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We might never know if a Twitter feed purporting to be by a woman left behind on her anniversary
weekend by her SXSW-bound husband is real. But it's very funny stuff.
Glenn Beck has repeatedly attacked the concept of social justice and churches that promote it,
asserting that it is "code language for Marxism" and warning that "when you see those words,
run." In fact, numerous churches and religious faiths, as well as prominent religious scholars,
espouse social justice, including the Catholic Church, the Conservative and Reform movements of
Judaism, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Social justice is a tenant of mainstream faiths and has been promoted by respected religious
scholars
The Catechism of the Catholic Church deals specifically with "Social
Justice." From the section of
its website devoted to "Social Justice," detailing positions on topics such as "Judaism
and Health Care Reform" and "Jewish
Community Budget Priorities." ("We have long been involved with the annual budget process,
advocating for policies and programs that assist the most vulnerable people in our nation.") And
the Union for Reform Judaism's Commission on
Social Action "seeks to apply the insights of Jewish tradition to such domestic and
foreign issues as human rights, world peace, civil liberties, religious freedom, famine, poverty,
intergroup relations, as well as other major societal concerns"; its website cites a statement by
Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform
Judaism, that "the thread of social justice is so authentically and intricately woven into
the many-colored fabric we call Judaism that if you seek to pull that thread out, the entire
fabric unravels."
National Association of Evangelicals promotes call to "work toward social
justice." In presenting its Charitable Choice 2000 program, the National
Association of Evangelicals, a speech on
the topic of social justice, King stated: "I think with all of these challenges being met and
with all of the work, and determination going on, we will be able to go this additional distance
and achieve the ideal, the goal of the new age, the age of social justice." He also said: "It is
tragic how individuals will often use religion and the Bible or misuse religion and the Bible to
crystallize a status quo and justify their prejudices." The U.S. government website about the
federal Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service 10/5/09]
Beck declares that phrases "lives in the real world," is "compassionate," and
"understands social justice" are really "code language for Marxism." While
discussing President Obama's remarks about what traits he would look for in a Supreme Court
justice, Beck stated on his radio show:
BECK: They're now talking about making sure that they can correct -- progressive phrase --
"social justice." That does not come from the bench.
[...]
BECK: Barack Obama comes out and says he wants somebody who lives in the real world, somebody who
is compassionate, and somebody that is -- that understands social justice. That's code language
for Marxism. It's called, to quote Hillary Clinton, that very American, early 20th century
progressivism, where they did a loophole and a couple of somersaults to deny that they were
progressives, to show the difference was enlightenment. Progressive is enlightened. Marxism is at
the barrel of a gun. That's the difference to these guys. Really? Yeah, you're telling me that
you're not doing things through the barrel of a gun? You're gonna have to. They're going to have
to. You don't need enlightenment. Justice is blind. [The Glenn Beck
Program, 5/4/09]
Beck clarifies stance on social justice
Beck: Social justice in which "you empower yourself to go out and help the poor" is
permissible. On his March 12 radio show, Beck reacted to criticism by the
Sojourners' Wallis:
BECK: So now, Jim Wallis comes out, and he has started to attack me personally because I have
said on this program, "social justice" is code language -- code language -- for big government. I
want you to understand. When it comes to your church, if your church is preaching social and
economic justice, you better do some digging and find out exactly what that means. Because if
that means big government, if that means yes, you need to support these big government programs,
you don't have a church. What you have is an organ of the government. You have the Anglican
Church over in England, which we left. You have the Church of England.
Separation of church and state. It's weird that I have to argue with someone like Jim Wallis the
separation of church and state. Now, if your church is talking about social justice in the way
that you empower yourself to go out and help the poor, well then that's exactly what Jesus or
Allah or Buddha or whoever it is, would like you to do.
GRAY: Yeah, they're trying to make this an anti-poor thing. They're trying to make this that
you're against the poor?
BECK: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
GRAY: I mean that's just ridiculous.
BECK: And so now, they're ramping up a boycott on Christians to boycott our show. Oh, really?
Look out, here it comes again, gang. The smear. [The Glenn Beck Program, 3/12/10]
Beck: "There's a lot of people that will say 'social justice,' and some people don't mean
Marxism, but others do." Also, on his March 12 radio show, Beck stated:
BECK: The other thing they do is they always change and confuse the language. Political
correctness comes from the progressive movement. Change and confuse the language. Look at this
case. Social justice. There's a lot of people that -- who say "social justice" and some people
don't mean Marxism. But others do, and you need to know, which is it?
The people who brought us, you know, the language into the political religious sphere were
looking for ways to bring progressivism into the church. It continues today. Where's black
liberation theology come from? Black liberation theology -- Jeremiah Wright's theology -- comes
from South America. The church had the power down there. The church was all-important. What the
church said, people listened to. It wasn't the government, because the government was always
corrupt. People had faith in the church, and they knew they could never have a communist
revolution if it wasn't for the church. If the church wasn't into it, so what did they do? They
came up with black liberation theology. It's Marxism. And they got it -- spooned it in -- to the
Christians, piece by piece. Just little bit -- progress. Little by little spoon feed it to people
until the church would decay and collapse on itself.
Why do people in Europe not go to church? Because it's one with the government. It always has
been. You must protect your church and make sure that it is not an organ for the government. That
doesn't mean that you don't fight and protest, and you know, your church when it comes to a moral
issue like abortion, that you don't stand up and fight for it. But you don't become one with the
government. Separation of church and state. Progressives have been waiting for this moment for a
hundred years. [The Glenn Beck Program, 3/12/10]
A few years back, I wrote about why we had found full text RSS feeds to be much more
powerful and useful than truncated RSS feeds. The reason that many sites push truncated feeds is
the belief that it will force people to click through, and the ads on the webpage are worth a lot
more than the ads found in RSS feeds. But it's a short-sighted view. Because what it's really doing
is trying to push readers to do something that they don't want to do. Many of them use RSS readers
because it's a more convenient way to organize and read the news they want. And, we found that by
making life easier for our readers, we were able to get a lot more readers, and
then that allowed us to put in place a better business model that didn't rely on trying to trick or
force them to click through. This is the same debate as the debate over ad blockers. It's a
question of whether or not you respect your community and want to add value for them, or
if you just view them as dollar signs and feel you need to force or guilt them into doing stuff
they don't want.
The full text vs. partial text debate is flaring up again as Gawker Media has just shifted all its blogs to partial feed
blogs. From my standpoint, this makes it significantly less likely that I'll link to them, because
I'm less likely to actually read through their posts to see if they're worthwhile. I'll stay
subscribed, but whereas in the past I might read through an entire post before deciding it was
worth writing about, now I'll only have a snippet to make that decision -- and that makes it that
much less likely that I'll find their posts worth linking to. And that seems like a mistake.
