Social media provides us with a rich source of information about people - our friends, our customers, everyone. Up until recently, large data volumes had to be 'scrubbed' down to work within our analysis capabilities - well no longer.
Mark Redgrave's recent blog post on Radian6, Do your Scrubbing in the Shower, highligts how you can keep the real human element in the data and thus not lose a key component of the social media content stream.

Telling your boss the number of people who “Liked” your content does not seem like a great way to get more marketing budget?
-    How can we move beyond “Likes”, “Clicks”, or “Followers”?
-    Social Media has brought a wealth of personal information and valuable data into the public domain
-    How can we target content and messages to people without understanding what they are doing and plan to do?

Dave attended a conference a few days ago called the Emergency Social Data Summit hosted by the Red Cross. At that event, he learned a lot about how first responders are using social media as a useful channel of communications in times of minor and major events and crises.

In this next interview in the OpenAmplify Insights series, Dr. Jeff Connor-Linton of Georgetown University and OpenAmplify Co-founder/CIO Mike Petit discuss indexicality, an important conceptual underpinning of the OpenAmplify web service. We'll discuss how indexicality has been used in existing signals, and how it might be applied to the design of new signals. OpenAmplify is committed to the advancement of the Semantic Web, and the constant enhancement of the our academic foundation is part of that commitment.

Google never rests, does it? Yesterday it unveiled Google Buzz, their social media clearinghouse app, which is currently offered only to Gmail users. Google Buzz ties in all the major social media points, and for mobile users, it allows for geographic location data as well. The utilities include:

I did a Google image search yesterday and was surprised to find a collection of photos from friends at the top of the results. It was pretty darned cool, but I have to admit that I was startled by this. Maybe I'm the last guy to know about it, but Google started rolling out bits of Social Search as early as last October. I decided to ramp up on my knowledge of what this all means, which led me to the Google Blog post entitled "Search is getting more social".