social-networks | Ian M Rountree

Facebook’s Automated Censorship Kerfuffle

April 17, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

If you’ve been anywhere near where I’ve been over the weekend, you’ll have seen this article on Dangerous Minds about Facebook removing a photo of two men kissing.

From the article:

[…] it seems that the sight of two fully-clothed men kissing was too much for Facebook, or too much for some ~~redacted~~ […] who complained about it.

This is an issue a lot of networks need to face and be willing to take their place on; if a user flags an image as inappropriate on Facebook, it’s up to Facebook’s policymakers to either remove the image for the same of propriety, or leave it up and face action from the person flagging the image.

Facebook likely removed the image for reasons it will never explain – the trouble will come, however, not when it’s a picture of two men kissing, but when it’s a photograph of a couple’s wedding kiss that’s removed for inappropriate suggestive content. Or a parent giving their child a smooch.

This doesn’t just apply to Facebook – all information-storing networks suffer the same trouble. Offending a loud minority with anything means normative action by the network. It’s the only way to go.

Without this, there are two options;

an incredibly strict EULA forcing people to acknowledge that they can’t do anything about things that offend them other than leave the network, or
zero memory on the site itself, to go along with the lack of moderation; this way lies 4chan.

Not every network can handle either kind of strain on it’s social contract, because online networks need to remain an extension of real networks. The unfortunate problem is that, while free speech exists as law in the United States, almost all social networks are now (or have the potential to be) global, and need to allow for the strictest common denominator.

We’re going to see more of this kind of thing in the future, and we’d best be ready for it. More than any other governing force in our lives, our social networks are the best equipped to dole out equality as a commodity; even equality of objection to things we consider of no consequence.

Is this a good thing, or a bad thing?

Make sure you read the full article on Dangerous Minds.

The Needs of a Personal Platform

March 20, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

When you’re starting out online, it’s easy enough to dig into everything a little bit, and keep your agility by not building a routine.

However, as you do more and more work – more writing, more tweeting, more status updates – you’ll begin to look for ways to reduce the emotional overhead on working your networks. Tools, like TweetDeck, web apps like The Deadline, time management processes, and more. This makes it easy to maintain momentum and keep your consistency high – but it does remove some agility unless you’re aware of the scaffolding you’re putting up around your work.

Creating a platform can’t be haphazard – you need to put some thought into the framework you create.

Got a blog? Great! You have a home base, somewhere all the content is your own.

Got a podcast? Cool. Whether you blog or not, you’re publishing your own content.

Youtube channel? Ok… Now we’re getting into mixed media. Video is powerful, but if it’s on a platform not your own, you don’t own control of it.

Massive Twitter following? Neat – but, like the YouTube channel, or a Facebook page for that matter, if Twitter goes away, so does your content – so does your platform.

Building a platform means having control not only of the scaffolding – the framework – but also of the content that fills it out.

We’ve known this for a while. Owning your database is important. Having purpose apparent behind our work is important too. But how do we do this in effective ways? We diversify.

We produce podcasts as parts of our blogs, we use Twitter and Facebook as promotional and communication tools instead of publishing venues. We create spaces where people can not only congregate, but interact as a group – campfires of media to be gathered around, rather than street corners to be passed through (and passed by, and bypassed entirely).

Diversity is part of the difference between building an effective personal platform – and building ephemeral content gardens.

Look at any of your heroes, the people who got you into this whole content marketing, social media game. What do they do? How have they grown over the years?

Chris Brogan writes a number of blogs, produces video, takes part in podcasts, tweets, has a Facebook community, does Third Tribe stuff, and more. He’s diverse.
Mack Collier has a blog, but also is intensely active on Twitter, and has built #blogchat into one of the biggest weekly twitter chats.

But these are platforms which have existed for some time – what else are we seeing?

I look at people like Stanford Smith at Pushing Social, who’s recently started video blogging and podcasting in addition to the #tweetdiner twitter chat he and Margie Clayman started last year. That’s diversity.

These are just a few examples – there are more. Are you one of them?

If you’re just blogging – why? If you’re only building a community on Twitter, what reasoning do you have behind it?

How are you addressing the needs of your platform – how are you allowing yourself to grow?

Image by Peter Alfred Hess.

How to Master the Power of Voice and Become a Blogging Muad’Dib

January 23, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

The Voice Must Flow!

The power to be in many places at once. Perfect memory. The ability to see the future. None of these count for anything without the power to inspire action with just a few phrases, delivered with perfect pitch, modulation, frequency and poignancy.

Anyone who knows anything about science fiction will know about Dune. In Dune, Paul Atreides – the heir to a ducal title – is cast out of his place by the betrayal of a lesser Baron (the piggish Harkonen) and goes on a journey of self-discovery, eventually learning that he is the Ultimate Power Embodied – the Kwisatz Haderach!

Voice isn’t only about displaying personality, it’s about directive communication.