Matt McAllister from The Guardian responded to Felix Salmon's blog post (the one linked above), and
noted that when The Guardian moved to full text RSS feeds they saw their web traffic go up significantly. Admittedly, there may be other
factors involved here, but it's yet another data point in favor of being open and making it
easier for your audience and your community to engage.
What I think both this and the whole ad blocking discussion come down to is a question of how
different sites look at and treat their audiences. If they feel they need to take a short-term view
and "monetize" every interaction with them, or if they realize that there's a long-term value in
building up a strong and loyal relationship. It's also quite similar to the constant debates over
the music industry -- where the music industry feels that it wants to get paid pennies every time
you hear a song. That's the short-term "we have to monetize every use" view, compared to the longer
term view, which recognizes that free songs and building up a relationship between the fans and the
musicians can lead to something much more lucrative that benefits everyone.
But the key point is made by Salmon in his blog post about this. Others like to accuse Salmon and
myself of supporting things like full text RSS feeds, letting people use ad blockers and being
against paywalls as "a sense of entitlement." Of course, since I'm on the publishing side of
things, I don't see how that actually applies to me since I'm defending the rights of the community
of readers over short-sited publisher decisions. But the real reason why we think these (well, for
RSS and paywalls -- I don't know Salmon's view on ad blocking) things are important to understand
is that taking the simplistic view of trying to maximize short-term monetization is a bad
business decision in the long term: At heart, my argument for full RSS feeds is
similar to my argument against a NYT paywall, and neither argument has anything to do with a sense
of entitlement on my part. Instead, both are simply bad business decisions. If you truncate your
RSS feeds, you'll get less traffic than you had with full feeds, and you'll alienate an important
minority of your audience. And if you implement a paywall, the increase in subscription revenues
will fail to offset the decrease in ad revenues, even as you'll alienate lots of your audience. So
neither makes commercial sense. Exactly. All of these are decisions that don't take into
account the bigger picture or understand the overall dynamic of a community. They assume that each
transaction is a single impact: if this user doesn't "pay" a site now, it's "lost revenue." But it
doesn't take into account that that user might "pay" in other means -- via a comment or by passing
it along to others. And what if that individual is influential and passes it on to a lot of people?
It blocking off that possibility because that individual doesn't "pay" by ad or paywall seems
incredibly short sighted and quite disrespectful of a community.
[SXSW] Today, Nikon, in partnership with Yfrog, launched an image sharing website where bloggers
armed with Nikon cameras will upload their photos and videos from around Austin during the
SXSW conference. The Nikon/Yfrog site is live since noon CT, and you’ll be able
to see pictures from Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan), Jeff Pulver (@jeffpulver), Sarah Austin
(@pop17), Brooklyn Vegan (@brooklynvegan) and the winner of the Nikon Film Festival, Marko
Slavnic. SXSW attendees can participate as well, any images and videos uploaded through Twitter
using the #SXSW, #SXSWpics or #SXSWpix hashtags will automatically be shared through the gallery.
Additionally, the #SXSW Twitter feed is displayed on the side bar, making the Nikon/Yfrog site a
great place to get the SXSW news.
Real-tme feed publishing startup
Superfeedr has quietly turned on automatic location data in
the feeds it republishes from around the web, we confirmed with the company today. Founder Julien
Genestoux explained the feature using Twitter as his example, but the same content extraction and
analysis is being done on all kinds of feeds run through the service.
"If you turn geolocation on in Twitter, then your feed will include geolocation in your Tweets
and we'll just push that through," he said. "If you don't do that but you Tweet about Austin, we
will deliver the latitude and longitude for Austin in the XML." In other words, developers
building apps on top of Superfeedr's real-time feeds will now know programmatically what
geographic locations are discussed in the content coming through the feeds. Future feature?
Subscribing to content by location instead of by feed URL.
Sponsor
Genestoux says he is using a number of 3rd party services to extract this data, including the
Yahoo Placemaker API. Along with this
location data, the service also offers automatic language identification and is working on entity
extraction and sentiment analysis.
The prospect of subscribing to content by location instead of by feed URL is an exciting one,
though Genestoux says he's just beginning to develop it. Could that facilitate a location data
stream that crosses and goes beyond the siloed location based social networks so widely discussed
these days? We suspect that it could.
Superfeedr could be described as "FeedBurner 2.0" - for a more real-time and meta-data savvy web.
The company was funded this
Fall by real-time incubator Betaworks and media mogul
Mark Cuban. Betaworks announced
today that it has raised $20 million more to build out its portfolio of companies like
Superfeedr, Bit.ly, Tweetdeck, Tumblr and more.
Another month, another visit to Silicon Valley – my home away from home – and, with
it, another visit to the Googleplex in search of insights. This time I chatted with Karen Wickre, who oversees
Google’s growing armada of blogs and Twitter embassies.
Google, perhaps more than any other company, has a culture of openness. Often a company’s
culture shapes its communications strategy. And that’s certainly the case with Google. So
social media comes naturally.
Karen first launched Google’s corporate blog back in 2004. Today the company has digital
embassies for virtually every product. This armada spans dozens of blogs, Twitter profiles, YouTube and more recently Facebook.
Back when the Official
Google Blog launched, posts were conservative. Wickre, a former tech journalist, told me
over breakfast that early items were almost whimsical, focusing on the food at
Google (which I can assure you, rocks).
While the blog still features some trivial fare, no one could call it – or any of
Google’s other digital assets – a light weight. In fact, the opposite is true. Google
uses its armada to take on hard issues likeChina, public policy and privacy. And
it largely eschews press releases, unless they are financial or material to shareholders.
While Wickre doesn’t oversee all these embassies, she serves as a beacon for the teams that
manage them – subject matter experts like product managers, engineers and marketers. Like a
good coach, she provides templates and best practices and answers questions as they come up.
Wickre, in the meantime, is turning her attention to how the company can strategically use its
own Buzz product.
Wickre is one of an emerging breed of professionals that companies hire to manage/lead companies
down the social media path. Not nearly enough credit goes to people like her. These individuals
are often the ones who have to effect change – with the help of partners like us.
Google, perhaps more than any other company, is a model of social media success. One reason is
that they tap into the three key trendsthat I wrote about earlier. They are real-time,
visible and data driven. However, what they do best is embrace using multiple messages, formats
and stories.
I subscribe to a fire hose feed for all the Google blogs as well as their Twitter and Facebook
embassies. On any given day you will find a wealth of news, tips and stories that are tailored to
specific interests. Only care about Gmail? There’s an embassy for that. How
aboutpolicy? That
too.
However, Google’s social media success goes beyond just having lots of teams engaged. Each
venue slants the content to the reader/viewer’s needs and utilizes different formats
– short form, long form, video, images and more. The end result is that Google creates
massive surface area that make them hard to miss in an age where information choices are
ubiquitous.
The takeaway here for companies is that, when possible, they should consider creating several
blogs and – more likely – digital embassies inside existing communities. One Twitter
presence might not be enough. The same goes with Facebook. (Note that this is just one approach
and not the only one. Some advocate centralizing content into a single place. There are pros/cons
to each.)
