Social Media This Week: November 28, 2008

Social Media in a Crisis

The news: Within minutes of militants opening fire at various locations in Mumbai Wednesday night, updates were being posted through microblogging site Twitter at a rate of approximately 1,000 per minute. For example, Arun Shanbhag, was visiting his family in Mumbai and has been journaling about the militant attack on different sites including his personal blog, Twitter, and Flickr (a popular photo sharing site). Different sites were set up to help families in need and to also ask for help while many Twitter users were sending pleas for blood donors.

Key question: The social media reaction to this horrible event underscores that Twitter is to 2008 what Facebook was to 2007. Will it become as much of a must-have marketing communications tool as Facebook has become?

WordPress Direct

The news: Spam blogs (or splogs) are a nuisance on the Internet. Splogs are junk blogs created to promote websites or sell advertising by republishing someone else’s content. On Monday, a site called WordPress Direct officially launched where users can create a blog by picking a subject, typing in keywords associated with that theme and the site will pull content from a number of sites and post it on the blog the user has set up automatically. There have been discussions on the web that this is a lazy form of blogging that ignores the intellectual property of other authors on the web.

Key question: Can search engines minimize the impact of splogs by downplaying their content in search results?

Cyber Bullying Case Closed

The news: Further to my post last week, the cyber bulling trial came to an end this week. Just to recap, the defendant, Lori Drew, posed as a teenage boy over MySpace to send first friendly and then menacing messages to a teen that killed herself shortly after receiving a message in 2006. Drew was convicted of three misdemeanor counts of computer fraud on Wednesday. The terms of service on the site state that users must submit “truthful and accurate” information. Drew’s defense was that she never read the terms of service in detail before setting up the fake profile.

Key question: If this verdict stands, will every site on the Internet get to define the law?