I’ve just stumbled across a neat little web application which allows you to visually explore your Twitter network. It allows you to discover which people interact the most and what they’re talking about, as well as traverse the Twitter-verse and finds links to people you might otherwise not have found. Think “six degrees of separation” for your Twitter followers.

The visualization runs right in your browser and displays data from the Twitter API.  According to the maker, Asterisq, it works like this:

Mentionmap loads each user’s Twitter status updates (tweets) and finds the people and hashtags they talked about the most. The data is displayed using Constellation Framework, a graph visualization library for Actionscript.

In this data visualization, mentions become connections and discussions between multiple users emerge as clusters.

Clicking a user will display their network of mentions as well as details from their profile. You can also search for friends by typing their Twitter user-names into the search box.

I think this visualization is really neat, and I’d really recommend you check it out and have a play.  I found it very interesting to see the relationships between the people I primarily converse with on Twitter.

I’m sorry but things like THIS – really pisses me off!

TEACHERS have been banned from contacting students on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and other social networking sites amid growing concern over inappropriate relationships.

There are so many reasons why this is wrong, that I’m not even really sure where to start. I am further infuriated by the comments on that article. Are these people serious? Really? Dodgy teachers engaging in inappropriate conduct with students, do not do so in open and transparent mediums. They’d actively disengage from these becasue they’d get caught! Dark and dodgy people cannot exist in the light. They run from it.

It’s funny how the general public demand the goverment to protect them and their children, despite having little or no understanding of social media (and technology more generally). They don’t understand the medium and they don’t understand the minds of those who would seek to target their children. Becasue if hey did, they’d understand that its a futile and pointless policy. Much like the proposed “clean feed”.

Grr….this kind of trivial, thoughtless, primitive thinking really makes me mental!

So we have some good news and  some bad news.  First, (the bad) is that Twitter still doesn’t have a monetization strategy, but on the plus side, CNN claims it has given one American Student the ability to force the Egyptian Authorities to release his translator from prison.

James Karl Buck was released from a Mahalla jail after sending a one-word blog post from his cell phone through the Twitter Web site. The message — “Arrested” — alerted all of his friends on the site of his detention.

When his college found out about the situation, they hired a lawyer who then got him out of prison. Now that he’s a free man, Buck is using his Twitter network (611 followers as of writing) to help free his friend Mohammed Maree.

Apparently, by uttilizing the massive network effects of social media, he was able to build public pressure, eventually to demand Maree’s release. He used everything from Twitter updates, blog posts on his own Web site to an electronic petition signed by more than 900 people.

As I have always said, the amazing thing happening with social media (and microblogging sites in particular) is soon going to be the most powerful lobby group in the world.  Ever.

Governments and Enterprises are going to have to realise that you can’t ingore the social media space, because of the devistating network effect poor public relations can have, with a very large group of highly motivated and highly coordinated social networks.  In the Chinese Earthquakes this year in fact, much of the relief and recovery was coordinated over Twitter.

With even more mainstream users comming onto sites such as Facebook and Twitter, this new “lobby group” will only increase in power and effectiveness.