Social Networks » Wikis

Social Networks everywhere

susana — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:47:36 +0000

The social networking phenomenon is having an increasingly important and fast growth. This influence has also reached TV. In recent years, the TV has change its conventional pillars. Anywhere, anytime and anyone are values and pillars that make life easier for users and have been very well understood by huge technology companies such as Samsung,LG…

Social Networks and the possibility of sharing content, are two of the main functions of Smart TVs.

Just as Social Networks adapted to the mobile market during the boom of Smartphones,now they will become popular applications for Smart TVs.

All main suppliers, including Samsung, Sony, LG, Sharp and Philips, have added the most important social networks(Facebook, Twitter, Google, Talk or Skype) in their latest devices because consumers do not bother paying more for a live content and simultaneous enjoyment with friends via Social Networks (25% according to Ericsson).
In entertainment series we can also see that Social Networks are very popular in our daily lives. Terms like “pinterested”, “seen on facebook”, “retweet” are beginning to be used increasingly.

Interactive TV will have an hybrid long period of coexistence with conventional models, but it will surely succeed.

Paying bloggers to write about a company is not ethical

Jose A. del Moral — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 19:48:18 +0000

“Dear X. I am proposing you to write two posts in your blog for two of my customers. They are both hotel chains. They offer two options: either to write a post I will be sending to you, in which case you would get 20 euros, or to write it yourself, in which case you would get 30 euros. Thanks for your time”. This is not science-fiction. It is reality in Spain. And not very ethical, from my point of view.

There is a big controversy in the US about posts written by bloggers being paid by brands. Even the Federal Trade Commission wants to impose some restrictions. But in Spain there are even some PR companies that offer this service. Their customers are mainly trying to nail Google, as this type of posts increase the chances of their sites being found on search engines. Of course Google will never know they are paying for these links, as most bloggers don’t disclose what they are doing.

It is not only unethical. It’s also ridiculous. For the following reasons, some of them taken from Adam Singer’s great post on paid blogging:

- If Google finds out, it can be a very dangerous game.
- It is making blogs so uncredible and untrustful. In fact, Julio Alonso, owner of Europe’s largest blog chain, does agree with me. Once you make a mistake in this respect, it’s going to last for ever and your blog will always be viewed by the reader as influenced by money.
- Blogging is very much about talking and creating conversations. This type of posts don’t create any conversation and will die by themselves. Blogs that sell posts are actually never going to make it to any relevant.
- For the advertised company it can become a problem of trustfulness if customers find out that its products are not as good as the blogger said.

And no, I don’t think that social media is dead, though some people will kill it if they keep abusing it.

Main Spanish press group is buying local review site 11870.com

Jose A. del Moral — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:57:21 +0000

The main Spanish press group, Vocento, is buying local review site 11870.com for an unknown amount, though some sources say it could be between 6 and 10 million euros. Vocento has been developing new sites in areas in which it used to be the leader with classified ads, such as Pisos.com (real estate) and Infoempleo (jobs).

11870.com was inspired in Yelp and its founders had successfully starte up Idealista, a real estate site based in Madrid. There are many competitors in the local review market, such as Lanetro (Planeta), Salir (Intercom), German-based Qype and Metroo(*).

(*) Alianzo is a shareholder of Metroo’s mother-company.

Mio.tv buys one of the largest social networks in Spain

Jose A. del Moral — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 17:44:10 +0000

New York based Mio.tv, a community for latinos, has bought Wamba, a social network from Mallorca, Spain, funded by Danish angel investor Morten Lund, now famous for becoming bankrupt. The price published by Carlos Blanco, who is a friend of the seller, is 4-6 million euros, though another source puts it on 5 million euros. Morten Lund had invested 3 million euros for a 40% stake, which means that the price has fallen down.

Wamba is among the top social networks in Spain, but quite far away from the two leaders, Facebook and Tuenti. It grew a lot in June 2008, after it bought Vagos.es, a community for students, but its audiense was stagnant. It is supposed to have 8.4 million users.

These are the top social networks in Spain, according to Alexa:
1. Facebook
2. Tuenti
3. Wamba
4. Badoo
5. Hi5
6. MySpace
7. Sonico

Can a company really be transparent?

Jose A. del Moral — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:28:09 +0000

Transparency is one of the main rules of a 2.0 company. Nevertheless, it is not always posible to be transparent. The more open you become, the more you can get hurt. The more information you give about your company, the more constrained you get by those data you are revealing. And in a corporate area, you have to be careful, as law is not always with you. So, where do you put the border?

These are the main advantages of being transparent in an organization/company:
- Internal collaboration: Employees get the “story”, so they can also get involved.
- Marketing: Customers, press and would-be employees get informed and they happen to like it.
- The company: talking about oneself does always help to know oneself better. So it can become one of the ways of improving.
- Competition: if they get to know you very well, they might become allies more than enemies.

