Uncategorized

Kevin - Feb 3, 2009

Great Post. I am still in two minds. Defining anonymous is the problem, I know you and the others - it’s not about that really, it’s those people that simply spread hate and use names that are never seen again. Maybe we should all have Open ID anon identities too!

Of course, if you’re being harrased that’s something different, at least by requiring an e-mail address you reduce the chances, and if you use disqus you can probably block them more easily.

I love anonymous commenting because it’s from the heart that people speak rather than from their pedestal. By this I meran that when you make an anonymous comment you don’t need to know anything. You can say what you feel and you’re genuine. Of course that feeling might last ten seconds and you regret it.The point is that you can speak as part of the uninformed mass, you can afford to be wrong and your sentiments reality the feelings of the crowd. The crowd is important. Understand the crowd and you understand how to please them. You see worries of anonmity, worries of stalking, feelings that the whole community you need is within three miles of where you live. Those comments have value. To be attacked both as an individual or a community doesn’t matter. That’s where dialogue and conversation come into play. That’s when we get to see each other’s points of views and it may result in friendships, or the disagreement doesn’t continue. We are the privileged with our blogs and our advanced mobile phones. For marketers and opinion hunters though it’s great. I read this post and I find myself disagreeing that anonimity is a bad thing. Everyone that comments on this blog lacks anonmity, at least for me because I know them on twitter or other websites. I lack anonimity too. I use a nickname online but within a minute of searching you’ll find who I am. The effect of that is quite concrete. Whenever I post on a blog, a newspaper or anywhere online I have a personality I want to show. I have a reputation I have to attempt not to damage too seriously. That’s because we all have our own egos to feed. I don’t mean that in the self loving sense that those dissenting voices use against the event and against twitter. I mean that I want to be taken seriously. I want to be valued. As a result if I flame someone who is part of twitter there is fallout I would immediately suffer from. I’ve seen it happen to others in forums, on twitter and in a number of places.

I’m active on the web, spending thousands of hours a year connected to the web. As a result I have to log into a lot of sites often. I don’t like logging in though. That’s why I would love for big name publishers like the WSJ, NYTimes and others to sign an aggrement with Facebook so that I may log into their service without having to remember my account details. It would actually serve them better. Facebook knows who my friends are, where I studied, what stories I recommend and in some cases why. It’s also a reflection of the times that are coming. I went on a blog commenting spree last week and almost all blogs ask for three things, name, e-mail and website url. When I have to input the data I think twice about leaving a comment, and may recommend the story and write a comment in friendfeed instead. Too bad the publisher loses that bit of interactivity. For those publishers that want me to subscribe to your website you can forget it. There’s no way I’m going to subscribe to a website I visit less than once a month. It’s just too much effort and too much additional information to remember. What I love are blogs that use Disqus. That’s because when I leave a comment I can find them all in one place at the end of the day. If someone answers my comment then I can see what they wrote. It means it’s an automated attention solution. Anything where I can spend time looking at new content is appreciated. It’s especially true now that web forums have become extro verted rather than introverted. You’ve probably noticed it too. How many forums are you still part of? In my case none. I prefer the friendfeed and feedly method of doing things, where I actively seek information and get it sent to a central point from which other people converge to comment, and head back out once they’re done. I love the web in it’s current form as a result.

For Valentine’s day I reached my 50,000th tweet which I dedicated to @orchideane through twitterfone, as asked by @toppgold. I really want to lay in to twitter for having database maintenance. really I do, but I won’t. I’ll concentrate on other things. There; contemporary joke: What’s the difference between twitter and the Stock market? None they’re both down.

Yesterday I installed twitter remote on this blog. It’s a quick and fun way to see which of you twitter friends have been to my site recently. This is particularly interesting now that more and more people have their own twitter account.

Here’s a quick preview of what it looks like.

