Derek E. Baird, M.Ed.

Weekly Wrap: Facebook Social Plugins, How to Create Foursquare Events, Apple Shutters Lala, What is Facebook Saying About You, Social Metrics Tools & More!

Facebook’s New Social Plugins: 50,000+ Websites in One Week: Phase one of Facebook’s strategy for world domination: complete. Facebook announced that more than 50,000 websites have integrated Facebook’s new social plugins in just one week. The plugins are a core component of the company’s new Open Graph initiative. [Mashable]

Apple To Shut Down Lala: In a brief message that was just posted on the Lala.com website, Apple has announced that the service will be shut down on May 31st, 2010. Does this mean we can start raising our hopes for iTunes in the cloud? [TechCrunch] 

What is Facebook Saying About You?: Yee’s tool shows you exactly what data a developer would get when it asks Facebook for info via the API, such as your name, birth date, location, etc. and also any public information such as your “likes”, your photos and so on. [GigaOm]

Summer Music Watch: Jennifer Lopez Does a Cover of Donna Summer's "On The Radio" [Ryan Seacrest]

The Future Of The Web is HTML 5: Did we mention that 2010 would be a big year for HTML5? Apple and Google are pushing it big time, and now so is Microsoft. When Internet Explorer 9 comes out, it will support HTML5 and help make it more common across the Web. [TechCrunch]

Millennials: This generation is diverse, educated and plugged-in: Gio Acosta says that on any given day there are only two hours in which he is not texting, doing something on his cell phone, or on Facebook, or playing games on his laptop or PS3. Acosta is exactly what Kaiser Family Foundation recently found in a study: That to say today's young people are wired is an understatement. It’s an integral part of their daily lives. [PennLive.com] [Barking Robot]

Edelman Digital Social Metrics Tools: Last week Suzanne shared a few tools to help you find new folks to follow on Twitter to kick-off a new focus on tools and resources for online engagement. I wanted to continue this trend by introducing you to a few blog analytics tools! [Edelman Digital]

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Teen Driver Program: NHTSA has developed a multi-tiered strategy to prevent motor vehicle-related deaths and injuries among teen drivers: increasing seat belt use, implementing graduated driver licensing, reducing teens' access to alcohol, and parental responsibility. Related: Get the 'No Phone Zone' Lesson Plan [NSTSA] [Barking Robot]

Guide to Creating Foursquare Events: There are some reasonable and relatively simple ways to incorporate Foursquare and encourage audience participation at your next event. [Tradeshow Insight]

Texting Poetry Inspires Kids: Once considered a disturbance in the classroom, cell phones, texting devices and other wireless technology are being embraced by some of the very same people who used to malign them: teachers. [Record Online]

End Bullying Now: Here's the link to the Josh Shipp & Brooks Gibbs 'End Bullying Now' Teleseminar! [Barking Robot]

2010 Totally Wired Teacher Award: After listening to feedback from our friends in the educator community, we've made some important changes to this year's Totally Wired Teacher Award provided by Dell. Please help us spread the word to any public school teachers you are in contact with. [Ypulse]

Infographic: How Apple Conquered the Music Industry

New Mac Online via ypulse.com

Global Youth: Russian Teens Are 'Rappin' With Vlad'

Russian rap reportedly has a new hero -- President Putin. The man who proudly touts his education on the streets of St. Petersburg was nominated for the first annual "Russian Street Awards" - honoring the best in Russian hip hop.

Putin recently appeared on “Fight for Respect: Start today!” a show in which he expressed his support to rap and break dancing. Prime Minister Putin took part by giving awards to the winners and expressing his support for rap music and breakdancing.

During the show street dancers, graffiti artists and rappers from all regions of Russia demonstrated their talents trying to prove that hip-hop and healthy lifestyle are compatible.

After the show was televised, Putin was heavily criticized for his desire to market himself to young crowd. Yet, during a live call-in show Putin explained that he participated in the TV show in order to attract attention to the issues of young people.

According to Putin, rap is filled with social meaning, and speaks about social and issues that are important to use. Graffiti is becoming a form of art, and breakdancing is compatible with a healthy lifestyle since it is hard to imagine that dancing can be compatible with drugs and alcohol use.

