social media insanity

Dear Twitter, 

there was a time, when our relationship was new and shiny, where I woke up in the morning with a feeling of titillating excitement at what I might have missed while I wasted time sleeping. I devoured the new tweets with fervour, eager to begin tweeting my own events of the day.

At first I carefully checked out each new follower, and blocked those who I deemed not worthy (or not real).

And then I started to follow more and more people, and more people started to follow me. I grew tired of checking out porn, so I gave a cursory glance to their timeline, and chose to follow based on that.

And with more followers, I got more tweets.

And more.

And more.

And soon, when I awoke, my twitter app no longer gave me all the tweets I'd missed, but stopped at 200, leaving me with gaping hours of missing tweets.

And yet I didn't care.

My eyes started to glaze over as some people retweeted entire conversations.

A celebrity tweeted an entire darts game until my head exploded.

Others retweeted their own words over and over.

Some tweeted their blog updates on the hour.

Others had personal conversations with each other that showed up in my list for no reason at all.

And many tweeted their every step - between the kitchen and their laptop. And back.

My brain began to bleed as I realised that twitter is exactly what I originally hated about it.

A diatribe of the minutia of the jejune.

Now that's not to say that every person I follow is broadcasting trite prattle, there are many people who I originally followed because I thought they were funny. And they still are. But I can no longer find their tweets in the incessant flood of mundanity.

So Twitter, I've decided that this relationship just isn't working for me. I don't want you in my bed anymore.

I hope we can still be friends.

------

It's been written by many a more respected person that Twitter is a waste of time. And Twitter has been defended by many for different reasons as well. Maybe slightly dubious reasons.

Before I started using Twitter I'd declaimed it many times as pointless and narcissistic. Filled to the brim with marketeers and shameless self promotors. I said it was banal.

Aha, I can hear you now, my gentle readers - smugly laughing that I am merely another of those that I decryed. I've set my blog up to tweet when I make a new post. Yes, guilty as charged. And I've also tweeted about coffee. A lot. 

I tweeted like crazy before they took my gall bladder out. That was procrastination at its best.

Twitter is just another method of communication, and it will be as good as you make it. That's one thing used in its defence.

But I don't think I've ever rung my mother, or emailed my best friend to tell them that the person standing in the queue in front of me is going to get a slapping.

Is it really a good thing to allow people to bypass the self filtering feature that "time" gives? The time to rethink what it's wise to say, and what is not. When you get back home, if something was really important, then you could post about it on an online forum, or blog about it. And if it wasn't worth saying, you'd simply consign it to your mental trashcan where gradually it would be eaten away by the maggots of time, along with all the other trash you toss in from moment to moment.

Twitter takes the trashcan out of the equation for some people. Instead of tossing those thoughts, they immediately broadcast them.

Which reminds me of this video...

But it's not only the banality of daily life that gets bounced around the twittersphere. Tragedies also more quickly from one timeline to another.

Recently Twitter was the centre of a controversy, when a mother tweeted that her child had fallen into the pool, and later tweeted that he'd died. Along with sympathy and condolences, she was targetted with accusations and blame - about her use of Twitter during a supposed time of grief.

As a communication tool, Twitter makes it very easy to quickly broadcast a message. And during such an awful time, a person has a lot of time of their hands. Time that they'd want to fill with distraction - anything to take their mind off the horrible reality. I can totally understand why someone would be using Twitter to broadcast at that time.

What isn't quick about Twitter however, is the reading and catching up. The more people you follow, the more your feed fills up with fragmented snippets of conversation, one liners, isolated statements and ambiguous comments.

What I'd really like in Twitter is a funny-o-meter, to filter out the tweets that really don't make the grade. Or a way to give star ratings to tweets that would accumulate, and give the tweeter an overall score. Then I could view only by score.

Oh, I know I can use lists for that. And lists are great. I have private lists where I can view only those that have interesting things to say. But first I have to make the list and decide who's on it.

Really, to spend all this time trying to filter out the chaff and find the wheat is a waste of time.

Ergo, I may have proved my point.

Let me just go tweet it... (Oh Twitter, you know I just can't stay away!)

I've just bitten the bullet and created an account at blogher.com. If you don't know what that is, don't worry - neither did I when I decided to keep this blog regularly. Despite posts dating back to 2007, I am still pretty new to the world of blogging in the terms of the "blogosphere" concept.

