I’ve often said that the advent of social media is an advance on the same level as the introduction of moveable type. It represents a complete and fundamental shift across the board. I recently stumbled across this lovely little gem of a video that illustrates this brilliantly and wanted to share it with my clients and readers.
There has been a lot of furor over the disclosure guidelines recently put forth by the FTC. On a personal and professional level it really makes no difference to me. All you have to do is click the Transparency link in my sidebar and you’ll see a full disclosure for the website and then additional case by case ones on individual posts. I always advocate transparency both in my own work and to my clients.
That said, I think that while the FTC guidelines may seem a fine idea at first I don’t believe they are. First and foremost is the fact that no print media, or its extended presence on the Internet , is subject anything like these rules. Double standards are never a good thing, especially in legal matters.
Then there are the free speech issues inherent in a double standard applied to news and information. Chris Crum on WebProNews has a nice post about it, including this bit about the stance taken by the IAB:
The IAB [Interactive Advertising Bureau] says the rules unfairly and unconstitutionally impose penalties on online media for practices in which offline media have engaged for decades. In an open letter to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, Randall Rothenberg, the President and CEO of the IAB, called the FTC’s distinction between offline media and online media, “constitutionally dubious.”
“What concerns us the most in these revisions is that the Internet, the cheapest, most widely accessible communications medium ever invented, would have less freedom than other media,” he said. “These revisions are punitive to the online world and unfairly distinquish between the same speech, based on the medium in which it is delivered. The practices have long been afforded strong First Amendment protections in traditional media outlets, but the Commission is saying that the same speech deserves fewer Constitutional protections online. I urge the Commission to retract the current set of Guides and to commence a fair and open process in order to develop a roadmap by which responsible online actors can engage with consumers and continue to provide the invaluable content and services that have so transformed people’s lives.”
Net Neutrality and freedom of speech are fundamental underpinnings of the modern Internet. We are in the midst of the greatest revolution in the access people have to information since the advent of movable type. Even though it will not affect how I operate it is still of massive import to all of us who work and write on the net.
Mr. Crum points out another valid point in another article of his:
Well-known author/editor/publisher Jeff Jarvis makes a really good point. He says the FTC assumes that the Internet is a medium. “It’s not. It’s a place where people talk. Most people who blog, as Pew found in a survey a few years ago, don’t think they are doing anything remotely connected to journalism. I imagine that virtually no one on Facebook thinks they’re making media. They’re connecting. They’re talking,” he says. “So for the FTC to go after bloggers and social media – as they explicitly do – is the same as sending a government goon into Denny’s to listen to the conversations in the corner booth and demand that you disclose that your Uncle Vinnie owns the pizzeria whose product you just endorsed.”
That really is the core of the matter here. Social media platforms are arenas of conversation. This sort of regulation, besides being unenforceable, is supremely out of place.
If you do reviews or any other form of blogging that involves brands or products you might want to check out DisclosurePolicy.org, which is what I used to generate the one you see on this website. It’s a quick, free, and easy tool to use and will help keep you on the ethical side of transparency no matter which way this is resolved.
What are YOUR thoughts on the issue? Let us know here or on our Facebook Page!
No offense meant to anyone who plays games on Facebook, but there are many of us who feel bombarded by the endless stream of Mafia Wars and Texas Hold ‘Em invites .
Today I’d like to share the easy way to get bothersome notifications out of your hair with only a click or two. That way if you don’t want to play you can opt out of seeing them when reading your wall. I’ll also show a quick way to block apps completely when invited.
Off The Wall: When you look at a Wall post, like the YoVille one pictured below, there is a small pull down menu in the upper left corner. See it? It says “Hide.”
When you pull down the menu it will offer you the option of hiding the person or hiding the app. Whichever one you choose will no longer show up on your wall. The fact that it works on people as well can be useful sometimes. You can preserve your friends status with someone but not be bombarded by their compulsive forwards (you know the type, the folks who post every fifteen minutes or so).
Stop It At The Source: Now this only removes the notifications from your Wall, it does not block invitations. What about those pesky invites you get every day? What about completely blocking an application? Look closely at the next invite you get.
