Social Web

One of the ironies of taking a class about new media technologies is that it is taking something that is inherently an individual activity (browsing and participating in the internet), and making it a group type thing.

This week (and part of next week) we are presenting to the class on a range of topics, picked by each of us a few weeks ago.

What we are discovering, or at least what I am discovering, is that while blogs, wikis, and web technology makes a cool new way to communicate between people across the internet, they don’t do much to the science of presentation.

Blogs are designed to work between individuals sitting at computer screens. So are web sites. It’s difficult to adapt a medium designed specifically to engage on an individual level to become an effective presentation tool.

In other words, web communications work when you want to reach a large number of people on an individual basis. If you want to reach a large number en masse, there are better tools out there.

At the moment I’m working on my “final” class presentation in the new media (blogging) class that I’ve been taking this semester at Oxy. What do I have to present to the class? The business applications of blogging.

I’ve got some work ahead of me, since I need to figure out what bits are important enough to squeeze into fifteen minutes, and once I’ve decided which bits, how to squeeze them.

Due to the fact that our professor seems quite interested in web page presentations, I’m sure there are going to be a bunch of those from other people in the class. I think I’ll try to find an alternate option.

Any ideas?

Over at the Mozilla Labs Blog, which I spotted via Startup Meme, there’s some details on what’s being called “The Coop,” which is a beta project that basically plans to add some social networking-type services to Firefox.

This is a really cool idea.

I remember a while back when I was on my “hey! new browsers!” kick and I downloaded virtually everything capable of displaying a web page I ran into Flock, downloaded the beta, and played around with it a bit. I’m sure that it’s changed for the better over the past year, but I’m willing to bet that this new Firefox project makes them quite nervous.

Flock just didn’t implement things right, when I used it. They had the right idea, but for some reason it was just a weird move to make from using a “standard” browser to using their system. Mostly it was the bookmarks that threw me, if I remember.

But Firefox has a lot to gain from hybridizing the browser with an IM service/social network. I’m not sure that their implementation is going to be right for me, judging by the info that they’ve put up on the blog already, but I’m interested nonetheless.

They talk about using the Facebook shares system to share links via the browser in an IM-like fashion, with a sidebar full of profile pics of your friends. The problem with this is that AIM is better, and everybody is already on AIM. That’s why I rarely use Skype–nobody is on the network (this is a different gripe, bleh).

I think that using the browser as a centralized “profile” from a social networking standpoint is an awesome idea. I’m tired of making profiles on fifty different web services, no matter how much I like them (last.fm is awesome, but do I really need a profile there as well as facebook, myspace, my own site, etc…)

I’ll keep an eye on this project.

I’ll let you read the New York Times explanation, since it’s undoubtedly better than mine, but the upshot is that the Supreme Court decided that–wait for it–the EPA is supposed to regulate our air quality under the Clean Air Act.

Sheesh.

WASHINGTON, April 2 — In one of its most important environmental decisions in years, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate heat-trapping gases in automobile emissions. The court further ruled that the agency could not sidestep its authority to regulate the greenhouse gases that contribute to global climate change unless it could provide a scientific basis for its refusal.

When I think about the changes that happen in language with new technologies, I think about how we “google” things now, or you can “skype” someone, or “mapquest” something. But sometimes there are other types of phrases that slip in unnoticed.

How funny is it, seriously, that cell phones have finally given us a legitimate excuse to say: “Hang on a sec, my pants are exploding.”

It’s always a bad sign when you get to the point where you have so many things to do that you spend an hour or so sitting around not doing any of them.

This happens to me more often than I’d like. I think I need to copy TheFerrett and start really using my phone as a PDA, make sure I check-off the things I need to do on any given day.

Oddly enough, I already makes lists like the ones he’s talking about most days, but I tend to put them up on the white board in my room, where it’s easy for me to do things like scribble in the margins. But carrying it around with me might help me organize myself a little.

You don’t have to be original to be successful. You just have to be faster than 90% of the people out there, and you have to have good execution.

I’m pretty sure this is not an original thought.

I’ve always liked the simplicity of Google’s pages. Way back in the day the Google home page couldn’t get much simpler - logo and a search box.

Then they gave us customizeable home pages, which turned out to be very cool. Then tabs. Now? Themes.

Not sure what I really think about it yet, but it *does* change dynamically with the time of day, which is cool.

I know this happens to everyone who, as I do, compulsively signs up to RSS feeds whenever they’re available. “I’ll read this now,” I think, “because it’s in the place where I go to read things.”

But as my RSS reader has gradually filled up with sites from all over the internet on all kinds of topics, I’ve taken to avoiding it. If I open the reader, then I’ll have to read them! Gah!

