Makes sense.
Craig Cannon on why people share things on Twitter without reading themPenalty for sharing a bad article = 0
Self-perceived value in sharing something early = 1,000,000Actual value in sharing something early = .1
Yep, pretty much sums it up.
(via khuyi-blog)
Just as we have a “do not track” option for our web browsing habits, we’re going to need to have something similar for other aspects of our increasingly-digital lives: from contact information to our location to moving and still images of ourselves. Because it’s no long enough for me to be careful with my opt-ins and online sharing; now I have to ensure that every single person around me is careful, as well.
Wil Wheaton on the Instagram controversy
Some valid concerns here with how we share online and the implicit consent granted when information that is not exclusively ours is shared.
Source: plus.google.com
The demographic and behavioral shifts for Millennials and younger people paint a picture where…the proportion of direct traffic that’s truly dark social declines and changes in composition — where much of that dark social activity in fact takes place on regular social networks using chat, and less on email. The huge Facebook messaging numbers for mobile seem to show that.
“There’s Less “Dark Social” Than Meets The Eye” via BuzzFeed
Moral of the story is that older people share over email and younger share over mobile social apps.
Source: BuzzFeed
My gut is that people are actually sort of private about a lot of their video viewing, and don’t want to automatically share it with the Web. It’s not like Spotify, where even though you may not be proud that you were listening to 38 Special, you don’t really care if anyone knows.
“Please Don’t Tell Me What You’re Watching on Netflix” via The Wall Street Journal
Interesting observation between the differences in sharing preferences. While not a scientific study, it seems that the overwhelming majority do not want to share their choices of video watching. I wonder what this says of apps that are trying to make TV and video watching more social and interactive.
Source: allthingsd.com
Author Neil Gaiman on piracy. Most interesting point is towards the end when he recalls asking an audience where they came to find their favorite author. As it turns out, it is not bookstores.
The Internet at its best is the world’s greatest discovery engine. While search still has a long way to go (despite Google and Facebook stepping into dangerous territory with their walled-garden experiments), we are the better for the access to the information and resources available through the Internet. Before the Internet, information was locked away, business models were more regimented, distribution was tightly controlled.
Piracy gets more press than it deserves. There is much weeping and gnashing of teeth by the old guard media elites, who are forever trapped in their own intellectual prison and shackled by complacency. Instead of understanding and innovating, they would rather circle the wagons and break out the big legal and lobbying guns.
The world however is not waiting for this slumbering beast. We are evolving into a remix and sharing culture. The artists and creators that understand this shift will succeed in the end, because they leverage power of discovery that is only available via the Internet. This is exactly what Neil himself comes to understand, as has Louis CK, Radiohead, and many other artists who used the Internet to get discovered, become viral, and unleash hordes of new fans.
Under Apple’s new textbooks plan, though, McGraw-Hill will try something different: It will sell its books directly to each student (the student could either pay out of pocket, or the school could fund the purchase via a voucher/code), who will use the book for a year, then move on. They’ll be able to keep the digital text, but won’t be able to resell it or pass it along to another student, and McGraw-Hill anticipates that another set of students will buy new books the following year.
- “Apple’s New Math. Or: Why a $15 E-Book Equals a $75 Paper Book” via AllThingsD
Let’s see how long it takes before the “won’t be able to resell it or pass it along” gets disrupted and upended. The publishers still do not get it…
Source: allthingsd.com
“One downside of the e-social revolution is that if all this ubiquitous interactivity leads people to shape their own opinions more and more based on the opinions of others, then we will be thinning out the “intellectual gene pool” of ideas and diverse thinking, and unintentionally putting ourselves and our culture at immense risk of catastrophic loss, either through miscalculation or simply a stampede of sentiment.”Paul Higgins: By re-blogging this am I adding to the problem?
Social Media And The Loss Of Uncorrelated Wisdom (via courtenaybird)
Over here at Strong Opinions, we revel in the reblog. Then again, when we reblog, it is not necessarily a reblog of agreement…
The sharing and reblogging and retweeting and all of that social activity has many depths of meaning and purpose. So I do not see any downside or heard mentality. Rather I see it as a way to express one’s own views, personality, and attitude. Sometimes that is simply expressed better in the others. Then there are times when an opinion is shaped by the view others. But I view all of this as additive and adding to the overall creation of knowledge in a way that was not possible before other than in centers of learning from the great libraries of Ancient Greece to our modern universities. Or to put a modern spin on it, we are in the midst of a culture of the remix.
