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“Consider the case of Maureen Evans. A grad student and poet, Evans got into Twitter at the very beginning — back in 2006 — and soon built up almost 100 followers. Like many users, she enjoyed the conversational nature of the medium. A follower would respond to one of her posts, other followers would chime in, and she’d respond back. Then, in 2007, she began a nifty project: tweeting recipes, each condensed to 140 characters. She soon amassed 3,000 followers, but her online life still felt like a small town: Among the regulars, people knew each other and enjoyed conversing. But as her audience grew and grew, eventually cracking 13,000, the sense of community evaporated. People stopped talking to one another or even talking to her. “It became dead silence,” she marvels. Why? Because socializing doesn’t scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote. “They feel they can’t possibly be the person who’s going to make the useful contribution,” Evans says. So the conversation stops. Evans isn’t alone. I’ve heard this story again and again from those who’ve risen into the lower ranks of microfame. At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting.” — Clive Thompson in Praise of Online Obscurity | Magazine
“When media events came out of a clear blue sky and made a pleasant distraction from the daily tedium it’s conceivable that you might want to get the inside track on a press release. That is no longer the case since boredom was banished and we now compete in an attention economy where distraction is a permanent state. It doesn’t really matter who you are, Universal Pictures or somebody trying to get a gig listing for a newly-formed indie band; you are no longer entitled to anybody’s attention. Not the public’s and not the media’s. Whatever attention you manage to get you have to earn.” — And Another Thing: The media professionals will be the last to realise the media has changed
Haiti photo gallery - Meet some of the young people Merlin put on the road to health - the hand holding the adult finger makes me want to cry.
Football | The Joy of Six: FA Cup quarter-finals | Rob Smyth | Sport | guardian.co.uk - Football in the 1970s. When Men Were Men.
“So why the certainty in that story? My contact noted: “There are going to be more and more stories like this as the collapse in online advertising has pushed sites into e-commerce and they need the links from [the Guardian] to push them up the [search] rankings. There are quite a few mobile phone so-called bloggers already in the UK who are actually little more than affiliate channels for the mobile phone operators. That’s often how they get their stories. Watch the links when you click through, it’s often quite instructive. There is, for instance, a very well respected UK mobile phone blogger who gets a lot of very good Orange scoops. Of course he does, my mates at Orange point out, the other half of his business is a retailer for Orange so he finds out about new phones at the same time as the rest of the channel. Is that journalism? Who knows these days.” — Picking facts from speculation on iPad launch prices and dates | Technology | guardian.co.uk
Previous Image (via BBC - Earth News - In Pictures: Sperm whale surprise
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“there are only around half a dozen German full-time professional SF/F authors … just one of whom earns a living writing SF.” —
CMAP #4: Territories, Translations, and Foreign Rights - Charlie’s Diary
This seems like an extraordinary number. Can it be true?
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In my experience, there is a direct link between the Obsessed With Buying Useless Shit From Paperchase gene and the Total And Utter Queen Bitch From Hell At Primary School…
Backing Up a Wordpress Blog to the Cloud Using Amazon S3 -
We posted yesterday about Wordpress.com founder Matt Mullenweg and his view that cloud computing is marketing speak.
The conversation followed a significant Wordpress.com outage. In our…