It’s still early days as they just launched it but take a look at the Topics feature put out by the MyBlogLog team at Yahoo, they sift through the hundreds of thousands of social media feeds of their hyper-connected members to highlight the most active topics. Similar to what Techmeme does for blogs but on a much larger scale and across more than just blogs.

Topics Page: http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/hot/topics

Blog Post: http://blog.mybloglog.com/my_weblog/2008/12/mybloglog-we-know-whats-hot.html

Indeed, conversations is what I am talking about – connected conversations – which is as good a concise definition of social media as any out there I think. And it is the connectivity bit that makes the difference as @ike above points out. Am framing a post on this subject.

I struggle to impress on people at my workplace (a warehouse, full of data, ironically), to be very careful not to mix up ‘data’ and ‘information’.
Within that small area, I think, lies a lot of the muddled thinking around the various business models. They are all finding that it’s not enough to have oodles of data and fancy lip gloss and call it “the next big thing”. Just because someone or thing is talked about does not validate it. I can talk about the garbage outside – but it’s still garbage.

The challenge of the social web for me is;
Is social commentary (like this one of mine) data or information?
Where’s the boundary?

The wonderful phrase, ‘Poverty of Attention’, a sort-of-soundalike antonym for attention deficit syndrome, is like art. It has information derived from the component data of it’s letters. So maybe, like the beauty of art being in the eye of the beholder, the ‘value’ of the social web is personal and will always remain so – like Ronald says above, ‘social’ depends on your definition of friend.

And next to that, I think we will always need people of real skill to make sense of the myriad of conversations and ideas. Otherwise, the conversational twitter remains as chatter, and as was said previously, what once happened in cafes now happens on the web and is essentially the same, but without the ambience.

For Google, if Information is data in context, then Google does not organize Information. They rank data according to the organization provided by people (links), take away the links and Google has no idea on how to organize the data.

As to attention, I model it as a temporary context.

But what that really all means is, you have to put Personal back into PC. Any cloud system will be slightly overwhelmed and as I have pointed out context/meaning is pretty much local. On the other hand as broader you go as less local it has to be, or it all depends on your definition of friend for social networks.

They were designed to connect, nothing more: http://occamsrazr.com/2008/12/05/absolution