Broadcasting Brain

Sometimes a writer really nails something and nails it down perfectly.

If you’re interested in social media, I suggest that you check out Steven Hodson’s post where he compares social media to the ancient art of maintaining oral history.

It’s one of those points that just seems like it should be obvious, but it sometimes eludes our comprehension.

Well done Steven!

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PopeyesChicken @MarkDykeman time to change your chicken! 7 minutes ago from web in reply to MarkDykeman

Tomato Guy is more cheerful, somehow

An incredibly intense, thorough, and insidious program has been perpetrated upon the world’s youth. They’ve been indoctrinated, experienced false and unrealistic expectations, and they are being set up for a great shock.

But it’s time to expose the truth and reveal everything for the world to see.

These unwitting victims of this nefarious plot are about to reach a moment of truth. It will rock them to their core when they find out what’s happened. Their lives will never be the same.

Horrible, isn’t it?

Oh, the injustice!

But wait.

There’s still hope.

You can help.

Keep reading, here’s where you come in.

The massive fraud is culminating at around this time of year. So be ready. There will be many victims.

Just so you can prepare, I’ll let you know what this shocking event is. Forewarned is forearmed. Right?

Ready?

Set?

Sure?

OK.

Here t’is.

And here’s a SPOILER alert just in case…

:::::: SPOILER :::::::

This shocking catalyst of the horrible revelation to come is called…

GRADUATION DAY!

And what is this horrible hoax?

That their education is now complete.

The truth?

Their education is JUST STARTING IN EARNEST.

And?

IT NEVER ENDS!!!

And how do you help the poor victims cope?

Simple.

You tell them the truth.

That the best is yet to come. That there’s always more to explore, more to see, more to do, and more to learn.

It’s one of the privileges of being alive.

Readers who’ve been on board with Broadcasting Brain for awhile know that I’ve written a bit about Digg and StumbleUpon, among other sites. In fact, I was a pretty avid Digger for a number of months and have spent a fair bit of time on Mixx, Reddit and a few other sites. I put that on hiatus back in March of this year and haven’t been very active on any of those sites except StumbleUpon of late.

I feel a bit guilty about walking away from social news. I mean, I was out there hustling stories and begging for votes and trying to call in favors and… all the normal social news stuff, actually. Then I dropped it, probably leaving a bunch of people who wanted my votes.

Here’s the thing(s):

• I had to acknowledge to myself that I was voting for some stuff that I really didn’t care much about. EDIT: SilentJay74 would refer to this as CLAV Syndrome or CLAV virus.
• I did accomplish one of my Digg goals (getting into the Top 1000), but I had to look at the time I was spending doing that and what I was accomplishing.
• Related to the above, my blogging and other writing was suffering.
• Seeing how Digg had been handling their user relations was getting discouraging.
• The quality of popular material on Digg wasn’t meeting my information needs.
• I didn’t feel that I was getting enough enjoyment or important new information by focusing on social news
• Microblogging and lifestreaming began to take up time, too.

I’m thinking about getting back into social news again, but I really find that that my time and focus required for social news is the same as blogging, so one will probably always suffer in respect to the other.

In general I think that Mixx might be the best match for me and my interests, although I don’t feel that I’ve really given Propeller a fair shake. I do know that Mixx has really done a lot of good work to their site over the past year and in terms of functionality, responsiveness, and community it’s pretty darn hard to top.

It’s funny how I started in social media as a sort of content producer, then got into social news to try to promote my stuff, then became a somewhat serious blogger, and now I’m pondering social news again.

I used to aspire to having one of my blog posts hit Digg’s front page, but over the past few months I’ve come to accept the fact that my blogging isn’t really the type of stuff that goes popular on Digg. That doesn’t bother me either. I’m growing my audience here, mainly through organic growth and networking, and that seems to be paying off for me.

I think I’m ready to approach social news the way one really should: as a means to find stories that you like and to support them, instead of trying to build up an ultra-profile on one of those sites. It’s a great and fun hobby, but really, the value in social media is in the relationships you build, not in the tiny skirmishes and victories of story popularity.

EDIT:  it can be a bit difficult to turn away from social news when it can be a source of blog ideas, but it’s always there waiting to be read.

Just a quick post to talk about literacy.

It’s very simple:  those who can’t read miss out on a lot of great opportunities and joys.

I haven’t done a lot of online research about literacy, but Jason Falls did show me the following website devoted to literacy:  NCFL Literacy Now.

Let’s all take a moment and reflect on the fact that we are very, very fortunate to know how to read. The ability to read and write blogs is just the tiniest fraction of the benefits we all enjoy through literacy.

Does anyone else have any links to literacy websites?s  Better yet, any examples of how they are trying to use social media to help (which might be very tricky, given the clientele)?

In modern pop music, you have a common array of instruments that work together to produce a song. You have keyboards and lead guitar to help provide both melodies and filler for empty spaces of sound. You have drums, percussion and rhythm guitar which help lay and maintain the beat.

And then there’s the bass.

It’s not a bass guitar, by the way: it’s a bass. Spelled like the fish, sounds like “base”.

