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bbc news has become the latest of the online news sites to embrace social media by adding buttons that let you easily submit content from the site to some of the most popular socially driven sites.

while i can’t say the placement of this ‘bookmark with’ box at the very bottom of the page is the best decision, adding the buttons makes perfect sense. if you look at the 10 most popular sites on digg, here is how the online news sites rank:

1. number 3 - ny times
2. number 6 - yahoo news
3. number 7 - cnn
4. number 8 - washington post
5. number 9 - bbc news

as you can see, online news sites already rank quite high, and making it easier for readers to submit their content will only help. for those readers that don’t know what social news sites are, bbc news offers a brief explanation.

heather posted some interesting research on the hitwise blog today about searches conducted for the terms ‘youtube’ and ‘funny videos’. while the research is limited to the uk it is general enough that it should by the same for the u.s. and most of western europe.

we found a strong negative correlation between the weekly share of UK Internet searches for “youtube” and “funny videos” over the past two years.

while we know from statistics 101 that correlation doesn’t imply causation, it seems that in this case that the decline in searches for the term ‘funny videos’ is caused by the rise in youtube’s popularity; just as youtube begins to take off, there is a sharp decline for searches for ‘funny videos’.

this is an expected result of a couple of obvious things:

1. people want to find not search: by searching for youtube, they know they can find funny videos, which would explain the negative correlation between the two.

2. people want content aggregation: youtube works because it is the hub for funny videos. rather than scouring the web and jumping from site to site, people can just come to youtube and jump from clip to clip. this is the same reason why sites like ebaum’s world succeeded.

i haven’t made a secret of the fact that i was less than impressed by the micro-blogging format when twitter was first launched. that said, over time i have realized that i wasn’t annoyed so much with the platform, rather with they way some people were using it. once i started appreciating the platform, i came up with several innovative ways to use twitter while keeping in mind the dangers that come with the territory.

but before we even get to that, have a look at chris brogan’s newbies’ guide to twitter.

Roy Jacobsen asked if there was a newbies guide to Twitter. There might be, but for those of you who want a different perspective, I feel up for writing another one. So why not? DISCLAIMER: This is how *I* derive value from Twitter. You might do it differently. Here it is, a Newbie’s Guide to Twitter.

not only is the guide itself very concise and useful but the comments on the post are informative too.

soon after the blogosphere started noticing that usa today’s social experiment wasn’t quite working, they issued a press release saying the exact opposite.

USA TODAY announces that its website, USATODAY.com, recorded a 20% year-over year increase in traffic for the month of July 2007 and a month-over-month growth of 24% according to Nielsen/NetRatings. It was also reported that more than 10.6 million unique visitors came to USATODAY.com in the month of July.

the problems with the numbers, however, is that the month-over-month increase is not a sustained growth, and as they point out in the press release, is a result of the simpsons movie and an exclusive interview with j.k. rowling (author of the harry potter series) and should level off in the coming months.

the 10.6 million unique visitors noted in the press release is not far off from the comscore data that michael arrington referred to, which showed about 10 million unique visitors. the problem is that the comscore data shows the 10 million as being a 29% decrease from the june figure of 14 million, while the press release mentions that the 10 million is a 24% increase from june figures.

now i don’t want to go around pointing fingers but i have generally found comscore and compete data to be fairly reliable.

back in march when usa today decided to embrace social media functionality, the response was all but good. some said bravo, others wondered if it would work, but 92 percent just didn’t like it. a month later it appeared that the news site had proven everyone wrong. the changes paid off with a massive 380 percent increase in new user registrations, a 21 percent increase in unique visitors, and over 40,000 new comments posted to the site in the month since the changes.

four months later, it seems that the spike was short-lived and that the social experiment is not working after all.

Here’s the Compete.com data, showing monthly visitors down from 14 million in March to about 10 million today, a 29% drop in unique visitors.

Comscore also shows a decline, although a smaller one. March unique visitors were 7.3 million; June was 6.3 million - a 14% drop. Total pageviews were 70 million in March v. 59 million in June - a 16% drop.

while neither of these measurements is completely accurate, they do show that the initial increased activity was a short-term effect and not a long-term trend.

according to a report released by mobile media authority, m:metrics, 12.3 million users from the united states and western europe accessed social networking sites from their mobile device in the month of june. 3.5 percent of the users (7.5 million) came from the u.s., while italy, uk, spain, germany, and france accounted for 2.8 percent, 2.5 percent, 2.3 percent, 1.9 percent, and 1.7 percent respectively.

