[Social Media]

I was more than happy to switch off my lights when 8.30 PM struck last Saturday, sending in one vote for Earth Hour. I learned about Earth Hour over the ads they showed on National Geographic and CNN over the past several weeks. Soon after, I started seeing Earth Hour shirts, Earth Hour mugs, Earth Hour keychains, and – get this – Earth Hour Twitter profiles.

I guess collaborative media was the real reason why Earth Hour's organizers were pretty confident they could get one billion “votes” for the worldwide event. Using only traditional media – TV and newspapers, for instance – would never have allowed Earth Hour to reach around the world quickly enough. But with the Earth Hour on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and a host of other collaborative media platforms, word got out pretty fast.

I suppose that's another advantage of collaborative media over traditional media – you can pretty much tune in to any piece of news you want and receive updates as they happen, which is impossible to do with a newspaper subscription. People all over the world were online when the lights started going off.

“Earth Hour” was mentioned on the Internet every seven seconds over the weekend, and Earth Hour collaborative media profiles and videos got viewed every twenty seconds. Obama Girl crossed my mind every ten minutes (she appeared in a new “Save Your Energy” video and I can't get her out of my head). It was insane – but of course, in a good-cause kind of way.

It's encouraging to see how collaborative media is being used to promote worthy causes like Earth Hour (and Obama Girl). Ordinary people have never had this ability to make their voice heard, and governments everywhere are slowly feeling the pressure to actually listen to their citizens. Obama's Administration, though having its fair share of whiny critics, has known about the power of collaborative media for a long time, and is currently using it to listen and reply to questions the American public want to ask.

I can imagine a lot of traditional politicians in Southeast Asia cringing every time they hear the word “Internet” -- which is, of course, a good thing. In this region, it'll be a refreshing change of scenery to see a government official who actually knows how to use the Internet to connect with the people – and not just his supporters, either.

Franklin Roosevelt was famous for reassuring nervous Americans during the Great Depression by chatting with them on the radio. In today's version of the Depression, US President Barack Obama basically does the same thing with the Internet – by holding an online town hall meeting yesterday, where he answered the most popular questions that visitors to the whitehouse.gov website asked.

Obama is credited for using the Internet in ingenious ways during his presidential campaign, resulting in a landslide victory. But it left people wondering whether or not he was going to continue using the Internet during his administration, despite his promises to do so. With his first town hall meeting, he's pretty much shown America and the world just how transparent he'd like his administration to be.

The town hall meeting took questions from over 90,000 Americans, who all-in-all submitted more than a hundred thousand questions about the economy. Now Obama wasn't the first President who encouraged the public to submit questions over the Internet, but what was special about the online town hall meeting was that the people who asked questions could also interact with each other and vote on the questions they'd like their young President to answer. More than 3.6 million votes were recorded.

Obama answered the seven most popular questions in real-time, at the White House's East Wing, with about 100 people in attendance. Most of the questions reflected Americans who were financially troubled, losing their homes and jobs and struggling to make ends meet. The most well-received question was a video from three bubbly college girls who asked what Obama planned to do to make college more affordable. Obama answered that a national program was going to be rolled out in a matter of weeks.

Surprisingly, one of the most-asked (and most-talked about) questions was brought up during the online meeting – Is it time to legalize marijuana? Grinning, Obama replied in the negative, wondering aloud what the question said about the online community.

Overall, I thought the online town hall meeting wasn't the best public appearance by Obama yet, since none of his answers had a “Whoa, cool” factor to them – unlike his answer to a CNN reporter the other day.

CNN Reporter: “Why did you wait two days to bring the AIG bonus issue to the public – If your administration had known about it earlier, shouldn't you have done something right away?”

Obama: “I took two days because I like to know what I'm talking about.”

I think Obama's doing a pretty good job so far, and I can't wait to see which issues the next online town hall meeting will tackle.

In recent times, we've heard how doctors in remote areas of the world make successful surgeries and diagnoses with the help of the Internet, and we've also seen “hacks” of certain mobile phones to detect disease in blood samples. It looks like the medical world will continue going through some big changes down the line. Just last week, a surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from a man's kidney was actually tweeted from the operating room into the Internet.

It looks like many of Heath Ledger's fans think that the heaps of awards and praise given for the late actor's performance as the Joker in “The Dark Knight” isn't enough. A few die-hard fans have started an online petition to actually retire the Joker character from any subsequent “Batman” films in history, as their own little “award” for Heath. What does the blogosphere say?

I remember the day when I gave up all hope for Internet search engines. That was when the search results I got on page one were filled with nothing but useless instances of the keywords in my search query. Then Google came into the picture and revolutionized how search was done, and suddenly the Internet was useful again.

