Aside from the use of Twitter, this More! magazine incident has ABSOLUTELY. NOTHING. TO. DO. with Paperchase.
Aside from the use of Twitter, this More! magazine incident has ABSOLUTELY. NOTHING. TO. DO. with Paperchase.
You know what Internet-based job boards have done? They’ve spawned the attitude that it isn’t necessary to write a decent cover letter (or any cover letter at all) as part of a job application. No one should apply for jobs using their current work email address, either — that’s seriously bad form.
The election draws closer, and I’ve just tried a couple of web apps meant to depress me: Vote Match (only a little, I know exactly where I stand and who I’ll be voting for, it was almost spot on) and the Voter Power Index (very). I bet the stars live in more powerful constituencies… sigh.
There’s good social media campaigns and there’s hilariously bad social media campaigns. Long-time friends will remember a parody I created a number of years ago to exorcise some emotional fallout (*cough*Save Michael See*cough*), and Stephen Baldwin apparently thought it was a great idea.
This new thing by Facebook — Open Graph — I’m in two minds about.
As I’ve said previously, this sort of data capture is really a marketer’s dream, assuming we’re smart about how we turn the data into information and what we do with it. On the other hand, I like my Web experience to throw up real surprises, to find things I never knew existed or agreed with. If this Open Graph concept takes hold and becomes mainstream, our web experiences are going to become more limited.
I’m not bothered about the privacy thing — embarrassingly, I’ve been an online ‘entity’ for long enough that anything I want to keep private I simply keep offline. I am conscious, though, that I’m really discoverable online, which is a weird realisation to have!
It’s time to try out Google Buzz after my first abortive attempt — here’s my profile. Exciting, eh?
Strange, isn’t it? The Internet is a great democratiser, but it’s also helped to concentrate power in only a few hands. I’m sure this isn’t exactly groundbreaking news, but my “I built my own website!” self is really having trouble coming to terms with it (but embracing it at the same time, I know I’ve written about it before but I can’t find it).
The web is shrinking! With the popularity of Facebook and Twitter (and their apps), there are probably five gazillion more pages out there. But the information on these sites lives and dies there.
It makes my life easier as a marketer to have these huge, aggregated sites that almost everyone visits — I can plan strategies with much more ease (notwithstanding my current question on how well these applications will display on mobile devices as they get more and more complex). I’m still occasionally obliged to build and/or manage a microsite, but one thing I’ve noticed there is a real dearth of these days is the fan site. There might be one or two that are real draws, but more people are likely to pledge allegiance in their profiles or on the Facebook Pages themselves.
It must be human nature to be lazy. The Web was this Wild West-y sort of place and it still sort of is — but for the most part, the mainstream have decided to take the path of least resistance and join up with these mega sites so they are ‘hanging out’ where everyone else is. I’m betting there are fewer weblogs now that social network and micro-blogging sites have really taken off.
There are still some excellent sites, thank goodness, but I guess this is the way the world works. There may have been a technological revolution and there’s all this talk about how kids are so different because they’re ‘digital natives’, but there hasn’t been a revolution in human behaviour. We’re still lazy shits who, generally, want to enjoy the fruits of other people’s labours.
We’ve watched a couple of episodes of The Virtual Revolution, presented by Aleks Krotoski. Neil is slightly cynical and scornful of what’s been said, but as my mum likes to say, stuff on the telly needs to be pitched at the lowest common denominator (hence the series Snog Marry Avoid?, which is an abomination). We spend a lot of time online and we’re a bit older, so I like to think we’re a bit wiser about the whole Ingterneck thing than the yoof today.
For starters, it was really refreshing (or super geeky) to watch a documentary on the Beeb and recognise the names of almost all the people being interviewed. It’s really amazing to think that the Web is 20 years old. I’ve been using it regularly for about 15 years!
This final episode about Homo Interneticus was very interesting, because I can’t imagine not knowing what life was like without being connected to a digital network 100% of the time, while 12-18 year olds can’t imagine their lives without the always-on nature of the web network. I do agree that if you spend a huge amount of time online, like I do, you’re in danger of forgetting that it’s only a tool that enhances our real lives. That’s what the yoof need to learn and understand.
What I’ve noticed that’s changed in me over the last five or six years is my already-short attention span is getting shorter. I continue to read books, which is probably the only thing that’s preventing me from having the memory of a brain-damaged goldfish, but I zip in and out of things much more quickly — as described in the interview above. I find the Internet invaluable when I’m researching something in depth (especially if it puts me in contact with an expert), but if I’m just browsing, I pick up a hell of a lot of shallow information.
(Plus I really liked the empirical proof that having lots of ‘friends’ on Facebook means bugger all because we still, in reality, have an upper limit of around 150.)