The social web has created something new to think about in the online search war – social search in real-time. Blogger, Sally Falkow, discusses that the way people are finding news and information has changed dramatically. Search engines are paying attention to the fact that a very high percentage of people say they are looking for discussions and opinions from others on a subject when they search.

The Google Blog explains that your friends and contacts are a key part of your online life, and most people on the web make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs; status updates; and tweets. This translates to a public social web of content that has specific relevance to each person, although this information isn’t always easy to find in one simple place. Social search helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle. So instead of finding well-known and official sites dominating in your search results, social search personalises the results so that relevant public content from your friends and contacts is highlighted.

The interesting thing about social search is that in some ways it can be seen as moretrusted results made readily available in the search process. This is because the authors of the content being viewed in a social search will be familiar and trusted voices, and these results could therefore be perceived as more valuable to the user. It could also have an impact on several industries, because people making use of social search will be able to read reviews; blogs; and even view pictures and videos from trusted sources who have published relevant content, directly in their search results, rather than having to rely on general review sites with recommendations by people they don’t know. This also puts a greater emphasis on the importance of brands and companies, having a social media presence. At the same time, however, as Newsclip’s Jaco Pienaar points out, social search could also have negative ramifications for academic-based online search, where students may be tempted to use the social search results as an ‘easy way out’, which would result in them using their social contacts rather than academically sound sources as references.

As Sally Falkow puts it, “whether you participate in social media or not, others are,” and these conversations are gaining influence – even more so with social search. As search engines tap into the stream of social content, everyone who does a search for your company or brand could come across discussions about you, rather than the official information you provide for them. As always, however, it remains important to understand the source of the information, rather than taking it at face value. It is interesting to see how search tools evolve, and with the combination of web search and social search, the way that people find news and information is set to change, and hopefully be enhanced.

If you’re getting a bit bored withFacebook and want to spice things up a bit, it’s as easy as changing your language settings. I’ve been having a ball lately simply by changing my language settings to Pirate English – this isn’t just a case of ‘Aargh, me matey’ – every aspect of Facebook communication is altered. When a new friendship is formed, you are encouraged to drink some rum in celebration. Uploading a new status from your cell phone is called using your ‘pocket parrot’ (love that!). Female friends are called ‘me lady’ or ‘that wench’, males are ‘captain’ or ‘that scurvy dog’. If this doesn’t tickle your fancy, you can try ‘upside down English’ too, where all your text is flipped vertically – make for interesting ‘how’d you do that?!’ comments from your friends!

Let me know if you come across other ways to go beyond the obvious on social networking sites.

News24 reported that the web was literally ‘atwitter’ this week when TechCrunch (http://www.techcrunch.com) discovered that a serial killer, known as dinner_guest, was tweeting about his murderous activities on Twitter. Speculation was rife as to whether the killer was for real; whether the tweets were part of a marketing campaign; or whether it was some type of sick joke. Not surprisingly, this unusual Twitterer gained nearly 300 followers in only 4 days.

It turned out that dinner_guest was a ‘fictional character born out of an artist’s mind’, who was “bored of the predictability of social networking conversations,” according to TheNextWeb.

This raises an interesting question: what if a real serial killer was to use Twitter to document their plans and murders? As blogger Zee puts it, Twitter’s immediate reaction would most likely be to shut down the account and notify the police, but at the same time, the microblogging site could quite possibly become a new way for the police to communicate with criminals and track them down. We’ve already seen how Facebook has been used as an alibi in a court case – no reason why social media couldn’t work the other way.

At the same time, this incident once again illustrates the importance of curating online information and not taking it at face value. As dinner_guest states – he was simply tired of the mundane nature of social networks and wanted to spice things up. We would do well to keep that in mind the next time we see ‘newsworthy’ content on our social network of choice – it may very well just be another ‘dinner_guest’ wanting to experiment with social media!

I recently saw that Strictly Come Dancing made it on the most-watched reality-television show globally and drew in millions of viewers, making it a global world record, according to the Guiness World Records. This intrigued me into carrying out a quick search of other interesting media facts and records that we could have simply overseen.

