2008 July- Colin Walker – expanding my online world….one post at a time.

Posted by Colin in Social Media on 07 31st, 2008 | 19 Comments

Social media is both a blessing and a curse. We have the ability to communicate with many interesting people from all over the world in the easiest ways we have ever had available to us. The flow of information and responses is incredibly engaging and is making the world ever smaller – even if...

Posted by Colin in Social Media on 07 19th, 2008 | 3 Comments

Yesterday, I was privileged to do a guest post for Louis Gray and chose to do something a little bit different and wrote about the issue of whether APIs can be used to generate revenue for services such as Twitter, It was something I had been thinking about for a while but the news that they had throttled...

Posted by Colin in Social Media on 07 15th, 2008 | 4 Comments

I wanted to post something a little different today and look at how my use of technology has altered which, in turn, gives an idea as to how my perception of social media has changed. This blog took over from the old Randomelements site which I had self-hosted on one flavour of SharePoint or another...

Posted by Colin in Social Media on 07 11th, 2008 | 1 Comment

This post was inspired by an item in my referral log: “Google Search: how media affect our identity”. It started me thinking about how we behave when using social media and online in general. Do we just be ourselves or do we play a role? Shakespeare famously wrote All the world’s a...

Escaping the echo chamber....

Posted by Colin in Social Media on 07 10th, 2008 | 12 Comments

I am reminded every day of what social media can achieve by Sal who continually amazes me with her creativity and ability to use the tools available to draw focus to things that matter – for example, the MooMag project and yesterdays post on cyber bullying. She is connecting to people for a reason...

Social media: casual user or addict?...

Posted by Colin in Social Media on 07 9th, 2008 | 2 Comments

Social media use no doubt differs depending on why you’re in it. The global conversation is always there: ambient noise, a constant buzz in the background. What differs between us is when we shift our focus to concentrate on that buzz. Casual users can dip in and out as they see fit – as has...

What are social web sites?...

Posted by Colin in Social Media on 07 8th, 2008 | 4 Comments

I have said before that Twitter is a facilitator for communication rather than the conversation medium itself and to a degree the same thing can be said of all social networking services it’s just that the scale and details vary on a per service basis. Jason Goldberg posted that he saw FriendFeed...

Posted by Colin in Social Media on 07 7th, 2008 | 7 Comments

It is noticeable that bloggers and the social media early adopter crowd (myself included) are very keen to make a good online impression. Why wouldn’t they? As has been said before, it is not necessarily the act of blogging or the participation that gets us what we want but is often the secondary...

Posted by Colin in Social Media on 07 3rd, 2008 | 4 Comments

Yesterday, Julian Baldwin coined the term “needstream” saying: Basic needs are “needstream” so mainstream doesn’t necessarily need to include everyone I commented that as everyone doesn’t need the same thing then everyone’s needstream is going to be different...

The private messaging divide....

Posted by Colin in Social Media on 07 1st, 2008 | 9 Comments

Steve Rubel started a conversationon FriendFeed which really polarised opinion. He asked “Should FriendFeed have a private messaging system like FB, Twitter, et al?” Divided Responses ranged from the affirmative such as “Taking conversations private is a great way to further a business...