Sips from the Firehose
A blog that seeks to filter the internet into a refreshing, easily-gulped beverage
Jun 13
Posted: under Art.
Tags: art, Chihuly Glass and Garden, glassblowing, museum, Seattle, underwater
I’ve always said that if I had any talent whatsoever in sculpting, the medium I would choose to work with would be glass. I just love how really talented artists play with its transparent/translucent properties, and how it can be melted & made to flow organically. Anyway, in Seattle, next to the Space Needle, [...] [...more]
I’ve always said that if I had any talent whatsoever in sculpting, the medium I would choose to work with would be glass. I just love how really talented artists play with its transparent/translucent properties, and how it can be melted & made to flow organically.
I felt like I should have been wearing a scuba tank, flippers and a BC vest. Which, come to think of it, would not be out of place during the regular Seattle Rain Festival Jan.-Dec. every year. Boom!
It is very hard not to want to walk through these dioramas.
Little kids passing by were imitating the stoner-dude turtles of “Finding Nemo.” I’ll admit it – I kinda was too.
I kept thinking, “Man, if there’s an earthquake, this is going to be messy.” Then I stopped and just appreciated.
I had to hold my camera above my head to see this. Feels like a little special Easter Egg for all us tall folks.
Anyway, in Seattle, next to the Space Needle, the Chihuly Garden and Glass museum is filled with these amazing creations. Years ago, I saw an amazing documentary about Dale Chihuly, and how he had filled the canals in Venice with these amazing glass sculptures for a festival. It’s famous as the first documentary for PBS that was shot in HD, and you can view some of it over on Vimeo.
Snake in the bamboo.
Squidbait.
LIttle cockleshells, all in a row.
May 29
Posted: under Digital Migration, new media, New Media Strategery, newspaper crisis, Newspaper Deathwatch, Newspapers, Platform obsession.
Tags: El Pais, newspaper, paywalls, Spain, spanish economic crisis
Unemployment over 50% – banking system collapse – political instability – newspapers run out of options When asked what are the enduring lessons of the last five years for newspapers, various pundits have opined “Don’t enter an economic recession massively over-leveraged and dependent on fragile business models.” In Spain, the problems that we are experiencing [...] [...more]
Unemployment over 50% – banking system collapse – political instability – newspapers run out of options
When asked what are the enduring lessons of the last five years for newspapers, various pundits have opined “Don’t enter an economic recession massively over-leveraged and dependent on fragile business models.”
One by one, newspapers are falling behind.
In Spain, the problems that we are experiencing in the U.S. are even more severe. The advertising base was even more reliant on crazy real-estate bubble advertising than it was here. Anyone who has flown into, say, Barcelona, and seen 20 MILES of empty housing developments, half-built apartment blocks, and gradually eroding graded hillsides, can quite easily judge what kind of devastation was left behind when that bubble burst.
But now comes the news that digital media has overtaken print in Spain.
There is some disagreement over just how many digital news outlets have sprung up in the past couple years:
Ahora desde la AEEPP (Asociación Española de Editoriales de Publicaciones Periódicas) reconocen que tienen 763 publicaciones digitales asociadas aunque, Carlos Astiz, secretario general de la Asociación, estima que puede haber 3.000 medios digitales.
…and exactly what constitutes a regular news publication (such as when its edition are funded via crowdfunding:
En medio de la crisis que afecta a los medios tradicionales, han surgido en los últimos meses un gran número de medios digitales con fórmulas diferentes para conseguir la rentabilidad. Desde la existencia de socios que por un módico precio acceden antes a los contenidos como en diario.es o infolibre.es a proyectos financiados por crowdfunding como la revista FronteraD.
But the trend seems to be that digital-only publications have been designed from the ground-up to be profitable on this new platform. The publishers, operating on a shoestring, find an audience, find ways to monetize that audience, and then start to methodically try to scale up.
The opposite is in action with the traditional media. They have their audience – but it is shrinking.
They have their revenue streams – but they are evaporating.
So they are engaged in a massive scale-down. Cutting coverage, cutting staff, and according to the Difusion story, only weeks/months away from re-erecting the infamous paywall around El Pais that was widely credited with destroying the paper’s digital operations before they had even gotten a chance to find their footing. I wrote an entire case study about it (and El Tiempo’s desperate attempts to re-connect with the young audience that they had alienated & lost) for the NAA.
