linkfluence

Esomar, the world association for market and opinion research, is holding its annual congress in Montréal between September, 22nd and 24th.

The 2008 Congress is all about Frontiers, in social sciences, in marketing and communication, in research. I will be pleased to take the stage during the "frontiers in technology" session to speak about "social graph theories as an alternative to traditional sampling methods" – although, to be fair, social graph approaches to market and opinion research rather constitute valuable additions to the traditional methodological landscape, especially when it comes to the social web.

The abstract is as follows: “Has the monopoly of traditional population segmentation criteria and sampling methods come to an end? Can demographics (employment, age, sex, ethnicity, etc) or behavioural (consumption and cultural habits) criteria be replaced by new “community membership” criteria? Has the “one voice – one vote” principle long lived for market and opinion research? Guilhem Fouetillou and Anthony Hamelle of linkfluence, a social web research institute, will offer creative and sometimes iconoclast perspectives on these issues. Basing themselves on social graph theories, they will share their insight on the importance of links, how they reveal the existence of true opinion communities, how they help single out opinion leaders and what this all means for the research industry.”

anham

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As announced in a previous post, we were pleased to share the stage of this year’s Personal Democracy Forum with a set of distinguished speakers.

For those of you who could not make it to New York, the videos of the presentations have been published on Blip.tv.

The video of our onstage presentation can be accessed directly here.

And for those of you interested in these topics, don’t forget to follow our coverage of this year’s US presidential elections on Presidential Watch 08.

Update: you may have a glimpse of the great amount and quality of comments received from online political pundits on Digg or on Twitter

anham

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For those of you who were not able to attend this year’s Beyond Broadcast Conference in Washington, DC, its organizer, American University’s Center for Social Media, has published a complete overview of the day’s debates and discussions.

Within a framework of discussions around the future and the independence of public media in an always evolving mediascape, notably because of new uses made possible by the Internet, three main topics were addressed:

• maps and dataviz solutions as ways to share information at a time when information comes in abundance;
• maps as a way of revealing the future of public media (where linkfluence was kindly asked to share its view)
• mapping the money (commercial media ventures vs. non-commercial media ventures)

“it will be much harder for any single actor to set the agenda, because they would have to be present in every community.” Instead, “media actors will have to work with local outposts in terms of providing information and setting agendas.”

I shared with the distinguished audience the idea that the mediascape was becoming more and more clusterised, with communities of interest becoming more and more prominent. Any venture, either commercial or not, wanting to push and promote information these days will have to work community by community, and not just broadcast to the masses. Read (and watch) more here.

anham

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Guilhem Fouetillou and Anthony Hamelle will tour on the U.S. East Coast in June 2008 to take part in conferences on the future of public media and on netpolitics.

Each year, the Beyond Broadcast conference, held by American University’s Center for Social Media, observes the evolution of social, or participatory, media. This year, the main discussion topic will be "mapping public media". Several angles will be dealt with: How are media makers using online mapping and visualization tools to tell stories and engage communities? What can those same tools tell us about changes in the public media landscape? linkfluence’s intervention will notably focus on the latter.

Prestigious netpolitics and Internet experts gather at the Personal Democracy Forum: Ariana Huffington, Vint Cerf, Joe Trippi, Esther Dyson, Lawrence Lessig, etc. This year, the PDF’s organisers hope to reboot the (political and democratic) system. The impact of new technologies and new social uses on political life and democracy will be analysed under numerous angles. linkfluence shall present the updated version of its Presidential Watch 08 map as well as several case studies on the presence of important campaign issues within communities of the social web.

Come see us in Washington D.C. on June, 17th or in New York City on June, 23rd & 24th!

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