At the end of August, the NFL decided to institute a number of rules prohibiting the use of social media by teams and referees on match day - as well as rules that banned the media from providing live play-by-play coverage of matches.

As was pointed out at the time, the rules are easily imposed on officially-sanctioned media reps at matches - but what's to stop the average Joe in the stands updating Twitter or their blog as the match goes on, or mainstream media who want to provide play-by-play coverage online by sitting on their couch at home and blogging? That's exactly what the Wall Street Journal's Peter Sanders did in the recent New York Jets / Tennessee Titans match.

Of course, the NFL is simply working to protect its lucrative television revenue deals (and, ironically, the couch-based writer is part of that revenue stream), however the crackdown on live-blogging certainly seems futile given that only forces the hand of bonafide media at matches - and the NFL certainly can't control or crack down on every Twitter user sat watching a match and sharing scores...

[Via TechDirt]

Online dating is a somewhat static market. You have premium players Match.com and eHarmony, who seem to suggest at every commercial break that the person you've been looking for your whole life just signed up a few minutes ago. At the other end of the spectrum, there's Plenty of Fish which, although vastly improved from a few years ago, is still one of the least visually pleasing and user friendly sites on the web. PoF does ridiculous volume and traffic, is free, and doesn't do a stitch of marketing.

Enter new kid on the block, Ge.la.to. Launching today, Gelato takes online dating and mating to the social web. Incorporating your lifestream into the process of getting to know you, while paying a keen eye to keep privacy at a reasonable level.

Something feels a little wrong about having to rely on a company that defines itself as a social media analyst to discover fully 15% of the Twitter users that follow more than 2,000 accounts on the social network identify themselves as "social media marketers." that of the people who identify themselves as marketers, 15% follow more than 2,000 people compared to 0.3% of total Twitter users following more than 2,000 people. Yet this is one in a set of ten interesting statistics to come out of a report by social media analysis company Sysomos on Twitter usage.

A summary of the 10 most interesting points from Sysomos' report was done by the Rohit Bhargava, and includes info-nuggets like the fact that over half of all Twitter accounts are inactive (have not posted an update in over a week), and that the top 5% of accounts by volume of updates are responsible for 75% of the updates published on the site. Unfortunately, some of the statistics given are tenuous at best. For example, the report contains a claim that 65% of Twitter users are under the age of 25, but as Bhargava points out, less than 1% of Twitter users actually disclose their age.

Putting together meaningful statistics on Twitter is an admirable, but near impossible task. There are simply too many variables, and not enough data to go on; Twitter's minimalist approach doesn't give analysts much to go on. Further, as David Pogue recently pointed out, users can easily change their usernames, significantly muddying the water.

So, what do you think - can we trust the numbers that are put out by social media analysis companies? Is this information useful, or is it akin to reading tea leaves?

A lot of sites have a feature that lets registered users keep track of their comments, so you can follow whatever conversation, flame war or trolling expedition you might be part. BackType attempts to bring that feature to the whole Internet, giving you a central reference point for your comments across multiple sites. Backtype uses the URL you attach to your comments to search for what you've written, and it has a handy feature to mark things as "fake" if someone else has been commenting using your site.

So far, BackType seems to mostly track major tech and "social media" blogs, by guys like O'Reilly, Owyang, Winer and Arrington, but it has the potential to grow across all types of sites and become very useful. The ability to follow people's comments is a nice feature, as it lets you see what others (even those famous guys!) are reading and responding to. If you have an interest in the social aspects of the web, it's worth a look -- at the very least, to dig up some comments you might have forgotten you left.

There's no doubt that Facebook is the 'most' popular social networking site to hit the scene. This one, unlike LinkedIn (although it has a whole other target, however users seem to be sliding towards Facebook recently), MySpace, and Friendster, seems like it could quite possibly be here to say. The proof is in the numbers.

Shrel Israel, social media guru, picked up the phone and contacted the corporate communications people at Facebook to get some numbers straight, here are some interesting tidbits he found out:

• Over 150,000 registrants daily since January.
• 35 million current users.
• In September there were no users from outside colleges, today that user base consists of over half.
• Average visitor stays for 20 minutes.
• 47,000 Facebook groups.
• More than 2000 applications.

The numbers speak for themselves. Facebook has grown in extreme popularity in such a very short time. If they keep this up, and keep users happy, they will be the leader for quite some time.

[via Web-Strategist]

Gen Y, a term sometimes used for those 20-35 years old, are old enough to be (some of) our kids but more importantly make up our next generation of clients. This generation, defined more by popular culture than by age, is an Internet-hungry and online-casual bunch. Currently, there are about 76 million of them in the U.S., not a bad market slice.

