Social Media

If you’ve read my blog, you know how much I enjoy RhettandLink. Well, they did it again. They turned a social contest they had conducted, SuperNote, The YouTube experiment, into a holiday greeting.

Talk about remix culture.

Have you heard about the shorty awards?

The Shorty Awards honor the world’s top Twitterers.

Wow. Did you know you could be the best when you started to Twitter? The things that the community comes up with continue to delight me.

I nominated some of the people I follow:

• @shortyawards I nominate @jennyholzer for a Shorty Award in #artist for sharing her art on twitter
• @shortyawards I nominate @fireland for a Shorty Award in #humor because even though I cringe, I also always guffaw
• @shortyawards I nominate @jowyang for a Shorty Award in #business because he illustrates how social media sharing reaps biz rewards
• @shortyawards I nominate @armano for a Shorty Award in #advertising because he is helping to seriously advance the conversation
• @shortyawards I nominate @whitneyhess for a Shorty Award in #personal her tweets make me feel connected to my community and she is so upbeat

As I thought about who to nominate, I ruminated about what people really did enhance my life because of their Twitter stream. And then I thought, I’m actually happy to get a chance to recognize these people in some way because their stream has made my life better in one way or another.

Maybe their is opportunity there. Where there is value, often you find a world of opportunity.

If you want to nominate an awesome Tweeter, check out the Shorty Awards. It’s simple and kind of fun if you enjoy giving people kudos or just saying thanks.

Individual as a medium
medium is the message
i am msg

These are some deep thoughts I’ve been trying to wind my brain around lately. Twitter has made me think about this more deeply, because I am seeing this occur in action.Twitter is fairly easy. The barrier to adoption is fairly low if you are already an Internet or mobile texting user.

So now we can all talk to each other. We all have the power to be curators and to be publishers. The power of the printing press is in our hands.

Mobile devices bring the ability to publish everything and anything in a heartbeat. Live blogging from a concert to reporting from the scene of horrible human tragedy.

Some of the tools can be hard to understand. So that’s the next thing we can work on. Now that we have this platform, let’s make it easier for people to create with it instead of wrestling with tools.

i m msg

When we think about the statement, ‘i m msg’ it’s multi-dimensional meaning is inspiring and mysterious.

It looks like something you would see in a live chat conversation. The small ‘i’ the ‘m’ abbreviation for ‘am’ and the word ‘message’ shortened to ‘msg’.

It sounds ominous and omnipresent.

It is derived from Marshall McLuhan and current thinking about social media.

It is imperative to participate in order to understand. In essence BE the message.

Represent what you believe in.

We are all ‘i’ and so how do we use this new ability to get some good stuff done?

That’s what we should be thinking about.

A few months ago I posted about signing off Facebook. Alas, being in the social media and User Experience space, I have been forced back on to participate in a few things I will miss out on otherwise.

1) Some members of a professional organization I belong started a conversation about making the organization more open and transparent to the membership. Ironically, this conversation is happening in the Facebook walled garden.

2) Clients are referencing interface elements that I can’t look at without being on Facebook because specific examples are being cited.

3) My friends have all abandoned MySpace for Facebook. I’m missing out on information about them that they assume I’m getting - I guess I’ll be catching up now.

Begrudgingly, I have signed back on to Facebook.  Since I signed back on, over a dozen people have found me. It was an interesting experiement to try to stay away but sometimes you have to go with the flow because taking a stance can have unintended consequences.

I just got an email to join OpenSalon. It’s a social networking and blogging site. The idea is that you can blog there and get people to pay you for your work.

From the site:
“Open Salon is a publishing platform with a built-in audience. It was developed for writers, photographers and artists of any stripe in need of a smart home for their work (and not one of those giant, anonymous blog networks), and who are hoping to be rewarded for it. After a quick, free registration, you can immediately begin posting your words, images or videos to your blog, start building an audience and even earning money.”

This sounds like a great idea, right? I always question things that sound too good to be true. So I started a sign up process and decided it was probably important to check out the Terms and Conditions of the site before posting any content.

There was something I found in the Terms that reminded me of the following,

In life, there is no FREE LUNCH.

“By submitting or posting User Content using the Service or the Site, you grant to Salon an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license to: (1) use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute the User Content in or through any medium now known or hereafter invented, for any purpose; (2) to prepare derivative works using the User Content, or to incorporate it into other works, for any purpose; and (3) to grant and authorize sublicenses of any or all of the foregoing rights.”

It goes on to say that if I remove my user content, Salon still retains the above rights. They don’t own it, but they can do whatever they like with it. This sounds like a situation rife with unintended consequences.

Gotta be careful out there, I’m telling you, read your TOUs! (Terms of Use agreements)

About a week ago, I disabled my Facebook account. A movie I saw on a reputable blog freaked me out. I don’t want to get into the details here, others explain it much better than me. I had known some of the facts before but for some reason last week, it just got to me and I shut it down.

Just so we are clear, I’m not afraid of the Internets or any of this ’social media’ stuff. I love it. I relish it. I seek out new services just for fun. But, I decided, since I wasn’t getting any value from it, (my professional network is on LinkedIn and my friends do like to hang out at mySpace so) Facebook felt like it was extra for me anyway.

I think it’s probably time for all of us to start reading those user agreements. DANG.

“Social media is about fostering discovery.”

In the spirit of a John Hodgman twitter post, that is all.

I’ve always wanted to go to SXSW. I think the first time I heard about it was when I was a DJ at my college radio station. It sounded to me like a freaking mecca of cool.

Sadly, I’ve never made it to the event. Due to things like work and not having an extra $1000 or so on hand for something like that, that stars have just never aligned.

Now I’ve been reading all kinds of things about the event this year that make me feel like it might be too late to attend this event with the expectations I’ve carried with me since college.

Here’s a few things I’ve been picking up through my various social media channels.

One of the sessions was not giving participants the content that they thought they could expect from the panel. Since the audience was filled with a bunch of social media savvy people, they all started talking to each other about this on Meebo. Unbeknownst to the panelist and traditional journalists in the room, an entire conversation about how this happened without the presenters.

There was also an article in Salon.

The kicker of it for me was the info graphic I found in the latest Fast Company.

And the twitters that people are sending, point to the end of an era.

I’m not saying it won’t be a great event next year, I’m just saying I don’t think the event I’ve always heard about happens anymore. No judgment, but sometimes , ‘their old stuff WAS so much better’. Things change.

The Netdisaster is only a TOY.

Now with video….

Not only is it an invitation to upload a video of your review, it’s smartly coupled with a very convienent link to a video camera you can purchase at Amazon to create your video product reviews for Amazon. This is such a great example of how context can drive sales. It’s also an interesting evolution of the product review that Amazon has made famous.