Interrelativity

Category: Social Media

  • Notes from @BigBlog meetup at Soulfood in Redmond

    I enjoyed attending my first SeattlePI.com BigBlog meetup last night at Soulfood Books, Music and Organic Coffee House in Redmond. Monica Guzman (@moniguzman) organized the event, and Nick Eaton (@njeaton), who writes the SeattlePI.com Microsoft blog, was the special guest. According to a tweet posted by Monica at the outset, other bloggers / tweeters /…

  • Power Laws and Pyramids: Participation, Gratification, and Distraction in Social Media

    I've been thinking and reading a lot lately about the different ways we can participate in social media, how others' responses to the social media content we produce can promote a sense of gratification, and how this – and any – gratification can also lead to distraction. One of my earliest and most memorable encounters…

  • Co-promotion Reconsidered: The Recursive Attraction of Attention

    Amybeth Hale, a Talent Attraction Manager with AT&T’s Interactive Staffing team, wrote a great primer on 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in your Career, which was recently posted on Mashable. The four traits are: Develop authentic relationships Be a digital trendsetter Take risks Give back (and/or pay it forward) I think there is…

  • The Commoditization of Twitter Followers

    I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter. I see – and have increasingly experienced – many benefits to its use, especially with respect to its propensity to foster meaningful new connections with consequential strangers and acquaintances. However, I am becoming increasingly cynical about some of the practices that are evolving, particularly with respect to the…

  • Conversations and Conversationalists in Social Media

    Josh Bernoff recently wrote that Forrester Research has added "Conversationalists" to its Social Technographics typology of social media users, which had previously included the occasionally overlapping categories of creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives. He and his colleagues define conversationalists as people who post status updates on Twitter or other social networking sites at…

  • The Dark Side of Digital Backchannels in Shared Physical Spaces

    Recently, I've been disturbed to read about some significant frontchannel disturbances arising through the use of Twitter backchannels to heckle speakers at conferences. Having finished off my last blog with an example of the beneficial ways that Twitter helps us connect with consequential strangers, I want to revisit some issues that initially arose [for me]…

  • Consequential Strangers and Acquaintanceships, Online and Offline

    Consequential strangers are the people with whom we enjoy casual relationships in our neighborhoods, workplaces and third places that can be as vital to our health, wealth, wisdom and well-being as our family and closest friends (or what I like to call speed dial friends). According to a new book by Melinda Blau and Karen…

  • Semi-reciprocal Transparency in Social Networks

    I'm put off by the offers I see on various social networking sites for seeing "who's viewed my profile". While this feature may be attractive to some profile owners, it has a dampening effect on my use of these networks – I am less likely to look at someone's profile if I know that they…

  • Communities, Technologies and Participation: Notes from C&T 2009

    Participation was the overriding theme at the 4th International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T 2009) last week. We can design and deploy technology to support a community, but how do we truly engage that community and motivate its members to participate? One way I was personally trying to promote engagement via technology within the C&T…

  • Twitter: a witness projection program

    Twitter has become the ultimate (or at least current favorite) tool for addressing the fundamental human need to matter, to have a witness. The increasingly popular web service "for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?" is, more…