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As we face an uncertain and worrying New Year, we can at least console ourselves with the fact that we are not living 1,600 years ago, and about to begin the year 410. In this year Rome was sacked, and the empire gave up trying to defend Britain. While this marks the glorious beginnings of “English history”, as Anglo-Saxon barbarians began their inexorable conquest of lowland Britain, it was also the start of a recession that puts all recent crises in the shade. - rzklkng

It's been a colorful decade in culture. Green became the new black, black became the new white, and the global economy slipped into red. The emergence of i-everything brought on an evolved understanding of "we" as collaboration, crowdsourcing and the social web unleashed a new era of relating to the world. - rzklkng

Even more important than the gross traffic originating from shared links is the social engagement of sharing. When compared to search, sites in our network are seeing up to 50 percent more engagement from sharing. Meaning share-originated links are driving up to 50 percent more page views per unique than search. Search drives a very focused click and is still the standard for intent. We feel influence is a proxy for the new social intent. - rzklkng

You can’t forget the great Christmas songs, movies and television specials. But what of the wonderful, heart-warming Christmases you spent with Archie, Richie Rich, Mickey Mouse and Little Lulu? Even super-heroes sometimes take a break from clobbering super-villains at Christmas. Here are some of the classic holiday stories that have made their way into the comics over the years. - rzklkng

As the current decade draws to a close, relatively few Americans have positive things to say about it. By roughly two-to-one, more say they have a generally negative (50%) rather than a generally positive (27%) impression of the past 10 years. This stands in stark contrast to the public's recollection of other decades in the past half-century. When asked to look back on the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, positive feelings outweigh negative in all cases. - rzklkng

In social media, the most common indicators we use tend to be engagement metrics. The hope is that if a user is going through the site or returning more often than they must be part of the community. On Facebook and social media sites, we look to fan counts and interaction. Examples include comments and retweets. These are supposed to indicate a growing and more dedicated community. On the surface that seems fine. But these indicators only look at the top level of interaction. - rzklkng

An overview of the process of camouflaging WWI ships. - rzklkng

Keep in mind, what I’m describing in this post is not a full-blown measure of Visitor Engagement for a lot of reasons. Still, as I’m kicking it around it appears to be a pretty good start and per my entire approach towards measures of engagement, I’d rather have all of you banging on the idea than work in a vacuum. So how does it work? - rzklkng

An infographic. - rzklkng

An infographic. - rzklkng

CHANGE is in the air. A new communications technology threatens a dramatic upheaval in America’s newspaper industry, overturning the status quo and disrupting the business model that has served the industry for years. This “great revolution”, warns one editor, will mean that some publications “must submit to destiny, and go out of existence.” With many American papers declaring bankruptcy in the past few months, their readers and advertisers lured away by cheaper alternatives on the internet, this doom-laden prediction sounds familiar. But it was in fact made in May 1845, when the revolutionary technology of the day was not the internet—but the electric telegraph. - rzklkng

In this post we have outlined an approach to determine the racial and ethnic breakdown of a population based solely on people's surnames and data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. We have found that while Facebook has always been diverse, this diversity has increased over time leading to a population that today looks very similar to the U.S. population. - rzklkng

But Farmville’s farms don’t actually mirror reality. In Farmville, farmers can get high returns. Seeds mature at impossible rates. It’s a place without slaughtering. There’s little of the harsh reality that Americans value food only enough to spend 10 percent of their income on it. If you had any doubts, know that Farmville is complete fantasy. - rzklkng

What will the social web evolve to? What are the trend predictions for social web in the coming new year. A variety of recent trend predictions for the social web see an evolution in the making – but no big breakthroughs. - rzklkng

It's about Google wanting to take control over the way you buy mobile phones -- the device and the service -- disrupting the entire mobile industry in the process. - rzklkng

The general point is that we’re really through the looking glass, in a world in which lots of things have perverse effects — and basing your policy ideas on intuition from “normal” times can lead you very much astray. - rzklkng

How we measure social media ROI is the hot topic in comunications at the minute. What metrics can we use, what new ideas can we develop, and my particular favouritedo we even need to measure ROI? I thought I’d collate this after reading and commenting on this post by Mike Litman got my brain swhirling. Here’s ten of my favourite posts discussing social media ROI, there’s some classics, and some newer pieces too: - rzklkng

We’ve talked a lot lately about the ROI of social media and how we measure success. There are a variety of theories on the most effective way to assess social media ROI, and Interactive Insights Group has created one of the most comprehensive list of resources I have ever seen. - rzklkng

