American’s are top taggers

I’m currently in the process of wrapping up my paper about Flickr the Commons. Retrieving a large dataset really has been beneficial in regards to my research. I’m not going to blog any spoilers but it is fun to look at the data especially in regard to the location of the Flickr Community members. To get a better understanding who contributes to the Commons we analyzed 167,871 accounts. This was the total amount of accounts who actively did something with the content of the institutions. One of the more interesting things was to see if we could determine the users locations and see which countries participate more.

Tagged with: location, flickr the commons, data, social media,

Tough Nut to Crack

Monitoring activities on the web is not new or unique. You have probably heard of Google Analytics (GA), a service that allows to monitor the traffic on a website. Nice graphics and tables show how many people have visited a particular page, where they come from, how long they stay on a page, and so on. This gives a certain impression of the success of a website.

Tagged with: social media, metrics,

Paper accepted!

This abstract I wrote, together with Harry van Vliet, about the usage of Flickr the Commons was accepted for the Heritage Impact 2012 in Brighton. I'm quite excited because this will be the first in a serie of papers focussing on social media data harvesting and analyses. Read the abstract here:

Tagged with: flickr, social media, cultural heritage, conference,

How's hyve?

Last year many friends turned over from the Dutch social network website Hyves to Facebook. A major reason was the acquisition of Hyves by publisher TMG (Telegraaf Media Group). With my friends a large number of Hyvers also removed their profile. In January last year I also switched from Hyves to Facebook. Since that day I've lost sight of what is happening on this social network. Until yesterday. Yesterday Marc de Vries, CEO of Hyves visited our school for a guest-lecture. One of his comments was a warning: the fact that your friends removed their profile doesn’t mean that Hyves isn’t doing well. On the contrary, Hyves is alive and kicking. In this blog a short summary of the developments.

Tagged with: hyves, social media,

The Crossmedialab social media album Top 50 2012

I love charts and yearlists. This passion started in my childhood. As a child I made lists of almost everything: how long it took to brush my teeth and put on my pajamas (with a all time record of 10 seconds), lists of the time the planes flew over our house to Maastricht Airport, and also of all the licenseplates of the cars in our neighbourhood. When I think about it, I’m surprised that my parents never thought I was autistic.

Tagged with: chart, social media, music, interaction,

How to measure online success?

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to download and read the research report from Culture24 focussing on museums and the Internet. Online strategy and how to measure online success were central in this four year during study. Developing effective ways to define, measure and evaluate the success of online activities is an issue faced by all parts of the cultural sector. Organizations regularly invest in cultural websites, social media activities and online services without a clear idea of what the services are trying to achieve, or their intended audience.

Tagged with: metrics, museums, social media,

Symposium "15 years SWOCC"

On September 13 2011, the Foundation for Scientific Research on Commercial Communication (Stichting Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Commercieele Communicatie SWOCC) celebrated its 15th anniversary in style, by organizing a symposium.  Its stated goal was to flood the participants coming from academia, advertising agencies and marketing departments with scientific insights from communication science. Unusual for a scientific meeting, it was held in Dutch, except for one apologetic (German) speaker who spoke in English. In practice this meant that the line-up of speakers was exclusively recruited from the ranks of Dutch universities, several of them still working on their PhD. It was organized in the debate centre “de Rode Hoed”, beautifully situated on the imperial canal (Keizersgracht) in Amsterdam. 

Tagged with: swocc, conference, branding, Marketing, social media,

The role of social media in the entrepreneurial process

There is an broad array of initiatives and experimentation with social media by entrepreneurs and businesses. ‘We have to do something with social media’ seems to be the credo and emphasize lies on ‘a race to the market’. There is a great deal of trail-and-error and knowledge on how social media works is often highly tacit. One can also think of this as a ‘probe and learn process’ of entrepreneurs and businesses trying to use social media to their advantage (Groen et al, 2008). The degree of success however differs.

Tagged with: phd, entrepreneurship, social media,

Like! part deux

As I promised, I’d think about liking. And so it came to pass that I did. For weeks I pondered about liking. I have come to realize that the “like” has a lot of aspects to it. I’ve been thinking about liking. How liking things helps us make sense of the world surrounding us. In a way, what we like defines us. If you are surrounded by things that you like, does it make you happy? I can imagine it will, so we tend to collect likable things and people around us. So we can create a personal utopia, built out of the things we like. We teach our kids to like certain things, so that we can share the pleasure of our liking. We meet new people and friends in places we like. Or we go to places people we like, like. Liking is emotion. 

Tagged with: emotions, social media, like, facebook,

Like!

I like a lot of things. I like snowboarding, I like to have a drink with friends, I like to have a good conversation, I like lobster, I like good wine, and so on and so on. People that know me well, know what I like. The basis of friendship is liking each other and doing things together you both like or love doing. Friendship starts when you’re doing something you like doing and meet someone with the same “likes”, we call the “interests” mostly. The same counts for doing things you loathe doing as well. This of course fits in the day and night equation(if there’s nothing to loathe, there’s nothing to like). This is the basis for fraternity or sorority initiation, make a bunch of people do stuff they loathe and the start liking eachother. This is also known as teambuilding. My point? Liking or loathing is a very big part of our social life, maybe even the very base of having one.

Tagged with: like, social network sites, facebook, social media,