social media

“Half of Social Media Campaigns Will Flop” from CNET, includes this salient passage:

“(Businesses) will rush to the community and try to connect, but essentially they won’t have a mutual purpose, and they’ll fail,” Sarner said. By a “mutual purpose,” he means a way to serve both the company putting out the campaign and the audience interacting with it: finding that balance is not easy

To which I reply: “It needs to be a brilliant, delightful collaboration among all parties.”

Broader? No, Deeper

This week, CNN launches “The Forum,” or rather “connects The Forum to Facebook.”

“It allows us to reach our audience in the places where they’re aggregating their friends together and sharing their thoughts,” KC Estenson, the general manager of CNN.com, said.

The item in the NY Times, entitled “Seeking Broader Reach for Social Web Sites,” continues:

“Although nobody has figured out the secret sauce,” said Tom Newman, the president of Interactive One, a new digital subsidiary of Radio One, “enabling members to interact with each other and interact with professionally generated content is the future.”

[The new] networks are making profiles portable, meaning that users can carry their social network identity to third-party sites, said Adam Ostrow, the editor of the social networking blog Mashable.

The sites are “allowing users to bring their friends from the social networks they already use” he said.

Ultimately, the meta-social network is the Web. But when I can connect to anyone, anywhere… what will I do? After “Broader,” we’ll need to focus on “Deeper.”

two more launches

I’m pleased to announce the launch of the handsome new portal site for our newly integrated Woodworking community under the Popular Woodworking brand. We came a long way from those early diagrams revised again and again as new groups joined Steve Shanesy and his team at the table. As usual, there are too many helpers to thank by name (because I always hear back from those I forgot!), but personally I’d like to credit Sangeeta Roy for her professionalism and calm.

The second launch (and it’s a soft launch for the next week or so) is the updated PRINT RDA online database, which features over 18,000 images from 12 years of Regional Design Award issues. This year, we are emphasizing the online subscription (with a free 11th Year DVD as a bonus while inventory supplies last). Thanks here go to the Development team (with a shoutout to Ben Thompson) and, as always, to PRINT Editorial for the high-quality content.

more from “click” book

I finished the Tancer book earlier in the week and found two more passages that resonated with this semester’s theme. More importantly, though, I think I found the organizing principle for my paper: a personal history of net/web technology. I’m thinking that my own experiments in online communications over the past dozen years will help anchor and color what I say about the evolution of bulletin boards and newsgroups to 2.0 social networking. More soon.

Meanwhile, here are the Tancer passages:

For all the talk about how the Internet has enabled superior communication between us, it appears in some circumstances to actually reveal our insecurity, and in other cases, with its anonymity and its inability to judge, to provide us a way to avoid posing the most difficult questions or admitting our shortcomings face-to-face with our friends and relatives. And that leads to my question: Isn’t this technology, which has so much potential to bring us together as a society by improving our communication, in some cases actually isolating us? If we continue on the path of relying more on technology to help us answer the basic questions about why we fear things, how to get things done, and how to relate to other individuals, we will continue to drift further apart. But one thing is certain: As we turn to search engines to answer our deepes questions, we’ll continue to learn more about ourselves. (“What Are You Afraid Of? And Other Telling Questions)

And finally, looking ahead…

While Web 2.0 is still considered a buzzword, surprisingly the industry is already discussing Web 3.0. Web 2.0 has made incredible strides in just the last two years, taking us from a static medium to one that encourages all of us to participate, but the movement has also created unique challenges, primarily how to deal with the massive amount of content that is available. If I could place my vote for Web 3.0, the need I see created by the consumer-generated content coming from Web 2.0 is a method to filter all of that information for similarity of viewpoint, reputation, and accuracy. Until that occurs, all of this content faces the prospect of becoming a collection of noise that we may not bother to rely on in the future. (“Web Who.0″)

Amen.

failure of open systems

False Steve Jobs Heart Attack Report on CNN’s iReport Is a Failure of Open Systems

as a proponent of open systems, i felt it was only fair to post this opposing view

washpost’s political browser

The Publishing 2.0 blog caught on to the new Political Browser from the Washington Post. As the commenters on the blog point out, this is very much in line with what Scott Karp has long been calling for: a news filter to challenge Drudge (Karp is big on linking as an added value). The WashPost model is interesting but in my view it doesn’t move far enough toward audience participation.

When I queried Karp on that point, he replied: “Each of the sections of Political Browser have comments. And there is a section for “Reader Picks,” and a way for readers to suggest links.”

We’ll have to see whether that’s enough to maintain interest.