Social Media

Scribd is a cool service which acts as a YouTube for documents. To quote their FAQs:

Scribd lets you publish and discover documents online. It is like a big online library where anyone can upload. We make use of a custom Flash document viewer that lets you display documents right in your Web browser. There are all sorts of other features that make it easy and fun to publish, convert, embed, analyze, and read documents.

Part of the idea behind Scribd is that everyone has a lot of documents sitting around on their computers that only they can read. With Scribd we hope to unlock this information by putting it on the web.

Nice! It certainly gets over the problem of sharing stuff online which isn’t a photo or video, say.

What’s extra cool about this service is the fact that you don’t even have to log in to publish stuff, you can just chuck it up anonymously if you choose. OK, so it’s not a great choice for sensitive information, but if you want to be able to share a document across the web, and you aren’t too fussed who sees it, it’s a great quick and dirty solution.

Euan Semple on the advantages of social media for everyone:

What I find interesting is that some people leap to the conclusion (both for and against) that social computing in business is bottom up. It isn’t. It is potentially as liberating for the middle and the top as it is for anyone else.

How many managers do you know who feel really listened to by their staff at the moment?

How many managers feel really understood by their boss?

Wouldn’t even your control freaks benefit from a better platform on which to influence their organisation?

Lots of people are talking about Twitter right now, and a lot of them are pretty high profile and influential. Twitter is pretty big, and it’s going to get bigger.

What is it? The best way to describe it is as micro-blogging. You can only write posts of 140 characters or less. Hardly the medium for composing massive essays on the future of the web, then. But pretty useful if you just want to let people know where you are and what you are up to.

To make posting more accessible, you don’t have to visit the Twitter homepage everytime you want to post. Instead, you can activate your instant messaging client to send messages to Twitter. That 140 character limit is important too – because you can post via SMS as well.

Another cool feature is that Twitter works as a kind of social network – you can subscribe to other’s Twitterings, and they can yours. Everything is RSS-ified as well.

What are the applications here, though? Apart from inanely keeping people interested in the minutae of your life? Marc Orchant notes some benefits:

I’ve been using Twitter for a while now and must admit that it has stuck in a way many social tools have failed to for me. Part of the reason, I suspect, is that it’s very low effort. But more to the point, many of by online buddies are using the service as well and that makes it a very convenient way to keep up to date on what they’re doing.

Yes, there’s an inevitable noise level inherent in this sort of thing. And the volume has gone up (way up) since Scoble, Pirillo, and Rubel decided that Twitter was cool. But all in all, there’s little not to like and the conversations are often quite interesting.

It is in the conversations that the benefit lies for me. Massive, disparate communities could grow up around Twitter, making it a great platform for discussion and sharing.

Tags: twitter

Lots of people are talking about Twitter right now, and a lot of them are pretty high profile and influential. Twitter is pretty big, and it’s going to get bigger.

What is it? The best way to describe it is as micro-blogging. You can only write posts of 140 characters or less. Hardly the medium for composing massive essays on the future of the web, then. But pretty useful if you just want to let people know where you are and what you are up to.

To make posting more accessible, you don’t have to visit the Twitter homepage everytime you want to post. Instead, you can activate your instant messaging client to send messages to Twitter. That 140 character limit is important too – because you can post via SMS as well.

Another cool feature is that Twitter works as a kind of social network – you can subscribe to other’s Twitterings, and they can yours. Everything is RSS-ified as well.

What are the applications here, though? Apart from inanely keeping people interested in the minutae of your life? Marc Orchant notes some benefits: