media individuals you will ever find. But 3 days ago he just got laid off.

Which only goes to show that in this current economic climate of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt … many good people are losing their jobs as companies are slowing down.

Tom, however, being Tom, is a proactive guy. So he put together the Hire Tom website and kicked his network into high gear. As WorkLifeNation reports, here’s his 4-step strategy:

1. Making the Hire Tom site
2. Alerting his network
3. Multiple LinkedIn updates
4. Twitter, Twitter, Twitter

Read the article for the full details – it’s great. And the results are coming too. I connected with Tom today, and he says that the opportunities are rolling in – only 3 days after being laid off!

Of course, not everyone has over 500 connections on LinkedIn or 2000+ followers on Twitter. Still, there’s a lot to be learned from Tom’s actions … especially that the time to work on your network is before you need it!

KPIs and Metrics: what’s the difference?

OK. So you’ve launched your new social-viral-mashable-linked-web2.0-connected web place, and you’re tracking a million metrics. Which ones should you actually be paying attention to? Those are your Key Performance Indicators.

As Rhian James at FreshNetworks mentioned in a comment on my recent post about measuring social media marketing efforts, that’s really the key. Burying yourself in a mound of data is unproductive; knowing which data tracks progress to your critical initiatives is pure gold.

FreshNetworks posted on this topic on their blog, and created a valuable SlideShare presentation illuminating the difference:

Twitter: Hello Again, Fail Whale

I’m seeing Twitter’s fail whale more and more lately:

Twitter has been MUCH better the past few months, but I guess the relentless growth – up about a million users in the last 3 months – is starting to take its toll again.

Planning for incessant growth is not easy … I recently met a Google engineer who works on Gmail on a flight who had some interesting thoughts. “Up and to the right,” he called it, referring to increasing traffic graphed over time.

Hopefully Twitter’s technical gurus can start to manage the growth curve better. Meanwhile we can all join the Fail Whale club.