The governments concern stems from an arrest of a monk who used a social networking site to convince a woman to visit his temple and then raped her.  "I call on Hi5 users to tell the monks to leave the site if they are found using it," junior minister Jakrapob Penkair told reporters after a Buddhist monitoring group said some monks were acting inappropriately on the site.

Thai media reported on Tuesday that a 23-year-old monk was caught raping a teenager he lured to his room via the Web site. "I am upset by this," Jakrapob said. "Any sort of misdeed caused by monks results in the deterioration of Buddhism."

Jakrapob said the government had to weigh the pros and cons of blocking the Web site from access by Buddhist monks and noted that the site was useful for online visitors to search for information and job opportunities.

Phrathepwisuthikawi, Vice Rector for Academic Affairs and Planning of Mahamakut Buddhist University said that monks should not be banned from the Web site if they are using it for religious purposes.

"If monks use the website to propagate Buddhist teaching, it’s not wrong," he explained. "It must be considered case by case."
 

According to BrandRepublic, that’s the key message in Social Networking Across Europe, a new report from Jupiter Research published last week.

Jupiter’s executive summary says this:

Localized site launches by MySpace.com and Bebo are aiming to drive European adoption of social networking sites, and the corresponding trend toward user personalization will increasingly lead to deconstruction of existing providers’ applications and content.

The report costs $1,500 (ouch!). That also gets you a 30-minute phone discussion with the analyst who wrote it.

In summarizing the report, BrandRepublic says that the UK has benefited from the English language bias of international social networks to become the country in Europe most attuned to social networks.

Offering different languages and different services according to nations is the key to gaining a large user base throughout Europe, the report found.

The growth of social network usage generally has prompted some reporting recently on the risks you can run online, eg, identity theft.

In the UK, this week (November 12-16) is Get Safe Online Awareness Week. The website (and related blog) has useful information on staying safe online.

Worth paying attention to, whether you’re in the UK or elsewhere.

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• Today’s social networked world

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I say this might be predictable because we see it in every other market: something is a smash, surprising success, incredibly or potentially profitable, and all kinds of somethings just like it pop up to ride the wave until the public can’t stand it anymore.

Cases in point: every search engine that came along after Google; every new YouTube-esque video site; every reality show sneezed out of LA after Survivor; every hottie bottle-blonde teen pop sensation to ever walk off the stage of the Mouseketeer’s Club.

Oh yeah, and the Spice Girls.

Point is, they offer nothing new.

Mr. Liew, whom I said you could blame, was prompted by Hi5′s funding success and did some digging to find out which social networks out there had the highest user engagement.

That’s an interesting choice because it is indicative of where metrics are truly going. It’s not just about unique visitors anymore. It’s also about time spent with potential consumers. A hundred broke customers are worth far less to marketers than 10 ready-to-spend customers.

Excuse me while I state the obvious.

Liew provides us with charts and graphs, illustrating that Orkut, the Google-owned network primarily popular in Brazil and India, seems to have the most deeply active members, who outrank MySpace in terms of average pages viewed per visitor.

Orkut also nearly matches MySpace in terms of average visits per visitor. MySpace is still, by far, the king of the social networks, though, with over 100 times the number of visitors Orkut has.

In terms of all things considered – unique visitors, average pages per visitor, and average visit per visitor, MySpace trounces all competition, including the recently much-lauded Facebook.

"Myspace continues to dominate Facebook on all three key metrics, suggesting that reports of MySpace’s death are greatly exaggerated, Facebook apps notwithstanding."

Heh. Good one, Jeremy.

But these you’ve heard of. The next question is: which will be the next blockbuster? Inquiring investors want to know.

Recently, on a gut feeling, I announced the dawn of the niche network era. But in all actuality, I don’t think a niche network – though valuable for pinpoint targeting purposes – will be able to attract enough interest, from users or investors, on its own.

Liew notes two surprises on his engagement chart lists, neither of which he had heard of, nor I, and most likely, nor you, but made both top 11 lists in terms of engagement.

One is Hoverspot.com, which appears to be, like so many others, a clone of MySpace – very vanilla, very J. Crew, very, um, Microsoft Zune. Standard, a suitable alternative, like tofu, Hyundai, Ask.com, or the other white meat.

But unless everybody defects from MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Tagged.com, Friendster – you know, the social networks that look just like it – it’s hard to imagine it being a blockbuster.

But I’ve been wrong before. I was wrong about Emo music.

What’s more interesting to me are the true originals, and the fact that a social networking site called VampireFreaks.com is on that list. Talk about niche. Are there enough vampire freaks to make an impact, even if they’re really engrossed in their network? Well, they have more visitors than Orkut, if that tells you something.

It tells me there’s a surprising number of vampire freaks out there. But there’s a limited number of things, as a marketer, you can expect them to bite on.

Ba-rum-bum.

However, if you gather up the vampires, the bar flies, and the full-time moms, and put them under the same roof – in separate rooms, of course – you may be on to something really brilliant: a network of niche networks already divided by demographics.

