Archive for social networks
May 28, 2008 at 11:15 pm · Filed under McLuhan, community, social networks
A week ago I was on a web seminar call with Nick Carr, journalist, dismisser of corporate IT and author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the world from Google to Edison.
Having just finished reading said TBS I was looking forward to getting up close to Carr’s ideas. The seminar was hosted by Google but so what, a lot of things are hosted by Google. What transpired though was an unfortunate sales pitch for Google’s cloud services. You get nothing for nothing so not much complaining coming from keepfakingit, but it would have been good to see Carr get stuck into some of the real issues he addresses in TBS.
Issues such as: Thomas Schelling’s theory of self selecting neighbours as applied to online communities and social networks.
Schelling’s thesis was that a randomly placed collection of nodes in a network, when given the ability to move independently at random, will eventually choose more like minded neighbours. for nodes and network replace ethno-racial families in city boroughs to get a real flavour for the social theory here.
Carr agrees with Schelling and points to examples of this happening in real life online communities. He argues that whilst many “Net defenders” points at a rich tapestry of life and opportunities online, the reality is an even bigger ghettoization of thought than happens on our streets. Net communities are more homogeneous and polarized.
A great example is the inward looking nature of the political blogosphere in the US. A study of blog coverage of the 2004 presidential election found a clear split in red and blue blogs. Republicans talked about their issues, trashed Democratic policy, but for the most part only quoted and referenced their on blogs. And vice versa.
Crowd sourcing is another danger area. Take for example Amazon’s auto recommendations. I bought a Nick Cave album from Jeff Bezos six months ago so now every time I login to Amazon I get offered random selections from Nick and his Bad Seeds’ back catalogue. Not a bad service and it’s getting better all the time. Or is it? Is it not the case that what Amazon have created is the ultimate pseudo-AI feedback loop. Instead of refining, Amazon is narrowing my choices and the more I use it the narrower it gets. If I were to pay attention to Amazon I’d have all 14 Nick Cave albums in my collection within a few months but not a lot of other additions. And there’s only so much Anglo-Aussie guitar slinging anyone, or their neighbours, can take.
All this would seem to fly in the face of the logic that has made Amazon exhibit A in the case for a long tail economy but it is a social insight that must be paid attention.
This is happening throughout cyberspace. Is the internet becoming the world’s biggest feedback loop?
From first hand experience the online sports community follows similar patterns. The net has embellished and enhanced real world walls and barriers. Spurs and Arsenal fans rarely if ever congregate together. Even for an England match they’ll silo themselves. In fact it could be argued that in an online sports community the team allegiance is an even bigger social marker than it is in real life. And once marked, and outsider will find it even harder to integrate into a hostile neighbourhood. Ultimately in the case of the Premier League we’re left with 20 silos of fans who are even more divided online than in reality.
And as we spend more time online and when online in social networks the real life effects are tangible and numerous.
Of course this isn’t to say social networks are inherently bad, but as we start to port more of our real life tasks to networks (job hunting on LinkedIn, date hunting on Facebook, new band hunting on MySpace) we should be aware of the allies we’re running down. And there should be an onus on the gatekeepers of these alleys to clearly signpost them and keep them well lit.
Finally, this is something new media patron saint Marshall McLuhan warned against but ultimately was optimistic about in Understanding Media. On the subject of television he wrote that man rejects uniform integration because he becomes more deeply involved in the human condition…
The entire approach to these problems in terms of uniformity and social homogenization is a final pressure of the mechanical and industrial technology. Without moralizing it can be said that the electric age, by involving all men deeply in one another, will come to reject such mechanical solutions.
It is more difficult to provide uniqueness and diversity than it is to impose the uniform patterns of mass education; but it is such uniqueness and diversity that can be fostered under electric conditions as never before.
It’s up to us to make sure that we’re constantly pushing the uniqueness and diversity envelope.
Posted by:
Cian O'Donovan
February 26, 2008 at 8:47 pm · Filed under media, photography, social networks
I wrote about Getty Images being on the market last week. The price at the time was north of $1.6bn. The buyout price turns out to have been $2.4bn. The guys at Hellman $ Friedman clearly weren’t reading this website when they went all in. What were you thinking!?!