They communicated first via Instant Message and made the sport popular. After webcams were affordable, dating sites emerged. By the time YouTube opened up the face-to-face world, research as we knew it had changed permanently. Then social sites like MySpace, and Facebook blew onto the virtual landscape. Television is becoming secondary to seeing what you want when you want it (this is the ongoing theme) and BitTorrent (among others) is the way to find preferred media, not TV Guide.

If your business is looking for its next generation of customers, what kind of online presence do you need to attract and keep the techno-oriented Y'ers who spend big bucks online? Although neither exhaustive nor scientific (my sample was everyone I know under 35), here is a list of popular places where young folks come together online. If you market, you should consider these sites.

Download Squad and its cousins – people want to know what's out there as soon as it's launched. DLS not only tells you what's there but also make it easy to find plus they let you know if it's worthwhile. With so much information out there, DLS and its cousin sites offer today's specials so you don't have to bother with the entire menu.

Gmail, Google News Reader, Google Docs – free online services by King Google are the prime haunt of many 20-35 year olds. Make sure you know how they work so when you build apps on your site you try to mimic the look and feel. When they want world news, they often use the links at the top of the pages.

The News Empire – the business-oriented target group seems to enjoy CNN's plethora of sites including cnn.com for news, cnnsi.com for sports, and the new CNN video area. They find news at their local paper's site as well as at the major news sites including The NY Times, WaPo, Google and Yahoo!.

Things Technical – if the users are geeky (a term I use with respect), they're likely to grab the most current news available from sites like Slashdot, Digg, Techmeme, Engadget and Reddit. Never heard of them? Each is a field-leader and they all use a blog-like or RSS-like updating system. Ease of use and consistent uptime can be more important than design. (A site is successful when its name becomes a verb, like, "Google that..." or "My review was slashdotted...")

Sharing Socially – social networking sites are more than just a "what's new" news item. Facebook and MySpace connect this international generation like virtual glue. Many users consider these sites to be their homepages and include links to other sites they want to visit (like Twitter, Google Reader, Pownce, their favorite blogs) right from those pages.

Photo Share – Got a shelf full of quaint photo albums? Today's shelves are online on a Flickr, Picasa or other photo site's servers. With the rapid availability of fast bandwidth, pictures go online instantaneously and can circle the globe in less than a morning. Others can comment and you can share all the photos you upload from your digital camera or more likely from your phone. In the olden days, we taught people how to attach a photo to an email. Today, we read the Flickr feed to see a picture that might interest us.

It's All in the RSS – most everyone who leans toward the technical has an RSS reader, whether it's Google or FeedDemon or others. The younger online group gets the feed for whatever interests them and checks that feed several times a day. It's neater and cleaner than browsing all over the Web and they get what they want when they want it (the ongoing theme) and have time to read it. If you don't yet have an RSS feed, what are you waiting for?

Share, Share, Share – the definition of social sites is sharing. We share not only photos and text but also we expect sharing in return. It's almost as if the Web has come full circle. From the olden days of the early 1990s to the mid-first decade of this millennium, the Web has evolved from open and free (when I started) to pay-as-you-go (when they expected you to pay to get news) and has grown into freely shared spaces that are your own. The mantra of sites is "Twitter/Pownce - Digg - Flickr" for the younger and clued-in audience.

Whether you consider this generation of Internet users to be egocentric and instantaneous gratifiers or open-minded and savvy, the proof of the online pudding is in the feed. Click a few links and see how they are coming to the knowledge that will make them – or keep them – from becoming your future customers.

If your fav site was omitted, please add it in the comments. You'd be surprised how many great sites we find out simply by asking others who are slightly more geeky than we are.

If you have always wanted to be a film titan and you love team work, (that ole collaborator in you), Your Broadcaster puts you in the director chair. Your Broadcaster is a Web 2.0 project where everyone (like you) contributes material for 5 full length feature films in these genres: Bollywood, Thriller, Comedy, Drama, Horror.

Members' participation is primarily through the upload of scripts, auditions, characters, cartoons and stunts among others, which are voted on by other members. Uploads of the most successful member will be used as the basis for the final film.

If you don't want to collaborate on the film project, but still want to show your stuff, you can join Your Broadcaster for free and upload your content such as videos, photographs, audio or video mash-up. Currently, the upload limit is 2 MB per individual data, e.g., video, photo, etc. You still get to vote and you can create your own web page, blog to share, view or post information.

If you do want to collaborate on one or all of the films, the fee is $10 for each, or $35 for however many you want. If you so desire, there is a $10 copyright fee to protect your work.

It's interesting to see how the crowd sourcing trend is impacting our world. Who would have thought Joe Public might get a shot at Oscar night? We're not saying Your Broadcaster will garner that type of success. It could very well share the same fate as the Million Penguins wiki novel, an experiment to publish a crowd sourced novel.

How do you herd edit a million voices, plots, characters, sub-plots, in a novel? The same question might be asked of creating a film with a million directors. Whatever the outcome, you can be sure it will be um, extremely unique, possibly establishing a new film genre altogether.

