In recent years we’ve seen an explosion of grassroots campaigns built around the web’s strengths: the low cost of production, the ease of distribution, and ability to build community. But while there are a host of worthy causes I feel like I’m spread too thin. The most insidious is the call to actions; while each organization may only rally the troops on an occasional basis when totaled it seems like there is a constant barrage of time requests. If it’s not DownHillBattle.org (music activism) then its One.org (the campaign to make poverty history), or DefectiveByDesign.org (a campaign to eliminate DRM), or IPac (defending culture and technology at the policy level), or the Electronic Frontier Foundation (defending freedoms in the digital world), or SaveTheInternet.com (fighting for net neutrality). Thankfully the mid-terms are over so I no longer feel guilt when I don’t have time to stump for my chosen political candidates. But the 2008 race is already so contentious that I fear I may be compelled to do something there.
In the old days (say, oh, even ten years ago) it would be very likely that I’d only have heard of one or two of these organizations – much less be called on repeatedly in an efficient manner to take some kind of action. Today, however, it seems like not a week goes by without pleas for calls to a congressman or letter to the editor. How does a person battle this compassion fatigue? Does anyone else have this problem? What do you do about it?
Shel Israel has a piece on Social Media Today which takes a brief look at people that are enforcing discipline via blogging.
Leigh Ann, a financial educator, told the Times she teaches people how to get out of debt, but couldn’t do it herself until she started the blog.
As part of my MBA degree we spent time going over goal setting and how best to keep them. A major facet of making a goal ’stick’ is writing down what you want to achieve and then putting it in a public place. Writing forces a person to articulate what they want and putting it in a public place keeps one from forgetting them. It certainly sounds like blogs fit that bill to me.
But the article ends with an intriguing question – would you read any of these blogs if you weren’t in the same situation?
Posted in site news at 3:59 pm by Matthew Reinbold
I’ve begun the inevitable task of finding appropriate advertising to support the bandwidth and hosting costs for mutednoise. The previous format had a couple slots for Google Adsense sections. While they occasionally got a click I was greatly disappointed in the ‘contextual’ appropriateness for the site – more often than not they would seem to pick up on the strangest keyword and produce ‘relevant’ content in only the most tenuous sense.
On the Militant Geek Propoganda site I’ve been using affiliate programs provided by Commission Junction. Those ads aren’t contextual (or they aren’t automated to try and fit the site’s content) but I can pick and choose the vendors to display. Overall, pre-selecting shops with overall relevance seems to perform much better that Google Adsense’s best day.
The crux, however, is what vendors to ‘build into’ mutednoise. Suppose, for a minute, that we could place ads for any kind of product or service here – anything from consumer electronics to male pattern baldness solutions. What do you think is appropriate? Or more accurately, what online shops or services are you looking to use? I’d love any and all suggestions here…
Posted in privacy, tools at 5:00 am by Matthew Reinbold
I will agree with anyone that is concerned with Google’s growing adeptness at gathering information. Privacy concerns are definitely an issue but the trade off are a number of free applications that make me a more productive person. However, to believe the following video, Google will have our entire genetic code on file… so that they can… um, what exactly?
And really, when given the choice between random ad bombardment and providing some information to have ads that pertain to me I’ll choose the latter.
Recently Barack Obama launched his bid to be the next president of the United States. Along with his announcement was the unveiling of MyBarackObama.com, a social networking site for supporters. Steve O’Hear has his impressions on ZDNet:
The site invites supporters to create a profile, blog their campaign experiences, plan and attend events, find other supporters, and help raise funds for the campaign. Obama already has an official presence on Facebook and YouTube, as well as an unofficial page on MySpace (presumably created by a supporter) which currently has 36,674 ‘friends’. Of course Obama isn’t the only potential candidate to utilize social software (see my post ‘YouTube on the campaign trail‘) but is the first to create a fully fledged social networking site of their own.
While neat some very knowledgeable web folks have had trouble with the site. Fred Wilson, a great blogger and venture capitalist lays out the problems with the site:
So then I saw that they let you write your own blog. That’s smart too. But what if you already have one? No way to import my political blog posts into my profile. The people who are most likely to blog for Obama already have blogs. It’s silly to shut them out.
I think this dilemma is going to be faced by many ‘grassroots’ efforts going forward – do you build a self-contained silo or do you spread a thousand seeds to the wind? A silo provides a controlled environment where messages can be carefully monitored, active users rewarded, and antagonizers clearly cut out. Letting self-forming groups build with whatever tools and platforms they’re comfortable with creates a more ‘authentic’ feel, acts as a natural extension of what those people are already doing, and offers functionality that may not be possible with one central system.
The answer, of course, is having both. But both systems need to feed and nurture each other; the central site provides video, photos, scheduling, etc. to keep the individuals primed. And it must also provide aggregation of the best back into itself – it validates user efforts and encourages extra effort. That creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop that grows with every iteration. That’s something that doesn’t seem to be happening at the moment with MyBarackObama.
