Social Media Revolution

One of the better videos that provides an overview, facts and insights into how social media has changed our world.

Unethical, Shady Huffington Post

Are you surprised? Huffington strikes me as an opportunistic person with a very self-centered nature, so her company's culture wouldn't be the most ethical. But this isn't a gray area since they are outright stealing content from the Chicago Reader, The Onion and others. More...

"Arianna Huffington's Scuzzy Copying Pisses Off Chicagoans" Gawker

"The Huffington Post Slammed for Content Theft" Wired's Epicenter

@ Blog World Expo & GodblogCon 2008

I'm attending the Blog World Expo and GodblogCon 2008 this weekend. Primarily going for our media company, InsideWork, which discusses the intersection of faith and business.

Thanks, Blogs.com... But Please Correct the Name

The people at Blogs.com, Six Apart's new blog directory, were nice enough to add my blog to their directory. It's edited by a team of 5 human editors (TechCrunch's coverage, "Six Apart To Relaunch Blogs.com As Yet Another Blog Directory") which similar to Blogged.com.

As with the Blogged.com people, they placed Silicon Moon's posts under their "Business" subcategory of "Marketing/Small Business." I guess anything about startups is placed under "small business." Anyway, definitely appreciate the inclusion and links. Thanks!

I did send in a request to Blogs.com already to correct the name they have listed. Instead of "Silicon Moon" they have "Growthology." Here's a screenshot with my recent "Building A Billion Dollar Business" post and the wrong blog name below it.


Hopefully this will be corrected soon :)

Open Web Asia!

Gang Lu created an aggregation page for Asia's top English language tech blogs called Open Web.Asia Workgroup. Here's a description:

The OpenWeb.Asia Workgroup is a network of premium blogs focus on Asian Web industry. These sites build efficient channels between Asia web and global industry, and also enhance the inter-communication of local Internet markets.

More from ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick:

Everyone working on the web around the world would like to connect with people in Asia, but it's not easy to do. That dynamic and populous region is often focused inward and it's made inaccessible to outsiders because there is so little information about what goes on there available in the web's dominant language, English.

OpenWeb Asia is a new project that aims to change those trends.

This is a good initiative by Gang, who I'm working with for the first pan-Asia web tech conference called Open Web Asia '08. If you're interested in what going on in Asia's tech space, check it out!

Twitter, Tina Fey, and the Future of Micro-Blogging

My op-ed at Mashable went up today. It's a light piece that I had fun with. Thanks to Jill for editing and TechCrunch's Mark Hendrickson, who provided his feedback. Check it out!

Twitter, Tina Fey, and the Future of Micro-Blogging

When the sitcom “30 Rock” began its run, some of my friends weren’t wild about Tina Fey, the show’s star and creator, saying she should “stay in the writer’s room” or that she “looked too mousy.” A few months later, however, those same guys were talking about how hot she was. Fey has since become a mainstream darling. Twitter is Web 2.0’s Tina Fey. Not so attractive initially, Twitter got better the more you looked at it. Case in point: Although I tested Twitter as soon as it launched, I eventually ended up sitting on my account because I wasn’t enamored by early adopters and Silicon Valley geeks listening to each other talk. Today, that situation has changed: While the echo chamber still exists, Twitter seems to be reaching a critical mass that will push it into the mainstream... (full op-ed)


UPDATE: From Compete's blog, "Twitter Traffic Explosion: Who’s behind it all?"

VentureBeat's MG Siegler has a related post, "Mainstream imminent? Twitter traffic almost doubled from February to April." I wonder where the idea for these posts came from? :) Probably coincidence.

UPDATE II: Learning 2.0 has a response and more thoughts here.

GOINGON'S NEW HOMEPAGE

Very cool. GoingOn, the company I co-founded, has launched a new homepage. Jon, our new CMO, did a great job.

Also this was done in a low budget manner, which was one of approaches I was advocating before I left several weeks ago. Another executive team member wanted to hire a design shop and spend $150,000 - $250,000 while others thought a few thousand would be good enough for the resources we had. I think I few thousand did a good job :)



Anyway, check it out and learn more about GoingOn here, especially if you're looking for a private-label social media (online community) platform.

800 FACEBOOK FRIENDS TOO MANY?... ACADEMICS NEED DEEPER ANALYSIS

This is a stupid statement. 800 Facebook friends are too many and reflect insecurity? Please. I'm not responding to this because I am approaching 800 friends on Facebook, but the fact that it doesn't take much analysis or deep thinking to see that this assessment is flawed.

