Gareth Barry has played his last game for England according to 70 per cent of fans.
A bottomupmedia poll earlier today asked whether the Manchester City midfielder – who earned praised after captaining England to a 1-1 draw against Ghana at Wembley yesterday – had an international future and the results are comprehensive.
It seems that even though the midfielder hardly put a foot wrong yesterday, most England fans think that it will not be enough to prolong his England career.
Yesterday Gareth Barry captained England to a 1-1 draw against Ghana, but despite winning praise from Andy Townsend and Clive Tyldesley a large majority of fans think the Manchester City midfielder is not international quality.
Here bottomupmedia is giving our readers a chance to have their say.
Maz Nadjm is the head of Social Media at Ogilvy Group UK. Before that he was Online Community Product Manager at BSkyB. In 2009 he founded Cozytweetup.com which allowed people to connect on Twitter and meet-up to follow their shared interests. Maz was born in Iran, raised in Sweden and studied in the USA and UK. He blogs at www.cozymazi.com.
Maz Nadjm: An advocate of social media
How do you use social media in your daily work, and socially? Professionally I use social media to network with other people in my field and get feedback or recognition for what I’m doing. When I want to reach out to someone, 95% of the time it’s on social. Some of my contacts have become close friends through using social. I’d say I use Twitter to contact everybody, LinkedIn for business and Facebook for my friends and family who are spread all over the world. I use Quora all the time. For me it’s the best Q & A site out there. It’s well monitored and much more efficient than searching for an answer using Google. It’s all about UGC and crowd-sourcing. Quora has kept a high standard of material and that’s all in the tone of the site. That’s an important lesson for many social media sites; it’s like when you go to a club, you might stage dive, but if you’re in a restaurant wearing a suit you won’t do that. It’s all in the culture of the place.
Which sites do you use most? On a day-to-day basis I use Twitter, Quora, LinkedIn and Facebook and all for different purposes. I like YouTube as well. It’s great to see how people are reacting to certain videos and how the latest news is broadcast.
Could you live without social media tools? No. Those days are gone. The kind of technology we see in social media has become part of people’s life. I have my iPhone close to me all the time. It’s there by my bed when I sleep and when I wake up I check the news and my emails etc. Read more of this post
The words LOL, OMG, WTF sprang to my mind so don’t worry.
Now that you have recovered, you are probably thinking why is this of interest to bottomupmedia?
The first photo is credited to @Charli Dickenson who after some digging around was safely established as a member of the public and not a Daily Mail reporter. Therefore, meaning that the story itself was created by Ms Dickenson sending in her photo to the Mail. Read more of this post
It’s an example of user-generated content at its best. What started out as one man’s simple idea is now supported by hundreds of writers and video journalists around the world.
Quakebook is a project thought up by ‘Our Man in Abiko’, a British man living in Japan, to showcase the response of normal people caught up in, or emotionally moved by, the Japanese earthquake. The aim was to create a book in one week and sell it to raise funds for the Japanese Red Cross. The book will first be available as a digital download, and then hopefully in print form.
He first voiced his idea on Twitter a week after the earthquake on Friday 18 March, saying: “”People of twitter, what do you think about a creative commons (ie cool to copy) copyright for #quakebook Good/bad for charity? Thoughts?”
He followed this up with a blog post further explaining the idea: “I’m looking for contributions from anyone who has something to say about the earthquake (eg where were you when it happened, what did you feel? How have you helped? Did it change anything in the way you live your life? Are you coping with grief? Or just bewildered behind a barrage of media images?) I’m not looking for windy poetic stuff, just honest stuff. Aim to write 250-300 words or so – equivalent to a short blog post (or one page of a book).” Read more of this post
Unfortunately, user generated content is not always a good thing, especially when the content is spam e-mails advertising fake pills. The world’s biggest botnet was shut down recently by lawsuits from Microsoft and drug company Pfizer, reducing spam levels all over the world by about 33% for a short period.
