The 20 things you MUST know about music online
I think it's of interest partly because the companies with big budgets are educating our visitors and training them in certain habits and expectations, and this will affect how they understand our sites and content; and partly because it'd be nice if the music industry finally caught up to its consumers.
I've linked to the summary post, but you can also download an ebook or read the original full-length posts.
From A Consuming Experience, Feeds basics 101: introduction to newsfeeds:
Feeds, RSS feeds, Atom feeds, XML feeds, newsfeeds, web feeds, they're increasingly common on the internet these days – but what are they, how do you subscribe, and how do you publish and publicise your own news feed? This post is a 3-part introductory tutorial guide to web feeds, aimed at intelligent non-geeks
Chris Anderson says social networking is a feature, not a destination:
Right now the world is focused on stand-alone social networking sites, especially Facebook and MySpace, and the fad of the moment is to take brands and services there, as companies build Facebook apps and MySpace pages in a bid to follow the audience wherever they happen to be. But at the same time there's a growing sense that elements of social networking is something all good sites should have, not just dedicated social networks. And that suggests a very different strategy–social networking as a feature, not a destination.
So far, so good – but Chris Anderson's day job is at Wired, which is definitely a destination site with a huge audience. Cultural heritage sites are useful for a range of people, but I suspect most people stumble across our content incidentally, through search engines and external links – they don't think "I'll spend my lunch break browsing the Museum of Whatever's website".
But another of his projects is much smaller so the issues are more relevant to the cultural heritage sector:
So we've been debating internally whether we want to shift to a distributed functionality strategy (AKA "go where the people are"), where most users interact with us via a widget on third party sites, clicking through to our site only when they want to go deeper. We're embarking on some experiments with a few partners we like to see how that goes. Hopefully a distributed strategy will help us reach critical mass as a destination, too, but right now we're simply experimenting to see what works.
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I think focused sites that serve niche communities will extract the best lessons from Facebook and MySpace and offer better social networking tools to the communities they already have. I'm sure huge and generic social networking destinations will continue to do well, but I'm placing my bet on the biggest impact coming when social networking becomes a standard feature on all good sites, bringing community to the granular level where it always works best.
So how would this work for us? Would our visitors gather around specific institutions, around institutional collections, around meta-collections that span several institutions, or around the sector as a whole? Would they, for example, gather around a site like Exploring 20th Century London, which has a very specific temporal and regional focus? Or are these potential users already on sites that meet their needs, at least to some extent? Our collections will inevitably still form a valuable resource for discussion, no matter where that discussion takes place.
Who knows? I think it'll be fun finding out.
I keep meaning to post about Ning. As the post above says, "Ning is not a destination itself–instead, it provides hosted social networking tools for niche sites to create their own destinations."
It could be a useful tool for smaller organisations who want to get into social software but don't have the means to build their hosts or applications, or for small ad hoc team working.
Two very handy resources when choosing forum software: opensourcecms.com lets you try out various installations – you can create test forums and play with the settings and forummatrix.org helps you compares applications on a variety of facets, and there's a wizard to help you narrow the choices.
Andy Powell makes the excellent point that social software-style tags function as virtual venues:
if you are holding an event, or thinking about holding an event… decide what tag you are going to use as soon as possible. … In fact, in a sense, the tag becomes the virtual venue for the event's digital legacy.
In other news, Intel get into Mashups for the Masses – "an extension to your existing web browser that allows you to easily augment the page that you are currently browsing with information from other websites. As you browse the web, the Mash Maker toolbar suggests Mashups that it can apply to the current page in order to make it more useful for you" and the BBC reports on Metaplace, a "free tool that allows anyone to create a [3D] virtual world" and incorporates lots of social web tools.
Ok, last Facebook post, I promise, but for Londoners, there's Poke 1.0, a 'Facebook social research symposium':
This social research symposium will allow academics who are researching the 'Facebook' social networking site to meet and exchange ideas. Researchers are welcome from the fields of sociology, media, communication & cultural studies, information science, education, politics, psychology, geography and any other sphere of 'internet research'. PhD and post-doctoral researchers are especially welcome, as are researchers considering Facebook as a potential area of research.
I've been wondering how long it would take for a meta-social networking site to emerge (or whether I should create one thereby making millions), allowing you to maintain active accounts on facebook, myspace, etc, with one single interface to read and post messages and comments, but of course Wired got there first. Sorta.
And yes, I did mean to post that many months ago! But it's still relevant because interoperability is only going to become more important in the social networking world.