[via TechCrunch]

Wis.dm is a relatively new social-driven bookmarking and publishing site which describes itself as, "A platform for creative people to publish their own work and store and share links and comments on a wide variety of web content."

Part Del.icio.us, part MySpace, Wis.dm has one solid thing going for it; A fresh and dedicated community who seem to be finding quality content without quite so much noise as some other popular sites. You won't find an overwhelming flood of new content every moment on Wis.dm but, what you find is mostly a cut above average.

The wisdom of a crowd is a debatable phenomenon. Love crowds or hate them, their collective wisdom is defining more and more what we read and view on the Internet. Social bookmarking and link voting are a great example however, we have a long way to go before we're done shaping and defining the ways and things crowds can decide. Cheers to Wis.dm for giving us one more choice, and another model with which to compare.

If you've ever had the good fortune of having one of your websites or blog posts dugg to the point of showing up on digg's homepage, you've enjoyed a huge traffic boost to your site. This is wonderful for web publishers, and I'm not going to lie and say that we don't care about it here at Download Squad; in fact, since the success of a given post is measured in large part by the traffic it drives to our site, it's certainly a goal of ours to have our posts make the homepage on digg.

But how valuable is digg traffic, really, and is the digg community one that we should even care about? Unfortunately, after observing the digg community for about a year, I'd have to conclude no, it's not. Now, at this point I should point out that AOL owns Weblogs Inc, who own Download Squad, and AOL also owns Netscape, recently converted into a social news and media voting site that is in many ways similar to digg. So if you don't think I can be objective about this, you might want to just skip this post. But I'm not here to sing the praises of Netscape over digg either. Overall, I'm not certain that social media sites like Netscape, digg, reddit, del.icio.us, or even the granddaddy of them all - Slashdot - will have any relevance whatsoever in five years.

Okay, so now that I've condemned a whole class of website, or really a whole class of online community, I should point out that while digg drives the largest amount of traffic of the bunch, the community at digg is actually rotting from the inside out.

This is a very inflammatory statement to make, but all it takes is to browse through the comments on few random frontpage posts at digg, and you'll see what I mean. The sheer level of superiority, sarcasm, and general negativity is overwhelming, and makes digg a place that is not only not fun to visit, it's certainly not a place to "share, discover, bookmark, and promote the news that's important to you", as digg's tagline optimistically claims.

While social media sites seem to be the future of web site aggregation, at least one element of it, there's one aspect of these sites that is starting to get annoying. Have you noticed some of your favorite sites adding a row and sometimes multiple rows of links to social news sites, ostensibly to make it easy for visitors to bookmark or save the site on del.icio.us, digg, netscape, reddit, furl, or any number of other sites of this ilk. Of course, there's also a myriad of service-specific RSS links, so that users of Bloglines, Google Reader, NewsGator, Netvibes, etc. can click on one link and subscribe to the site in the reader of their choice. The thing is, I'm not sure people even use these buttons, particularly when they're all grouped together; they've simply become litter online.

Well, if you're someone that wants to offer your users the ability to easily subscribe to or bookmark your site, but want to avoid littering your site with all of these site-specific icons, check out Add This. Add This allows you to put a single image link on your site to take your readers to a dedicated bookmarking site page, and another for feed readers. Once there, they can choose the service they'd like to use, and perform the function they're looking to do. On one hand, all this seems to be doing is cleaning up your pages by putting all the site-specific links on an intermediate page - something you could arguably do yourself. But there's more to the Add This service, which makes it more compelling.

Add This aggregates statistics about which pages and site features your readers are collecting in their bookmark collections the most, and provide that data back to you. Assuming the web viewing population uses these links more than I think they do, this could provide some very valuable information as to what people are truly finding interesting on your site. Personally, I'm still a bit skeptical as to the need for all of these site-specific links. If this trend continues at the rate it's been going, ad blocking software will also be blocking social media bookmarking links just to provide a cleaner interface for web users. Hey, it's a thought.

If you have an interest in podcasting, blogging, or any of that other "social media" hooey, then you'll want to be in Atlanta, Georgia on February 10th, 2007. That's the date of the as-yet-unnamed social media conference being organized by Sherry Heyl, the Atlanta Media Bloggers, and a bunch of local riff-raff. (If you have any bright ideas for a name, feel free to share.)

For I don't know how long, Yahoo! News has provided the means to rate (aka recommend) news stories. It's not a simple "thumbs up/down" but a five-star scale. At the top of each topic page at Yahoo! News you can find links to "Most emailed," "Most viewed," and "Most recommended."

The most recommended stories bubble to the top at several places (along with their respective RSS feeds):

• All news stories
• All news photos
• World News
• Business News
• Entertainment News
• Sports News
• Technology News
• Political News
• Science News
• Health News
• Opinion