I now own the latest Cornershop album, Cornershop and the Double O Groove Of. I wasn’t necessarily planning on buying it until an unexpected intervention.
I’d listened to the album a couple of times on Spotify and thought it really rather lovely. I Tweeted my thoughts on the album and made a mental note to possibly purchase a copy if I saw it for a decent price.
A few hours later, I had a retweet from Tjinder Singh from Cornershop, along with a quick thank you.
A new year, a new shiny toy to play with in the shape of Quora, the social question and answer service.
Since Tuesday, Twitter – and Quora – has exploded with hype, counter-hype, naysayers and people somewhere in-between trying to work out if this is the next big thing in social media.
There’s a few interesting points to be made around the bubbles around these services, which I’ll come to in a bit, but to answer the Quora question, my initial thoughts are probably not, but it’s an interesting and potentially very useful site that could gain a reasonable amount of traction.
Who would have thought bath screens could start a good discussion on social media? On a National Union of Journalists mailing list, of the reasonably high-up members shared with us an email he’d rather mischievously sent to a DIY store asking for their review rates after they invited him to write a customer review of his purchases.
Although done in semi-seriousness, I don’t necessarily agree that it’s an area where the NUJ should be getting involved in. For me, although the quality of reviews can be variable to say the least, they are still a useful service and the company should be congratulated for trying to engage in a form of a two way conversation and even create a community, of sorts.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read an article proclaiming the death of blogging, for reasons too numerous to mention. But while the independent blogging arena is constantly in a state of flux as it defines itself (mixing Heraclitus and Sartre, if you will), these last couple of weeks have shown how vital and how vibrant blogging can be when applied by the mainstream media.
Like an ageing celebrity, some web companies, startup or otherwise, feel like they’ve been around forever and you assume they’re in rude health until you see a news story flash up that they’ve died.
And then you remember they exist, feel a bit sad, relive the happy memories and move on.
12seconds.tv, sadly, is that aging celebrity.
At that start of the week, the video microblogging (or microvlogging, I suppose) site announced it was to close later this month. It It was lacking: Lack of a revenue model, lack of time, lack of interest all seemed to conspire to kill it off.
What happens when you put a load of bloggers and PRs in the same room and get them to discuss their industry? Fight? Or consensus? Or both?
The most recent London Bloggers Meetup didn’t quite reach either of those stages but the panel / open floor debate was interesting, partly because it showed how little the debate, and indeed industry, has moved on.
The panel lined up with Cate Sevilla from Bitch Buzz, Chris Osburn aka Tiki Chris, and Pete Stean from The Londoneer, with Stephen Waddington (Wadds) from Speed Communications, Matt Churchill from Edelman and Laurence Borel (Lolly) from Mindshare on the PR side.
If anonymous commenting on the internet had a users guide, then one of the more sensible pieces of advice would be “Don’t do it from your work PC.”
It’s advice a commenter on the previous post would have been good to consider. I don’t make a habit of running Whois searches on the IP address of every commenter but, given that this place doesn’t get that many trolls or sockpuppets, and given the subject matter, I was a bit curious. Turns out the IP address was from one of the (many) PR agencies who’ve pitched me this World Cup.
And they’re off. We’re now well and truly into electioneering territory as Hobson’s Choice the General Election 2010 rolls well and truly into town. Forget any hope of finding out news that isn’t connected to three middle aged men trying to out-quip each other. It’s everywhere. Including social media. And as a recovering politics geek who spends more time than is healthy on these places, I find it all completely fascinating.
There’s a horrible temptation, not just in social media, but in all walks of life, to see something that works, think “Oh, that’s ok then,” and leave it there, while all the small cracks slowly grow ever larger. You wouldn’t forgo an MOT just because your car appeared to be working. The same’s true for social media.
So, just because a well run Twitter-based campaign worked well for one company, it doesn’t mean that it’ll work for another. And, crucially, it definitely doesn’t mean that you can repeat it again a few months later for the original company. Everything is different.
Yes, I’m still on a sabbatical, but wanted a quick mention of Google Wave, which I finally got round to signing up after having the invite sit in my inbox for a week.
First impressions… yes, well.
On one hand, I like it. There’s a lot of potential there. In term of work collaboration it could be very useful indeed – kind of inbetween a wiki and email. Certainly for small group based projects with plenty of distance between them there’s a lot a potential. I think Chris and I can both see it working with the twofootedtackle podcast as well.