If you look to the left underneath the blue Add button you will see Block This Application underneath it. If you never want to see that game or app again just click it.
When you do so the following pop up window will appear:
That pretty much sums it up. Click block and you’ll have stopped all of it at the source.
We all have different ways we use the Internet and social media, controls like these allows to do so with control over our experience.
Personally I block most of the games, simply because I don’t play them. (Well, okay, I play Zombies you caught me. That’s the only one though.)
I decided to write this post after have several people expressed surprise and pleasure when I showed them how easy it is. If you find it useful please share it with others!
Most of my posts over the next several days will be audio reports from Rising Tide IV, a conference founded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the leveee failure that followed. Here’s the short form:
After the flood that followed Hurricane Katrina’s landfall, the internet became a vital connection among dispersed New Orleanians, former New Orleanians, friends of the city and of the Gulf Coast region. A surge of new blogs erupted and, combined with those that were already online, a community of bloggers with a shared interest in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast developed. In the summer of 2006, after the success of the first Geek Dinner, and to mark the anniversary of the flood, the newly formed NOLA Bloggers organized the first Rising Tide Conference, taking their shared interest in technology, the internet and social media and turning advocacy for the city into action.
Over the intervening years we have had guests ranging from the Wall Street Journal’s Chris Cooper and Robert Block, authors of Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security, to this year’s keynote Speaker, Harry Shearer. I’m particularly happy that Mr. Shearer made the time to join us this year as his bloggin about the disparity between national news and the actual events in the disaster zone have been vitally important over the past four years. (I’m also a huge fan of The Simpsons…)
I’d like to invite anyone with questions about Katrina, New Orleans, or the conference to feel free to drop me a line or leave me a comment. I’ll answer as best I can and if I don’t know the answer I’ll find you someone who does.
Robin Laws is a game designer whose work I am very fond of. Since he blogs and I like his work I follow his posts on a fairly regular basis. Today I found one that addresses an interesting aspect of social media that I had not considered.
I often get questions from friends and clients about the “deluge of trivia” that social media generates, the posts about someone’s uninteresting breakfast and so on. Signal to noise ratio. One side of that question I had not looked at until now was the fact that some of the trivia is useful in and of itself.
The difference between emotionally reinforcing trivia and mere mental clutter comes with degrees of separation. If someone unfamiliar to me complains about the loud kids mobbing the coffee shop, rhapsodizes about the perfection of the prosciutto at a café, or recounting a harrowing commute, I don’t much care. If a celeb, writer or some other figure I know through their work is doing it, I care insofar as the message is witty or otherwise entertaining. If a friend or relative does it, I care, regardless of the elegance of expression, because I like that person and am happy to be reminded of him or her for a few seconds.
As someone who works in isolation, these instants of low intensity emotional content are especially valuable. They substitute for the office chatter I’d get if I worked with others. Except that I can turn them on at will, whenever I need a moment of micro-procrastination. When the mental batteries have recharged and I want to get back to work, I don’t have to politely negotiate my way out of the chit-chat. I just switch browser windows. Maybe this makes me a robot to say so, but this seems like a social efficiency to me.
I like the perspective. I can see it clearly in my own work patterns and habits since moving to Cincinnati.Having relocated to a part of the country I barely know has made me value those water cooler moments even more.
Lou Ordorica, one of the community managers for SUN Microsystems, was recently kind enough to share this slide show on social media monitoring. I found it to be well worth sharing, especially for those just starting to engage social media from a work stance.
It’s nicely done and while I agree with his advice I must admit to having little familiarity with Yahoo Pipes. I’ll probably have to give Daniel Johnson Jr. a poke and get him show me the basics.
I’ll admit it, I love my iPhone. Rather I love the apps. Don’t get me wrong, the interface is sweet enough to make me return to AT&T (something I never thought I’d do), but it is the extended functionality of the applications that I’m really jazzed about.
You see, there is a plethora of social media apps, most of them free, that really help you keep up with things on a real time basis. I’m going to take a look at a few of these now.
