Danish prime minister, Ander Fogh Rasmussen, yesterday celebrated his 10 year anniversary as leader of the Liberal party, Venstre. The PM chose to celebrate the day by going for a run with his Facebook friends. He also mentioned how Facebookhas been a positive inspiration in his daily work and thanked the Facebook friends for their positive comments on his wall.

It is interesting to see how Facebook has moved from being social networking tool to being a tool for powerful politicians to engage with their stakeholders; and the empsasis and investment that politicians put into a tool like this. 

Tom Loosemore has an interesting discussion of when you are liable to pay the license fee. Apparently in the UK, you have to watch the BBC in order to have to pay license.

In Denmark it is enough to be in possession of a mobile phone (or any other electronic device) that has the capability to show one of the national TV channels:

It looks like there is still some way to go here in terms of harmonisation within the EU, but watch out if you borrow a computer from a friend in Denmark, you may have pay a license fee while you browse the your Facebook profile and enjoy a latte in your local café.

Guy Kawasaki recently had a post on his blog about Spokeo which I thought, I had better check out. After getting over the irritation of not being able to use my preferred email address, I found it fascinating to get blogs, flickr streams and other more or less interesting news about people who happened to be in my hotmail address book – if nothing else this was a prime example of why we should always consider to weed our contacts lists from time to time

However, after my initial enthusiasm subsided I got irritated over several small things in the tool.
1) My LinkedIn contacts do not all seem to update – some of them stay as numbers and although all profiles can be displayed by clicking on the number why can’t Spokeo at least retrive the name…

2) Organising information by person or alphabetically rather than by platform.
I mainly use LinkedIn and Facebook and have just over 100 in the former and between 20 and 30 Facebook friends. Still I would much rather be able to see information on a contact across several platforms rather than looking at all platforms before moving on to the next.

Otherwise an interesting tool, but personally I still prefer to visit people profile pages on LinkedIn and Facebook, especially if they include links to their Flickr stream, del.icio.us bookmarks and YouTube channel here.

It has been very difficult to find any exact information on the release date of Simon Lynge’s debut album “A Beautiful Way to Drown”. I recently saw Danish/Greenlandic singersong writer Simon Lynge at a live gig at CafeKino here in Copenhagen and wanted to hear more.

Karl Long had an interesting post on a hidden Guinness ad which users competed to find. Finding information on Lynge’s forthcoming debut has been almost as much of a hunt as finding the Guinness advert, although I am not sure this has been quite intentional

At the recent gig, I purchased a CD from Simon in the break and was keen to buy his new album when this was due to be released. On the cover notes further information is simonlynge.com Jumping at the chance to find out more, I keyed in the URL but to my surprise this space has been taken over by domain squatters.

However, I quickly find the artists new homepage and his MySpace profile via Google.

On the artist’s homepage the only information, I find is that a debut album is indeed on its way, but no release date or information on how to buy the album.

On Lynge’s Myspace profile there is no immediate information either.

Finally, returning to the original URL from the CD cover and digging in the archives of the internet I managed to make some progress.

On an old version of Simon Lynge’s original web page I finally managed to find his email address and he quite promptly responded to my query.

Simon Lynge has now also posted further information about the release on his MySpace blog:
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=24104256&blogID=329579964

Simon, I am still looking forward to buying your album on Wednesday.

After having used social networking sites for almost two years, it has struck me how different the types of connections that you encounter in social networking are. I think the following 6 desciptions cover the main types of contacts that I have.

Proactive
Usually they invite you before you get a chance to invite them! Enthusiastic about social networking and sometimes even open networking. However, you can be quite sure that you get an invite if you know one of these people. Some proactive users may also

Collectors
These users do everything to get as many friends, buddies connections – the more the better. Collectors may be just as proactive as the proactive user but will typically lose interest in connections once the connection has been established. These are very useful as facilitators of connections, although many of the connections they can deliver may not be of a high quality standard.

