In recent years, McGonigal has grown especially interested in the way that massively multiplayer online gaming generates collective intelligence, and interested in the way that the collective intelligences thus generated can be utilized as a means of improving the world, either by improving the quality of human life or by working towards the solution of social ills.

For example,games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems?

She say’s:

Instead of providing gamers with better and more immersive alternatives to reality, I want all of us to be become responsible for providing the world with a better and more immersive reality.

It also took me back to a scary Star Trek (original series) episode entitled: A Taste of Armageddon
In this episode (plot summary by http://www.ericweisstein.com/fun/startrek/) Kirk, Spock, and three crew members (including Galloway and Tamura) beam down and are met by Mea 3 and a security detachment of two who take them to Anan 7 and members of the High Counsel. Anan 7 claims that Eminiar VII has been at war with Vendikar, the third planet in the system, for 500 years. However, no evidence of warfare is evident to the landing party who witness a fusion bomb “attack.” In fact, Yeoman Tamura’s tricorder shows no radiation disturbances, despite Anan 7′s claim that half a million people have just been killed. A counter-attack is ordered by Anan 7 and carried out by Sar 6′s activation of the “attack unit.” Spock realizes that the war is being fought by computers which calculate casualties and that the citizens who are declared “dead” are then required to report to disintegration chambers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

On a positive note, I really like this video as it is both well presented and provides great lateral thinking. For example, recently she has suggested and developed 3 games that encourage resolving world issues in a virtual environment but with a possible optimism and input for real world challenges or reflections.

The 6 Social Media Sites You Should Explore – They are certainly leading the new social media revolution

Firstly, Foursquare – Ever heard of the term, ‘location, location, location’!? Well this is a location-based social network/gaming application that is gaining ground.  Members or  Users “check in” at local businesses and earn rewards for frequently visiting participating establishments.
Currently, the site is receiving greater than 1 million check-ins per week.  Business owners can get value out of Foursquare by offering incentives for users to check in, such as special offers for repeat visitors. There is also the ability to be crowned Mayor of an establishment!
i.e: What is the definition of a deal? One example, is a a free drink or appetizer or starter dish for the Foursquare user who checks in the most (Its the user who is called / hailed the Mayor).

Interestingly, this company has signed major partnerships with TV network Bravo and restaurant guide to functionality and usage.

In the video above, you can see Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare. Here he discusses the goals of this location-based social networking application.

Gowalla – According to Wikipedia: Gowalla is a location-based social-networking game created by Alamofire. Users ‘check-in’ at Spots in their local vicinity, either through a dedicated mobile application or through the mobile website. As a reward users will sometimes receive items from check-ins. Items have developed to become a promotional tool for the game’s partners e.g. Incase. As of March 2010 there were approximately 150,000 active users.

Rummble – Similar to the latter, the concept of trust and ratings is introduced. For example, their website suggests:

It is a bit like your social network, but based upon trust (or lack of) in peoples recommendations so you can discover cool stuff from thousands of people, not just friends or immediate trusted connections. Rummbling is really easy online or from your mobile phone.  Its the best to Rummble when you’re actually at a place you love or loath, then you can add a photo & if you want, share it straight away on Twitter, Facebook, Bebo or more…

Google Buzz – Buzz allows users to post status updates and upload pictures and videos to a Google profile, not unlike Facebook and Twitter.  A user’s network is formed by contacts they interact with frequently on Gmail. If a user makes an update public, the information also gets added to the “Buzz” layer now available on Google mobile maps.  Now, Google Maps users on iPhones and Android devices can view the things other Buzz users have said about businesses in the area.

Loopt – This is another location-based social service. It aims to connect its users with their friends by visually displaying their location and availability on a localized map. Users can connect with friends in the area, see reviews and recommendations of restaurants, and find events in the area that might be of interest.  Businesses have tapped into Loopt’s location data to offer targeted promotions. Loopt is already accessible on more than 100 mobile phones and currently used by about 3 million people, giving it the widest distribution of any of the location-based services.

Blippy – Blippy aims to connect people around the purchases they make.  I guess people will need to be very careful about what they say or what could be misconstrued! Blippy publishes the amount and location of customer purchases, with user permission -that the rest of the community can then react to.

Groupon – This site offers “collective buying power” by providing deals to groups of people who buy products and services in bulk from participating retailers.  The site uses social networking to get users to share offers with their communities, in order to reach the target number of customers the “Groupon” requires to activate.

Businesses could gain exposure and new customers by making offers on the site—if Groupon develops a large following. However, one observation is to take advantage of group discounts you will have to find members with the same interest first. While the revenue from the purchase is helpful, exposing a large group of customers to your product is even more valuable.

