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  • Don’t Touch the WetPaint!

    That’s apparently what people in our little group have been feeling. I know I certainly have. It is intimidating. You can’t just be a floating user. They expect you to have a page of your own. You can imagine that my profile’s first and mandatory wiki is blank, while the group’s wiki (DictionarydotCOM300) is slowing shaping itself, it seems. It’s kind of voodooish. I wish they had an application where you can see who last viewed the page (of the admin) so there’s a kind of validation there. Without it, I feel blind and curious about the level of interest in the site. Two heads are better than one and five heads are better than two, but are five headless chickens better than one lowly contributor?

    With care and respect to my group. LOL.

  • Command Your Brand: 6 things to embrace about new media and the new consumerism that goes with it

    This article, “Content Builds Brands Online,” discusses how online branding is different than offline branding and what you can do to run with the big dogs, so to speak. “Whereas offline branding tends to be image and emotion driven, online branding tends to be information and logic driven.” I have summarized the content into these points: Computer, Composition, Commerce, Content, Contenders, and the Seeker. McGovern calls attention to the special kind of person that is affected by online branding and how it can be considered a second stage preceded by offline marketing. He claims that it is not about getting attention but giving attention.

    References
    McGovern, G. (2001, Winter2001). Content Builds Brands Online. JMM: The International Journal on Media Management, 3(4), 198-201. Retrieved February 22, 2009, from Communication & Mass Media Complete database.

    For a powerpoint presentation…

  • The Customer Feedback Breeding Ground

    Buy Our Lemonade… Wait, Someone Set up a Stand! New Media has created a space for the business to flourish or fail depending on their use of online forums and social networking. Flourishing means that you’ve got people on this new technology. And failing means a failure in savvyness. You can’t encourage people to do transactions online and trust its efficiency without some major work put into it. “These firms are encouraging people to contact them but not equipping their [call centre] staff to be of help,” said Galat (Muncaster).

    For a business, its all about profit and progress. What happens to that model when it shifts to the internet? Shwooom… out the window. Without in-person interaction, how can a business know who its customer is? They have to rely on other methods, such as monitoring the number of downloads or comments posted, but the ease of this feedback makes it less meaningful?

    A dynamic source of information and interaction, the website might often offer more than they bargained for. Murphy said “Some of the forums pose questions regarding certain products, like flat-screen TVs and cameras, while others discuss what type of beer is favored among CityCenter members.” What happens when the space is no longer about the product? Have these retailers stopped being effective? or have they reached a new (and better?) way of reaching the consumer?

    Would I trust a site that allowed its customers to talk about beer brands when it sells radios? This kind of freedom is what the people want. And many progressive sites like CityCenter cater to that. The power of the consumer has been amplified and enhanced with the new technology and they use it to talk to each other about products they like and products they don’t like. At this point of the newness of it all, it’s about who’s in on the ground floor, who is setting up the best of Customer Feedback breeding grounds. Communities are setting up shops around brands, these days. The Cult of Nike. AA for Coca-Cola fans. CityCenter is raising the bar. The landscape of consumerism is changing, becoming digital. All of the trust we put in paper from money, to receipts, birth certificates, bank statements… it’s gone. It’s replacement? Online snifflers and thick-rimmed glasses wearing computer monkeys behind brand names that think their interface is obvious when the customer is clueless.

    Questions:
    (1) How does online retailing entail products or concepts that have little to do with product quality and efficiency?

    (2) What does the “brand community” have that geographical communities don’t?

    (3) How can trust of brands be misused in online commerce?

     
     
     

     

  • The Revolution Aired on YouTube and then was Promptly Forgotten About

    “Organization Man: Joe Trippi Reinvents Campaigning” from The New Republic Online by Noem Scheiber (10 November 2003); (2) “The Race of the Web Sites 2004″ from ACM Interactions by Kathy Gill (November-December 2004) http://faculty.washington.edu/kegill/pub/gill_ACM_2004.pdf;

    As Noem Sheiber describes Joe Trippi, “part campaign insider, part pundit, and part pure bravado” and completely overrated. The article says that he was considered to be a computer geek by many critics, and I have to say that probably quite as replacable. There always has to be a pioneer in any intersection of technology and life, and he just happened to be at the right place and the right time to turn every campaign he touched into gold… or promises, anyway. He used the Internet space to get voters out of their homes and it worked. Though he started by lemonade stands. Word to Trippi, though he probably knows: it’s illegal to bribe people to vote! Even lemons, you lemon!