Since I’m about two weeks behind on all my feed right now, I just gave up and decided to MARK ALL AS READ. Screw it. I’m not back-reading. Look forward, not into the past ;)

A Wired plug on my Google Homepage caught my attention today: Movies on demand, at the Movies.

The longer, real title “Movie Firms Working on Digital Film System” is far more accurate, but the concept is still something that realistically should have been set up years ago.

[Film studios] are working on a new digital film delivery system that, if successful, could give theater operators the flexibility to put a popular movie on an extra screen as quickly as the demand for it arises. At the same time, theater operators could boot out a surprise stinker and even book in for a day or two an art-house film with a small but devoted audience.

Theaters have had trouble in recent years getting people to actually show up at the screen to watch new movies. Rampant piracy and the advent of affordable home-theater setups, including wide screen TVs, have put a real damper on the allure of going out to the “big screen.”

I remember hearing a figure that said theaters spend an average of $13 in advertising per customer that sits in a chair. That’s not a great ratio. I also probably remembered it wrong, but I think I’m in the right ballpark.

A big step in filling that gap would be the ability to modulate screenings for demand. How many times do theaters screen a movie to one or two people, while they tell dozens that another movie is full?

Even better would be the ability to show any old movie on-the-fly, but I’m not sure how practical that is. In any case, this sounds like a cool system: good for consumers, good for theaters.

Sometimes I don’t really understand the way my mind works, but it amuses me, so I keep it around.

I was working on my screenplay when I noticed that Celtx, the awesome freeware program I use to write, has a little button in the toolbar that looks like a Dr. Mario capsule.

Wouldn’t it be great if it was a Dr. Mario button, and when you clicked on it it launched a game of Dr. Mario? Talk about a great way to deal with writer’s block!

In fact, I can’t really think of a program that wouldn’t benefit from having a Dr. Mario button. Some one go do it!

Several weeks ago I started a series of ten posts explaining some of the fundamentals of good blogging.

You can find last week’s post here.

Tip #3: Write good headlines

Your post titles matter a lot more than you think they do. They’re big and bold and styled to be important, so search engines think they’re important. Which means…they’re important.

A lot of people spend time coming up with clever, gimmicky one-liners for their posts, which is admittedly fun, but you’ll draw a lot more traffic a lot more consistently by being practical. Think about what it is you’re actually writing about, and then, think about how you would go about googling it.

In the ideal situation, your post is answering some sort of question. Make that question the title of the post. That way, the next time someone googles “how do I tie shoelaces,” your post is far more likely to show up.

Absolutely not.

Tuesday night’s Frontline presentation on the news media featured a section on the LA Times, and the current, possibly idiotic, owners of the Times explained that they were trying to make the LA Times a more local paper in order to increase readership.

That’s stupid. The LA Times is in a position halfway between The New York Times and the Who Cares Times. No matter where I live, I will probably subscribe to the Sunday NYTimes just because it’s an iconic, national newspaper. When the World Trade Center went down in 2001, I bought the New York Times issue the next day, because it’s the status symbol paper.

The way newspapers and other old media are going to grow their readership is by broadening their appeal, not narrowing it. Assuming that the LA Times can’t and shouldn’t compete with the NYTimes, the Washington Post, the WSJ, and…USA Today is insulting. It can and it should.

Don’t get me wrong–the LA Times should continue to cover local news, events, weather, high school sports, and everything else that a good local paper covers, but it damn well better not focus on, and I’m slant-quoting from the documentary here, “the things people in Los Angeles care about: Style, Fashion, Hollywood.”

I’m insulted. If I wanted tabloid crap, I’d buy tabloids. I want good journalism, journalism that I can’t get from CNN, The Drudge Report, or even NPR. I’ll buy the LA Times if you make it worth my while. But budget cuts and shallow topics are not the way to do that.

According to Ars Technica, the bill absolutely fails to provide anything useful to consumers:

Yet again, the bill does not appear to deliver on what most observers want: clear protection for making personal use copies of encrypted materials. There is no allowance for consumers to make backups of DVDs, to strip encryption from music purchased online so that it can be played anywhere, or to generally do any of the things that the DMCA made illegal in one fell swoop.

When are media owners going to realize that their content needs to be available everywhere. You can’t lock consumers into specific players or services and expect them to be happy. If I buy a song I want to play it on my iPod, my phone, my computer, and my home stereo.

If I got 60 minutes (viewers are basically 55 and up) as a daily video, commercials and all, that played on my iPod, phone, computer, and TiVo–I’d probably watch it.

The difference is that the younger generation of media consumers (this is me) want to consume media on our own terms: when we want to, where we want to. The first group to figure that out, and monetize it, will be the big big winners.