This is by no means an inclusive list, only 5 exceptional companies striving to change the social media landscape with fresh ideas.

Which up-and-coming social application are you most excited about? Who did we leave off the list that should have been included? Please leave a comment below…

Other new services include:

http://www.Intent.com
http://www.akoha.com/
http://www.traxo.com/
http://www.socialight.com/
http://www.communike.com/Messages.aspx
http://www.yoink.com/

http://www.wombeat.com/

What about linking Social Media to Augmented Reality!?
Our article and associated videos about the potential of Augmented reality can be found at:
http://www.drsavi.com/opportunities-with-augmented-reality/

The following articles are also fascinating, i.e:  The future of social networking – a concept investigation with Augmented Reality & http://imod.co.za/2009/10/01/social-networking-and-the-future/

NB The following mock-up images from the latter, say it all!

Blogging for your Internet business is one surefire way to boost the visibility of your products and services. Here are a few ways to boost your internet advertising with the help of a blog:

1. Make your clients or customers abreast on your website’s alterations. Your new products and affiliate websites could also be announced through your blog. For example, a car dealer network (No, I’m not going to comment about recent recalls from a particular car company) could communicate the progress it is making on alterations(!) or special offers. For a sales force Business podcasting could inform sales reps / agents of special offers or even a motivational speech to urge the team on to achieve targets.
2. Keep track of your business objectives and plans through open writing. Your blog content can be easily stored through archives. What could be better than searchable information that could be easily accessed by anyone browsing the web, right?
3. Air your opinions, advice or reviews on specific services or products that are related to your business. Publishing is a very easy process with blogging.
4. Ensure that you respect your competitors by not slating them!
5. Include links that will fetch back links and subsequently improve your ranking on search engines. This could be better executed through putting well-written articles in your website. Affiliate links could also be included in your blog to earn more extra income.
6. Collect response through the ability of blogs to fetch comments from your blog readers. You can learn and improve your products and services through with the feedback from your readers.
7. Connect easily with other bloggers. When other bloggers notice that you have something good in your blog, they will put you in their favourite lists that will automatically link you to their blogs.
8. You can use your blogroll or front page link to help you ensure the latter.
9. Recently, I read that the content of your website should consist of at least 60% (in relation to) what you sell (services and products). Blogging should help you communicate more about your brand and value you can give
10. Get your clients involved by communicating case studies

In summary, communicating your business through a blog and corporate podcast can improve dialogue both internally (corporate/charity/organisation’s mission) and externally, to your clients getting a good feeling about your confidence  to provide them with excellent service.

With an increase in use of the Internet by clients and an emphasis of new media, there is no better time to discover how interactive approaches, digital marketing and effective corporate communication can help further develop your business and online presence.
Please click here to view the full course coverage.

On-line booking / Registration is now open at:

http://www.khlinteractive.com/book-now or directly via the Registration page

An early bird discount price of £224 is available until 3rd February 2010 midnight.
The cost includes all materials, refreshments and lunch. After this date the full regular price of £280 applies.

Enter Promotional code KHLVA for Web Virtual Attendance
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You can watch previous courses run by KHLInteractive for free from their dedicated streaming page.

Ofcom said its research reveals that 38 percent of internet users now have a social networking site profile — up from 22 percent in 2007.

Also revealed are some interesting gender differences, re: what the internet is regularly used for.

Men are more likely than women to use the web for news, while women are more likely to use the Internet for social networking, Ofcom said.

1:3 adults who use the internet (29%) are watching online or downloading TV programmes or films. Of those, adults aged

25-34 are more likely to watch TV online or download programmes and films and almost all are doing so through television broadcasters’  websites.

These facts imply some fascinating trends:

* An opportunity for on-line advertising
* The latter needs to be considered together with age profiles
* Maybe kids have moved on to something else – firstly what is it and how long will it be before
adults are bored or wish to follow the ‘new thing’
* What is driving the motivation for adults to get online? Is it just a phase or simply because of
life  becoming so busy & fast.

With regard to the latter, with ever increasing personal productivity, online government information/service sites and access to digital media, adults are likely to stay hooked.

Does this mean that the digital divide is changing. In my view, probably not as even though Broadband has wider coverage, are people really getting connected and do they know how to use services properly.

General Facebook stats (global) are also interesting:

However, is there not a danger that without proper policing/moderation it could be vehicle for spammers delight?!

For corporate testing of view-point / gaining instant feedback it will be extremely useful.

It is clearly early days as Facebook have recently announced a concept called an ‘inlay’, i.e: As a user you can view links shared in the Facebook newspage in the context of your friends.