Putin’s meeting with the rappers impressed the community, and the organizational committee of Russian Street Awards decided the performance was worthy enough to be nominated as “Event of the Year.”

Weekly Wrap: Ning Goes Bust, Seacrest Speaks, Breakfast Club Turns 25, The 'Digital Natives' Myth, Growing Up Gaga, Poking is Not A Media Plan & More!

Axe Falls on Ning: It has just announced that it is killing off its free product, forcing existing free networks to either make the change to premium accounts or migrate their networks elsewhere. Related: Posterous commits to building a Ning blog importer. [TechCrunch] [Posterous]

Seacrest Speaks: So what’s going on with TV’s leading multitasker? Is he overwhelmed? More like overjoyed. After nine years of hosting America’s most popular singing competition, he still love his job -- correction: jobs – though he is contemplating letting one of them go. [LA TIMES]

Sesame Street Video Helps Military Kids Cope with Loss: Elmo and a slew of other Sesame Street characters arrived at the Pentagon Tuesday to help debut a military-themed episode of its series called "When Families Grieve." [CNN]

The Breakfast Club Turns 25: This week in Critics’ Picks, A. O. Scott looks at the 1985 film “The Breakfast Club,” an exploration of suburban teen angst — and detention — directed by John Hughes, who died last year. Related: NPR Podcast > The 'Brat Pack' Grows Up [NYT Video] [Barking Robot via NPR]

The Myth of the Digital Native: One of the monsters is the "digital native" – the term, not the child. Coined by author Marc Prensky in 2001, the phrase has its usefulness in helping us adults grasp the major media shift we're experiencing and embrace young people's openness to it.

But two leading new-media thinkers – Sonia Livingstone of the London School of Economics and Henry Jenkins at the University of Southern California – both have concerns about the phrase becoming too definitive. [NetFamilyNews]

Is Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution Making Kids Smarter?: According to a recent story in The Guardian, Oliver's Feed Me Better campaign, which he launched in 2004, has helped cut the number of absences typically attributed to illness by 15 percent in an area of southeast London. It also improved the number of students who reached proficiency on English standardized tests by 4.5 percent. [Good]

Poking and Tweeting Are Not A Media Plan: Social networking is more than setting up an online presence, and social media is more than just blasting out press releases. Until brands understand how to authentically join, rather than crash, the conversation, they will continue to throw their money away. [AdAge]

Producers Guild of America Adds Transmedia Producer Credit: This is a modest but important step toward officially recognizing where the entertainment business has been heading for some time. The major blockbusters across all media — film, television, gaming, music, and the rest — have been transmedia affairs, though the term transmedia has not necessarily been used. [Chris Rettstatt]

Gen Y Celebrates Diversity: Embrace our acceptance of diversity by showing Gen Y that your brand is diverse.  Brands and products that once only fit into a certain group or niche have now spread into many groups and niches. We will take your brand and make it our own. Take advantage of this and engage a larger group of the 20 somethings and teens. [Premise]

Why You Have to Understand Video Games to Understand Gen Y: Gen Yers love to keep score. They’ve been keeping score their whole lives. They keep score in their personal relationships, in the workplace, and even with the companies that advertise to them. It all started with video games. If there were no scores, nobody would have ever kept playing them. [GY Joe]

Growing Up Gaga: The self-invented, manufactured, accidental, totally on-purpose New York creation of the world’s biggest pop star. [New York Magazine]

Infographic: Are iPads the Future of DJing?

via milesbonny.com

Related: Mix Your Music Library With djay iPhone App

What Can Pop Learn From Lady Gaga's Telephone?

It's fair to say Lady Gaga's new video has caused a stir. Since it surfaced on Thursday night, the world's media – with the possible exception of John Pilger, and even he probably muttered a tentative OMG in private – have offered their opinion on Telephone. The more thoughtful of these have focused on the alarming amount of product placement the video contains.

