In this NowStreaming video, Brian gives his presentation on the rising popularity of infographics. Viewers of this video will learn what an infographic is, what it should not be, and why infographics have become an important addition to internet marketing. Brian also discusses two of the many successful infographics produced by NowSourcing that have generated an abundance of traffic for our clients. If you’re interested in having NowSourcing create an infographic, head over to the infographic page on our site and let us know.

You know when you have one of those days where everything just seems strange?  You do a few double takes because you thought you saw a cat playing the piano, or a crazy chipmunk staring you down?  Well, that was my day last Friday.  The entire day I felt like the world was working together to creep me out and make me as uncomfortable as possible.  Seriously, I’m not joking.  Let me start from the beginning.

I woke up when my radio turned on at 7 o’clock.  While laying in bed listening to the radio, I was suddenly reminded it was Friday (TGIF!).  The morning radio show played a montage of songs containing the word “Friday”, and the first one really annoyed me.  I had never heard it before, and the only words sung were “Friday, Friday, Friday” over and over and over again.  Talk about a reason to get out of bed.  I immediately stood up, clicked over to iTunes and put on my favorite Weezer song.  I checked my email while I was at the computer and was excited to see a message from eHarmony.  The message was telling me someone was interested and my hopes for the day immediately got better.  Could this be the one and only I’ve been searching for?  I watched her promo video, and it turned out she’s not exactly my type.  You see, I’m a dog person through and through.  I love just about everything there is about dogs.  This girl though, she made it very clear that she LOVES cats.  It turns out her love for cats is at about the same level as my love for dogs.  Take a look at her video below and you will understand.
 

 
By the time I headed to work I had adjusted to the morning and was feeling pretty good.  I was still a little bummed about the eHarmony girl, but not enough to stop me from hitting up my favorite coffee shop.  As soon as I walked in I saw the cutest family.  There was a mom, dad, and two young boys sitting together on a couch.  The older boy was holding the young one in his lap and, for some odd reason, kept putting his fingers in his brother’s mouth.  I quickly learned the younger one’s name was Charlie, as his older brother yelled at him for biting his finger.  I wanted to tell him to stop, but it was just too funny.  “Charlie bit me,” he kept crying out in an English accent.  “Charlie bit me and that really hurt, and it’s still hurting.”  While still laughing uncontrollably, I ordered my coffee and took a seat to watch the morning news.  The news was covering the Miss Teen USA Pageant from the night before.  Apparently one of the contestants thought Americans couldn’t point out the USA on a world map because, well, they don’t have maps.  I’m sure she felt real smart after that.

When I left the coffee shop I cut through the park to get to work.  There’s typically a few yoga classes going on, but today there was a guy trying to do some ninja-like moves.  He had a wicked afro and, after failing miserably at a back flip, fell on his face when trying to do a nun chucks routine.  I kept walking and came across another strange person, but instead of ninja moves this guy was swinging around a metal stick.  I think he was pretending to be in Star Wars or something, but no one else was near to fight back.  I always thought the yoga people were weird, but they seem pretty normal compared to Friday’s park people.
 

 
When I finally got to work I didn’t think much else could happen.  That is, until I saw my co-worker.  He was sitting at his desk crying his eyes out with a sheet over his head.  I asked him what was going on and he simply kept repeating, “Leave Britney alone.”  I don’t know anyone named Britney, so I was extremely confused.  He also had a lot of dark makeup around is eyes, so yea, not sure what was going on there.

After seeing my delusional co-worker, I had about had it for the day.  I probably would have quit on the spot, but I had to leave early to take my son, David, to the dentist.  He ended up needing to have a tooth removed, which caused him to be quite loopy in the hours after.  He eventually calmed down, but only once I was preparing to leave for the night.  By the time the babysitter got there, he had become a much more normal seven year old.

My destination for the night was my good friend’s wedding, which ended up being more of a show than a traditional wedding.  The wedding party, in all seriousness, danced down the aisle.  Who does that?  There we were sitting in a lovely church, and suddenly Chris Brown’s Forever started blasting.  I think the old man in front of me nearly had a heart attack when he saw his granddaughter shaking her booty in God’s house.  I guess the bride and groom just couldn’t wait to have their first dance at the reception, though the reception was not without entertainment itself.  The bride’s cousin put together a montage of dances as a wedding present, titled “Evolution of Dance.”  It was pretty cool, I guess, but I was really getting tired of having to watch people dance.  The invitation never said this was going to be a themed wedding.
 