Soon to run back behind the paywall. Maybe it will work this time. Then again, with so much new competition in the digital marketplace, and with the brand discredited & distrusted by younger readers … maybe it won’t.
Meanwhile, over in the digital-only world, site owners are waking up to the trend of “native advertising” – i.e. putting posts into the middle of the flow that look a lot LIKE the news stories that readers are there to check out … but that contain sponsored content, written in a way that doesn’t conflict with the rest of the content on the site.
Check out what John Battelle has to say about this evolution of monetization:
The reason native works is because the advertising is treated as a unit of content on the platform where it lives. That may seem obvious, but it’s an important observation. When a brands’s content competes on equal footing alongside a publisher’s content, everyone wins. Those search ads – they win if they are contextually relevant and add value to the consumer’s search results. Those promoted tweets only get promoted if people respond to them – a signal of relevance and value. The same is true for all truly “native” ad products. If the native ad content is good, it will get engagement. The industry is evolving toward rewarding advertising that doesn’t interrupt and is relevant and value additive. That’s a good thing.
May 08
Posted: under advertising, New Media Strategery, Social Media monetization.
Tags: access, American Airlines, free first-class lounge, Klout, monetization of online reputation, reputation scores, social media
One in an occasional, erratic and occasionally erratic series Time is money. Image is everything. Manners maketh man. Your reputation precedes you. And now, having a high (enough) Klout score wins you entry into the American Airlines first-class lounge, where you can look down your nose at the hoi polloi, and raid the “Continental breakfast [...] [...more]
One in an occasional, erratic and occasionally erratic series
Time is money. Image is everything. Manners maketh man. Your reputation precedes you.
And now, having a high (enough) Klout score wins you entry into the American Airlines first-class lounge, where you can look down your nose at the hoi polloi, and raid the “Continental breakfast with liquor” setup before your flight.
I know this is going to result in me getting spammed mercilessly by American Airlines for the next millennium. The question, as always, is – is it worth it?
The mutability of your online reputation, as measured by any of the upstarts trying to put a wrench onto this social media/word of mouth monster, into actual real-world rewards is a very tricky thing. Having a lot of YouTube followers (or blog readers) gets you onto the red carpet for movie premieres. Mommy bloggers get to test-drive new models of minivans.
But in the past, these kinds of corporate reacharounds usually had the intervention of a PR agency. This iteration goes through Klout, and asks you to connect AA directly with your Klout account (and thru Klout, to all the social media sites you included in Klout to try to boost your score).
Insidious? Evil? Useful? I guess it depends on how sanguine you are to turn over all your personal data & connections to friends in return for something that can run a couple hundred bucks, and make waiting for your flight a lot more pleasant. Certainly a consideration, if the sequester cuts ever kick back in, and we face 8-hour delays again.
Still: “When you don’t know what the product being sold is … the product is you.”
Apr 22
Posted: under Blogging, Blogs, Conspiracy Theories, Platform obsession.
Tags: 4chan, Boston Bombers, crowdsourcing, investigations, lynch mob, overreaction, Reddit
The genie is not going back into the bottle. Nor should it.
Our jobs as journalists/media professionals are to figure out how better to make this impulse actually turn into something productive. I give Reddit a lot of credit for actually pitching in and helping. [...more]
Is every crowdsourced “let’s catch the Bad Guys” effort inherently doomed to wind up as a witch hunt?
For a while last week, as we were all caught up in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, I was cheered up a bit by the efforts of Reddit and 4chan to try to figure out what they could do to assist in a positive way. It seemed like they were doing all the right things, in a sincere effort to help law enforcement by crowdsourced the efforts to determine who had planted the bombs. Right up front, Reddit said that racism, trolling, idiocy of any kind would not be tolerated. They even had as a “sticky” post up at the top of the page, a notice reminded everyone of the sad story of Richard Jewell.
For a while, it seemed like they might actually be able to contribute something. That maybe having tens of thousands of sharp-eyed internet sleuths poring over the mountains of photos, videos, and eyewitness reports might lead to what the pros call “actionable intelligence.” Noted internet provocateur Jason Calacanis went so far as to say,
“Twitter is where all the smart and important people in the world spend their time, which means instant coverage of these horrific events unfolds there in real time. Sure, there are spammers and idiots on Twitter, but smart people favor Twitter over any other social network by far.”
(snip)
Yet folks say, ‘Don’t speculate’?!
Ummmm, that’s exactly what we need to do!