The nine-and-a-half minute clip plugs at least 10 separate brands, including Virgin Mobile, DietCoke, Polaroid (for which Gaga is a creative director, though whether she attends board meetings wearing her jacket made of Kermit heads is unclear), and Wonder Bread.

It's this last one that puzzled me. White bread is not aspirational. When I'm in the bakery aisle of Morrisons, I don't tend to think "hmmm, which sliced loaf would Gaga go for"?

Gaga's product placement has reached a new order, but how might pop have looked if such blatant commercial opportunism had always been the norm?

via www.guardian.co.uk

Pew Research: The Millennials | Confident. Connected. Open to Change.

This is part of a Pew Research Center series of reports exploring the behaviors, values and opinions of the teens and twenty-somethings that make up the Millennial Generation.

Pew Research: The Millennials | Confident. Connected. Open to Change.

Generations, like people, have personalities, and Millennials – the teens and twenty-somethings currently making the passage into adulthood – have begun to forge theirs: confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and receptive to new ideas and ways of living.

Learn more about the findings and take the 'How Millennial Are You?' quiz.

Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with Digital Media

Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out was written as a collaborative effort by members of the Digital Youth Project, a three-year research effort funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California.

Conventional wisdom about young people’s use of digital technology often equates generational identity with technology identity: today’s teens seem constantly plugged in to video games, social networks sites, and text messaging. Yet there is little actual research that investigates the intricate dynamics of youth’s social and recreational use of digital media.

Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media

Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out fills this gap, reporting on an ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings-at home, in after school programs, and in online spaces.

This project was one of many funded by the MacArthur Foundation to explore digital media and learning. New projects in this area are being aggregated through the Digital Media and Learning Hub.

Weekly Wrap: Chegg Battle of the Bands, Oprah's Leno-CoCo PollGate, Social Data Revolution, Mattel Looks to AR, Gen X Stereotypes, Real Time UX, Rowling on Imagination & Failure, Mowtown Content Strategy & More!

Chegg Joins College Battle of the Bands: College Battle of the Bands is proud to announce its partnership with textbook rental service Chegg.com! Student bands and musicians can sign up for FREE and promote their music for a chance to play great venues and win amazing gear and cash prizes as part of the national series of events. [Chegg.com]

Conan-Leno Mudslinging Continues With Oprah.com Poll Allegations: So how exactly does the source close to NBC figure that Team Coco flooded Oprah’s ballot box? By good old-fashioned ballot box stuffing, thanks to software designed by die hard Coco fans and advertised on one of the many Team Coco Facebook pages. (Really Team Jay? Why would Ms. Winfrey, or Conan for that matter, want to do that?) Related: Conan, Leno & The Tonight Show Debacle [MovieLine] [Barking Robot}

Augmented Reality Gives Lift to Kids Digital Space: Mattel was at the head of the line as the first major consumer products player to incorporate AR into a retail toy product. As the master toy licensee for James Cameron's film Avatar, the California-based toyco teamed up with an AR software solutions house Total Immersion to create a line of action figures. [Kidscreen]

The Social Data Revolution(s): In 2009, more data will be generated by individuals than in the entire history of mankind through 2008. Information overload is more serious than ever. [Harvard Business Review]

Free Reality TV Show Debuts on Your PlayStation 3: Sony Computer Entertainment America is making good on its promise to expand original content offerings on its PlayStation Network distribution service. It will be bringing an original reality television series, The Tester, to PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable consoles via the PSN as a free downloadable series starting February 18. [Mashable]

Study Finds Podcasts Reach Unreachable Consumers: Although podcasting has shown to be quite popular in niche markets, many marketers have not jumped into the fray. The results of a recent Edison Research and Association for Downloadable Media (ADM) study could change some marketers minds, however, because apparently consumers being reached by podcasting are unreachable in other formats. [Junta 42]

Tweet O' the Week: "At Chateau Marmont on a gorgeous day. Everyone here looks like they're on the verge of famous." via @TVBlogster

Get Real About Gen X Stereotypes: Much laudatory ink has been spilled on the Baby Boomers...usually by Boomers themselves. As for the Millennials, those born between 1982 and 1998, the quantity of reportage lauding their public-spiritedness has quickly become tiresome. But a new report casts doubt on the widely accepted stereotype of Gen X-ers as inferior to these other groups. [New Geography]