But today, Google seems to be plagued by new kinds of search problems. It seems that most Google searches I do these days seem to come up with Facebook profiles and Tweets right on page one – not really the kind of information I find. It's usually easy enough to find the relevant hits at first glance, but when Twitter “pollution” gets so bad that it knocks Wikipedia off the top spot, it's a pretty serious hurdle.

This isn't the first time Google faced this kind of problem. In the early parts of this decade, the rapidly-growing number of blogs also began swamping search results. They fixed this problem fairly quickly by adding a blog search feature, but even this remains hard to work with to this day.

Granted, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter has made the Internet more useful and enjoyable for millions of people. But there are still some strange creatures out there who use the Internet for only its informational capabilities and not its recreational side. These creatures are the ones who move the world, and when they no longer have Google on their side, they may need to start looking elsewhere.

It's going to be a strange world where people start using other search engines over Google...

Still, it's not the first time Google got hounded by such problems in search. Even with their constantly changing parameters and indexing procedures, they still sometimes struggle to bring relevant results to page one. This is probably the reason why Google is keeping new search engines like Cuil on the horizon – if Cuil gets its act together and starts bringing better search results, “cuiling” might soon make it to the dictionary too.

Suddenly, searching on Twitter doesn't seem like a bad idea. For one, social media platforms seem to pick up on breaking news much more quickly. Google is great at giving you news stories that happened eight hours ago. But for news as-it-happens, it's probably better to look through relevant Tweets.

Of course, Google can just buy Twitter...

Why didn't anybody think of this earlier?

Police in Queenstown, New Zealand, recently nabbed a young man who tried to break into a bar's safety deposit box. What's unusual about the arrest was the way the police found the man. They posted the man's picture on Facebook, which then made its way to the local TV news. People who recognized the man soon started calling the police, and the arrest was made soon after.

The man was obviously not very bright, as he took his mask off about a half hour after trying to get the safety deposit box open. When he finally gave up, he looked up at the security camera – and his fate was sealed.

It's funny how I keep hearing a new use for social media every week these days. We all know how Barack Obama won the US general election, and we all know how more and more people are finding love online. We've also heard stories of suicides being prevented, lives being saved, and other deeds of heroism that the Internet has made possible.

But I think it's about time police forces all over the world actually tapped into the power of the Internet to bolster their operations. In many countries, particularly in this region of Asia, the most that police can do is take vague calls from tippers, or post “wanted” posters in public gathering places. With the Internet, they can potentially reach a much wider witness base than ever before, leading to more apprehensions and crimes prevented than ever before.

At the same time, though, they'll have to be careful. The Internet can be a two-edged sword when it comes to crime-fighting – just as it can aid the rule of law, it can also undermine it. I remember reading about a case that ended up in a mistrial because a female plaintiff's testimony contradicted what she wrote in her blog.

Still, it'd be great to one day see improved security systems. Brick-and-mortar establishments would benefit from improved security systems – fancy having a video stream of the inside of your shop being broadcast live on Facebook 24/7, with your archives stored on an offsite server. Or fancy seeing your local police force tinkering with their Facebook profiles, encouraging civilians through Tweets to take a more active part in fighting crime.

The list goes on and on. I may not be a big fan of Facebook, but I just might change my mind once I see crime rates all over the connected world dwindle. I have said this thousands of times and I will say it again. We have the tools at our disposal. We just need to start thinking what else we can use them for or what else we can create with them.

I know I've already spoken volumes about social media on this site the past year, but people still keep finding newer and better uses for it in their lives, both at work and at play. Now, the big names in social media, like Skype and MySpace, are making going to the office a little more fun for a growing number of 9-5 workers around the world.

Here's an interesting statistic. When asked whether they'd rather give up sex or Internet access for two weeks, a surprising number of respondents chose they'd rather give up sex. Is this a sign of just how reliant we've become to the World Wide Web?

The poll, carried out by Harris Interactive and sponsored by Intel Corp., was done on a group of 2,119 adults between the ages of 19 to 52. Among male respondents, 30 percent – that's three of every ten men – said they'd forego romping in the sheets for two weeks and keep their Internet access. The female side of the poll was even more surprising – 46 per cent (yep, that's almost half) of all women would much rather stay connected to the Web for two weeks, even if it means no sex.

It seems that the Republicans have learned their lesson. Michigan Republican Chairman Saul Anuzis recently announced his intent to lead the Republican Party in a very unlikely place: the micro-blogging social network, Twitter.

He's not the only Republican jumping onto the social media bandwagon these days – other GOP candidates are also launching profiles on Facebook, MySpace, and other social media platforms in preparation for the 2010 midterm elections. John McCain may not like the idea, but his colleagues doing the right thing – unless the Republican Party learns to embrace technology and incorporate it into the party agenda, it's bound to face another landslide defeat against those geeky Democrats.