Pretty busy  but there’s several stories I haven’t written about … yet … (and may not get to, in Venturebeat or Entrepreneur), and yet…,  would still like to mention (even in passing – here – no point letting good content go)  such as real time web applications and  Foursquare vs. Rummble vs. iPhone vs. android posted by TechCrunch a few days ago.

The question is how the use of “geo-tweets” will change the world, or change business, or change your routine?

“….  it has also implemented the Twitter’s new Geotagging API which provides accessible location context to tweets from Rummble check-ins and reviews. This works with new versions of twitter clients like Tweetie, Tweetdeck and Seesmic Web, which launched support for the Twitter Geotagging API earlier this week. That means Rummble users can geotag tweets with their current location (if they choose to share it) and any venue in the world. This real-time geo-data is consumable by everyone on Twitter, regardless of whether they are signed up to Rummble or not.

This is one of the first social apps (outside of twitter clients) to use geo tweets. It adds geo lat/long into tweets for Twitter’s Location-api for status updates posted out of Rummble. This covers the user’s location, check-ins and tweets posted of Rummble reviews of a bar or cafe etc. Tweets from the Gowalla and Foursquare aps are geotagged if the setting has been switched on in twitter settings.

It makes sense  geo-tweets happened first in Twitter clients – and are now fanning out to applications where Twitter is part of the conversation, but not the only part.   In fact, it’s possible – I suppose – for other applications, like Facebook ….. or anything … to piggyback off of Twitter’s geo location API, even if they aren’t connecting with Twitter in any other way …. but that’s the subject of another post – if it ever gets written.

A few days ago I heard about the Comcast/GE/NBCU deal and thought about an increasingly new digital environment, how content get’s paid for, new revenue streams,  along with fallout in the cable industry which will dominate 2010 and 2011, which is just around the corner.   I don’t really understand the details this merger, yet, but I feel it’s an important development – and signals that content (a cable company now creating content) and the how it’s distributed (cable and internet) are being re-thought out.

I suppose the possibility of measurement – because the internet channel is now owning the entertainment channel – instead of just being the “pipe” for it; maybe we’ll end up paying for entertainment as we pay for “bandwidth”, but in a more direct way – if so, the overwhelming sentiment is negative, based on comments I read.

In face, when I think about it – say I’m watching an episode of Monk, and I’m a Comcast customer … I might get all the stuff I want off of BitTorrent (I don’t, but others I know, do), but it the “pipe” is the …… entertainment channel – might they just charge me for that and put it on my internet bill ….. ugh!!!

Now, I was at Monitoring Social Media 09 last month, in London,  Matthäus Krzykowski, of VentureBeat, was on the same panel as I was (on the Future of Social Media Monitoring) and talked about improvements in sentiment analysis coming from social media monitoring platforms that focus on specific verticals – but didn’t talk about what he’d seen recently (an example of such a monitoring platform that does this well)  .. though MediMix might be an example – targeted at the pharmaceutical, medical device and biotech industries looks like proof that this logic holds.

According to Luke Barney Jones in OurSocialTimes:

ScanBuzz™ is already being used to monitor the top 200 products and 100 corporate brands and, in industries where consumer scare stories can be fatal, a quick, informed response could save these companies millions if not billions. Expect to see more of these niche tools launching in 2010.

The solution to sentiment analysis (it’s largely inaccurate now) may be more specific content - a solution that, in a different context, improved organic search results, several years ago – when you have too much content to gauge relevancy – the solution turned out to be  more stringent analysis of the consideration set of a search query.

“For the first time ever, drug manufacturers have the opportunity to monitor the word-of-mouth happening among patients, or between patients and healthcare professionals. Customers are now more vocal and accessible than ever before, and life sciences companies must address the new expectations and needs of the social physician and patient. ScanBuzz™ equips pharmaceutical teams with essential social media listening, management and reporting capabilities,” says Henry Gazay, CEO of Medimix international.

For example, Scanbuzz™ uncovered that the amount of online discussions on a particular oncology product increased five-fold during the ESMO conference last September, which gave the manufacturer of the drug an immediate indication about their Return on Investment (ROI) at this congress. Also, on the day when the Pfizer-Wyeth merger became effective (October 15th, 2009)Scanbuzz™ recorded a four-fold surge in buzz about Wyeth, with patients and employees tweeting their concerns about the merger, and financial traders blogging about the impact it would have on the short to mid-term value of Pfizer’s stock.

I think there’s a good story here – a very good story – but, I’d require personally seeing ScanBuzz and comparing it to what I could pull, with a properly set up topic profile in Techrigy, Radian6 or Sysomos (just got access to their platform, as well).  I think there may even be more than one story here – but again – I need to touch what I’m going write about ….. otherwise, there’s no authenticity, and little insight, and I might as well be parroting someone else’s ideas or stories – and I’m not interested, as much, in doing that, any longer.