The Case for Content Strategy, Mowtown Style: how do you start humming the content strategy tune to your own team and to your prospective clients? Listen up and heed Aretha Franklin. No, really. [A List Apart]

UX of the Real Time Web: A major thing done by users on the real time web is the posting and recommending of external links. These links will often go to a story, website, picture, or video that could be of interest to people right now. One problem is that there is so much sharing being done on the real time web that it can become difficult to differentiate the legitimate links from the noise. [instantShift]

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination: J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association. [Harvard Magazine]

Global Youth: What Youth Think | 2010 Youth Trends Report

Partnering with youth marketers, culture and trend experts from around the world, Graham Brown (the force behind mobileYouth) have crowd-sourced an impressive amount of research on global youth trends and shared his findings in a series of three presentations.

What Youth Think: 2010 Youth Trends Report presentations are a must see for youth marketers, media planners, educators, youth pastors and anyone else who works in the youth space.

So sit back, take notes and enjoy. Then let's all meet up at the Carrot Mob!

2010 Youth Trends Report Part 1

View more presentations from Graham Brown.

2010 Youth Trends Report Part 2

View more presentations from Graham Brown.

2010 Youth Trends Report Part 3

View more presentations from Graham Brown.

Millennials: The Gen Y Tsunami is Here

 

"For marketers, the Millennials represent a multifaceted challenge that defies easy categorization. Beyond their demographic diversity, marketers need to recognize distinct behaviors, preferences, attitudes, and values that set this group apart from the rest.

We need to realize that consumer-driven marketing integration is not a dream but a critical reality. And this starts with understanding who these young adults really are."

--DMW Direct Consumer Insights,"Millennials"

Related: 2010 Ypulse Youth Marketing Mashup

Weekly Wrap: Slacktivism, Open Source Social Innovation, Boomers & Social Media, Helping Google Get Social, Sundance 2010 Round-Up, Texting Party in the USA, Steve Jobs' Wardrobe & More!

A Time and Place for 'Slacktivism': Slacktivism; (v.) action 4 social change w/o much effort beyond a click/text. Known causes: social media, cellphones. [Ypulse]

Baby Boomers Get Connected with Social Media: Boomers are turning to social media, where they keep up their offline social connections and make new ones. Online marketing messages that help them build on their connections—and foster other online relationships—will get their interest. [eMarketer]

Lady GaGa's Lessons for the Music Business: Underneath Gaga's haystack wigs is a case study of what it takes to succeed in the music business today. Gaga, 23 years old, has made shrewd use of new digital platforms, while still leveraging the clout of a major label, an institution deemed obsolete by many proponents of DIY culture (Thanks Ypulse!). [WSJ]

Conan O'Brien's Fate a Sign of the Times: While the "Tonight Show" ratings fell under O'Brien's tenure as a whole, ratings amongst the younger demographics were better than those of Jay Leno's "Tonight Show." According to the New York Times, the median age of "Tonight Show" viewers fell by 10 years, from 55 to 45, in O'Brien's first month alone. [Colorado Daily]

Social Media Marketing, How Pepsi Got it Right: Social media marketing campaigns are proving to be goldmines rich with customer engagement and insight that companies wouldn’t likely have otherwise. Companies like PepsiCo are going to extensive lengths to foster this type of collaboration with fans, and the payoff has been big. [Mashable]

Will Creating a SWAT Team Help Google Get Social?: As successful as Google has been with plenty of other things — including a little thing called search-related advertising — it has struck out big-time in virtually every attempt at the social side of the web. [GigaOM]

Reflections from the Sundance Film Festival: Lois Vossen, ITVS vice president and Independent Lens series producer, shares her reflections on this year’s festival, which wraps up this weekend. [Beyond the Box]

College Students Hate Email: In fact, the student joked that she only uses her email to “communicate with her boss and adults.” She uses Facebook as her preferred method of peer-to-peer communication – she has had a Facebook thread running between the three of them for three years now. [Off Campus Media]

