About

This Social Information Feed Tracker (SIFT) Tool website is an R&D project funded by Mobile Muse to support social media tracking and aggregation based on a channel concept to group tracked items around events and/or topics of interest.

So, what exactly is social media aggregation and tracking?

First, the term social media itself must be defined:

Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and "building" of shared meaning, as people share their stories, and understandings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media

In short, social media is the combination of text, video, images, audio, and other electronic representations that are created and shared by people. Every topic, event, or item of interest today has from 1000s to millions of related social media artifacts created, often in real time. Examples of real time social media around events that reached mainstream awareness are the London subway bombings and Hurricane Katrina.

Tools such as Technorati, Flickr tags, or Google Blog search help to track and be notified of items of interest, but must be set up manually by people who understand how to utilize all of these tools. How can we help less technical users easily set up tracking without need to understand all of these tools?

Secondly, direct use of these tools by end users, especially those attending events or interested in a topic, are still not a mainstream activity. How does one enable ad hoc mobile usage of this type of sharing, without requiring account creation and full understanding of these Web 2.0 websites ahead of time?

Enter the SIFT Tool: create a channel (e.g. iPhone in Canada) and an associated short tag (e.g. ipca), and start aggregating any social media around those terms. Based on the short tag, media from Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter (photos, video, and microblogging respectively) start to be aggregated.

To support ad hoc mobile usage, SMS and email IDs are created, allowing end users to submit short pieces of text or attach videos and images. As many users -- especially at events -- are more likely to be carrying a Blackberry or other smartphone rather than a laptop, submission via email is the easiest vector to share multimedia information.

Pair this with real time projected displays, and local and remotely gathered social media can be created and displayed in a feedback loop, or used to trigger other actions (e.g. create a Flickr tag display based on submitted SMS messages). Attendees of events are visually shown what social media can do, as well as being able to participate directly. The channel provides an archive of material that can be reviewed after the fact, and provides incentive to explore the Web 2.0 tools directly.

Currently, creating a channel enables tracking, aggregation, and submission using the following sources / input methods:

• Per channel SMS / microblog: text 604-825-1277 with ' your message' and it will display in your channel and on the global microblog page; also aggregates Twitter posts tagged with # via a Twemes RSS feed.
• Email submission: email photos, text, and videos to a sifttool.com email address for your channel and it will be automatically be added to your channel
• Flickr: tracks photos at flickr.com/photos/tags/
• YouTube: tracks videos on YouTube tagged with