 
Once I made it home, I paid the sitter and immediately went to bed.  That was too much weirdness for one day.  Thankfully the rest of my weekend was pretty normal.  I took David to the zoo on Saturday, and we got to see a lion get reunited with his previous owner.  It was real touching, but my favorite part of the day was when we saw a mother panda get sneezed on by her cub.

So that was my Friday.  I don’t think I’ve had such a strange day in my life, and I hope to never have one again.  For a moment I thought it might be Friday the 13^th, but it wasn’t.  I guess it was just my luck to run into all of the strangest people in one day.  How about you guys, did any of you have a weird Friday too?

The launch of the Trends Dashboard coincides with a new blog from YouTube on the same theme. The blog is being called “a destination for daily insight into the zeitgeist of the world’s largest video site.” The blog does all the Trends Dashboard work for you, delivering a package of trending clips in an “easy to digest format.” 35 hours of video get uploaded to YouTube every minute, so depending on your investigative tendencies, the Trends blog might just be perfect.

But the Dashboard is certainly worth checking out as well. You can browse or compare, and the findings are quite interesting more often than not. Whether it’s music or sports, what we watch depending on location and age differs more than you might have guessed. Trends will deliver “4 at 4,” meaning four of the trendiest videos at 4 a.m. And 4 p.m. With that kind of content stream, and everything else Trends puts at your finger tips, we might not need to leave YouTube ever again, for better or worse.

With us today is top digger and the brains behind SocialBlade.com – FirstDigg.

1 – Tell us a little bit about your background.
I’m 28 years old, currently live in New York (the state, not the city), and like long walks on the beach — wait what type of interview is this again? =]  I’ve have been working in the telecom/networking/software industries since I graduated college (go UMass!) and am originally from Massachusetts.  I like to travel and have been able to do my fair share of both business & personal travel over the course of my life so far and have met many cool people in the process.

Meeting Israeli Diggers: MediaSight, TalSiach, FirstDigg, AllINeed

Meeting NYC Diggers: numberneal, FirstDigg, gbarberi

Meeting fellow YouTubers (some famous some not so)

2 – What made you first interested in Digg?

I’ve been a Digger for almost four years now joining shortly after the site was created.  I believe I first heard about Digg from the TV show The Screen Savers when Kevin was introducing it to the world. For many years before that I had been going to Slashdot for my news and Digg looked to be an up and coming replacement for old-style media. At the beginning I still needed to visit other sources because Digg just didn’t have everything, but I loved that anyone could submit something and you had the ‘preview’ of what was going on in the upcoming section where you too could help out and pick what was good and bury what was bad.  At the beginning I did a lot of looking around in /upcoming, but after a while it got overwhelming and I stopped going there.  A little over a year ago though I decided to try my hand at submitting and I discovered a completely different side of Digg, both rewarding & challenging but above all, addicting.

3  – What inspired you to create SocialBlade?

When I first started submitting to Digg it was purely to see ‘what it would take’ to hit the front page, but after the first day of doing that I quickly became addicted. I found that I was good at it and that I could use this skill to hopefully fill in some of the missing gaps in news articles that didn’t make it to Digg.  I then started to look around to see who was most successful on the site and started studying them a bit to get tips.  One of these people with Muhammad Saleem.  What he was doing on twitter was occasionally when one of his stories hit the front page he tweeted a [Digg Threshold] message with some data on # of Diggs, etc.  I found that information very interesting, but found that there was no way to find out how many Diggs a story took to hit unless you saw it at the moment that it did hit.  Since this information wasn’t available anywhere I decided to take a crack at the Digg API and see what I could come up with, and that’s where SocialBlade came from as a permanent source of this information for everyone.

4 – Tell us about SocialBlade’s improvements over time, and plans for the future?

Since SocialBlade went live almost a year ago it has added graphs, trends, and one of its most popular features, the top user listings.  The top user listing section though I can’t take all the credit for, though I’ve done a bit of improvement to it. Christopher Finke is the original author of that but discontinued it releasing his code.  I picked it up and integrated it into SocialBlade to continue to let people see that information. As for plans for the future, I’ve have a ton of ideas just haven’t had the time to create them yet.  One of the things I had wanted to do for example was create a sort of user portal around the site where you could create an account & customize what you saw, and also get alerts when stories you are tracking/submitted go popular. Hopefully someday I’ll get the time to create that.

