Earthquake's Epicenter?: Twitter

I listened to a fascinating discussion the other day on NPR regarding newly-found scientific uses of crowd-sourced data.

First, my pseudo-definition of crowd-sourcing:

- taking little bits of information from lots of individuals and smart devices, piecing it all together, and using the resulting set of data to make intelligent decisions.

One of the major crowd-sourcing developments is tracking earthquakes on Twitter. Scientists found that although not as accurate as seismographs, mining Twitter for specific keywords and phrases allow them to more quickly determine an earthquake's epicenter and magnitude. And I bet you thought Twitter was useless.

More crowd-sourcing action:

1. Google mines GPS-enabled phones for speed and computes road congestion

2. Google has helped the CDC track flu outbreaks faster than ever by combining search phrases with their geographic origin

Retirement?

What do you think, time to retire the blog? I haven't posted in over 6 months now. I'm pretty sure that means my blog is dead.

Or maybe I should just rehash it so it prominently shows a combo of Twitter & Flickr? Is anybody out there? Just nod if you can hear me.

Cheap on the Tweet

If you're a deal seeker, Twitter may be able to help you. Check out CheapTweet -- a Digg-esque site where the most popular deals are Tweeted & vetted by the Twitter community.

Think of it as answering the question, "what deals are people finding right now".

Why Twitter Matters

If you're a regular visitor to my blog, you're probably used to seeing my Twitter feed broadcast my latest ramblings.  And I'm willing to bet there are a number of people out there that a) don't know what Twitter is, b) don't understand Twitter, or c) think Twitter is overrated and will be gone in a year.

Well I've just read an article tweeted by @jcuene preaching why Twitter (and Twitter search) may become more important than most people think.  It boils down to this:

Google Search: provides the most relevant content on the Web that match your search terms

Twitter Search: provides the most recent content on Twitter that match your search terms

In other words, Google helps you find information.  Twitter helps you find information that is being discussed right now.

Social Media 101 - a.k.a. The Barack Way

I was about to write a post highlighting a particularly bad use of social media, when I stopped and (no offense) thought about my audience.  So instead, I thought I'd take a step back and briefly touch on what social media is all about in case there are any lingering questions out there.

Social Media is about you... whether you are a creator, consumer, or contributor, social media needs you.  Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and YouTube are all exemplary examples.

YouTube would be a worthless site if nobody uploaded a video.  It would be equally worthless if nobody ever watched those videos.  And it wouldn't be as strong of a website if nobody commented on, linked to, or shared its videos either.

Social Media is about taking traditional content & publication models and flipping them on their head.  Instead of a few powerhouse publishers creating content and distributing it out to the masses, Social Media is about the average Joe or Kjersten writing a blog post, Digging an article, Twittering about Super Bowl commercials, writing a product review, or...you get the idea

This can be both extremely exciting and/or incredibly scary, depending on who you are.  Are you a CEO of a company whose products are being bashed by thousands?  Scary.  Are you a marketer who just happened to put together a web video that was forwarded to friends by the thousands?  Amazing.

And thus, the reason why this "new" form of media is so amazing.  It's 99.9% democratic, there are no boundaries, and nobody knows what the heck to do with it.

Thanks for reading and doing your part.  I'm trying to keep up with my end of the deal.

Hi, I'm from 1984

So I finally decided to join Twitter. Thought it would be an easy way to update my Facebook status & blog all in one simple 140-characters-or-less sentence.

I'm so cutting edge with technology it hurts.