But there are also many disadvantages:
- Marketing: internal information is not always good. There are some data that you’d better hide.
- Employees: can you really reveal everybody’s salary? Many people might not like it. I’ve always thought that many people work because they have fun (me) but many others work mainly because of the money. That’s it. You can not avoid it.
- Competition: the more information you give to them, the easier it is for them to compete with you.
- The future: some things you say now could become a problem in the future, as somebody could use them against you.

So this is my advice:
- Blog mainly about positive things. Mainly means not always. If you want to be credible, you need to say some not so nice things from time to time. Anyway, it is very important to show passion about what you are doing.
- Blog at the beginning. When you are launching a company there is not much to hide. Just tell what you are doing. It’s fun and you will get people around the company from the very beginning.
- Blog about the future. What concerns you? What challenges are you facing? This is interesting stuff, and people will love to help you taking the right decision.
- Open an internal wiki and try to select one thing every 2-weeks wich could be open sourced. This is a good exercise.
- Don’t give too many data about finances. This is a very delicate subject and, in fact, most of the people won’t really understand it.
- Blog about the interesting people you meet in your company work, but ask them permission before you do so.
- Blog the business plan. In fact, most business plans are done to show them. So don’t worry so much about opening it. Don’t be afraid that anybody could steal your idea. Ideas are not worth so much any more.

Novel based on a wiki

Jose A. del Moral — Wed, 03 May 2006 13:13:57 +0000

Collaborative literature. That is what the authors of the Wikinovel have in mind; it is a collective creation project on the Internet, where writers like Espido Freire, Juan José Millás and Jon Arretxe will take part, each of them in a different language (English, Spanish and Basque). Alianzo has created the technological platform, but the rest is the work of an enthusiastic research group from the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts of the University of Deusto.

Besides, it is sponsored by Banco Santander and the Spanish paper El Correo Digital (Vocento) is also collaborating. The combination of technology, media and, above all, tones of literature has encouraged an incredible number of participants. It has been visited by 2000 people in the project’s first 12 hours, and tens of authors have taken part including theirs own texts to complete the Wikinovel.

Wikis in the Financial Times

Jose A. del Moral — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is an interesting article by the Financial Times about the alternatives to the email, which has become a ?killer application?. ?We can?t live without it, but we can?t manage it properly either? explains the author before describing her 4 main challenges: spam, security, organised storage, and asynchrony.Despite it all, email is still the most used tool in order to communicate and collaborate with others and even to do unimaginable things, like planning tasks, because it is a very flexible and, above all, informal application. And the fact that blackberries are becoming more and more popular to download emails anywhere makes this phenomenon even bigger.Fortunately, as the Financial Times assures, new collaborative software is being created and it could act as a substitute to emails. The article mentions wikis, blogs and social networks, among others, as tools to create communities of practice among organizations. The fact that the Bible of capitalism (shall the Economist excuse us, since it belongs to the same group) is talking about these tools is, no doubt, a sign of their settlement.

Will 2006 be the year of the wikis?

Jose A. del Moral — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Last Tuesday I was asked to make the forecast for the year 2006 in the conference about social software organized by Juan Carlos González from eDonostia. I said that Microsiervos will beat Barrapunto (if the first one keeps growing like it is doing now, it will be the first Spanish blog by next September); and together with that I made up my mind in favour of the wikis, a quite new tool with loads of potential.Luistxo Fernández (CodeSyntax) -I was sharing the table with him and Txema Garitano (Hispavista)- agreed, so my forecast may be right for the first time . To say the truth, wikis are very simple, cheap, flexible, and, what’s more, they’ve got a model of success: the Wikipedia.This is an experiment I?ve already done to two people: You give a normal user a wiki and really powerful management tools The first tool is installed in half an hour and it only requires 30 minutes of learning. The second one needs hours, even days, to install it and learn how to use it.At the beginning, the user prefers project management tools, because they?ve got more applications and because they are like a BMW when it comes to cars. After one month, you notice how little by little they move to the wiki, i.e. a Volkswagen Polo; it is less powerful but much simpler. Actually, it is so easy to use that I wonder how we have created things on the Internet without such a tool.In Alianzo, we use wikis both for our intranet and for the intranet of a couple of associations and businesses. We use them for anything that requires a bit of order and organisation. We will soon launch a curious application of the wikis for quite an important organisation (I?ll explain it another day).And here we have the results of our preaching: my friend Mentxu Ramilo has become a fan of the wikis and she?s using them to prepare an amazing conference in Vitoria. Miguel García, from San Sebastian -unfortunately, I didn?t get to know him in eDonostia- has a Wiki cultural Guide, which is like Lanetro, but much closer to us.The other day I explained in this blog all the opportunities that wikis offer to education; and another time I mentionedsome other applications. Today I?ve discovered an even more exciting one: Wiki-shops. They have been launched by Amazon, and they just consist in letting the users speak, freely, about the products for sale.In Customer Evangelists this phenomenon is known as “civil marketing“; they include it in the revolution known as Web 2.0. Steve Rubel calls it the “wikipedification” of the Internet. Putting all the nouns aside, I think it is quite clear that the wiki is to the Network what paper was to writing. Scrolls were smart, but they were not available for everybody.