For instance, did you know that the longest title of a book is 1 433 characters (290 words) and was written by Davide Ciliberti from Italy, in June 2007? The book describes the idiosyncrasies of the PR world. The full title is ‘Per favore dite a mia madre che faccio il pubblicitario lei pensa che sono un pierre e che quindi regalo manciate di free entry e consumazioni gratis a chi mi pare, rido coi vips, i calciatori le veline e le giornaliste, leggo Novella e mi fotografano i paparazzi, entro neI privé saltando la coda, bevo senza pagare, sono ghiotto di tartine e gin tonic, ho la casa piena di oggetti di design, conosco Paris Hilton, Tom Ford ed Emilio‘.

The largest fashion catalogue had 212 pages measuring 1.2 m by 1.5m and was a replica of the Bon Prix S2 catalogue Voila! when unveiled in Hamburg, Germany on 30 August 2003.

Meanwhile, the record for most letters published in a national newspaper in one year was scooped up by Shailendra Singh Yadav from India. He had 214 letters published in the AJ Independent Hindi daily newspaper between 2 January and 30 December 2007. And, the smallest published Koran book measures 1.7 cm by 1.28 cm by 0.72 cm. It is published in an unabridged, bound version, in fine print Arabic and is 571 pages long. The book was published in Cairo in 1982 and is owned by Dr. Muhammad Saeed Karim Beebani of Pakistan.

The best selling copyright book is (surprisingly?) the Guiness World Records which sold over 100-million copies worldwide in June 2001. Excluding non-copyright works such as the Bible and the Koran, the book of world records is the world’s best selling book.

Moving on to television, it is interesting to note that the longest running TV cooking show is Hasta La Cocina in Mexico, which has been broadcast each weekday since 1 December, 1960. It has been presented continually by Mrs Zarate from Mexico and is owned by Televisa Guadalajara Co. Meanwhile, the longest running TV drama is Procter & Gamble Productions’ Guiding Light, which was first aired on 30 June 1952, and is broadcast each week day. Guiding Light was originally broadcast as a 15-minute radio serial on WLW Radio in Cincinnati, beginning on 25 January 1937. And, the longest running TV variety show is Sábado Gigante, which has been broadcast every Saturday evening since 8 August 1962. The show was created and has been continually hosted by Mario Kreutzberger from Chile.

In the radio field, the longest running weekly radio programme with the same host is Folksong Festival hosted by Oscar Brand, which was first broadcast on 9 December, 1945 on WNYC Radio and continues to do so today airing on Saturday evenings from 22:00 to 23:00 on AM 820.

I don’t have more local information – yet – but I do plan on snooping around some more and will share my latest findings with you soon.

The Cape City Green Week and the recently held Brands and Branding for Good Conference are examples of the fact that ‘green awareness’ is spreading to beyond merely forming part of corporate CSI, to becoming wiser about the issues of green computing and green IT in a media sense.

Green computing can be broken down into green use (reducing the energy consumption of computers and other information systems, as well as using them in an environmentally sound manner); green disposal (refurbishing and re-using old computers, and properly recycling unwanted computers and other electronic equipment); and green design (designing energy-efficient and environmentally sound components; computers; servers; cooling equipment; and data centres).

I recently blogged about how South African are starting to recycle their computing equipment and old cell phones, as this keeps harmful materials such as lead and mercury out of landfills.

While media consumption is definitely on the increase – particularly in the mobile sector, with cellphone contract holders claiming a new handset every two years – the resulting ‘waste’ is fast accumulating. Take action by recycling your outdated phone, if possible – by giving it to someone less fortunate, for example.

What are your thoughts on getting businesses more ‘green-wise’? Do you work in a paper-free environment or conduct online searches on the more energy-efficient ‘Blackle‘? Feel free to share your comments below.

This morning, Newsclip hosted the final leg of it’s quarterly seminars at the Bryanston Country Club. Amy Linnell of the Marketing Strategy department gave attendees insight into how to engage with the social media space properly. The key lies in both the quality and quantity of your efforts – one needs to be actively involved from the outset in terms of regularly updating their newsfeeds and responding to customers’ queries, while developing good quality, reciprocal relationships. Linnell also expanded on the dangers of social media that one should be aware of, and emphasised the importance of using both push and pull technologies in accessing information. Newsclip’s MD, Simon Dabbs, rounded off the session by fielding questions from the audience and sharing his own experiences with ‘now’ media.

