Sam Harrelson

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.

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.