Archive - 2008
August 20th
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 08/20/2008 - 07:42
August 19th
Social Media Map – What does it mean?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 08/19/2008 - 13:05Yesterday, I posted an updated Social Media Map on Flickr. mriggen commented on Flickr, “Man, that is one crazy Interwebs diagram!”. Over on FriendFeed, AcademiaConnect.org liked the picture and Bill Anderson commented, “A very intriguing diagram. It's fascinating to look at, but I'm not sure how to make any sense of it. What do you make of it, if anything?”
I suspect that Bill was looking for sense making of what is going on with social media, instead of a simple description of the graph, what the arrows mean and what the over all graph can tell us. However, I will start with the simple description, and go from there
At the very top of the graph is ‘cellvideo’. Coming from it are four arrows pointing to where I send videos from my cellphone, YouTube, Blip.TV, Utterz, and Facebook. Following the arrow through Blip.TV, you will see that Blip.TV is set up to send links to the video to Flickr, Orient Lodge, MySpace, del.icio.us, and Profilactic.
Looking at it on a macro level, a lot of arrows feed into the aggregators FriendFeed and Profilactice. I probably should have added some other aggregators like MyBlogLog, LifeStream and others. A lot of arrows come out of ping.fm. Other sites, like Utterz and Orient Lodge end up being key hubs in the middle of things.
It was actually Bill that got me thinking about this. A while ago, he complained about multiple duplicate messages showing up in my FriendFeed. If I send a message with ping.fm to fourteen different services, and each service shows up in FriendFeed (or Profilactic, Lifestream, or others), you can get some very annoying duplication.
This can get more complicated if I post something on Orient Lodge, which then feeds Twitter, Identi.ca and other sites, which all feed FriendFeed.
So this raises lots of questions. To what extent should you feed from one system to another? How do you decide when to feed and when not to? How do you decide when to aggregate and when not to?
I don’t think there are easy answers to any of that. On the one hand, you can view each system as completely separate silos. Blog posts go on Orient Lodge. Pictures go on Flickr, microblogging goes on Twitter. Videos go on YouTube. If you approach things like this, then aggregation to an aggregator isn’t a problem.
Some people adopt this approach because they are afraid of Google penalizing duplicate content. I think this fear is unfounded. I don’t know how Google penalizes duplicate content, but my content changes shape between different services, and it isn’t the sort of duplicate content that I would think Google is concerned about. Google is much more concerned about link spam. Copy the same block of 150 links to 150 blogs so each blog gets extra incoming links; I’ve seen blog posts like that and I can imagine Google being more concerned about that.
Yet content cannot easily be broken into silos. Videos are made up of pictures. The pictures tell stories. Beyond that, you may want to get your story out on as many sources as possible. Personally, I want people to be able to easily find my content, independent of which sites they prefer.
This leads to the next problem, as illustrated by the comments I received on the Social Media Map. One was on Flickr, two were on FriendFeed. None where on Orient Lodge itself, which is what I like my primary focal point to be.
Now, I have been working on bringing in comments from other systems. Currently, it works well with comments on FriendFeed about Orient Lodge posts, as well as with Disqus. This blog post consolidates some of the comments, but there is the issue of how to consolidate comments, and for that matter simply not to miss comments on one of the less frequently used social networks.
All of this brings me to my final concern, for right now. It is possible to feed content from one site to another via various APIs, feeds, protocols, etc. Some of these feeds can introduce latency. So, instead of sending something just to Twitter and letting other people pick up the RSS feed from Twitter, when they get around to it an hour or two later, I’m using things like ping.fm or posterous.com to send my messages to as many services at the same time as possible.
However, federation with the Open Microblogging protocol could end up being a step towards a better approach. If I can find one place that sends my messages, no matter what content or form, to all the different sites I would like it, that would be great. If I could find aggregators that would better manage duplicate content, that would be great.
These sort of tools still seem a ways off, and instead we have people building lots of similar systems, trying to get their part of the mindshare of people in social media, and I suspect things will only get more complicated before they start becoming cleaner.
August 18th
Social Media Map
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 08/18/2008 - 10:55As new services continue to crop up, the map of the social media services I use and which ones feed which other ones continues to change and become more complicated. Back in June, I produced this graph of my social networks:
Things have become much more complicated as more Microblog sites like, Identi.ca, and other Laconi.ca based sites, Kwippy, Rejaw and others come on line. Things have become more complicated as more sites send feeds to others, include Posterous. Things have become more complicated as additional aggregators have come on line, like Profilactic, and SecondBrain. Included in this are aggregators aggregating aggregators.
Hard to get your mind around? Just take a look at this picture.
If that is mind boggling, just wait. There is another OpenMicroBlog player on the scene now, which I hope to explore soon. I suspect things may continue to get worse and more complicated until we start seeing federation between different microblogging sites working much better.