First, it's not surprising that people like Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis have over 2,000 friends because their blogs are read by tens of thousands. So do any of their 2,000+ friends perceive them as insecure? No. They are just well-known in the blogosphere and attract invite requests. Even Hugh MacLeod, the cartoonist and blogger, gets 28 requests a day and he's a second-tier blogger.

But I'm not even referring to these people in my analysis of why these academics haven't looked beyond the shallow end of the research pool. I'm thinking about people like myself, who are very extroverted, or recent graduates that used Facebook as their primary online address book.

Consider a very social person who belongs to a large religious organization, such as a church or temple, or social organization, such as a fraternity or sports club. A large church would have at least a thousand to several thousand members. If you're fairly active and friendly in a church of twenty-somethings, you could get a few hundred Facebook connections from this organization alone. Then add another hundred or more from your fraternity, and then your other friends from high school or other circles which can easily add up to 500-1,000+ connections. Would people perceive these people as insecure? No.

If you are a recent graduate of a professional school, such as an MBA program or law school, it's easy to realize that 800 is not a number reflective of insecurity or people simply wanting to horde online friends. Such programs are about networking, so with classes of 300 to 1,000 a very social person can easily accumulate a large number of friends that would welcome the connection. I finished my graduate program in 1998, so not one of my 104 classmates are on Facebook but if we recently graduated I am certain that I would have connected with many of them (probably more since there were 200+ MPA students in the total program plus 700+ MIA students) because we had small classes and had many social gatherings every month that led to a close-knit culture.

With today's college students living on Facebook as their primarily social tool, I would hardly label a person as "insecure" if they accumulated such numbers unless many of their connections did not know them at all.

So there is the other side if a person accumulates a majority of their connections without really knowing them, then I would label them as a bit off or possibly insecure (probably neurotic). Most of these people you could identify with the little interaction that you've had with them. From your conversations, nonverbal cues, or how they present themselves on their profiles can be indicators of insecurity or shallowness of their relationships. So the researchers from Penn State who created mock profiles to test this theory would obviously gather such responses since these online "people" had zero real connection with their "friends." Also placing an arbitrary number, such as 800, on this behavior was stupid. This perception or behavior could be for people with 100 connections or 2,000. Just a quick scan through my list of friends, those with 800 or greater connections are all either personalities in the blogosphere or very social people with connections to large organizations whose typical members are in their twenties (i.e. churches, schools, community groups).

Another factor to consider is the purpose of the connection since some people are using Facebook as a business tool ("Facebook - the Hub for Your Personal Brand"). For myself, probably a quarter of my connections are professionally related connections, so I don't know them as friends but it's assumed from both sides that the purpose of being "friends" is business related. Generally, I try to keep my Linkedin connections separate from my Facebook connections unless I have interacted with the people fairly often. So there are many people, especially in Silicon Valley, that conference hop and accumulate connections by using Facebook as their rolodex so again it's easy to see active networkers accumulate 500 to 1,000+ Facebook friends.

Anyway, since I didn't see the details of these various research results I might be missing something, but I hope these academics come out with more interesting findings on online social interaction in the future than this topic.

TECHNORATI RELAUNCHES... BLOG SEARCH IS DEAD

Dave Sifry announced Technorati's redesign and change of focus today. I believe this is a good move on their part to expand their services to meet the changing landscape of this new media world.

Steve Rubel is spot on about "Blog Search is Dead and Google Killed It"

Over the past several months, I have found Google's blog search slowly improving while Technorati's search results have been declining in quality. It seems to be that Technorati has kept up with indexing many of the older blog posts and content. Their search isn't as deep any more. I've always believe if Google ever dedicated real resources to their blog search that Technorati would suffer, and I assume we will eventually see this unless Technorati keeps taking steps like this in the right direction.

Robert Scoble shows himself to be a bit weak on the analysis part again. His view is on the opposite end of Rubel's: "If Technorati can beat Google, why can’t Microsoft or Yahoo?"

Technorat beat Google? Is he a New Jersey boxing judge? I guess that's why he's a marketing guy. It's almost amusing that he states, "I have a feeling that their valuation just went up about $500 million. At least." Huh? Hello? Who would buy Technorati at that price? Also I wonder if he's tried his old company's search engine? It's pretty good and sometimes better than Technorati on blog search. Test it out.

Anyway, here's more from TechCrunch.

Open It Up, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle!