Businesses today need to consider having multiple streams that are mapped to high priority
interests. This creates surface area and lots of entry points for stakeholders to get engaged.
What’s more, the content should be “hand crafted“- eg tailored to each community. And these spaces should be managed
by identifiable employees who are subject matter experts.
This is how I am tailoring my own content. I use Twitter for sharing/conversing around links and news. My
new Facebook
community is for discussions and sharing insights and observations. While my Posterous blog site is for
essays, videos and the occasional digital doodles.
Now scaling might intimidate some. According to a recent Smartbrief survey, time is the chief obstacle to engaging in
social communities. However, if a business makes social media a team sport, as Google does,
anyone can succeed.
Greetings humans! If you've seen The Engadget Show, then you've been privy to some
pretty incredible performances by a group of musicians and artists who eschew familiar instruments
in exchange for hacked and modded handheld gaming devices. We grabbed our cameras and got a brief
look at the history of the chiptunes movement, the difference between Game Boy music and music from
Game Boys, and most importantly, how these artists and visualists make it all happen. Kick back and
take a look at the segment (featuring the likes of Glomag,
Paris, and Outpt) --
you'll be glad you did!
Special guests: Glomag, Paris, and Outpt
Produced and Directed by: Chad Mumm Executive Producer: Joshua Fruhlinger Editedby: Michael Slavens Opening titles by:Julien Nantiec
[iTunes]
Subscribe to the Show directly in iTunes (M4V).
[Zune]
Subscribe to the Show directly in the Zune Marketplace (M4V).
[RSS M4V] Add the Engadget Show feed (M4V)
to your RSS aggregator and have it delivered automatically.
Execs Downplay Web Video Threat; Cablevision, Rovi and Disney execs dismissed
cord cutting fears at the 2010 Media Summit in New York. (Light
Reading)
Pick Your Favorite Rev3 Shows & Create a Personalized Feed; Revision3
viewers can now generate personalized RSS feeds, combining new episodes from shows like
Diggnation and Film Riot to one single feed. (Revision3 Blog)
Disney and Starz Entertainment Extend Pay TV Output Agreement; Disney will
continue to supply Starz with theatrical releases from Walt Disney Pictures, Walt Disney
Animation Studios, Disney-Pixar, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures and Marvel Entertainment
through 2015. (press release)
Recognizing Courage, Securing Online Freedom; Google celebrates Reporters
Without Borders’ World Day Against Cyber Censorship on YouTube. (Official Google Blog)
Revenge of the Cable Guys; Business Week devotes this week’s cover story
to cable’s fight against cord cutting and over-the-top competition. (Business
Week)
Comedy Time Teams with American Greetings for E-Card Line; studio focused on
short-form comedic content for mobile devices aims to bring some fun to St. Patrick’s Day
and other e-card-worthy occasions. (emailed release)
We’ve written about FunMobility’s nifty picture
messaging app for the iPhone and Android,
called FunMail, that allows users to blasts their text into the application, which then breaks
down whatever the user typed for context and places fun graphics with your original text. Now,
FunMobility has caught the Twitter bug and is launching FunTweet, a web service which turns any Twitter stream into visual
messages that are related to the text.
Similar to FunMail, FunTweet will turn text in Tweets into a matching image. On FunTweet’s
site, you sign in with your Twitter credentials and the service will draw your Tweets from your
Twitter homepage feed and display each tweet as a FunMail image on FunTweet. Users can also enter
a @UserName, a HashTag or a Subject as well to the images. If you like the image FunTweet picked,
you can publish the Tweet to your Twitter account. If you don’t like the image, click
“Try Again” and you can choose from other images. For example, if you tweet about
writing a story or reading a book, then FunTweet will come up with images that match
“story” – a book, a magazine, a typewriter, or a pen.
FunMobility is hoping FunTweet can be a display tool for parties, conferences and other
gatherings where live stream messages may be projected. I find myself wishing I could include my
own pictures into my FunTweets so I’m hoping the site will soon include that functionality.
FunMail for the iPhone has gained a bit of traction in a short amount of time with 100,000
downloads since its launch in November. So FunTweet could gain a loyal following a fun tool to
spice up Tweets. TwitSig and SayTweet also allow you to make images from Tweets.
Chris Allison is a social
media strategist at NeboWeb, where he helps
clients make the most of the social web. You can follow him on Twitter as the voice behind
@Neboweb.
As social media marketing becomes more widely practiced, the questions of the day are less
frequently focused on the benefits of social media and more often focused on its implementation.
Justifying social media to superiors is no longer the marketer’s biggest challenge.
Instead, marketers are being challenged not on the potential benefits, of which there is ample
evidence, but rather on how to get those benefits. Where to start?
Social Media as a Catalyst
With this challenge in mind, it’s vital to understand that social media is neither the end
nor the beginning of any marketing effort. Rather, social media is a catalyst that works
most effectively when it is finely woven into the fabric of a brand’s other activity.
When putting together a puzzle, it helps to take a look at the big picture on the front of the
box. Likewise, when putting together a social media strategy it’s necessary to zoom out a
little and examine how social media will fit into the context of your other business activities.
Below are four pieces of the puzzle that brands can mesh with social media to maximize results.
1. Cause Marketing
The socialization of the web has made it evident that brands that want to succeed online must
feel and act like humans, not like desperate, distant corporations. Accordingly, some social
media marketers have taken on the role of teaching brands how to be human: don’t say stupid
things, don’t feed the trolls, and don’t dominate the conversation
– pretty fundamental stuff that somehow got lost during the incorporation
process.
However, guidelines for not screwing up aren’t enough for brands to really benefit from
social media. Until you bring something interesting to the table — something that inspires
passion, laughter, or curiosity — nobody will care if you have a Twitter account.
One of the most effective, simple ways to get people to care about what you’re doing is to
do something worth caring about: get behind a cause. Brands have been benefiting from cause
marketing for a long time, but the catalytic nature of social media has brought three additional
benefits to the cause marketing table:
Access to increased publicity
The ability to be a vocal activist instead of a silent philanthropist by joining
conversations
The ability to bring customers into the support process
Pepsi is one of the best examples of a brand that has recently seized the opportunity to leverage
a mix of social media and cause marketing. Their Refresh Everything project incorporates votes from users to decide where
Pepsi will donate their funds as
well as a variety of other simple social media features: single sign-on, a Facebook Fan Page, and a blog.
By involving users with a voting process, Pepsi has effectively done three things. First, instead
of just doing good themselves, they’ve helped their customers do good, which helps
establish a very positive brand association. They have also created a situation that will compel
users to share with their friends (in order to accrue votes for the cause of their choice).
Finally, they have built a feedback mechanism that will ensure the causes they support are also
the most popular among their customers (which is great PR).
