What’s the real cost of social media? Last week we looked at an interesting infographic on the value of social commerce and today we wanted to share another interesting infographic on the cost of social media. So how do your social media costs compare? These stats, which have been aggregated by Focus.com, show some good […]Related Digital Buzz Posts:
Renowned Kenyan crowdsourcing site, Ushahidi is set to launch a new site that will help monitor government effectiveness. The new site is called Huduma.
Huduma (which is a Swahili word for “service”) enables people to submit reports on the performance of services in their district by text, e-mail or Twitter. The reports are then mapped on the Huduma site for public viewing.
The service is a modification of the Ushahidi platform, an open source technology that crowdsources crisis information via SMS and the web and then maps the reports for viewers. Ushahidi is estimated to have been deployed about 12,000 times across the world including notably during the earthquakes in Haiti where it proved to be invaluable.
“There will be a dashboard which will compare one district with another. We will also layer in other information such as aid flows from, say, the World Bank. So, for example, if you pull up the profile of a school or clinic, you will have information about what aid it may have received as well as local reports on whether the teachers are turning up to work.”
International donors are reportedly excited about the service because it can serve as a useful tool for tracking international aid and ensuring that it is being put to good use. According to Hersman, the service will be launched in five constituencies and then spread to various parts of Kenya. The team plans to initially focus on the health and educational sector and later expand to include infrastructure, governance and water.
Huduma joins the growing number of technologies and tools dedicated towards solving African problems using African solutions.
For more information about the service, visit www.huduma.info.
To read more examples of ways in which Africans are putting tech to good use on the continent, check out this post.
The real-time web is becoming an increasingly important source of news, but many users still prefer to receive their content the old-fashioned way: Through a steady diet of RSS feeds. One of the best news readers out there is the web-based Google Reader. Although simple in appearance, it has some features under the hood that can help you greatly improve your news reading experience.
If you’re a new user, you might want to fill up your Reader with interesting feeds. If that’s the case, make sure you don’t overlook feed bundles, which you can add by clicking on “Browse for stuff” in the upper left-hand menu. Here you can browse through featured feed bundles, bundles from your friends or recommended feeds from users with similar interests as you.
Once you’ve populated the Reader with enough feeds that interest you, it’s time to start organizing them.
Folders
The simplest ways to organize feeds is by creating folders. Click on the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner and choose Settings — Folders and Tags. Create as many folders as you’d like; for example, you might want to create a special folder for very important feeds, or create a folder for each subcategory of news you’re following, such as “tech,” “business,” and so forth.
Now, instead of always clicking on “All items,” you can read the feeds from each individual subcategory separately.
To move a feed from folder to folder, select it and click on the Feed settings drop-down menu, then click on the name of an individual folder to move the feed there.
Trends
A lot of users just fire up Google Reader, add some feeds and then stop tweaking and optimizing. However, if you subscribe to a lot of feeds, Google Reader can actually help you get rid of the ones you’re not interested in and focus on those which are important to you.
The best way to do this is to use Trends, located in the upper-left corner of the Google Reader screen. Click on it and you’ll see a lot of statistics on how you use your feeds. For example, you can see which feeds you click on and read often, as well as which ones you share and email the most. You can also check out which feeds are frequently updated and which are almost completely inactive.
If you find that you don’t use certain feeds at all, or that they’ve become inactive, you can get rid of them by clicking on the trash can icon next to the feeds in Trends. You can also erase active feeds that you rarely read or share.
If you frequently add new feeds to your Google Reader, you can repeat this process every few months.
Shortcuts
Did you know that Google Reader supports keyboard shortcuts? The mouse can only take you so far; power users will definitely want to remember some of these as they can make the process of skimming through hundreds of feeds much more efficient.
Here’s a list of some of the most useful shortcuts supported in Google Reader.
j/k – selects the next/previous item in the list space/shift-space – moves the page down/up n/p – in list view, selects the next item without opening it o – in list view, expands or collapses the selected item enter – in list view, expands or collapses the selected item s – stars the selected item shift-s – shares the selected item m – switches the read state of the selected item t – opens the tagging field for the selected item v – opens the original source for this article in a new window shift-a – marks all items in the current view as read 1 – displays the subscription as expanded items 2 – displays the subscription as a list of headlines r – refreshes the unread counts in the navigation shift-n/p – selects the next/previous subscription or folder in the navigation shift-x – expand or collapse a folder selected in the navigation shift-o – opens the item currently selected in the navigation gh – goes to the Google Reader homepage ga – goes to the “All items” view gs – goes to the “Starred items” view gt – allows you to navigate to a tag by entering the tag name gu – allows you to navigate to a subscription by entering the subscription name u – hides and shows the list of subscriptions ? – displays a quick guide to all of Reader’s shortcuts
Other Tweaks
Over the years, Google has been adding little tweaks and improvements to Google Reader, and it’s hard even for power users to remember all the options it offers. Here are a few lesser known options you might want to check out.
Sorting by magic: Click a feed, and select “Sort by magic” from the “Feed settings” drop-down menu. Instead of giving you the newest items first, this feature reorders the items in your unread feed based on your own past reading history and overall activity inside the Reader.
Next bookmarklet: For a really quick and easy way to browse through your feeds, Google has included the “Next bookmarklet” in its Settings page (under the “Goodies” tab). Just drag it to your bookmarks bar, and each time you click on it, it will take you to the next unread item, marking it as read in the process.
