He could be right about this and once the TechCrunch50 and DEMO08 conferences finish up news will start flowing once more and everyone will get back to normal. Maybe it is true that because nothing new is being announced until then all we really can do is rehash the same old stuff over and over again with the occasional news item to keep us on our toes. As hard as it might be for those of us in this space that write about all these shiny new things one has to think that it must be equally hard for startups busting at the seems with cool stuff to share.

While we all wait though to see all the new things that will spark all our writing juices there is as I said more than a few tech bloggers who are having a really hard time getting excited anymore – or at least for now – with the social media space. As Corvida from SheGeeks and I talked about last night on Discussion Point along with her post on her blog it seems like all the conversation is about clones rather than new and cool services:

All the latest sites and services are all the same to me. Clones. Clones that do one feature better than the original. Clones that don’t have any of the features that the original has. Clones that are playing catch-up and clones that should have never seen the light of day because the original was a dumb idea to begin with. There’s nothing to talk about because there really isn’t any “real”" news. Innovation is at an all time low and we’re all suckers for it because something is better than nothing. Well, screw that!

As well we have people like Robert Scoble who once said that the only way to stay in touch with him was on Facebook which then changed to Twitter but now he says for everyone to use email if they want to talk with him. It is amazing the change that can happen in attitudes about shiny new things in the space of less than a year.

Then today I read where Colin Walker; a blogger I have a high regard for, posts how he thinks much like Corvida that technology has lost its spark

It’s not just that the technology has plateaued, it’s not just that the conversation stalled but, somehow, that the social web has lost its spark.

We moan about the echo chamber and dream of social media ubiquity but once things get more ‘mainstream’ our precious corner of the web seems to become less relevant. We seek out friends who are not talking about the same old stuff but end up with a screen full of items we have no interest in.

I’ve spoken about balance on many occasions but it appears that a balance is almost impossible to achieve. Do we embrace the noise or just stop lying to ourselves and admit that the echo chamber is where we belong and is what brought us here in the first place?

When you tie all this in with the thoughts being expressed by Mack Collier who wonders if social media is overrated one has to wonder if indeed this is just pre-conference doldrums or if in fact social media is starting to lose its luster.

What do you think? Is this just a lull and we’ll all be back in form soon enough or is there something going on here?

Conversation Tags: social media, conferences

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What happens though when someone gets into one of these social media sites before you do and sets up an account with them using your identifiable brand name? Not all of us are like Robert Scoble who can fire off an email to the service involved and ask for help – and getting it – to get his brand in effect returned to his control. Companies general just sic their lawyers on the offending parties. Or you can do what Exxon Mobile has done in the case of someone on Twitter who hijacked their brand and created an ExxonMobileCorp account.

The fact that this was an account setup by someone who wasn’t an Exxon Mobile employee was found out by Shel Holtz and which I found out about on Jeremiah Owyang’s blog today. As Jeremiah says in his post

Shel Holtz was one of the first to discover this, as he commended Exxon for their efforts, their response was “It’s not us”. The mystery continued to unravel as I received an email from the Dallas Chronicle Press wanting to talk to me about what I knew –the word hit mainstream analysts and press in three days, secrets don’t remain secrets for long in internet speed.

“Janet” has been posing as an Exxon employee, answering questions about the direction of the company, where philanthropy resources are being spent, and even responding (in a few off tone way) about the Exxon Valdez which put many off.

The way that Exxon Mobile has dealt with this so far makes for some interesting reading on Jeremiah’s blog because he has had a chance to talk with Alex Jeffers; a Exxon Mobile spokesperson, about the incident. Rather than letting the lawyers loose they are for now just asking Janet; who the name behind the Twitter account, to come forward with who she really is

“Be forth coming about who you are, it’s ok to be in support for or against something, but you should be forth-coming about your identity”

One of the things that Jeremiah points out in his post is that companies must be monitoring their brand

Companies must monitor their brand
Brands should be monitoring the discussion and instances of their keywords in social networks –failure to do so results in becoming case studies.

I would suggest as well that even us relative newcomers to the idea of having a brand need to keep this in mind as well or you maybe like Robert Scoble and find someone has already grabbed your brand on that new service you want to check out.

What do you think about this? Do you think that this is something that we really need to be concerned about? Does it really matter what someone else is doing in your name on the web?

Conversation Tags: Twitter, social media, Exxon Mobile

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My thoughts about this kind of crystallized today with a post by Svetlana Gladkova over at Profy.com where she was taking about balanced news for tech bloggers on things like Twitter and FriendFeed. In the post she says:

And again I was reminded that if an earthquake happens, say, in the Altay Mountains that are mere 500 kilometers away from here, I will probably not notice it at all since I have no friends from that region on Twitter or on FriendFeed (this is not exactly the most connected place on Earth). So my professional interests and the people I communicate with because of them interfere with anything that could be important to me personally as a citizen of another country across the ocean.

This seems to be a sad imbalance and this is not what it is supposed to be - after all, there are many things that matter to people on Earth and they are not necessary related to technology and web 2.0.

One of the most oft used phrases used in the tech blogosphere – I can’t talk to the other types of blogging – is that of it being an echo chamber were we are continually echoing things other people have written. In many ways this is a very valid claim but I am wondering if rather than helping to fight against this things like Twitter and FriendFeed aren’t possibly exasperating the problem.

Rather than writing about the wider issues of what is affecting technology and how it is affecting us we seem to be forever narrowing the boundaries to that of one around the tools that we are using. This isn’t all encompassing but I am seeing more and more  time being spent writing about social media tools rather than social media. This could also be because of who I follow on these services but I have always tried to make that a very wide base of people from all areas of the blogging world. As it is I read everything from security blogs to a broad range of everyday type of blogs and right through to blogs about the blogging industry itself. So I am not sure if that point would hold up in this case.

I’ve even noticed that with my own writing I seem to be being drawn further into talking about the tools rather than the repercussions and this is not where I want to be going. Sure the tools and the use of them is important but they are only tools. I don’t need to know what kind of poster I am because that doesn’t answer any questions or really spark serious conversations.

It’s a well accepted sociological fact that human beings have an innate fascination with their tools regardless of profession. It appears that this hasn’t changed in the least when it comes to the web but I worry that with the ease of being able to publish our thoughts that we are becoming to obsessed with the how’s rather than the why’s and who’s of our technological world.

What do you think – are we painting ourselves into a corner?

Conversation Tags: Twitter, FriendFeed, tools, blogging, social media

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I got this heads up early from Eric Berlin who I know from his blog called Online Media Cultist but informed me that he also has a day job as a web producer/project manager for 3jane.com in Los Angeles California. As a part of that job he has been involved with the makeover of Makeoutclub which is a social networking site for people involved in the indie underground music scene.

While Makeoutclub was originally founded in 2000 it was decided that the social network needed to have some work done to it in order to better serve its niche market. Along with Gibby Miller; the director of product development at 3jane, Eric worked hard in bringing the site up to today’s standards of what is expected to be found in current social networks. The idea behind this relaunched version of the site is to provide a cool place for folks involved in the hardcore. emo and indie music world to get together. If those terms are foreign to you then chances are that Makeoutclub probably isn’t for you but if you do know what they mean then you might just want to check out this updated version of the site.

To join – or just have a look around – head over to www.makeoutclub.com and see what all of Eric and Gibby’s hard work has done to improved an already hot site for the trendsetters of the indie scene.

Conversation Tags: music, indie, emo

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My job is to make you think.

How I do that can be covered in so many ways even with the traditional news type blogging but regardless of the how’s the end goal should be to get our readers to think about what has been written because then a really cool thing can happen. The reader wants to add their thoughts to yours and all of a sudden you have a live organic thought process happening that grows beyond the original piece. Does this always happen? No, and that is the ultimate shame and waste of this medium we have created because the reader has decided for whatever reason to abnegate their responsibility.

Where my job might be to make the reader think it is the reader’s equal responsibility to engage with the news I might be reporting or the idea that I might be trying to get across and add value to it. That value can be anything from pointing out where I could be wrong and why through to add their own spin what has been posted or even previously commented. It is this communication that turns what is basically talking into a vacuum into a living document that we can all learn from.

