Reading Sampler: Interesting Conversations
I’m watching a few of these very active Conversations, there’s a strong interaction, folks don’t always agree, however some good is coming out of them, I find myself going back to these conversations to see what’s happened.
A challenge to the community focused on communities
This group blog called the Future of Communities is a collection of thought leaders that discuss communities, and often in the sense of marketing and or business. Tara admits to being not agreeing with a majority of the previous writers in this post Where is my community?. I highly encourage you to read it, and as well as follow the interesting comments that follow.I’m sticking with the term Social Media
We also (I say “we” as I believe those that interact with me in comments, are also writing this blog with me, I’m heavily influenced by you) are having an interesting conversation around the terms of Defining Social Media. I originally wrote this piece as someone in the back channel was criticizing the use of the term. When I first wrote the title, I failed to be clear on my stance, and almost created a whirlwind for some allies, thankfully, it’s all cleared up now. I wanted someone to suggest a better term, but I’ve yet to see one.
Social Media is cracking
I honestly feel while the majority of humans are good, humans corrupt almost everything. Are you familiar with Digg? It’s a user voted news site, the community votes for the top stories, and those that submitted the most top stories become powerful influencers. As a result top diggers are removed from the community as contributors. Was it strategic for Kevin Rose of Digg to lop off those users, or should he have tried to continue to plug holes in the dam? Either way, in another few months, another top set of diggers will rise, and get offered payola. A few months ago I wrote a post (and was criticized) that the problem with wikis is people. (read carefully before making an assumption)Damon and Charlene Li on defining Engagement
I’m on a mission lately to try to define terms that I know folks are using, why? Probably because they haven’t thought about it before throwing it around. Interesting conversations as we try to define “Engagement”. Do read commentary from Damon and Charlene Li.Update: Well Chris Coulter has certainly ’spiced up’ my post with his counterpoints on Customer Reference programs and Social Media. Well at least he read the whole thing in detail.
Oh, and speaking of conversations, I’m trying to get away from the echo chamber as much as possible now. I may dip back and forth, but for the most part I hope not to be seen as a sub node on techmeme, a site I read constantly. If you’ve been paying attention, the focus on this blog has shifted as my role in the community has. I may talk about this later.
Have you heard of my gesture feed? It’s selected posts that I ’share’ from my Google Reader. You can subscribe to those shared posts in a feed. (I do a lot of reading and sift through a lot of noise). Someday, I may cut out blogs to most of my feeds, (save for a few special ones) then just subscribe to link gesture feeds.
Please leave comments of interesting conversations that demonstrate velocity, I’d love to hear what you think is interesting.
5 Comments so far
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Hey Jeremiah,
I just added your “shared” Reader Feeds to my “Shared Feeds” folder in my Reader next to Robert Scoble’s and a dozen others I’ve been reading. I really enjoy this form of reading. I can’t and don’t spend much time throughout the day on the web (I farm for a living) so it works well for me to come back and go through what others have filtered. Is there anywhere that collects links to people’s shared feeds that you know of? A “Shared Reader Aggregator” of sorts? Or would this create a whirlwind of disgust from those bloggers needing clickthroughs on their sites? Just curious. And thanks for your insights.
Chris
thanks for doing that, I’m hoping that I’ll weed through the noise, and find signals that are interesting to me, which I can pass onto you.
Yes, there are other aggregation tools such as techmeme.com and tailrank. Subscribe and visit to those sites.
Techmeme is a ‘conversation tracker’ and shows some of the top conversations by ‘top’ bloggers in tech.
I don’t care about traffic in that way, (notice, no ads on my site) feel free to use my blog feed anyway you want. A smart blogger (marketer) will figure out how to always have their voice heard, even if it’s in a more distributed method like you suggest.
I’ll check out those links for techmeme and tailrank.
Glad to hear you say that about being a good marketer. We find that our product sells itself (organic produce) because it’s a solid product and we stand behind it. I think bloggers who have enough faith in their product (words/ideas) will have no problem finding their specific markets.
On that thought, we don’t sell to Whole Foods or big chains, we know who we can sell to effectively. That’s probably a downside to the net for bloggers. They sometimes try to sell their ideas to the whole world. That’s some big shoes to fill.
Chris
I find your blog interesting and refreshing. Keep on linking out, and leave comments where appropriate.
Have you heard of stormhoek wines? they used blogs to get the word out.
Thanks for the encouragement Jeremiah. I try not to invade the tech world too much with comments because I know my viewpoint is often moot or off-key to many. But that’s okay sometimes I guess.
But I will keep linking to the best of my ability.
Stormhoek wines- that’s the company that the fellow Hugh promotes? I’m impressed with their marketing…. very fresh…..classy with a rough edge. I’m a big fan of that style.