Sometimes the rules change. Sometimes dogma needs to be flipped: ‘Shut up and let the cops do their job’ in the case of a terrorist attack is EXACTLY wrong.”
But very quickly, the idiot side of the internet took over, as 4channers started inserting “Where’s Waldo” into the photos and mocking the efforts to sift through the assets to find something of use, while outlets like CBS started wringing their hands over the fact that hordes of people on the web had self-deputized, and were now possibly (because who knows? It’s the unruly internet, after all!) out of control.
CBS news was not a believer.
But the apology today from Reddit makes it clear that whatever clear intentions we started out with, no matter the warnings posted to try to ward off the kind of unthinking, hysterical shaming/assumptions of guilt … at the end of the road, we wound up at the same old familiar virtual lynching tree.
Like two vast and trunkless legs in the sand, this is all that remains of the once-great campaign to find the Boston Marathon bombers.
A few years ago, reddit enacted a policy to not allow personal information on the site. This was because “let’s find out who this is” events frequently result in witch hunts, often incorrectly identifying innocent suspects and disrupting or ruining their lives. We hoped that the crowdsourced search for new information would not spark exactly this type of witch hunt. We were wrong. The search for the bombers bore less resemblance to the types of vindictive internet witch hunts our no-personal-information rule was originally written for, but the outcome was no different.
Of course, the traditional media is now pretty much hanging on the rim, whooping it up over the mistakes made on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc. And the digital media are firing back at the well-publicized errors at CNN, the NY Post, AP, and Fox News (whose coverage could have had poor Zooey Deschanel wondering if she was about to be sent to Gitmo with a sack on her head).
From 4chan to the front page. Not such a short journey, after all.
So what’s the real takeaway here? Well, the hard fact that I keep coming back to is that there were hundreds of thousands of people spending hours of their lives, obsessively poring over photos and videos. In some cases, this can lead to killers being found, mysteries being solves, and the innocent being set free.
In this case, it did not.
That does not mean that we should slam the door on crowdsourcing and leave everything to “the professionals.”
Look, we’ve got The People Formerly Known As The Audience no longer willing to sit passively and just let “news” wash over them. They want to be involved. They want to react. They want to DO SOMETHING. Send money, travel to New Orleans and man a bass boat with a rescue crew, build tents in Haiti, pepper their congressman with Tweets … whatever.
This generation grew up playing video games. You push the buttons on your digital device, and stuff on the screen in front of your face reacts. This paradigm is powerful. That’s why kids, including me, back in my [*wheeze*] youth loved playing them. They make you feel involved, empowered, in charge, filled with agency. Pick a phrase.
This genie is not going back into the bottle. No matter how much all the scolders tut-tut, the impulse of human beings to get off their asses and do something when they see something that moves them deeply, is going to continue. It will continue not just in the safe and societally acceptable channels of sending money/volunteering (and I think the mountains of teddy bears sent to the parents in Sandy Hook are misguided). This impulse is inevitably going to continue to play out in the digital realm, where we increasingly spend so much of our attentionshare.
Nobody really covered themselves in glory this past week.
The genie is not going back into the bottle. Nor should it.
Our jobs as journalists/media professionals are to figure out how better to make this impulse actually turn into something productive. I give Reddit a lot of credit for actually pitching in and helping.
Apropos of this: over the weekend, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsome was at the Los Angeles Book Fair, plugging his new book “Citizenville,” all about Government 2.0. He answered questions about what he thought the intersection of technology and society can and should do and told a great story about the virtue of trying. Paraphrasing here:
“I own a hotel in Reno that was built back in the 60s. It’s old-school, so it has no air-conditioning. In the summer, to keep it cool, we open the doors to let the breeze flow through. The problem is, the mosquitoes also come in.
“Well, we had a night clerk. He was a little … strange. Like you’d pretty much expect from a guy who chooses to work the 2 a.m. shift. So he comes up with an idea to try to solve the mosquito problem. He goes out and gets a whole bunch of catfish and stocks them into the ponds surrounding the hotel, that were the breeding grounds for mosquitoes.
“A day later, I get a call from one of the managers. He’s freaking out – ‘There’s blood everywhere! Blood and meat and torn flesh in the hallways! Something terrible happened here! I gotta go!”
“And then he hangs up. I’m freaking out. Wondering if the Manson Family somehow got loose and went Helter Skelter all over my hotel.