My entry into this conceptual zone was marked by the decision that a) despite declaring that I don't blog, I actually had been, and that b) if I was going to blog, shouldn't I get some readers?

So I did a bit of research (we call this googling) and found a lot of places to put my blog. I signed up, then they asked me for money, so I went back and did a bit more research, and found some free ones. I'm now listed in several directories. I am sure you can find me easily if you search for my social security number or go to page 3456. But better to be listed at the bottom than not listed at all.

And the traffic flooded in. People came to my blog in droves. I watched them clicking over my stats meter and saw what pages they read. I wondered who my regular reader based at microsoft was. Maybe it was Bill Gates? I came crashing down to earth when I found out that it was the bing bot. I found out half a dozen of the other regulars were yahoo and google.

Even worse, some real people came to my directory page and left me a message "hi I visited your site, I clicked on your ads! Please come to mine.". Ok then... I don't have ads. So you sir, are a liar. Did you even set a twinkling digital foot upon my site? I think not.

Back to the drawing board!

It occurred to me that if I want readers to come to me from a directory, then I should give back something by reading and commenting (where appropriate) on other blogs. I tried to use the directories to find some that appealed to me. That was easier said than done. It struck me just HOW many people there are blogging their faces off. A stupidly enormous number. Stupormous number.  By chance I managed to stumble over a few that I enjoyed. I learned that there is a whole genre called mommy* bloggers. I found that often blogs have blogrolls where they list all their mates' blogs. These lists of blogs are so long that they drop down in front of you and trail over your toes. Luckily, bloggers seem to travel in packs. So within the pack of bloggers that I started to read, the blogrolls start to repeat. But they are still too many to read regularly.

It hit me one day that the rss news reader I have in my applications folder actually has a use. I put all the blog feed urls into it for the blogs I like. Now I can read new entries if they come in. What I need now is some sort of plugin to allow me to assign a rating to those that are just failing to be interesting so that I can dump them after a few entries. Harsh, but necessary, with another hundred waiting to take their place!

Apparently some people make money off blogging. Well blow me down. Not only make money (from the ads and sponsored content) they also get free stuff. And to start with I figured the very biggest, most well known - 300 comments at a time - blogs would get free stuff sent to them. And yet this is not the case. If I was to pick myself up and fly to a blogher conference, apparently it's all about the swag.

Or to put it another way, it's all about mommy* marketing. Let's face it, we - the mother of the household - are the brand guardians. We are the ones who choose what gets bought. Who put their foot down on whether sunpack peanut butter is better than craft. Whether Nestle is allowed in the house at all, and whether we buy into to Oreo mindset. The advertisers want to market to mother's directly. So who was the clever clogs who first noticed the blogging sensation and thought "let's have some of that... a new media waiting to be tapped!" And off they went, smooching and schmoozing the mommy* bloggers, paying them to put their products in the body copy, with gratutious photos of their kids smeared in whatever food constituent is present.

It makes me think of that comedy sketch that illustrates what would happen if product endorsement was placed within the sitcom or soap, rather than in the ad breaks - and not just one product, but a constant barrage of different products. Sadly that comedy sketch isn't that far fetched anymore - consider the ABC soap "One Life to Live":

Tea: I warmed up some soup for you. I don't want you to go to the police station on an empty stomach.
Todd: What kind of soup is this?
Tea: It's Campbell's. It's healthy, good for your heart.
Todd: (spooning away) Yeah, it's good.

While it's quite probable that a conversation in your own kitchen could well involve the merits of one brand over another, you don't really want it force fed to you in your media.

I've looked at a few blogs recently that seemed to be entry after entry of product endorsement. They don't last long in my rss feed. I don't really care about the new snack you're testing on your kids. I want to read social comment, opinion and humour. I read blogs to get away from the ads, not to have them reguritated to me in less sophisitcated writing.

But then, I've been on the other side of that fence. I know just how despicable the marketing world is. There is no altruistic side to advertising. I was, and still am morally outraged that French Connection think it's OK to put "FCUK YOU" on a t-shirt that a kid might wear. Or see. The advertising concept was great, but it should never have been shown before the watershed. It certainly shouldn't have walked down the street. Trevor Beattie had a brilliant idea, but someone needed to give him a sense of boundaries. The CEO of FCUK, Stephen Marks was quoted saying unconvincingly that "there was no thought of it being rude". ORLY? So saying FCUK YOU is ok then.

That was over a decade ago, but the fact still holds that advertisers are not always thoughtful or truthful. It's something that we all know quite well. And yet people are quite often duped by the niceness of a company that wants to give them free stuff.