Brands can benefit greatly from integrating social media with cause marketing, and they can learn
a lot about how to get started from the tactics that Pepsi has used.
Isolating the impact of social media to the web is an easy mistake to make. It seems natural
enough to meet online goals with online activity, but the tangible world of physical objects,
locations, and events can often provide a compelling medium to drive fans to engage with you
online, or vice versa, you can use your social media efforts to drive activity to guerrilla
marketing events like Red Bull’s stash, or simply to brick and mortar stores.
Integrating your social media efforts with real products, store locations, or activities is an
important way to acknowledge that you care about the complete customer experience, and that
you’re not just in the social media space because it’s popular.
Some of the most successful campaigns, such as Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice, have been focused on
driving the purchase of offline products. Similarly, customer support profiles like Comcast Cares would be much less successful
if they didn’t have the power to influence real offline change by working with customer
support representatives that can help customers on location.
On the surface, social media may look like a simple set of social networks that people use to
communicate, but when marketers look deeper they find that it presents a whole new venue for
empowering all of their existing services, online as well as off.
3. Media Coverage
Though citizen journalism and user generated content have proven to be extremely powerful
(Iran’s election
crisis, Barack Obama’s massive online get out the vote efforts, etc.), it is important
to remember that brands can still benefit enormously from traditional media coverage.
When it comes to social media, or any marketing for that matter, brands must find ways to
leverage all of their assets in the same direction. Just like the offline world can easily be
used for online gain, so too can traditional media be leveraged in the new media space.
Amit Gupta, founder of several wonderful startups like
Photojojo and Jelly, sheds some light on how his businesses have benefited
from traditional coverage:
Mainstream press is harder to get, but still drives significant awareness, especially among
‘everyday’ people who aren’t spending all day on the internet. And the names of
old media carry
significant cache, enough to drive double-digit increases in conversion rates simple because of
the credibility their names lend.
I exchanged e-mails with Amit and he was kind of enough to lend some extended insight on what to
expect from traditional media. TV, web, and radio are all able to generate fast, measurable
results. With these mediums, people are either interested, or they aren’t. There are
comparatively few lagging responses. Newspapers and magazines on the other hand, while carrying
significant credibility, produce results that are harder to measure because their content is
often read over days, weeks, or even months.
The ultimate success of a social media strategy depends on your ability to recognize problems and
seize opportunities to solve them. When considering the needs of your campaign, whether
it’s brand equity or an immediate spike in interest, consider traditional media as another
tool in your toolbox that could meet those needs. However, remember that part of your strategy
should involve doing, saying, or making something interesting and worth talking about. If you
don’t do that, no amount of good press can save you.
4. Technology
Lastly, your social media strategy is inherently paired with technology. Without technology,
social media cannot exist. However, technology’s role in creating a social media strategy
often goes understated.
At SoCon10, a social media conference
in Atlanta, Carol Kruse (head of interactive marketing at Coke) described the pain her team went
through creating a Facebook application, only to find two months later that changes in
Facebook’s design would require Coke to restructure the application – a
maintenance cost that hadn’t been anticipated. Having a plan in place for making
technological changes on the fly is an important ingredient in the fast-paced social media world.
But technology is more than just a potential cost that bloats social media campaigns; it’s
also the life that fuels them. Applications like the recently launched MySpace Fan Video are powered by
collaboration between experienced creatives and programmers, not just one or the other. Thus,
perhaps the most important synergy to be formed by any company delving into social media is one
between their technology team, internal or external, and their marketing team driving the
strategy.
Conclusion
Synergy is the name of the social media game. Whether you’re coming from a small company or
a well-known brand, starting as far back as possible, zooming out and staring at the big picture,
is crucial to creating a strategy that makes sense.
These are four of the most important pieces to the social media puzzle. If you can think of more
or have something to add to these listed, please leave a note in the comments.
If you've been paying
attention to the official GDC Twitter feed over the
past few days, you will have noticed a couple of intriguing, if out of place messages.
The first one, posted on
Wednesday, simply said: 'Non semper ea sunt quae videntur'. Those looking around on the Internet
will have noticed a WikiQuote page sourcing
the quote to 'Phaedrus'. Apparently, he was "a Roman fabulist, by birth a Macedonian and lived in
the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius and Claudius."
The English translation of that Latin quote is 'Things are not always what they seem', and if
you've been following other Twitter discussion of Game Developers Conference, you'll know that
writer/designer Ian Bogost recently
Tweeted: "Does anyone know, what is this GDC talk with no description: "Metaphysics of Games"
by "Phaedrus"? Lurid."
And indeed, a new Official GDC
Tweet directs interested parties to a previously programmed
talk scheduled for tomorrow, Saturday at 3pm, in Room 134 of North Hall at the Moscone - the
last talk slot of the entire event.
It's called 'Metaphysics of Game Design', it's by 'Phaedrus', and that's all the info we've got.
There's some other Twitter
rumblings about whether the Roman fabulist is back from 2000 years of exile. Or whether it
might be something or someone else entirely. Guess there's only one way to find out...
When you think about internships at media companies, you probably picture people fetching coffee,
running errands, or worse. But some internships have taken a different tack, setting up
specialized blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages for their interns to help them understand new
technology and spread the word about their programs.
At NPR, the 40-plus interns put together a special 30-minute multimedia and audio presentation for
the rest of the staff each term. The special "Intern Edition" -- run mainly by interns themselves
-- has morphed into a regular blog
with daily updates. At satellite radio giant SiriusXM, 150 interns are herded by "Ross the Boss"
Herosian, a former intern who has a special Twitter
feed, Facebook page, blog, podcast and even YouTube channel for the internship program.
The advantage for interns coming into these programs (which run in spring, summer or fall terms)
is that many of them are already immersed in digital media, so there's nothing to relearn. As
Doug Mitchell, former head of the NPR Intern Edition, told me
for a MediaShift story in 2008:
There's no 'legacy' to concern ourselves with because Intern Edition starts completely from
scratch each term with a room full of strangers and me as the continuity and institutional
memory. What better place to develop new thinking about media, development and consumption than
where nothing truly exists.
A Major Juggle
One thing that interns at NPR have in common with other workers at media companies is the need to
juggle like mad. They have their regular internship with a specific NPR radio show or production
service; they might have classes at school or other internships; and then they have the
extra-curricular work of Intern Edition, their creative outlet. And that creativity can take many
forms: video, drawing, comics and more.
"It's never easy," said NPR senior trainer Sora Newman, who has taken on Doug Mitchell's former
role. "The interns need to be committed to the project and they always underestimate the amount
of time it takes to produce a radio story or slide show, etc. These are just skills learned by
experience."
Intern Edition gives NPR interns a place to showcase new skills, test their limits and even build
an online audience via social media. The @NPRInterns
Twitter feed has more than 2,500 followers. And one intern, Teresa Gorman, has just one job for
her internship: executive producing the Intern Edition. Gorman told me that "We do almost
everything ourselves ... It's tough. It's worth it, though."