“And then I get the callback. Turns out the catfish really didn’t feast on the mosquitoes the way it was planned.
“But the raccoons? They feasted on the catfish. They went into such a frenzy, they were running through the halls of the hotel, ripping apart and eating the catfish they were easily catching out of these ponds. Looked like a massacre.
“The manager says, ‘So we fire him, right?’
“I said, ‘Hell no! Give that man a raise! At least he tried to solve the problem. He didn’t sit around, waiting for someone else to try to solve things. He saw a need and he jumped in and tried to fix things.’
“Granted. His solution didn’t work. But at least he tried something new and different.
“And that’s how the award for ‘Best Failure’ was born.”
That, in a nutshell, is how I feel about not only the attempts by ordinary citizens to help find the Boston Bombers … but the fact that Reddit is trying to work out the acceptable rules for how to run a crowdsourcing project that adds value to the response to a tragedy. If nobody tries anything until we have it all perfect … then nothing will ever get done.
If you want a more formal response to media coverage of the Boston bombings, you can check out the Poynter “4 Takeaways” list.
Mar 19
Posted: under Denial of Reality, Digital Migration.
Tags: com, Cyprus banking meltdown, journalism, local coverage, Los Angeles County budget, Matty Yglesias, news coverage, Salon.
Matty Yglesias says on Salon that online journalism means things have never been better! OK, there is some validity to his POV that access to unlimited sources of information has made the sophisticated news consumer (at least potentially) better-informed than ever before. Here’s Yggy on why things are so peachy-keen: American news media has never [...] [...more]
OK, there is some validity to his POV that access to unlimited sources of information has made the sophisticated news consumer (at least potentially) better-informed than ever before. Here’s Yggy on why things are so peachy-keen:
Well. Yeah, that’s all true. If you’re looking for information on what is happening in Cyprus, and why this might melt down the Eurozone and start the dominos toppling the way they did back in the fall of ’08 again, there are certainly all manner of viewpoints, neat multimedia presentations, and interactive tools that will help you understand this big, glamorous, international story.
…as is the Economist.
Bloomberg and Business Week are all over this…
But where I start to have problems with his premise is down here on the local level. Now, trust me, I am very far from a newsroom curmudgeon. I don’t want things to go back to 1989. Hell, I make my living creating and refining digital content that is delivered across a wide variety of platforms (broadcast TV, desktop web, mobile web, native apps, online video, etc. etc.). And I am all to painfully aware of the problems inherent in making professionally produced content pay on digital platforms (see, well, pretty much the entire output of this blog for the past six years).
Here’s the deal: big international stories get lots of clicklove. The Cyprus meltdown could potentially affect billions of people. So that’s a huge potential audience right there. Many of those people are bankers, international businessmen, politicians, the investor class, etc. (READ: people who advertisers will pay to get their messages in front of.)
So the business model & incentives are there to produce all manner of content running this story to ground and microscoping all the possible permutations.
Again, this is not the problem.
The problem is this (from 2009 – and since then, it’s only gotten worse):
Only a handful of states have budgets bigger than Los Angeles County’s. NASA spends 25% less in a year. The county’s welfare and foster care departments serve the neediest, whose ranks will only grow as the economy staggers.
And the county’s purse strings are controlled by just five politicians, the Board of Supervisors, whose powerful incumbency means they almost never face serious reelection challenges.
But now just four reporters tend this turf anywhere close to full time: two for The Times, one for eight dailies controlled by newspaper baron William Dean Singleton, and one for City News Service, although that young reporter frequently gets pulled off for other duty.
Back in my day, as many as a dozen full-time reporters walked this beat, filling the row of cramped, glass-walled cubicles on the dimly lit fourth floor just above the supervisors meeting room. (The Times had at least half a dozen other reporters at its downtown mother ship, digging deep into city and county government.)
Yep, that’s right. Down here on the local level, those incentives that make it possible to provide such in-depth coverage for international stories are not (yet?) in existence. So we get things like the 2013 budget for LA County going through with barely a hiccup.
This is where $25 billion goes this year. I heard nothing about this – and I’m plugged-in!
That’s a lot of loot. But what really blows my mind is this other pie chart. It shows that this year, Los Angeles County gets almost half its budget – $10 BILLION – in assistance from the State and Feds.
Seriously, WTF? This county is home to an absolute massive amount of economic activity. We have the 2nd biggest port in the hemisphere. Hollywood, high tech, manufacturing, etc. And we still have to get about half our money as basically political welfare from the state and feds?
