Archives for 2008

Mashable Open Web Awards 2008 Open for Nominations

Mashable has opened up the Nominations for this year’s Open Web Awards. The awards recognize the leading innovations in social networking, with both applications and companies in the mix. The timescale of the nominations, online voting and winner announcements have also been released:

The categories for this year’s awards are as follows:

1. Mainstream and Large Scale Social Networks
2. Embeddable Widgets
3. Blog Plugins
4. Social News
5. Social Networking Applications
6. Social Bookmarking
7. Search And Social Search
8. Sports and Fitness
9. Photo Sharing
10. Video Sharing
11. Start Pages
12. Places and Events
13. Travel
14. Music
15. Social Shopping
16. Fashion
17. Celebrity and Gossip
18. Mobile Applications
19. Dating and Romance
20. Wiki
21. Politics
22. How-To
23. Environmental
24. Non-Profit Causes
25. Online Games
26. Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks

You can vote nominate your company, application or preferred nominee using the Mashable voting form below:

Social Media Application BackType Announces New Upgrades

Ever since its launch I’ve been a huge fan of BackType. The social media application is one of the most useful tools I’ve seen yet, both from a personal and a business viewpoint. The way it works is simple:

Users set up an account at BackType and register (or claim) their blog or website URL’s. These would be the ones that you would normally input whenever leaving a comment on a blog. If you’re not a blog owner, BackType will provide you one when you register.

This then allows BackType to recognize you whenever you post a comment to any blog you visit. That comment will then be attributed to you for the lifetime of that blog post.

The benefits of this are two-fold. You can have an immediate visual history of all the comments you’ve ever left (as long as the same URL has been used by you). Additionally, you can revisit posts from years ago and see if your views have changed.

On top of that, you can also follow your favourite bloggers and see what comments they are making. This allows you a great insight into the mindset of the people you respect and read regularly. And as a tool for businesses, knowing what’s being said about your company can offer an excellent opportunity to gauge public opinion of you.

Now, BackType are adding to the benefits already offered with a slew of new features. In a newsletter sent to BackType users, the company made the following announcement:

We’ve been releasing a lot of new things at BackType over the past month; we thought a newsletter would be a great way to keep you up-to-date. Here’s what we’ve been up to:

FriendFeed

We’re proud to announce that BackType has been added as an official service on FriendFeed. Now you can easily add all of the comments you write to your FriendFeed account ? it will work even if you’ve already added Disqus and Intense Debate, so no need to remove those.

Alerts

BackType Alerts sends you an e-mail update (immediately, or in daily or weekly digests) whenever a subscribed search term is mentioned in a comment. You can also monitor your alerts via RSS or through the alerts tab in your BackType Dashboard. Think Google Alerts for comments.

Twitter

Lots of people have discovered BackType through Twitter; in fact, we have our own account @backtype that we like to use to get feedback and help you out when things go wrong. So we thought Twitter would be a great place to share the comments you write. Now you can setup auto-posting to Twitter in daily or weekly digests. You can also tweet any comment individually ? just click the tweet link beneath the comment.

Widgets

Several people have been asking for a way to display their latest comments on their blog, so we released three widgets ? to display your comments, your shared comments and search results, respectively. All widgets are stretch-to-fit, designed to fit in the sidebar of a blog. Try them on your blog and let us know what you think.

Developers

We’ve released a comprehensive API so developers can leverage our data set; in fact, there are already developers building applications with it. If you’re working on something cool, we’d love to hear from you.

Trends

We’ve been noticing some interesting statistics and trends with comments and comment behavior that we wanted to share. So one night we decided to build a small application called BackType Trends to demonstrate ? and we made it available for developers to explore via our API. BackType Trends lets you graph mentions of keywords and topics made in millions of comments.

As I said at the beginning of this post, BackType was already one of my favourite social media apps. With these new additions to its service, maybe it will become one of yours too.

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If Only Twitter Had an Interactive Status Bar

I’ll come right out and say it – I’m a huge fan of Twitter. I think it’s one of the simplest yet most effective networking tools anywhere in social media. Such a simple networking concept as well – 140 characters to have a conversation (Tweet) or recommend a blog, website, person, business or product. Yet like any popular application, Twitter has its downside as well.

This ranges from the people who follow you simply to spam you with pitches for their business or latest money-making venture, to the Twitter users for whom having the largest amount of followers is more important than the conversation.