If you would like to know more, look out for your next Networking Newsletter, due to hit your inbox this week. To sign up for the Networking Newsletters and to attend Newsclip’s next seminar in early 2010, contact Newsclip’s Debbi Lyle on debbi@newsclip.co.za.

As we are constantly bombarded with news of the latest mobile phone or smartphone offering even more amazing features from GPS navigation to social networking to enhance our lives and make them easier, Martin Cooper, credited as being the lead engineer of the Motorola team that developed the mobile phone, has said that today’s phones have become ‘too complicated’ and try to do too many things for too many people. He feels that when you create a universal device that does so many things for so many people, it doesn’t do any of these things well.

The alternative, according to Cooper, is rather to have several specialist devices that focus on one thing that will improve our lives. But is this really what consumers want? Would having to keep track of several different devices really be an ‘improvement’ in our lives, or would we rather take the chance that the features may not work as well as Cooper would have hoped in order to take advantage of another improvement in our lives – the convenience of having everything in the palm of our hand at the touch of a button? Sales figures suggest that consumers are seeking phones with a range of features, with smartphone sales across Europe increasing by 140%.

Dr Jon Argar of University College London feels that there is no reason to believe that people are avoiding complicated technology, or that smartphones don’t have the capacity to cope with the additions designers integrate into them. Ultimately, the future of technology is in the hands of consumers, and most of them would rather have all their needs met by one device than have to seek other devices to supplement the ones they already own.

Perhaps Cooper, who has previously criticised the iPhone for being complicated and hard to use, is still accustomed to the technology used to create the first mobile phone, which he describes as weighing “over one kilo and you could only talk for 20 minutes before the battery ran out, which was just as well because you would not be able to hold it up for much longer.” It is certainly true that with that kind of technology we would not be seeing the advancements in mobile phones we are today, but with that as a stepping stone and with the advancements in technology we have seen over the past decade, there is little doubt that not only will we keep seeing more new features available on our phones to make our lives easier, we will also come to expect and demand them, if we haven’t already begun to do so.

The shift to online has not only meant efficiency and faster communication, but an array of options that seem to have begun to offer online users the option to withdraw from their realities and escape into an online world. Newsclip’s Analysis team thinks that we might be on the verge of losing the human touch. This is fundamental because no matter how much faster we can send information out there, we are still communicating with people. Many leaders in the field have recently underlined this importance – the need to be authentic, honest and human. In terms of the marketing mix – are you taking these questions into account?

In an article titled ‘Virtual cities get real bustle’, New Scientist magazine of 3 October 2009 states that: “While virtual globes such as Google Earth or Microsoft Visual Earth provide great bird’s-eye views of urban landscapes, they show ghost towns – empty streets free of traffic or people. Now, a system that can draw on real-time video from traffic and surveillance cameras, and weather sensors, is set to change that.” The article goes on to explain how the system will fill virtual towns with cars and people, and could even let online spectators zoom in on live sports events.

This marks the fact that virtual world are definitely becoming a reality and offering more than just escapism.

In another article in the magazine, Nic Fleming states that while eye-popping sums are at stake in the virtual economy, intellectual property disputes are now heading for the courts. Virtual is definitely crossing over into reality, with many crucial developments taking place… but whether this is a good thing or not is anyone’s guess. I’m all for escapism, but don’t we have enough problems to deal with in the real world?

While news is meant to be impartial by nature, it cannot be denied that there is usually an element of control or influence involved. It sets agendas; thrusts certain issues into the spotlight; and influences how we perceive certain events.

The media has long been regarded as the fourth estate of government, and as a result, its independence has long been an issue, with certain papers seen as simply lapdogs or mouthpieces for government to make its policies felt clearly in the media.

How do you regard the media? Watchdog, or mouthpiece/ lapdog?

Post your comments below, or click here for a more in-depth discussion.