This is a quick overview of the first 141623 definitions of social media by the following people:

• Ben Parr: “… the use of electronic and Internet tools for the purpose of sharing and discussing information and experiences with other human beings in more efficient ways”
• Anthony Mayfield: “… a group of new kinds of online media, which share most or all of the following characteristics: 1) Participation … 2) Openness … 3) Conversation … 4) Community … 5) Connectedness”
• Robert Scoble: “… Internet media that has the ability to interact with it in some way”
• Brian Solis: “… put the power of media into the hands of the people, which transformed content consumers into content producers”
• Stowe Boyd: “1) Social Media Is Not A Broadcast Medium … 2) Social Media Is Many-To-Many … 3) Social Media Is Open … 4) Social Media Is Disruptive”
• Chris Heuer: “… redefining how we relate to each other as humans and how we as humans relate to the organizations that serve us”
• Joseph Thornley: “… online communications in which individuals shift fluidly and flexibly between the role of audience and author”
• David Meerman Scott: “… online media with a participatory or interactive component”
• Ike Pigott: “… strange brew of Technology + People + Organization + Freedom”
• Deirdre Breakenridge (PR 2.0, FT Press 2008, xviii): “… anything that uses the Internet to facilitate conversations between people”
• Robert Berkman (The Art of Strategic Listening, Paramount, 10): “Blogs, wikis, digital videos or any other kind of textual or multimedia forms of media and typically generated by ordinary consumers”
• Beth Kanter: “… a way of using the Internet to instantly collaborate, share information, or have a conversation ideas or causes we care about”
• Daniel Nations: “… a social instrument of communication”
• Eric Karjaluoto: “… media that users can easily participate in and contribute to”
• Louis Gray: “… a loose term that largely relies on user generated content”
• Marta Kagan: “… people having conversations online”
• Sarah Worsham: “… it’s about the shared meaning you create with your customers as you interact with them and they with each other”
• Mark Dykeman: “… the means for any person to: publish digital creative content; provide and obtain real-time feedback via on-line discussions, commentary, and evaluations; and incorporate changes or corrections to the original content”
• Ashwini Dhagamwar and Sandeep Arora: “… allows people to participate using Media (text, audio, video, pictures) instantly. Social Media is the story about people participation on a scale never seen before. Social Media is the fusion of technology and social behavior”
• Toby Beresford: “… editorless content prioritised by popularity”
• Jeff Jarvis: “Play is social. Media is play. Social media is fun”
• Susan B. Barnes (Understanding Social Media from the Media Ecology Perspective): “… interpersonal media. It supports the sharing of personal exchanges in new and unique ways”
• Bonnye E. Stuart, Marilyn S. Sarow, Laurence Stuart (Integrated Business Communication in a Global Marketplace): “… a term applied to digital media that enable customers to control content”

I’m planning to putting together a systematic overview à la Kroeber/Kluckhohn. But to do this, I’m still looking for further ways to define social media. So, whose definition is still missing?

But this is not the case. If you take a look at Google search for “Obama” in the last 30 days, the USA only rank fourth on the list of countries searching for the president-elect:

1. Ethiopia
2. Kenya
3. Cameroon
4. Uganda
5. United States
6. Senegal
7. Benin
8. Ghana
9. Nigeria
10. Cuba

Is this a language issue - Obama perhaps being a very common name or word in those countries - or is this really a sign for the emergence of a more globalized internet? Is it about Obama or obama? There is some evidence for the second explanation: 1) the search volume clearly peaks on 5 November, the day after the election, 2) the three top related searches are for “barack obama”, “obama mccain” and “mccain”, 3) none of the mentioned countries were in the top list in 2005.

So, are we really witnessing the beginning of a truly global internet or a worldwide discursive space? Manuel Castells spoke of the emergence of global networks in production, communication, consummation and power, but also of locales or regions that are virtually cut off from this network. Maybe Africa is not so unlinked anymore?

Some users feared that they would not be able to see the fail whale after Twitter announced having solved a lot of their uptime issues - but as you see in this chart, there have been whale sightings all through September.

The latest spike had been the Twitter redesign on 20 September which got the Twitterati puzzling whether their favorite cetacean had also been given a face-lift. Rest assured - this had not been the case.

In the meanwhile the financial crisis has gathered a lot more search engine buzz as you can see in the following graph. But it still has not reached the level of buzz that bacon has.

When will this topic pass the bacon test?

