The Most Public Index, Silicon Valley | The News is NowPublic.com

The Most Public Index, Silicon Valley | The News is NowPublic.com: "today there are almost innumerable ways for one’s voice to be heard. The goal of the MostPublic Index is to measure—on a completely transparent, metric-driven basis—who is most effectively broadcasting their own personal brand online and who are the emerging players.”

NowPublic’s formula gauges influence and “publicness” across four categories, including:

o Online Visibility
o Presence on User-Generated Content and Social Networking Sites
o Interactivity and Accessibility
o The “R” Factor: Presence on Microblogging Platforms (Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.)

NowPublic examined statistics in each of these categories from Alexa, Compete, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Quantcast, Technorati, YouTube, and various other blogs and sites, to create a list of Silicon Valley’s leading influencers. It then narrowed the list to 50 by analyzing and documenting individuals’ presence and popularity in each of these channels, applying a weighted scoring system, determined by the strength of specific traits held in each online community."

Helge: I know some of these people over Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites. I don't write this for name dropping purposes. I like to follow the blog covering this kind of topics.

Helge: Just added me to Twitter. His Aboout: "In 1982 during the Falklands War my Father in a letter home, whilst serving on board the Hermes , suggested that we buy for me a ZX81 ( we spent forever trying to decipher 2×81 ). My Father created in me a passion for maths, technical problems and getting things done. Many years later and a involvement in the Linux and Open Source community ( due in part to the encouragemnt of Andrew Hollingsworth and Damien (Murff ) Murphy ) leads me to now being a strong supporter and proponent of free and open source software today . I'm 30 something ( as of 2006 ) Married with one Daughter. Currently ive been enticed into Blogging and since it means it keeps my own local wiki up to date I dont mind so much!"

The Opinions of a Loud Mouth Man

The Travels of an Urban Ubuntu User

The Opinions of a Loud Mouth Man: "Voting with your Feet. Ive mentioned before about the interesting and useful new stuff I keep learning within the social networks to which I belong. Today was one of thos “Genius” moments where in I see something that makes me sit up and say “Damn Right!”. The story behind this discovery of this particular image is that my online friend ( a new distinction in our society I feel ) Susan Reynolds posted the image from Chris Pirillos flickr stream. In the comments on Flickr Raines points out that it was “Kaliya Hamlin (aka IdentityWoman)” who wrote it as part of Ungomecamp and its an organisational principle of Open Space Technology Format . I think it sums up quite a bit of how I feel somedays especially when I am looking for ways to improve any community in an attempt to see it flourish and grow. Thanks for reading"

Social Media

Mobile Think Tanking

A think tank is an organization, institute, corporation, or group that conducts research, typically funded by governmental and commercial clients, in the areas of social or political strategy, technology, and armament...

MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING

Apophenia writes, “I believe that teenagers are the reason that mobile will happen sooner than we think. I don't believe that the first explosion will be US-based.”

Who is she? “My name is danah boyd and this is the "Best of Apophenia" collection page. If you want to see the full blog, click here. If you want to see my publications, click here. Enjoy!”

USA isn’t a leader in mobile. Apple iPhone and Microsoft Zune are going to add some buzz to the mobile business environment. Motorola needs to make a come-back. Nokia want’s to re-invent its US presence. LG and Sony-Ericsson are also out for a slice.

Best Of Apophenia

“Over the years, I [Apophenia] have written numerous posts about social media, social software, social networks and other industry-relevant topics. Colleagues often remark that it is difficult to sift through my personal blog to find relevant material. For that reason, i decided to put together a "best of" to highlight the essays that are most interesting to newcomers interested in social media. Right now, these are just recent essays and blog posts that deal with particular issues in depth. If you think that a particular entry should be listed here, please let me know! Better yet, add it to del.icio.us or to digg - i'm watching these sites to see what entries are particularly popular or useful.”

“I think that mobile social network-driven systems will look very different than web-based ones but the fundamentals of "friends" and "messages" and some form of presence-conveying "profile" will be core to the system,” she continues.

MARCO AHTISAARI

“The big human fundamental needs and capacities on which the growth of the mobile industry was built are social,” writes Marco Ahtisaari the son of the former Finnish President. Marco has been with Nokia and knows the mobile industry inside out. Last year he quitted and is now working with a new mission: project.

“Social interaction has arguably been the driving force of adoption of both the Internet and mobile communications, continues Marco. I agree. Web 2.0 has made the social possible on the web. But the same promises were available through IRC’s, chats and bulletin boards before the Web 2.0 and blogs. The activists are the core of the movement.

“Starting with voice call with the widest reach to SMS text messaging, e-mail, instant messaging, down to tens of millions of people reading and writing weblogs and sharing of photos with a close group. How many of these have been explicitly designed by anyone?” He writes in his blog. How many bloggers are there? 70 million, I guess today. How many are really active? I have no idea. Does anyone make blogging activity quality control?

“The ones that have succeeded have been simple open ended functionalities (e.g. SMS is 160 characters of text), based on the primitives of social interaction that leave room for human interpretation and invention.” Marco Ahtisaari writes. The simplest things are the best tools. Taking out the complexity from mobile smart phones is going to be an essential mission. But SMS isn’t easy to use. But it works.

“Consider the big human fundamental of gift giving. Has the universal human practice of gift-giving face-to-face really gone digital yet? Could it? Should it?” he continues. I think there are a number of charity networks using that part of the Internet. I’m not an expert in that field.

Who am I? [More about Danah Boyd]

My name is danah boyd and i am a PhD candidate at the School of Information (SIMS) at the University of California - Berkeley and a Fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communications. My research focuses on how people negotiate a presentation of self to unknown audiences in mediated contexts. In particular, my dissertation is looking at how youth engage with networked publics like MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube. I am interested in how the architectural differences between unmediated and mediated publics affect sociality, identity and culture. My dissertation research is being funded as a part of the MacArthur Foundation's Initiative on New Media and Learning.