Pipes is a new beta app from Yahoo that has been getting high praise among the digerati. It takes advantage of the RSS machine readable format and allows people to remix that data in a graphical interface – no coding is needed.
Planning a trip? It takes research and time. Or maybe you can do a single pipe which will give you all the answers you need in a second? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: the travel fanatic. Seemingly most complex of all the pipes here, it’s actually quite simple to make. It combines Flickr images, Yahoo Answers, and Yahoo News related to the location. (Various other feeds could be added, but I chose only these three for simplicity’s sake.) This results in a very comprehensive feed with a lot of information on the place you’re planning to visit.
How useful is it? Pretty damn useful, I would say. With a bit of tweaking this single feed replaces what would previously be an entire service.
While that sound promising – getting contextual information about a place that exists throughout the web – trying to change the default ‘London’ to anything else doesn’t seem to work. And building a pipe from scratch, despite involving ‘no code’, is still slightly confusing. For example, something as simple as providing a unified feed for several of my blogs seems overly complex and still doesn’t work as I expected it to (I can’t figure out how to have the individual posts appear in the order in which they were posted – right now it seems to grab all articles from one site and then another). And, as Stan mentions, the interface is buggy and lacks some certain key features.
So would you ever use something like Yahoo Pipes? Or is anything beyond an aggregator for RSS feeds overkill?
Mathew Ingram, writing on the Social Media Today site, brings us the story of KFTY, a television station out of Santa Rosa, California. It’s owners, Clear Channel, fired all the reporters on staff in the name of giving citizen journalism a try. The result has been the dark side of crowdsourcing, or what is referred to as digital sharecropping.
Ironically, the station that is encouraging its viewers to create their own news media may be enabling its own irrelevance.
The Poynter Institutes site has more, and Dan Kennedy at MediaNation points out that citizen journalism is often a euphemism for getting content for nothing, to boost a content producers bottom line. But Dan makes a good point: since the technology is cheap and plentiful, what exactly does a citizen journalist gain by giving their content to a TV station for free, when they can just upload it to YouTube? In the long run, TV stations like KFTY may be sowing the seeds of their own irrelevance.
Sadly, I don’t expect this to be the last example of corporate interests trying to get by with only user contributions. Is there a good example out there of traditional media working alongside and being enriched by user contributions?
Mitch Ratcliffe is a ZDNet reporter blogger. On a recent web post he talks about the brewing storm between Google/YouTube and the television networks. While that portion of the article has the usual copyright conversationalists in full glower mode the gems are buried toward the bottom. There, Mitch (quite correctly, I think) points out why YouTube is so important and won’t be replicated by a studio:
The local flavor, added by individuals who lovingly or hatefully recast media, is essential to the success of this form of media. It is the fact someone sits down and excerpts the significant parts of each episode of Lost, for example, that makes mainstream-derived media more popular on YouTube. Those edited contributions are the filter that allow people to decide whether to watch the whole show.
A studio portal would, by emphasizing the whole programs, put a damper on personal expression, making the place sterile and, well, much like television is already.
In other words, social media sites add value above and beyond the content that they’re covering. Unless the studios can recreate their businesses to harness the passionate contributions of their audiences any efforts by them will pale in comparison.
Update: Changed Mitch’s relationship to ZDNet as per comments below.
In conjunction with the upcoming Oscar Awards the group behind The Pirate Bay has audaciously put up OscarTorrents.com. It serves as a site specifically linking to pirated copies of Oscar nominated movies. If that doesn’t prove that the hubris has left the house, they’ve also dared the entire movie industry with their taunting:
To those worried about downloading in case they get sued: by our calculations, your chances of getting nailed are way less than your chances of winning the lottery. Don’t think twice about it.
To all intellectual property landlords: we are aware that OscarTorrents might annoy you — but contain your righteous indignation for a while, and think: we’re only linking to torrents that already exist. Face it: your membrane has burst, and it wasn’t us who burst it. Your precious bodily fluids are escaping.
You haven’t beaten us, so why not join us? Think of a new business model that doesn’t involve overpriced pieces of plastic and skanky cinemas hawking cheap carbohydrates while relying on $6/hr projectionists who can’t keep a film in focus — not to mention insulting your audiences by (to pick a few examples) surveilling us with nightvision glasses, searching bags, 30 minutes of commercials and bombarding us with ridiculous anti-piracy propaganda. Take a look at yourselves. Is it really any wonder we’re winning?
I can appreciate a certain amount of moxy. And the content industries need to change to deal with the economic realities posed by the web. But I disagree with this. There is a talk available on Google Video (and embedded below – I can’t believe I didn’t mention this earlier) by Lawrence Lessig about Culture and Code. At the end of the discussion, during the Q&A, somebody makes a statement that all the pirates have to do is continue their ways and wait for the old copyright champions, those stuck in 20th century models, to die off. Lessig correctly points out that what he is proposing is the equivalent of ‘digital terrorism’. (Given that many of these acts are perpetrated by self-described ‘pirates’ advocates for rational reform are already battling from a compromised position.) And if that’s how we allow the battle to be framed we are never going to win meaningful changes at the political levels.