ClappingTree’s Web 2.0

HOW IMPORTANT ARE SOCIAL MEDIA and how widespread is the usage of social media among educational institutions and commercial organizations? Two recent studies by Dr Nora Barnes and Eric Mattson, as reported on Robin Good’s site, suggest that:

• The Inc. 500 companies know far more about social media than one might predict,
• Social media have arrived in American colleges, and
• The use of social in the ivory tower is outpacing even the business world.

Sixty-one percent of the academic respondents use at least one form of social media. Four of the six social media have similar adoption rates to those of corporations. Blogging is the most common form among academia, at a 33% usage rate — 14% higher than that of the Inc. 500 respondents! Wikis, on the other hand, are used by only 3% of admissions departments compared with 17% of responding businesses in the Inc. 500. (See figure below.)

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MY RESULTS:
You are Yoda

“NOT ANOTHER TWITTER CLONE!” was my response when I heard of Jaiku and more recently Pownce. Thanks to Google search, I managed to find the results of a Jaiku, Pownce or Twitter poll and read a really useful review on all three by Grace at the bottom of all the comments:

I’ve had a twitter and a pownce. I tried both for a good amount of time, especially since I have friends on both, but none on jaiku. However, I ditched them both for jaiku in the end, regardless.

Twitter’s good points:

• it was first, thus more popular
• streamlined

Pownce’s good points:

• ability to share actual files
• attractive templates
• comments on posts

Jaiku’s good points:

• ability to stream other feeds
• their “badges”
• comments on posts

I’ve found that twitter and jaiku are actually on the same level when it comes to server hiccups. I was turned off by pownce’s apparent lack of a separate method of displaying my posts. Jaiku’s feature of streaming my other feeds eventually won the war in my eyes.

Since the poll results shows that Jaiku leads with 48% (or 193) of the votes, I decided to ignore Pownce and checked out Jaiku instead. Added my twitter and ClappingTrees blog feeds to it. Looking good. I’d probably choose Jaiku too. If I do, I may need to start using Twitterfeed so that I only need post in Jaiku once and that “jaiku” would turn into a “twitter” and then a “tumblr”. What’s your take on this?

LAST THURSDAY, AT THE GEEK TERMINAL CAFE, I announced to all present at the BNI Crescendo meeting, “I am an Internet Coach. I am also the one who started the ‘R-C-G fire’ at Geek Terminal.”

“R” is for “Renaissance”. On June 11, I suggested to the leader of BNI Renaissance, to hold its weekly meetings at the Geek Terminal. The chapter did so the very next Wednesday.

“C” is for “Crescendo”. As a result, a few days later, Renaissance’s mentor (also a founding member of BNI Crescendo) advised Crescendo to hold their weekly meetings there too. They did so the following Thursday.

“G” is for “Global”. Shortly after, some BNI Global members apparently visited Crescendo at the Geek Terminal and decided to hold their meetings at the cafe too — on Tuesdays.

How did I know of (or rather started noticing) Geek Terminal in the first place? It was through blogs! Many bloggers in Ping.sg (such Ben Koe, DK, Keropokman and many others) had been writing about the Geek Terminal, how customers can surf wirelessly and connect their PCs to power points anywhere within this cafe! And so this was how the “R-C-G” fire started. All because of blogs, and partially thanks to me, three BNI chapters (and thus around 60-80 people) are now having business breakfast at the Geek Terminal every week!

Afternote: BNI, by the way, stands for Business Network International. There are over 20 chapters in Singapore alone. I joined the Renaissance chapter as a member a few weeks ago. The Global chapter, for some reason, has disappeared from the listing.