Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
“O.R.?”
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 11/05/2010 - 10:07When I was a kid and my little sister or I were bothering our two older brothers too much, one would knowingly look at the other and say “O.R.?” The other would nod, and the two of them would disappear into their bedroom. My sister and I were always a bit miffed to be left out and wanted to know what “O.R.” really meant.
One day, I was fortunate. It must have been my little sister that was annoying my older brothers, because they said I could tag along. We entered my brothers’ bedroom and they sat on their beds. One of them told a story to the other, or at least that is what it seemed like to me. They might have been recounting a strange dream, or just about anything else, but it became clear to me that “O.R.” meant to go into one’s bedroom and tell stories.
Later I explained this to my little sister and after that she would often suggest, “Let’s have an O.R.”. Later, I found out that “O.R.” really simply meant, “Our Room”. My brothers would escape to their room to get away from my sister and me.
Yesterday was my wife and my tenth wedding anniversary. We had a simple celebration at home. It was also the second meeting of a group of Connecticut bloggers which I couldn’t make it to. I’m not sure how many people did make it, but I received an email afterward asking everyone what the goals of everyone in the group are.
I started off with my story about “O.R.”s because it provides a valuable context to understand what I look for in any social media gathering: community and narrative.
My sister and I didn’t want to feel left out. We wanted to be part of a community. We ended up creating our own little community with its rituals. I think of blogging in a similar way. Good blogging is about being part of a community, or perhaps many different communities of bloggers. What holds the community together is the story telling, is the narrative. I hope that the new blogging group can embrace community and narrative.
Today at noon, there will be a story.lab event at The Grove co-working space in New Haven. This seems like another good opportunity to explore finding community and narrative, whether we are bloggers, other social media enthusiasts, or however else we chose to define ourselves.
Where do you find community and narrative?
Freebird!
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 10/31/2010 - 14:58Recently on the Adgitize Forums I asked fellow bloggers what bloggers' memes they participate in. This led to an interesting discussion of memes and the pros and cons of participating in Bloggers’ Memes.
Meme is one of those words that everyone seems to have a different idea what it is. Bloggers often talk about weekly blogging community events like Music Monday, Ruby Tuesdays, Wordless Wednesdays or Follow Fridays. Others question whether or not these are really memes in the purest sense of the word. I tend to think they are and to participate in a few different ones.
Music Mondays is the idea of bloggers putting up blog posts about music every Monday. Often they visit one another’s blogs and leave comments or links. Wordless Wednesdays is the idea of bloggers posting pictures, typically with minimal verbiage attached. Again, the idea is to visit one another’s blogs and leave comments or links. Follow Friday grew out of Twitter where people list people that they like to follow on Twitter, hoping that others will list them as people good to follow as well. I end up doing it as a blog post so people can get the context of why I follow someone. Perhaps the commenting and linking are simply more basic memes that go into these blogging memes.
Yet memes are much more than just little things bloggers do to connect with other bloggers. The Wikipedia definition is “a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena”.
The idea dates back to Richard Dawkins’ book “The Selfish Gene”, written in 1976 the evolutionary aspects of memes. How does “a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices” replicate? How does it morph? What are the history of these ideas?
Some members of the Adgitize Forums spoke about disliking memes. They spoke about it in terms of bloggers memes. However, when you look at it in the wider perspective, being part of a culture means participating in various memes. Do we shake hands with people when we meet them? Do we bow to them? Do we hand business cards to people? Do we use one hand when we do it or two? Do we take off our shoes when we enter people’s houses? Do we say God Bless You when someone sneezes? Each of these seems to be units “of cultural ideas, symbols or practices”.
I thought about this more yesterday, when I went to see Blue Man Group’s performance in Hartford yesterday. At one point, as members of the group went down and interacted with members of the audience, I thought it would be really interesting to see Blue Man Group on Oprah. As I think back on it, I suspect that they were using particular memes tied to shows like Oprah. However, since I don’t watch shows like Oprah, I can’t really name or describe it. Yet it seemed like it was there.
At another point, they spoke about various things that people do at concerts, holding up cellphones and waving them back and forth. This would also seem to be a meme that has evolved over the years. It used to be lighters. This led to someone shouting out from the audience “Freebird!”. This too, it would seem is a unit of cultural practice. In fact, the Blue Man Group seemed to be heavily laden with memes and related ideas. The references to cellphones, texting, Captain Crunch, Twinkies and Lady Gaga would have been completely missed by people from other cultures or times, including fans of Blue Man Group when they first started back in the nineties.
It would still have been a wonderful experience, not recognizing the cultural symbols in the performance and simply absorbing the rhythm, music, and imagery, but it would have been a much different experience.
I don’t claim to know a lot about memes. I tend to look at our culture, at times, from the view point of a detached observer, but knowing the cultural practices, even if I don’t always participate in them, I believe, enrich my experiences.
So, I keep posting Music Monday, Wordless Wednesday and Follow Friday posts on my own blog. I read other blogs participating in other memes, and I enjoy hearing someone shout “Freebird!” out at performances.
Connecticut Bloggers
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/28/2010 - 10:02Recently, I’ve been in several discussions about Connecticut blogs, so I thought it might be useful to explore various ways people can find Connecticut blogs and ways that Connecticut Bloggers can be found.
To put things into perspective, Blogspot lists 59,900 bloggers using their software in Connecticut. Over the years, I’ve been picking out various Connecticut blogs that I follow in Google Reader and you can see some of them in my Connecticut section of Google Reader.
One of the oldest and best established aggregator of Connecticut blogs is CTWebLogs. More recently, newspapers are getting into the blog aggregation business. The political section of my blog appears in the opinion section of the Journal Inquirer. The Record Journal has a Community Blogs section on there website and other newspapers are starting to follow suit.
