Interrelativity

Interrelativity: musings about interrelatedness

  • 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…

  • Motivations, Conversations and Book-Centered Sociality

    I attended talks by three authors last week – Daniel Pink, David Allen and Bryant Simon – all presenting their work in different formats, styles and contexts. Daniel Pink had a conversation with Warren Etheredge at a Biznik event on Tuesday night at Hotel 1000 Seattle about a range of topics, including Dan’s latest book,…

  • Place-centered Sociality

    Jyri Engestrom first introduced me to the concept of object-centered sociality almost 5 years ago, through a blog post in which he argued that social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. Jyri suggests that the problem with some social networking services (such as LinkedIn [at that time]) is that they…

  • Coffee, Community and Health

    An article reviewing the health benefits and risks of coffee by Melinda Beck in yesterday's Wall Street Journal includes a number of studies that have yielded conflicting results on the effects of coffee. Coffee consumption of varying levels has been correlated with significant differences in the likelihood of being diagnosed with diseases such as diabetes,…

  • Transmitting vs. Transforming Customer Dissatisfaction

    I've encountered several examples of customer dissatisfaction recently that prompted me to consider the various channels customers use to signal their dissatisfaction, and how well or poorly those channels serve to resolve the issue(s) in a satisfactory way. In reflecting on the word satisfy – which derives from the Latin satisfacere: satis enough + facere…

  • 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]…