5 – Views on Digg criticism / bannings? Surely you have something to say, as SocialBlade has the Digg Graveyard.

Lets be honest here, some people truly do abuse the system and do, even beyond TOS violations, and do unethical things to get stories onto Digg. There are sites that sell Diggs or automatically Digg stories for you and I do believe that those type of things shouldn’t be tolerated. That being said I am against the complete all out ban on scripts and I feel that many of the bans may be unsubstantiated.

I’m a programmer and a hacker (the good definition of the word) at heart and I feel that there are so many things that scripts can do to enhance a website.  Scripts are just tools which are neither good nor bad.  With tools you can build anything from a spaceships to bombs.

Just to illustrate the point, I use a whole horde of greasemonkey scripts across the internet to to add features to sites that are missing.  For example I hate having to click on the next page button time after time on websites to continue to use the site.  I prefer to be able to just keep scrolling down and down the page and have it automatically loaded for me, and on Digg, Flickr, Twitter, and many other sites I’m able to do this with a script called AutoPagerize. Just so there is  no confusion though let me say flat out, I don’t use any scripts on Digg to automatically Digg anything or any malicious or gaming scripts so if you’re reading this Digg, don’t ban me please!

So in short, I feel that scripts themselves should not be a reason for banning, its what you do with them & what ones you use that should be looked at. Also, the bannings aren’t really helping anything anyway. It’s the fundamental way social news is built that is not working right now.  That’s what needs to be worked on further.

Lastly you asked about the Digg Graveyard. When a digger gets banned, or “buried” by the Digg staff there is no way to know unless you try to visit their profile page.  The Digg Graveyard was created as sort of a community announcement to let people know who was no longer with us, and approximately what date they were buried. Since this information was getting passed around anyway, I just figured it’d be nice to see it all in one place and have it be automatically updated.

6 – We don’t see much of you on other social networks.  Why not?

Since I am using the social news networks primarily as a reader and not a marketer or blogger Digg does a fairly good job of delivering what I need in terms of news. I did use Reddit for a little while but I found its interface to be much less manageable.  If I’m gone from Digg for a few days and want to catch up on news for example I can, just start on page one and keep going until I see something I saw before.  This isn’t, or at least wasn’t the last time I checked as feasible on sites like Reddit.

Basically though, what it comes down to is this.  Digg has a good enough interface & enough sources to deliver enough of the news to me that I don’t have the time nor feel the need to push into many other social news networks.  So when submitting, I’ve dedicated some of my free time to filling in the holes I’ve found on Digg, helping to give back to the community there.

Anyway, regarding social networks outside of social news, I have become attached to Twitter & YouTube.  Make sure you follow & subscribe to me! =] I have accounts on other sites including Facebook, and Linkedin, but those are more to keep a profile and I don’t really do much with them.  If I was to measure the amount of time I spend on different websites online, probably at least 50-75% of that time could be split between Digg & YouTube.  YouTube is my other hobby.  Ever since I got an HD camcorder a year and a half ago I’ve been making videos on my free time for there.  Nothing all that spectacular but I entered one of my videos in a contest and won a trip to Singapore from it.  Diggers may also enjoy my April Fools’ Joke from last year “YouDigg” or a video I recorded from the Digg(nation) Meetup in NY last year.

7 – What do you think the future of social media holds? Will Digg make it? How about other competition social news/networks?

I think Social Media or Social News specifically does need a bit of work, but still has the potential to succeed in the future.  If an algorithm can be created to fairly and accurately detect what you are interested in and deliver news from the entire web in a timely manner that matches those interests to you filtering out everything that isn’t interesting to you then I think social news will defiantly be a winner.  Digg currently does not meet all those criteria, but I believe is striving for that. I think we are a long way still from eliminating ‘old media’, but I think over the next ten years social media (and Digg) will evolve to deliver a much more accurate picture of what is hot news in the world & interesting to you as a reader.

Digg definitely has a big head start, but if someone else beats them to the punch on these things it’s still anyone’s game.

8 – Any advice for those that want to become “top diggers?”

