Beginning to prepare for the class I’m going to give on building your own Social Media Monitoring tool/dashboard from scratch at London’s Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp in 9 weeks  and noticed Net-Savvy Executive just posted about it too.  I’m open to meeting and consulting but haven’t really sought it – just a reminder about it.

In terms of building your own Social Media Monitoring platform, Tattler looks promising but not yet ready for prime time, based on trying to install it  on my Dreamhost Virtual Server (had to install Drupal first) and then reading about all the failed installations.  I’m not giving up on Tattler – but am leaning more towards NetVibes, Yahoo! Pipes, SocialMention, etc – with several enhancements – I’ll talk about that in London – and I’ll compare the same exact queries in the self built tools with Radian6, Techrigy and pretty much, whatever I can get access to.

A few interesting “Social Thoughts” – stories I read about worth noting and discussing briefly; the pace of new platforms is moving so quickly it’s helpful for me to think of “arcs” rather than one particular subject, just now.

Last week I attended PluggedInNYC and listened to a presentation about Klout; it wasn’t the first time as I’ve known about Klout for over a year and occasionally use it.  What I didn’t know is Klout can provide Influencer Lists on Demand for many subjects, as long as there is a Topic list for it already generated.

The biggest issue I have with the list it’s based on a short period of time, the last week or two – but if you need an list of Influencers – and there is a subject that is close to what your looking for that Klout has already generated, you could get lucky.    Maybe they’ll figure out how to let everyone get a list on anything they want down the line; I hope so.

Another interesting development I noticed, coming out of Social Good, or similar to it, is the Crisis Camp Haiti that is being held this weekend in NYC and sponsored by the Personal Democracy Forum, which I’ll try to spend some time at.  One thing I’ve found is that I learn the most by working for others – on solving their problems.   In fact, being hands on is something I find is indispensable for Social Media; can’t imagine talking about analytics or social media and not actually having my hands in it.

…. Crisis Camp Haiti NYC will take place January 30 & 31, 2010 joining together with technology volunteers at Crisis Camps in three countries and 10 cities to provide local opportunities for citizens to assist in crisis mapping, data management, and RSS feed aggregation. In addition, people with specialized skills such as translation, computer programing and literacy advocates are encouraged to participate.

Crisis Camp is a open, collaborative event held in “barcamp” style with http://www.crisiscommons.org/ to provide local and international responders, Haitian community leaders and non-governmental organizations an opportunity to engage with operations on the ground in Haiti.

Where does one learn the most?  By helping others solve their problems – and giving insights freely while asking questions and listening.   Anyway, should be interesting and hopefully, helpful, all the way around.

Meanwhile, last week was dominated by Conan leaving NBC - but a guest post on TechCrunch by Paul Carr made me laugh with it’s dry wit and insight about what people are actually loyal to (see below):

…. The truth is, audiences aren’t loyal to a particular star: they’re loyal to a medium, and often within that medium they’re even loyal to a slot. Conan knows this which is why when he was offered a later slot for his show – 12:05am, with Leno being moved later to replace him – he refused. “Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the Internet a time slot doesn’t matter,” he said. “But with the Tonight Show, I believe nothing could matter more.”

….We live in a world that’s full of people who want our attention and we can’t possibly filter all of them ourselves, so we accept that we need certain media gatekeepers to do the filtering for us. NBC is one of those gatekeepers: the Tonight Show spot is the very expensive jewel in their crown – a crown that can only be worn by one person. By choosing Conan to be that person, NBC immediately signals that he’s worthy of our attention.

What Paul Carr is saying is that internet audience does not equal television audience – and people might be loyal to a medium (ie: Television, and then, a time slot).   Not sure I agree or not, but I found it interesting reading, none the less.

Between seeing TechCrunch hacked into tonight (see below), and trying to retrieve Jason Calacanis ranting this weekend against ComScore I’m wondering if TechCrunch and Calacanis deserve one another.

Having worked with Comscore and hearing a few sides of the argument all I can say – when you talk about technical things, you need to have your facts straight ESP when talking about analytics (you can muddle things up with religion, art, even social media and sometimes get away with it).  Calacanis doesn’t know what he’s talking about with the Comscore measurement issue – and one of the worst things in the world is being misinformed.   Even Quantcast got into this conversation and the sparks where sure flying this weekend.

What that has to do with TechCrunch being hacked into,  I don’t know, but in my mind, I made a connection (Arrington isn’t the nicest person in the world either … but who is?)  At any rate, I hope TechCrunch repairs the hack soon and without too much damage.

