herebenotions

Get out the vote

Couple of videos of note in the run up to the election

The influence of the blogosphere

Back in March, Edelman hosted a breakfast seminar with Jeff Jarvis, a media expert, social media guru and Buzzmachine blogger. Here you can watch Jeff talk about the influence of the blogosphere, the challenges for companies entering into a dialogue with bloggers, his view of emerging communication trends and more in the videos on the Edelman site.

Apparently a large portion of Edelman's USA income come from advising companies on how to blog; seems a shame that more advertising companies aren’t getting in on this game. Brand blogging is all about conversations, getting close to consumers and doing so in a creative and engaging on brand way.

Stumbling

Back in November I stumbled upon stumbleupon.  This is another great web2.0 company that crosses search with social networking. 

I love the site, it's made me fall in love with the web in a new way.  I love the randomness, the unexpected stuff it throws up that I'd never see otherwise.

So how does it work?

Download a toolbar that sits in your browser, and any time you fancy you hit the stumble button and you'll be taken to a new webpage. The pages you are shown depend on the interests you've previously stated (over 500 options), the friends you've made and stumbleupon learns from the likes and dislikes you state with one click as you browse.  All pages have been recommended by other stumblers, so it neatly sidesteps all the companies that pay search engines to get on the first few pages, and you tend to get interesting, high-quality sites. 

The blogging feature is easy to use; you can add comments to any webpage that are copied to your blog, and even if you don't want to comment on a page you can review everyone else's comments. You can recall the full list of sites you've given the thumbs up or down to. It's also a lot quicker than 'proper' grown-up blogging, so I've tended to switch to that for capturing a lot of the random, little things that catch my eye. 

You can browse stumblers by their interests, or see who liked the page you're on, and send stumbles to your friends (this is easily the best social networking feature). 

Some of my stumbles are blogged on my stumbleupon homepage.  There's the odd gem, but a lot of totally random stuff like oneword, footprints in the sand and weirdly pretty odd too.

Taking the law into our own hands

I've kind of had a thing for politics since The West Wing started and I got hooked; but the political process is off-puttingly political, so here's a link to wikocracy.  A nice experiment to see what happens when everyone can write and revise the law (US) - to make the process of law-making free for all. 

Life caching

Dandelife is a social biography network, where you can tell you life story. 

A user's page shows a horizontal timeline, with events neatly placed in history, as well as photos, videos, tags and favourite stories.

Tagging is an important part of storytelling on Dandelife, allowing users to create common threads within their own stories, and connect with those of other members. Dandelife works seamlessly with flickr and YouTube, letting users import photos and videos to illustrate their narrative.  Dandelife, launched two months ago, is currently in beta and free to use.

Similar ideas include OurStory, WikiBios, and Eternity4All.  See more here.