[via]

Now it’s been one month and I did a short comparison of last month’s Google numbers with this month’s. The result is pretty impressive: almost every page did lose unique visitors in the last four weeks:

Mozilla did experience the greatest loss. I am not sure whether this is a measurement error due to the early release of Google’s application or a real downfall. Perhaps their all-time high on Firefox download day has something to do with this? But a look at the graph Google’s AdPlanner draws for German visitors to Mozilla.com does not suggest any dramatic drop:

If you search for “Germany”, TwitDir is able to find 8,095 users while Twitter reports 10,145. So TwitDir only knows 80% of the people Twitter knows who entered as their location “Germany”. On the other hand there’s UK. Here TwitDir reports even less: only 65% of Twitter users. The numbers for France or Japan are in between the both.

Now comes the delicate part. We only can guess that TwitDir also knows about 65-80% of the total users. Currently that’s 3,011,532. So the magic number of total Twitter users should be between 3,500,000 and 4,500,000. Use at your own risk.

Among the major Facebook age segments, the fastest growing are teens (13-17) and young (26-34) to middle-age (35-44) professionals, with the growth in teens driven by non-U.S. markets. Also note the strong growth in the much smaller 45-54 and 55-59 age groups

So, social networking is not a teen thing anymore (if it ever was). Unfortunately, no numbers for Germany are mentioned in the article, so I took a quick look at Facebook myself and the result is the following:

So, while I have no earlier numbers to compare with, in contrast to the US, France and Turkey, the 18-28 age group in Germany is clearly below 50%. Additionally, the 13-17 age group is weaker than in the US or France, where it encompasses more than 15%. The German age distribution resembles the UK the most.

If you break it down in single years, you get the following distribution. The largest age class is 25. The high number for 65 probably should be an artifact.

A few months ago, I wrote a post for my German blog that described Google as a global database of people’s will to knowledge and of their wishes (this of course echoes John Batelle’s famous phrase). In that particular post I then put forth a wish myself: that we receive some kind of API to access this global database of searches.

Google Insight for Search

With Google Insight for Search (”Google Trends on steroids” as Andrew Chen calls it) the search company made a huge step in the right direction. Finally, they’re giving us back some of the information we type into the famous form field day on and day off. Our information.

We can now access information about what terms are searched for when and where. This cannot be underestimated. It’s not only possible to trace whether the global search population prefers red wine or white wine. It’s also a great tool for monitoring brands, especially with the possibility to show the headlines for data points that are somehow standing out of the general trends. It also makes comparing search terms within different categories a breeze - so is this interface to the inner workings of the noosphere a dream come true?

Some things seem unfinished yet. For example the algorithm that is used to match headlines to the graphs. When I’m displaying search terms for Austria, I get headlines from Germany that seem to have nothing to do with Austria. And when I’m analyzing search terms for Germany, I get a lot of headlines from the Netherlands which even is another language. I don’t know how this is done, but it can certainly be improved.

On the other hand, what I like about this service: it does not omit results for Google’s own projects as has been the case with Google Trends for Websites. It does not deny that Knol is not a serious rival for Wikipedia yet and that the distance between Google and Yahoo is not that great (besides: that’s a whole lot of people using Google to search for Google).

A few uses for Google Insight for Search that immediately crossed my mind:

• Monitoring Brands and Corporations
• Analyzing where people using your product live
• Search Engine Optimization
• Meme tracking / Buzz monitoring
• Calculating relationships / Semantic Web
• Tracking a person’s reputation
• Looking for seasonal trends

What else could this be used for? Please add your suggestions in the comments below.

Regator Screenshot

The screenshot displays how Regator shows the two latest posts on this blog. If you click on “Kinda related” (doesn’t sound too obvious btw), Regator shows a few entries that are also on this topic. And they definitely are more than just “kinda” related.

For example, my recent entry on McLuhan is connected with other blog posts that connect McLuhan’s thoughts with the recent developments in social media and one or two of those entries really gave me new thoughts, I would have liked to have known before I wrote the article.

Other features that are nice for this kind of service: you can rate posts up or down, there’s a list of hot topics, you can comment on the posts, you can create a hot list of your favorite blogs or channels etc. The only thing Regator does not offer is social network functions. You can’t add friends. Or rather: You don’t have to worry about reconstructing your network of friends on yet another platform. I like that. But it also means that there is no way to weighten ratings by people you trust.