Here’s an inter­est­ing social media site in the real estate space: Stree­tAd­vi­sor, a new startup based in San Fran­cisco. (“Let the world know what you REALLY think about your street!”) From the folks behind the site:

StreetAdvisor.com is an entirely new kind of online real estate com­mu­nity
pow­ered by crowd-sourced reviews, pho­tos, and videos.  The new Stree­tAd­vi­sor
pro­vides a real-life “insider” view mak­ing it the essen­tial guide­book to
find­ing the right street to call home, con­nect­ing with neigh­bors, and
dis­cov­er­ing new things, doc­u­mented by the peo­ple who have lived there.

Con­sumers can learn and share vital details about where they live includ­ing
noise lev­els, traf­fic, neigh­bors, enter­tain­ment, and pub­lic ser­vices, etc.,
much in the same way peo­ple share their expe­ri­ences with prod­ucts and travel
at pop­u­lar online shop­ping and travel sites. It also allows for first­hand
rec­om­men­da­tions and neg­a­tive expe­ri­ences about local busi­nesses,
enter­tain­ment, ser­vices, lifestyle, and back road gems.

Today the site launched some new upgrades, giv­ing home­own­ers, renters,
and buy­ers a place to review, share, and learn what it’s like to
live some­where. The site is cur­rently in pub­lic beta and is ini­tially focus­ing on the United
States, United King­dom, Canada and Australia.

Go ahead, plunk your address in there (mine came up empty, but it’s very early). If this takes off, I’ll def­i­nitely use it to help scout out prospec­tive neigh­bor­hoods for my next house.

Wikipedi­ans are in another spat, over the use­ful­ness of the term “social media.”

Here was Wikipedia’s entry before it was emas­cu­lated to its cur­rent entry:

Social media describes the online tools and plat­forms
that peo­ple use to share opin­ions, insights, expe­ri­ences, and
per­spec­tives with each other. Social media can take many dif­fer­ent
forms, includ­ing text, images, audio, and video. Pop­u­lar social medi­ums
include blogs,mes­sage boards, pod­casts, wikis, and vlogs.

Tina
Sharkey (co-founder of iVil­lage, for­mer SVP of AIM and Social Media,
and now head of BabyCenter.com) first came up with the term “social
media” as a form of community-driven Inter­net con­tent in 1997 and
reg­is­tered the domain “socialmedia.com” shortly there­after. Later,
Chris Ship­ley (Co-founder and Global Research Direc­tor for Guidewire
Group) helped pop­u­lar­ize the term “social media.” The Blo­gOn 2004
con­fer­ence, July 22–23, 2004, focused on the “busi­ness of social
media.” Ship­ley and Guidewire Group used the term “social media” in the
months lead­ing up to that event to dis­cuss the com­ing together of
blog­ging, wikis, social net­works, and related tech­nolo­gies into a new
form of par­tic­i­pa­tory media.

I launched SocialMedia.biz at that 2004 Blo­gOn con­fer­ence. But kudos for the term should go to Tina Sharkey, whom I met a cou­ple of times when she was a VP at AOL and who recently took over the edi­to­r­ial reins at Baby­Cen­ter — as it hap­pens, a posi­tion I once held.

A cou­ple of days ago I had an inter­est­ing call with Den­nis Yu, the chief data cruncher for SocialMedia.com, which obtained the url from Tina and launched a busi­ness around it. Den­nis and co. are doing some great work by con­nect­ing wid­get devel­op­ers with mar­keters and post­ing the appli­ca­tions on Face­book. You’ll recall that on May 24 Face­book launched Face­book Plat­form, a site that sup­ports Web devel­op­ers’ efforts to cre­ate third-party apps for Face­book mem­bers. Now there are hun­dreds of Face­book appli­ca­tions, with more going live every day.

SocialMedia.com is keep­ing a run­ning tally of the “total num­ber of apps installed” on Face­book: 12.8 mil­lion as of today. That refers not to the num­ber of appli­ca­tions,  but to the num­ber of users who installed the wid­gets to run on their Face­book pages or blogs. This is one of those areas where social media and social net­work­ing directly intersect.

Among the most pop­u­lar Face­book apps that SocialMedia.com cre­ated or pro­moted are Happy Hour!, Food Fight!, My Aquar­ium and Harry Pot­ter Magic Spells. You have to log into Face­book to access these wid­gets. I’m still exper­i­ment­ing with wid­gets on Face­book so I’m adding a lot that I may or may not use. But I’m impressed with their breadth and vari­ety and with the loy­alty of their users.

“Appli­ca­tions are just explod­ing. The vol­ume on our sur­veys is just crazy,” Yu told me. “We’re find­ing that they mon­e­tize bet­ter than ads.” The com­pany solic­its mar­ket­ing data through sur­veys and con­tests, some­times by offer­ing vir­tual money in wid­gets like Food Fight. Hey, it works.

From an old friend and col­league, Rory O’Connor, via a Face­book mes­sage, comes word of Wiki­men­tary:

Wel­come to Globalvision’s wiki about all things wiki, a wiki wiki if you will.

Through this wiki, Glob­alvi­sion hopes to:

1. Gather as much infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble about wikis and share it on this wiki
2. Pro­duce a feature-length doc­u­men­tary about the wiki phenomenon
3. Enable a col­lab­o­ra­tive wiki­men­tary in which every­body has an
   oppor­tu­nity to mash up, add to, edit and improve our rough cut which
   we’ve already cre­ated and posted.