If anything, what social media and a connected online universe has provided us is the wardrobe of options to help us dress ourselves in a particular worldview. We can try things on as we like, take more risks, and switch things around faster than before the formation of our connected social web. Is this a good thing? Possibly, but we are still very early in this era of social networking, but if history is a guide, almost every technological advance has been a net positive for humanity.
(via emergentfutures)
Source: Fast Company
Over the last decade, my musical tastes atrophied. I was not in a band or playing gigs anymore. I stopped buying music. I did not attend a single concert. I was essentially stuck in the 90’s music wise as a whole decade of music passed me by. My music collection stopped at the Foo Fighters.
When I started my blog on Tumblr, it was simply to get something up quick without much hassle. As I started reading other Tumblr’s though, most of the people I followed were also sharing music. Some of it, like the stuff Bijan posts, is not my taste, but plenty of other folks, like WhitneyMCN and Jenrobison, have inspired me with the music they post. The point is whether I like the song or not, I still follow all these people and get exposed to music that otherwise would never cross my way. This was when I got back into music again.
Discovery is a tricky thing. The music we listen to is heavily influenced by what we are exposed to, which is generally the mainstream media and our friends. When we are introduced to music that goes outside of the bounds we are used to, the natural reaction is to dismiss or mock it. Most of the kids I hung out with in school listened to Aerosmith, AC/DC, and Judas Priest, not Joy Division, Depeche Mode and The Smiths. We mocked one kid relentlessly for a year because we found out he was an Amy Grant fan. We were not into discovery, we were into what we knew and what Kerrang, Hit Parader and Circus told us we should like.
Social networks have entirely shifted the game of discovery. Now we can collect and stream and share music all across various destinations. We are awash in awesome online music apps like Spotify, Turntable and others. My problem is that these apps are not really solving the discovery problem. My problem was that I wanted to expand my musical boundaries without being deluged with options while getting the balance right between playing it too safe and being way too out there.
Tumblr therefore was my default music discovery service. While I enjoyed checking out tunes in my Tumblr dashboard however, it was a pain to find music, especially music I liked and wanted to play again or share with others. Then I found Ex.fm, the most brilliant music discovery service ever. It is now my regular everyday playlist,. New music is getting fed into it every day from the people I follow on Tumblr, but the explore features help me break out once in a while to find new music and artists. My only complaint is that there is as yet no Android mobile version (only iOS), but I am sure they will fix this problem soon.
If your music has been getting stale, I recommend trying out Ex.fm, hooking it up to Tumblr, following some folks, and open up your mind. Good listening!
First time I noticed this, Amazon building out a social recommendations engine. I had heard about this last year, but I suppose I do not do much shopping. My guess is that this will prove to be significantly better than Amazon’s current recommendations, but this only hints at the very tip of what should be a very interesting and rapidly innovating space within eCommerce.
The potential and impact is much greater and wider however than eCommerce. Following on from these experiments, the potential to provide much better, more personalized recommendations across an entire spectrum of goods and services is at the heart of social recommendations. Where brute-force statistical algorithms failed, the input of social data will begin to usher in the era of hyper-personalization.
The promise of hyper-personalization was elusive, with mentions and experiments since the first dot com boom, but never materialized. In fact, I had been involved in one company several years ago that provided technology to deliver real-time marketing offers via call centers and websites using various statistical analyses, real-time data collection and customer demographic information. With infinitely more sharing of personal information and a different mind-set towards privacy and data however, the promise of hyper-personalization is getting closer to reality.
A few weeks ago, Diana kicked off a new initiative she calls /mentoring…Today, I’m joining the movement and want to hear from people who want to engage in a mentor/mentee relationship with me.
Every major step forward in my life so far has been inspired and encouraged by the mentors I’ve been fortunate enough to have. I believe that hopes, dreams, and advice are best shared in ongoing, personal relationships, and it’s important to me to make myself available as a mentor to others….
1. Tell me about yourself. How did you become who you are, and who do you want to become?
2. What do you hope to gain from our mentoring relationship?
3. What’s the best thing you’ve read, watched, or listened to lately?
4. What are you curious about in life?
Last but not least, here are some great tips for a successful mentor/mentee relationship.
Mentoring is something that many talk about, but few actively participate in. I have tried to do this in a small way with the startups I advise and by hosting Ohours. I am glad to see a growing movement however that is encouraging people to help each other and building these valuable mentor / mentee relationships. I look forward to see where this movement goes and I encourage everyone to open themselves up to becoming mentors or finding mentors.
