Archive : March 2009

Made by Many has worked with Amnesty UK since January ’08, and helped them design and buildProtectTheHuman.com – their digital activism community.

Anjali announced earlier this week that she’d just created a crowdsourcing wiki. She’s too modest to tell everyone how successful it’s been, so I’m doing that now. It has turned out to be an incredibly useful resource – so useful in fact that with no promotion, media or blog coverage it hit the front page of Delicious, from where it was picked up by ReadWriteWeb.

For some reason – probably the fact that it’s a close-up of a single, leering eye – Shane Richmond’s Twitter avatar really stands out. Of all the people I chat with on Twitter, his seemed the most grotesque, the most horrifying and I let him know this. Shane disagreed and challenged Teh Twitter to find examples of scarier avatars, even recommending a few.

Crowdsourcing is something that keeps coming up in our work at Made By Many, and I’m sure in a lot of other places as well, given that the power of the internet is growing ever stronger. It’s always useful to see and learn what other people are doing in terms of harnessing the power of online communities. So I’ve created a wiki that lists all the examples of crowdsourcing that I could find listed across the internet. Here it is.

Today, most advertisers pay the same amount to serve 1,000 ads to a hyper-connected super-influencer as they do to my granny (granny only rarely uses the Web and has relatively few followers on Twitter). The CPM, or ‘cost per mille’, is undifferentiated from user to user – despite the fact that some users are very much more influential than others: the value is crudely determined by the advertiser, the site and the quality of your sales team.

It’s true that there are snazzy behavioural targeting technologies that allow site owners to gain a higher degree of individual insight – for example, by tracking which sites and what type of content they have been visiting and consuming before arriving at yours – but the basic, flat-rate same-CPM-for-everyone is still the prevailing model for monetising online visits in the UK and US.

I know March isn’t quite over yet but if I waited any longer, this list would have grown too big. So here goes:

1. Informapping: Interested in knowing which parts of the world have the most news stories on a map? Or maybe you want to look at new stories by geographical region? This is for you then.

2. My Twitter Weighs A Ton: How much does your Twitter account weigh?

On the last day of the SxSW Interactive festival a couple of young female zombies shuffled over to us. They’d been ‘turned’ that very morning and were handing out ‘infected’ stickers and leaflets to get people involved in the world’s first community generated zombie film, Lost Zombies.

At a Cajun restaurant last night we started extending the Made by Many identity using crayons on our tablecloth. We may have been in Austin for a little too long.

We found this really great hat shop in Austin – Hatbox – where we are attending SxSW. 

Right, that’s it. I’ve had enough of not being at SXSW and getting assailed with people going to cool lectures, eating Tex-Mex and drinking cocktails. I’ve decided to create myself a SXSW-free Twitter.

Unfortunately I only have a half-way-house solution feeding the Twitter stream through Yahoo Pipes and hacking out all SXSW mentions.