A little walk
Yesterday’s walk, as seen by Sportstracker. Pictures to come soon.
A few years ago we were part of social networks. These networks were based on social interests, activities, passions and more. Over time as attention shifted from Social networks to social media so the activity that people were busy with changed. With that change social media professionals filled the channels, pushed for “audience” rather than friendships and eventually created what they call the “posting dead zones”. This is both amusing and sad.
It is amusing because social networks, later called social media were entirely about conversations and sharing content and experiences of interest. In such an environment you would use social media from the moment you woke up to the moment you went to sleep. You would meet with members of your social media social networks a number of times a day. The Return on investment for having no “posting dead zones” meant that people would be attentive to what you posted.
With time, and as early adopters were replaced by mid to late adopters, as conversations became less private and less personal so the opportunities to connect with people declined. Instant messaging via Google Hangouts for Ingress, Facebook messenger for personal friends and whatsapp encourage exchanges between existing networks. The work of adding new people to a social network has shifted back to face to face meetings.  As a private user the return on investment in regards to social networks has imploded. We see this with Facebook and Twitter. Their stickiness has declined.
Social media practitioners forget that social media are about social networks. People use the social network where they connect with other people. When a social network is no longer sociable “posting dead zones” get extended so much that vibrant networks become ghost towns. Facebook and twitter spent so long focusing on getting advertising and mainstream media on board that they forgot the essence of social networks.
I haven’t blogged in a few months but I have been tweeting, and working full time, and I’m attempting Nanowrimo once again this year.
Last year the process was easier as I had a lot of free time. This year I need to make time.
I did get to over 20,000 words but inspiration is slower to come. The meetups are still going on. We’ve had two in Lausanne already, one in Zurich, one in Bern and the next will be in Basel. I think I’ll skip Basel as I have some more urgent projects to finish first.
Did I mention over 1.3 billion words have been logged for Nanowrimo? That’s after 18 days of writing.
The next two weeks or so shall see me resting but not from media work. There’s a good chance I’ll be working on a project about a Prison in the Lebanon. It was shot a few weeks ago and the person in charge of the project needs help with the editing.
It looks as though it’s going to be an interesting project. I’ve already viewed quite a bit of footage, read the voice over text and discussed the idea. I’ve started to form some ideas of how to create the story and tomorrow this should progress further with me going in to work.
In around two weeks I’ll have an interesting work shift, from 5am to 1300 hours, in other words my work day will be finished when other people get their work day started. We’ll see how that goes anyway.
Ciao for now
Earlier this week Google decided that it would shift from subsidising narrowcasting content makers to favouring “broadcasters”. This was demonstrated with their shift towards rewarding content creators with higher requirements. In order to be a youtube partner, you need people to have viewed 4000hrs worth of content and have over 1000 subscribers.
A few years ago when you browsed Youtube you would easily browse through hundreds of videos before finding content worth watching. You would then browse and find more content. It was organic.
In recent months I have noticed a shift towards the sensationalist and tabloid. Most headlines are now clickbait. As an experiment log out of Google and look at the top youtube content.
Instead of seeing 16-30 videos you see ten videos. The content that they want you to see has been whittled down. This means that unless you have a big audience, clickbait titles and are already authoritative you will be invisible. The amateur aspect of Youtube is gone. It is being replaced by the authoritarianism of mass appeal.
There are hundreds of thousands of content creators that had accepted to have adverts as pre-roll, as banners or at the end of the videos. Google and Youtube no longer take advantage of the long tail. Most of us create content that is seen a few hundred times and the revenue is minimal. Marketers still paid youtube for the visibility and youtube still made money off our backs. We were never going to see that money. It would have taken years for us to earn enough for an electronic transfer to be made. Youtube was the clear winner until they decided to stop making free money from us
The second upside is that we’re going to be able to browse videos and find acceptable content more easily until recently we were forced to watch from 5 seconds to two minutes of advert before watching five seconds and clicking away. Without adverts, we will see the video is mediocre and move on sooner.
When youtube was young it provided a unique opportunity because it gave us “unlimited” space and bandwidth for the sharing videos. Neither of these is scarce anymore. The barriers to sharing videos on our websites have decreased. HTML5 and above, h.265 and H.264 make it lighter for us to upload and share video content from our own websites.
Youtube was a great place for browsing and finding interesting content to watch but as algorithms and populism took over the website so the ease with which we could find random interesting content has decreased. From 30 videos to choose
There are four phones on my desk that are well adapted to tracking hikes. There is the nexus one, the e51, n95 and n97. The reason I mention this is battery life. In my experience if you go on a long hike at least one of the phones will die.
You could buy an extra battery or two to make sure that this never happens but a more practical solution is to take all of your phones, install the tracking application on them and swap phone once the battery dies.
Of course this would involve taking three chargers with you but at least this way you could track the hike in terms of chapters and somehow aggregate the data for a true hike map.
Podcrastinating, when you put off doing something because you prefer listening to a podcast instead.
It’s when you know that you should be doing a number of things but because you want to listen to conversations you listen to podcasts instead. Those guilty for taking a lot of my time would be From our own Foreign correspondent, quite a few of the TWIT podcasts and many more. It’s not that you’re not learning because you are. The problem is when you spend ten-twelve hours listening to podcasts rather than getting on with the tasks at hand.