Trust no-one: trust everyone

February 3rd, 2009

If you’d checked Bruce Springsteen’s Wikipedia page during the American Super bowl on Sunday night you would have been confronted with ‘This guy kinda sucks’.

Presumably moments before the page featured a full biography/discography etc, but with one mouse click and a few key strokes a malicious force (or let’s face it mischievous child), had changed an entry in the most popular point of reference on the internet.

Should we trust everything we read? Of course not, and especially not on the internet. I’d say it was fairly common knowledge how Wikipedia is built and maintained and yet for some reason it still seems to be almost universally trusted.

The internet provides the average person with access to more information than we can even imagine – but just like any source of information, no one authority should become so heavily relied upon.

If you have a burning desire to find out about Bruce try listening to some of his songs on last.fm, have a look at pictures of him in a google image search, see when he was last mentioned by AP: make up your own mind. It’s never been easier to gather information, and make up our own mind about the truth.

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Fascinating Facts

March 5th, 2008

Social media is much more than just a Facebook page (although it’s a good start), there are many different ways of sharing your message and listening to what your public are saying about you.

Here’s a few ‘Fascinating Facts’ I’d like to share with you:

  1. There are 113m active blogs being monitored by Technorati. 1.6 million new posts are added every day, the equivalent to 18 updates a second
  2. 663k people download the BBC Radio 1 Chris Moyles podcast every month. 300k less than the ‘Best of Today’ from BBC Radio 4
  3. Two years ago – YouTube didn’t exist. Now it features more that 76m videos and 2.8m user channels
  4. The UK has 8.5m active Facebook users, 5m MySpace users and 4m Bebo users. The fastest growing Facebook demographic is the over 25s – and Bebo is the biggest network in Ireland and rapidly growing in Scotland.
  5. Skype’s 276m registered users around the world have clocked up 100 billion minutes using free Skype-to-Skype voice and video calls since 2003
  6. Wikipedia has 7m entries and over 6.5m people registered as “wikipedians” (check out sister site wikinews for collaborative citizen journalism)
  7. Flickr has 2 billion images online and 3 – 5m pictures are added every day (although Facebook has 4.1 billion photos on its site!)
  8. Micro-blogging is on the up. It’s predicted that 1m people are following Twitter

Your public are talking about you all over the web. Come on and join the conversation.

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