    Anywho, it was (and still is!) the game of campaigning. Information technology relates to acquiring demographic characteristics. They want to cater to you! Getting people in those voting booths meant a lot to the campaign and they “targeted” people. Mr. Trippi wanted a more efficient way to do that. Back to a traditional formula: lower cost of campaign= victory?

    With his insightful focus on the internet, Trippi claims to have empowers the supporters of the campaign to not only join the effort to elect Howard Dean, but to make improvements and additions that the staff of the campaign couldn’t have foreseen. Can we believe anything that Trippi says about getting involved, if even he admits that the battle for taking the white house is based first on money of the candidate, then the quality?

    So after the steps made with online marketing of the presidential campaign, Bush and Kerry had their turn to shine– to be considered a revolution. And they spend their opportunity on disfunctional sites. I would like to know what Ms. Gill thought of the Obama and McCain sites. Any improvements? Are we innovating the right aspects of what was considered to be the most effective part of the Internet’s intersection with politics?

    Ironically, red state voters didn’t have the up to date technology to support their candidate’s website. Just think of any rural Texan with a 1024×768 monitor. Bush’s “campaign goals” topic, rather than “voter goals”… the user must register before checking out local volunteer options. Bush blog allows no commenting, has anonymous authors. How discouraging. Has winning the presidency has come down to widgets?!

    With my cutesy idealist view of the world, I hope that Americans take upon themselves participate in a political revolution that causes them to get up from their seat.

    Questions:

    (1)What was the most effective and innovative part of the Dean campaign?

    (2)Considering Gill’s list of site faux pas, what do you think are the qualities most appreciated by political netizens?

    (3)How has political activism become easy and convenient during the past hundred years? How does that affect the mentality of the voter?

  • The Wicked Wiki

     Title: Facebook
     URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

     The article describes the history, development, features and some legal battles of the social networking site. On April 30, 2004, the earliest wiki-article of Facebook is written and has had two hundred contributors since. In the age of social networking sites, the sense of disclosure is becoming distorted; I selected this article to understand its evolution and possible future changing our social landscape.

    The article is relatively accurate. I can’t check all the facts, but it seems to check itself, with its transparent development. Its “veracity level” (and this is a subjective scale on my part from 1-10) is an eight. It is so because though it has many contributors, a comprehensive time line of not only Facebook’s foundation, but developments since. Though, the credibility of individual contributors is nil. Who are these people really? The major contributor to the article is a user called Gary King. He has evaluated and contributed a great deal of content not only to this article but to articles relating to video games and cartoons.

    Nicole S. Cohen, a PhD student in the Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at York University in Toronto,writes “…Facebook positions itself as leader of interactive, participant-based online media, or Web 2.0, the descriptor for websites based on user-generated content that create value from the sharing of information.”  Her article is detailed and provides quotes from Mark Zuckerman himself. Similarly, the wiki-article also provides quotes, however, the content of the quotes contribute to the article as a entertaining anecdotal accessory, rather than a support in credibility.

    The  hyperlinking format allows readers to connect the information to other brands involved and learn about their contributions to Facebook’s different applications. Cohen writes “Once logged in, members spend time—according to Facebook,on average, 20 minutes a day—linking to friends’ profiles, uploading and ‘tagging’ (or labeling) friends in photos, creating and joining groups, posting events, website links, and videos, sending messages, and writing public notes for each other.” In comparison, the wiki-article writes three paragraphs to the same sentiment and also adding that similar features provided by other online media, which are hyperlinked. Some of the hyperlinked brands, indicative of wikipedia’s interlinking knowleges, flickr, livejournal Comet, Xanga, blogger and company. This allows the reader to relate to facebook using other existing technologies and online entities. This feature, which is incorporated into many of its articles, is detrimental to the credibility to this article. Where as generalizations and descriptions can be vague and invite questions, the linking of the reader to articles written by other groups of anonymous, perhaps lacking credentials relevant to the author’s topic, the mechanism could possibly lead to a web of misconceptions and hodge podge information that doesn’t necessarily contribute to understanding.