Note in reader: Similarly to the “Next” bookmarklet, Google provides a “Note in reader” bookmarklet on the same page, which lets you share items from a webpage with your followers in Google Reader with one click.
Blackbaud, a fundraising software company, has put together an infographic that tries to answer the question: “What good is social good?”
Much is made of social good as a revolutionary tool for corporate social responsibility (CSR) and philanthropy. But the transient, high-speed nature of social networks can make social good campaigns difficult to measure.
Blackbaud’s infographic, posted on its Netwits Think Tank blog, offers a great overview of the social good ecosystem, including stats on U.S. online fundraising, average donation, fundraising method, motivation and type of cause supported.
It’s an interesting overview for social good tech heads and casual users alike who are interested in learning how the digital space is making a difference both online and offline.
What do you think of the findings? Let us know in the comments.
The issue of data privacy on the web gets a lot of attention, thanks to the practices of sites such as Facebook and Google, but the positive aspects of those companies’ data practices tend to get overlooked. Not only does data drive the overall experience of our favorite sites and services, but it also drives innovation in broadly valuable technologies such as Hadoop and advanced analytics tools. As the government and policymakers, in general, strive to strike a framework for online data practices, they’d be wise to look at the issue from all angles.
The McKinsey Global Institute released an interesting report on big data last week, identifying key strategies for specific vertical markets that could save them hundreds of billions of dollars. The report highlights industries (e.g., health care and the public sector) and technologies (e.g., Hadoop and data warehousing) that we’ve covered before and that already are big data stars, as well as one very important issue to the future success of big data efforts: finding the appropriate balance between consumer privacy and business innovation.
The authors don’t delve into too much detail on this topic, but I give them credit for mentioning it at all, because it’s a deep, multi-faceted issue that could fill an entire report of its own, and that has broad implications beyond the world of big data.
As the report’s authors note, policymakers will play an important role in enabling future big data advances, both technologically and strategically. They point out and briefly discuss six issues facing policymakers:
Build human capital for big data
Align incentives to promote data sharing for the greater good
Develop policies that balance the interests of companies wanting to create value from data and citizens wanting to protect their privacy and security
Establish effective intellectual property frameworks to ensure innovation
Address technology barriers and accelerate R&D in targeted areas
Ensure investments in underlying information and communication technology infrastructure
I’ve given this issue a lot of thought over the past few months, and I think No. 3 is the key issue — not just for the future of big data, but for the future of the web in general. Unless there’s a well-reasoned balance developed between consumer privacy and business interests, goals such as information sharing and an increased pace of innovation could fall victim to the federal government’s heavy hand. As I explained in January, Congress is considering its strategy for regulating online privacy, but it’s an issue strewn with pitfalls. Here are a couple of thoughts I’ve been mulling lately:
Proposed federal regulations could hamstring technological innovation: For example, two proposed federal regulations — the Federal Trade Commission’s Do Not Track policy (which has just been endorsed by several senators in the form of the “Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2011″) and the Department of Commerce’s Fair Information Practice Principles — have the potential to seriously hamper big data and analytics innovations, illustrating the importance of striking the right balance. The regulations are fairly complex in their current states, but they strive for two separate but interrelated goals, respectively: giving consumers the ability to proactively opt out of certain data-tracking practices and giving consumers all the information — upfront and crystal-clear — about how sites are using their data. Both limit to some degree what sites can track, how they can do it, and impose penalties for violations. My concern — and one echoed by Google in its recent opposition to California’s proposed Do Not Track legislation — is that customer data has driven the innovation of numerous key big data technologies by major web sites, including Hadoop (within Facebook and Yahoo, especially), NoSQL databases and many of Google’s tools and projects. McKinsey highlights many of these among the list of technologies enabling big data. Will putting companies’ analytics efforts at the mercy of consumers, and under the thumb of the federal government, reduce desire to innovate because they fear penalties or because they simply don’t have the relevant data required to do so?
Social media and the personalized could be jeopardized. This is directly related to the above concern, but is more wide-reaching. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, and larger-scope web sites such as Google, innovate on big data technologies because their services rely on data. The only way to optimize and create a better user experience is to draw better insights into customers’ activities, interests and connections. And the only way (or, at least, the primary way) to make money from such services is via targeted advertising. It’s the data that drives Google’s huge advertising revenues, which pay for its myriad free services, and Facebook to an $80 billion valuation. I’m not suggesting Facebook or Google are going to fold in the face of proposed regulations, just that their services could suffer. Less data and more regulations means less innovation and fewer risks taken. This might be a boon for privacy, but it’s a hindrance in the fast-moving web world, where major changes come from rewriting code as opposed to physically building a new project, and where services can be improved on the fly as issues arise.
Don’t get me wrong, consumers deserve more information and the federal government is right to attempt to give it to them, but everyone needs to get educated on the connection between data collection and usage and the benefits they provide. If consumers value their social media and personalized web experiences, and if the government is serious about pushing analytics as a major skill set for the next-generation economy, they need to consider the issue of big data in terms of its pros as well as in terms of its obvious cons such as privacy and security implications. It might be tempting to clamp down on data practices or to click “do not track” and shut off the personal-data firehose, but such decisions could have far greater implications than meets the eye.
