Dave

What is Social Media?

Robert Scoble asks ‘What is social media?’ Stowe Boyd answers:

  1. Social Media Is Not A Broadcast Medium: unlike traditional publishing — either online or off — social media are not organized around a one-to-many communications model.
  2. Social Media Is Many-To-Many: All social media experiments worthy of the name are conversational, and involve an open-ended discussion between author(s) and other participants, who may range from very active to relatively passive in their involvement. However, the sense of a discussion among a group of interested participants is quite distinct from the broadcast feel of the New York Times, CNN, or a corporate website circa 1995. Likewise, the cross linking that happens in the blogosphere is quite unlike what happens in conventional media.
  3. Social Media Is Open: The barriers to becoming a web publisher are amazingly low, and therefore anyone can become a publisher. And if you have something worth listening to, you can attract a large community of likeminded people who will join in the conversation you are having. [Although it is just as interesting in principle to converse with a small group of likeminded people. Social media doesn’t need to scale up to large communities to be viable or productive. The long tail is at work here.]
  4. Social Media Is Disruptive: The-people-formerly-known-as-the-audience (thank you, Jay Rosen!) are rapidly migrating away from the old-school mainstream media, away from the centrally controlled and managed model of broadcast media. They are crafting new connections between themselves, out at the edge, and are increasingly ignoring the metered and manipulated messages that centroid organizations — large media companies, multi national organizations, national governments — are pushing at them. We, the edglings, are having a conversation amongst ourselves, now; and if CNN, CEOs, or the presidential candidates want to participate they will have to put down the megaphone and sit down at the cracker barrel to have a chat. Now that millions are gathering their principal intelligence about the world and their place in it from the web, everything is going to change. And for the better.

Larsson’s Greatest Goal

Am not surprised at all about the impact Henrik Larsson has had at Man Utd since joining. You can’t help but feel it was a shame that he spent so much of his footballing life in the backwater that is Scottish football.

I found a YouTube video of one of my favourite ever goals – the diving header Larsson scored for Sweden against Bulgaria. Great stuff.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGF4dxNym80]

Removing Links – a Blogger’s Obligation?

I have had a few comments in the 2,000 odd Bloggers post requesting that links to their blogs are removed. These seems to be for two main reasons:

  1. The bloggers never asked to be involved in the project (as, incidentally, I didn’t)
  2. They are worried that Google will see it as a big link farm and punish them accordingly

I haven’t got round to removing the links, largely out of laziness rather than any objection to the request.

But it set me thinking – does anyone have a right not to be linked to? The 2,000 Bloggers thing is an exception, given the numbers involved, but can people legitimately request that a link to them from a blog – or any website – be removed?

Making Search Humane

Having added the various sets of new links to LGSearch, aside from keeping the list of links up-to-date, I think LGSearch is pretty much fully developed with what’s available from Google Coop right now.

I still wonder, though, whether there should be a further way of presenting information found on the web with a human element of quality control, whether by rating web pages or documents as to their usefulness or some other means.

I don’t think I could build this sort of functionality into LGSearch itself, but it could be stored in a subsite off there easily enough.

I had a go previously with an open source package called (I think) Scuttle which was in effect a de.icio.us clone but which lacked robust user accounts and spam filtering, with disastrous results. Another option might be to use Pligg, which is a digg clone, which features accounts and voting on links and might be the better option.

I’d like to know whether people here can see the value in having a human-determined list of good quality web based material that could be searched, and what ideas people have with regard to how it might work, whether using Pligg or not.

Also, would people in any great numbers use such a service? I think the benefits are significant, but you need people in early to make that obvious.

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