I have been tracking the recent London riots with some interest. Having spent the first half of my life in London, keeping up with the comings and goings there seems like the right thing to do.
Particularly under circumstances such as these, when old haunts are seen being blitzed again, I take leisurely strolls down memory lane preferring my own sentimental journey to the path of degradation which has led to the present day blighting of Blighty.
Is the social web a thing of the past?
Like a good book you can’t put down, here is a tube in the same category: Elevation Partners Director and Co-Founder Roger McNamee presenting at The Paley Center For Media.
Roger McNamee shares a number of compelling arguments that invite us to think about the social web not in terms of where we think we are, but in terms of where irresistible change is taking us.
Well worth watching…twice:
The time constraints on today’s executives are more numerous than ever before. Between the economic downturn, ever-changing industry regulations, fast-moving information and simple day-to-day management tasks, corporate executives are trapped in the virtual jail cell that is today’s business climate. The unintended result of executive “information-imprisonment” is a workplace where they may have little insight into employee morale, culture, and general goings-on during the workday. Blinded by the reflection of their own to-do-lists, executives are turning to consumer social networks to stay connected to the people that execute on daily tasks inside their organizations.
Ever since I started using WebCite a couple of years ago I have been interested in the idea of online curation. It seems that there has been a proliferation of curator services of late and a heightened sense of the potential benefits that come with the extraction and aggregation of content from tweets, Facebook, blog posts, RSS feeds and what-have-you.
Services like Paper.li, Tabbloid, The Tweeted Times, and Feedly mash-up the linked-to content, typically in a newspaper or magazine format. I am noticing that even sites like LinkedIn are jumping on the bandwagon with the recent launch of LinkedIn Today. Whatever next?
Two years ago, I found myself taking a crash course on influence, advocacy and online behavior. We had taken in a family in need and leveraged the web, specifically Twitter, Paypal, a blog, and most importantly, our real social network, to raise nearly seventeen thousand dollars for the family.The velocity of the effort — nearly twelve thousand dollars was raised in less than twenty four hours — was amazing and made me realize that the old model of a few people controlling information and distribution is giving way to a new, highly distributed, individually empowering system that leverages social media. In this case, I had enough influence and trust with my core network to create a ripple effect that spread to other networks, which were transformed into advocates for the family. This is the new, emerging model of influence.
Facebook, which began as a way to connect students at Harvard, now has a population greater than most countries. The site has become a staple in the lives of many of its 600 million members. It is where people store and share photos, plan and organize events, communicate with the people in their lives. It’s become a hub for news and link/video sharing. It’s a marketing tool, a place to promote one’s business and professional endeavors.
It is also ruining our lives.
While it seems that many are tinkering around with measuring the ROI for their investments in social media, some have turned their attention to the waste associated with search. Naturally, just as the former eludes most of us, the latter is hard to avoid.
Experts like Thomas Vander Wal, a scholar and a poet, while advocating the virtues of tag augmented social search, leave us speechless when we find they don’t tag shit.
No matter. This slide deck redeems our favorite technosocial architect who not only sees the irony in not wanting to be labeled, but may well not give a tinker’s cuss if we do.
I remember watching Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us and feeling at the end that something profound had just happened. That was in 2007, not that long ago really. Around the same time I watched Shift Happens and was left similarly inspired by the rate at which my world was changing.
Trust in other people is established on the basis of promises kept. Either explicitly or implicitly we judge that a particular person is reliable, based on our own experiences or those of others. We don’t trust everyone we encounter of course, but a small number of those people we trust and who we happen to like will become friends; especially if the trust and attraction is reciprocated.
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