If those lifelines ever go away, this county will frickin’ implode.
What is the story with this? I’ve not seen it. It’s probably out there – but I have heard reams and reams about the fiscal cliff, the sequester, and yes, Cyprus. Not a whisper here in the LA market about a budget that has a far greater likelihood of actually devastating me and the community I live in.
I know the ’08 real estate meltdown devastated property taxes, but come on! This is unsustainable.
I know there are many, many proposed solutions to this problem. But I also know that none of them have gotten traction – yet.
I am working every week with my class of journalists at USC, to try to prepare them for gigs in the real world. It is my hope that they will not have to work at news outlets (and you know who you are) where they will have to use the skills I’m teaching them, to put together linkbait slideshows on celebrity sideboob. Or produce yet another think-piece on whither the Euro.
So yeah. In some situations, with some stories, things are really, really great. But down at the granular level, journalism is not in the greatest shape. Dismissing these problems as the fantasies of ill-tempered Luddites is not a path to a solution, Matty.
xxx
Mar 11
Posted: under advertising.
Tags: Facebook advertising, future of advertising, taming the firehose
Basically, this boils down to “are we willing to pay – either with our privacy (the coin of the online realm) or in actual ca$h dinero – for the relentless stream of information to be filtered down to stuff that we actually want to see, or that we need to see?” Interesting that Megan McArdle [...] [...more]
Basically, this boils down to “are we willing to pay – either with our privacy (the coin of the online realm) or in actual ca$h dinero – for the relentless stream of information to be filtered down to stuff that we actually want to see, or that we need to see?”
Interesting that Megan McArdle comes to this via an experiment to boost her Facebook engagement levels.
Here’s the nut grafs:
But after a decade out in the open, we are moving back behind walls. More and more we’re using gatekeepers like Google and Facebook to contain the chaos. Doing so serves their purposes—but it also serves ours. In a 2012 Pew Survey, 21 percent of Americans reported getting news from Twitter or Facebook in the last day, and the number is only increasing; the Atlantic Media Group recently reported that almost half its traffic comes from social media.
Complain as we might about privacy violations and the invisible hand and all that, the reason this is happening is because, in some sense, we want it to. We’re the ones herding onto Facebook and Twitter to get our news rather than using older, more open technologies like RSS readers. We’re the ones who have chosen to let their algorithms aggregate for us what, in the dizzying world of Internet content, we would otherwise have to uncover for ourselves. We’re the ones who complain bitterly whenever anyone on the Internet tries to charge for anything. But how did we think all those servers and Web developers would be paid?
Mar 07
Posted: under Blogging, Digital Migration, new media.
OK, this is really derivative, but I’m so impressed with the insight in this list that I’m shamelessly repeating it here. Go to BoingBoing. Click on the ads. Give them some money. They are good. I like BoingBoing. (Please, no DMCA notice for this…) To my journalism students – when you’re trying to construct a [...] [...more]
OK, this is really derivative, but I’m so impressed with the insight in this list that I’m shamelessly repeating it here. Go to BoingBoing. Click on the ads. Give them some money. They are good. I like BoingBoing.
(Please, no DMCA notice for this…)
To my journalism students – when you’re trying to construct a compelling narrative, for a story that goes beyond “On Tuesday, the Board met for two hours to consider blah-de-blah…” you could do a helluva lot worse than use these rules to challenge yourself to come up with something that grabs the reader and makes them keep clicking the “Next” button at the bottom of your page.
Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling – Boing Boing
From Aerogramme Writers’ Studio, via Adafruit. My favorite is #13: “Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.”
These rules were originally tweeted by Emma Coates, Pixar’s Story Artist. Number 9 on the list – When you’re stuck, make a list of what wouldn’t happen next – is a great one and can apply to writers in all genres.
- You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
- You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be very different.
- Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
- Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
- Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.
- What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
- Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
- Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.
- When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.
- Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.
- Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.
- Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
- Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.
- Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
- If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.
- What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
- No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
- You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
- Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
- Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?
- You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?
- What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.
Technorati Tags: writing, blogs, Pixar, BoingBoing, rules of storytelling
Mar 04
Posted: under Blogging, Lemmings, New Media Strategery, Sip With Caution.
The “Follow/Unfollow Dance” builds your lists … but to what end? Social media whiz & Cheesehead Homie Erik Johnson writes powerfully about his experience with one of his intellectual idols. Viz: Every school had one. The kid who pretended to be your friend just to get something he wanted from you and then acted like [...] [...more]
The “Follow/Unfollow Dance” builds your lists … but to what end?
Social media whiz & Cheesehead Homie Erik Johnson writes powerfully about his experience with one of his intellectual idols. Viz:
Every school had one. The kid who pretended to be your friend just to get something he wanted from you and then acted like you’d never met. The user. Not the model you would build a business around and certainly not the model for a business social media strategy.
If you’ve been paying attention to the growing phenomenon on Twitter of people who want to bill themselves as thought leaders & social media experts following you & then unfollowing you a few weeks later after snookering you into believing there is a mutual interest, this sad saga will seem very familiar. I’m having my own issue with it myself – I’ve noted that a lot of the people that I follow don’t seem to actually be interested in connecting with me, other than to connect. I don’t get any follow-up conversation out of the connection.
I’ll admit it. I’m not as diligent as I should be in following/unfollowing and tracking everything that’s going on in the social sphere. Been spending a lot of time on content creation the past few months – writing books, creating lesson plans, wireframing sites, handling social media for other people … so yeah, mea culpa.
I turned to JustUnfollow to see if this would help.
JustUnfollow purports to help you keep track of whether or not you’re being gamed … and perhaps even to start gaming the system yourself (Not Recommended). I am dismayed, but not surprised, that services like this are becoming common & in-demand.
The service generates a DM that you can customize to say thanks to the people that follow you. It’s kinda filled up my DM column with these messages. As you can see, I tried to make the “Thanks” message a little less boilerplate sounding.
I get a steady stream of notifications as to who has followed me in Tweetdeck. This is handy, as the notifications often wind up in my spam folder in Mail. However, this is still something of an impersonal-feeling process, mostly because I’ve been slacking off on actually connecting with those who connect with me. My bad, people.
I had kinda hoped that this service would run in the background and keep some kind of order to my Twitter feed. And then, I got this little notification:
Apparently, I’ve been rude. Didn’t realize that I was doing so. I was buried under book deadlines, designing a multi-platform site for a client, and teaching a class. Still, I was negligent and I got called on it. Worse, it seems the solution I tried to impose has actually done the opposite from my intentions.
It appears that in trying to set up a system by which I rewarded people with at least a DM for following me, I somehow stumbled into a situation where that DM is seen as the very thing that I was trying to avoid. I probably need to go in and tweak the settings on JustUnfollow to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Also, I should probably use JustUnfollow to see if there is some chicanery going on with my Follow/Unfollow stats. I’m interested in connecting with journalists and New Media thinkers, to widen the variety and depth of the info-flow that I expose myself to.
However, I still struggle with taming the torrent. And yeah, I know that is ironic, given the stated mission of this blog. But The situation is not being helped by the amount of “Hey, are you really paying attention to me?” messages coming at me, especially when compared to the “Social Media Users” that are trying to get me roped into following them, just so they can boost their own Klout score.
Here’s what I wrote as a comment on Erik’s blog. And yes, I do recommend that you follow him.
Unfortunately, I am locked in exactly this kind of dance myself on social media. As the number of Twitter followers you have starts to become a real badge denoting authenticity and authority, the incentives are there to “game the system.” I’ve tried to restrict my Twitter feed to only people that I actually can pay attention to; when in the early days, I went nuts and got up into the thousands, my feed was streaming so fast that I couldn’t actually get any value out of it. Which brought my efforts to the equivalent of spitting into a vast, anonymous torrent. I’ve got quite enough of that trying to engage in the blogosphere, thank you very much.
Whenever I see Twitter accounts with 40,000 followers and 40,000 following – well, I know that the person has devoted significant time to building a list and a presence. But it makes me wonder – will they actually respond to an attempt at conversation? Can they? Is it even possible with the flow from 40K people coming through HootSuite/Tweetdeck? I couldn’t do it with 1500.
And if the point of social media isn’t to actually have a conversation with people about something of mutual value … then what’s the damn point, anyway? Just start graffiti’ing up billboards and save the rest of us from the tricks and games, already.
At this point, I’d have to give JustUnfollow a Sip With Caution rating:
Sip With Caution
Jan 12
Posted: under Blogging, Blogs, Platform obsession, Web Tech.
