Entries by Alan Langford

As either a younger member of the boomer generation, or an older member of Gen-X, I'm a member of a big demographic that seems to have a hard time understanding social media. The most common reaction I get to mentioning something on Facebook is "I will never have a Facebook account!"

I realize now that part of the bad reputation that social media has with middle-aged adults is due to the fact that most of these people are parents, and everything they know about social media sites has come from their kids.

This led me to a great insight. Good social media sites are malleable to individual users, and that's what makes them so powerful. I am certain that my Facebook experience is vastly different from that of your average teenager's, and that's a good thing.

A middle-aged friend recently asked me about Facebook and Twitter, with the subtext "I don't 'get' either of them." I've reworked my response a bit in hope that it will be helpful to others:

The main purpose of Facebook is to get found by people you already know but have lost touch with, think of the people you would invite to a high school reunion. Simple as that. It's also good for keeping up on the big stream of small things that winds up being news in a nominally mundane life. It works well if you're not "always on" the net. You can pop in every week or so and catch up. If you ignore the clever little time-wasting applications and notification noise, it's a useful tool. In short, Facebook is good at making an electronic link to people you already know.

Twitter is much more geared to making new connections and is really something for those of us who are "on the 'net" most of the time. What it's best at is finding new clever people, and getting breaking news. Information travels very quickly in Twitter, and to a large extent it's filtered to the interests of the people you follow, which means you get more information about the things you care about. As a writer, it's also superb at making you edit things down. The 140 character limit is brutal, but it enforces the practice of a clarity that can carry into other writing.

So how did I do? Is there anything else that "defines" these sites?

With the rise of social media sites and services (Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and so on), a whole new field of "Social Marketing Expert" has been created. Aside from the obvious fact that it's hard to be a credible expert in a relatively new domain, the silliness of some of these "experts" is laughable.

By far the best of this bunch are those who have been discredited elsewhere and are hoping that their bankrupt strategies can somehow find new life in a new medium. It may be true that "the medium is the message", but sometimes the message sucks universally and thus transcends all media.

The prime example here is "word of mouth" marketers. These aren't the people who say, quite correctly, that word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing communication anyone can get, but those who figure that somehow word of mouth is a tool, something that can be created out of thin air.

Surely manufactured word of mouth has been sufficiently discredited that we don't have to bear through more ill-advised campaigns in the social media space. Is there anyone still doing the "paid shill" scam, where people are paid to go into public spaces and talk up specific products? Have sufficient bloggers been roasted over online flames for accepting money in exchange for talking up products? Apparently not.

So get ready for a (hopefully brief) onslaught of bull masquerading as recommendations. It will be easy to spot, let's take a look at a quick example:

Slimeball:	Good morning.
You:	Good morning Slimeball, what's the weather like over there?
Slimeball:	Pretty good, it's a great day for DumbProduct!
You:	So, it's warm and sunny or something?
Slimeball:	Actually it's raining quite heavily, perfect for DumbProduct.
You:	I see, and how are the kids?
Slimeball:	They're happy, thanks to DumbProduct.
You:	Just hold on a second while I block you and write a negative blog post about DumbProduct's unethical marketing techniques.

Bottom line: if you're a marketer don't do this. Just don't. Build genuine word of mouth by delivering a great product and providing great service. Encourage your customers to talk about you, but please, never cross the line and start trying to pay for it. No good can come from this.

I've been "hanging out" on Twitter for about three weeks now. My interactions with it have evolved quite a bit over that time.

When I first got on, my attitude was "what's the point?" That became "okay, so this is the best part of Facebook minus the dumb applications and a lot of FB's cool-but-useless user interface." But along with this functionality came a challenging signal to noise ratio. How can you decide who to follow? It's certainly not by popularity. Some of the most followed accounts are little more than posts of the form "(hook text) (external link) more on (topic) at (posters_site)." In other words, "Here's something vaguely interesting on a topic we cover. Hopefully the first link will generate the expectation that our site has even more useful information, and you'll start using us as a source."

If that's all Twitter had to offer, I'd be gone by now. But despite the noise, there's quality in the signal when you find it. I have interacted with people with unquestionable intelligence, people with expertise in interesting areas, and people with humour and insight. Twitter is also undeniably a superb source for news, both global and local.

