Sunday Smorgasbord

This is my weekly post about random things that I have read or seen recently that I find interesting, intriguing or just plain silly:

Zuckerberg hacked: How can I not write about this given that I spend all my time here writing about social media?  Yes, the head

Image courtesy Slashgear

honcho of Facebook had his fan page hacked and apparently it is someone who sees the ‘true’ potential of social networking. The episode has raised questions about security on Facebook and added to the debate about the Facebook business model. While it is not really news that nothing on Facebook is absolutely secure, here is a glaring reminder that the door is more unguarded than we may realize.

If that one is a ding for social media, here are two news items to get us all excited about our brave new world!

TED ebook: TED with the wonderful tagline “Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world” has been using the full power of the Internet in carrying on the campaign of Ideas Worth Spreading. It is with great interest that I read that TED is now going to start releasing ebooks – they are going to continue the model of idea sharing in small packages. These short ebooks will be around 20,000 words and cost $2.99. The principle of communicating substantive ideas and the premise that there are many who care both appeal to me greatly about the TED talks. I hope to see that spirit in their ebooks too.

Social Media and State of the Union: President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union marked the real engagement of the occasion with social media. The Whitehouse had a live stream of the speech and there were parallel Facebook and Twitter updates. The responses on social media were also running alongside the speech as real time commentary. There have been many interesting articles on the way social media made the average US citizen feel more connected to the speech and this is one more evidence of social media’s ability to upgrade the power of the people. There have been interesting wordclouds capturing the essence of the speech and analysis in terms of Democrat and Republican responses. It has been a fun event for social media as there is endless scope for slicing and dicing the data!