Nestle is one company that has tried to bring the mommy* blogging force onboard to help promote them as a family company. It caused an uproar, because apparently nestle have a lot of detractors in the breastfeeding community (there is a community just for breastfeeding? That doesn't sound quite right). I wonder if - once all the screaming and kicking and calling names had died down - whether the overall PR was good for Nestle. It probably was. Anyway, the 30 invited bloggers got free stuff. Win win, eh?

So, back on topic - this entry was really about how to market MY blog. It occured to me that I am not even sure what niche I am in. I don't see myself as a mommy* blogger (or even a mummy blogger) because I can't bring myself to babble on about how much my kids mean to me, and how I see sunshine in their hair. I am not suggesting that OTHER mummies are babbling - just that I would be. I might see sunshine in their hair, but that will only be whilst I am doing a nit check. Is that really the kind of thing that people want to read about?

I think that I modelled my thought processes on the type of newspaper column I always enjoyed. The back page column, or Kate Muirs OLD column in the Saturday Daily Mail. It was a personal take on a public concept, with added humour. Plus I don't really want to parade my random depression or box of crazy in public. Not when I've hooked my blog up to facebook, so people who remember the time I climbed a tree and flashed my boobs at the work party can read it.

And I've started to stitch extra bits onto my blog with badly placed sticky tape. A bit of allotment news here, a bit of photoblogs there. And the daily snap which I've decided needs to be re-thought. So I might have a shuffle and and polish and change a few bits here and there. Or I might simply do nothing, and hope that someone invites me to a brand conference and gives me free stuff.

* mommy - yes, I know it's WRONG. Bloody Americans. But they coined the phrase. They might get confused if I say "mummy bloggers" and think that there was a whole new Eqyptian artifact community of bloggers. Not that that wouldn't be REALLY interesting, no siree.

SciFiGuy asked about copyright in the general forum at support, and since I can't reply in that forum, I PMed him some information instead, as I find copyright interesting. But then I thought that maybe we should share this here as it's already a hot topic in another thread.

Hi SciFiGuy

Copyright applies to any expressible form of an idea or information that is substantive and discrete and fixed in a medium.

Source: Wikipedia

Copyright is automatically attributed - if you wrote it, you own it. However, that doesn't mean if you write the words "I love you" that you own the copyright for those words. Fair use policy also allows you to copy a proportion of a work , and fair use takes into account these variables:

the purpose and character of the use;

the nature of the copyrighted work;

the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole;

and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Source: Wikipedia

Courts have previously found that a use was fair where the use of the copyrighted work was socially beneficial. In particular, U.S. courts have recognized the following fair uses: criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, research and parodies.

Source: EFF

Here are some other pages that might help you: http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html http://www.walthowe.com/pubweb/copyright.html http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090329/2229284297.shtml

yuku have started a company blog for the third time. Depending on your local customs, three is either a charm, or bad things happen in threes! So only time will tell if this blog will be interesting, regularly updated, relevant and/or honest.

yuku's previous blog, and the one on ezboard both suffered from a serious lack of content. Due to a policy of not revealing what is going on behind the scenes, neither of them could muster up anything that even passingly masqueraded as an insight.

Their other major downfall was relying on a single person to make updates. This lead to updates that had little to do with the product, and suspiciously like third party advertising (ala "Sonos").

We (the staff) at yuku decided that a blog for yuku would only be any use if it was a multiperson blog, so Chris created the staff blog page. It was just like the board portal page, but it listed the latest blog posts and led to the staff blogs. But alas, they refused to implement it.

But at least we were using the yuku blogs, rather than Wordpress - which is very good blog software, but what's the point of using a third party blog when you've got your own? And with an off-the-shelf blog template too - for shame!

And actually, I said take 3, but this is about the 5th blog that yuku have done, and that's probably not the full list. The real third and fourth blogs were appsbird.com (which seems to have dropped off the interweb) which was made of 3 whole entries by CammoWest, and yuku blog which in its first post made in September 2008 stated that:

Over the next several weeks, we'll share with you the best techniques for making your site as visible as possible on the web, including detailed descriptions of the "Top Ten SEO Secrets for Social Networks.:"

And then didn't.

I was reading next months .net magazine today, and there was a column inch dedicated to twitters over heard in the "twittersphere" (actually, that should be over read, right?)

