Sportscaster Len Berman on his move from old media to new media.
Category Archives: Social Media
The Facebook Effect
The sub-title of David Kirkpatrick’s book is, “The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World.” I like the idea of connecting the world and I’m finding Kirkpatrick’s book a real page-turner. While I can’t seem to fit Facebook into my online life, I want to understand it’s brief history while watching it being made.
UPDATE: I’ve finished the book and rank it among the most interesting I have read this year. Or, in a long time. David Kirkpatrick had me on the edge of my seat from cover to cover. After the jump are some excerpts that got some highlighter.
The Facebook Effect happens when the service puts people in touch with each other, often unexpectedly, about a common experience, interest, problem or cause.” pg 7
As Facebook grows and grows past 500 million members,one has to ask if there may not be a macro version of the Facebook Effect.Could it become a factor in helping bring together a world filled with political and religious strife and in the middle of environmental and economic breakdown? A communications system that includes people of all countries, all races, all religions, could not be a bad thing, could it? pg 9
“The most important investment theme for the first half of the twenty-first center will be the question of how globalization happens. If globalization doesn’t happen, then there is no future for the world. The way it doesn’t happen is that you have escalating conflicts and wars, and given where technology is today, it blows up the world. There’s no way to invest in a world where globalization fails.” — Peter Thiel pg 9
Were the growth rates of both Facebook and the Internet to remain steady, by 2013 every single person online worldwide would be on Facebook. pg16
“I think what we’re doing is more interesting than what anyone else is doing, and that this is just a cool thing to be doing. I don’t spend my time thinking about (how to exit).” — Mark Zuckerberg pg 139
“The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end and pretty quickly.” — MZ pg 199
Facebook is founded on a radical social premise — that an inevitable enveloping transparency will overtake modern life. For better or worse, Facebook is causing a mass resetting of the boundaries of personal intimacy. pg 200
Facebook now sits squarely at the center of a fundamental realignment of capitalism. Marketing cannot be about companies shoving advertising in people’s faces, not because it’s wrong but because it doesn’t work anymore.” pg 263
In seventeen countries around the world, more than 30 percent of all citizens — not Internet users but citizens — are on Facebook. — Facebook Global Monitor pg 275
Imagine you’re at a football game and your mobile device shows you which of your friends are also in the stadium — perhaps even where they’re sitting. Maybe it could tell you who in your section of the stands has attended exactly the same games as you in the past. Or who is a fan of the same teams as you. This may seem cool to many users. To others it may feel Orwellian. pg 316
Facebook might even begin to function as a sort of auxiliary memory. As you walk down a street you could query your profile to learn when you were last there, and with whom. Or a location-aware mobile device could alert you to the proximity of people you’ve interacted with on Facebook, and remind you how. pg 317
(Mark Zuckerberg) wants to rule not only Facebook, but in some sense the evolving communications infrastructure of the planet. pg 31
The closer Facebook gets to achieving its vision of providing a universal identity system for everyone on the Internet, the more likely it is to attract government attention. Facebook could have more data about you that governments do. pg 328
“Facebook Connect is basically your passport — your online passport. The government issues passports. Now you have somebody else worldwide who is issuing passports for people. That is competitive, there’s no doubt about it. But who says issuing passports is government’s job? This will be global citizenship.” — Yuri Milner, Russian FB investor pg 328
The average age of (Facebook’s) 1,400 employees is thirty-one. pg 331
Facebook is changing our notion of community, both at the neighborhood level and the planetary one. It may help us to move back toward a kind of intimacy that the ever-quickening pace of modern life has drawn away from. pg 332
“Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man — the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of society.” — Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) pg 332
Facebook aims to assemble a directory of the entire human race, or at least those parts of it that are connected to the Internet. pg 333
Google Buzz Redux
Reply
I’ve been (unconsciously) dividing web stuff into two piles. Something that has a little shelf-life (to me or others), and stuff that does not.
Increasingly, the first group is being made up of things I have written or created. These usually get posted here at smays.com. In the days before YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and all the rest… pretty much everything was posted here because there was nowhere else to park them. (This became very clear to me during my recent weeks-long clean-up.)
The second pile really never makes it to pile status. It’s commonly referred to as a “stream.” Bits and pieces that flow by but don’t warrant saving in the sense described above. In fact, tags and permalinks make it easy to find just about anything that drifts by.
There’s no real point to this post other than I’ve been thinking about this, so I write about it.
I’ve added Google Buzz back to my Gmail page and think I might make it the stream into which my other little tributaries flow. It really seems well-suited for this. If you’re a regular here and use Buzz as well, let me know.
I won’t abandon the blog because I have a good bit invested in it and it has more of a permanent quality to it. A place that I own and control.
Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare Time Revolution
“Someone born in 1960 has watched something like 50,000 hours of television already. Fifty thousand hours—more than five and a half solid years.”
Sweet Mother of God! I can tack another 7 or 8 years on that. That daunting stat is from an article in latest issue of WIRED Magazine in which Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink share some thoughts on what Mr. Shirky calls the “cognitive surplus”:
“Television was a solitary activity that crowded out other forms of social connection. But the very nature of these new technologies fosters social connection—creating, contributing, sharing. When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same. When someone buys a computer or mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one. This lets ordinary citizens, who’ve previously been locked out, pool their free time for activities they like and care about. So instead of that free time seeping away in front of the television set, the cognitive surplus is going to be poured into everything from goofy enterprises like lolcats, where people stick captions on cat photos, to serious political activities like Ushahidi.com, where people report human rights abuses.”
“Cognitive Surplus.” I love the very idea of that. I’m not sure I would be a better person had I spent those 50,000+ hours blogging instead of watching Maverick, but I would be different. And if I had to choose today, it would be an easy call. Come to think of it, I am choosing.
Social Media Revolution 2
The secret to Farmville’s popularity
“The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness.[11] We playFarmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.” — From an essay by y A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz
I’ve never played Farmville. Or any other Facebook game. I don’t have a Facebook account anymore and find myself unable to explain why I do not. So it’s hardly fair to use this thoughtful essay as an explanation. But the very essence of Facebook seems to be social obligation. I hate obligations and avoid them wherever possible.
Facebook/Farmville fans can tell me where Mr. Liszkiewicz misses the mark with his essay.
Why radio news guys don’t do social
Papper: Radio News Does not Make Use of Social Media from Poynter Institute on Vimeo.
From Mashable: “Although Facebook and Twitter are popular with TV stations, only 27% of radio newsrooms use Twitter and 1% have a Facebook page. The survey’s conductor, Robert Papper of Hofstra University, said the contrast in usage is due to staff size. “If you had a staff of three or more, you were involved in a number of social networking things. If you did not hit that magic number you were not involved.” He explains why radio stations do not participate more in social media in the video clip above.”
“Software Is Media”
As software has moved from running on local machines to running in the browser a number of important things have happened. One of the most important changes is software has become media.
Like other forms of media, software produces an emotional reaction when we use it. Software needs to have a “voice.” It needs to be more than a simple utility. We need to feel something when we use software. The best software does this incredibly well.
Like media, the interfaces that present software to us need to be stylized, designed, and elegant. Software can be beautiful and the best software is beautiful.
And like media, the most important measurement for software today is the number of engaged users. The more engaged users a piece of software has, the more impactful it can be.
Once we’ve begun to treat some of the software in our lives as media, we are going to treat all the software in our lives as media. And the software that is ugly, void of emotion and voice will not work as well for us. So I believe all software is media and will be seen as such by its users.
Why Twitter is worth the time
I can’t believe I’m still having to make this case. But I can throw a rock and hit half a dozen people in our company who –at the mention of Twitter– will huff, “I don’t care about what some stranger had for lunch!”
I think most of them know that something more important is going on but they don’t want to admit they might be wrong on the topic. And because they are NOT part of “the conversation,” they don’t see tweets like these on the Twitter page of Mark Neumann, a candidate for governor in Wisconsin, where our company operates a news network.
Neuman has almost 3,600 followers and some of them –who might not otherwise– might hit the link to our site to hear the interview with their guy.
PS: This is the kind of blindness that brings out the smart ass in me.
A “teaching moment” or Big Brother?
YouDiligence.com is the brain-child of Kevin Long. According to a blog post on ESPNB’s Jock-O-Sphere, the service works like this:
“…for a small fee — $1,250 a year for 50 athletes or less, or $5,000 a year for 500-750 athletes (described as pennies a day for each athlete) — schools are essentially given a broad-scale monitoring system for their athletes’ Twitter, MySpace and Facebook pages. Enter in the keywords you’d prefer not to show up in your student-athletes’ stream — these can range from curse words to alcohol and drug references to just about anything; it’s entirely customizable — and the instant any of these buzz words are posted to a student-athletes’ social media stream, administrators can be alerted via e-mail and a detailed account of the instance is added to a spreadsheet log … instead of online a few hours later on a blog or newspaper’s Web site, which could be potentially damaging to the program.”
This is a really interesting post (by Ryan Corazza, a freelance writer and Web designer based in Chicago), whether you’re in the world of college athletics or not. Would you (would I) be okay with your company monitoring what you post on social sites? Are you sure they are not? Would it make a difference in what you post?
Disclosure: At least one of the schools mentioned in the post is a “university partner” of the company I work for, Learfield.
For the record, I don’t see anything wrong with schools keeping an eye on what their student athelets are saying/writing. I mean, it’s out there. You should assume everyone is reading every word you post.
If you feel that your school is censoring your freedom of speech, then it’s decision time.