I have been really lucky on both Mashable and my own blog here to have written some posts that have really engaged the readers - both good and bad. In either case though I have learned something and I would like to believe that those posts have contributed more than possibly better written posts that had no conversation build around them. As Robert said in his post

This is a participatory media, not a one-way one, and, while it has a different editing system (the editing is done post publishing, not pre publishing) it’s pretty clear to me that this system arrives at the truth a lot faster than anything on paper does.

But, you gotta read and participate in those comments! Lots of old-schoolers don’t like that dirty work.

Equally so readers need to participate because when they do bloggers get better at their jobs. Without our readers involving themselves in the conversation and keeping us on our toes - keeping us engaged in trying harder to make you think. In this process we all have a chance to learn and grow and isn’t that the whole idea behind this social media experiment we are all involved in?

Conversation Tags: blogging, social media

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Yesterday I lamenting how little of any real interest there was to read – to be sparked into writing anything. How a single day can change things as much of my Sunday has been spent reading almost non-stop things of interest. In some ways there was almost too much leaving one wondering where to even begin writing. That is the incredible thing about this living breathing entity we call the blogosphere and make no mistake it might only be made up of ones and zeros but this ever so small segment of the larger web is indeed alive.

Like any living being it pulses with life that feels, cares, defends and yes reacts when any part of it is attacked. As such those of us that sit here each day in front of of our keyboards and monitors watch as an incredible amount of information flows in front of us on an almost minute by minute basis. Depending on our interests we write about politics, life, death and yes of course technology. Some of us prefer to write about the news as it happens while others prefer to reach deeper and write about the things we think about when it comes to technology; or our preferred area of interest.

We are still very much trying to gain a shaky understanding of this new territory that exists without any real rules or framework in order to provide those that follow with a sounder sense of what lies ahead of them in this new world of social media. Leslie Poston from Profy.com wrote about this lack of rules [nw] in a post yesterday where she suggests that this new world is inherently anti-rules because of its organic nature:

This trend toward a kind of social media home owner’s association is driven in part by ego and part by a desire for control and power, and it goes against the grain of social media.

Social media and the internet it plays on is organic by nature. Organic concepts scare the pants off of people and companies, especially big enterprise. After so many decades of an economy based on control, this constantly changing, shifting and, above all else, accessible new media has the mental suit wearers cowering in fear.

As Leslie points out though in her post there is a growing wave of people looking for these rules which makes them feel safe in this social media world. I have seen it beginning to happen on places like FriendFeed not to mention past experiences with things like a Blogger’s Code of Conduct [nw]. As well some people seem to feel [nw] that as the early travelers of this road we should be bound by some guild or association in order to sanction what we are doing to again make those who follow feel safer. This kind of talk pulls me back to a quote of Alvin Toffler’s in an interview [nw] by Strategy + Business that I read today:

I see that humanity has done phenomenally well, at incredibly accelerated rates, in introducing revolutionary technologies. But that’s the easy part of a transformation. Changing the social structure is much more complicated than developing a new bit of software. Bits and bytes don’t have vested interests, but people do.

I think that this under current of a call for rules or such similar ideas is a perfect reflection of Toffler’s point about people having vested interests. Rules only exist because people want to be able to exert some form of control over the situations that they find themselves in. where informal rules or codes of conduct don’t seem to work we collectively look to higher authorities to step in and impose them. This is of course goes against everything that the wider Internet was based on – which was the open and free dissemination of ideas and thought without any restrictions.

Whether this is a good foundation to build anything on is open to discussion – now and in the future. That doesn’t change the fact though that bloggers and those involved in social media in one way or another have become the vanguard of of these changes and I believe that we must make sure that we aren’t acting like those with vested interests. If we are then I think we will being doing not just ourselves but also those that follow a disservice.

Even as we debate these points and the need – or not – for rules I have been feeling that even within our very narrow spectrum of the web that once again things are changing. Like Mark Hopkins said in a post [nw] early this morning

There’s a new revolution afoot, and no one has quite pegged it yet. We’ve come pretty far, but we’re all working in a realm where we’re simply translating the Old Media one to one into the New Media. It’s grown up, and we know it makes money, but we haven’t transformed it yet. We haven’t made it our own.

