3 posts tagged “internet”

I have always loved and lived by Alan Toffler's quote "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

So when 2008 biennial news consumption survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press came out with their results, it made me reflect a little since I read the print version of The San Jose Mercury News (Business and Technology section only) and almost all of The Wall Street Journal every single day along with many things online.

Being an Integrator - of news, books and people - I started thinking of the Perfect Storm for the main stream media, especially anything in the print.

A few observations that tie into Pew's study:

• Study: Americans [particularly young Americans] reading less than they used to
• 80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book in 2006 [Some more stats here]
• The Success of Amazon's Kindle
• Literacy Debate: online, R U Really Reading?
• Nicolas Carr's piece in The Atlantic: Is Google Making Us Stupid

Now let us look at the other key findings of the study:

• In spite of the increasing variety of ways to get the news, the proportion of young people getting no news on a typical day has increased substantially over the past decade. About a third of those younger than 25 (34%) say they get no news on a typical day, up from 25% in 1998
• Social networking sites are very popular with young people, but they have not become a major source of news. Just 10% of those with social networking profiles say they regularly get news from these sites

So now if we consider LinkedIn, I see a tremendous opportunity for my alma mater. Considering the fact that its a business network, where knowledge for most at a bare minimum is key to survival - the Traditionalists and Net-Newsers probably make up most of the 26 Million users it has amassed.

It has already made some stragic inroads in that direction recently with a News feature and partnerships with New York Times and BusinessWeek. This is just the very tip of the potential LinkedIn has along with its Company feature and Recommendation Engine.

Imagine: People [primarily] Make News, People Report News and now People Deliver News!

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."

Was working my way through this issue of The Economist and all of the above connected for me. The possibility of being in a web services' Hall of Fame seems to be driving user generated content and  hopefully happiness.

First - happiness is more and more being described as a "positional" utility driven by habits and rivalry. Habits since it depends on what we get inured to over time and rivalry since it is important for us to have something that others dont.

Many of the successful web services today are not only driven by user generated content (UGC) but more importantly by those of the power users. For example, one third of the articles submitted at Digg are those by the Top100 (which has now been removed) for example. That Top100 the or the LonelyGirl15s on YouTube are all a part of this virtual Hall of Fame. This is positional - not all get to be in it. This is not necessarily new either - the regular Hall of Fame (supposedly about 3000!) has always created a driving force for a lot pf people to achieve greatness. What makes the Internet Hall of Fame different is that 1) the barrier of entry is far lower and 2) you need to sustain it for some time at least to get anything really valuable out of it. Consequently one continues being committed to generating content before and after to stay ahead ahead of the pack and in the process, hopefully happier

What do you think?

Imagine: If there was only one fixed "top list' published one time by a site