Month: December 2008

Of Course There Is a Social Media Backlash Coming

8FC5CDE3-2476-4FB0-B75B-E5D10F8E04F0.jpg

There is an interesting discussions among the early adopters last night into today on the topic of blogging and FriendFeed that has spilled out into the rest of “social media.”

Scoble kicked things off last night when he asked (on FriendFeed) if he had harmed his blog by investing so much time there.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch gives perhaps the pithiest but most accurate response on that thread:

HELL YES YOU HARMED YOUR BLOG THIS YEAR.

So the question becomes, is there a backlash coming from the early adopter influencer crowd towards the rising tide of noise on platforms such as Twitter or FriendFeed or even Facebook? Sure, they are great for “conversaton” but does it do harm to contribute too much content there and not enough on your blog?

Steve Rubel chimes in with an interesting point:

Micro Persuasion: Andy Beal on Investing in Social Media Spaces: “Could a backlash be coming? Maybe if Twitter builds an ad revenue model and shares it with the audience they can stem the tide. Interesting notes about how Pownce is no longer with us and how some invested time there. The same could be said for Jaiku perhaps since Google has done nothing with it since they bought it.”

The answer is that there is no answer (how Zen of me).

Each case of social media usage vs blog usage is an intensely personal thing. Sure, there are marketers that see social media as “the next gold mine” (duh…talked some about that fallacy last year), but there are many of us that see these platforms for what they are… tools. They aren’t gold mines or “platforms to be leveraged.” They are communication tools. Sure, use them for data, trend watching, tracking, etc… but at the end of the day, know where you hang your hat.

Of course there is a social media backlash coming amongst the influencers, the tech savvy and the people that realize in a down economy you have to focus on what is most important to your company, your ideas or your “brand” (I’m beginning to loathe that term even more than I used to).

As Andy Beal points out, we “own” our blogs in the sense that we (unless we are using wordpress.com or Blogger, etc) write the content, pay for the hosting and are in charge of their upkeep. It’s great to play in the Twitter commons, but it’s nice to have a place to lay our heads when it gets dark. And the economy is dark now.

68D41E4B-511A-40F2-AE65-F67218650E40.jpg

retweetradar Offers ReTweeting Some Redemption

99E38C29-2BE3-45B2-99A0-3670C43B4174.jpg

I hate “retweets.”

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past 3 months, you might not be aware of the scourge of a phenomenon sweeping the twittersphere lately… the retweet.

Basically, when someone says anything you find amusing, you include the syntax “R/T” and copy their tweet. Boom. A retweet. In all of its ugliness. My favorite Twitter desktop application, TweetDeck, makes retweeting insanely easy, helping to spread the plague like hungry fleas riding the back of diseased rats. You get my point.

My reasons for hating retweets are varied, so I’ll get into that in another post. But for those of us who loathe these unholy creatures of digital bits, there’s some redeeming value since they do point to trends (albeit not always quality or valuable trends). However, if you’re looking at Twitter, or social media in general, from a 20,000 foot point of view and trying to glean insights, there is some data to be had here.

A nifty new app built on the Google App Engine allows you to see some of the trends being retweeted:

retweetradar – Finding trends in the mountains of information ‘retweet’ed on Twitter.: “retweetradar is a sister site of http://spy.appspot.com your social media ‘spy’, listen to the social media conversation on any term from Twitter to FriendFeed, Flickr to Blogs and more… watch it all in near real time.”

I’m really falling for the Google App Engine. I need to do more exploration there. As a footnote, Scott Jangro has set up a blog there to fool around with the django and Python language native to the platform, so go check that out.

So, even though retweets are the new antichrist, there’s some atonement for them since they do point us to a measurable function of what might be trending hot in terms of a very niche community(ies).

Personally, I’d rather just put a stake through their tiny digital hearts.

68D41E4B-511A-40F2-AE65-F67218650E40.jpg

Geek Dads @Home

I’m doing a new weekly podcast with Joe Magennis and Daniel Clark that combines the experience of a “stay-at-home-dad” with “geeky stuff.”

It’s a pretty fascinating intersection of topics.

Happy Birthday Ian Clark | Geek Dads @Home: “The premise of our podcast revolves around three dads working from home while we provide day care for our kids. We will share our insights on the tools that allow us to function in this set up, but more importantly the podcast gives us a record in our own voices of the experiences of raising our children. The hope is that some time in the future, when they can best appreciate it, our kids will subscribe to this RSS feed and hear their dad’s perspectives on their lives growing up ….”

Here’s the mp3 or click the link above to listen to the stream (and subscribe…iTunes subscription should be available soon as well).

And let us know what you think, if you don’t mind.

Long Term v. Short Term

thomaswhitley:

Welcome guest blogger, Sam Harrelson. I recently shared this article with him about a scholarly journal that is going to begin requiring its authors to post a summary of their research to the online encyclopdia, Wikipedia, an interesting idea, indeed. I then shared with him this response by Jim West, who vehemently disagrees with this new wiki advice. Below is Sam’s well thought out response.

I never thought I would say this, but as I get older, I am rapidly (ironically enough) becoming aware in how much more valuable a “long term” perspective is for the academy (and all things).

Growing up, I could never have dreamed of something like the internet. That’s a lie, actually I could. However, growing up in the Tatooine academic wasteland of Mullins with its pathetic town library and my set of 1988 World Book Encyclopedias, I always wondered how much more I could have learned had I had access to a major library. I was a complete dork. When I heard about the “internet” in the early 90’s, I was immediately taken with the idea of being able to read and share information from anywhere, and be connected to scholars and journals and ideas from anywhere at anytime. When the World Wide Web first launched to the public in 1993, I was there. It was amazing. Still amazes me. Information overload quickly took over my brain. Still does, unfortunately.