On to the next subject – Read about World Economic Forum explores growing influence of social networks in Smart Mobs the other day …. Davos is happening again but this time, somehow, it’s getting less attention.  Why?  In past years many believed the world was being secretly run from Davos as many world leaders met there and discussed information behind the scenes.  Many figured … if anyone has the answers about what is going on in the World, and why, the people at Davos do (not). But last year we found out the attendees Davos were as clueless as anyone else on the economic meltdown that happened on Wall Street and quickly spread to the rest of the world.  Suddenly, hanging out in Davos seems less appealing…..

The World Economic Forum (Jan.27-31) explores the growing influence of social networks in a workshop at the start of the Annual Meeting 2010 in Davos . The discussion is moderated by Loïc Le Meur, Founder of Seesmic and will include, among others Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning, George Colony, CEO, Forrester Research, Reid Hoffman, Founder, LinkedIn, Owen Van Natta CEO, MySpace.com and Evan Williams, CEO, Twitter.

Given the topic of the workshop it was natural to open it to input from the different social networks. WEF wants to hear from you:

1. “How are social networks changing society?”
2. “What are the most important implications and risks for society?”
3. “What should individuals and institutions do to leverage the power of social networks and improve society?”

Well, I just saw and spoke to Loic last week at the Seesmic Look launch at the New York Times Center, and I’ve met or been at conferences where most of the rest have spoken – I’ll be interested to hear what comes out of this panel but won’t hold my breath it will be any more interesting (outside of the Venue and networking possibilities) than the typical conference I attend in NYC.  Somehow, the “Who’s Who” of the world become less interesting and more “average” the closer I get.   Maybe that’s because they’re just people and don’t really know much more than you or I.

Ah .. finally TechCrunch is back from being hacked – just in time for me to mention BeeZag, a new video service that pays you for your attention.

… Dubbed a ‘real-time targeted video advertising service’ by the company, Beezag’s business model is basically to force-feed young adults with video ads in exchange for cash and coupons (which is not to say it won’t work; more on that later).

And they’ve just raised over $2.5 million (on top of an earlier $750k founding round) from a group of angel investors, so time for us to take a closer look.

Currently, the only way to get in to Beezag is to have an invite code or exercise some patience after signing up for the waiting list.

Kinda interesting – instead of targeting people, just pay them to listen to you ….. hmmm … makes me wonder.

And smart people are talking about Loyalytics including John Lovett at Web Analytics Demystified…

Localytics is a digital measurement solution designed to provide metrics specific to mobile applications. The interface allows clients to view details about their apps such as usage patterns over time, user type (new vs. returning), user software (platform and OS), as well as user hardware and device versions. It can also track events within applications such as start, stop, play, etc. which are customizable to enable capture of the most important app functionality. The tracking also includes geo location capabilities to determine where apps are dispersed across the globe. All of these metrics are provided in real-time empowering clients with instant cognition of the use and utilization of their mobile apps.

Without going into the long and short of it – Mobile hasn’t been measured well by most analytics solutions – the fact industry analysts who I respect are taking a close look at Localytics is indicative of a maturing of the capabilities to measure mobile applications – this will play a key role in the rest of 2010 and 2011, I feel.

But the best thing I read was from one of my favorite bloggers, Jacob Morgan - he seems to have the most “substance” of anyone I’ve read on Social Media – he actually thinks his material through.  I’m not saying Chris Brogan doesn’t – but Chris often talks about stuff most people already know while Jacob Morgan talks about things people need to know about they don’t know – important things like the Dunbar number and how it ties in to Social Media connections.   Here’s a quote from his post (that originates from Mortem Hansen’s Collaboration book):

…. research shows that weak ties can prove much more helpful in networking, because they form bridges to worlds we do not walk within.  Strong ties, on the other hand, tend to be worlds we already know; a good friends often knows many of the same people and things we know.  They are not the best when it comes to searching for new jobs, ideas, experts, and knowledge.  Weak ties re also good because they take less time.  It’s less time consuming to talk to someone once a month (weak tie) than twice a week (a strong tie). People can keep up quite a few weak ties without them being a burden.”

We can definitely go past the Dunbar number of 150 and I said as much a few years ago in a couple of posts (see Is Social Friending Scalable? and Friendship and Social Networks along with How Many is Too Many? Optimum Workgroup Size). The point Morgan is trying to make  is “weak bonds” are more useful and diverse than “strong bonds” – and I’ll argue it’s much easier to ask simple things of people you don’t have strong bonds with as there is less to lose.

Anyway, I’d like to go on but this post is long enough.