Here’s some pap from the press release. From the Getty side:
“We are enthusiastic about entering the next phase of Getty Images’ evolution by partnering with Hellman & Friedman as we continue to provide innovative offerings to businesses and consumers in a very dynamic digital media environment.”
And the H$F MD Andy Ballard said the private equity firm will work to “realise the full potential of [Getty's] traditional businesses while furthering the evolution of Getty Images into a global digital media company”.
Can’t wait to hear how they’re going to do that. It’s certainly not going to happen by them continuing the aggressive acquisition model that has seen them acquire 50 companies in a decade, but lose serious market value over the past two year.
These guys are going to have to get out amongst the publishers, both big and super-small, and come up with a new business model. Some suggestions:
How about working with Google to rev share the yield on pages that also display ad-sense. Let’s call this one photo-sense. If a photo really does add value to an article, some ad-creative or a feature piece let the traffic reward Getty.
On the other side, how about you let the amateurs (and pros) on Flickr tunnel through the Getty API and sell their wares straight to the world’s photodesks.
Posted by:
Cian O'Donovan
February 21, 2008 at 7:43 pm · Filed under community, magazines, media, social networks
What Fast Company are doing in terms of integrating amateur and pro content is pretty interesting. Right through their site they are erasing the boundaries between their highly paid internet A-Listers, Scoble, Israel etc, and their readers. And the truly amazing thing here is that Fast Company is at heart a magazine, the oldest of old media types.
One thing that makes this work is that the pro bloggers and writers are really pro. And the community editors are doing a good job of bringing the very best amateur content to the surface.
Jeff Jarvis weighs in with his ever definitive thoughts on FC and co here.
Posted by:
Cian O'Donovan
February 17, 2008 at 11:35 pm · Filed under photography, social networks
A lot of outlets reported last week that the sale of Getty Images has stalled. With the economies of so many countries hitting rough water right now that shouldn’t be a surprise. Getty’s market valuation is $1.6bn, that’s not an inconsiderable amount of money for a collection of photographs. But really that isn’t the real problem Getty face. The issue at hand, an old media dinosaur struggling to adapt to massive market changes.
It seems Getty has been around forever but a quick check of Wikipedia shows it’s only halfway through its second decade. But through non-stop acquisitions of smaller agencies it has become a giant in an industry now dominated by very few players, just themselves, Corbis and Jupiter Media. Sound familiar? It should. There’s a lot of comparisons that can be drawn with the music industry.
Like the big music players Getty spends a huge amount of time and money chasing real and potential customers for what they claim are copyright infringements. They send thousands of cease and desist letters to websites for unlawfully using Getty images every year. They follow these up with letters claiming damages.
Many of these abusers of Getty’s images are big and medium media. National papers, as well as professional organizations on a local level. But many are small time bloggers and social network users.
Now, I don’t think for a minute Getty are in the same league as Sony et al, suing 12 year olds for six figures worth of lost earnings. After all, Getty haven’t yet brought any of these cases to court. But they’re not a million miles off.
All this seems crazy. Let’s throw out the economic and legal arguments for a moment and just look at the actual process here. User/blogger goes to Getty, looking for an image for their purpose, let’s say they’re writing a recap on a Premier League football game. Before they even begin to search they have to decide if they want a Rights-managed (RM), Rights-ready (RR), or Royalty-free (RF) image. They then have to use a not-too-clearcut price calculator, finally downloading the image in a range of sizes that may or may not be what they need.
OK you’re saying, but the guys in Condé Nast and editors on newspaper photo-desks know their way around image libraries. Well sure they do, but what I’m driving at here is this question: are there more of them (professionals), and are they more valuable than the mass market for photos on the web. Especially in the context of social media, where image and identity differentiation are more important now than ever before. Is there a whole new mass market for Getty to tap? If so they are doing their hardest to ignore it, sticking to a web 1.0 or even pre web business model of central control and expensive limited access for customers.
In part II of this one I’ll take a look at some possible ways Big-Photo® can make money in mass market, and maybe draw up a comparison with the Photobuckets and Flickr’s of the world. And I haven’t even mentioned professional photographers yet.
photography
Posted by:
Cian O'Donovan
January 28, 2008 at 1:00 am · Filed under content, social networks
No meta data. No way of knowing who’s read a journal or paper before. Of knowing what they thought of it. At least unless you’re the librarian or have one of those special CIA computers that track books on particular subject matter like “The Idiots Guide to making Nuclear Fission in your living room”.
