Was reading Untangling The Social Web on the Economist Web site as a result of glancing at Jeff Larche’s post on Social Media Explorer titled Tracking The Elusive Influential and thinking how much attention is going into this these days (will write a chapter on Influentials for my book though it wasn’t in the original proposal – beware, site is still being worked on) .

For one, i would disagree with Larche in that mining social data isn’t scalable to other industries (outside cell phone companies); instead, the context and groupings of data would be different.   I guess it helps to have the data to analyze and in some cases there might not be enough, but in other cases there will be (like dating sites – I bet there’s plenty of info that could build influencer lists – travel  and review sites too).

As far as Gladwell’s insight of  having messages spread by Mavens being incorrect my feeling is we have so much data and ways of interacting via Social Networks, the effort to do so is “weak” or with little effort in many cases, so you can have spread of message without Mavens (influentials) because the message is “crowd-sourced”.   But you still need influentials to amplify and focus the messaging, after all, what do people discuss if not a story or situation about someone or something that someone brought up with the rest of us find interesting enough to share.

Also was reading that 250 Million People Now Using Facebook Connect Every Month in TechCrunch – this is all happening at LeWeb 10 today in Paris (I wanted to go this time but just as well I didn’t – have enough on my plate right now).  But that just goes to show that as more people use Social Network features like Facebook Connect, there’s more data to share and more to Analyze – it’s mushrooming so fast I doubt any analytics platform can fully process the entirety of it, today.

Just became aware of PeerIndex while commenting on the Fresh Networks Influencer study over the weekend but Who needs Whuffie – What’s your PeerIndex at Le Web? according to Mike Butcher at TechCrunch.

There there is the Google Global Advertiser Program using Global Market Finder and a step by step system.

I guess the whole thing benefits Google since they have the network to show the ads everywhere and help you write and translate them too – ha! Sounds a lot like ancient Rome.     I just wonder how good the ads will be – how much of the local context do you need to sell – maybe for a digital product, not that much, but for other things, I think we’ll have to see.  Would make a interesting case study (hint- hint).

Then, between Kindle and Google own book store – you can get books on the web and have sections of them seen (that’s attractive to me since I’m writing a book) but I’m wondering if the metrics tracking part hasn’t caught up yet.   After all, with all the explosion of sharing going on, online, how can we keep track of all of it when it’s growing so fast that no one has ALL of it.  No one, not even Google.

Google’s acquisition of Phonetic Arts looks interesting as well. According to Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch, the technology specially allows you to record a speech library, which can then be used to piece together new sentences which sound “surprisingly realistic.”

Finally, Gizmodo’s insight that nearly everything looks better at a 45 degree angle hits home for me as it helps explain why a painting of mine done a while back was one of my best.

Here’s the 45 degree off lamp.

Here’s my painting “Homage to Manet” – painted a while back – my style is different now, when I paint but I recall the tilt of my angle is something I didn’t have in my other works – it was also the colors and subject and place I was living in at the time, I would not put it all on the angle, but the tilted angle did help a lot, I think, make the painting more “special”.

It’s one of those paintings I should never have parted with … oh well.