Bloggers talk about creating a voice all the time, and in many cases, we’re referring to the same things;

Humour, or lack thereof
Opinions, or sets of beliefs
Passion, or clarity of desire
Engagement, or how easy it is to turn a statement into a conversation.

HOPE hard enough and you’ll get a certain kind of success – but to be a real master, you need more than hope.

All of these things matter, but they’re not the core of The Voice.

In Dune, the Voice is an arcana very few are trained in – and the fact that Paul Atreides is trained in even its rudiments is almost heretical. Masters of the Voice have the skills to control anyone they have face-to-face contact with, after just a few minutes of exposure. They must gain this power over each individual person they wish to control, and do so by keen observation of body language, cataloging of reactions to some initial prods, and above all else, listening to the words their subjects use.

By this process of pre-communicative observation, practitioners of the Voice can easily understand the motivations, weaknesses – and potential of a subject. So, when she finally does speak, she can use the entirety of subtle inflection, posture, micro-expression, tone, pitch, metre… Every verbal and non-verbal tool physically possible to such a high effectiveness, that the subject is helpless to argue or disobey.

As a blogger, you have more tools at your disposal than text formatting, multi-media, your usual level of eloquence, or your standard subject matter.

You’ve got more than just your words. You have the spaces between then-the long dashes creating suspense, the ellipsis… Hanging out and doing it’s thing. You’ve got direct address writing (which most of this post is written in), choice of gendered or genderless pronouns… All of these things, once you know how to go beyond vocabulary and work pacing, verbal innuendo, and inflection by way of grammar into your writing… There’s power, just waiting there.

Consider the following passage about a remote bystander observing the initial attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001:

When James burst into the room, yelling this and that about being under attack, I didn’t even know what to think. Who was attacking who? Had he been playing paintball again? I mean, seriously. It wasn’t even seven in the morning. I got a real shock when I followed him to the living room. He wasn’t kidding – one of the towers was falling on picture-in-picture, and not ten seconds after my eyes hit the screen, the second plane hit the other tower.

What sense do you get from the above paragraph? There’s information there. There’s a hook (the attack) there’s characterization (the remark about paintball), there’s narative (first-person). It’s concise, informative, and to the point.

How about this?

“Guys! We’re under attack!”

The door shook – great. James’d put a crack into it with the heel of his boot. A muddy crack. Double great.

“Seriously, guys, get up! One tower’s just come down, and they keep saying there are more planes! More damned planes!”

What was he on about, anyway? I levered myself up and threw on a shirt. If he’d found some new video game to spend his rent money on…

No such luck. One look at the TV left my mouth gaping. Under attack indeed. I forgot about the muddy boot crack in my door.

What’s different? The details are identical in form to the first paragraph – the attack, the two towers… You know exactly what both are getting at. But the two passages may as well have been written about different people. There’s the focus on dialog, the broken-up structure of the second passage, completely different use of timing…

And we’re just comparing two very short pieces, essentially stating the same facts; the narrator’s roommate bursts into his room, waking him/her with what seems like nonsense – but is very quickly proven to be terrifying truth.

While the examples I’ve used are semi-fictional, the same thing applies to blogging, or writing of any kind where format restrictions are loose. Journalists with word count limits need to be ultra-direct. Bloggers, authors and other writers benefit from other tools, like using the tonal changes that pacing and directive writing can create.

It’s up to you, young pup!

Using the power of Voice in writing is more than just what you choose to write about, and the words and phrases you use to express your opinion. Leaving it at phraseology and opinion may be enough for some – but if you really want to master your power of Voice, going beyond and asserting control over your very tone and inflection in writing is the next step along the Golden Path.

Being serious about the development and use of your Power of Voice is a good idea. Knowing how to produce tone, inflection… Even a little – necessary hesitation just with words and grammar can make your writing stand out as much more human.

Still. It never helps to lose the humour all together. Am I Right, Dunecats?

Top image: Modified screenshot from Sci-Fi Channel’s “Frank Herbet’s Dune” (well worth watching)
Bottom image: Dunecat. Source; the interwebs.

A Thought About iTunes Ping

September 17, 2010 by Ian Leave a Comment

Recently, Apple announced the new version of iTunes – iTunes 10. It’s got a lot of upgrades from previous versions – a tweaked, cleaner UI, some nice small changes to layouts and organization – all of these things are good. Yes, even the new icon, which has gotten bashed a bit for being generic and dippy. Hey – I like blue gradients, I don’t have a right to bash the logo.

However, one of the new features iTunes incorporates is what feels like an ad hoc social network, called Ping. Ping allows you to follow people, or musicians – get updates on new albums, things the people you’ve connected with like. I’m all for that, but I have to wonder; is it sustainable?

Ping is a flash in the pan.

I’m not the only one criticizing this. Ping has already been bashed as an inside sales tactic. That’s not my concern (everything is a sales tactic). I’m not even concerned about the system being centralized in iTunes, or being limited in features to half-Twitter, half-Facebook (or maybe all Google Buzz) style features. I don’t even care that it won’t let me blog more effectively.

