Its a bird, its a plane, its the Social Media Group roundup.
Google Search with My Location Experimental Ad: “Pizza. Pizza. Pizza.”
Google just released this experimental ad to promote geolocation-enable mobile search in which a guy says the word “pizza” for ten minutes straight. Some intrepid soul who managed to tough out the whole thing reports that Easter Eggs abound:
Click on the basketball at 0:42, on the word “azzip” at 1:22, on the fire at 1:47, on the word “Florida” at 4:39, on the horse head at 5:49, on the dinosaur at 6:36, on Santa at 7:58 and on the toast at 9:06.
How long can you last?
[huffpo.]
Social Media for Social Good: Dan Savage Creates YouTube Channel to Help Gay Teens
Michelle’s pick this week is this incredible project:
(via Mashable):
Sex advice columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage has launched a YouTube channel called “It Gets Better.” He’s soliciting videos from fans who want to provide support and encouragement to gay teens who face adversity, discrimination and bullying in high school.
Savage announced the new channel today in episode 205 of his podcast. He’s also hinted on his blog that further explanation will come in the next issue of his sex advice column “Savage Love.” The channel was created after Indiana teenager Billy Lucas committed suicide in response to bullying from his classmates, who assaulted him with epithets and told him to go home and kill himself because he was gay.
Each video will feature a role model sharing personal experiences that illustrate that life for gays and lesbians improves beyond high school.
Twitter for real-time journalism: Did Mother Jones coverage take it too far?
Hasdeep pointed me to Phil Bronstein’s column at HuffPo:
Everyone’s a critic in the digital mosh pit. But the venerable and politically earnest magazine Mother Jones was accused last week of “retweeting rape.”
So what really happened? And is a “rape feed” something we shouldn’t do, just because it hasn’t been done before?
Mother Jones reporter Mac McClelland, currently in Haiti, decided to live-tweet her day spent with a Haitian rape victim trying to get medical care. The power and immediacy of the real-time, staccato exposition, punctuated with emotion … was unpleasantly jarring for some followers used to the magazine’s typically lengthy, contextual articles.
Data Mining of social networks: insights in social connections
This article about network data mining from The Economist captured Mark’s imagination:
“Of course, companies have long mined their data to improve sales and productivity. But broadening data mining to include analysis of social networks makes new things possible. Modelling social relationships is akin to creating an “index of power”, says Stephen Borgatti, a network-analysis expert at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. In some companies, e-mails are analysed automatically to help bosses manage their workers. Employees who are often asked for advice may be good candidates for promotion, for example.”
List of the Week: The Seven Best “Why Facebook is Down” Cracks
Over at GigaOm Mathew Ingram compiles seven of the most awesome cracks made during this week’s Facebook outage including this doozy:
