Today’s TV on Tuesday is a TED Talk by James Surowiecki, finance writer for the New Yorker and author of The Wisdom of the Crowds. He pinpoints the moments that social media became as relevant and informational as traditional news (such as the 2005 tsunami or the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes) and how it may even trump traditional media in its ability to preserve personal stories in their most direct form.  How do you get your news these days? Is it from social media (tweets, Facebook updates, and the like) or more traditional sources (such as the New York Times)?

The media landscape has changed over time from the printing press to the telephone to radio waves that allowed TV and radio.  However, the internet is the first source of media that gives us the man-to-many conversation pattern, rather than the one-to-one pattern of the phone, or the one-to-many pattern of radio and television.  Everyone is a listener, everyone is a producer – it’s like having a phone that could turn into a radio if you pushed the right buttons.  Listen to Clay Shirky as he addresses how this powerful paradigm shift has affected how we receive news – from all around rather than the top down – and how that affects the workings of the world and the politics within it.  This is an amazing talk about the power of social media, and the power that social media endows people with.

We’ve all heard of Facebook, MySpace, Linked In, and Twitter.  Maybe you have an account on one or the other, or even all four.  You, with millions of other users, are along the ride of being available 24/7 to have friends, family members, and other networks to see your information, profile, and pictures.  Now being able to share posts on your daily life exercises and thoughts, we- as a social networking obsessed world- are now officially spend 82% more time on these sites compared to the amount of time we put just a year earlier.

So much time that some of us are putting in the number of hours equivalent to a full-time job – a full-time job that doesn’t take a break on weekends. If the average person spends around five and a half hours a day, seven days a week, that leads one to a little shy of forty hours. Didn’t think you spent that much time each week, did you?

And it’s not just the United States that is infatuated with social networking. Australia, Switzerland, Brazil, Japan, Italy, Spain, and the entire U.K is shortly behind us. In Fact, the US may have the most people belonging to these groups, but Australians have the lead for times-per-day visits. Around the globe, people are interested in having people follow them and have people interested in what they are doing; all day, everyday.  Are we in a self-obsessed world, or just a world that loves to communicate with each other? With social networking up by 82% from last year, how much longer will it be before all of our time is spent on the computer?

People have been concerned since the initial creation of social media that it will disconnect us – that the digital world will replace the “real” world and as such, relationships will suffer.  Here, Stefana Broadbent argues the opposite.  She’s an ethnographer who studies human interaction, and her research shows how communication tecnology is capable of cultivating deeper relationships, bringing love across barriers like distance and workplace rules.  What do you think – do you think the internet enables or prevents intimacy?  How has it affected the relationships in your life?

By now, everyone’s heard about the devastating earthquake in Haiti: as we write this, over 100,000 are feared dead.  We posted on Tuesday about how social media can save lives, and suddenly, we’re given the opportunity to witness it in action.  According to CNN, a fundraising campaign done solely through text messages and networking sites like Twitter and Facebook has raised more than $3 million for the Red Cross’s relief work in Haiti.  Mass text messages went out on various carriers last night, urging users to text “HAITI” to 90999 in order to donate $10 to the relief effort, to be added to their phone bill at the end of the month.  IPhone developer Justin Williams jumpstarted the idea of Mac and IPhone developers decided to donate a day’s worth of sales to Haitian relief efforts.  He tweeted his idea, blogged about it, and got a bunch of developers behind him.   The result? IndieRelief, where companies and individual developers can choose an organization for a day’s worth of sales to go to.

The crisis in Haiti is heartbreaking, but it’s wonderful to see the tools we use to talk about our lives and promote our business to be used to spread widespread good in this way.  With the types of social networks we have in place worldwide, it hardly takes any effort to mobilize millions of people, and that’s an amazing thing.

For more information and updates on Haiti, click here.

As more evidence of the reach of social media, we leave you with some TwitPics of Haiti, taken by @CarelPedre and @MarvinAdy.  And if you have any more information on relief efforts through social media or otherwise, please share!

[via Mashable]

In the recent post by Twitter’s CEO, Evan Williams, he tweets: “Across all metrics that matter, yesterday was Twitter’s highest-usage day ever. (And today will be bigger.)” All well and good, but this raises the question:  why the concern? Why the defiance? Twitter’s doing all right… isn’t it?

Doing a bit of sleuthing, we uncovered the following social media trends over the past year:

Facebook’s number of visits, as perhaps expected, are on an upward trajectory. But Twitter and LinkedIn are a different story: the number of visits are completely flatling.  The website Compete allows comparison between various sites. Go to Compete’s website > click the green “try it for free” link > create a login. Once thats done you can click on the link “compare sites” and fill in the boxes with sites you want to compare statistically. We put in Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and clicked the one year link to see the data over the past 12 months.  This is what we saw:

What do you think are the reasons for this?  Are LinkedIn and Twitter simply trends that have passed their prime?  And what allows Facebook to be eternally popular – the increase in services, the changing interfaces, or simply the wider market?  Let us know your thoughts!

We spend a lot of time talking about social media’s many uses in business, but today we’re going to talk about a broader use for social media – a use that can actually save lives.  Erik Hersman discusses how texting can be used to deliver life saving information quickly.  Interestingly, he also discusses how people can be used to determine the veracity of information in order to filter it – an idea that, while generated in interest of saving lives, is entirely applicable for business.  Enjoy!

Many people are attributing the success of Avatar to the influence and vast reaches of social media. At first, we shook our heads in denial. You see, having seen Avatar we would like to say that Cameron’s one billion dollar profit (one billion dollars!!) is directly related to the stunning visuals, thought-provoking themes and truly inspiring characters created in the film.

Nevertheless: It must be grudgingly admitted that the team at Avatar’s commitment to social media is almost as impressive as their commitment to pure awesome in the actual film. The facts are these: Avatar has Facebook, Myspace and a Twitter page. On Twitter they have 20,245 followers, and even more impressive they have 725,707 friends on Facebook. This allowed already fascinated more polite word for obsessed) fans to post, tweet and get involved in the geek event of of the season. Some might argue that Twitter, Facebook and Myspace accounts are fairly usual now as Hollywood has jumped on the bandwagon and realized the importance of online marketing – enter Avatar’s interactive trailer…

The piece de resistance, the straw that broke the camel’s back (or in Cameron’s case, gave the camel a gold saddle worth one billion dollars) is the interactive trailer. You need to download it but it’s worth it. The genius of this trailer is that there are 10 hotspots, where you have the option to click for further in depth information. such as cast interviews. Once you have had your fill of Jake Sully, you can click to resume the remainder of the visually stunning trailer. Not only that, but you can get all of the latest Twitter, Flickr and YouTube feeds right from the trailer.

In conclusion, the social media force cannot be underestimated, It is a powerful tool that even such powerhouses as James Cameron cannot ignore. But as cool as tweeting, Facebook posting and clicking on interactive trailers are, still go and see the movie.

And bring your 3D glasses. It’s an awesome look.

Twitter recently posted “Top Twitter Trends of 2009”; which shows that in 2009, Tweeters tweeted about just about anything. Twitter conversations, issues and dialogues spanned from Obama’s inaugural speech, to Harry Potters, Susan Boyle and beyond.

So on any given day in 2010, how can an individual tweeter hope to know exactly what is happening in the Twitterverse? The answer? Trending hashtags! Hashtags are tags that consolidate tweets on a particular topic so trending hashtags show the main topics that are occupying Twitter at any particular moment.

You may look at the results for 2009 Twitter trends and think…er…What is the point of looking at trending hashtags if it only confirms the enormous ground covered each day by tweets? We’ll tell you: This way, we can be involved in dialogues that matter – we can see what Tweeters are mainly interested in and jump right on the bandwagon.  Of course, due to the nature of Twitter, tweets that matter are forever changing. In order to be ahead of the game, or at least fast on its heels, check out Wthashtag.com: It shows the currently trending hashtags for tweets and if it can, dishes out a brief description as well.

So, today we will leave you with the tending hashtags as of this moment in 2010: They are (drumroll) #nowplaying, #meant4directmessage, #ThingsYouDontSay, #willgetyourejected, #uksnow, #whatsfunnierthan. All of these a testament to the vibe of 2010 in the wake of the festive holidays: Completely irreverent and nothing to do with turkey.

According to the Global Language Monitor, it is. Their recently conducted poll for the most used words of 2009 put Twitter as the number one word of the year, followed by Barack Obama and H1N1. What I find striking is the contrast between the big and the little. When people say the president’s name, they generally say it in reference to large scale issues: healthcare, national security, taxes – things that affect us not only now, but for years to come. Swine flu is an international epidemic. Yet Twitter is used for the super short term: the latest breaking news, a sale or special that will only last 2 hours, a joke that is momentarily amusing. Have we experienced a paradigm shift, where the little has captured our attention more than the big, or are we simply tweeting away to distract ourselves from the larger woes of the world? What do you think accounts for the mega success of Twitter? Is it a passing trend or here to stay?