Ok, it’s too late on a Sunday night to go into this in depth, but the last post has me thinking of how we use libraries, or rather why I don’t. Why can’t I go down to Whitechapel public library and have the same experience I can have looking up a book on Amazon. Why can’t I have a better experience, after all, the public library doesn’t have the same commercial agenda as a publicly listed company. And an academic library is actually there to promote and encourage the transformation of information stored in books, to useable knowledge in someone’s head.
So why isn’t there a way to capture a reader’s thoughts as they’re reading or browsing. And of displaying this to the next 12 year old looking for Deathly Hallows. Or computational chemist looking for some shit hot molecular vibration modeling information. Libraries have to start organizing information differently. Turn the card files into networks. Two way networks and allow us to rank and annotate them. And communicate through them.
There was a time music was accessed by artist name, album name or song title only. Didn’t matter if that was online or in Virgin Megastore. MySpace changed that. Now we find new music through networks. There’s a lesson and a model there for our libraries.
David Weinberger’s “Everything Is Miscellaneous” dealt well with why this information is needed. Now we need an altruistic version of Mark Zuckerberg to build an Open Source network for Libraries worldwide to hook up to.
Posted by:
Cian O'Donovan
January 28, 2008 at 12:26 am · Filed under McLuhan, content, social networks
First off a full disclosure: I read John Naughton’s “The Networker” column in today’s Observer on printed news sheet version I bought from Hackney Road’s best minimarket, Ince. I’m sure Gutenberg would be delighted by that, as no doubt Mr. Ince was when I handed over my £1.90. A lot of money for something I’ve gone and re-read online for free. I think by admitting that I’m removing myself from the demographic this post is all about but such is life.
A couple of thoughts on Naughtons words, or more to the point, the study by the British Library and UCL on the information-seeking habits of young people he refers to. The report says amongst lots of other interesting things that we are spending as much time searching for information as consuming it. It also states that we’re not spending much time on the media once we find it. We read, then move on to the next object on the same horizontal plane.
What does this mean? It means two things: first Google, Amazon and iTunes have a ways to go in terms of getting us media easier and quicker. There’s a debate swirling at the moment about human search and what it has to offer a world in which Google are paying all the best engineers to make sure their algorithm stays in first place. Of course that assumes that finding the information is the end goal. Sometimes the search is as entertaining as the media at the end.
Take Twitter, it could be said that the micro blogging application/universe is really a passive search tool. I connect/follow all those I think will point me to useful data and hey presto, I get pointed to media I invariably find interesting. This is a form of human search. And because of the social nature of the search I enjoy the process as much, if not more than the end result. Marshall would be proud, in this case the medium really can be the message.
Second, isn’t this method of consumption very much like the way we use some social networks, and I’m thinking MySpace in particular. We connect, consume media that our new friend has posted, then move on. All the time we’re at the same rung of the hierarchical ladder.
Over the past 12 months many have looked at News Corps purchase of MySpace and wondered if maybe Rupert Murdoch in his senior years had shot his wad on Tom co. Facebook was the cool new thing led by a twenty-something year old with the best PR since Mother Theresa. But the Facebook fanboys have been quiet of late. MySpace has been getting some spring cleaning and the media-model it’s build on is looking sound enough.
So what does that add up to? Well at the end of their report the British Library team come to some conclusions. They say the days of paid-for library searches, additional pins and passwords to get into bespoke cataloguing software, and separate, non-connected databases for online and offline information are over. Users just couldn’t be bothered. Users want a one stop shop. Users want to use their Google toolbar. If libraries want to remain relevant they’re going to have to open up and let Google, MySpace or whoever it may be in.
Posted by: Cian O'Donovan
January 7, 2008 at 5:52 pm · Filed under Setanta, social networks, sport
After a couple of hours playing with the Setanta RSS feeds
everything’s ready to go. So go follow twitter.com/setanta for all your Premier League football news.