However, I’m realizing that as fortunate collections of cooled energy, there is something magical to focusing on ideas rather than personalities. As I learn more and live more, I’m beginning to realize that the nature of the web, and our always-on culture in general, emphasizes personality and personal brand building over ideas or attempts at best describing the state of things. Call me platonic, but I don’t see this as a healthy development of our society. Improving ideas or theories, even through small incremental steps, should be the focus as our lives as scholars, not necessarily worrying about spreading our ideas to people that don’t care through social media.

That’s elitist, but I’m beginning to realize that contributing a few small atomic glimpses of understanding about Dura Europos towards the wider collection of human knowledge is a much more worthy way to spend the time that these cooled pieces of energy which make me up have left together in this state compared to building up a personal brand. All is vanity.

Wikipedia is interesting because it doesn’t necessarily cling to the notions of “social media” that emphasize personality. It’s difficult to tell who is editing articles, etc unless you know how to look up that information. So, I do think that it’s viable on that front. However, the idea of it being a “commons” area where anyone can add in information (even if it will be quickly edited out) without peer review lends the entire platform to better discussing Britney Spear’s latest album rather than the mysteries of human existential phenomenology. Peer review helps to enforce this notion of “long term developments of ideas” over the cult of the personality (which, as a footnote… we are seeing creep into scholarship with the Bart Ehrman, Crossan and Elaine Pagels mentality of publishing for Barnes and Noble rather than publishing for humanity in a timeless nature).

So as much as I enjoy Twitter and blogging and Facebook, etc… I’m beginning to take a real hard look at my own contributions to this culture. Even my Blackberry is a tool of that devil. I’m not going to run and get thee to a nunnery, but I am going to start focusing much more on the long term and platonic nature of ideas in my studies over a silly egotistic notion of personal brand building.

I’m still that little boy in Mullins who wants to know more. Now I just need to realize that knowing more bears the responsibility of having to contribute to the collected wisdom of humanity rather than becoming a star theologian or a web celebrity.

Sam Harrelson

To read more of Sam’s musings check out his blog.

Long Term v. Short Term

thomaswhitley:

Welcome guest blogger, Sam Harrelson. I recently shared this article with him about a scholarly journal that is going to begin requiring its authors to post a summary of their research to the online encyclopdia, Wikipedia, an interesting idea, indeed. I then shared with him this response by Jim West, who vehemently disagrees with this new wiki advice. Below is Sam’s well thought out response.

I never thought I would say this, but as I get older, I am rapidly (ironically enough) becoming aware in how much more valuable a “long term” perspective is for the academy (and all things).

Growing up, I could never have dreamed of something like the internet. That’s a lie, actually I could. However, growing up in the Tatooine academic wasteland of Mullins with its pathetic town library and my set of 1988 World Book Encyclopedias, I always wondered how much more I could have learned had I had access to a major library. I was a complete dork. When I heard about the “internet” in the early 90’s, I was immediately taken with the idea of being able to read and share information from anywhere, and be connected to scholars and journals and ideas from anywhere at anytime. When the World Wide Web first launched to the public in 1993, I was there. It was amazing. Still amazes me. Information overload quickly took over my brain. Still does, unfortunately.

However, I’m realizing that as fortunate collections of cooled energy, there is something magical to focusing on ideas rather than personalities. As I learn more and live more, I’m beginning to realize that the nature of the web, and our always-on culture in general, emphasizes personality and personal brand building over ideas or attempts at best describing the state of things. Call me platonic, but I don’t see this as a healthy development of our society. Improving ideas or theories, even through small incremental steps, should be the focus as our lives as scholars, not necessarily worrying about spreading our ideas to people that don’t care through social media.

That’s elitist, but I’m beginning to realize that contributing a few small atomic glimpses of understanding about Dura Europos towards the wider collection of human knowledge is a much more worthy way to spend the time that these cooled pieces of energy which make me up have left together in this state compared to building up a personal brand. All is vanity.

Wikipedia is interesting because it doesn’t necessarily cling to the notions of “social media” that emphasize personality. It’s difficult to tell who is editing articles, etc unless you know how to look up that information. So, I do think that it’s viable on that front. However, the idea of it being a “commons” area where anyone can add in information (even if it will be quickly edited out) without peer review lends the entire platform to better discussing Britney Spear’s latest album rather than the mysteries of human existential phenomenology. Peer review helps to enforce this notion of “long term developments of ideas” over the cult of the personality (which, as a footnote… we are seeing creep into scholarship with the Bart Ehrman, Crossan and Elaine Pagels mentality of publishing for Barnes and Noble rather than publishing for humanity in a timeless nature).

So as much as I enjoy Twitter and blogging and Facebook, etc… I’m beginning to take a real hard look at my own contributions to this culture. Even my Blackberry is a tool of that devil. I’m not going to run and get thee to a nunnery, but I am going to start focusing much more on the long term and platonic nature of ideas in my studies over a silly egotistic notion of personal brand building.

I’m still that little boy in Mullins who wants to know more. Now I just need to realize that knowing more bears the responsibility of having to contribute to the collected wisdom of humanity rather than becoming a star theologian or a web celebrity.

Sam Harrelson

To read more of Sam’s musings check out his blog.