A couple of days ago Google announced something very interesting – Sidewiki. This creates an overlay on any website / url allowing a form of commenting and rating. Because this is linked to the browser, the site owners themselves have no say here – you can’t opt-in or opt-out. At one level this could be a move which forces every website into the social media space – whether they like it or not.
Powerful stuff – so I signed-up and at that point realised the sting in the tail. In order to work, your browser has to send Google details of your browsing. This gives Google the information it has been craving for a long time, largely without success thus far – identifiable data about individuals’ behaviour, not just anonymous links that come into a website.
As I understand it – Google’s strategy is based around accumulating as much data as possible about individuals in order to, in Google’s words “improve the quality of service we can offer”. What this actually means is improve the quality of the data Google can offer advertisers. Ultimately Google is looking to push this away from just computers into any digital device that individuals use – thus building up a complete picture of their digital life.
The flaw in this strategy is not a technical one – it is a social one. People were happy with Google search because the results were based on collective behaviour, but each contribution was anonymous. A shift to a form of output based on their identifiable behaviour as an individual, not their anonymous behaviour within a group – will not be seen as socially acceptable. People will not trust Google enough to feel comfortable with them having this level of knowledge. The key to making this strategy work therefore is to construct a big sugar coating around this particular pill – hence Sidewiki. Perhaps a better name for it would be Big Sidebrother.
This is a shame – because attractive as this sugar coating is, the pill is still too bitter to swallow (that said, I haven’t de-enabled sidewiki yet!)
In the Gutenberg world information was created by acts of publication. In the post-Gutenberg world (i.e. world of social media) information is created by acts of observation.
Don’t know whether this goes anywhere – but the idea of the act of observation being more than passive is not new. It sits at the heart of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantam mechanics where the way in which you observe something will determine its state (Schrodigger’s cat and all that). Seems to accord with the emphasis on space rather than place – spotlight rather than stage sort of thing. More thinking required.
A journalism student in Australia (@jadelemoigne) contacted me last week (through good old fashioned email) to ask questions about Twitter and whether it was encouraging journalism.
I thought I would also blog the answers I gave, since this is a good question.
Dear Jade,
First off – its very difficult to separate Twitter from the rest of social media – it’s just one piece of the whole new information ecology that is transforming the way we access information. In general terms this shift is making traditional institutionalised media (and with it the journalists they employed) less relevant and creating processes that allow individuals to share with each other the information they need about the world.
Therefore – within my answers you could effectively substitute the term social media for Twitter. That said… Continue reading
Have just been to TedxTuttle. Interesting. Eclectic certainly. The clash of styles between a TED sit back and listen approach and a Tuttle sit around and talk approach didn’t quite meld together. I felt that a TuttlexTED event might have been better. Now there’s a thought. To which I can hear @lloyddavis saying “well, just give it a go then”.
The presentation that got me thinking the most was by Mat Morrison (@mediaczar). Mat had been doing some interesting work looking at social media networks and influence. Continue reading
What do social media monitoring and the English Channel have in common?
Answer: if you understand how you sail a ship up a busy sea-lane, like the English Channel, you will understand how to do social media monitoring.
As I have previously posted, there are basically two approaches / camps within social media monitoring. First is the data capture approach that uses proprietary paid-for tools to crunch all the data and churn out charts and graphs and measure sentiment etc. Second is the real-time approach based on constructing a monitoring panel that monitors activity in the relevant conversation spaces as it happens. I sit very firmly in the latter camp, not because the analysis tools don’t work – they have their uses – but because they are nowhere nearly as important or useful a tool to an organisation that wishes to design and manage a social media campaign. Continue reading