At SiriusXM, social media outreach is less about promoting the work of interns as it is about
promoting the internship programs to prospective interns. Herosian told me he took a program that
had 15 interns four years ago and built it into a powerhouse with 150 interns spread out around
the country. The internships are unpaid, but they do offer college credit.
"I wanted to get the message out about what we're doing and market it to college students," he
said. "I thought it would be great to go where the students are, rather than waiting for them to
come to us. So when Facebook came out, I was creating groups for people to join, and when they
launched the Pages feature, I saw a great opportunity for a community and outlet so that people
can follow us."
Challenges for Interns
While both programs have had success in training college students and bringing some of them on
board with full-time jobs, there have been some obstacles along the way. NPR interns have had to
deal with an entrenched traditional media mentality, and SiriusXM has had to sort through various
online platforms to get it right.
Dominic Ruiz-Esparza is the communications director for Intern Edition, and an intern at "Talk of
the Nation." He told me there have been battles among interns over the direction of Intern
Edition, which mixes newsy stories with lighter fare.
"There's a bit of disagreement about how much should be news content and how much is trying out
new things that are fun for interns," Ruiz-Esparza said. "There's a bit of a battle here among
people who run Intern Edition. I have a news background and would like that, but that gets boring
and some people want to try innovative things. So it's really up to the managing editor to
decide, so that we have some news and the interns have creative freedom, too."
He's also noticed that there's still resistance to change at NPR as a whole.
"Guy Raz, the weekend 'All Things Considered' host, talked to us awhile ago and acknowledged that
there's a very conservative spirit here at NPR and it's changed," Ruiz-Esparza said. "It's a lot
better than it was, but it's still not the norm for these new forms of content to be primary. The
website has changed a lot due to the new CEO [Vivian Schiller], but there is that divide. It's
changed somewhat, but not quick enough for young people here."
At SiriusXM, Herosian has a serious challenge just keeping track of the 150 interns spread out
around the country. Luckily, he has interns to help him with that task. Because Herosian is only
a handful of years removed from his own internship, he can relate to the interns and has taken on
the "Ross the Boss" nickname in a light-hearted way. Herosian hasn't been afraid to try new
digital platforms to promote the SiriusXM internships -- and he admits some of them just didn't
work out.
"At first with the blog I set up a LiveJournal format where everyone had their own account, but
it was just too many moving parts," Herosian said. "For us, it wasn't the best interface to use.
We also used Ning, which is a great service but it didn't quite meet our needs. Sometimes less in
more with social media, because everything you create you have to maintain. People in corporate
environments will create these pages and then say 'my job is done' and there's no maintenance
that goes into it. It's the conversation aspect that's important, so you can't create them and
then have them lie dormant."
Intern Learning and Teaching
As for what's been working well in social media, Herosian said Facebook has been the best way to
promote the program to college students, who are much more comfortable commenting or asking
questions in that environment. He was surprised that many college interns were new to Twitter and
had to be prompted to use it regularly. One SiriusXM intern, Jeremy Lubsey, said he had heard a
lot about Twitter before, but had never used it very much until his internship. That said, he
thinks he'll get a lot more use out of his new LinkedIn profile.
"[One of my biggest lessons was] the importance of social networking sites such as LinkedIn,"
Lubsey told me. "The second week, I was talking to one of the production guys and he said to put
up a page on LinkedIn and get your name out there. That's helped me to work on my career after
SiriusXM."
And when it comes to social media, sometimes it's the interns who help teach the staffers new
tricks. Mediaite editor-at-large Rachel Sklar told me that
the startup site had been blessed with "awesome, kickass interns" who also have their own
Twitter feed.
"As for social media training, it's gone both ways!" Sklar said. "Only an idiot would welcome
these kids just out of school without making a point of learning from them. They've grown up
steeped in this stuff. The training flows both ways!"
*****
What do you think about internships that include blogs, podcasts, Twitter feeds and more? Should
more media companies do that? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea
Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco
with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.
If Hideo Kojima's Twitter feed has you looking for more
high-profile Japanese game designers to follow, two other notable figures joined the
microblogging service last week: Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami and Grasshopper Manufacture CEO/No More
Heroes director Goichi "Suda51" Suda.
Unlike with Kojima's feed, however, Mikami and Suda51 don't have a team of translating their
tweets into English text. Suda51 has at least put up some machine translated updates: "With Babel
Fish in the midst of translation. As for me natural bone three day monk. twitter third day and
thrust. Tomorrow is climax."
Mikami's tweets, though, are all in Japanese, which is a shame as there are some curious updates
in there, according to Andriasang's
translations: "Actually, this month I started a new company," and "I'm eating ice cream."
[SXSW] J'ai vu Sobees pour la première fois à DEMO 09, c'est un aggrégateur
de réseaux de sites sociaux qui a l'air pas mal du tout quand j'ai vu la démo. Il
offrait un modèle de monétisation via le sponsor des marques. Aujourd'hui, la firme
a lancé Sobees pour SXW et MIX10: les applications Sobees évènement regroupe
le stream photo Flickr, Google news, recherche Twitter en temps réel, le RSS feed officiel
depuis l'évènement, les messages Twitter officiels depuis
l'évènement, vos comptes Twitter et Facebook personnels. Sobees est en partenariat
avec Salsadev.com pour fournir des mots de passe à chaque conférence, vous
permettant d'affiner les recherches et trouver les news, les photos et les tweets relatifs aux
sujets tendances pour SXSW et MIX10.
Vous pouvez essayer les applications ici (Silverlight 3 fonctionnent sur Macs et PCs pour la
plupart des navigateurs):
GAO’s Watchdog Report features five-minute interviews with auditors and
investigators on new investigations.
“Podcasting enhances the service GAO provides to Congress and the public by offering an
alternative means for people to learn about significant issues and new GAO reports and
testimonies,”said Gene L. Dodaro, head of the GAO.
To date, GAO has released five episodes of the Watchdog Report:
March 3, 2010: On GAO’s latest review of the use and accountability of Recovery Act
funding and how jobs created or retained by the Act are being reported, featuring an interview
with Chris Mihm, Managing Director of Strategic Issues
February 26, 2010: On how the Department of Defense and the Coast Guard are handling sexual
assault prevention and response efforts, featuring an interview with Brenda Farrell, Director of
Defense Capabilities and Management
February 3, 2010: On key challenges facing NASA, featuring an interview with Cristina
Chaplain, Director of Acquisition Sourcing and Management
January 6, 2010: On the 2010 Census, featuring an interview with Robert Goldenkoff, Director
of Strategic Issues
January 6, 2010: On the financial condition of the U.S. Postal Service, featuring an
interview with Phil Herr, Director of Physical Infrastructure
To subscribe, add this podcast feed to your podcast client:
[SXSW] I saw Sobees for the first time at DEMO 09, it is a social sites networks aggregator that
looked pretty good when I saw the demo, it offered a monetization model via brand sponsorship.
