Before having my say on this weeks bitchmeme I thought I would wait for the situation to calm down and look back on one of the issues raised – that of where we should be linking to.

As is often the case when emotions are running high the situation can rapidly spiral out of control which is what seemed to happen yesterday. Points are made and in the effort to strike while the iron is hot things may not be said in exactly the way we would like and, as such, ambiguity can creep in causing misinterpretation.

Linking

The particular problem of linking arose as Robert Scoble linked to a conversation on FriendFeed instead of the source post by David Risley. David was unhappy with this claiming it was done to deny him the “Scoble Google Juice” – the large body of traffic that invariably follows anything Scoble discusses. I don’t wish to comment here on the rights or wrongs of what happened but feel that the issue itself should be addressed.

Now, the issue of where we should be linking to is not a new one, the last time a similar row broke out – which coincidentally involved Scoble again – was the beginning of last year when he claimed that large sites (such as Engadget etc.) didn’t link out to the small guy – he had to back track. Sue Polinksy followed this by asking if big bloggers should also be linking to the little guy instead of sticking within the A-list echo chamber, Robert followed up with his own thoughts and, at the time, the overall opinion was a resounding ‘yes’ but is this necessarily the case today?

Changes

The web has been changing considerably – aggregators and the like are forcing us to adapt to new ways of gathering information, sourcing our content and generating links to our blogs. The arguments around comment fragmentation don’t appear to be going away any time soon so what are our responsibilities? Should bloggers, as Corvida of SheGeeks suggests, make an effort to post comments at the source location and by, the same extension, should we also be linking back to the original post rather than any discussion that may relate to it? Is it just common decency to do so?

Social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Mixx and Sphinn have gotten us in to the habit of asking for votes at a location remote to our blogs in the hope that the more votes a story receives the more traffic it will generate back to our blogs. Is the process of adding Likes and Comments to FriendFeed so different?

Signal to noise

The recent discussion about the noise level on FriendFeed has prompted some to suggest that there should be a way of filtereing our streams with maybe only those items that have been liked or have comments showing. This would be a way of filtering by popularity – a similar thing to how Digg and the like operate on their front pages.

If an influential blogger were to link to a conversation on FriendFeed rather than the orignal post and those who followed that link found 30 empassioned comments waiting for them would they not feel the need to check out the source to see what all the fuss was about?

Are there any answers?

The way we use the web has altered and opinions that were valid a year ago may not hold the same weight as they used to. How long before our source content becomes fragmented rather than just the comments? Will we see a move towards posting away from our blogs (we already do guest posts) so that the source itself is in the same place as the reactions? A FriendFeed blog anyone? Could something like this even spell the beginning of the end for blogs as we know them?

Image by David (North60).

You’ve probably noticed the link on the right to the Social Media Mafia (SMM) website and wondered what it’s all about, some of you have clicked and probably still wondered (the site is still under development). So, as an evangelist for SMM I’ll try to explain.

SMM is the brain child of Chris Hambly and is based on elements of Mafia mentality. As Chris says forget about the horses heads and machine guns in violin cases – instead look at the honour system involved and the system of favours. Social media is built on making connections and building relationships, as Chris puts it:

If I help you in some way we have started to build a relationship, I have provided for you, without charge, something you want or need. In return you also provide for me or someone else in the social media family. This generosity is what builds trust, it is the currency of the movement.

Social Media Mafia, therefore, is a means to connect individuals in a way that promotes sharing and the doing of ‘favours’. Whilst social media is predominantly recreational there is an increasingly prevalent business use and something like SMM will better place individuals to take advantage of the links that are created – any financial or business gains are as a result of the favours system, a secondary benefit.

The family

To complete the Mafia metaphor Chris, as the founder and head of the family, is The Don – he makes all the big decisions. You then have a number of ‘Capos’ (or lieutenants) who may form their own local “rackets” for their geographical area and stage “sit downs” or unconferences in order to build the relationships and extend the potential of the members or ‘soldiers’.

SMM is, therefore, like a self contained social network but with a wider remit than just connecting its members. The goal of SMM is as follows:

• Provide a forum for the networking of colleagues and peers who have dedicated their careers to social-media, with a goal of representing a large and diverse community of interests and experience.
• Facilitate information exchange on issues that relate to creative business, technology embracing, advertising, new-media skills training and industry related education.
• Provide a platform for: industry events, seminars, web 2.0 information exchange, web-based information outlets and professional special interest groups dedicated to specific skills and areas of expertise.

An offer you can’t refuse?

Does this sound like something you want to get involved with? Are you involved with social media and want to utilise its full potential? Then why not get over to the Facebook group and contact Chris. You can also give me your details and I’ll pass them on for consideration.

Then I happened to notice a tweet by Michael Martine of Remarkablogger advising:

to prevent “twitter-squatting” you might want to snag any names that should be associated with you

We all know about cybersquatting – registering URLs that could be associated with, or used by, large companies to profit from its resale – but what about social media?

Potential for abuse

There is a huge potential to abuse social media in order to ruin a persons reputation. It is easy to sign up an account and there are no checks. There is nothing to stop anyone from creating an account in someone else’s name and using it to cause havok.

I asked “Who has grabbed various social media names to avoid identity squatting?” on FriendFeed and had a response from Jon Erickson stating that several of his clients have found their brand names being used by others. Now he doesn’t say that it has been done maliciously but it does lead to a potentially big problem and, as social media becomes more mainstream, is this going to be something we will see more of?