This is a major no-no in my book – after all, social media is all about the conversation, whether it’s from a business or personal point of view. But there could be a solution…

I’m not a technical person by any stretch of the imagination, but I wonder how easy it would be for the Twitter programmers to make their status bar interactive? At the moment, it’s just the standard “What are you doing?” that greets all users. But what if it was tied into each Twitter user’s comments and updated accordingly?

You could the have an instant view of what that person is like on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the best kind of user who gives as much as takes, and 1 being the George W. Bush of the Twitter world). Some of the messages could include:

Why would you ever follow me? This would be reserved for the users who Tweet incessantly every minute and all about their own product, blog or business. Conversation for them died with women getting the vote. Why would you follow them indeed?

Why won’t you love me? Perfect for Twitter users who are simply in it for bragging rights to their friends about how many people are following them. The only Tweet you see from them is the “Who wants to be number 10 / 20 / 30?” and so on.

Why 8/10 Whiskas cats prefer my Tweets. This would be for those Twitter users that embrace the true meaning of social media. They share, they advise, they interact, they converse – simply put, they socialize.

Of course, you could have an infinite amount of status bar messages. The Tweets that people sent out would have their own analytic measurement – using keywords, links and hash tags – and the status would change accordingly.

Like I said, I’m no technical whiz. But I’m sure either the guys at Twitter itself, or one of the numerous and highly talented application developers using Twitter, could come up with something. What about you – think it’d catch on?

Competition Time with CommentLuv

One thing that I love to encourage here is conversation. While I hope that you visit my blog because you find it (reasonably) entertaining and interesting, nothing pleases me more when I see lines of conversation opening up in the comments section of each post.

This is where I feel social media really comes into its own, and accounts for the increasing maturity and quality of blog comments. Instead of the old-school “my dad’s bigger than yours” and “wareZ ruleZ!” type of comments, the majority of blog visitors are now engaging the other visitors in conversation and views. This offers an invaluable insight into not only your readers, but the world you inhabit in general.

Yet it also takes a commitment from blog visitors to comment on blogs – time from their day, time to post and often without recognition. I always try and respond to each and every comment made – I feel it’s the least I can do when someone makes the effort to communicate with me and share some of their day.

The good people at CommentLuv obviously agree. They’ve just announced details of a competition that anyone who comments on a blog can take part in. CommentLuv is an excellent blog plug-in, that shows the last blog post of anyone who comments (as long as they have a blog, obviously). It’s a great way of recognizing the time and effort someone puts in when leaving a comment.

(For anyone who’s commented on my blog, you’ll see what I mean at the end of each comment.)

The prizes are still to be determined, although it looks like it will be between some cool gadgets and monetary prizes – or even a mix of both. Participation is easy – all you have to do is register your blog at CommentLuv and your blog details/profile, and that’s it. Full details can be found on the competition’s FAQ page. The only real stipulation is that there are no Spam comments just to increase your chances.

I love this idea. As I said earlier, it shows commitment when someone leaves a comment on a post. It’s nice to be able to recognize this. Good luck, and happy commenting!

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The Mashable Open Web Awards 2008

As the largest blog focused exclusively on social networks, Mashable has the envious position of a captive audience that listens to and respects them. Five million page views each month would suggest online users agree. Therefore, their annual Open Web Awards are much sought after and awarded to only the most deserving recipients.

Recognizing the major innovations in web technology, there are 26 categories overall. These include mainstream and large scale social networks, blog plug ins, wiki and many more. Now it’s almost time for the 2008 awards.

Nominations for the categories will begin on November 5 and remain open until November 18 2008. At that point, the first voting rounds will begin a day later on November 19, and last until December 15. The votes will then be tallied by polling partner Polldaddy with the results announced shortly thereafter.

The Open Web Awards 2007 received over a quarter of a million votes, and with double the amount of blog partners this year – 100 as opposed to last year’s 50 – it looks as if that figure will be topped with this year’s awards.

The nominations will be made public on Wednesday November 5. As an official blog partner for the awards, I’ll be bringing you all the latest news as it’s announced – from nominations, to People’s Choice Awards and more. It promises to be a great end to the year for the social network arena – I hope you stop by for the news as it happens, or check out the main Open Web Awards site itself.

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