By Kwasi Fraser

          Well, it seems that 2009 is no different from 2008 and the other years prior, meaning another hike in my property taxes to fund our school system.  Even with these hikes schools are still faced with significant shortfalls, just look at some of the real time comments posted on Samepoint at http://www.samepoint.com/real-time.php?q=School+Budget. 

So, I live in a relatively small town called Purcellville, it’s in Loudoun County Virginia.  It’s a great town rarely, in this days and age, would you find a major supermarket within few blocks of a working farm that is over 200 years old.  Well, we have that in Purcellville.  I’ll write more about my little town and that great farm another time let’s go back to the matter at hand, funding our schools. 

It seems each year our taxes increase to support the budgetary obligations of the school system, and even with these increases many schools are still forced to make cuts in certain school programs and even in academic staff.  Some districts have eliminated high school sports due to budget cuts. Frankly, I believe the current method of funding the school system has run its course and it is high time for another approach.  Don’t get me wrong; budget cuts are necessary at times. However, when there are financially viable alternatives we need to at least consider and assess them. One such alternative is to monetize certain assets of the schools to create revenue stream(s) to fund our schools.

The approach that I’m proposing is one that I have written about several months ago in my local newspaper.  This approach calls for schools to partner with major corporations that have large advertisement budgets such as Proctor & Gamble, AT&T, Time Warner and others.  Proctor & Gamble’s ad spend from January to September 2008 was $2.3 billion.  The D.C. schools’ budget gap of $40 million is less than 2% of Proctor & Gamble 2008 ad spend.  Many schools in my district have cut field trips that could have been easily sponsored for several years by a company like Proctor and Gamble in return for free publicity in the press and on T Shirts given to students during a sponsored field trip.  That’s a topic for another blog, think www.FieldTripSponsor.com, but I digress.

The schools across this nation have many highly visible assets that are advertisers’ dream.  As a taxpayer I am also an investor in the school system, as such, in addition to a quality education I’ll like to see a decent Return on Assets my tax dollars have placed into the school’s daily operation. The schools’ assets range from buses and buildings, to rooms and fields that are viewed by a rather captive audience each school day and at times on weekends.  Sure we can apply my proposal to the majority of these assets but let’s focus on the school buses for this writing.

The school buses are the most visible representation of the school, they are seen during on and off hours by thousands of eyes. Such intense visibility is an advertiser’s dream. Given this, the School Boards across this country need to develop a strategy to lease ad space on all school owned vehicles to generate ad revenues. I know there will be concerns around what items to advertise on the school buses, and the overall policing of the ad placement process.  But in these dire financial times we need to revisit this and work out ways for it to be effectively implemented.

This nation has a multi-billion dollar advertising industry and our school system has the vehicles that will drive in revenues for the advertisers and our schools.  I agree that placement of certain ads like junk food, for example, should be prohibited because it plays into the growing problem of obesity among our youth.  However, there are thousands of other beneficial products and services that can be advertised. For example, a company in Hanover, MD cleared off a part on their fleet of truck to place ads for Xerox, a company that produces office equipment for schools and our homes.  Again, in these difficult times we need to seek out opportunities and creative solutions for the financial challenges we face.  Budget cuts are not always the answer, let’s make use of our free market system, and in so doing let us not only teach capitalism but practice it, starting with our schools.

Wow, what a stretch. About six months ago, I was asked if Samepoint has an API? Embarrassingly I had to say no - then I thought about it. What would an API have to do in this day in age to be different? I am just saying, there are tons of APIs out there. Yahoo, google etc. So I stepped up and got API keys to all the major ones. I was surprised of the diversity of options. Yahoo was cool because it had many output options. Google blog search was excellent because of the real-time nature. Technorati was great to show off the “little guys” . There were three gaps that were missing.  These gaps took us 6 months to fill.

The gaps were volume, diversity, and search-ability. By volume I mean, if you want to make a real brand attribute decision, you need more than 100 comments. I need say 100,000. No API was giving that up. Well I guess the hose from twitter does but that does not settle the diversity factor. By diversity I mean, we need comments from bookmarks, networks, micro blogs, blogs etc. We found that the only way to get such a diverse representation of sources was to build it ourselves.

The other gap was search. The APIs we reviewed were awesome for mashups. The gap that existed was the ability to search deeper like proximity search, fuzzy search, etc. This is so needed because the vocabulary of social media contributors is very diverse. For example, LOL means Laugh Out Loud or btw is “by the way”. When looking for Brands like “Target” you can imagine the value of having enterprise search functions.