Most people consider “top diggers” to be the person who has the most front page stories on Digg, and while I do agree that is part of it, to me a “top digger” has always also meant being the must successful with each submit as well.  In addition to learning the ins and outs of Digg and how the site ticks, and spending a ridiculously amount of time on the site, I really recommend thinking like an editor.  After all that’s what everyone else on the site is supposed to be doing when digging up or down your story.  The biggest thing I can say is submit only quality stories. Don’t submit things just to submit even if you know that it will do well on Digg because its the right type of a story.  That just clogs up the tubes and is effectively social media spam.  If you focus on quality you will do well, become respected, and everyone will benefit.  That’s always been my goal.

Overall Top 1000 (sorted by Popular Ratio)

Top Active (90d) (sorted by Popular Ratio)

9 – Any final words?

Thank you first for giving me this opertunity to express myself and explain to everyone a bit of what I do.  If you’d like to learn more about me follow me on my social news profile on Twitter or my alternative profile, subscribe to me on YouTube, check out my site SocialBlade and of course add me as a friend on Digg.

Everyone thinks their dad is weird. But I, on the other hand, know my dad is totally crazy. He does this thing called “Social Media” or whatever. I can’t even count the times that he’s tried to explain it to me. Don’t get me wrong, I mean my dad is amazingly cool. All the ridiculously hilarious (and usually meaningless) videos on YouTube that have come out within the last 30 seconds, he knows about and feels necessary to show me and tell me about it.

Back to this Social Media (or whatever) I’ve started to understand. Started. It’s a bit hard to grasp at first, that’s why I’m stuck writing about how I absolutely know nothing about anything, I mean writing about what my dad does and how he knows everything about everything. So all the time, I hear my dad talking about this thing called “Plurk” and “Mixx” and “Digg” and whenever he brings these things up, I suggest making a parody of them called “Crapp“. But that never really works out.

Basically what I know about his job is that he talks to a lot of people all over the world, makes websites cool and popular (relatively speaking) and gets paid for it. Seriously. I suppose their might be more to it, but with my youthful ignorance, I see this job as a cakewalk!

And so, one day, I decided I wanted to help…boy was that a good idea. Right now he’s clickin’ and clackin’ around on his laptop, no doubt reading over my shoulder in the office. And I’m just silently frustrated, wondering why my dad couldn’t have a scuba diving equipment store, or drive a boat or at least own NASA. But, no, he does the boring job. Which really isn’t so boring once you think about it.

Coming from a police family, I have always had enormous respect for law enforcement and the job they do, and after having just seen the Facebook application for the Greater Manchester Police (GMP) in Great Britain, I am even more impressed.

This just goes to prove that Facebook CAN be useful. Take away all the pokes, games, fortune cookies and other time-wasting applications and you can actually come away with something useful in the end.

Despite living nowhere near Manchester (and despite being a fine upstanding citizen of the law), I decided to install the application to see what it contained. I was extremely curious to see how Facebook was being utilised to fight crime and maintain law and order. Was it just a publicity gimmick or does it have some real substance to it that other police forces can learn from?

There are four main parts to the application. Two are just direct links to the GMP website and the GMP YouTube page. It’s the other two parts that I found extremely interesting.

The first is a continually updating list of all the recent crimes reported in the Greater Manchester area. Facebook users can then comment if they think they have something to offer that can help the police to solve the case and there is also a direct link for each crime to the GMP website :

Which makes me wonder – is there someone in the GMP who sits there and constantly monitors Facebook for any leads that come in? If so, that must be quite a cushy job.

The second very interestng feature on the Facebook app is the ability to report a crime directly from Facebook to the GMP. It’s an interesting twist on being a police informant or a “snitch”. Instead of the Hollywood stereotype of meeting your police handler in a dark alleyway, you can now log onto Facebook in the comfort of your own apartment and report all of your tips online! Of course, it has a nice name – “Submit Intelligence” – which sounds a lot better than “Rat Out Your Friends And Get Knee-Capped For Your Troubles”. “Submit Intelligence” makes you feel as if you’re James Bond or Jason Bourne doing a great service for your country.

Do you know of any other police forces in the world who use Facebook for fighting crime? If not, why the hell is Greater Manchester Police the first and only police force doing this? This is a fantastic idea.

Repeated calls to the GMP Press Office to find out their Facebook success rate were not returned. I guess they are too busy playing Scrabulous.