What a weird instrument.

The bass is supposed to be a part of the rhythm section of a band, providing a sonic tie between guitars/keyboards and drums and percussion.

A little bit groove, a little bit thud.

So what does this have to do with social media?

Good question, but it does bring to mind the fact that I’ve rediscovered the GoGos after almost two decades and I’m silently grooving to them on my couch. How am I listening to them?

YouTube. It’s one of the biggest social media sites out there, probably the largest collection of video files that is freely available to the general public. There are original musics videos and live videos from thousands of musical acts. Then there’s the quite possibly illegal live performance videos that appear. The quality sucks for a lot of them, both audio and video, but they do offer different ways to experience this music.

Sometimes that bass riff in We’ve Got The Beat is exactly as per the original recording, sometimes it shifts and plays around depending on the gig and the tempo. That’s all about the musician.

You can get some incredibly creative user-made videos set to these songs. Sometimes they are cover versions played by other bands. Other times, someone creates a deck of completely different images and synchs them up to the beat. There’s a pretty cool mash up on YouTube where someone took a scene from The Breakfast Club and used the GoGos song instead of what was in the movie (or maybe that’s the original song from the movie - I honestly don’t remember). There’s another which uses footage from the movie Grease.

And there’s this goofy but fun version, too.

All legalities aside, it’s pretty freaking awesome that we can take sound and video files and mix them together, share ‘em with the world, get feedback, and spawn a lot of new cool stuff.

I spend a lot of time writing about Twitter, FriendFeed, blogging, and such.

I’ve done virtually nothing with audio or video on the Web. And it’s become such a huge part of social media, something that is vibrant, pulsating, and throbbing like that grooving bassline in We’ve Got The Beat. This rocking undercurrent of sound is fun, it pulls you in and makes you want to pump your fist. Or dance. Or both.

Just like a good conversation and trading of ideas in social media can pull you into its groove and tickle your intellect and make your brainwaves want to dance.

Man, it looks like fun.

Growth of the entire social media market is every content creator’s best hope for success. That means that bloggers in general need to continue to provide content on an ever-widening and growing field of topics and interests.

At the same time, social media enthusiasts need to continue to promote social media to any or all who are interested in order to grow the overall social media market. We’ll all benefit if that happens. Otherwise, the blogosphere will be engaging in the fierce market share wars that highlight the life of commodity producers in mature markets. And it’s pretty darned hard to compete on price when something is free.

So how do we keep growing the thing, looking at blogs in particular?

Leading Question

ReadWriteWeb’s Josh Catone asked the following question: do regular people really read blogs?

The answer to Josh’s question would seem to be no, or at least not many people do. It’s worth noting that his main source of information was a Harris Poll asking US adults about political blogs, but, as Josh also points out, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of data from 2007 or 2008 about blog reading statistics.

Let’s not forget one thing, though: the poll was limited to politics and political blogs. If long term voter trends in North America are any indication, interest in voting is waning, which could likely reflect declining interest in politics or political discussions (not withstanding The Huffington Post’s success at the top of the Technorati index). On the other hand, my general feeling is that readership of tech blogs continues to increase over time, and there are some other hot blogging areas that growing (perhaps mommy bloggers, making money online (there will always be a market for this), and business blogs in general).

(The comments section from Josh’s post, full of interesting insights, also spawned a thread at LinkedIn on the topic of blog reading that’s worth checking out.)

How to grow the blogging audience

I believe that we can increase the number of potential readers by focusing on five different areas:

Education - many people have heard what a blog is, but might not be able to tell a static website from a blog. They need to understand things like:

• reverse-chronological sequence of publishing, which is the reverse of the structure of a lot of other documents
• tags/categories
• searching
• pages
• comments
• RSS and news aggregators

These things are second nature to the vast majority of the current blogging audience, but some people don’t get it yet. Maybe a lot of people don’t get it yet. Marketing Ninja also has a relevant anecdote showing a situation where people preferred static documents (e.g. Adobe .PDF files) over blog posts at a ratio of 8:1 or more. There must still be a significant population of people who don’t, won’t, or can’t read online, although I don’t have any statistics to back this up. Even in my own case, there are many times when I’ll print out a blog post in order to read it later.

This brings up another good point: trust and reliability. Many people will put more faith in a professional-looking document than an amateur-looking blog, even if the blog happens to have better content. Old programming dies hard, sometimes.

Promotion of all kinds - create demand: virtually everyone in the world needs a telephone or access to one in order to conduct their business. By contrast, virtually everyone in the civilized world wants an iPod or other portable media player, but few actually need the device. However, the precedent started with the Walkman and Discman players evolved with the introduction of the digital media formats (particularly .MP3 and .MP4 files), creating desire that was satisfied with a revolutionary product both in design and capabilities. The growing number of media files, both professional and amateur, helped create demand for a new portable media player.

Blogs are like the “player” and good content will create demand for the “player”. However, we need to keep emphasizing things like portals, indexes, and search engines. Alltop, as I’ve written before, can only help to promote the blogosphere and social media in general. [Here's a post that can help you take advantage of what Alltop offers]

Cross-promotion between bloggers, even those in the same niche, needs to continue to maximize eyeball exposure.