    The depth and flow of argument is vital to the credibility of an article. The wiki-article uses bold headings to separate points of interest. One of these headings reads “Adam Guerbuez” and following this are two lines indicating his mild involvement in Facebook as being one of its spammers. Is this credible? Somewhat. Somewhat all of the points made in the wiki-article is credible in the sense that it links itself to other people. How can an article be credible if all it does is piggy-back of other articles. Little snippets of credible sources combined together into one article does not make that one article more credible than a more focused article. Cohen’s article uses eighteen pages better than wikipedia’s Facebook contributors uses their 9 measly sections. Cohen forms the more credible information using relevance, a coherent point of view, though it is not as updated as much as the wikipedia article, I find that older, more reliable information is much more useful and verified than something that is updated by a group anonymous users with no scholarly affiliations to speak of.

    Parting words: Analyzing articles for credibility is sometimes subjective. I think that credibility is a rock. Wikipedia credibility is a sedimentary rock. You’ll find information looks like a rock (credible), could be considered as a rock (credible). It started out as a bunch of little grains of meaningless sand, but hey, you take what you can get and sometimes it works for what you want it to.

    References

    Cohen, N. (2008, Spring2008). The Valorization of Surveillance: Towards a Political Economy of Facebook. Democratic Communiqué, 22(1), 5-22. Retrieved February 13, 2009, from Communication & Mass Media Complete database.

    Facebook. (2009, February 11). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:03, February 13, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Facebook&oldid=269893490

  • Big Media, Small World

    “September 11th.” (Applaud.) Many questions can be answered with this famous date in United Statesian history. Did technology change on this date? not really. However, it was this happening that demonstrated the changes in the way we respond to events and each other. While traditional media was looping the images of the attack, people on the Internet were talking about it.

    Traditional media is is expensive. Consider the costs of distribution, materials, and don’t forget about contributers. The blogoshere has introduced a cheap and efficient mode of information flow. Not to say that digial media and distribution has solved all of the problems that face mass media in its form today, but it has certainly created a new network where money and catering to the people is not a high priority. The international market of the Internet can allow the most obscure information to be accessed. Consumerism takes a new level of gratification. Consumers have a new level of control. As the Cluetrain manifesto dictates, “markets are conversations.” With the new media, the input from consumers are a lot more personal, reliable, and easy to manipulate. Gillmor takes it a step further to say that “journalism are conversations.”

    With that, people like closeness. They feel closer to independent productions with less intrusive ads. Bloggers have the resources to encourage a closer relationship to their consumer than ever before. Public radio is looking for a way, starting with podcasts. The rule of connecting with the new media consumer is that it has to be the ultimate convenience, easy, eye catching, or really specific. There are new rules for appealing to the new audience. When telephones are tied up, the TV is unresponsive, newspapers are a day late, the Internet, reaching across space, time and minds, connects the planet in a way like never before. Traditional media cannot keep up, but rather must join the pack.

    Questions:
    (1) In the history of journalism, there have been pampheteers, muckrackers, and now bloggers; what do these have in common?

    (2) An alternate version of “where were you when the attacks happened?”: How did you communicate to others on (or about) September, 11th?

    (3)What ways can internet sites, such as npr online, learn about their users’ demographics without some level of privacy invasion?

  • The “Hit” Tyranny

    (1) Chapter 4 “Markets are Conversations” from The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual by Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger (1999, 2001) cluetrain.org;(2) “The Long Tail” from Wired by Chris Anderson (October 2004) wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

    Listen up. We are tired of being sold to, tired of being “patrons” and just tired. We want our services to speak in a human voice, not some inflated self-important jargon. That’s why facebook, amazon, and Rhapsody are exploding. As the “cluetrain manifesto” expounds:

     ” We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it.”

    With the Internet’s capabilities and applications, comes the new business model… wait, there isn’t one. But, we’re still stuck in the mindset that products have to earn their keep, as if they were physical things waiting around to be bought. It is a new level of ideas and consumerism, where a national market can respond to the plethora of national products, and even internationally so. Digital products have replaced production costs. What used to be five dollars is now one and the savings can be passed on to you, the consumer… once the corporations have realized it. Some are already on this trend, while others have yet to fathom. Hint, hint, newspapers. You must realize that (according to Chris Anderson and agreeably so) “Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.”

    What a world we live in. Where it doesn’t matter if you’re great in your town, but if you’re great in someone’s town. I think that thinkers and movers and shakers will be glad to hear (and more importantly understand) that popularity is no longer required for fame and success. The Internet and the digital market is a ray or hope for the misunderstood and the small town rocker. I can imagine that people will be recognized for their ability to convey the human spirit, even if their silo stacking neighbors don’t get it. But, certainly it starts with the online institutions, the reliable recommendations and the user friendly sites that will encourage this sharing and comparing of, what it comes down to, taste.