Written by Mark O’Neill

You know what happened? Jason Calacanis said “follow him.” (I took out my angst on the picture, can you tell?)

I really enjoyed refreshing every 3 seconds to see another dozen or so followers adding Mr. Modine, and some automatic bot adding them back (Twitter couldn’t even keep up, if you’ll note the sole icon down in the bottom).

It happens every day – but that’s how Twitter works.

“Last month Alex Iskold suggested that there are 3 basic types of Twitter users.

There are listeners, who pull in a lot of information but don’t send much out. Talkers, who push information out to a lot of users, but don’t take much in. And there are hubs, people who both follow and are followed.

“Think of Twitter as a large network for information dissemination,” wrote Iskold. “It typically starts with talkers, flows through the hubs and ends up at listeners.” ” – ReadWriteWeb on TwitterMeThis

And it is this flow of Twitter that sent one of my favorite follows packing. Hugh MacLeod writes “I liked Twitter. But I found it too easy” as his lame excuse for leaving all his adoring fans hanging. We’ll miss you!

gapingvoid : No, seriously. I’m leaving Twitter. Cheerio. [Big Kiss]

I guess it’s back to Google, Yahoo, TechCrunch, Flickr, Youtube, Web 2.0, and blogs for the tweeter formerly known as @gapingvoid.

#YIF: Why I Follow

So there’s this thing called hashtags for Twitter, in case you didn’t know about them. Basically people stick them in their tweets and the themes get aggregated by hashtag aggregators, like Hashtags.org.

There’s all kinds of hashtags, like for conferences (#sxsw tracked the live micro-blogging of the South by Southwest Interactive conference) and political debates. #yif is the hashtag for “why I follow,” and you can really do some data mining with the stuff people say.

jljohansen: @chrisbrogan The 3 people I talk with the most on Twitter are @ikepigott @dough and recently @swhitley Always good conversations. #yif

danieljohnsonjr: @scottsigler #yif bcuz w/ his twisted mind, better to know where he’s coming from & going to. Infected: April 1st!

BarbaraKB: @CathleenRitt #yif Admits to “getting nothing done,” shares hair stories, does stand-up comedy while practicing financial wizardy in NYC.

To me, this is revolutionary. What other social tools encourage people to not only publicly state why they like you, but also track those responses for all the world to analyze?

Nowhere else but Twitter do you get an open book test on being popular.

#YUT: Why You Twitter

sonnygill@nowsourcing Never mocked, was just skeptical on its usefulness…boy was I wrong. Able to connect & converse w/industry leaders, how great.18 minutes ago from web in reply to nowsourcing

MarkLaymon @nowsourcing your obsessive talking about it made me follow it more, in doing so I have found it as an easy way to follow the smm industry 23 minutes ago from web in reply to nowsourcing

kdpaine @nowsourcing the iowa caucuses 24 minutes ago from web in reply to nowsourcing

TheNanny612 @nowsourcing The people, the conversation, the humor, great questions with helpful and inspiring answers. It is like IM on speed… love it!26 minutes ago from twhirlin reply to nowsourcing

bdthomas @nowsourcing I started out loving twitter, now I mock it. Regardless, I’m still addicted. 27 minutes ago from twitterrific in reply to nowsourcing

BarbaraKB @nowsourcing never knocked it. been an addict for a year now. may need to delete like @gapingvoid… 28 minutes ago from web in reply to nowsourcing

SilentJay74 @nowsourcing you talking to me? 29 minutes ago from web in reply to nowsourcing

gideonshalwick @mayobrains – gutsy survey, but i love it! @jtunkelo and i have been talking about the virtues of twitter for the last year! http://web20marketinglive.com 1 minute ago from im in reply to mayobrains

melaniephung @mayobrains I still have no earthly idea. There’s something about the constant updates that just sucks me in. half a minute ago from web in reply to mayobrains

hyperlinked @mayobrains Although I didn’t mock, I didn’t see the point. Did it: My friends joined, I met new people, got recent news updates. 3 minutes ago from twitterrific in reply to mayobrains

UtahSEOpro @mayobrains the fact that everyone else uses Twitter too. if it had a lower user-base then i couldn’t communicate as pervasively 2 minutes ago from TwitterFox in reply to mayobrains

What outrageously great things have you seen on Twitter this week?