The power offered by Sidewiki is that now potentially every webpage has become social.
To avoid chaos I suggest the need to develop procedures, moderation/monitoring panels, roles with escalation policies and published Net-etiquette.

Facebook has recently introduced an app that allows you simultaneously update both your facebook and twitter, in order to save a lot of time and keep both social friends from either network updated on your everyday activities, leaving no one in the loop.

The tool is known as  SocialToo Status which allows the updating of your personal wall or status with one update through Facebook.

The only downside to this tool is that in order to take full advantage of the dual status updater you will need a SocialToo account, to connect both your Twitter and Facebook feeds. The process from here is fairly simple as once you are signed in your practically ready to tell both worlds what you are up to!

According to SocialToo Status :

When your status is published via SocialToo Status your updates appear in your personal stream, along with a link to each destination we also sent the status update to.  This helps promote your other Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts.

Here’s how to get Started:

1. Go to http://socialtoo.com and click on the “Facebook App” link in the upper-right corner – you’ll want to hit “allow” on the prompts when it asks you so we can properly publish status updates to your stream.
2. Once the app is added to your account, you’ll notice on both your home page and/or profile page  a new green SocialToo Status quote icon in the “attachments” section.  You’ll probably have to hit the down “more” arrow to get to it. The more you use it, the more likely it will appear outside that drop down in the future!
3. Click on the green quote icon, and a new SocialToo Status-branded Publisher will appear.  Congrats – you’re all set up!

So no need to be switching back and forth through your social sites to update your status or even worrying that any are being neglected!

In speaking about having sole audio-blogs, Twitter it seems is way ahead of the game when compared to other social networks and the various apps that they offer.

Now Twitter offers the choice of listening to tweets on your phone! Once again the range of expectations that twitter brings to social networking never ceases to amaze.

Twuner I understand is quite fun. The new technology twitter brings us a combination of text and speech and is only designed for listening to audio tweets through the medium of your phone.

The great main advantage is that this caters to those at a disadvantage reading twitter messages, making it easy for them to send and receive tweet messages.

There are minor errors as one would expect with speech recognition devices and Twuner is no exception, i.e. pronunciation of slang and foreign words and having URL links in audio form can be a bit pointless. Though there is the choice of male and female voices both are a bit impersonal and might take some getting used to.

Many tried the twuner and have said that this is not one that wil be taken by the pubic readily as twitter, like most social networks is considered a visual medium, Twuner suprising all odds accomplishes the audio tweeting task top of the game.

So give it a try, Twune into Twitter!

Normally considered the written current news, Blogs are methods of relaying information through means of regular commentary, and is also considered a type of website, but have you considered the possibilities of having a blog solely in the form of mp3?

Embedded audio can normally be found on websites of all sorts, as well as on blogs which can be an addition link on a website keeping daily readers up to date with the current affairs of the organization or the outside world.

With the possibility of incorporating an all audio-blog there are limitless things that can be done that the written text cannot accomplish. Such as language tones i.e. Sarcasm and many other expressions that are captured perfectly and clearly in the tone of voice might be missed in ordinary text.

The blogs are stored in an mp3 format and there is the additional downloadable option that makes the information easier to share as well as transfer on to any portable device such as mp3 device or your phone, as well as the audio-bog can be transferred onto a hard copy such as a CD. So this does not limit you to the use of the internet to access the blog’s information.

Just like any international website there is also the options of having various languages to accommodate different persons, in audio the use of voice-over plays in perfectly, where the use of audio voice-over techniques could facilitate many different languages.

There are however some disadvantages where this method of blogging may not be disable- friendly and might require some facility to cater to the disabled.

To read more on the process and various equipment and features used in audio-production Click Here.

Tweet By Live Video Stream.

Evidently, It is not enough to have mini messages being poured out to millions of daily followers, twitter now feels the need to broadcast your tweets live by means of video.

Formerly known as Mogulus, Livestream has launched a broadcasting system built on twitter known as TwitCam. More or less like a video chat but with the slight addition of your twitter credentials, TwitCam has easily become a simpler way of relaying your daily activities to an avid follower.

Putting it simply, twitter users need only to log into twitcam.com using proper identification and the TwitCam software will automatically detect the video camera installed, create a page for the live video then broadcast and posts the link in the your twitter feed so followers can join live.

Now live video chat in twitter is available with just one click!

Another additional quirk to this tool is that while engaged in TwitCam, you can further interact by tweeting normaly to other followers.
Forget about that pesky 140 character limit, the TwitCam requires no limit, is completely free and takes sociability further into the clouds.

To try out for yourself  how this new tweet tool works Click Here