    Anderson advises: “By offering fair pricing, ease of use, and consistent quality, you can compete with free.” The greatest advantage that a drug dealer has with marijuana, is the greatest advantage that the government could have. Maybe I am arguing for two different things, here, but it comes down to the fact that the consumer likes good and easy products versus bad and sketchy ones. Right now, companies are intimidated by the price of “free.” Can we fix it? (Everyone chants) Yes, we can!

     

    Questions:

    (1) Chris Anderson mentions the concept of “the psychological value of convenience.” What tasks in your life would be more convenient if it were digitized?

    (2) The Internet is seen as a democratizing medium. How does that concept relate to the hierarchy of consumer and producer?

    (3)How will the “a la carte” method of buying music put pressure on music artists?

  • The “Prosumer”

    The unique union of social media and the news media is going to change the way people relate to news and each other. As the mental landscape of the young generation is molded by their peers and their media, social media will have significant effects on how and what news to which they will be exposed. Being of a generation, often characterized by the “information overload,” this process of social media opening up users to relevant information is more important than ever.

     

    To help flush out this topic,Arielle Emmett, a former Temple University journalism professor, wrote the article “Networking News.” Published in American Journalism Review, this article reflects interests of the audience. She quotes main figures of the media connection of social media, ranging in representation, from NASA to the NY Times, to PBS. She discusses the effects of online exposure in social media like Twitter and Facebook for business models of institutions that relied on specific advertising that isn’t really there in the internet. A main component in the online trends of news and entertainment is something that Emmett refers to as “social filtering” which is the “word of mouth” strategy digitized.

     Nicole S. Cohen, a PhD student in the Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at York University in Toronto, writes “within this discourse, Facebook positions itself as leader of interactive, participant-based online media, or Web 2.0, the descriptor for websites based on user-generated content that create value from the sharing of information.” Her position on the subject comes from looking at a the social-economic picture and treating the relationship between medias as a discourse to be solved by negotiating the role of consumer and producer and often a new role created by the users of social media that she refers to as “prosumer.”

     The authors’ expertise and audience determine the style each of them used. Emmett’s article relies on the credibility of other people’s observations and points of view. By using these people in the field, she creates the effect of having a great deal of connections and authentic predictions of what these new innovations might mean for old institutions. She highlights their name and position within the company to show her readers her research, where as Cohen uses more discrete citation methods, giving more emphasis on the information itself, rather than the person. With a sprinkling of numbers, whether it’s a number for amount of users or subscribers or a percentage or date, both authors use concrete statistics to convey that the technology has been adopted by many people and continue to grow rapidly.

    Emotion plays a role in the reception of technology. Emmett’s article highlights the individual more than Cohen. “Networking News” takes a closer look at companies affected by the shift of business model that the online networks have caused. The different quotes from people in the various businesses allow the reader to sympathize with their feelings about the unpredictability of new media’s effects on old media. Cohen’s approach is more detailed, but offers less variety of voices.

    Each article demonstrates a point of view. While Emmett takes the perspective of the predecessors of social media, like PBS and NY Times, Cohen’s resource for a great deal of her insights comes from the creator of Facebook. In her article, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook offers his take on the issues relating to the effects of social media and why it functions the way it does. Cohen’s article also related the complex roles that the users play in the structure of online media.

    Both perspectives, Cohen and Emmett tell a bigger story about the new trends in media. I chose these articles because they approach a story from different points of view. Emmett looks at how news corporations are exploring new ways to use the Internet’s capabilities. Cohen delved into the details of the capabilities of Facebook and its features that certainly complicate the previous view to media. It is interesting and vital to get two sides of the same story and it becomes more important to look towards the future of our growing networks, but also remember that it is not machines that we are ultimately dealing with, but thoughtful human beings.

     

    References

    Emmett, A. (2008, December). Networking News. American Journalism Review, 30(6), 40-43. Retrieved January 28, 2009, from Communication & Mass Media Complete database.

    Search query: “Facebook” in EBSCO, specifically Communication & Mass Media Complete database

    Cohen, N. (2008, Spring2008). The Valorization of Surveillance: Towards a Political Economy of Facebook. Democratic Communiqué, 22(1), 5-22. Retrieved January 28, 2009, from Communication & Mass Media Complete database.

    Search query: “Facebook” in EBSCO, specifically Communication & Mass Media Complete database, narrowing down results to “academic journals”