The other problem is that few of us are consistently brilliant, so even on an individual level there's no telling how many mundane posts you'll have to read before encountering the gem that makes it worthwhile.

So I have developed a list of user types for Twitter that I use as a guideline when deciding who to follow:

• The "I am a Channel" type is interested in their follower count above all else. Every post they make returns to a gateway on their site, so they can pump up their traffic stats. Some are more subtle, but the ultimate goal is to make their web properties a destination.
  
  
• The "monetize" type is intent on convincing you that they know how to monetize your online presence. Inevitably this leads you to a pitch for their e-books and/or training courses. Somehow I get the feeling that these people are all modern equivalents of the "Make $1 Million from Classified Ads" artists. why do I get the feeling that the way you monetize is by selling e-books telling people how to monetize?
  
  
• The "I am a social media maven" type — which is distinct from an actual social media expert — is a variation on "monetize". All you have to do is buy/subscribe, and they'll show you how to get to the top of the social media heap. By and large, these folks would fare far better if fewer of them appeared to be laid off auto workers living in their mother's basements. The ones who seem to have some class wind up being the ones who value connections above all else. As I've said before, there's something unsettling about "hook up with me on LinkedIn as a trusted source, even if I don't know you from a serial killer".
  
  
• The "random link" type finds purportedly interesting information and tweets it with a useless explanation, as in "wonderful (link)". I suppose that somewhere out there, the simple act of posting makes the link worthwhile, but in my experience so far, 85% of the links go to stuff that is old, dull, boring, or just plain not interesting. A complete waste of time. Explain what's interesting about the link, please.
  
  
• The "topic feed" type usually picks a well-defined topic to post about and either relates facts about that topic or posts links with information relevant to the topic. Focus is the key to success here. If the topic is pig farming, it no good can come from posting random comments on abstract art.
  
  
• The "expert" type goes one better than the topic feed. These are people with a real interest and some expertise in their field, and they regularly post observations and insights along with the "topic feed" fare. A significant number of posts from these people reference original content that hey have compiled or authored.
  
  
• The "personality" type is someone who has a real world profile and is using Twitter as another channel for communicating to their audience. Think Obama.
  
  
• The "community" type is a member of a smaller community that uses Twitter to keep up to date. This is what Twitter seems to have originally been designed for. Some of these communities have "personality" types, who have a significant profile in within the scope of that community.
  
  
• The "shared mundanity" type posts nothing but tidbits from their life. As in "listening to x while doing y". There's a fine line here. Much of the charm of Twitter is getting a snapshot into other people's lives, but we don't need the whole film; odds are that you're just not that interesting. If none of these posts have any meaning, if they don't transcend mere observation, then the unfollow button is not far away.
  

The real challenge here is that most people exhibit a mix of these types, and probably a few more that I haven't identified yet. Twitter is all about constructing your own community and becoming a part of it. It's social media at its most fascinating.

Writing on ojr.org, Getty Storch asserts that "Papers must charge for websites to survive". There is a lively debate in the comments that follow, most of them are in disagreement with Storch's analysis.

This includes mine, which I reproduce here.

Anyone who thinks newspapers can survive on local content needs to spend a few weeks on Twitter. Here is a medium where news arrives in near real time, is reliable (since misinformation is rapidly corrected by others), and relevant. This applies just as well in a global environment. I have seen real reports from people on the scene of demonstrations in Thailand and Athens, and learnt about the supply of gas from Russia to Slovakia from people in cold buildings. Twitter and similar channels tell me about traffic jams on my route downtown, about power outages and emergencies in ways that no newspaper or even television station can ever dream of achieving.

Twitter has merely brought something that has been happening for a very long time into the mainstream. As a case in point, I learnt about the death of Princess Diana via an international online chat almost three hours before the local media picked it up. This is a decade ago. Times have changed.

Information is now free and it will remain so. Any attempt to charge for access to it is absolutely doomed. The only hope that news media, particularly "print" media have for survival is by adding value. This means aggregating sources, adding perspective, and performing astute analysis. Even so, most of the revenue from these activities will be derived from online advertising, and those revenues will be orders of magnitude below what the industry currently sees as normal.

The newspaper as we know it is dead. There is no model that will resuscitate it, period. Rigor mortis has set in, the patient just doesn't fully realize it yet.

