Gary's Social Media Counter

A friend in work, Stephen, pointed me towards this post from Gary Hayes. Gary has used a series of industry stats (see below) to create a "real-time" Social Media counter. OK, we can all agree that this is based on statistics and obviously not an actual counter, but none the less I would say that if anything it's only getting less accurate by under-estimating figures as Social Media adoption grows.

Gary used the following data sources for the counter:

• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
• Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
• Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
• iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future (Aug 09)
• 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
• YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)
• UPDATE: YouTube 1Billion watched per day SMH (2009)- counter updated!
• Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
• Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
• Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
• Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)
• SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

He has also created two downloadable version of the counter (righ click and save as):

• The raw flash movie 82k
• A windows executable app 4.4MB

Gary can be found at the following places:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• MySpace
• YouTube
• Flickr
• LinkedIn

Bloggers To Write Local News

The Guardian Newspaper has confirmed that it will be hiring Bloggers for its local news service. The announcement by the paper that it was looking to hire qualified bloggers who could cover "community news and report on local developments" is a strong indication of the publishers acceptance that "citizen reporters" hold a legitimate place in the news gathering process. The Guardian has said that it will commence with Leeds, Cardiff and Edinburgh, but that they are planning to launch similar local news projects across a number of locations.

Brand Republic reported Emily Bell, director of digital development at Guardian News & Media, as saying: "Guardian Local is a small-scale experimental approach to local newsgathering. We are focusing on three politically engaged cities and we expect to launch in early 2010."

The Guardian are not however the only publication going in this direction. The Guardian will join a growing list of national UK publishers who are looking to tap into the local market. The Mirror Group recently launched more than 100 hyper-local websites that serve specific UK postcodes, with user generated content, while Associated Northcliffe Digital launched a local project with 50 regional news sites allowing people to write and upload their own content.

"Guardian Local is a small-scale experimental approach to local newsgathering. We are focusing on three politically engaged cities and we expect to launch in early 2010," said Bell. Sarah Hartley, the Guardian Local launch editor said: "While researching developments at the grassroots of community journalism, I've been impressed by the range and depth of coverage from local websites and blogs. This experimental project reflects both the shifting nature of journalism and the reality on the ground."

The Guardian has stated that the Bloggers they are looking for will have journalistic qualifications.

National Australia Bank: Little Wonders

I found this great video over on Digital? Marketing? Blog! (via AdWeek) of The National Australia Bank's latest tv commercial, "Little Wonders". The ad uses some really sweet tilt-shift filming. I just love the effect so much - really nice.

Twitter in Talks with Google and Microsoft

According to an article on All Things Digital, Twitter is reportedly in talks with Google and Microsoft about integrating its real-time search results into their respective search engines.

While it is currently possible to see Tweets in Google and Bing, the deal in question would see the search companies gain access to a full feed from Twitter. This would allow them to fully index all tweets. Apparently Twitter is talking to Google and Microsoft separately about data-mining deals, which could see one of the search engines gaining a massive advantage over the competition should there be any exclusivity. However, talks are said to be at a very early stage, with Twitter exploring all opportunities.

This news follows the recent report that Twitter raised another $100 million in new funding, to add to the previous $55 million. The fund raising has given Twitter a $1bn market valuation.

Irish Web Awards 2009

Last night the 2009 Irish Web Awards were held in the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel. The awards are run by Damien Mulley and are just about the best awards ceremony you could ever go to. I feel safe saying that this is the only awards that you are guaranteed to have a brilliant time. The award's MC for the evening was Rick O'Shea, who did a stellar job.

Here are two videos from the evening: