Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding Explained

Now this is a nice video! It tells that using crowds for things is not a new idea but with help of Internet we can reach faster more people.
 
Not only the content but I also like the style of this video :).

LinkedIn spam

Last week I got a LinkedIn invitation from a genius who was a fan of Michael Jackson. At the same time he holds several amazing positions:

-Owner of Global LINK SERVE
-C.E.O of FORD
-C.E.O of Toshiba Japan
-Director in Nokia
-Director in sharp Electronics
-Director in Sony Electronics Company
-Director in Lexus
-Director in colgate Palmolive usa

He must be a busy guy...

What is really amazing is that he has got 15 new contacts after yesterday and there´s now only 2 people between him and me.

Why isn´t this account already closed? I would think LinkedIn notices if someone sents thousands of invitations in a short period and starts suspecting something weird. And if someone is CEO for several companies at the same time, doesn´t it ring a warning bell somewhere?

And what does the people think when they accept invitations from a stranger?

There is an option to report about spam in LinkedIn too but in this case I chose the option of I don´t know this person and after that there´s no way to report about the spammers. :P

Social networking @ Common Craft

Social networking video explains the idea behind the networking services, e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.

Social bookmarking @ Common Craft

A friend of mine asked how to manage bookmarks, so once again it's time for a Common Craft video:



I created a new account for me. It's easy to take the bookmarks from your browsers and add them to del.icio.us, here are the instructions for e.g. IE7, IE6 or Firefox.

You can choose to keep your bookmarks private or share them with your friends and the world. Have fun!

Blogs @ Common Craft

Yet another Common Craft video, this time about blogs:



I've watched that several times every now and then and still find very useful ideas from it. Until now I have used Blogilista to find the new blogs to follow since I've been interested about Finnish blogs and bloggers. Now that I'd like to start building a global blogosphere for me with blogs and followers from all over the world I need new tricks. The video recommended to search blogs from Google's blog search or Technorati. I added my blog to Google's blog search and also to Technorati by claiming it (sounds like a gold rush, does it? Well, I have a hidden treasure here ;). For that purpose I needed to add this code here:

Technorati Profile .

I hope I can get new readers from those search, so welcome :).

PS. I also started to follow Common Craft at Twitter.

Twitter irony

Harhar, see this video.

Social media figures

Yle is tweeting its news, but only in English. Interesting, what will be the next Finnish media to join Twitter?

The latest news was about Facebook: "While some employers are blocking employees from logging onto the social utility site Facebook during office hours, other companies are urging their marketing people to tap into the money-making potential social media holds."

Guess how many Finnish FB users there is? According to Yle: some 1.5 million Finnish users! Recently I read that 20% of Internet users in the world use Facebook, now I'd like to know how many Finns use Internet.

Some stats from Tietoviikko:

1. Qzone has 200 million users
2. Facebook has 175 million users
3. Microsoft Windows Live Spaces (blog network) has 126 million users
4. MySpace has over 100 million users.
5. Google's Orkut service has 67 million users.
6. LinkedIn has 36 million users.

Twitter mania is ongoing in States: they were 4 million people in the U.S. visiting the site in February while in January it was only 2.6 million.

LinkedIn - what it is for me?

I showed you the video about LinkedIn. Now I'd like to add some other nice sides of the service:

1. It's always interesting to see who knows who. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo has only 6 contacts in LinkedIn (Bill Gates has 5 and Jari Sarasvuo has 2). Anssi Vanjoki has 1 recommendation (he has recommended 3 persons) and 189 contacts and I have 18 colleagues who are connected to one of Anssi's colleagues. And there's only two persons between me and Obama according to LinkedIn...

2. LinkedIn shows very clearly who are the contacts that I and x shares. If I am looking for a job, I can see if the hiring person knows someone from my network and ask my contact e.g. if he/she would be a nice boss to work with ;). I have also been often very surprised to see how small the world really is: e.g. my Spanish friend knows my Russian colleague.

3. Speaking about jobs, there are also job ads in LinkedIn.

4. From LinkedIn you can easily follow where your old colleagues or class mates are currently working and you can see their email addresses from there.

5. Your turn: what is the feature that you like in LinkedIn?

Judging people every day

Not that long ago you needed to make hard decisions once a year: to whom to send Christmas cards. Who belongs to your (extended) family, are your neighbours worth a card, do you still want to greet your old class mates or colleagues that you saw 10 years ago and what about people you never see: the postman, your landlord.

Now you need to judge people every day: to accept an invitation or not in one of those social networks. E.g. Facebook was meant for friends and LinkedIn for colleagues, right? Now I got FB invitations from people that are not in my phone's contacts and from people that I have never seen in real life. Sounds like a close friend? How about people that share the same office but with whom you never worked or even talked, you know their name but that's it - can you really consider them as your colleagues in LinkedIn?