In the first group there are the basics, the official apps put out by the social media platforms themselves. Generally all free and usually quite well done. LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Livejournal, WordPress, and Skype all have solid functionality and beautifully streamlined interfaces. All of these are fantastic for turning your iPhone into a veritable social media swiss army knife.
Two things in particular I would like to note with this group of apps.
First: MySpace, which is an annoying wasteland of bells, whistles, and dating site ads, is much easier to manage from within the app than on an actual computer. Highly advised if you use the platform.
Second: While Skype has full functionality you can only use the voice aspects over wi-fi. From what I can gather that’s due to their deal with AT&T. Even so the chat function, which I confess I use more frequently, works over the 3G/Edge networks quite handily.
Then comes the second group, third party apps. There are a few in particular that I like: Red Delicious, Mobile Photo, and Twittelator Pro are indispensable.Lets take a closer look at them, shall we?
Red Delicious ($1.99 from Mac Appetite)
You can browse tags and bundles, view and search bookmarks, it supports device rotation, and allows you to view Delicious’ popular bookmarks. Nice streamlined functionality for my favorite social bookmarking service!
Mobile Photo ($2.99 from XK72)
I’ve been waiting for a Flickr app for the iPhone. All of a sudden there are several. I found this one to be the best across the board. Not only does it give you quick access to almost all of the Flickr functionality you are used to but it also allows you to open the camera from within the program. This lets you immediately title, tag and upload (as well add to any pertinent set or group) your photos as you take them. Brilliant stuff, I can’t wait for the next event I liveblog!
Twittelator Pro ($4.99 from Big Stone Phone)
Darnell Clayton over at The Blog Herald has a great review of this king of Twitter apps that goes into extensive detail. Suffice it to say that there is nothing I’ve found that is even close to it. If you use twitter check it out, there is a free, cropped version you can test drive. Trust me you won’t want to go back. It lets you do everything!
Installing these two groups of apps will allow you to bring your social media prescence with you everywhere that you could want it. The possibilites for liveblogging, citizen journalism, and lifecasting are incredible!
Do you use these apps? Are there others you like better? Let me know, I’d love to hear from you!
Yeah, that’s pretty fair approximation of my state of mind right now. Getting the LLC registered up here, learning the ways of home ownership, deadlines / content creation, all these and more have devoured my time outright. Add in an exciting little interlude of getting assaulted on the way home the other night (do not worry, I’m perfectly fine) and its been hectic.
In the midst of all the the madness I realized that something was missing. What the new house has desperately needed was for me to do some cooking.
It was even more an olfactory thing than a desire for the food itself. It just suddenly came to me that that backbeat of fragrances from cooking Creole food is a significant part of what makes a house feel like home. So, having planned in advance and made a trip to Jungle Jim’s, a vat of jambalaya was called for.
As the Trinity (celery, bell pepper and onion) sauteed down in an Herculean amount of butter the aroma began to drift through the house, suffusing it with the smell of the first stages of the dish. As I added garlic, beer, wine, and three kinds of sausage the atmosphere evolved and spread from room to room. Now it smells like home.
It is the basic things, things that often fall below one’s radar they are so basic, that can comprise the most important part of one’s environment.
Lets tie this together with social media for a moment:
What are the little things in the “background” of your online landscape that might be more important than you think?
What are the “smells of home” for you when in an online community or while using social media?
There has been a lot of furor over the disclosure guidelines recently put forth by the FTC. On a personal and professional level it really makes no difference to me. All you have to do is click the Transparency link in my sidebar and you’ll see a full disclosure for the website and then additional case by case ones on individual posts. I always advocate transparency both in my own work and to my clients.
If you look to the left underneath the blue Add button you will see Block This Application underneath it. If you never want to see that game or app again just click it.
Most of my posts over the next several days will be audio reports from 
I’ll admit it, I love my iPhone. Rather I love the apps. Don’t get me wrong, the interface is sweet enough to make me return to AT&T (something I never thought I’d do), but it is the extended functionality of the applications that I’m really jazzed about.
In the midst of all the the madness I realized that something was missing. What the new house has desperately needed was for me to do some cooking.
makes a house feel like home. So, having planned in advance and made a trip to 
important part of one’s environment.
