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Ka-pow! Flex your social media muscle and Klout opponents arcade-style in TweetFighter II

Klout has become the standard for quantifying social media influence.While some disagree with its accuracy, or the concept of quantifying online social fame period, its hard to argue that Klout hasn't been put to its best use ever: as a power-up in an epic throwback to the old arcade Street Fighter games.

TweetFighter II: The Social Warrior is a simple but awesome game in which you select two Twitter users and pit them in a Street Fight. The mechanics are very basic: you type in keywords and see who commands more expertise in that topic. Damage is then amplified by Klout scores.

I've got a Klout score of 61 (edit: it's apparently 62 now) and fared pretty well when blasting enemies with my signature #Techvibes punch, but I have some advice for rook shows: never type "never" against Toronto pop sensation Justin Bieber. His perfect-100 Klout Score, combined with a popular song and movie both called "Never Say Never," one-hit KO'd me. In fact, it even one-hit KO'd Oprah (whose lack of frequent tweeting places her Klout at a surprisingly low 80).

Google+'s Sparks feature disappoints: Comparing Aggregation and Semantics across Major Social Media Players

While Techvibes' Knowlton Thomas reported that Google + reached 10 million users in 16 days, let’s not jump the gun and call Google's latest foray into social media a smashing success yet.

I wasn’t impressed by Google Sparks, a feature released in Google+, which shows results based on keywords that you search, but the depth of the results are terrible, and not remotely comparable to Google News.

Matthew Ingram, beat writer at Gigaom says that one part of the future of media certainly is aggregation, but realistically, it’s already here and has been for quite some time.

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McLuhan's son Eric Headlines at CROSSMEDIATO: Insights into the Changing Media Landscape

crossmediaTO

July 21st marks the 100th birthday of Marshall McLuhan, the famous Canadian media visionary.

Last night's CROSSMEDIATO event hosted by Gavin McGarry of JumpWire Media featured McLuhan's son, Eric as a speaker. CrossmediaTO is a monthly series that focuses on motion, mobile, marketing, publishing and gaming the third Wednesday of every month. The notion of cross-media will be further explored byInteractive Ontario's X-Summit October 24-26 at The Carlu in Toronto, which has recently posted an open call for speakers. 

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Montreal's tech-savvy 'Facebooking Father' to become Canada's youngest bishop

Montreal's Father Thomas Dowd is only 40 years old—but the tech-savvy "Facebooking Father" is poised to become Canada's youngest Catholic bishop and the second youngest in the world.

Thomas will be ordained in early september. His age makes him stand out from other bishops, no doubt—or should I say "no dowd"?—but just as differentiating is his tech background.

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This Week's Top 5 Trending Topics on Twitter in Canada

1. Harry Potter. 

The eighth and final movie in this epic fantasy saga launched at midnight this morning. Twitter users in Canada—and everywhere else, really—have been going nuts talking about the end of this decade-long movie series (they're books, too, by the way). "Gryffindor," "Albus Severus Potter," and "Neville Longbottom" are just some of the HP-related TTs that have been swirling about the Twittersphere these past couple days.

2. Rupert Murdoch and co.

Talk about controversy. Rupert Murdoch gained massive Twitter fame (and not the good kind) this week after he axed major British newspaper News of the World in a bid to take over television channel British Sky Broadcasting, a deal that ended up flopping anyway. NotW editor Rebekah Brooks has now quit amid allegations that the paper was involved in big-time phone hacking scandals. This story is only just beginning.

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Twitterstorm: Real-time social network will sign up as many people today as it did in first 16 months

Twitter was by no means a lightning bolt out of the gate. The peculiar, 140-character-based "real-time information network" was a niche on a good day and a straight-up outcast on a bad one.

It took Twitter 16 months, or nearly 500 days, to reach its first 600,000 users. And now? It signed up 600,000 people yesterday alone.

Twitter, who is celebrating its fifth birthday today, also revealed that on July 15th, 2006—its launch day—224 tweets were sent. Today, that many tweets are occurring more often than every tenth of a second, for a total of nearly 300,000,000 per day.

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Canadian Twitter users are on the Internet twice as much as others: Study

Twitter's constant flow of real-time conversations and news has got people hooked: Twitter users in Canada average  over 33 hours a week online, while their non-Twitter counterparts clock in just 17 hours online weekly, according to a CBC/Radio-Canada and BBM Analytics joint study.

Time spent accessing the internet has tripled for even the casual users: in 1997, weekly online time was less than 5 hours, the study notes.

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Follow #AccelerateAB today

AccelerateAB logoAccelerateAB is happening all day today Wednesday, July 13th in Calgary; and if you haven't already signed up, unfortunately registration is closed. If you weren't lucky enough to score a ticket and want to follow today's events, set your Twitter feed to track #AccelerateAB.

With over 300 attendees in the afternoon, consisting of A100 members, C100 members, Enterpreneurs, Service industry, TEC Edmonton, Innovate Calgary, Startup Calgary, and Startup Edmonton, and many other groups, including sponsor Techvibes, I'm looking forward to a great networking and pan-Alberta tech community event.

The morning pre-conference roundtables include 25 companies handpicked by a selection committee comprised of VCs and also includes 25 A100 members and 10 C100 members. The companies included are:

  • Aquila Diagnostic Systems Inc., Edmonton
  • Beamdog, Edmonton
  • BlackSquare Inc., Calgary
  • Business Infusions Inc., Calgary
  • CAN Telematics Inc., Calgary
  • Carbon Engineering, Calgary
  • Cardinal Media Technologies, Calgary
  • Chaordix, Calgary
  • Cleankeys Inc., Edmonton
  • Empire Avenue, Edmonton
  • eThor Media Ltd., Calgary
  • GEOTrac International, Calgary
  • Gridly, Calgary
  • hookflash, Calgary
  • iConnectivity, Calgary
  • Innovative Trauma Care Inc., Edmonton
  • Intelliview Technologies Inc., Calgary
  • Mobovivo Inc., Calgary
  • Poynt Corporation, Calgary
  • Psyko Audio Labs, Calgary
  • Pureinbox Inc., Edmonton
  • Tagle Information Technology Inc., Calgary
  • Xtreme Technologies Corp., Calgary

Experience the Calgary Stampede online with JOI Media's social experiment, Stampede Photos

Calgary's JOI Media recently launched a website called Stampede Photos.

This social experiment collects photos with the #stampede hashtag from Twitter. Designed to showcase the power of the Twitter hashtag, and to compile Calgary Stampede photos in a unique way, Stampede Photos is a fun and free way to experience the Stampede online from the eyes of the public.

You can join the fun by tweeting anything with the #stampede hashtag that includes a photo. The Calgary Stampede ends on July 17th.