Adds Rory:

[The] project … involves
mov­ing the cur­rent OS online focus from a strictly tex­tual one to a
richer mul­ti­me­dia, full motion video-and-audio experience.

As a first step toward that end, I have set up a wiki about wikis at globalvision.wikia.com. My goal in doing so is to gather as much
infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble about all things wiki, and then to cat­alyze the
cre­ation of two films about the over­all wiki phe­nom­e­non: an open source
doc­u­men­tary – or ‘wiki­men­tary; and a com­pan­ion, ‘old-school’ stan­dard doc­u­men­tary film.

As
you know, novel uses of the wiki appear almost every day, in areas as
dis­parate as pol­i­tics, humor, med­i­cine and bank­ing. My team has already
assem­bled infor­ma­tion and links about as many appli­ca­tions as we can
find — but we need your help to know more. So PLEASE let us know what
you know and share your expe­ri­ences at globalvision.wikia.com. (You
might also try shoot­ing and post­ing some video of your own – if you
don’t find it too daunting!)

Fons Tuin­stra at E-Media Tid­bits:
My Fling with Social Media: Face­book and Twitter.

Daily Kos: Bill O’Reilly Says He Will “Destroy” Daily Kos, the left-leaning grass­roots pol­i­tics web­site. A look at the lat­est rant­i­ngs from wack job O’Reilly and Faux News.

At the Pix­elodeon con­fer­ence at the Amer­i­can Film Insti­tute last month, I had a great time chat­ting with Abra Chouinard, host of a cool new games show called TotalMMO. She was so enthu­si­as­tic about online games that I was tempted to lay aside my cam­corder and pick up a joy­stick. OK, my mouse. You get the idea.

Here’s our 5-minute interview:

MPEG-4 at 480x360px (38MB) | Our­me­dia page
MPEG-4 at 320x240px (23MB) | Our­me­dia page
Flash ver­sion at Inter­net Archive

Cross-posted to Real Peo­ple Network

From MoveOn.org Polit­i­cal Action:

Did you know the U.S. right now gets only 2% of our elec­tric­ity from clean energy
sources like solar and wind? We have the tech­nol­ogy. We know peo­ple want it. We just
haven’t had the polit­i­cal will.

But Con­gress is vot­ing this week on H.R. 969, a bill that will dra­mat­i­cally boost solar and wind energy. If it passes, it’ll be like tak­ing 37 mil­lion cars off the road. Along with the rest of the energy pack­age, it’ll be the biggest step in two decades toward a clean planet and afford­able energy.

Big oil and coal are fight­ing the bill hard, because it would under­cut their stran­gle­hold on our econ­omy. That’s why Con­gress needs to hear from the pub­lic that clean energy is a pri­or­ity. So, today we’re launch­ing a petition:

“Con­gress must act now to move our coun­try toward a clean energy econ­omy based on solar and wind power by vot­ing yes on H.R. 969, the Fed­eral Renew­able Energy Stan­dards Act.”

You can sign the peti­tion here.

San Jose Mer­cury News: Can Web radio sta­tions escape the new-royalty-rate box?

Unfor­tu­nate that the arti­cle doesn’t point out that tra­di­tional radio sta­tions pay noth­ing to the artists, which makes the new, exces­sive rate hikes for Inter­net radio even more unrea­son­able and out of kil­ter with mar­ket­place realities.

TechCrunch: Now­Pub­lic gets $10.6 mil­lion for crowd-sourced news. (I’m on their Advi­sory Board.)

Dia­blo mag­a­zine: How do we cre­ate bet­ter schools?

James Daly / Edi­tor In Chief

Edu­topia, a pub­li­ca­tion of the George Lucas Edu­ca­tional Foundation

Improv­ing our pub­lic edu­ca­tion sys­tem is the great social exper­i­ment of
this age, as impor­tant as the civil rights and suf­frage move­ments were
to ear­lier gen­er­a­tions. … Today’s high school­ers are hard­wired in a fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent way than most of the adults who instruct them.
Many [kids] never knew a day in which broad­band Inter­net access wasn’t
deliv­ered directly to one of the two or three PCs in their home.

It’s odd, really, that the aver­age super­mar­ket has changed more in the past five years than the typ­i­cal school has advanced in the past 50.
Super­mar­kets have leaped into the future—my local store boasts a
bustling deli, two ATMs, and video com­mer­cials at the checkout—while
most schools haven’t changed much since the Eisen­hower administration.

So although the ques­tion “How can we cre­ate bet­ter high schools?” can
be answered a thou­sand ways, I’ll sim­ply say this: Teach stu­dents how to use the tools of today for a world that is rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent from
the one in which we grew up. Don’t force-fit the teach­ing meth­ods of 50
or 100 years ago onto the adults of tomor­row. Treat stu­dents as
cit­i­zens of a mod­ern world in which cul­tures and ideas are instantly
acces­si­ble any­time and any­where. But also teach them this: The online
world can’t always be trusted. We spend a lot of time teach­ing kids how
to find things online, but we need to expend 10 times more effort
teach­ing them how to inter­pret what they’ve found.

Bravo.