The Rustock network included approximately 1 million hijacked PCs and sent up to 30 billion spam e-mails a day.
Yesterday, thousands of protesters poured into London to show their opposition to the coalition’s new budget cuts. Anarchists and other protesters prepared for the meeting weeks in advance via Twitter, Youtube and Facebook.
It’s believed that a network of anarchists known as “Network X” planned much of the violence which resulted, including occupying landmarks in Whitehall and West End and attacking the Ritz Hotel.
However, there is another side to this: police are also using social media technology to keep track of groups and to help them to find the names of protesters.
Spokesman Alan Crockford of the Metropolitan Police said: “With the huge spread in wide use of social media any one can say anything and our job is to work out whether there’s intention and capability or just someone letting off steam. We can use it to find out about the size and scale of a demonstration”.
“The police have always monitored information which is in the public domain, in a few years this will be considered no different from reading a leaflet about the march”.
Police in many countries are now careful to monitor social networking sites for signs of trouble, as Australian officers showed in the recent case of a fight “organized” via Facebook in New South Wales, Australia (which proved to be a hoax when nobody showed up).
There is also a darker side to the authorities’ use of social media: Egyptian police have reportedly used Facebook and social media to track down the names of protesters during the riots in February, enabling them to arrest them more easily. Those captured were locked up, intimidated and possibly tortured.
In case anyone missed it, MySpace is steadily loosing the battle against Facebook and other social media website, new figures from tech analysts showed yesterday.
The site lost around 10 million unique users from January to February, despite the company’s attempt to become more specialized in catering for music fans and musicians. According to the Chitika ad network, 48 percent of those who still use MySpace access music-related sites.
The company also intends to lose about 500 staff worldwide.
Could this soon be a thing of the past?
A number of reasons have been suggested for this trend, including increased competition from the more professional Facebook, competition from other musically-focussed social networks like Apple’s Ping and younger users becoming sick of the website. Or maybe it’s just the horrible music which blares every time you open one of their pages.
So, is this a blow for musicians who want to produce UGC?
It seems unlikely that even if MySpace does fail, it will limit the ability of new musicians to get their material out into the world. There are so many other channels for them to use- YouTube, Ping, Buzznet, Last FM- that there will always be a way for them to put it on the internet.
Still, it’s a shame that one of the grandaddies of social networking is now in such dire straits.
Ever heard of the 90-9-1 rule? No, I didn’t think so.
But in the world of user generated content it’s a pretty handy rule of thumb to indicate the proportion of creators, contributors and consumers. It reveals that 1% of web surfers are creators. They’re the ones blogging, posting images to Flickr and videos to YouTube. 9% are contributors, web browsers who leave comments on those blog posts/ photos/ videos. They might also contribute by retweeting an article they find interesting. If you leave a comment on this insightful blog post, then you’re also part of that 9% of contributors. But if you don’t, and that’s not a threat by the way, you’re part of the vast majority, the 90% of surfers who are consumers. Consumers, or ‘lurkers’ as they’re described in the UGC world, read the material and move onto the next without leaving a trace, well, apart from helping the hit count of course.
The three groups make up an online community where some participate more than others. The proportions are neatly portrayed in the pyramid graphic, as seen here with different terminology. Surely this tells us that the proportion of ‘users’ responsible for creating ‘user generated content’ is insignificant in comparison with the number who consume that content. Researcher Jakob Nielsen has referred to the phenomenon as ‘Participation Inequality’. Many more web surfers are consumers than creators. As journalism progresses to become more and more web-based will we see a shift in the 90-9-1 rule, with more creators? Read more of this post
UGC isn’t all reporting on disasters and doom and gloom; in fact, one of the booming areas for User Generated Content is in players creating their own content for computer games.
Whether you are blasting aliens or trying to save the Princess with Mario, user generated content looks to have an important future in the game world.
Bottom Up Media 
