Social media’s pink-toned guru, as I called her, Laurel Papworth is currently in Saudi Arabia helping launch an online social network for Arab women. And she’s nervous. Her first post from Jeddah is fascinating. “No matter how naive I may be in some things, no waaaaaay can I pretend this community is just another oh, dating site, or tv show, social network. It’s a game changer, a rule breaker. Newsflash: social media is disruptive!”
Saturday Reading, 8 March 2008
I think I might make this a regular feature? Should I just use some automated social bookmarking tool to generate the page?
- Over at New Matilda, Ben Eltham has written a fine summary of The Super Seasprites Saga. He links to an explanation of the sunk cost fallacy which probably contributed to this monumental fuck-up.
- Laurel Papworth’s piece 2020 Summit: Objective Journalists vs Passionate Blogging, which I’m planning to respond to at length some time this weekend.
- A piece from The New Yorker, Scents and Sensibility: What the nose knows, which ponders, amongst other things, why one molecule smells of spearmint when its exact mirror image smells of caraway. (Hat-tip to 3 Quarks Daily.)
- And for a change of pace, try the selection of First Dog on the Moon cartoons which were published in Crikey through January and February.
Four pieces feels about right for today.
That Business Conversation
Mark Pesce’s latest speech, That Business Conversation, given to about 170 CEO-types at the Western Sydney Business Connection yesterday, is another good read.
Even in defeat, he haunts us… via our folksonomies
I’ve been working on the tag cloud page, and one of my attempts to clarify things has revealed a disturbing fact.
I decided that the “category cloud” on the left-hand side of the website was already showing that the biggest categories were politics, the Internet, human nature, media and business. I didn’t want the tag cloud to repeat that information. So I decided to remove all the tags which were also the names of categories.
Boy, that certainly changed the emphasis!
Even in the reduced screenshot (right), one name dominates. Yes, out of 944 posts, counting this one, 91 are tagged “john howard”.
My own boyfriend comes in a poor second with just 42.
Is that right?
Continue reading “Even in defeat, he haunts us… via our folksonomies”
Australia’s unwired politicians
In October 2007 I wrote: “The next time someone says we’re experiencing Australia’s ‘first internet election’ or our ‘first YouTube election’, slap them. Slap them very hard.” Now UTS research into the 2007 federal election further illustrates the point.
As ZDNet News reports, only two-thirds of the sitting federal members and senators had a personal website, and only 1 in 10 had a MySpace page — though personally I object to MySpace being the touchstone.
The study also revealed only 6.6 percent had a blog, 5.75 percent had posted one or more videos on YouTube, 3.5 percent had a Facebook site and only 3.1 percent had a podcast, as at 20 November 2007.
But of those that did find their way online a large percentage failed to go beyond traditional one-way communication.
Much more in the full story. Hat-tip to Peter Black.
Mark Pesce on the “forward” button
Mark Pesce has knocked off a quick piece for the ABC on how the power of the “forward” button is changing politics. He reckons it’s a bit rushed, but I think it still has value.