Responsive
Users who accept your invitations but rely on others to invite them rather being proactive in setting up a network.

Reluctant
People who only accept an invitation after receiving one or more reminders – either through the networking tool or after being prompted by people in real life.

Unresponsive
People who you find on social networks but who never responds to invitations even when they are sent reminders. They have probably signed up at some point by mistake or they are no longer interested.

Non-existent
People who are not on any social networks.

You may say that all this is good but what is the value of this information. Soon I will explore whether we can measure the overall quality of our network by assigning values to these 6 categories.

This week saw the launch of Google’s Open Social – a new open standard for social networks which be used on a variety of platforms from LinkedIn over Orkut to MySpace. Most of the blogs I read regularly are enthusiastic about this development:
O’Reilly Radar
Marc Andreesen
Jeff Jarvis
The Guardian
Karl Long

Now the question is of course whether Facebook has already got a size where they can stick to their own platform and take on the competition or whether platforms using the new Open Social standard will win in the long run.

Some other useful links:
http://blog.linkedin.com/
http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

This week Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine writes in his regular Guardian column about how networked journalism may be a future way for journalists to be working. Jarvis defines networked journalism as “collaboration with the communities it covers”. Although I can easily see how this approach secures a stakeholder buy in, I would worry that objective and unbiased news (as if such a thing ever exisited) will be very hard to aspire to. News readers have of course always been one of the main sources of revenue for newspapers (advertising being the other one), but going too far down this route could create serious conflics of interest.

On the other hand, one could argue that networked journlists have already existed for decades where political correspondents rely on politicians to share information with them.

The Danish prime minister called a general election yesterday and it made me wonder how many Danish party leaders are actually using social networking tools like LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace.

A quick search gave the following results:

Only the two main candidates use two of the tools, Facebook and MySpace. Neither Anders Fogh Rasmussen nor Helle Thorning-Schmidt are using the more serious tool, LinkedIn. From the above it looks like Danish politicians still do their canvassing without social networking tools.

Recently, US democratic senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama consulted LinkedIn users about small businesses and entrepreneurs and connected with almost 1500 LinkedIn users who responded to the question, but it looks like this type of campaign has not yet come to Denmark.

For a while I have been considering whether Instant Messaging could fill a communications gap I experience between email and telephone in the workplace.

I am too old to have grown up with Instant Messaging and have therefore, by habit, often relied on email. I decided to post a question on the LinkedIn Answers section to see if anyone else had some thoughts on this subject.

I had a strong sense that IM would be the right tool in terms of being a mixture of email while bringing the instant response that we are used to from telephone conversation. Also I hoped that the more transient nature of IM would make people more inclined to respond quickly.

Although I frequently manage to hit send before I meant to (and often have finished drafts that I had meant to send), email seems to make people think twice before they send something, and frequently not respond at all or respond after a while.

I have created the following list of pros and cons.

Pros:

• Ability to see if colleagues are online and thus not writing emails or phoning in vain
• Quicker when you need to have a quick consultation with someone
• Good for small talk or phatic communication (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phatic).
• Personally, I think this can be very important for building team spirit and cohesion.
• A little more informal than email which may generate more ideas.

Cons:

• Circumvents antivirus systems
• Could be a time waster – but as one person points out time wasters will waste time whatever tool you give them
• Not possible to document

See the full list of answers here:
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/business-operations/project-management/OPS_PRJ/116661-4119495

The latest entry on the LinkedIn blog on communicating effectively features something I haven’t seem before. In addition to the blog post, Chris Richman, also explains the content of the blog post in a YouTube video clip. Although one could argue this is presenting the information twice, I don’t feel that this is a tautology. This dual layer approach works very well and it is nice to see the content presented in a new way, possilby this should be called YouBlog.

The title of the blog post is “Communicating more effectively through LinkedIn” and this is exactly what the YouTube clip achieves. Well done and keep up the good work at LinkedIn.