Strategy + Consulting
Wonderful scoop from Stuart Bruce who informs us that David Miliband’s cabinet Office Minister brother, Ed, is set to launch a blog.
One thing I would advise him to do is to sort out his Wikipedia entry…. it’s a bit scant and there’s no image available. I presume he’s planning to blog to make himself and his role at the Cabinet Office more accessible. Well, being able to put a face to a name would be a good start!
If you’ve not seen the news via Steve Rubel (here), Google has added a comment facility to it’s Google News making it – in Steve’s words – “an editorial product rather than simply an aggregator”.
This leads to Steve’s next question: “can a PR agency comment on a source’s behalf (assuming they represent them) and if so how is our affiliation verified?“
It’s the same question being asked by the fore-father of citizen journalism, Dan Gillmor – only from the other side:
“How will this work? How will Google verify that the people commenting on what’s been written about them are actually the people in question? What kind of data-gathering will this lead to on Google’s part?“
Dan’s argument is that traditional media outlets have missed a very big trick to allow readers to add their voice to news coverage and as a result the ability to do so has been claimed by one online media giant.
What this means for the future of news coverage remains to be seen.
Technorati tags: Google News, Steve Rubel, Dan Gillmor
Did anyone read yesterday’s article in the London edition of the Financial Times about the use of social networks in the US presidential election?
I only ask because I did, and found it to be pretty un-insightful. OK, if I want up-to-the-minute commentary on social networking and politics I might turn to David Weinberger rather than the newspaper, but from the lumpen headline: “Battle for blogosphere ballot box heats up” to the closing para, little light was shed on what US candidates were actually doing with social networks.
First up the piece told us how many Facebook and MySpace friends the top Democrat and Republican candidates have. Then we got this insight from strategist, Thomas Gensemer, managing director of Blue State Digital:
“You can be putting a message out there in far more powerful ways than just e-mailing or on your own website … Instead of pressing ‘send’ to half a million people today, it’s activating a message that will be active for days thereafter”
Hmm. Enlightening.
Maybe Peter Daou, head of Hilary Clinton’s online campaign team can offer us a better explanation:
“More and more the internet is becoming essential to the political process”
Maybe not.
The most interesting questions are raised by the article’s critical voice of reason, Colin Nagy, director of Source Communications.
His argument is that:
“Collecting friends is superficial and doesn’t require any real effort on behalf of the friend …Would you rather have 20,000 friends who do nothing, donate nothing, or 10 friends who are active, crazy fundraisers?”
And he has hit the nail on the head. The real question is how do you get your 20,000 friends to become “active, crazy, fundraisers”.
The answer is: you change the way you do politics. I’ve said time and again that simply pushing out the same, tired, two-faced political crap that most 12 year-olds can see through but doing so via exciting new tools like social networks won’t work.
What politicians and their campaign teams need to grasp is the change in power dynamics within social networks. It’s a flat structure rather than a top down or even slightly hierarchical network. Rather than the network being there for them, they are there for the network.
People, like Colin Nagy don’t get it. He expects his 20,000 friends to do something for him or his candidate, when in reality they want him to do something for them. And isn’t that what politics is all about?
Technorati tags: US Presidential elections, social networking, Financial Times, Hilary Clinton, Peter Daou, Colin Nagy, Thomas Gensemer
I’ve just come across a great resource for anyone interested in academic research in and around the field online communications.
The Journal for Computer Mediated Communications seems to make almost all of its content available for free via its website. I’ve used some of their stuff before while completing my post-grad diploma – the dissertation for which I am currently struggling to research and write.
The JCMC frontpage currently has links to a special section on blogging which lists some interesting articles:
{via Danah Boyd]
Shane Richmond at The Telegraph has an update on the newspaper’s blogging service MyTelegraph 12 weeks since it launched.
After running for 12 weeks the service now has over 7,000 users signed up, with a large proportion of these fitting nicely into the telegraph’s core demographic:
However, there is still a nice distribution of users in MyTelegraph’s long-tail:
The post also has a good debate in the comments section where MyT blogger Brendano asks Shane: “How many of the 7,000 members are active, though?”
Shane responds that although MyT doesn’t have 7,000 users blogging:
“not everyone who joined the site wants to blog (believe it or not). Many of those who are registered are commenting rather than blogging and a significant proportion are using My News and not engaging with the blogs at all … perhaps a third of the members are now active bloggers. Of course, the hundred or so most active bloggers are the ones people notice the most. Most communities are like that.”
The Telegraph’s foray into providing a live social space for individuals (not even telegraph readers) to blog and interact is definitely an initiative worth keeping an eye on.
As Simon Dickson says: “I doubt many blogging platforms could claim that kind of demographic, which would seem to justify the Telegraph’s move into this space, and may encourage others to follow.”
Shane promises another update in three months time.
[Via Simon Dickson]
Rather fascinating but alarming article at OhMyNews about a possible case of Wikipedia manipulation.
Regardless of whether or not it’s true, Wikipedia and the Intelligence Services, offers some real food for thought as to whether intelligence services can influence or place trusted editors within sites like Wikipedia to shape news and information.
The argument that the crowd will resolve disputes with collective wisdom or ‘social knowledge’ holds true providing everyone is working from the same position – ie. sharing their genuine opinions.
Doesn’t this fall apart when someone is pushing a specific agenda?
Where you normally have a group of people sharing ideas to achieve an undetermined outcome of information, you have a someone with a clear and fixed idea of what the information should look like at the end of the process?
Worth reading the article by Ludwig De Braeckeleer which gives an overview of the debates raging about a particular Wikipedia admin over at Wikipedia Review and Wikipedia-Watch.org.