That is the thing about being a part of the vanguard – a part of the bleeding edge of change – we are constantly looking to make the new things our own. Those that do manage to make it their own in turn become like way stations pointing the new arrivals towards the new trails that are being constantly blazed by those looking for even deeper social changes. Whether you want to travel any further is entirely a single person’s decision. Some will travel to the next station while others will indeed stay where they are because at this point that is where they feel the safest.

I do believe though that we can be assured that regardless of the format that they might end up using those that we now call bloggers will because of their nature keep traveling forward. I know I will be and I am looking forward to where ever that journey may take me.

How about you?

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Unfortunately nothing could be further from the truth – no matter how much the goodness of social media advocates would like use to think otherwise. Whether it be from the very software that powers all these social media happy camps to the people that we blindly add to our friend lists nothing is lily white or crystal clear.

While I have written in the past [nw] about how the very services we use in social media seem to lack any concept of real security recently these services have found that they are just as susceptible to things like spam as any Web 1.0 service was. In addition people people are finding out that outright scammers have taken up residence within their utopian world of ones and zeros.

A good case in point is a story from the other day by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira at Profy.com [nw] where another blogger by the name of Connie Reece tells of a user [nw] on Twitter and Plurk who has been leveraging their friend listing to bilk them out of money that was supposedly to be used to help this user pay for medical expenses. Cyndy relates how even Connie herself had donated money to this person before finding out the truth. In her post Cyndy quotes Connie as saying

"Just as social networks can be used for good, they can also be abused and used for nefarious purposes. When that happens — whether for good or evil — our reaction as a community is important. Think about what it means to be a good community citizen. Should we let angry accusations of being “self-appointed police” stop us from speaking out? Or do we take a stand against bad behavior?"

And that is the important question here – how do we react when we have been duped online. How do we deal with the fact that this supposedly pure world of social media has been sullied by people with no other interest in social media other than the fact that it is a gullible world just waiting to be plucked.

For as much as we might like to believe that our homes within these new social networks are safe from those mean and nasty people who prey on the people with good and trusting hearts the fact is that just as in real life the web – and yes social media – has its evil people too.

Just remember – bad people don’t care about boundaries – real world or digital.

Conversation Tags: social media, web 2.0, scammers, grifters, con-artists

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Really it doesn’t. Whenever a new Web 2.0 or social media service starts getting a lot of attention someone somewhere will figure out how to create a ranking scale for that service. The latest incident to get everyone’s pundit shorts in a knot is the new Frienderati addition to Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop site and how it seems to be a hand picked list of the top people on FriendFeed.

While there has been plenty of talk on FriendFeed about the new Alltop site it was Rob Diana who actually stepped up to the plate [nw] and wrote how he felt about it and rankings in general. In addition to his points about Frienderati he also raises the fact there there is a new service from aideRSS called PostRank that allows us to see how individual posts in the blogosphere are ranked. This will require feed readers that can utilize the PostRank API but like Rob says “… just how many ranking systems do we need”.

As much as I agree with much of what he has to say about bloggers and all the different ways available to rank both our blogs and the posts we write I get the feeling that he is more interested in the larger question of why we even need rankings in the first place

I guess my problem is that we probably have enough rankings to follow already. Do we really need an API for one? People are always going to be creating these lists, do we need to try and deconstruct them or even invalidate them? Can we just talk about good content?

To answer Rob it all boils down to one extremely simple fact – it’s human nature. If there is something going on that involves more than one person we will by our very nature find someway to figure out who is the best and who is the worst and every stop in between. It doesn’t matter if it is sport or if it is wine making we’ll always come up with a top 10 list. We do it with movies, music and right through to things like hurricanes.

Rankings are inevitable.

They aren’t going to go anywhere.

After all if we didn’t have them how would we be able to pick out the top 10 music CD’s or top 10 books we would want to take with us to a desert island. Not to mention the top 10 reasons why we don’t need rankings.

Conversation Tags: blogging, leaderboards, rankings

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