January 17, 2008 at 12:51 pm · Filed under communication, community, media, social markers, sport
Blogs with cartoons, that’s the way it should be done, and nobody does it better than Hugh McLeod.
His post on “social markers” has some great insights. But it’s the example Hugh uses that really catches my attention. By using the Boston Red Sox, McLeod points out probably the greatest social marker on the planet. At least for the 50% of people with “Mr.” in front of their names. Sure beer and pussy are pretty big ones too for us males, but if sport wasn’t invented for this purpose someone like Mark Zuckerberg would have to round up some funding to do it.
So why do so many sports websites fail to get this? Sure there are some great community sports ventures, I’m thinking sportingo.com and the like, but big media hasn’t done a lot of note other than the standard web forums as seen on the likes of espn.com and skysports.com. These simply do not engage users the way social nets do. Sports news and analysis is piled high on the back of an 18 wheeler running red lights on a one way street.
This is something Setanta.com can build on. Right now Setanta is showing the best slate of big-time boxing fights the UK has seen in years. It’s a sport with renewed vigour because of the likes of Joe Calzaghe, Ricky Hatton and David Haye. And the boxing community has jumped in and are using any available means of communication to tell us how much they like it. We simply have to give them a better way of communicating this passion than web forums, reply boxes to articles and email addresses.
Great cartoon btw Hugh.
Posted by:
ds
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