This post on the Gartner "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2007" report includes the familiar Gartner Hype Cycle diagram, updated for 2007, which is more than you'll get from the Gartner site (for free, anyway).
Common Craft have produced videos on RSS in Plain English, Social Bookmarking in Plain English, Wikis in Plain English and Social Networking in Plain English (via Groundswell)
Also worth a look, Google Code for Educators "provides teaching materials created especially for CS educators looking to enhance their courses with some of the most current computing technologies and paradigms". They say, "[w]e know that between teaching, doing research and advising students, CS educators have little time to stay on top of the most recent trends. This website is meant to help you do just that" and it looks like it might also be useful for busy professionals who want to try new technologies they don't get time to play with in their day jobs (via A Consuming Experience).
Also from A Consuming Experience, a report on a talk on "5 secrets of successful Web 2.0 businesses" at the June London Geek Dinner.
On a random note, I noticed that the BBC have added social bookmarking to their news site:
I wonder if this marks the 'mainstreaming' of social bookmarking.
I'm still catching up on news and various RSS feeds, here are just a few things that caught my eye.
These slides from a presentation on Open Source applications in archaeology are worth a look. They've included lots of screenshots, which is useful because it demonstrates that open source applications are becoming much more user-friendly.
Wired makes a compelling case for Twitter as a 'Social Sixth Sense':
Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.
In theory I just don't get Twitter but in practice I do read some long-running threads on various forums where people can post a quick rant about work, about their love life, or just add a random disclosure. If I know the people posting then I find those threads interesting. And I also love Facebook status updates for the same reason – they don't require a response but sometimes it's nice when they trigger one.
A post from forrester.com on lessons for content on YouTube, and by extension on 'informal' online content generally. In summary, be sincere.
But first here are a few reasons why BlendTec succeeded — reasons you ought to pay attention to before trying it yourself:
- It's funny. It's visually arresting. It's short. These are three qualities your videos must possess. Here's another company that also succeeded with a visually arresting video: Ray-Ban.
- It's authentic. These guys are geeks. Wright told me the CEO — Tom Dickson, who's featured in the video — is an engineer. It comes across. This stuff ain't slick, folks, and if it were it wouldn't work. (I love the proud and cheesy smile while he watches his company's blender reduce some object to dust.)
- It's original. Figure out what your unique value is. Then film it and put it up there. Don't copy Blendtec, or Ray-Ban, or Dove. This may be the hardest part.
- It actually connects to the value of the product. You see these videos and you can't help saying "Can that blender really do that? Maybe I should get one." And many people do. You could be a hit on YouTube with a video that doesn't connect to the value of your product, but that will help your ego a lot more than your sales.
From willitblend.com: Speaking through YouTube, blogs.forrester.com.
Sometimes I think sincerity is regarded as daggy or unsophisticated, or just too simple to work; but I suspect it's part of the reason the participatory web has taken off.
I was thinking about all the fuss in the cultural heritage sector about Facebook on various museum-y discussion lists at the moment, and thought perhaps the off-line equivalent would be posts saying
"I've discovered this place where lots of young people hang out, interacting with each other in a really natural way. The thing is, institutions can't go there, only individuals. But this place is full of audiences we want to reach. So how can we engage with this new-fangled 'pub' thing?".
I guess what I'm asking is, is Facebook 'fit for [our] purpose' or are we just chasing it for the same reason marketers love youth social networking sites – it's a place where a hard-to-reach demographic hang out.
With that in mind, here's what Facebook does well:
…just how intrinsic the use of Facebook is today among younger scholars – grad students and junior faculty – in their scholarship and teaching. Facebook, for now, is often the place where they work, collaborate, share, and plan. Grad students may run student projects using Facebook groups; they may communicate amongst each other in inter-institutional (multi-university) research projects; they may announce speakers and special events to their communities.
I've been enmeshed recently in increasingly agonized conferences that concern themselves with "re-thinking scholarly communication" and grappling with understanding what tools might be used to facilitate new models of peer review, or facilitate research collaboration, or teaching — and all the while – of course – it has been happening anyway, using widely available tools that provide the flexibility and leverage that scholars have been seeking.
And here's why it's relevant to the cultural heritage sector:
…regardless of the ultimate fate of Facebook, the set of characteristics that it has established – the sense of community; user control over the boundedness of openness; support for fine grained privacy controls; the ability to form ad-hoc groups with flexible administration; integration and linkage to external data resources and application spaces through a liberal and open API definition; socially promiscuous communication – these will be carried with us into future environments as expectations for online communities.
From Working in Facebook, O'Reilly rader.