In a post I wrote called the A-Z of social media for brands I decided that P stands for Policy. I'm not one for too many rules and regulations, but it is a good idea to define some clear guidelines to help staff (especially novices) to do the right thing. So let’s take a look at some real world social media policies and guidelines as used by companies. Zappos does a great job of summing it up in seven words, but the detail is also important and there are some fine suggestions here... - rzklkng

“It’s pretty clear that most SmartBrief on Social Media readers feel the White House hasn’t been able to fulfill its lofty goals of providing more transparency through technology,” says Chaney.Despite the negative results of the survey, Chaney does believe that the government is at least headed in the right direction. “I’m encouraged that, whether you agree with his politics or not, we have a president who sees the advantages of a collaborative, grassroots approach to government. Whether the government will become a ‘platform’ of, for, and by the people remains to be seen.” - rzklkng

Create your own magazine covers! - rzklkng

An infographic detailing blogger share. You'll note the current result resembles the Firefox logo. - rzklkng

That observation prompted Dash to wonder what satisfaction he was getting from "chasing novelty." If his uncle could make do with an old cell phone, why couldn't he? Thus, a small movement was born: In April, Dash and a few tech-luminary friends launched Last Year's Model, a one-page site that encourages techies to consider the old before jumping into the new. The response, Dash says, was overwhelming—people posted hundreds of comments on the site and on Twitter and Facebook explaining how the economy, the environment, and general thriftiness had prompted them to stick with old phones, music players, cameras, video game consoles, and other devices. - rzklkng

Making your own versions of great food and clever gadgets is already rewarding, and if you play your cards right, the homemade route also comes with serious bragging rights. These 10 economical homemade creations—epicurean and electrical—should inspire some well-deserved praise. - rzklkng

Our approach is inspired by current research results from cognitive science, computational linguistics and neurobiology. We aim at radically improving the way users interact with knowledge and information online. Recent studies show that human thought processes have a strong visual component and that the brain can process images significantly faster than textual information. We are convinced that it is time for innovative, interactive, visual methods of working with and discovering facts and information instead of wading through ever longer lists of documents and search results. - rzklkng

The annual state of the blogosphere report provided by Technorati always provides a ton of interesting information for bloggers, marketers and PR pros to use and reuse. My only issue with it is they make us read through pages upon pages of content to get at the good bits, and don’t provide a list of just the stats as a resource. Well fear not, I’ve gone through the entire report for you and pulled out just the stats that I found compelling. These are useful for presentations, blog posts or even Tweets and are good all year: remember, we don’t get another one until late 2010. - rzklkng

An interactive map showing the geographic location where conflicts over water have occured, and information about each conflict. - rzklkng

In states with lower percentages of people that endorse spanking and washing kids' mouths out with soap, which is the case in New England and much of the Middle Atlantic, Obama did very well. In states with higher percentages, like Wyoming, Idaho, and Alabama, McCain won big. Even the states that fall somewhat far from the trend line are usually easy to explain. For example, Hawaii, Illinois, and Alaska are all favorite son or daughter states. Several states that are below the line, like Nevada, Indiana, and Ohio, are states that have usually voted Republican in the past. - rzklkng

We're currently working with a dozen different clients, all web application (re)designs. All of these clients have data rich applications and need equally rich data visualizations to help their end customers analyze data quickly and effectively. What makes my job really interesting is that these clients are in different industries and are using different technologies. So we have pulled together a set of 28 tools for creating graphs, Gantt charts, diagrammers, calendars/schedulers, gauges, mapping, pivot tables, OLAP cubes, and sparklines, in Flash, Flex, Ajax or Silverlight. - rzklkng

National newspapers may try to impersonate regional newspapers that are dying or dead. (There have been reports that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal will soon publish San Francisco Bay Area editions.) We already live in the America of USA Today, which appears, unsolicited, in a plastic chrysalis suspended from your doorknob at a Nebraska Holiday Inn or a Maine Marriott. We check the airport weather. We fly from one CNN Headline News monitor to another. We end up where we started. - rzklkng

The information offered on this site provides valuable insight into Internet usage trends. We compile system data from numerous web sites and organize it into reports so you can stay current. We also put the power of market research and statistical analysis in your hands by allowing deep drill-down reporting as well as a powerful filtering system to limit data to only specific browsers, operating systems, search engines and even corporate versus residential usage! - rzklkng