Today, the company launched Sobees for SXW and MIX10: the Sobees event applications aggregate
Flickr photo stream, Google news, Twitter real time search, the official RSS feed from the event,
the official Twitter messages from the event, your personal Twitter and Facebook accounts. Sobees
partnered with Salsadev.com to provide the trending keywords within each conference, allowing to
refine the search and finding news, photos and tweets related to the trending topics at SXSW and
MIX10.
You can try the applications here (Silverlight 3 working on Macs and PCs for most browsers):
This article has been published at RLSLOG.net - visit our
site for full content.
NoTV released the premiere of a new comedy called “Sons of Tucson”. Three wealthy
young brothers hire Ron Snuffkin to pose as their father when their real one goes to prison for
committing a white collar crime. Ron is forced to step into the patriarch role of the Gunderson
family and display different skills and tricks to keep the family going.
UPDATE 1: NoTV REPACK their XviD release, coz the first one had some HD feed issue, not
really important IMO.
UPDATE 2: 2HD released the 720p version and they have things to say again
EP 1.1 Pilot
When the Gunderson boys – Brandon, Gary and Robby – hire
Ron Snuffkin to pretend to be their father after their real father goes to prison, they find out
that there’s more to their “fake” dad than meets the eye. Ron has to enroll
them in school, convince Robby’s teacher to keep him in her class, sweet-talk the
principal, locate mint-condition toy soldiers at his grandmother’s house and avoid a thug
who wants his money
I've decided my old homepage was bad enough to revisit now that I've got a bit more content
hosted deep within it. I replaced my crappy hand written HTML with tools written this decade, and
threw in some amateur visual design. The software
Firstly, in order to keep the webpage fresh with little effort, I've chosen RSS aggregation as
the method of content generation. Since I know Ubuntu and Debian both use Planet, that's where I first looked. But it seems Planet 2.0
is aging, and the fork Planet Venus brings some
neat new options. It expands the selection of templates, adds a configurable RSS filter step, and
makes the normalization step configurable.
It's also packaged in Ubuntu as planet-venus, making it fairly simple to set up. Deployment was a
little tricky, as the package leaves most of the site configuration to the admin. You'll need
a config.ini (I used /etc/planet/planet.ini), a template dir
(/usr/local/share/planet-venus/theme), a cache dir (/var/cache/planet) and an output dir
(somewhere in /var/www typically). Finally, you'll need to set up a cron job to run the static
output generation script regularly. The script reads all the feeds and parameters in config.ini,
caches the results to save bandwidth on subsequent runs, passes them to the template engine, and
places the final product in the output dir.
When building a lifestream style site, you have to be picky about the kinds of feeds you put in
or it gets Facebook / Twitter style spammy. This is where the RSS filter step can help; Planet
Venus comes with a few filters like 'notweets', and a few stripAds filters to cleanse ads before
republishing. It's the same design pattern I talked about before here with Liferea. In the future I could write
one to add in comment feeds and then filter out everything that fails to meet some strong quality
criteria. Output templates
Planet Venus's real selling point to me is using Django templates. I've been meaning
to learn Django for a while now, and this is a pretty good way to work with the templates portion
of Django. And again, the filter pattern pops up. Here, filters take python variables as input;
in Planet Venus's setup you have access to feed and item variables, as well as planetwide
settings. One example filter might be to simply pluralize a word
based on a variable (yes, you can even handle 'y' pluralization). Another example is the urlize filter that adds
HTML anchor tags to likely URLs (not so great when you already have anchor tags in the filter's
input).
I also use templates to generate an RSS feed. Nothing difficult about it, since the input to
templates is basically an RSS feed to begin with. To reduce the probability of bugs, I translated
a provided example htmptmpl RSS template into
Django, and it's much smaller and clearer to me. Unfortunately, there's a bug in Planet Venus
that prevents the use of multiple Django templates. I've reported it upstream, and I'm sure I can
fix it or work around it. Web Design
I also decided to take a look at CSS layout frameworks, to get up to speed on the subject
quickly. 960.gs is popular, but it's 960 pixel width assumption works poorly with quirky
resolutions found on massive monitors and smartphones. Luckily, I found found fluid960, which is very similar, but implements
fluid layouts. It retains the CSS class names of 960.gs, so tutorials and documentation on one
translate fairly well to the other. Which is good, because fluid960 pretty much relies on you
already knowing regular 960 (I didn't). This presentation
gives a good summary of things you might want a CSS framework for, and this 960
tutorial covers what I needed to know.
Color scheming is probably the hardest part for me. It's simple to pick a color pallate that goes
together, but there is a higher level opportunity to communicate something through visual design.
I could choose a purple scheme to reflect my collegiate experience, or an Ubuntu pallete, but it
seems inappropriate for a personal site. I've got a bit of low level coding experience, so I
could go with a green on black terminal theme, but it's been done to death ever since the Matrix,
and it's basically impossible to beat jwz's version.
Since I'm not really looking to break into web design, I went with a relatively muted color
scheme that organizes the content without distracting from it. Truthfully it doesn't matter all
that much, as experience shows the majority of hits will come via RSS.
Well, that's basically all there is to my automated homepage system. On to more important things,
like setting up a calDAV server or a feed processing tool.
An unspecified China-based maker of PV modules plans to lower its spot market quotes by 10%, from
US$1.7-1.85/W currently, the third quarter of 2010 in a bid to maintain its global market
competitiveness after the expected reduction in feed-in tariffs in Germany at the beginning of
July, according to industry sources in Taiwan.
If you're interested in covering SXSW Interactive for Download Squad, you too can join the fun.
Just head over to Seed and set up an account. Then email us at sxsw (make the at sign here)
downloadsquad dawt com to let us know who you are and what panels you'd like to cover. We'll be
meeting and greeting Download Squad fans and Seed writers at the Seed booth right there in the
Austin Convention Center, so don't be a
stranger.
Also, you can jump straight into the action by giving us a short, punchy "takeaway" from any panels
that you attend (or conversations both in and out of the convention center). Once you have a Seed
account, you can accept this assignment here.
If we publish your work, you get paid!
Starting tomorrow, I'll check in with daily updates and I'll be appropriating our Twitter feed with regular happenings. I'll use the #sxsw
hashtag, of course. Meanwhile, keep an eye on our special hub page for SXSW as we build out coverage through
next week.
"We'd like to write blog posts, but don't have time."
That's the oft-heard lament in newsrooms. More and more traditional journalists recognize the
benefits of blogging and social media, but many just can't figure out how to add them to their
existing workload.
I have a solution that seems to work in our newsroom. When faced with this issue, I recommend
colleagues do everything they usually do, such as have brainstorming sessions, take part in
editorial meetings, do research and collect web links -- except now they should do it publicly.