Tweet O' the Week: Can someone please buy Steve Jobs a new outfit! The man has more money than God and Oprah! A simple button down will do!" (via Scott Nevins) [Twitter]

Americans Sending 4 Times as Many Texts as Brits:There was a turning point a couple of years ago when it was suddenly undeniable: It was either text message or be left behind. If you were paying for it by the message, you suddenly had to find a plan, because you started having more and more friends that wouldn't talk any other way. Well, we're wondering if it has finally reached that point in the U.K. - or if it's yet to come. [ReadWriteWeb]

Teen Drinking May Cause Irreversible Brain Damage: For teenagers, the effects of a drunken night out may linger long after the hangover wears off. A recent study led by neuroscientist Susan Tapert of the University of California, San Diego compared the brain scans of teens who drink heavily with the scans of teens who don't. [NPR]

Open Source Social Innovation: Last week Bill Gates entered the digital publishing world by establishing the Gates Notes - an online evolution of his now annual January letter sharing his thoughts on the progress of the issues central to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It’s interesting and symbolic that the next chapter of his life story would include an “open source” platform for sharing IP on social innovation. [Cheskin]

Study: Facebook and MySpace Enhance the Positive Relationships Kids Already Have

When the Morgan Stanley Report on Youth Media Consumption was released last summer, it unleashed a flurry of media reports on the plague of "internet addicted" youth.

Since the Morgan Stanley report, we've continued to see a steady stream of news reports on internet addiction and youth. So it wasn't too much of a surprise that last weeks release of the Kaiser Family Foundation 'Generation M' study was met with a variation on the internet addiction theme.

While there are indeed negative aspects to digital media, along with kids who spend way too much time playing video games and texting, there are also lots of young people using social and digital media in positive and inspiring ways.

As Meredith at Ypulse points out, most media outlets and parenting guru's focus solely on the negative effects of digital and social media. More often than not, the positive effects of social and digital media in the lives of tweens, teens and twentysomethings are left out of the 'youth and digtal media' conversation. I couldn't agree more.

A new study in the January issue of Developmental Psychology conducted by psychologists at the University of Virginia suggests that well-adapted youth with positive friendships will use social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace to enhance the positive relationships they already have.

Researchers assessed the friendship quality and popularity of 172 13- to 14-year-olds, and then, eight years later, "friended" the study participants on their Facebook and MySpace pages to examine their interactions and friendship quality in those domains.

The entire report is locked up behind a pay wall (but well worth the 11 bucks), but here are some of the key findings:

• The research team found that the youths who were better adjusted in their early teens were more likely to use social media in their early 20s, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity or parental income, and that, overall, the patterns of friendship quality and behavioral adjustment as early teens continued into early adulthood;

• The interactions young adults are having on their Facebook and MySpace pages are more similar to than different from the interactions they have in their face-to-face relationships;

• Parents of well-adjusted teens may have little to worry about regarding the way their children behave when using social media. It's likely to be similar positive behavior;

• 86% of the youth in the study used the social media sites like Facebook, MySpace or Twitter, which parallels the national average;

• Use of Facebook and MySpace is really pervasive among this age group, so it's understandable that young people would want to be connected with their peers in this way; it's an extension of the relationships they already share;

• Parents should try to stay involved with their children and make an attempt to understand their online world in the same way they would want to understand any other aspect of their lives.

Social and Collaborative Marketing Trends

Shiv Singh from Razorfish has put together an informative presentation that highlights the value of social media as part of a collaborative approach to marketing. He calls it Social Influence Marketing, but it’s essentially an approach to marketing that includes the customers in many of the activities. 

MusicDNA: New Filetype To Allow For More Than Just Music

via news.bbc.co.uk

The new file, MusicDNA, can include things like lyrics, videos, artwork and blog posts, which will continually be updated, as well as the music. It has been created by Norwegian developer Dagfinn Bach, who worked on the first MP3 player in 1993.

The new file format will be searchable, with up to 32GB of extra information embedded in the file. The format is being designed to allow for dynamic updates of information on lyrics, videos, artwork and relevant links anytime the user is connected.