When you first arrive on twitter it’s lots of strangers sending messages speaking about what they’re doing and it quickly becomes overwhelming, especially with the vast number of people. For the first few months many people send no more than a hundred posts a day as they get used to the twitter stream. Eventually with time they get into the swing of things and they begin to interact with the other users and this creates a sense of friendships. Those friendships grow and they flourish, from the occasional exchange initially until several weeks later they are full grown conversations. That’s when character begins to show, when we see who we would love to spend more time and who we would get to meet in person. That’s when the tweetup is about meeting old friends for the first time in person. For most of you this is a foreign concept. For you the web is a place to keep in touch with friends who have moved out of the town where you are living. That’s why facebook is popular with over one hundred and fifty million people worldwide. That’s why so many of you are friends of mine on facebook but not on twitter. There is another trend, which is stronger and stronger, online friendships becoming physical world friendships. I call them this way because as good as the conversation is online you can’t give the person a hug or share a meal with them. The tweetup was an occasion when you had the pleasure of meeting these people for the first time. i still remember meeting sizemore for the first time, Loudmouthman and a few others. I remember meeting Documentally too. What made these meetings so interesting is that we knew each other from weeks of tweeting in most cases, although in others it was spontaneous. There was no breaking the ice. You just go straight into the conversation an that’s what makes it such a great networking tool. That’s part of the reason I was invited by Seesmic to LeWeb. I really value these opportunities. Recently though there’s another trend. You meet people in person and learn they twitter, you chat to them in person for a day, two days or more and you feel you have a good connection. A few days later you’re online, using twitter and you’re interested in staying in touch with them, seeing what they’re doing and sharing that passion, whatever the project. There is that drift away though, you give them your time but they don’t reciprocate. Instead you get a deluge of self promotion and ignored comments to what they’re doing. That friendship which had seemed interesting is broken. People don’t have time for twitter. Thousands of people are joining twitter every day and thousands of people are finding new followers but none, or hardly any of them are working at what made twitter so great, the community aspect. The community feel has disappeared. It may have something to do with traveling away from London but I think it’s deeper than that. I feel that as twitter has grown in value and as it has become part of their daily lives they are less willing to devote as much time to communication online. Of course this may be a sign of how ubiquitous Twitter has become. If it’s a tool where everyone is spread around the world then everyone wants to be online to talk because that’s their only choice. Now though opportunities have blossomed and twitter has become a local affair, and the bigger the local population the more isolated you will feel if you’re living in the provinces. That’s what I feel now. I’m not saying it’s a negative thing. I really disliked the only twestival event I went to but I think that’s because I saw that twitter has finally become something local. The fact that the event is in over 100 cities proves this. Twitter has become local, and so the focus is on those that live within easy meeting distance of where you live. That’s why London twitter users ignore users in other cities. That’s why there’s a new form of community. I’m looking forward to when twitter becomes more popular in Switzerland, when I get more local friends to use the site. In the meantime though I have to accept that more traditional approaches to friendships may serve me better. I did leave forget my phone at home tonight, when I went to meet some friends and I didn’t turn back to get it. I went out. I was disconnected from the world and it didn’t matter. I was finally living locally once more. I’ve learned a lot from this twitter separation. I will be back to the service but if you don’t give me the time of day when I send you a message then you can forget about me following those hyperlinks to the work you’re so busy promoting. I want to feel I have a personal connection with those I follow, not that I’m part of an audience. I want you to be in my seminar group.

warzabidul - Feb 4, 2009

What makes the first meetups so great is that you spend weeks and months talking to people, you develop a relationship with those people so that when you finally meet them you’re really happy. That feeling is made even nicer when you realise you have similar interests to people you had not met yet.

Now the tweetups and other meetings often feel like a formality, nothing fun, nothing innovative. That is not to say that I don’t like tuttle. In fact I do like tuttle because there you still have that young entrepreunerial spirit, those innovators and thinkers. There’s a lot to be gained from the tuttle meetups. That’s a concept that works really well in my eyes.

There is a video of me at the only Twestival event I have ever been to and I lay into the event for the fashionistas that attended the event. I was so disappointed with the event as a whole that I have lost my passion for going to social media events, especially when I need to travel over a thousand kilometers. Environmental conscience is one good reason for not travelling to these events but the second is the quality of the people there. When I talked to people at the Twestival event and asked them about twitter they looked at me strangely, when I asked them about how many tweets they had written they told me from five to two hundred on average. As a passionate twitter user and having been to a lot of social media events, tweetups and seesmeetups this really dissapointed me. The event felt like nothing more than a facade, nothing more than an opportunity for people to say “look at how trendy I am, I’m on twitter” yet not understanding anything about the ethos of the twitter way of life. I love twitter, and I love those that use it well, I love how certain people use it the same way they use sms and other social means. I don’t like that in Switzerland I’m strange because I use twitter. I like it even less that over here twitter will never be popular. There is no reason for it because of social cohesion, but also a far smaller community. Switzerland is about skiing, sailing, cycling, hiking, parapente and more sports. We’re not in a city. We’re in the countryside, Europe’s playground. Why be geeky when sports would be more social. More to the point everything is current. I don’t need to wait two to five years for people to adopt the sports. That’s why I’m coming back to Twitter on Valentine’s day. (It’s also the day I got my driving licence ;-))

Here we have @sizemore speaking about why he organised the first London tweetup. I will upload some of the other interviews soon but I’m just checking the player embedding first

This text will be replaced

var so = new SWFObject(‘http://www.main-vision.com/mediaplayer/player.swf','mpl','320','240','9'); so.addParam(‘allowscriptaccess’,‘always’); so.addParam(‘allowfullscreen’,’true’); so.addParam(‘flashvars’,’&file=http://www.main-vision.com/richard/video/size.flv’); so.write(‘player’);

warzabidul - Feb 4, 2009

Did a quick search and I found this link for videos: http://natgeowild.co.uk/programmes/monkey-thiev…. Hope you find some of what you were looking for.