Business has a degree of protection where trademarks are involved but for a normal individual things could be a lot harder to resolve. Personal vendettas could lead to reputation trashing or even blackmail leaving the affected party the difficult task of first getting the offender stopped and then trying to repair the damage.

Cyber-bullying

There has been at least once instance on Twitter of someone trying to trash anothers reputation but fortunately, that seemed to backfire and gave the ‘victim’ a great deal of publicity. How long will it be, however, before this takes off as a means of cyber-bullying?

We are advised to sometimes register different names to keep work and personal streams separate but perhaps it is time to start doing so in order to prevent abuse. The law around this issue will no doubt need updating to reflect the changes in technology but there is always a period when the legal system is slow to catch up with the rest of the world.

Your take

Is this something you can see developing? What steps have you taken to prevent your identity from being abused on social media web sites?

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Image by Jana Christy.

I have been tagged by Julian Baldwin of “notes, thoughts, ideas and responses” to share my favourite Twitter tools and continue the collaborative list that has started in reponse to a few posts.

Part of the beauty of Twitter is the whole universe that has emerged around the API. While the simplicity of the service itself makes it a joy to use Twitter really comes in to its wn once you start using the applications that have sprung up around it.

So, down to business. I’ve written about most of these before and it’s interesting to note that my preferences haven’t changed – perhaps it’s a case of sticking to what you know.

Quotably

Quotably allows you to track conversation threads relating to a Twitter username you specify, it shows both conversations started by that user (with related replies) and those threads the user has contributed to. This is especially useful in tracking any answers to a question you may have asked and getting a screen dump of them all in context.

Twitter has a habit of not referencing the correct tweets in a thread so Quotably let’s you re-organise them so that they appear in the correct order.

Quotably has also recently introduced a new feature which tracks the most popular things happening on Twitter in real time.

TwitThis

TwitThis is an easy way to post a link to any page to your Twitter feed and can be used via a browser bookmarklet, a button on your page or even a WordPress plugin. TwitThis gives you a number of options to choose from for telling the world what you are doing such as: Reading, Looking at, Responding to in order to give a bit of variation with your Tweets. An example looks like this:

Intwition

There are a number of Twitter search tools out there but Intwition is different in that it is designed to search for URLs. Bloggers can perform ego searches to see who’s been discussing their blog. A good twist on this is the “reach” stats – not only can you see who has been posting links but also the total number of Twitter users potentially exposed to that link. You can even subscribe to your query as an RSS feed.

Hashtags

Another great way to track tweets about specific topics is to use hashtags: simply a word proceeded by a hash character, e.g. #hashtags. Tweets that include these tags can then be collated in order to get an overall picture of conversation about a particular subject. There are a couple of sites you can use to track them but hashtags.org gives by far the best information.

There’s my favourites so it’s my turn to keep the ball rolling and tag someone else. If we’re playing by the same rules that Julian set then whomever I choose should not duplicate any of the tools already mentioned here or in the other posts in the series – this could start getting tricky.

I’ll tag Mark Dykeman of the Broadcasting Brain, over to you Mark.

Yesterday I asked if the echo chamber was still relevant now that the needs of the early adopter and those of the populace at large are becoming more differentiated. Today I want to follow that up by asking if the masses really know or understand their needs?

We live at such a pace that we often have little time to consider what we actually want. We exist in a semi-robotic state commuting from home to work and back, and before we know it it’s tomorrow and we do it all again. With life like this how can we expect the consumer to really know what they want? If everyone knew then the world would be full of entrepreneurs.

Just look at the amount of money spent on market research, product testing and advertising, it obviously works or companies would not be willing to invest so heavily. We go from day to day being told what to eat, what to wear, what to buy and - because we have more important things to be getting on with - we go along with it.

If consumers need their hands held with something as simple as the weekly shop is it reasonable to expect them to know what they want from an online service when many haven’t yet grasped concepts such as the web and email?

Need or want?

Look at the example of the iPod as given by Mark in his comment. The iPod is a classic example of a product creating a niche for itself. Now, I wouldn’t say that the iPod created an actual need (that was always going to be there with the spread in digital entertainment) but it created a desire. It was the effect of, as Mark says, “Simple and powerful technology” - Apple just beat everyone else to the punch.

There has always been a need to communicate over long distances, this need was filled with the telegram, telephone and now the internet. As we increasingly become part of the global village the need is there to communicate with more people in different places so it is more a question of how we want to do things and this causes its own problems.

Choice

Choice is generally a good thing but in areas of uncertainty it is often easier to be given a direction and grow your knowledge than try to pick one path from many. Consequently, people will often follow the herd and go with whatever their friends are doing – in a social media context this actually makes sense. As Louis Gray has been pointing out social media is not defined by its features but by the community that use it and if all your friends are on service X it would be foolish to use service Y.

Niche services are able to deal with this diversity as they are targetting a specific audience but for mainstream users too much choice could prevent wide enough adoption of any service preventing it from ever reaching the tipping point. It is nice to have healthy competition in any market but when the market becomes flooded the value is lost.

What now?

Will a particular service come out on top solely due to the herd mentality or will the market need a nudge in the right direction? Who is best placed to lead: the echo chamber or business, or should anyone be leading at all?

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Image by Tara Hunt.