I'm a friendly person and sometimes making these decisions is very difficult. If i accept an invitation from x that I don't know that well do I then need to invite y that I know much better? If I reject an invitation do I need to explain why I did it? If I have way too many friends in a system, I can't actually follow them all - a recent study was saying that you can follow "only" about 150 persons. And then the privacy issue: I don't want to share the same stuff with my friends and my so called friends. I wrote earlier about my blogs: I have several of them and their themes are tailored for the audience. At the moment I can't do the same in the social networks - or should I create several accounts? Not very handy...

Any comments? Do you find it easy to make these decisions?

Toikkanen's microblog service network

Tapani Toikkanen draw this amazing picture about the microblogging service interconnections (it's ok to loan the picture here because it has Creative Commons licence and I told the origin).

A blog and a microblog, what's the difference?

I compare blog entries to emails and microblog entries to SMSs. Blog entries are typically longer and can contain pictures while microblog entries are often plain text and quite short (in Twitter 140 signs in Facebook 160 signs).

Twitter: first experiences

After Facebook Twitter looks really messy.

See e.g. Martha's page - her updates and her answers to other Twitter users (comments begin with @) are shown in reversed chronological order and in order to follow the conversations you'd need to jump to the back and forth (and even if I did it, I didn't notice to which update she was referring).

When you move your cursor above the tweeties (I think that was the term for Twitter status updates?) they are highlighted in grey and there are two icons: with star you can mark your favorite tweeties and with arrow you can answer to them.

Normally the tweeties are public to everyone in Internet (see the latest tweeties by all Twitter users from here) but you can also choose to protect them by choosing the persons who are able to follow them. Once again you need to make decisions: what to share and whom to share.

Blogging and Blogilista

After 7 blog entries it's time to promote this blog to readers (I don't want to be one of those persons who put up a blog, writes the first entry, tells the world about it and then never go back). Starting a blog is easy, all you need is a name and idea about the topics you want to include (adding topics afterwards is easy too but it is good to think about this already from the beginning).

I started blogging 4 years ago and now I have several of them. For close friends and family I have blogs about my private life and sharing the pictures of kids (I don't want put our faces to Internet, not even to FACEbook). Then I have blogs about my hobbies (from public Share on Ovi photo-blog to semi-public Yahoo's 360 blog) and my work related blogs: Hidden treasure in Nokia's intranet and Hidden treasure 2.0 here.

Why do I have so many blogs? Because the audiences are different: my friends might not be interested about my hobbies, my colleagues might not like to watch my kids playing in the snow and only part of my hobby friends are carried away about web2.0. I also need to keep Nokia confidential information inside the company, that's not to be shared in Internet. So I can't tease my contacts by putting all fruits in the same basket - I let them to choose the apples and berries they find tasty. That's the nice thing about RSS feeds: the reader makes the decisions.

So where do I find the eaters for my juicy web2.0 stuff? As I come from Finland the obvious answer is Blogilista. I just added my blog there. In web20 category there were 11 blogs, in web2 64 (I need to check those blogs and start networking with the interesting ones). Blogilista is the place where you can find the blogs about the subject that you are interested, there is something for everyone, the variety is huge! You might use Blogilista as a feedreader service too.

Joining Twitter

So I joined Twitter. Creating the account was pretty easy but the next step failed: I was not able to see if my contacts in Yahoo email are Twitter users. Then I was suggested some popular people and organizations to follow and I chose e.g. Martha Stewart since I love crafts. Amazing amount of followers she has... My profile is visible here. So Twitter, here I come, I hope you have something interesting for me!

Yle news promotes Twitter

Funny to see Twitter in the main news :). They tell Twitter has come to Finland, Pepsi Max uses it for promoting. E.g. Barack Obama is using Twitter and anyone can start following him - the difference between Twitter and Facebook is that in the latter people need to approve friends.

Not only companies but for celebs this is a great thing: they can promote themselves for free, and only to the persons who are interested about them, not sending spam messages (which I BTW hate!).

So far I have avoided Twitter since none of my friends is actively using it, i.e. they have not sent me any invites. But now that even Yle says Twitter is the cool thing, I need to go there too. ;) To be continued...

Facebook changes

Facebook is going to change soon, see what's coming. It's about filtering the data: you get more freedom who of your friends and what kind of data you want to follow more closely.

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Already now you can choose how much you are sharing.
Go to My Account - Settings - Privacy manage

News Feed and Wall

Control what stories about you get published to your profile and to your friends’ News Feeds.

Actions visible to friends:

Stories are published when you edit your profile information, join a new network, or update your Status. Also publish stories when you...

		Remove Profile Info
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Moozement, connect with your training buddies

While going through my RSS feeds in Bloglines I found out that Ivan had introduced his hobby project called Moozement, a social network for sharing sport activities. Really interesting, go and check it out. :)