August 17th
Thinking about Citizen’s Journalism
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 08/17/2008 - 14:28Yesterday, Kim was out registering voters at the Milford Oyster festival. I stopped by and ran into Tessa Marquis and had an interesting talk about citizen journalism and I’d like to illustrate a few different points of this from recent events.
First, I’m no expert on journalism, so if what I’m suggesting doesn’t make sense, I apologize. However, it seems to me that there are three key aspects to any journalism endeavor. First, there is the gathering of information. Then, there is the ‘sense making’, finding a story line or narrative that is compelling, and then there is the distribution.
This gets to a key problem that live bloggers run into. Too often they are trying to gather information and make sense of what is going on all at the same time. This can draw them out of the moment, and they can miss important information.
So, when I am live blogging, or doing various forms of mobile social media, I try to simply gather information and get it distributed as quickly as possible. Then, when I get back home from an event, I can try to make sense, and write up a longer, more narratively interesting entry. What is nice about this approach is also the collaborative aspect. If people see my comments, photographs or listen to my audio posts, they can grab and do their own sense making out of it, even if the sense they make ends up much different than the sense I eventually make out of it.
My blog post yesterday is a good example of that. Local Politics is a picture that I took with my cellphone, which I added a small amount of text to and sent on to Flickr, which in turn posted it to my blog. Later, Mike Brown posted additional information about the candidates to help with the sense making process. When and if I get time, I hope to write up a more detailed post about the Oyster Festival, but the way things are piling up, that just may not happen.
So, if we break apart the information gathering part of the journalistic process from the sense making part, we may find that we want to apply the distribution to both the information gathering part of the process in addition to the sense making part.
As I have been working to get bloggers, delegates, and others going to Denver to submit their information via cellphones to sites like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and so on, I’ve also been working on the distribution channels of this raw information. The DemConvention Room on FriendFeed is set up to pull in information from many such sources so people can look at a fairly raw, unedited feed, and then decide what they want to use for their own sense making.
CSpan is getting into this game as well. They have just set up an account on Twitter and have additional plans in place for their website, which will include aggregating messages on Twitter flagged with the #DNC08 and #RNC08 hashtags.
Here in Connecticut, Lon Seidman has set up http://ctgoestodenver.info/, a site that will have various content from the Connecticut Delegation in Denver.
As a final note, as I checked the DemConvention FriendFeed room, I saw a posting about one of the Denver bound bloggers who was in a serious accident.
Please do whatever you can to help the blogger and her family with the increased expenses this accident will add to their coverage of the convention.
Free Markets and Monocultures
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 08/17/2008 - 12:34(Originally published at Greater Democracy.)
Over the past few days, I’ve been getting into discussions with various conservatives comparing their concern about big government with liberals about their concern about big business. My primary concern is that centralized power, whether it be with big government or big businesses is not the best way of addressing the issues we face.
Some may note that these days the dividing line between big business and big government is becoming blurrier. Others may note that this discuss applies much more broadly and may talk about peer-to-peer networks as opposed to highly centralized networks. These are interesting topics worth exploring. However, today, I want to focus on the conservative response and what I think are some of the flaws.
The conservative response focuses on the free market, and their belief that free markets are the best ways of addressing problems. Some would argue that our markets are not really free, but that government policies particularly benefit big business. They would point to the vast sums that big business spends on lobbying. This argument has a lot of merit, but still, we need to dig deeper.
The free market enthusiasts all recognize the danger of monopolies. Monopolies prevent free markets from doing their magic. Yet they often look at monopolies in terms of whether there is a single corporation controlling the market, and over look the aspects of when several companies are virtually indistinguishable from one another and this group of similar companies controls the market.
This leads us to the key issue. Free markets are good at rewarding short-term profitability, short term profitability may not be the best way to address problems. If one company is very successful, other companies will imitate these companies and the largest companies end up being very similar, and we lose any sort of diversity. Personally, I don’t find a lot of difference between Burger King, Wendy’s or McDonald’s. I don’t see a lot of difference between Verizon and AT&T. I don’t see a lot of difference between ABC, NBC, and CBS. I don’t see a lot of difference between Borders and Barnes and Noble. I don’t see a lot of difference between Budweiser and Miller. I don’t see a lot of difference between Ford, GM and Dodge.
Essentially, free markets tend to create monocultures with minor differences between the brands. So, what is wrong with monocultures? Look at nineteenth century Ireland for the answer. Everyone was growing the same type of potatoes. It was the most profitable crop, at least in the short term, just as SUVs had been the most profitable vehicle in the United States for quite a while. However, when things changed, such as the potato blight in Ireland, or the steep increase in gasoline prices, the profitable crops and products rapidly became unprofitable and massive dislocations were created.
Those interested in longer term stability would do well to look beyond a simplistic view of free markets and think about how we can promote a better diversified economy.
