Girl Power: The top 50 most influential female bloggers

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Sisters are doing it for themselves. North X East has just released a list of today’s top 50 most influential female bloggers. (And no unfortunately I didn’t make this year’s list.) In reverse order, the list names the women who are taking the blogosphere by storm in what used to seem like a boys-only playground.

The list gives readers a 30 second rundown of each blogger and why they are the cat’s pyjamas. If you want to know who the blogging world are hailing as the cream of the crop, check it out. And despite what many might think, it’s not all lipstick and handbags…

Facebook launches Lexicon a new service to analyse its trends

Ever wondered who is saying what and how often on Facebook? No, well neither have I really, but Facebook has launched a new service which now shows you anyway.

Lexicon is described as a tool to follow ‘language trends across Facebook’. It looks at the usage of words and phrases on profiles, groups and event walls.  

For example, you can enter "blog, PR" to compare the usage of these two words on its walls. Like I have done on the right here for an example.

Users can enter up to five terms with each being a word or two-word phrase.

How do you interpret its results?

It shows the number of users that posted that term per day on a profile, event or group wall. It doesn’t count repeated terms by a user on one particular day. You can even zoom in and out to analyse the data more closely if you want too.

I know what you’re thinking - is there a privacy issue here? Well apparently not as everything is kept anonymous and it doesn’t consider private data, such as messages, Chat (I will cover that at another time), invitations, or searches.

Marketer’s should give it a quick whirl as it could prove pretty useful for a quick reference to something but apart from that I think it’s pretty basic.

Now if I post this on my Facebook profile will it show on Lexicon - hmm who knows?

Cross posted on: Norton’s Notes

FT social network doesn’t have longevity

I picked up The Guardian this morning and read an interesting article by Mark Sweney about the Financial Times which plans to create an exclusive social network.

The proposed scheme will be a membership only network costing a fee of £2k a year for each lucky networker.

The Guardian describes the membership as including: "attendance at any one FT Global conference plus 20% off subsequent events, face-to-face members’ networking events and a 12-month premium subscription to FT.com."

Oh I think I should point out that the FT will also be using your details to target you for anything they possibly can if you join.

"Busy executives in the media and technology industries are increasingly networking, communicating and connecting online and the launch … provides a highly targeted network where executives from these fast-moving industries can connect and share their knowledge," said Jayne van Hoen, FT conference director

Having read this story I have asked myself one question - why? Why would I join a social network at the cost of £2k a year, when there are already plenty of decent business networks out there which cost nothing?

Social networks such as Facebook and Linked in also have the ability to make themselves exclusive too - so you can have who you want within your particular network.  I also don’t really see the value in having a closed network - the only real benefit I can see is actually for the FT , not the user, as the newspaper gets everyone’s details for marketing purposes.

Only time will tell if this will actually be a success - my guess is it will get a few members initially but don’t expect Facebook to be quaking in its boots!

Cross Posted on: Norton’s Notes

FeedDemon now free

I’ve long been a fan of FeedDemon as in my opinion it is by far and away the best RSS reader on the market. So good that it was worth paying for, even though most of its competitors were free.

Well FeedDemon is even better as Newsgator (the company that acquired the product) has made it free.

Eight things you don’t know about me

Chris Marritt has tagged me with the ‘Eight things you don’t know about me’ meme.

1. I used to want to be a civil servant and work as a diplomat in a British embassy somewhere interesting - until I realised that you had to be good at foreign languages.
2. I was a finalist in the UK Junior National Working Hunter Pony championships at Stoneleigh, but didn’t do too well in the final as my pony was slightly agoraphobic and scared in large arenas.
3. Growing up I attended five different schools and I’ve now lived in eight different areas of the country.
4. Famous people I’ve met include Tony Blair, Gordon Brown (in fact most senior Labour politicians), Princess Anne, Lord Douglas Hurd, Brian Blessed and Sooty.
5. I wish I could play a musical instrument or speak a foreign language, or just that I had the time to learn to do either of those things.
6. I like lots of different types of food, but HATE baked beans with their horrible sweet, sickly sauce.
7. The most unusual place I’ve visited is Lebanon in the early 90s when an Arab publishing company paid for me to visit the Palestinian deportees stranded in no-man’s land between Israel and Lebanon. My visit was covered on Syrian TV news.
8. Places I would love to visit include California, Washington DC, the Deep South, Hong Kong and China.

Eight people is way too many to tag so I tag everyone else at Wolfstar: Tim Sinclair, Chris Norton, Karen Bruce, Kirstyn Pollard, Sebastian Mysko and Beth Kay.

XP: A PR Guy’s Musings

"Some athletes throw balls, but cheerleaders throw athletes!"

I just couldn’t resist blogging about this article in the Daily Mail (mainly because it kinda made my blood boil)

Tanya Gold tells the story of her visit to the ‘international cheerleading championships’. The article was in fact quite entertaining, particularly because about 90% of it was completely wrong and actually focuses on the dance section of the competition rather than the actually cheerleading competition (even the picture was of a dance team).

I thought I would give you guys a couple of facts about how things really are, and how this article reinforces the negative stereotype that real, athletic cheerleaders are fighting so hard to break.

1. I had to post these videos as they speak for themselves. If anyone can say that cheerleading is not a sport, athletic or extremely hard this should shut them up.

NCA Highlights - Highlights of the ‘All-star’ teams (they don’t cheer for sports teams either) from 2006 National Cheerleading Association in Texas.

A skills tape from collegiate team, North Carolina State. (Count the guys!!!)

2. Cheerleading compromises gymnastics, dance and stunting. All these three disciplines are extremely hard in themselves. Cheerleaders have to be good at all three. Trust me it’s tough. I want to cheerlead because I love all three of these sports, not because I secretly want to be American.

3. I bet Tanya doesn’t realise that we train around four/five times a week for three hours each time to be even slightly good at the sport.

4. The competition she saw was the cheerleading equivalent of a local pub football team when compared to the world’s best.

5. British, male cheerleading is growing. One of my squads has 11 guys on it, most of which are the strongest, most athletic guys I know. 50% of collegiate cheerleaders in the US are male. How many guys do you know that can single handedly hold two 21 year old girls above their heads?

6. My mum doesn’t come to any cheerleading competitions. She would actually prefer if I didn’t cheerlead as she regularly thinks that I may kill myself in the process.

7. Competitive cheer routines rarely, if ever, use pompoms.