My concern is breaking the rockstar illusion. Immediately on getting Ping set up, I started following some musicians. U2, for example, who have turned out to be quite vocal, in a mostly positive way. However, after actively checking in on Ping for a few days, I realized something. I don’t really care about musicians.

Don’t get me wrong – I love music.

I just can’t connect with musicians. I sing – I was part of a community chorale for years, and I loved it. I work with musicians daily. However, like economists or farmers, my day to day life has very little to do with the process of promoting music as an art. And that’s really what Ping is for; it’s a social network aimed at promoting music. The kind I like, the kinds my friends like. Forget that I might prefer Satriani to Motorhead, or Grateful Dead to K$sha – taste is important, but one thing’s for sure – and I think this is being overlooked.

I’m probably not the only person in the world who prefers to follow music, not musicians.

Anyone – even my friends – foisting their favorite band in my direction is likely to get indifference before interest.

But then, I wasn’t into MySpace either. And that’s who Ping really goes after – not bloggers or Twitter enthusiasts. So maybe I’m just the wrong audience.

And audience is important for music to be appreciated. Am I right?

Notes from #blogchat – Anonymity vs Identity for Corporate Bloggers

July 5, 2010 by Ian

The major question of tonight’s #blogchat is one that keeps coming up all over the place – how should corporate bloggers identify themselves – by name, or should they remain anonymous?

It’s a difficult question to answer. The web both embraces and despises anonymity in equal measure; identity and obfuscation both have their uses, if you’re respectful of them.

Before my notes from #blogchat, I thought I’d share some articles – one from TED, and three of my own.

Prominent notes on anonymity: m00t speaks at TED about anonymity on the web.

My take on anonymity in general: Anonymity on the Web – Privacy, Courage and Anonymity – The Webspace/Realspace Divide in Courage

Now, the notes:

There was a little discussion with @prosperitygal about the differing advantages and challenges of multiple personas on the web versus simply maintaining multiple presences – it’s a challenge either way, but the voice here is the key.

The wide concensus early on was that multiple authors should be identified on company blogs. This sentiment split by the end of the night – some people like @SbuxMel advocated for personality and passion, citing a Starbucks customers blog‘s lack of both, despite its lip service to varied authors. I mentioned there’s a big difference between writing a blog that’s worth subscribing to, versus writing one that’s worth bookmarking. Tricky difference, but an important one.

Others (myself included, mostly) brought up the disadvantages of varied identity on company blogs. If the favored writer goes away, what happens to the blog? Similarly, a personality only helps if you have one; Identifying yourself to an audience only helps if the audience identifies with you, more than just identifying you alone.

What didn’t get much talk, was the actual differences between a company’s voice and a varied personal voice. Identifying authors is one thing; addressing their personalities as compared to the company’s planned marketing voice is quite another. The process is difficult, certainly, and doesn’t get a lot of the right kind of attention.

From Monsanto, @JPlovesCOTTON mentioned Monsanto sends interns to blog at big events, for ground-up experience – which I think is brilliant, both from a guerilla content point of view, and from an experiential point. How else to gain this kind of experience, having your work out there, than just to do it? Segregating official channels from the varied voice, here, is useful and appropriate. Here’s the blog JP mentioned: Beyond the Shows.

One of the last things I noticed was a discussion of challenging your audience. I agree with this – but how to define challenge? Is it bringing direct calls to action? Inviting discussion? Challenging an assumption? How a company does this speaks volumes about its culture. However, there’s no silver bullet for challenge. What’s appropriate for a pharmaceutical company is not the same for a farmer.

The overwhelming argument I need to bring up is that identity of company bloggers isn’t the core issue; how a company approaches blogs is. It’s not what, it’s how. The assertions of so many participants were that all bloggers for companies should be identified. I agree, there are benefits to this, but also cautions.

Especially in smaller companies, where blogging isn’t a full time position, identifying a blogger is a mixed bag of snakes. If five web designers blog for a company, and identify their work, what happens when clients begin to request a favourite designer to work on their projects?

Bonus Round: “Blogs are a medium, not a genre!”

Apparently, people are touchy about what they blog. @GeoffLiving opined that blogging was mutually exclusive from writing – I disagree. Blogging is a medium, a method of writing or publishing, not a genre. The same way fantasy fiction is a genre independent of books, movies and so on, short-form opinion writing is not an exclusive product of blog publishing software.

When I mentioned I wasn’t expecting to spark such a kingdom-genus-phylum argument, @elizabethonline called me “the Linneaus of the Net” – I’m not sure whether to be amused, or expect it was a sardonic remark. Either way, funny.

What do you think? How strongly tied should blogging be to identifyable authorship, especially in corporate environments?

Participants List: TweepML #blogchat for July 5th 2010.

Transcript: What The Hashtag transcript for #blogchat, July 5th 2010.

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