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.)