For those who don't know, a favicon is the graphic that shows up in the location bar and bookmarks of modern browsers. They're great visual clues that help you remember what's on a page.

It is possible to have this icon animated, at least for some browsers. DON'T DO IT.

Animated graphics are designed to catch your eye. Once your attention is caught, you're supposed to understand a message and respond. That response takes you to a web site. If a favicon is up, then you are already on the site, so animation just catches your eye and distracts you from the site. Anyone who thinks distracting viewers from paying attention to their site should get out of the business and consider a career as a utility pole.

The other possible thought behind an animated icon is that in a sea of tabs and bookmarks, the animation calls attention to your site. That might work, but if every icon is animated, then the result is a sea of irritation, so it's not a strategy that will work for long. As far as tabs are concerned... I just visited these sites, I can recognize your icon without having it wave at me. In fact, the second time it interferes with my attention, your tab will get closed.

Summary: Animated favicons have lots of drawbacks and little upside. Just say no.

Possibly the Internet's most valuable contribution to society is it's ability to foster dialogue. Unfortunately that dialogue is frequently not constructive. Among the least constructive techniques is the "attack and run" method, because there really is no way to control another person's ability to communicate. The attacked person merely opens another channel. This is a case in point.

Earlier today, the nameless writer behind a seemingly useful site, http://www.space.gs/, known as "Astronautics" (formerly "astrospace") on Twitter, decided to communicate information about a mail server security problem. He or she posted several tweets on the subject (many now absent). This is the remaining one:

Astronautics: JSC mail server may have been hacked. If you get an HSFNEWS email from NASA check that the urls in the email are not Chinese

Then some time later, this tweet:

Astronautics: I lost many followers making that public service announcement - it's strange how so many people have no sense of duty.

I thought I'd offer an explanation. Honestly I thought I was polite:

alan_langford: @Astronautics You assume all your followers are affected and/or can't recognize spam. You flooded twitter with what amounts to noise. Not good

Just in case, I added (fixed a typo):

alan_langford: @Astronautics I happen to think your "regular" feed is interesting enough to tolerate the odd lapse, but obviously not everyone else does.

The public response was:

Astronautics: I do my duty and make public service announcements. I make a difference. I will not bend to court popularity.

Which is all well and good, but it seemed to me that the author was trying to understand why many followers left, which is unrelated to one's sense of duty. Maybe it was my sense of duty to try to offer an explanation in the first place. Then I got this rather shocking direct message:

DM from Astronautics: It is not a 'lapse' and I do not care what some loser like you thinks. I am a professional journalist with a sense of DUTY. Go to hell.

The individual subsequently blocked me, removing the opportunity to respond as well as depriving me of his "journalistic" feed and forcing me to respond in a public way. I suppose in hindsight that's not much of a loss.

So here's my response: this person is clearly using a definition of "professional" with which I am not familiar. Maybe I'm out of touch. If anyone has a link to a credible reference that lists name calling, not identifying yourself, and telling people to "go to Hell" as professional, please send it to me. Considering the increasing meaninglessness of "professional" when attached to "journalist", I am now questioning the credibility of anything on this site. That's too bad, because credible news on space and astronomy would have been a good thing.

I've been hanging out in Twitter for a couple of weeks now. It's generally amusing, and in some ways I can see it as useful. In a way, it's simply the most interesting part of Facebook (status updates) without the lame and cloying attempts at "fun". But one thing that's irritating about it is the "social media experts" and the "u 2 cn get rich" crowd. I would go on about this, but Michael Pinto has done a great job already in his post Social Media “Experts” are the Cancer of Twitter (and Must Be Stopped).

Instead I want to focus on a subset of Twitter users, the "Friend Troll". These people post multiple tweets, encouraging everyone to connect with them on other social media sites, usually LinkedIn. Now the premise of LinkedIn is that people use it to build connections between people that they know and trust. Obviously someone who gets the bulk of his or her connections from random Twitter followers is not adhering to this principle, which debases the entire concept.

I'm pretty sure that LinkedIn introduced the "Recommendations" feature as a way to combat this, but there's nothing to stop a savvy user from trolling for those, so it's of limited usefulness.