Nothing groundbreaking that other media outlets aren’t doing here, but wait until @setantacritic gets going…
Posted by:
Cian O'Donovan
January 6, 2008 at 10:07 pm · Filed under communication, community, content, media, politics, social networks, sport
Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer have put together an interesting collaborative media review tool over the past few days. It’s worth checking out at http://twitcrit.scripting.com/changes.html.
The technology is simple. Get a Twitter account, track down and start following @twitcrit, then message @twitcrit with any media review that takes your fancy. So far so easy if you can script and rummage around an api. But let’s step back from Jarvis’ critique of the latest Democratic prez debate (hey Jeff, why all the hating on you boy Barack?) and look at what this approach does to media interaction.
The wonderful thing about Twitter is that it is a nice simple lightweight medium for one to many broadcasting. Using a browser, a desktop app or a normal SMS from a phone, anyone can send 160 characters of love, hate or debate to those that “follow” their tweets. There’s no walled gardens (Facebook etc.) which means the user can get information in and and out of Twitter with the minimum of fuss.
Up until now Twitter has been great in situations such as conferences, where, for a short period of time only, people need a one-to-many communication structure. It also did a job during recent Californian fires. But all of these uses have been somewhat simplistic. There’s not a lot done with the data on either side of the transport. Message is entered into Twitter, Twitter sends it on it’s merry way, tweet is read at the other end. Bosh!
But how about we start some smart aggregation as Jarvis is suggesting. How about instead of treating each tweet as an isolated many-to-one message, we aggregate it with other likeminded tweets so that we have many many-to-one tweets all sorted and bunched on the receive side. We then start building a picture of what the crowd is thinking on any particular subject, and importantly (as this really comes into its own in live situations) we get a picture of how the crowd’s collective mind is changing as the debate/show/movie/game is progressing.
So how’s this different from those calls to action for standard text messages during X-Factor and the like? Twitter is the difference here. All of this messaging takes place within a defined (but relatively open) infrastructure. We can follow our tweets. We can reply to others and we can interact on a plethora of devices in different ways.
Two applications immediately jump to mind. Elections. Live sport. Howard Dean and the rise of the A-List blogger made blogging the big story of 2004. Can Twitter have an impact this time around?
As for sport, we have a bit longer to think about that, but at the very least a live play-by-play of the Super Bowl, or the multimillion dollar 30 second spots that surround it is a goer in a few weeks.
Now, one final issue. What and how does big media get a piece of this action?
Posted by:
ds
January 2, 2008 at 11:32 pm · Filed under McLuhan, community, media, social networks
In the week that Big Brother once again pokes its nasty head out of room 101 here’s some words from Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media pp 67:
Having extended or translated our central nervous system into the electromagnetic technology, it is but a further stage to transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well. Then, at least, we shall be able to program consciousness in such wise that it cannot be numbed nor distracted by the Narcissus illusions of the entertainment world that beset mankind when he encounters himself extended in his own gimmickry.
If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of informations seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?
Adding McLuhan’s two points together: if we get social we get rid of Big Brother and the rest of our navel gazing “reality culture”. Yet it could be argued that “reality” media is the apex of media development in the four decades since McLuhan wrote the above. It’s not an argument I’m going to make right now though. That’s one for Andy Duncan over at Channel 4.
Posted by:
ds
December 27, 2007 at 2:51 pm · Filed under brands, community, content, media, social networks
From Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture:
The specific content of gossip is often less important than the social ties created through the exchange of secrets between participants - and for that reason, the social functions of gossip hold when dealing with television content. It isn’t who you are talking about but who you are talking with that matters. Gossip builds common ground between participants, as those who exchange information assure one another of what they share. Gossip is finally a way of talking about yourself through critiquing the actions and values of others. As cyberspace broadens the sphere of our social interactions, it becomes even more important to be able to talk about peope we share in common via the media than people from our local community who will not be known by all of the participants in an online conversation. Into that space step the complex, often contradictory figures who appear on reality television.
Jenkins mentions this in relation to building community around reality TV. But really this applicable to all relationships and Jenkins brings it up after a discussion on building brand champions/agitators in the community.
So the questions arises, how can brands and media owners facilitate this gossip? Is this where they interact with the social networks or should they even be trying to own this or merely interact with it.
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Posted by:
ds
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