Here’s a couple of posts which become more useful when you read them in concert:
That’s the poacher and the gamekeeper covered…
Recently in Web 2.0 Category
A neat quote that encapsulates where the divide between new and social media lies:
Adriana says: "I divide between old and new media on the one hand and social media on the other hand. New media is just digitalised old media. Social media are tools like blogs, tagging, podcasts, wikis etc that facilitate communication. It is by its nature interactive and I especially like the social aspect of it."
Kristine Lowe, quoting Adriana Lukas.
I've long found that posting in irritation can get me into trouble, so I've sat on this post for most of the week. But really, I've had enough now. The social media backlash is in full swing, and, frankly, if you didn't see this coming, you haven't been paying attention.
It started with linkbait expert Techcrunch poster Paul Carr shutting down his social media presence, but really gained momentum when Leo Laporte of the TWiT network realising that the majority of his microblogging activity was having no significant impact whatsoever.
Inevitably, most web tech is built by (surprise!) technologists, who are themselves often attracted to shiny new things over the established things of the past. That cadre of bloggers-turned-social media gurus who once sold us on the virtues of blogging have been flitting from service to service in search of the next big thing that they can evangelise. But increasingly, they've been wrong about the coming success stories. From FriendFeed (sold to Facebook, largely abandoned) to Google Wave, they've been trying to tempt us to follow them to the New Thing and abandon the Old Thing. And most people haven't obliged.
Indeed, as Alan points out, pretty much what these "leading voices" are doing is reflecting what less obsessive neophiles have been doing since the start: building on the existing utility of older services, rather than replacing the old with the new. And even then, people will only use those services that they see a clear, simple value in. FriendFeed and Wave were geek tools, not ones that would see mainstream adoption. And a good proportion of those web neophiles have no antenna at all when it comes to sensing what the mainstream will enjoy.
Continue reading The Dangers of Web Neophilia.
Bit.ly has scientists? Who knew? Interesting stuff, though:
[via MarkMedia]
I've embedded the slides in the extended entry...
Continue reading Data from the Real-Time Web.
The BBC's Nick Robinson on the comments left on his blog:
"So I'm going to be honest with you and I've said this before and I've upset some people. I don't read the comments anything like as much as I used to because there is too much static white noise in them and not enough pure feedback. But if we could find a way of having a more thoughtful, less abusive debate via blogs I think that would be a good thing."
[Via Mediating Conflict]
He's not alone in this observation - many big, high traffic blogs have abandoned comments, employed moderators, or left their comments as a bear pit, because one to many conversation doesn't scale very well. Forums have been dying under the weight of moderation problems since before blogs were first published.
This is a challenge for mainstream media companies as social media becomes a more central part of what we do, and not just a fringe activity (in fact, I'm in the process of arranging a meeting with one of our titles that is going through the early stages of this issue).
What's the solution? Community managers? User voting? Enforced registration?
Image via Wikipedia
The terminally-ill Google Wave was less a curious beast than one came at a curious time.
Mid-2009 was the time when Twitter was really, really coming into its own. Facebook had become a behemoth that was rapidly moving from "can it beat MySpace?" to "MyWhat?". The big social media innovations of the previous few years were going mainstream, because their barrier to entry - a short status update - were so much lower than those that had preceded them.
People who had missed blogging, had missed Twitter, had missed the rise of social networks, were suddenly desperate to catch the next wave that came along, and to catch it early. Google is a big, huge powerful company stuffed with PhDs. Wasn't it logical that they would be the ones to bring the next big thing forward? When the first announcement and demo of Wave was a show greeted with cheers and waving laptops from developers, the path to a clear, but wrong, assumption was laid.
Last summer was a bizarre time for me. I'd spent years telling people that various things were going to be important - from blogs to Twitter - and generally, being ignored by most people. Now everybody was enthusing about something new. We had internal discussions about it. We had meetings and brainstorming sessions, and I really started to wonder if I'd just got too old, that I was beyond the edge, that I had nothing to add to the future development of social media in the company, because people saw Wave as important, and I didn't.
To me, Wave looked awfully like a solution hunting around for a problem. It was a bunch of cool technologies that had been bundled together into a product that made no sense. I've tried an awful lot of Web 2.0 style products down the years, and you get a feel for those that stick and those that don't - and this felt like one that wouldn't. I just tried to find the blog posts I wrote about Wave - and discovered that there weren't any. That's a pretty good sign that I didn't care.
Continue reading The Wave That Drowned.
Initially, I got rather excited by this infographic that's doing the rounds:
Another great chart to challenge people's preconceptions! Hurrah!
And then I looked at it a bit harder. Social networks and blogs lumped together? That's...not very useful. It implies that people want a significant amount of their content delivered in a social manner, but doesn't give us any clear picture of how relationship-driven that delivery actually is. Hummph.
Luckily, there's more detail in the original blog post, although not enough to really tease apart what's going on here. The mobile use pie chart is worth a squint, though.