Tags: Blogging, Blogs, CES, Las Vegas, NMX
The blogging community is notoriously hard to please. Check out the vitriolic tweets directed at the poor victims who dared to sit onstage at the close of the NMX convention, talking about “Inventing the Future.” Check out the silvery television-headed robots: Despite the rather ugly tone at the end, there were some creative attempts at [...] [...more]
The blogging community is notoriously hard to please. Check out the vitriolic tweets directed at the poor victims who dared to sit onstage at the close of the NMX convention, talking about “Inventing the Future.”
Check out the silvery television-headed robots:
Despite the rather ugly tone at the end, there were some creative attempts at serving the pajama-clad tech nerd lynch mob:
First, there were the somewhat shellshocked crew behind the counter at the BlackBerry booth. They were apparently laboring under the misconception that there are actually talented developers in the world that, given a choice, would pour their time and energy into creating an app for their platform.
If there is a clearer indication that upper management at BlackBerry is delusional and out of touch, I haven’t seen it.
The signs plaintively exhort the fictional mobile developers to “blog about it!” Not sure if publicly acknowledging that you’ve just wasted your time & effort on a platform that’s got one foot in the gave and the other on a banana peel should be seen as a complicated cry for help, or a confession of bad business judgement.
Next, the folks at Readz, promising “Simply Beautiful Tablet Publishing.” I’ve been grinding my mental gears on the various tablet-publishing solutions for the past two years, most recently with Atavist, iBook Creator, and the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. What I’ve learned is that these tools promise much, but run headlong into the contradictions inherent in this chaotic new space.
For example, there are the crazy quilt screen resolutions, video formats and typographic specs. Ad then there’s the whole horizontal/vertical screen orientation layout problem. IBook Creator is particularly ugly and opaque on this issue — your layout will look fine one way, but flip the iPad the other way, and some elements will show up and others … won’t. No rhyme nor reason to it either.
Meanwhile, the InDesign files churned out contain such spaghetti code that you are directed to open them in Dreamweaver to clean up the CSS3 and HTML 5.
I’ll give Readz a spin, even though they inexplicably have “Wilson” the volleyball from Castaway as part of the booth decor.
I did like the quirky spirit displayed by the WordPress “Happiness Bar,” where they touted the fact that the WordPress platform is being used by everyone from giant corporations to “your dad’s book club.” The folks there were talking about vague plans for better ecommerce plugins.
If someone were to come up with an open-source PayPal, that would really rock a lot of worlds. The challenges would be enormous – whenever there’s money involved on the web, you WILL get haxxors. It’s inevitable. Then again, getting out from under a corporate monolith that is vulnerable to pressure (such as in the Wikileaks case) would be a step in the direction of international press freedom.
Next up, Raven. I’ve been looking at them for a while – they’ve been struggling for a long time, trying to compete with Radian6, Crimson Hexagon, et al. They seem to be engaged in a re-branding pivot, trying to go to the low-end blogger side of the spectrum, to sell us indie freaks the long-awaited way to monetize our audience(s).
They’re offering a 30-day free trial, and that alone differentiates them from the competition.
UStream was one of the big sponsors for the conference, and they (allegedly) worked to fatten the backhaul pipes so that the bloggers in attendance could all either upload live streaming video of themselves, or download everyone else’s livestreams. Which is kind of a strange thought-exercise: an entire conference room full of people all looking at themselves looking at each other on their ubiquitous tablets.
I’ve worked with clients over the past few years to use UStream to give their fanbase and users access to live events. Where it starts getting tricky is when you want to archive the events and make them available to the audience later, or even store them on your own site’s multimedia library.
Jan 08
Posted: under Blogging, Blogs, Digital Migration, Social Media monetization.
Tags: #nmx BlogWorld
Somehow, I expected more of a mad scientist’s lab, with chortling henchmen. Or hench-Americans, as I hear they prefer to be addressed…. It is always dangerous to give a group of bloggers (should that be “a flamewar of bloggers”?) a stage and a microphone, and dare them to get pretentious about predicting The Next Big [...] [...more]
Somehow, I expected more of a mad scientist’s lab, with chortling henchmen. Or hench-Americans, as I hear they prefer to be addressed….
It is always dangerous to give a group of bloggers (should that be “a flamewar of bloggers”?) a stage and a microphone, and dare them to get pretentious about predicting The Next Big Thing.
UPDATE: the always irascible bloggers have deemed the event a FAIL because of the lack of interactivity. Also: keyboard pants?
