Completion of Class 2: A Further Primer on Social Media

Twitter and 3rd Party Sites

API  = filter allowing 3rd party sites to access the data on their terms.

*find 3rd Party Site that uses API to re-present twitter data and post in wiki

Audio-Visual Sharing

Location organisation allows greater discovery of your content.

Wikis

Tend to get dis-organised: hence not a good institutional DAMS (Digital Asset Management System).

Discussion Fora

Require management and control over content which members MUST provide.

Life Stream Aggregators

friendfeed=biggest

Create aggregated identity on-line.

Are these good if you are constructing different on-line identities for different purposes?

Location Sharing

Game-like initiatives sound rather...American: "Super User."

Virtual Worlds

Second Life can be an empty experience because there is no purpose or focus.

Issues

Authentication for multiple accounts becomes so immense one almost needs an IAMS (Identity and Access Management System): so social media services are creating their own IAMS.

Need to be aware that everyone is always watching - do I hear shades of Bentham and Foucault? - so you need to be comfortable with your level of involvement.

One also needs to be aware that services can disappear with your content for little reason and with great immediacy.

Often, you sign away many of the rights you have to your content when you put them on a social media service so it pays to always read the small-print.

It is tiring maintaining your on-line identities - particularly when you have multiple identities or aspects of your identity that you want to hide from some social media services.

Cloud Computing

Means that catastrophic system-failure is protected by over-redundancy. Yet there are also issues with data security (see Patriot Act).

Trends

Simply: from static, simple, and dated to dynamic, rich and immediate.

Copyright Moral Dilemma: Is it morally wrong to access TV shows via torrent?

TVNZ worried that On-Demand would reduce ratings but it seems to have increased them; allowing people grater access increases grater word of mouth.

Threadless

Crowd sources designs: also means there is a guarenteed market since the market decides on which ones they want to buy before the product goes on sale.

An engaged community will advertise your product for you further reducing your overheads.

Facebook, Twitter, & Leftovers

Social Media usually synonymous with Social Networking-sloppy speaking people!

The Daily Show - Trend Spotting: Social Networking.

Speaking of connection and isolation...

Allow you to have different strengths of relationships and to manage these more easily. Data mining has become much easier to allow visualisation of data.

Open Source app development allows users to generate the site they actually want - people will use the site more because it can do what they want to do. It also means that the devs of the owning company don't have to do all the development. Also reduces the need for main devs to devise new apps - crowd sources innovation.

How do we get people to do things on our site?

Facebook

More people on your site means you can get more money from advertising through greater exposure and ability to charge more. But just because people see our adverts does not mean they are more effective-particularly in Social Media where users are used to filtering out ads.

Encourages accuracy but also allows you to be not quite as accurate as you should.

Twitter

No necessary reciprocity - which is a good thing you don't have to feel like you need to keep up a "friendship" but can let people think what they will.

Have a habit of slipping things in to see if people like them - yet this can be not so good see the retweet feature.

Traditional media takes longer to break news because they have stricter standards to follow; they need to do more research before they can print a story.

Provides weak connections.

Tweetdeck - and other apps - allow you to order the torrents of information.

Blogs to Communicate with Our Members

OUSA is looking at instituting a blog on its homepage to improve communication with our members. It is hard, however, to point out to people the amount of work that is required for a blog to be useful. At this stage, the powers that be envisage the blog will be updated weekly. However this is nowhere near often enough to keep people engaging with the blog. Indeed, when Twitter was offered as an alternative (since the micro-blogging style is much easier to update) this will apparently make the page too cluttered. Also, the blog itself will be a micro blog. If it is going to be a micro blog then why is it a blog?

Twitter is Great!

I have just discovered Twitter. Whilst it may seem rather pointless to have a blog in which you can only post 140 characters at a time it is a great way to keep people updated on what you are up to. With such small posts, you don't need to set aside much time - as I find myself doing for these posts - but you can quickly scribble something down. And, what is more, it is really fun!