9 solid reasons why E-mail still beats social networking
1. Because all the updates on social networking sites including Facebook still reach our Inboxes - email from social networking sites is the new SPAM.
2. Because we are getting tired of browsing profiles. Most of the people are like us anyway - bored, blank and uninteresting.
3. Because, unlike teens, school kids and college co-eds, we got to work.
4. Because, unlike social networking sites, it is not rude to send an e-mail to the SPAM folder - it is easy, and acceptable to ignore people using email.
5. Because email is the working person's most important social network - we can have all our important contacts in the address list, available in the chat section during our email sessions - Facebook is pretty late to the IM scene.
6. Because the next generation of email will have integrated RSS.
7. Because the next generation of email will sections for our favorite profiles.
8. Because a major part of social networking activity is SPAM - it is everywhere - on twitter, too. If they are not selling something, the people on these social networking are selling themseleves all the time. Everyone is shouting out aloud "Look at me! Look at my blog post. Look at my pic. " - it is all noise, and pathetic. A man can only take in so much in a lifetime.
9.
Because like social networking, e-mail does not make the service providers any money - how long before they start shutting down the social networking sites for lack of revenue?
Labels: e-mail, facebook, social networking
Hyperlocal: where is the citizen media in small-town America?
Compared to people in the big cities, citizen media activity is mostly limited to pictures on Flickr. Steven Clift at the
PBS Idealab finds that few small town people care to participate in forums, write blog posts, shoot and post videos and do all the things that apartment-living, "pressed for outdoors" us big city folks do.
Small Town America does not Twitter that much. Steven writes:
I've stumbled across a number of sites like Flickrvision and its cousin Twittervision which show real-time geo-tagged content. Panoramio shows photos from Google Earth. Placeopedia and WikiMapia are trying to get people to manually link place-based Wikipedia pages to maps. My friends with Placeblogger allow you to search by place, but I don't want to type in village after village. The best site I've found that seems to get, is FindNearBy.Net which maps Craiglist and EBay sale items.
All in all, touristic rural areas do pretty well with photos online, but finding blogs/blog posts, video, wiki pages, online forums without highly focused geographic term searches seems near impossible. ...
How can we explain this?
1. Hyperlocal is an acquired taste. The failure of Backfence is case in point.
Everyblock is working so far because it works more on the automatic aggregation lines, relying on government data for things like police records. Besides, it focuses on big cities including New York only.
2. Hyperlocal needs proactive hand-holding - where editors and link curators encourage and help out local contributors, doing events and so on.
Thanks for the
linkLabels: citizen journalism, citizen media, everyblock, hyperlocal, twitter
The glut of social network activity aggregators/lifestreamers
Friendfeed, the Valley's (ok, the 250's) favorite social network activity aggregator/lifestreaming application is
not alone. We are going around in circle, and so far it is fun.
:-)
Labels: friendfeed, funny, lifestreaming, social networking, social networking aggregator
Idea of the year: why not have bachelors of invention?
Trevor Baylis has proposed a breakthrough idea about ideas, laying out that students of the 21st century have a first hand knowledge of all topics related to the art (or science, depends on who is talking) of invention.
Advocating that the Generation Y (or Z…what ever happened to Generation A-W?) gets a head start in their life, Trevor proposes a new course the study, leading to a
Bachelor Degree in Inventing, where students get to know things like
intellectual property, disclosure, trademarks, patents, business plans, creating prototypes, raising venture capital, the history of invention…and so on.
If the curriculum makers of the world respond to it in an enthusiastic fashion, it will indeed be cool.
Read more
here.
Labels: education, innovation, invention