Oh.My.God, in a month of publication time, the best 8 twitter snippets that they could find to print were pointless and banal sentences that would have slotted in nicely in a converstation between two people, but had no interest or relevance to anyone else in the entire world - nay, galaxy.

Here's one: "My design process is like a drunk night out. I know where i'll start, but no idea where I'll end up..." It's an unoriginal cliche, and I really don't care about your design process anyway. Who are you?

Two of them were almost good comedy one liners if added to a standup routine and polished up a bit, but as standalones were pretty meh, and the rest were completely "whatEVER".

This was on the same page as an article by Gary Marshall (whose articles I always enjoy reading) nicheising* people who use particular websites. I'd reproduce it because it was funny, but I really can't be arsed to type it all in. One salient paragraph however addresses twitter -

"[it's still largely populated by]... shameless self promoters and social media consultants. These consultants all have 55 million followers, all of whom are social media consultants and can't get through a sentence without monetising it."

I am so glad I am not the only person who can't get enthusiastic aobut a site that is actually pure spam.

* Nicheising - slotting people into their niches. I thank you.

I was reminded yesterday of one of the things I was not sorry to leave behind when I stopped working for yuku, and that is the incredible childishness and self absorbed behaviour of a small number of the member base.

Someone "anonymously" tipped me off about a thread that had disturbed her. She didn't like to see people portrayed in a negative light, and wanted me to be aware of it. My first reaction was "don't look!" I've seen so many topics about me on and off yuku in the past 5 years that I know better than to bother reading someone's less than well informed opinions about me. But I didn't recognise the board url at all, so I ended up clicking the link.

It's never an uplifting moment to read a bitter, ranting diatribe aimed at yourself. Not alluded at, or disguised as the actions of yuku, but individually villified in vitriolic terms. I was momentarily taken aback. I paused briefly to look at the rest of the board, since I still didn't know who's it was. Nothing worth reading - more rants, a total of only 4 people posting on it (probably). And it seems to belong to the profile seeing fit to libel* me. But all in all, stuck in the backwater of the internet - not really likely to affect me.

The first reaction when you read something that is so utterly wrong about yourself is to reply and put the record straight. But I've had too much experience with that type of person to think that they even care about the facts. In her sad little head I deleted some of her posts, so therefore I was on a vendetta to erase things that she said just because I didn't like her. I'd hate to rain on her parade and say that she didn't really make much of a blip on my radar in the first place! What really happens when you reply to them, is that this kind of person replies and twists your words out of context, or just screams unreasonable abuse back. Or - which is ironic (I think) - just removes your comment. The very thing that they are complaining about in the first place.

Anyway, the topic was made back in March. That's a long time ago in internet terms. She's probably forgotten about it completely right? Actually no - she's proud of it. Seeing me in her who's online, and maybe using her tracker to see where I'd been, she actually replied to some of the topics I looked in. I wouldn't have even known that unless one of the people I shared the link with had told me - so I went back to have a look (yes, silly, right? Breaking my own rules?) and what I discovered wasn't an apology or embarrassed admission that she'd been angry at the time, but a defiant "enjoy reading this?" comment. Oh my. I have a feeling this woman is old enough to be my mother, but she's acting like my 7 year old might - in 6 years when she hits her teens! Sulky and sullen, with no consideration for the feelings of another.

This is a common internet problem. Some people don't seem to be aware that others are real human beings. They are unable to deal with others in a face to face manner like they would in real life. Or at least - I hope they would. Prior to her parting comment I partially felt like I could explain things to her - but now I couldn't care less what she thinks. And anyone who knows me won't care either.


Footnote:
* libel - yes, it was libel. Defamation is defined as: "the communication of a statement that makes a false claim, expressly stated or implied to be factual, that may give an individual, business, product, group, government or nation a negative image." She claims I lied to her, that I deleted posts and topics from a personal dislike. Of course, to prove that it is defamatory, I need to prove that it's not true - which I could. Or to prove that it isn't libel, she needs to prove that her statements are true - which she can't . She could, of course change it into her "opinion" rather than facts, since that's all it is.

The funny thing is that although I wrote the Code of Conduct, I was rarely the person who put it to use. On one occasion prior to its implementation I had to undelete 10 topics in order to see why 3 members had been banned by a staff member. I unbanned all three after finding nothing more than angry members complaining that a bug remained still unfixed. That was one of the reasons I wrote the Code of Conduct in the first place - to ensure that members and staff alike had a clear outline as to what was acceptable.