This week's article for my column was derived from my experience and thoughts while I was in Seoul for the OhMyNews conference a few weeks back. Anyway, check it out:

Open It Up, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle!
Taking a lesson from South Korea's OhMyNews, a horde of bloggers-turned-citizen journalists is about to storm the gates of traditional media.

It had been over a year since I'd left Seoul, South Korea, when I returned a couple of weeks ago to attend OhMyNews' Citizen Reporters' Forum. Upon arriving, I was immediately struck by just how ubiquitous technology is in that country—a fact that had faded from my memory in the interim. Wireless phones are everywhere, and PCs with broadband connections can be found in each mom-and-pop shop. At a conference to discuss, share, and learn about the global progress of online citizen journalism, I was reminded at every turn of the long tentacles of technology.

The most powerful reminder came in the form of OhmyNews itself. OhmyNews was born in the "Land of the Morning Calm," a land that also happens to be the broadband capital of the world. Begun in February 2000, by Yeon Ho Oh, the service -- which grew out of Oh's vision of every citizen as a reporter -- has grown to more than 38,000 citizen reporters, including approximately 600 international reporters and 54 full-time staff reporters. Since its inception, OhmyNews has also inspired countless other citizen journalism projects such as Dan Gillmor's Bayosphere.

The forum gave me an opportunity to reflect on how the internet has influenced the development of a conservative Confucian society and its even more conservative news industry. Bearing little resemblance to the media outlets portrayed on TV shows in this country (think Mary Tyler Moore and Lou Grant), the news culture in South Korea comes much closer to America's yellow press of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet it was within this cultural atmosphere that citizen journalism was born and that major newspapers began allowing comments on their online sites. How to explain this cultural left turn? Blame it on the broadband boom.

Despite its leadership position in broadband services, however, South Korea has lagged behind the United States in the development of blogging -- which didn't catch on there until 2003 (several years after it had taken off in this country). Even now, the vast majority of South Korean blogs bring to mind the early days of the American sites Xanga and LiveJournal (where people wrote primarily about their daily experiences in diary-like posts), and blogs about business and politics are few and far between. Is this simply a function of a more culturally repressed and conservative society? Or could it have more to do with the symbiotic relationship between blogging and citizen journalism?

As I pondered this, I began to wonder whether the rapid growth of OhMyNews had stunted the development of the blogosphere in Korea. And conversely, whether the booming U.S. blogosphere would stymie the development of online citizen journalism here. Given both options, would I devote my time to creating, promoting, and building traffic to my own blog, or would I become a citizen journalist for a site such as OhmyNews?

On the side of Citizen Journalism, OhmyNews' traffic is hard to ignore: At 750,000 unique visitors a day, the service pulls in more eyeballs than most blogs can even dream of attracting. And it pays: One citizen reporter received a few thousand dollars after a couple days, while a professor/citizen reporter received tips of more than $30,000 during the course of a week (for example, from 60,000 readers paying 50 cents each). Ah, the beauty of micropayments.

Even with BlogAds and Google's AdSense leading the monetary charge in the U.S. blogosphere, OhmyNews' incentive system seems more rewarding. Why go through all the effort of promoting, posting, and linking for a blog when most people get just a few hundred visitors a week (or less) for their efforts and a rejection from Google's AdSense program (which requires minimum traffic numbers)? And even if I were to get enough traffic to join AdSense, I'd still only receive less than $50 a month. I suspect most people would find an established citizen journalism site a more attractive option-more traffic, more money, but probably less personal recognition.

It's only a matter of time before micropayment systems become firmly established in this country, internet penetration reaches the furthest corners of America, and mainstream media finally cracks and opens the floodgates. Wouldn't it be cool, then, if a U.S. media company were to incorporate a citizen journalism system into one of its properties? If, say, 40,000 citizen journalists were to contribute half of the New York Times' online content?

Get ready, because it's about to happen. The internet and technology have spawned a new wave of citizen journalism. Now, the choice is yours: Either ride it in or watch it come crashing onto the shore!


UPDATE: Since the old AlwaysOn site was taken down and posts were not properly transferred, just read the copy at OhmyNews here.

[tags: citizenjournalism, journalism, blogging, micropayments]

First Post

Hey! Welcome to my first blog post! I really don't know what the purpose of participating in this exercise of self-publishing and self-promotion is, but I am hoping it turns out to be fun, entertaining, and insightful to myself and others that visit. Will anyone ever visit? Who knows?