By the title of this post, I don’t mean that the U.S. Senate will vote by using XML. I mean that the U.S. Senate is making it’s past votes, its voting history, available in XML format. Read here for more information. Imagine the mashup possibilities here. They could be hysterical.
Bloggers, on both sides of the political spectrum, will finally be able to rehash and mash up votes with other media to get those votes to turn out they way they want them. Votes mashed up with Google maps, and podcasts, and videos, and Flickr pix. Ones-sided votes, over-sided votes, landslides, mandates; all these things will come to pass on many different blogs, all of them different and all with the same voting records. Sort of like The Daily Show, but on a micro basis. This could be hysterical. It could also be confusing.
Imagine a million blogs, many of them not satire or parody sites, suddenly getting in the business of trying to be funny. Dipping an untrained toe into the waters of parody and satire. Mashing and hashing and rewriting “history” with their own version of Senate votes. And combine that with the slow, but sure, demise of the central “repositories of reality,” i.e. mainstream newspapers. Then what might we have. More people who are more confused than they already are?
This is going to be funny, or sad. I’ll let you know which later.
The end of social media socialism? Sacré bleu! How could I say such a thing? No less even think it? Well, it’s possible. At least in the opinion of Simon Dumenco in his article entitled “The Coming End of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook Socialism.”
The article starts off its theory by citing how Cardinal Sean Brady of Ireland two weeks ago suggested that Ireland’s Catholics should send prayers via Twitter. Now, at first you might think that’s a really great idea. And on a moral and spiritual level it certainly is. But Simon gets down to practicality very quickly, and alas I fear he’s right, but only to a certain point.
Simon suggests that if not only Ireland’s 4 million Catholics started to tweet pray, but if the world’s one billion Catholics conducted multiple daily tweet prayers on Twitter, the whole Twitter system would coming crashing down around our tweeted ankles and just ruin the party for everyone. After all, there is just only so much server space and bandwidth that can be bought by a company that has, essentially, no revenue model and, with it, no revenue. With that kind of crushing demand, no matter how altruistic its nature, how could Twitter be used by the rest of us? The whole thing would ground to an annoying halt. People would abandon Twitter in droves, and venture capitalists would no longer want to feed this monster. This is Simon’s theory. And I believe he’s correct, but only up to this point.
People might abandon a prayer-crushed Twitter, but that doesn’t mean that they’d lose their jones for expressing their inner-child in 140 characters on less. They’d simply move on to some other free micro-blogging site. They might simply move, en masse, to Plurk, or Seesmic, or Yammer, and in so doing the crush of prayers would automatically make these lesser known micro-blogging tools household words overnight.
So no, Simon. I don’t think such overdemand will contribute to the end of social media socialism. The people want it free; the people get it free. No matter where they have to go. There will always be a server with extra capacity, and a VC to fund it.
I stumbled across an interesting article recently, actually without using Stumble Upon. The title is “Do You Have a Social Media Hub?” and explores the concept of landing pages, but in reverse. Shall we call them “take off” pages? The idea’s simple.
The author of the article, Samir Balwani, suggests that especially for companies not maintaining a blog they use a social media hub. The hub is a page leading to other social media platforms on which the company has a presence such as Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Delicious, FriendFeed, etc. and ad infinitum. The idea is solid.
It’s solid because many companies, especially small companies, don’t have the staff resources to maintain the rigors of blogging, nor do the have the monetary resources to contract out the blogging task. The tactic of a company presence on the sites mentioned above can be less demanding in terms of time requirements and if employed properly may better represent the company in the ongoing conversation within social media. This idea also promotes the readers’ participation in UGC, content which is not created by the company, but about the company, allowing visitors to experience the real brand as defined by the crowd, and not the company marketing department.
Sounds like a win-win, and maybe more effective than other social media tactics.
I read an article last week about how information from Twitter could be incorporated into the emergency response and notification system. Does that mean the 911 system?
I checked the article’s date three times. I thought I might be reading something from April Fool’s day, but no, the article was dated April 28, 2009. This is a particularly interesting development that raises a host of questions:
Does this mean we’ll have alerts from Twitter driving police, fire and EMS workers to various destinations?
Given the potential anonymity of Twitter user accounts, does this mean that we’ll have an increase in false alarms?
Is it faster for someone to text in that they need help instead of using the phone function?
Will this make us safer? Or drive up the cost of first responders?
I suppose we’re about to find out.
Is it possible to be too connected.
Absolutely.
A recent article entitled “The Twitter Pandemic” played on the current news about the swine flu being so popular. In the article, the author talks about how sometime (or maybe much of the time) sensationalism is used by tweeters to gain attention for their tweet and for any connected blog post or web site. Sensationalism? How about the title of the article that discusses that? The article is titled the “Twitter Pandemic,” written about two days after the mainstream news hyped the heck out of the swine flu.
This kind of writing, or tweeting because when you come down to it tweeting really isn’t writing, sensationalism that is, is nothing new. It’s been around since the days of “yellow journalism” perfected in the late 19th century. But now this writing style is in the hands of people using it without supervision. Not necessarily children, they often are, but folks who write and, by extension of this writing style, act like children. People writing with no fear of liability or recrimination. And as their connectedness increases, our sense of reality fades, leaving us to cut through the sensationalism to find reality.
All for the sake of being “connected.”
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About  Here at " Richard Telofski on The War on Capitalism," I discuss and analyze the individuals and groups conducting campaigns against capitalism. In the articles on this site, I provide analysis on lesser known facts about this movement. More . . .
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