I don’t expect any one social network to take over the industry giants. I expect clusters of them, bought and bundled and monetized, to it.  

Well, noteworthy to some of us, anyway – for whatever reason, Hi5 has yet to put out a press release or blog post on the matter.  Still, as reported by Om Malik, the “San Francisco-based social networking start-up is said to have raised about $20 million in its latest round of funding.”

Malik goes on to hint at why most people have never heard of this site, writing, “The company . . . started out as a social-network-plus matrimonial site targeting the Indian diaspora, but later morphed into a social network, and since then has gained popularity in some Latin American countries, Mongolia, Tunisia and Romania.”

In other words, Hi5’s not much of a hit in the U.S.

Of course, the American market isn’t the be-all and end-all of social networking – Orkut, for example, is doing all right without us.  And speaking of a Google property, there’s a strange similarity between Hi5 and Google.

“My sister-in-law found her mother after 34 years of searching by using Google,” according to a testimonial from “Laurie M.” in Google’s Press Center.  “I just thought you’d like to know you helped us find our mom!”

That account’s been there for a while – I’ve often wondered why Google doesn’t update or delete it.  Now, in Hi5’s “About Us” section, “Nathan, Belize” states, “Thanks to hi5 I was able to talk to my mother for the first time in 25 years . . . it was the sweetest joy to finally hear each other’s voices.”

Coincidence?  I dunno.  Malik writes, “If you look at this social networking map of the world, one finds that there are quite a few international-only players.  Someone like Google or Yahoo should attempt a large scale consolidation – or at least that is what Hi5’s backers must be hoping for.”  Perhaps Nathan’s testimonial is a nudge from Hi5.

Rather than be accused of rigging the test I’m going to grab all of the actors/actresses listed in the top actors section of the Yahoo Buzz Report. The list has been de-duped and alpha sorted, results with Wikipedia in the top ten are indicated with an *, results with Wikipedia in the top 3 are indicated with an !:

[Aishwarya Rai] !
[Alec Baldwin] !
[Angelina Jolie] !
[Angie Harmon] !
[Carmen Electra] !
[Drew Barrymore] !
[Elizabeth Hurley] !
[Eva Longoria] !
[Goldie Hawn] !
[Halle Berry] !
[Hilary Duff] !
[Hugh Grant] !
[Jaimee Foxworth] !
[Jamie-lynn Discala] !
[Jennifer Aniston] !
[Jennifer Lopez] !
[Jessica Alba] !
[Jessica Biel] !
[Kelly Ripa] !
[Kerry Washington] !
[Kristanna Loken] *
[Linda Hamilton] !
[Lindsay Lohan] !
[Lucy Liu] !
[Pamela Anderson] *
[Richard Gere] !
[Rosie Perez] !
[Sarah Silverman] !
[Scarlett Johansson] !
[Shawnee Smith] !
[Shilpa Shetty] !
[Tobey Maguire] !
[Tori Spelling] !
[Yasmine Bleeth] !

So out of 35 of the most popular actors searched on the web last week Wikipedia has top 10 listings on all 35. More impressive is that they have a top 3 listing on 33 out of 35 listings. Most were number 2 with the odd #1 or #3 thrown in. If you bothered to click through you might have noticed that IMDB was #1 for most of the listings, and you’re wondering why I’m not complaining about that. Let’s cruise on over to the top overall searches for the same time period. Again list has been de-duped and alpha sorted * for Wikipedia top ten ! for Wikipedia top 3. To make it even more apparent I’ll remove any of the people listed in the top actors list as well:

[Akon] !
[American Idol] !
[Avril Lavigne] !
[Beyonce Knowles] !
[Britney Spears] !
[Chris Daughtry] !
[Christie Brinkley] !
[Dancing Bush]
[Democratic Presidential Debate 2007]
[Department Of Defense] !
[Elvis On American Idol]
[Hi-5]
[Internal Revenue Service] *
[Kelly Clarkson] !
[Lost] !
[Mark Twain] !
[Mike Penner]
[Milka Duno] !
[Naruto] !
[NBA] *
[New England Journal Of Medicine] *
[Prime Numbers] !
[Prince Harry] !
[Pussycat Dolls] !
[Regis Philbin] !
[Rocky Mountain News]
[Rosie O’Donnell] !
[RuneScape] !
[Sea Otters] !
[Spider-Man 3] *
[T-Pain] !
[WWE] !

Out of 32 possible terms Wikipedia had top 10 listings on 27. Out of 27 possible terms Wikipedia had top 3 listings for 22. These aren’t ordinary terms either, they are high volume search terms. Ok some people are saying that’s Yahoo list not Google’s, so why didn’t you use the Google Zeitgeist? Well as has already been demonstrated Google lies on the Google Zeitgeist so let’s leave the Pinocchio of search sitting in the corner. Next we’ll look at the terms that didn’t have Wikipedia listings int he SERP’s:

[Dancing Bush] – that’s news, people were really looking for DancingBush.com, not enough time for it to be in Wikipedia yet and be authority scored yet.

[Democratic Presidential Debate 2007] – that’s a news item again.