I did take six months to build this, and thanks to Amazon, our server farm can grow with the speed of social media. You can read about the API here. If you can think of some cool features you’d like to see added, just shoot us a note at learn@samepoint.com or make a comment. Thank you all for your interest in our unique API. I will just put this out there - If you think you have a need for a robust API to make your application rock, just shoot us an email. We love to collab.

- Darren

I think today I struck a nerve in some of my “friends” within social networks. I recently set up a personal account on Facebook, and went to invite some 500+ of my friends from another network.   To my surprise I got a message back from one friend that read … “I appreciate I will pass.  I do not use facebook at all and will not ever… don’t email me again”

It would seem that “friends” are network bound.  This is a very interesting concept Samepoint will explore in detail.   As we learn more about this social media thing,  I hope we all can stay friends in the “real” world. After all, I thought we were friends .

- DC

Take a look at our favorites:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/samepoint/

Social Media Search

There has been plenty of talk centered around social media search. Why is is even different that Google or Yahoo search? Well, it is simple. When you want to to know what people are talking about, then you use a social search engine.  Being a pioneer in this space, Samepoint.com has seen many uses for social media search or the new coined phase real-time search.

When I created samepoint.com, I had a simple mission. Create a tool that only showed me the conversations that are happening on the Internet and prove that we are very similar. We proved this. There are conversations going on from here to Russia and we see similarities in the topics across the world.

We are now moving to the next phase of our social media search engine where we will engage partners to enhance our search offering to the public.  We are always open to partnerships and ideas. Please keep them coming.

More soon.
Darren Culbreath
co-founder, Samepoint.com
learn@samepoint.com

We are monitoring the toxic assets real time search here : http://toxic-assets.samepoint.com/

An interesting quote from twitter today :  “If they’re toxic, how can they be assets?” — darkling8

Was doing some research on retail real time social search:

Sears : http://www.samepoint.com/real-time.php?q=sears

WalMart: http://www.samepoint.com/real-time.php?q=walmart

BestBuy: http://www.samepoint.com/real-time.php?q=bestbuy

Looks like a good deal of chatter about these stores.

We recently have been receiving lots of e-mails about our lack of international focus.  These e-mails were from France, Spain, Germany and many other countries concerned that even though they liked our website, they are unable to read and take advantage of the content.  They have used tools like Google translate in order to read the pages.  Of course this is very inconvenient within a search platform.

To respond to this, Samepoint.com has introduced a new way to read search listings.  For each search listing, users are now given the ability to translate the listings in over 10 languages. The reason why this is very important for us is we still believe that people can connect based on ideas.  If someone has a great idea from England, someone in Argentina should be able to read this idea and share thoughts within their language.  This is the whole point of being globally social.

We’ll be adding more international features to our interface in the next few weeks.  Please let us know what you think of our translation feature as we will be monitoring comments and enhancing our feature set as we go.  For those who have the chance to take advantage of this feature, thank you very much for your patience and we will try to continue to listen and learn from your great feedback.

.. I have posted. Sorry about that. We have been working on new features and reading feature requests from users. The one that kept coming was adding a translation function. Well, we did. Now you can translate any comment in 10 different languages.  Give it a try and let us know what you think.

We had a few bugs (Opportunities)  on samepoint.com today.  

Opportunity 1:  The Footer Gone Wild.

The footer was broke for about five minutes.  Since I too am a heavy user, I noticed the problem immediately and fixed it. Let’s just say, there are too many CSS got-U’s  in the world.  

Opportunity 2:  Images with no meaning.

We had a user try our image search today and noticed that the images could not be clicked on.  When the user clicked the hyperlink, the clickthru did not go to the website.  It went to the image file, not giving any context what the image was used for.  That of course was a big problem and we fixed that too.

Opportunity 3: RSS for all sections

Now that we changed the interface of the site and added many more sections and opportunities for people to categorize social media, we are now faced with a very interesting opportunity. We are missing some feeds. We are now in the process of adding RSS feeds for all sections.  At the moment, we are only providing RSS feeds for conversations.  In the near future all categories will work.  If you have a special case where you need the feed to work for your website, e-mail us from our contact page and we’ll get back to you quickly.

Warm and fussy moment …

I’m consistently reminded how important social media is to a business and it’s customers.  These 3 opportunities that were found today only came to us from our users emailing and sending us direct messages on Twitter.  Thank you all for your contributions today and tomorrow we will conquer bigger things.