Weekly Blogistan Round-Up no. 21/2009

This weekly round-up comes with a free day of delay, as I was pretty business last night taking pictures of the sunset from Braunsberg. Riding my bike home I had to be very careful since a nightly meeting of a rabbit and a motorcycle is usually a very unpleasant experience for both sides. I haven't digi developped all pics yet, but this one turned out quite nicely:

So back to blogging business – what a week! We now finally know that there actually *are* differences when it comes to the two sexes using social media.

Men are from Facebook, women are from Twitter?

Despite all post-modern philosophy, a new study seems to prove that there actually gender-driven differences between men and women. Hunter-gatherer, anyone?

“Men generally have the attitude, I'm going to go there, I've got to get it and get out,” says Phillips. “Females like to go online and socialize and shop around – much like going into a store.”

Track these ole blue eyes

Problogger looks his readers closely into their eyes. Latest findings in eye-tracking research:

For headlines ? especially longer ones ? it would appear that the first couple of words need to be real attention-grabbers.
Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best.
Shorter paragraphs performed better in Eyetrack III research than longer ones.

Tweet, but tweet safely

Twitter is all about the birds (even though a couple of bees and flowers have been reported lately), but don't forget the precious advice our swimming friends have got in store for us: if something smells phishy, it probably is. That's we all kinds of online-scams determined to acquire your login called phishing. And yes, indeed, it all actually is very complicated and stuff, but this article might help you to separate the spammers from the scammers:

With Twitter?s monumental growth, there has been an increase in the amount of scammers looking to exploit individuals for profit either by the technology itself or by “social engineering”. Many of the same security disciplines required when using email or the web in general now apply to Twitter.

Death of a Dolla

Up-and-coming rapper Dolla was murdered last week – shorty before his death he had started twittering and now fans are using his MySpace page as a virtual memorial site:

The issue raises again an interesting question – what happens to social networking accounts after their original owner has passed away? There isn't really a legal stipulation about who takes possession of a user's social networking accounts, and they often become sort-of “memorials” to their late owners.

Digital Influence Mapping

As marketing gets more and more complex, questions will be asked about the true nature of your friends, John Bell argues. And his conclusio definitely is worth taking into consideration:

We will need to trun our attention to complex integrated programs that perserve the authenticity of social media-delivered opinion by combining it with clearly distinguishable and highly-relevant advertising.
Social media marketing will continue to get more complex.It's future is in integrated programs that mix the enthusiasm of happy, even delighted, customers and the reach and relevance of targeted marketing.

In defense of Friendfeed

Each week new arguments about the greatness of FriendFeed turn up. Elias even thinks that big G should add the service to its shopping cart:

Friendfeed does real time better than anyone else. Facebook rules when it comes to the activity stream of a person ? meaning, tracking an individual's life and to some extent media sharing. Twitter rules for sentiment, as it's like one massive chat room, and to some extent link sharing. But Friendfeed, quite frankly, craps all over Facebook and Twitter in real time search.

Indeed, FF knows a good deal about aggregation… the fact that humans are rare visitors while bots love Friendfeed is a different story though.

Videos of the week

This week two brilliant clips caught my attention: Multitouch Barcelona designed and implemented the first “Human Interface” ever, called Hi – see it in action:

And then there's Paul Thompson's “Super Smooth Level Flight over Frying Pan Farm Park” which proves, that model airplanes and video cameras are a winning combination:

And that's pretty much it for this week – thanks for your whuffies, stop by again soon, I'll keep you posted!

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