MySpace and Facebook are the top two social networking sites accessed via mobile in both the U.S. and UK. MySpace attracts 3.7 million U.S. and 440,000 UK mobile users. In America, Facebook’s mobile audience is about 2 million, and in Britain, about 307,000. Rounding out the top three is YouTube in the U.S., with 901,000 mobile visitors and Bebo in the UK, with 288,000.

as online social networking becomes an integral part of people’s lives, being able to access these networks while on the go is clearly becoming increasingly more important. not only have these networks acknowledged the need to have mobile versions of their sites, but if the iphone versions of youtube, facebook, and meebo are any indication, it isn’t unconceivable to imagine that these companies will create optimized versions of their mobile sites for more mobile devices and give you the best possible experience based on your device.

this would mean that we can say goodbye to the generic mobile surfing experience and welcome an optimized experience for every mobile device (or at least the more popular devices). not only will this improve the experience of the current mobile users of social networking sites but this will encourage more users to try mobile access. i, for example, stayed away from surfing the generic facebook mobile on my blackberry, and until recently, even on my iphone. but with the new facebook interface for the iphone, i’ve already spent a couple of hours trying it out.

my friend and fellow bloggers and social media enthusiast, ben cook is running a very interesting experiment on his site.

The purpose of this site is really quite simple. I’m trying to get this site to generate a full time income starting from scratch. However, the true over arching goal is to be as transparent as possible, documenting every step I take, to the point that anyone, and I mean anyone can duplicate my success (or perhaps my failure).

as one part of the blogging experiment, ben is offering the complete blogging package.

Basically, this prize package is everything you need to either launch a brand new blog or catapult an existing blog to the next level. Bottom line, it’s useful.

if you are a blogger or want to be a blogger, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

in what is a result of google strong-arming a blogger, the anonymous blog that was posting facebook ‘secrets’ was shutdown earlier today. a new blog called facebook secrets again has now been created and documents the back and forth between the blogger and google with regards to the dmca.

Hello,

Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that content in your blog:

facebooksecrets.blogspot.com

allegedly infringes upon the copyrights of others.

not only is the legality of this action questionable since the code wasn’t stolen, rather leaked by facebook, but there is also no way for google to keep shutting down blogs that repost such content. and even if google does keep shutting them down, the content will simply move somewhere else.

what happens on the internet, pretty much always stays on the internet.

not even a day has gone by since i published some calculations about how much paper was being wasted courtesy of unnecessarily lengthy, itemized bills at&t was sending its customers using iphones. this is an email i received in response to that post:

Hey, I just saw your post about AT&T’s paper bills being enormous today through a link on Digg.

I actually work for an AT&T call center, and while I’m not defending AT&T, I thought the following should be known:

1. AT&T is aware they are killing a lot of trees and is just starting to prevent it by going to “summary billing”-meaning no more call/data details for every phone on the account, just basic charges. This happens by default for every new customer as of August 10th.

2. We are told to encourage customers to use ATT.com to view their detailed bill online rather than looking at all the specifics on their physical bill. We’re also told to encourage paperless billing altogether; an option offered to customers when they sign up their phone number online. All of this is offered free on their website and is available to them 24 hours a day. There are a few exceptions where they wouldn’t be able to view their latest bill for a while, but I am still new there, so I don’t know all the specific factors that will cause this.

3. Also, any customer that changes their rate plan (which, trust me, is about half the calls I get every day) as of August 10th will automatically be put on the summary billing. They have to actually pay an extra $1.99 per month per line to view their call details now. This is where we are trying to push for the customer to view their bill online in hopes that they eventually just sign up for paperless billing. While this method of charging can be taken as two ways, A) ATT just wants to make an extra buck, or B) ATT really does care about trees and is just trying to sway customers away from viewing their bill on paper, I like to think that they are doing the latter. Though, it’s probably the former. ATT doesn’t have the greatest scruples in the world.

[last part of the email has been omitted]

mission accomplished.

while the exact number is yet to be determined, current consensus puts the number of iphones sold at 270,000 for the first day and a half of sales, and expectations at around 10 million devices to be sold by the end of 2008. if during this time at&t does not get its act together and stop sending out bills that are averaging 50 pages in length, they’re going to have a lot more than just unsatisfied customers after them.

before we go on, let’s look at some quick paper facts (pdf):

A cord of wood is approximately 8 feet wide, 4 feet deep, and 4 feet high. A cord of air-dried, dense hardwood (oak, hickory, etc.) weighs roughly 2 tons, about 15-20 percent of which is water. It has been estimated that one cord of this wood will yield one of these approximate quantities of products:

• 1,000-2,000 pounds of paper (depending on the process)
• 942 100-page, hard-cover books
• 61,370 No. 10 business envelopes
• 4,384,000 commemorative-sized postage stamps
• 460,000 personal checks
• 1,200 copies of National Geographic
• 2,700 copies of an average daily newspaper

that said, with 10 million iphones expected to be sold by the end of 2008, that means 10 million at&t customers that can expect to get 50-page bills, 12 times a year, totaling 6 billion sheets of paper wasted (at around 80,500 sheets of paper per tree, this would mean around 74,535 trees) because of at&t’s stupidity. of course sales aren’t going to stop there so it’s up to us to stop at&t from continuing this madness.