Another story that may be interesting is how online mapping is changing – for example CloudMade Makes Map Data Integration Easy, For a Price ….

…. With CloudMade datasets, you also don’t need to worry about querying the database. We’ve long wanted a geo database in the cloud. Google’s Maps Data could provide a simple version, but does not have rich query ability. One new API has come close: the recently-launched GeoAPI.

I suppose, we might pay for certain types of maps we want, on demand – but can’t find anywhere else, online - like toxic dump sites or bed bug ridden apartment buildings in a specific location you considering living in …. such data is valuable – but getting it on a map just the way you want it – only exists if you can find that map … and if it doesn’t exist – you can’t query the data in … perhaps, till now.    A very big story here – but again,  vision is needed to cover it, well.  Maybe  there’s a whole monetization stream here, too … listen to this…

….. the features long available in CloudMade may put it over the edge. It has customizeable mapping tiles, something no other provider has without installing your own version of OpenStreetMap (the same underlying map data used by CloudMade). Plus, CloudMade promises that monetization options are coming soon. With it, developers will be able to share the revenue from sponsored points of interest and other location-based ads.

Again, I don’t know yet what you can get without paying for it – and a custom map created this way… but I bet if you need very specific, time sensitive information that’s customized to a specific question – this may be an answer (depending on the data CloudMade has).

Another interesting story, I think is Jacob Morgan’s post on Enterprise 2.0 – Companies Interested in Enterprise 2.0 Need to Take Strategy Seriously – where companies are allocating their dollars – I’ve freely taken from Morgan’s post and re-arranged his points to make my own …

… Forrester and provides estimated interactive budgets for various companies during 2009.

Look at how little is being spent in industry verticals on Social Media compared to what is being spent in Search Marketing, for example, plus little or no money on strategy … at all.

Pay special attention to the fact that almost all Enterprise 2.0 budgets are under 3 million dollars (with a majority being under 1 million). Notice that only 6% of the total Enterprise 2.0 budget is going towards developing a strategy.

Duh … hardly anyone is investing in “Strategy“?   Wow!  I guess that means enterprises figured they already did their research and know what to spend money on, etc.

Morgan, who is pretty bright, I’m finding … goes on to say …

… it does raise the question of what companies are doing and expecting from a budget that is oftentimes under $60,000?  This is part of the reason why I asked the question, “Is Enterprise 2.0 a Crock?”I realize that we are still in the early adopter stages of social media, social business, enterprise 2.0, or whatever else you want to call it but I think we need to do a better job at allocating budgets towards Enterprise 2.0 shifts.  Why can companies justify hundreds of thousands of dollars on software and staffing but not on developing the strategies that support that? Something doesn’t make sense here and I think we need to rethink how we are approaching this.

Yep, I agree – something is wrong, and an indepth article would be a good way to examine what that is or may be.

Yet another worthy story comes from Marketing Pilgrim …  are we looking at a News Bailout Next? and asks a tough question -

… who will profit from this concept more: our democracy or the likes of Rupert Murdoch? Hey let’s just go out and figure out which failing business model victim looks the most like AIG, Bank of America or Government General Motors and throw money at their executives business and see just how much better it gets. WTF!

The question becomes …. should the government rescue media entities who also happen to own much of media we care about, because they ran it to the ground – or will they provide funding to new media, similar to the stuff Jeff Jarvis writes about, that needs a helping hand?

Yet another story comes from SeoBook – I Stopped Caring About Links (Well, Almost) where “free” and “paid” services are debated.

….. Imagine having a quarter million+ non-customers.

…..  Assume 5% of the 250,000 people are entitled ___holes. Assume another 5% of them are great people who just happened to have a minor issues in the conversion process (forgot their username, picked the wrong username, registered under the wrong email address, didn’t get the welcome email, etc.).

….. Could you imagine handling 25,000+ personal emails a year? Add in paying customers & media inqueries and now your up above 30,000. And that doesn’t even include making close to 1,000 posts a month in our member forums and reading the nearly 100,000 posts that have been made there! I love the work I do (and love helping people), but I think this really expresses the sentiment nicely.

That’s why I’m flying to Montreal in less than two weeks to work with a company called KeenKong – that is developing a solution to this issue – see my post on KeenKong – Conversational Analytics a few weeks ago.

Finally, a post on Gizmodo with a really nice graphic, way too long to reproduce here – I’m so Passé That I Don’t Know 95% of These Social Networking Sites -

… It all started with Classmates.com, which apparently has 50,000,000 users now. On the top of the pyramid is Facebook and its 300 million users, followed by MySpace’s 263 million. In the middle you have a huge constellation of sites, most of which I just can’t recognize. Trombi? Vampirefreaks? Bigadda? Cafemom? Geni? Itsmy? Qzone? Xanga?

enough for now..