So now, for example, brainstorming can be done with a wiki-like tool, and notes from a meeting or
background research can become a blog post. Instead of saving bookmarks as private "favorites" in
a web browser, you can publish them as social bookmarks. Ideas and discussions can be expressed
as blog posts or as status updates on social networks.
I call this approach "live-streaming the newsroom." It was the subject of a three-day workshop I
recently gave in Moscow. I was brought there by two Russian media NGOs: Eurasia-Media, the media
training department of the New Eurasia Foundation, and the Foundation for Independent Radio
Broadcasting (FNR).
Below is an overview of the tools we used and discussed during the workshop. We also put them
into use to cover the "end of the line" of several Moscow subway lines (an approach that was
inspired by a project
by The New York Times).
Tools for (Almost) Instantaneous Blogging
Mindmaps In preparing the project, I published a MindMeister mindmap that charted out various social
media tools. The map was published as an open wiki, and, as a result, people have added useful
information. My colleague and co-organizer Charles Maynes at FNR also translated some key nodes
into Russian. For the Moscow subway project, we made yet another mindmap.
Posterous/Tumblr Between classic blogging and micro-blogging services such as
Twitter, there are new possibilities that allow for rapid blogging in short or long formats
that also incorporate multimedia. We used "Posterous"http://www.Posterous.com, though we also
could have used Tumblr. These platforms enable bloggers to
post using email. Simply attach pictures, audio files or a link to YouTube, and Posterous
integrates it all into a post. Here's how we used it on our workshop blog, newsroomru.
RSS Reader While preparing the workshop -- and during the workshop -- I used
Google Reader as a feed reader and Diigo as social bookmark platform. I like the fact that Diigo
enables you to create public or private groups. Have a look at the MixedRealities group.
Twitter During the event, I commented on the workshop using Twitter. I used
the hashtags #newsroom and #newsroomru.
Photo/Video SharingFlickr is extremely
useful for various reasons: You can select the appropriate Creative Commons license for
re-publishing pictures, and publishing pictures on Flickr can also attract new visitors to your
site or blog. For video, we used YouTube. We shot using semi-professional videocameras as well
as the Flip video camera, which enables fast and easy recording, editing and publishing.
Audio Sharing Are your colleagues still hesitant to write their own blog
posts? Talk to them and record your conversation using AudioBoo (using either a laptop or an iPhone), and publish the result
instantaneously via Posterous.
Chats Why not discuss coverage, or even the preparation of coverage, in a
moderated chat session? We tried out CoverItLive on
the workshop blog (on Posterous) and it worked perfectly. Within the CoverItLive interface, you
can integrate streaming video (I showed Ustream), Twitter
feeds and Twitter lists.
Twitter I think it's essential to recontextualize services like Twitter. For
example, try curating with Twitter by using lists. Posterous can also be
recontextualized by easily integrating into some of the major blogging platforms. Diigo,
Twitter, Flickr etc can also be aggregated in a FriendFeed stream, which one can embed easily on a site or blog. No scripting
knowledge required...
Community We also thought about how to keep in contact after the workshop ends
and the participating journalists go home. Then there's the larger question of how to set up a
platform for your media community. We used Ning to create the
newsroomru group. Maybe we'll also use Second Life
for synchronous immersive encounters in the future. (I also briefly demonstrated Second Life,
which recently made it much easier to
integrate web content.)
Mindset
All the above mentioned tools only become game changers in the newsroom if journalists stop
thinking that they should only publish a nearly perfect, finished product. Newsgathering is an
ongoing process. It's great to publish perfectly crafted articles, videos and audio -- but this
should not stop us from streaming the production process.
It will, of course, be difficult to do this for some investigative work; but I think many
projects can benefit from bringing your community into the brainstorming phase. It hardly takes
any time at all.
Most of the things a journalist does to cover his or her beat can be live-streamed using the
above mentioned tools, among many others. The value is that the audience will give you helpful
suggestions, and practicing transparency will lead to increased credibility.
*****
How do you integrate social media into the workflow of the newsroom? Which other tools would you
use? And don't forget that you can still add to our social media mindmap wiki!
Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading
Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy.
After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire
service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his
wife Liesbeth.
Google late Wednesday rolled out an alternate take on Google Reader that
superficially makes things simpler but is also ideally suited to tablets. Google Reader Play
switches from Reader's usual plain list view to a large-buttoned media browser based on user's
"recommended items" feed. The new web app shows any photos or YouTube videos in a large, central
area and lets users favorite or share the content they prefer; recommendations also come from
fellow users....
- Add support for native Gentoo packages (Aleksey Lim).
- Added --select-only option. Requested by Bastian Eicher.
- Allow https: URIs in and lt;feed> elements.
- An implementation's "id" doesn't have to be path or digest (it just has to be a unique string).
You can use and lt;manifest-digest> to give a set of digests with different algorithms and the
"local-path" attribute to give the pathname. If the ID contains an '=' then it is added to the
digests list, for backwards compatibility. The Selections XML format also now supports and
lt;manifest-digest> and the local-path attribute. This is part of a gradual change to the new
format; please continue to use the old syntax for now to support older versions of 0launch.
- Rank digest algorithms and download using the best available. This means that, for example,
0launch will default to using the sha256 digest when available, even though the id attribute uses
sha1 for compatibility with older versions.
- Support several package implementations in feeds for different distros. There is a new
"distributions" attribute on and lt;package-implementation>, which is a space separated list of
distribution names where the element applies. Each Distribution object is given the chance to
report how well these names match the current distribution (for example, Ubuntu might report 1 for
"Debian" and 2 for "Ubuntu"). The highest scoring element(s) are then passed to
Distribution.get_package_info(). Based on work by Aleksey Lim.
Changes
- In the GUI's version column, only show "(was ...)" if the implementation ID changed. Before,
simply reloading the same XML file would display things like "1.0 (was 1.0)". However, commit
d8f59932 broke that by reloading the feed even if no changes are detected, in case some other
instance of 0launch updated the file. Note that it's still possible to get the "X (was X)" message,
if the ID changed but the version number didn't.
Python API
- Added Implementation.local_path attribute. This is the absolute path of the implementation for
local implementations, or None if it's not local (a distribution package or a Zero Install package
identified by a digest, whether cached or not). This is so that we can avoid id.startswith('/')
checks everywhere, since this doesn't work on Windows.
- ZeroInstallFeed._get_impl always creates a new Implementation. Before, calling this twice with
the same ID returned a cached copy, but we never used this feature.
Bug fixes
- Removed unused code. In the very first (0.1) version of the injector we downloaded from local
files rather than using HTTP, etc, and some code to support that was still present.
- Fixed error for passing a parameter that wasn't a GTKWindow (Rene Lopez).
- Fixed typo in error message format string. Reported by Aleksey Lim.
- Removed old check for gpg. _run_gpg checks again later anyway, and does it correctly (accepting
gpg2, not just gpg). Reported by Aleksey Lim.