Politics is an area where a lot of blog aggregation goes on. LeftyBlogs has been around for a long time, aggregating blogs that are about local politics. Unfortunately, they have not updated their list in ages and it is pretty incomplete.
Ballotpedia is a wiki trying to provide a better list of political blogs. It does not have an apparent political leaning. Anyone can set up an account and modify it. So far, the modifications appear to be dominated by conservative bloggers.
Moving away from politics, an interesting list is New England Bloggers. They haven’t updated their list since last December, but you can still find many interesting Connecticut Bloggers on the list and in the comments.
More recently, Connecticut Bloggers have been gathering at various events. Wendy and Cheryl both wrote about their experiences at PodCampCT where various bloggers, podcasters and others interested in social media gathered.
Then, there is an emerging group of Connecticut Bloggers that plan on meeting regularly to share their blogging experiences. Wendy wrote about the first meeting and Lisa wrote about an upcoming meeting and listed blogs of some of the participants. Another participant, Christopher, wrote about the upcoming gathering in his blog as well.
As a final note, I would like to mention a few other Connecticut Blogs that I’ve been visiting regularly recently. Grampy’s World, Small Town Mommy and Moomettes Magnificents are Connecticut blogs I’ve found through various blog advertising networks like Adgitize and EntreCard. I particularly like Adgitize in that it brings in both traffic and a little advertising revenue.
There are probably several other good lists of Connecticut blogs. If there are some that you especially like, let me know.
Fiona to Interview State Comptroller Candidate Kevin Lembo
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 10/24/2010 - 09:10For the past two and a half years, my daughter Fiona and I have done an Internet based radio show using BlogTalkRadio. She was about six and a half years old when we started and now we have over a hundred recordings of the two of us talking together on Sunday evenings.
Our typical shows have been about what she has done over the past week. Visits to Papa’s house, trips to orchards or to pick pumpkins, playing with puppies; the stuff of childhood. Yet on various occasions Fiona has interviewed special guests. Last November, Fiona interviewed Connecticut Gubernatorial Candidate Dan Malloy. She was born in Stamford when Dan was mayor there and they had a good chat. I wrote about the interview back then in a blog post, Fiona Interviews CT Gubernatorial Hopeful Dan Malloy on Internet Radio Show. It provides a summary of the discussion and some context on other people she has interviewed.
She has also interviewed State Representatives and candidates for that office. This April, Fiona interviewed Connecticut Secretary of State Candidate Denise Merrill. Both Denise and Dan are on the ballot this November.
At a discussion between bloggers and State Comptroller Candidate Kevin Lembo, I asked Kevin if he would be interested in being on Fiona’s show. With just a few weeks left before election day, I wasn’t sure we would be able to get him on as a candidate and was prepared to have him as a guest sometime after the election. However, the campaign has managed to make time for him to call this evening.
As I’ve explained to candidates, if they can explain what the job is and why they think they would be good at it to a nine year old interviewer, they are probably more than sufficiently prepared to speak with other members of the press and public that might be having difficulties grasping what the campaign is all about.
So, I hope that you consider tuning in this evening at 6:30 PM, U.S. Eastern Daylight Time to here Fiona interview Kevin Lembo.
At the end of the introduction of the show each week, I say, “I encourage all parents to find time to talk with their kids, perhaps even recording the discussions or, as we do, sharing them on BlogTalkRadio.” I was glad to hear people from PodcampCT talking about doing that very thing, so I also hope that over the coming weeks, I can highlight shows similar to Fiona’s and encourage you to listen to them as well.
Analyzing Entrecard
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/23/2010 - 08:25Entrecard is giving away 5000 credits to anyone that writes a review of their service. They typically sell credits at $3 per thousand credits, so in theory this is worth $15. That said, I have never bought credits on Entrecard. Instead I earn them a couple different ways.
First, I have an Entrecard widget on my site. Other people pay credits to advertise. Entrecard keeps half of the credits paid and I get the other half. As one of the more busy sites on EntreCard ads on my site typically cost around one to three thousand credits a day. That gives me between 500 and 1500 credits each day for my advertising on Entrecard.
Entrecard members also get a credit for each site that they visit and drop a card on. You can get up to 300 credits this way. There are a few things that this results in.
First, the quality of Entrecard visits are not all that high. Google Analytics shows the bounce rate from Entrecard on my site is currently 92.77%. That’s pretty high. Normally, I don’t worry too much about bounce rate. It can mean that people are finding what they look for on their first page view. It can also mean that they are not really paying attention and simply moving on. I suspect this is often the case with Entrecard visitors. Yet even with that, I get over 100 visitors from Entrecard each month that stop and read more than one page on my site.
Many of these visitors end up being people that become regular readers and that I read regularly as well.
In terms of incoming demographics, a little less than half of my EntreCard traffic comes from the Americas. A little over a third comes from Asia. It often seems like it is a much higher percentage that comes from Asia. Drilling down more deeply, regions that drive the most traffic to my site from Entrecard are Manilla, Cebu and Jakarta. For U.S. traffic the regions driving the most traffic are from Texas and Florida.
There are some people from Connecticut that use Entrecard. I get more traffic from a local news site and from Facebook than I do from Entrecard, but I do get some Connecticut traffic.
Is Entrecard for you? Hard to tell. It can be a useful way of getting some new readers and joining some discussions. However, for it to be useful, you need to agree to have their widget on your website and really, you need to spend time connecting with your readers. On the other hand, you really should be spending time connecting with your readers anyway. So, do you use EntreCard? How’s it working for you?