So what's required is some way to measure the level of respect that someone has for the sites that they inhabit. I have decided that, at least for sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, that the friend count / number of connections is a good metric. Unfortunately, LinkedIn generalizes the connection count, so "500+" is the best we have to work with. Let's run with that for a moment. Assume the person is 40 years old, and has been working for 20 years. That's just over two friends per month, for every single month. Roughly two weeks per person.

Maybe I'm a poor judge of character, but two weeks of accumulated interaction with a person is, in my experience, not enough time to build a stable trust relationship. By contrast if I take as an example a very personable fellow who I have worked with, who I trust, and who is CEO of a publicly traded software company, I see just under 100 connections.

So after surveying my connections profiles, I have developed the "LinkedIn Connection Credibility Metric".

• 1-10 Connections: You are either antisocial, or don't "get" social media.
  
• 11-100 Connections: You're "regular folk" and consider your connections before making them.
  
• 101-250 Connections: Difficult. If you have a customer facing job, your connections could be credible. If you don't, then you probably include anyone you've met in business and thus your connections are questionable.
  
• 251-500 Connections: If making connections with people is your only full time job, then this is possible, but still your connections are met with scepticism. If there are solid, meaningful recommendations to back up your connections, then maybe.
  
• 500+ Connections: Give me a break. If I connected with you, either I knew you before you went over to the dark side, or for some reason I thought you might be useful as a portal to someone I want to work with. Yes, I'm using you. But then again, you probably think that's what social media is about.
  

One site I miss from years back is swoop.org. It was a compendium of "swoop" based logos, showing the design trend (or lack of originality if you're less generous) pioneered by the Nike logo.

Maybe it's time to do the same with four colour quadrant-based logos. I admit, I used this motif in a logo about four years ago. Maybe that's a sign. When part-time hacks like me start using a motif, it's time to put it to bed.

Yet this past week, Google introduced a new four-colour, quadrant based "favicon". And... and... and it just plain sucks. Not only is it a stunning example of trailing-edge design, it features limited readability. On my system, the outlined lowercase "g", which bleeds into the background, is lost in either the default brownish grey of the default theme, or completely obliterated by the black background of my alternative theme. If you can't control the background, don't use bleed. Isn't that Design 101?

Two revisions back, Google's icon was an elegant representation of the uppercase G on their full logo. I have no idea why they moved away from that, but each successive revision has been worse.

So here's some advice for aspiring designers: get past the four colour quadrant motif. Come up with something new and original, or at least rip off something that's less tired. Please.

A few days ago, YouTube began muting the audio tracks of videos that contained "unauthorized" copyright material. Some videos will now have the notice “This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by all copyright holders. The audio has been disabled.” displayed beneath them.

This is a good move for YouTube. It will help absolve them from any liability for "broadcasting" content that the RIAA cabal deems worthy of protection.

It's not such a good move for the RIAA and similar groups. A music track is an essential part of many videos, and we can be pretty sure that not many people who produce them are going to go to the trouble of obtaining copyright clearance. Instead, they're going to seek unencumbered music. This is going to drive up the demand for "open" music, which will in turn cause more musicians to provide the same in exchange for some small promotional credit on the video.

Thus a win-win is born. Video creators will have access to more music they can use, musicians will have a showcase for their work with a potential for global profile that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. How long will it be before this exposure results in a musician who "makes it" in the mainstream? It will only be a matter of time.

How will these musicians feel when a big label comes along to offer them a contract that pays a fraction of the revenue they actually generate while insisting that they turn their backs on their roots by joining the copyright cartel? Some will buy in to the promises and sign up, but some won't. Instead they'll seek new methods and revenue models for distributing their work. Perhaps they will make the bulk of their money from live performance, or maybe they'll find other ways to do it, but they will eventually succeed at it.

Once a successful formula has been found, those who seek to maximize revenue by controlling distribution will have lost the final step in their battle. They will have successfully spawned a revitalized industry that makes them irrelevant. This has always been inevitable, but YouTube's move will certainly accelerate the process. To me it is amazing how, blind to reality, this industry continues to find ways to kill itself off with ever greater efficiency.

Kudos to YouTube; still yet another dunce cap to the established music distribution business.

[Note: this article is still on the Onion site but the video is broken there too. Leaving this post up in hopes that they fix it one day].

This is just too good to not post.


Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard