web strategy + consulting
The aptly titled “you don’t understand our audience”
Today while I was surfing through the most popular delicious links, I found this article (above). It’s about — well, I don’t actually know what it’s about because the content was locked behind a registration field.
CONTINUE READING below
Continue reading ‘Cater to the web2.0 user-reader (or perish)’
Last night, while enjoying my new monitor a little too late into the night, I surfed my way into an interesting crossroads of ideas. Namely, the apparent conflict of amateurs versus professionals - a topic I visited recently with my post on citizen editors.
At one corner of my web browsing crossroads is Andrew Keen, the controversial author of Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture. Keen happened to be on a local television show last night so I read up about him online. I shouldn’t have to explain what sort of reception he’s received from those of us invested in web2.0 paradigms, tools and trends. And I’d summarize his thesis if his book title didn’t do so already.
“I don’t know how to run a newspaper.
I just try everything I can think of.”
- Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane
I recently had an interesting conversation with a journalist friend about the question of blogging and accountability. Like many of his colleagues, my friend believes in the role of gatekeepers from an ethical standpoint of public good - facts versus hearsay and that sort of thing. I agreed.
As I write this, I meditate on the fact that I do not have the luxury of a personal editor to go over this post - a post that might also benefit from a professional turnaround time (time to edit, refine and further research). At best, I can afford an hour or two for this non-paying work - and it is work.
That said, I welcome a set of basic standards appropriate to the realities of this particular writing context.Thing is, who gets to define them? And can we really apply the standards of an old paradigm to a very new (and different) one?
UPDATED: Jan. 10/2008
(Draft) Bloggers Code of Conduct from Tim O’Reilly. There are a bunch of other similar docs out there (that I might have referenced) but this is one of newest. Visit individual media sites for their own policies - CBC and BBC, in particular, are at the forefront.
Ross Mayfield and Howard Rheingold’s Participatory Media Education Resources offers the most thorough and succinct overview of participatory media I’ve found. From the introduction:
“Recent technological changes have made much wider social changes possible: Until the end of the twentieth century, only a relatively small and wealthy fraction of the human race could broadcast television programs, publish newspapers, create encyclopedias; by the twenty first century, however, inexpensive digital computers and ubiquitous Internet access made the means of high quality media production and distribution accessible to a substantial portion of the world’s population. In 2006, more than one billion people are connected to the Internet and close to three billion people carry mobile telephones. These technological changes in accessibility of production tools and distribution media have led to social, cultural, economic, political changes in the ways people communicate, a set of technologies, practices, and skills some call participatory media
Gangs, drugs, street racing, bullying, video game addiction. These are the typical negative headlines we associate with today’s youth. It’s really no wonder why young people disengage from a media that reinforces negative stereotypes and treats them as an entity to be seen, observed, critiqued but not heard. One of the things I’ve always told writing students is “if you don’t tell your own story, others will tell it for you - and it likely won’t be a very good story.” But give them tools, training and a forum and you’re going to hear the real stories. Take 16 year old Charlotte Lytton, who writes about discrimination in the workplace in Today’s Guardian:
Depending on where you stand in relation to the technology adoption lifecycle, tagging is either old news or a recent discovery. Regardless of where you’re at, a new PEW report on tagging has confirmed that tagging is on the rise among mainstream internet users. Here’s a great overview of the trend, with explanations, from the BBC:
New to tagging? Read on for some what, why and how-to resources.
As much as I celebrate the revolution of public participatory media I am increasingly frustrated at the apparent apathy of some citizen media makers to properly contextualise their work through tagging (aka folksonomies) which is a form of cooperative catagorization. Without tags, your images, video and/or audio content are not searchable, public or properly “participatory.”
The philosophy of participatory media is simple: participation between viewers and makers in the production and distribution of citizen produced media. Being a citizen media producer isn’t about merely a selfish show and tell but a cooperative process that involves you taking the time to make your media accessible, user-friendly and easy to distribute on a variety of platforms. Given the amount of bandwidth required to host all that citizen media, the least a citizen media producer can do in return for all this free publicity is to properly contextualise his or her work in a meaningful and relevant way.
My recent experiences at Flickr and Ourmedia confirmed that people still aren’t bothering to tag their works. Or those who are, aren’t doing a very good job of it.
“Create. Share. Get noticed. That’s what Ourmedia is about.
Go, now, check it out! Upload your content.
And if you’re a woman artist, writer, thinker, musician… please, please PLEASE build a profile and upload some content (and PS - Ourmedia needs more women contributors)
I haven’t spent enough time there to provide much of an overview but I like it so far. I like Ourmedia because it features some of the best new social software tools built into a relevant context for content creators (as opposed to people looking for hangout buddies). And they don’t have a craptacular TOS like some of the other, more corporate YASNS. But I wouldn’t call Ourmedia a YASN. It’s much more.
Delicious | Education
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