Those good old fax machines

This week I took another trip down memory lane. I was cleaning out some boxes at the attic and came across a bunch of old faxes. It drove me right back to when I was about fifteen years old. Me and my girlfriends used to spend evenings faxing to a group of friends living on the other side of the country. My dad always used to wonder why the fax machine was out of paper, again...

Tagged with: privacy, social media,

This is cool!

Have you noticed the Content Marketing Playbook, 42 ways to connect with customers? I discovered it on Junta42. There is more fun stuff there by the way. But this is really cool. You want to know which media you might best use to spread your content and don't have the time or energy to really study all the different types of (social) media and what there pitfalls mights be? Take a look at this small booklet. You can download it for free, so why not.

Tagged with: social media,

Is social media making us less social?

A famous Dutch comedian once said:,, When we invented the calculator, we got worse at calculating. Could it be that because of communication technology we got worse at communicating?”. Making things easier often means we get worse at thing, we need to practice. Our brains need the exercise to tackle more difficult problems later on. For Example: if you wanted to say something to your auntie, that lives on the other side of the ocean, you’d send a letter. You would think long and hard on what and how to say it. Your brain gets to exercise. You’re being creative. You’re message would hold meaning. Some of this is because the medium used is the letter, which enables you to think before you communicate. And because of the slower pace of life people had time to think about their message. If you’d go to a bar the messages of people would therefore be more thought over. Because people would be used to think before sending their message, at least a fraction longer then now. In making it easier to send your message to someone else and the demand of modern society to react fast, the message becomes less thought through. Communication has gotten more volatile. We see it every day. Combine this with the anonymity of the internet and you’ve got a cacophony of un-thought-through messages. Every moron with an opinion can be part of an intelligent discussion. And smoothly the norm is transformed to; Say anything, anytime, anywhere, anyhow. So the quality of communication has gotten less.

Tagged with: social, communication, social media,

Social Media Gnomes!

One reason for the interest in social media is that people expect to make money on it. Some investors paid serious money for popular social media sites. However sites like Twitter or MySpace are now having difficulty finding funding respectively have been down valued from their original buying prices. After watching a rerun episode of South Park, I concluded that most social media business strategies could be compared to the Underpants Gnomes business strategies.

Tagged with: south park, business models, user-generated content, social media,

Generation Dumbstein

By now, most of us reasonable people have figured out that ‘Generation Einstein’ is just a silly term invented by elderly people who were impressed by the apparent agility with computers and other gadgets of their ‘kidz’. It turns out that they aren’t multitasking at all but just constantly distracted, and only the more sensible kidz are capable to turn off their distractions when they have something important to do like studying for a test or listen to a teacher (he said grinding his teeth).

Tagged with: netgeneration, social media,

Social Supermarkets

Having been able to do research on social media, a lot of things have been drawn to my attention lately concerning the term. As we all use the term, there is still no consensus on what we mean by it. Is it because we are all too stubborn to embrace a collective definition? Or is it that it is just complex material? I think that the latter is true.

Tagged with: wikipedia, social media,

We're all on Twitter, but nobody tweets

Off course this statement is an exaggeration. Sorry! But recently I stumbled upon an interesting research by Harvard about how people use Twitter. The researchers questioned over 300,000 Twitter users and found that most Twitter users are merely followers. Half of Twitter users tweet once very 74 days, 25% of the users never tweet and 10% of Twitter users account for over 90% of tweets. This is an even smaller percentage than people contributing 90% to Wikipedia (15%). In the comments on second state of dutchtwitosphere you will find similar numbers on the Twitter users in The Netherlands: “50% of the Dutch Twitter accounts have less then 12 updates. 5% of the Dutch Twitter accounts have more then 550 updates”.

Tagged with: twitter, social media,

Information Overflow

I have been a list member of SocNet for years now and every now and then some posting attracts my attention. Take a look at this recent message from John Maloney:

Tagged with: information overflow, ugc, social media,

Just call me 3,141,592,653 of 7,851,455,000

In the American science fiction show Star Trek there is a species called the Borg. The Borg manifest as cybernetically enhanced humanoid drones of multiple species, organized as an interconnected collective. Within the interconnected collective, every drone shares what it sees and does and decisions are made by a hive mind. They operate solely toward the fulfilling of one purpose: to "add the biological and technological distinctiveness of other species to their own" in pursuit of perfection. This is achieved through forced assimilation, a process which transforms individuals and technology into Borg, enhancing, and simultaneously controlling, individuals by implanting or appending synthetic components. In Star Trek, attempts to resist the Borg became one of the central themes, with many examples of successful resistance to the collective. Every now and then drones can escape the collective (most notably Seven of Nine), and become individuals once again.

Tagged with: internet, collective, star trek, social media,

Social Media Monitor

Got my hands on the first edition of the social media monitor. And to say it upfront: disappointing. For some reason I was excited to read this, maybe because social media is also a major topic in our own research program. Knowing how hard it is to define and model social media in order to deduce some relevant research questions, I expected new insights and some help to bring our own research one step closer to the Holy Grail. Alas!

Tagged with: paper, research, social media,