Value - put simply, bloggers need to provide content that other people would want to read or find useful. We don’t need spam, we don’t need a lot of echoes, we need new, fresh, and useful material. This material needs to appeal to beginners, intermediates, and experts.

Unfortunately, the blogosphere could also be called the spamosphere due to a lot of content which is designed as platforms for online advertising sales instead of valuable content. Give people material that they both want and need!

Diversity - related to value, we need to broaden the subject matter, or at least provide more valuable content across a wider range of topics. We may be digging deep into the fabled Long Tail into increasingly smaller and specialized niches, but we need more good (hopefully original) content suitable to an increasingly wider audience. Fortunately, ongoing innovation and new product launches offer a continual supply of blogging source material. We also need more material about everyday items that affect broad groups people, both within and outside the tech realms.

Opportunity - more high speed Internet and wireless access; cheaper hardware and software; ease of use. As Steven Hodson recently pointed out, what may be seen as inexpensive to some may be a prohibitive cost to others. There’s talk of $100 or $200 laptops for developing countries… maybe there’s a lot of opportunity for these in the Americas and Europe as well. In addition, inexpensive high speed Internet access is not ubiquitous, even within the Americas. My parents have only had access to medium speed Internet during the past two years and they live about 10 KM from my home. Mobile phone Web use is predicted to drive demand and may be a cheap alternative; however, this could remove any incentive to produce cheaper desktop PCs and laptop PCs.

The rising tide

The phrase “a rising tide that lifts all boats” was not coined by US President Bill Clinton, although he and his executive team made significant use of the phrase during his presidency. Here’s a definition from Wikipedia:

…is associated with the idea that improvements in the general economy will benefit all participants in that economy, and that economic policy, particularly government economic policy, should therefore focus on the general macroeconomic environment first and foremost.

Substitute the word “blogosphere” for “economy”, remove the references to government and policy, and the concept holds true for blogging. Broaden the potential blogging readership base and you help prevent commoditization. We can enlarge blog readership by following the five suggestions that I’ve presented.

Everyone can win.

If I’d been smart or otherwise had some insight I would have gotten into blogging at least five years earlier. Instead, I start with an unfocused personal blog in mid 2007 and don’t really go whole hog into somewhat serious blogging until early 2008.

I’m a relative latecomer to the blogging game. Shrug. So be it.

However, these do seem to be interesting times, again in relative terms, to be a blogger. Some would say that blogging is moving into a stage of maturity and slower growth. Meanwhile, microblogging and lifestreaming are offering new options for online communication that rival blogging for reach while making it easier to use mobile phones, digital pagers and PDAs for Web publishing. Blog comments and related conversations seem to be going anywhere the commentator wants to take them.

Steven Hodson predicts that we’ll see the great blog weeding of 2008 as content creators migrate to other platforms or else give up the ghost altogether. The growing set of social media tools (don’t forget Facebook and MySpace) make publishing easier, which may be encouraging some casual bloggers to pull up stake and move on. Meanwhile, conversation dispersion, scrapers, and current advertising models have been throwing uncertainty into the results of monetization for some time. At least, that’s what I assume Steven’s getting at and that’s what I’m going with.

In some ways it seems like I’ve gotten into this blogging game too late, like a kind of pyramid scheme where the spoils go to the earliest adopters. In this case, the spoils are attention, reputation, and income.

On the other hand, if a lot of people are going to drop out of the blogging game, it could also be a great opportunity for many newer bloggers to establish ourselves as authoritative, respected bloggers. So maybe some of the spoils will go back in play.

But, if some people do pull out, could it be an indication that the wells of riches are drying up? It depends on what riches you’re looking for, I think. I’d say traditional monetization through ads certainly isn’t a piece of cake and it’s probably getting harder as the total pool of advertising capital, while still growing overall, is atomized and dispersed into many, many buckets of various sizes.

Attention and reputation are still in play but they may be limited to tightly defined niches. Or not, who knows? Smart people who communicate well and network effectively usually find ways to get their voices heard. These kinds of people are usually worth hearing.

At any rate, none of these things are dissuading me. I’ll keep on writing here until I either run out of ideas or an audience. Is there a better way to talk to the world?

One thing that I think is worth discussing is how to continue to increase the size of the blogging and social media audience. I think that’s something I think would benefit everyone. That’s what I’ll discuss in my next post.

Photo by carbonnyc

Why is this man reacting in horror?

It’s because he’s learning that growing your blog subscribers can have a surprising effect!

And what is that effect?

Why does it happen?

What can you do about it?

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s too cool!

Seriously, this Watchmen commercial contest, where you make a commercial, set in the Watchmen continuity, to be embedded in the upcoming Watchmen movie is too cool!

Social media might be seen as lightweight by some, but this… is just too cool!

A chance to win cash, other prizes, getting your commercial featured in the movie, maybe even getting a bit part in the film…

At what other time in history could you pull together a competition like this with these tools?