- "No automatic updates" didn't work (Aleksey Lim). The GUI set freshness to -1 to disable checks,
but Policy only checked for zero.
- Don't require a bzip2 executable when handling .tar.bz2 archives. We'll fall back to Python's
built-in tar.bz2 support. Reported by Rene Lopez.
- Fixed unpacking of zip archives with "extract". unpack.extract_zip() moved the extracted contents
up to the parent directory, while all other other extract methods leave them in place.
- Fixed error when a download has the wrong size. Reported by Aleksey Lim (#2921426).
Rejex is a very handy little site for building and testing regular
expressions on the fly. It's composed of four simple text boxes and a very informative cheat sheet
(not shown above, but after the jump). You feed your text into the "Test String" box (the middle
one), and then your expression into the top box, and immediately see the matches in the bottom box.
Here I am searching for instances of the letter "o" which are either at the beginning or the end of
a word, so I got a match for "over" but not for "fox".
Half the tool's value lies with the informative cheat sheet, showing you exactly what each regex
character does. I would have been happy for some "popular regexes" such as "matching an email
address" and "matching a US phone number" etc, but even so, this is definitely a tool I am going to
bookmark for future use.
The regex cheat sheet: Share
So it's been a few weeks since Google Buzz launched, and because I'm a good little geek-soldier
who eats his own (figurative) dog food, I've invested lots of time to learn how it works and,
more importantly, how it can work for me. Although I'm doing my best to be an optimist, I can't
seem to warm up to Buzz. Yes, folks, I think I'm falling out of like with Google's new social
media darling service.
Or, to be blunt, Google Buzz sucks.
Maybe that's a little harsh. Maybe it sucks for me and not for others. Maybe other users
absolutely love the thing because they feel it's already transformed how they connect to each
other. If you're one of them, please let me know, because so far, no one I know has bothered
using it to any great degree.
And there, dear readers, is the core problem. Despite the fact that Buzz leverages our existing
Gmail contact lists to give us a head start in the friend-population game, it doesn't seem to be
translating into actual, sustained, meaningful activity.
In the early going for Facebook, as you may recall, its friend approval process often left your
universe as pathetically empty as a sixth grade prom dance floor. Google, by contrast, leveraged
Gmail to avoid repeating Facebook's mistake, but its jumpstart philosophy doesn't seem to be
resulting in anything remotely approaching an enjoyable party. Whenever I click on the Buzz link
from Gmail, I feel like I'm right back in the sixth grade, down to the dim gymnasium with the
lousy acoustics and watered down punch.
There are so many reasons to rant on Google for
foisting yet another social media failure on us, but for now, I've narrowed it down to these
four:
Conversation stream hijackers. Every time I sign in, there's a monumentally
long conversation thread from Robert Scoble at the top of my list. Now, don't get me wrong:
I've long been a fan of Robert Scoble and decided to follow him precisely because I appreciate
his perspectives on the rapidly evolving social media landscape. But his overwhelming presence
at the top of my Buzz feed is starting to annoy me. To his credit, he's recognized this flaw
and has apologized for it -- though he really shouldn't, because it's not his fault that bad
interface design allows uber-users to overwhelm the feeds of regular folks like me.
Interface from hell. I wouldn't mind Robert Scoble's extreme ownership of my
screen real estate if I had the ability to move things around to suit my needs. But Buzz's
no-customization philosophy means you're stuck with whatever's there. You can't filter out
users or threads that don't interest you. You can't prioritize the ones that do. You're stuck.
And those things that look like overlaid folders? They don't work. For all the criticism that
Facebook has received over the years for its revolving door of radical interface changes, at
least we can eventually tweak that interface to somewhat reflect the things that matter most to
us. Google Buzz assumes we all subscribe to the old Eastern Bloc notion of one size (badly)
fits all.
Inconsistency with other Google services. Remember the nasty old days of DOS
when every app had its own interface and command structure, and moving data from one to another
was the PC-era equivalent of Babel? Well, after a couple of decades of getting used to
Microsoft's cross-application philosophy -- with across-the-board methods for printing, saving
files, cutting and pasting content, among others -- it almost seems as if Google wants us to go
back to the pre-Cambrian period. Every Google service seems to come with its own unique
interface and, as a result, its own unique learning curve. While I understand that a social
media tool like Buzz will necessarily have a fundamentally different feature set than, say, an
RSS reader like Google Reader, there's no reason why some of the baseline conventions of Google
Reader, such as the ability to expand and collapse conversations and seamlessly connect to and
manipulate feeds, can't be adapted for use in Buzz as well. Using the two services side-by-side
reinforces my belief that they may as well have been designed on different planets. There's no
reason for this.
Cryptic contact management. After years of finding friends in Facebook and
identifying interesting folks to follow in Twitter, the Buzz approach to adding contacts is a
major letdown. Not that I'm surprised, as contact management within Gmail has never been a
Google strong suit. But it's particularly botched here, starting with a "Find People" routine
that first forces you to scroll through the friends you're already following. Once you get to
the Suggestions field at the bottom, you're faced either with a long list of people you don't
know (maybe they sent spam to your Gmail account six months ago) or a really short list of
people you don't know. "Load More" buttons are few and far between. Right now, I've got one
under the list of folks I follow. Which means it's useless to me. I'd like to have one that
helps me find new people to follow, but that's nowhere to be found. Similarly counterintuitive
design decisions abound throughout Buzz.
I'm apparently not alone, because the kinds of conversations that routinely happen on other
social media platforms -- multiple back-and-forth messages that often pull in participants from
near and far -- just aren't happening here. I fear Buzz may go down as yet another failed attempt
by Google to figure out the social media Holy Grail.
I've always thought of myself as a pretty tech-focused guy who can figure out the peculiarities
of virtually any piece of software or, increasingly, Web-based service. But Google Buzz makes it
such a frustrating, annoying process to get anywhere close to functional with people who matter
to me that I've concluded my time would be better spent elsewhere. I'm not convinced spending
hours fighting with Buzz's busted interface will do anything to get my "friends" to wake up and
engage in this new environment. From where I sit, I doubt it'll change without radically invasive
surgery to the product. Even then, I wonder if users already entrenched in Facebook and Twitter
will even care enough to chime back in to Buzz.
Carmi Levy is
a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past
life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He
comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them
leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business.
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We’ve written about 
If you've been paying
attention to the 
If 
The Interactive
portion of 
Google late Wednesday rolled out an alternate take on Google Reader that
superficially makes things simpler but is also ideally suited to tablets. Google Reader Play
switches from Reader's usual plain list view to a large-buttoned media browser based on user's
"recommended items" feed. The new web app shows any photos or YouTube videos in a large, central
area and lets users favorite or share the content they prefer; recommendations also come from
fellow users....
There are so many reasons to rant on Google for
foisting yet another social media failure on us, but for now, I've narrowed it down to these
four:
Recommandations
)
and reject those that you are not interested in
(
)