[Elvis On American Idol] – It was Elvis theme week on American Idol and Celene Dion sang with Elvis, so again news.

[Hi-5] – This one surprised me HI-5 is a transplant Australian kids band and has a Wikipedia page so go figure.

[Mike Penner] – Mike is sports writer who announced he’s having a sex change operation, so again news.

[Rocky Mountain News] – I have no idea why people are looking for this, nothing jumped out at me, drop something in the comments if you know.

What conclusions can we draw, wikipedia’s, not a good source for recent news, so you won’t find those types of items there. What else changed, IMDB.com dropped out of all of the searches except [Spider-Man 3] which is a movie. That’s exactly how it’s supposed to work, IMDB is a topical authority, they dominate in their area of expertise and not in any other area.

What’s the problem with with Wikipedia, well in a word wikiality (how funny is it that Wikipedia has a #2 listing for [wikiality] further proving my point). Anyone with a computer can edit Wikipedia, and we rely on the least common denominator of mob intelligence to determine accuracy. That wasn’t entirely true, you can actually win an editing war if you are willing to expend large amounts of time defending your fiefdom of personal edits, I just have better things to do with my time.

Why am I complaining, isn’t Wikipedia free and non commercial? Have you visited techcrunch and learned that Wikipedia has removed the no follow from links to their new commercial project wikia. Starting to see a problem yet? Who do you think is going to be the number one traffic referrer for Wikia … Wikipedia. Kinda gives them an unfair advantage getting all that free traffic from Google doesn’t it? What’s really going on is Google is willingly allowing Wikipedia to be a doorway page to funnel traffic to Wikia, not a bad set up to be on the other side of the cash register for eh?

How do we fix this problem, Google has to admit that Wikipedia really isn’t an authority for anything. Sure some of the information there is good, but I can’t tell you how many facts in the past 3 weeks I found that were omitted, misinterpreted, or just plain wrong. What you think I should do my part and fix them? Know what I’m not on Wikipedia or wikias payroll so why should I help them out? Adding no follow and taking away the value of the links removed the invisible currency and payment that existed. So now I have to guess and determine if I am going to get enough traffic from them before somebody who doesn’t have to qualify their level of expertise comes along and decides they don’t like my edit for whatever reason and just removes it. Wow sure sounds like a website that should be dominating the SERP’s don’t you think?

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1. Akash Garg of hi5
2. Sean Suhl of Suicide Girls
3. Max Levchin of Slide
4. James Hong of HotorNot
5. Markus Frind of PlentyofFish
6. Drew Curtis of Fark

Now, some of that may be because I‘m about to moderate a panel myself on User Gen, and I want to emulate Guy’s success here, but it’s also because I loved finding out how these guys created such viral communities.

Funniest comment:

Drew said they were taking alot of flack from the Washington Post because one of their headlines had said Anna Nicole Smith’s condition was *upgraded* to dead.

Most interesting:

None of these guys planned to go where they are with these companies, they followed their users ideas and they went with the natural flow of what was necessary. In fact, Sean said, in effect, the planning has to be loose, and you can’t just follow the rules.

Most consoling:

Turns out fear is ok. When I think about this blog or anything I’ve created, I always wonder when it’s all going to end. I know I’m not alone as so many entries on the blogosphere (and off) have to do with ‘the bubble bursting’, but I was consoled that Max says he’s often terrified that it will all disappear too. Made me feel better to know there was someone else out there that was obsessive about it.

Most exciting:

James says passion is everything. Just like I say about blogging that you won’t succeed if you don’t like what you are doing (ie pick a topic you love), James says you have to love what you do as an entrepreneur. If you can’t be passionate and love your product, then find something you can love and go with it.

The ‘duh moment (that everyone needs to understand):

Listen to your users. Passionate users know your product, even better than you do. When they talk you need to listen. Slide would be an entirely different product without user suggestions.

Although, I’d insert the fact that Markus says some users should NOT be listened to. Use your brain, and think about where your bread and butter is. Don’t implement stuff just because it was asked for… Some features are not helpful and could actually destroy the community you have created (ie chat rooms full of married people on a dating site).

On Marketing:

Most of these guys said that marketing was of little value to them (gasp). They said the viral things that really made them successful was an accident. Sure you can come up with a great idea, but the real truth is that if your company is doing something cool, people will talk about it.

HotorNot said that by the end of day one they had 40K unique users, and within a week they were seeing millions of page views per day. They showed it to cube-locked geeks (Intel workers, ironically) and they passed it around immediately. Sean from Suicide Girls says they spent tons of energy on a CSI episode in which their girls were featured, with no result and got a ton of result from a column on their site and from a YouTube video one of their girls uploaded (she was lipsyncing to a Hall and Oats song).

Now, as a marketing consultant, I want to disagree, but I can’t… Communities are where it’s at, and marketing has to make their job showcasing the communities that have evolved naturally and making them more user-friendly (off-site buys+clear, directioned thinking involving on-site assets). Marketing isn’t dead, but it’s way different than it was just last year.

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