4 posts tagged “blogosphere”

I watched a really neat movie yesterday called, Resurrecting the Champ. Its inspired by a true story about a Pulitzer Prize winning LA Times writer J. R. Moehringer.   

It was about a sports reporter who is in the verge of losing his job when he discovers a past boxing champion (Samuel Jackson] on the streets - his is a bum. No, he is homeless

The reporter, played by Josh Hartnett, in his enthusiasm to save his career overlooks certain investigative facts and procedures. The story really weaves in well the father and son relationship in two different families. There are some excellent dialogues in the movie that will make you think deep so here is a question that arose for me:

• What do I tell a class of 6 year olds, with my daughter in it, about What I do? What is my story?

[imagine the firefighters, the policemen, the writers who typically are called to speak a little to the class]

This is not a movie review, this is not about answers but provoking questions that can make a difference.

I thought it had some parallels to Robert Scoble's post called Has/How/Why tech blogging has failed you. The movie is about a struggling Writer and Bloggers write as well ..... and like Boxers, most of them stand alone.

Imagine: Its about pride, not popularity

Matt Richtel has a very neat article in the New York Times here called "In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop"

Some quotes from his article:

"Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

It is unclear how many people blog for pay, but there are surely several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands.

I am definitely not paid to blog but if you want to read what they have to say, there are some posts here and here

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch had a post independent of this article that says a lot about the world of professional bloggers here called "Six Months In, And 600 Posts Later...The Worlds Of Blogging and Journalism Collide (In My Brain)". Some related quotes from this post are:

"It is mostly breaking news, reporting facts and providing analysis. At TechCrunch, I am completely focused on blogging, 24/7"

That is because the blogging never stops. Just ask my wife and kids, who now mock me by repeating back my new mantra: “I’m almost done, just one more post.”

But we live or die by how fast we can post after a story breaks, if we can’t break it ourselves.

I won't be surprised if Matt Richtel's story was inspired by Erick's post.
 
It tied in really well with my earlier post "Who Is Your Chauffeur" here. It was in response to a post on entrepreneurs but applicable to everyone and then of course, there was this post way back, which probably fits the best. The pictures of Stripe climbing (from the book Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus) away says it all.

Viral_social marketing

The latest special print issue of MIT's Technology Review has an article on visualizing "Better Friends" by Erica Naone. Apart from the visuals of the blogosphere, Twitter and others, the one that caught my eye was the visual on viral marketing - something very relevant and dear to me.

Furthermore, being deep into social media, networks and user-generated content -  the last line of the paragraph below hit home for me. I used to listen and learn from many top social networkers/producers until I noticed that I started shutting myself out with many - they have lost their influence with me. They are all the time selling products and services with the sole cause of their own popularity. They do not evangelize - they sell. Popularity is their focus - not their collateral success. One erodes the social equity built over time and involvement. Many have have many friends today online but then there is a social connection/equity even with your audience/readers/followers - the mind is fickle with all the noise and the "new new things" and "new new people" coming out everyday.

The web is becoming social - from a network of servers and pages, its becoming a network of people. We are the carriers - we consume from each other (not just reporters), we produce and we distribute.

The full article is here and the piece on viral marketing from the article below:

Viral_social marketing1

"Several years ago, a large retailer tried to encourage word-of-mouth marketing for products sold on its site byoffering incentives to site visitors who made product recommendations. Many companies are trying to use people's social connections for such "viral marketing" programs, hoping that information about products (and the urge to buy them) can spread through a network of people the way a virus might. But after studying more than 15 million recommendations generated by the retailer's incentive program, a team made up of Jure Leskovec, Lada Adamic, and Bernardo Huberman, director of the information dynamics lab at Hewlett-Packard, was skeptical. Huberman and his colleagues looked at the networks that grew up around each product--who bought and recommended it, and who responded to the recommendation--and saw that they took on different characteristics depending on the type of product. A network around a medical book (top image below), where red dots and lines indicate people who purchased the book while blue dots and lines represent people who received a recommendation, shows a scattered network where recommendations, on average, don't travel very far. The network surrounding a Japanese graphic novel (bottom image below), on the other hand, shows a thick flow of information among densely connected people. The researchers found that viral marketing was most effective for expensive products recommended within a small, tightly connected group. They also found that overusing consumers' social connections for marketing can make them less influential."

Well - I couldn't think of a better way to test how relevant TechMeme "is" or should I say the relevance of Techmeme.
This post has nothing to do with technology so here is some important trivia on it:

• Is is the third-person singular verb form of the copula in the English language [Source:Wikipedia]
• A search on Google for 'is' gives 4,450,000,000 results
• Is is country code top level domain name for Iceland

Imagine: iSocial instead Social Ads [John/Steve - you cool?]