Last year, this post almost certainly wouldn’t have got written. I’d have probably been busy running around, bottle of beer in hand peering at people’s nametags and having mutually agreeable conversations that what we were doing was the future. Today, this post nearly didn’t get written because I got distracted by The Big Lebowski on TV.
Somewhere along the line, I’ve morphed from Riggs into Murtaugh.
Google Buzz slipped out yesterday with a minimum of fuss, or at least, a minimum of fuss compared to the launch of Google Wave. Still, at least expectations were dampened down, and today Gmail users have found Buzz arriving in their inbox.
What to make it of, though. Mark Cahill says it’s the moment that social media has finally reached the mainstream, calling it a “Facebook killer of epic proportions”.
Sometimes shows that you’re interested in pass you by. Had it not been for idly flicking through the Saturday TV listings while waiting for my toast to, er, toast I’d have completely missed The Virtual Revolution on Saturday night. And even then, I only Sky Plussed it on a whim, given that I was recording football that night as well.
This is a rather roundabout way of saying make an effort to seek it out and watch it if it’s passed you by as well. It’s an excellent and illuminating exploration of how the internet has changed our world. It’s especially good if you’re new to social media and want an overview that doesn’t assume knowledge or patronise. Absolutely fascinating and probably one of the few non-sport related programmes I’ll be making an effort to watch.
As pleasant surprises go, finding your podcast has been nominated in the Best Podcast category for the 2009 Soccerlens Awards is, well, rather nice.
What’s really impressive is the twofootedtackle podcast’s co-nominees. EPL Talk and World Soccer Daily are pretty good, but Football Ramble and especially the Guardian’s Football Weekly are the dons of the football podcasting world. I suspect anybody starting a footballing podcast has Football Weekly in their mind when they do so.
Here’s an interesting thing. On Saturday I, along with nearly 20 million others in Britain, was watching Britain’s Got Talent (both for work and pleasure). I also, predictably, was on Twitter, and had several trending and tracking tools – Twitscoop, Twitterfall, etc – open (because I’m a geek and I like tracking the conversation, m’kay).
Once all the acts had performed, it was obvious that Diversity were trending stronger than any other act over Twitter. “If,” I thought, “Twitter is anything to go by, Diversity will win.”
Here’s an interesting way to get a rung on the PR ladder – sell yourself in a little over half the time the So Solid Crew spent bigging up themselves.
The deal: getting PR graduates (plus anybody else who fancies a go) to sell themselves in what may possibility the world’s shortest job interview via micro-vlogging site 12Seconds.tv. The prize: a month’s paid PR internship with the Big Yellow Self Storage Company.
Essentially, the candidate has 12 seconds to sell themselves in their job interview and even tough there’s only one internship up for grabs, all the entries will be shown around the industry.
Gosh, there’s nothing like a few well placed words for kicking off a party political crisis. Or, rather, there’s nothing like a slightly weird video that presents the Prime Minister of this country looking like a strange gurning alien for kicking off a party political crisis.
Earlier this week, Hazel Blears, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, wrote in the Observer:
“YouTube if you want to. But it’s no substitute for knocking on doors or setting up a stall in the town centre.”
Martin Moore’s discussion around the death of Ian Tomlinson and the subsequent investigation and unearthing of footage by the Guardian raises some interesting points about the place ‘old media (for want of a better phrase) have today:
“Would the ‘truth’ surrounding Mr Tomlinson’s death have come to light had it not been sought out by journalists, and then published as the lead story in the Guardian? Perhaps, but I don’t think so.”
Then there’s the Damian McBride email scandal that may have broken in the blogosphere but still needed the traditional media to completely take it into the scandal it has now become. Would McBride have resigned if the accusations had just appeared on Guido Fawkes’ blog and nowhere else [1]?
If, in the future, we’re all going to be sat at our desks blogging, Tweeting, Flickring and whatnot, for the rest of eternity, we’ll probably need e-numbers to get through it.
Whether or not that was one of the reasons behind Skittles taking their home page all social media-like, we’ll never know. But they are one of the more high profile brands to experiment with the various tools online. Whether it’s worked or not is another matter.
To recap: anybody logging into their Twitter last Monday would have probably found a slew of tweets with the hashtag #skittles. These were then fed into the Skittles home page which was updating all mentions of the sweet on Twitter.
Bobbie Johnson from the Guardian has had it with social media. It’s easy to sympathise.
“Listen. I have blog. I use Twitter. I idly flick through lists of people I’d forgotten I ever knew on Facebook. I’ve even got a MySpace page, although I don’t like to talk about it. They are great ways of connecting people, and they’re very exciting when you start using them, because they allow virtual contact in ways that are analogous to – if not the same as – real life. You know, communicate with people. That old thing.
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