Parents in the silly con valley are idiots. They are in a trillion dollar industry and make billions a year because people want to use the technology they are developing. Think about how different my childhood would have been if we had learned camera work and video editing in art classes rather than painting, pottery and other less interesting art forms. Imagine if as a child I had not watched Cousteau Documentaries.
Once again I was out in the rain walking around a city. Once again I was looking downwards and then up. I was also looking around and navigating through a city I have been to before but only for a meal and on my way to another place. I went there for a blogobar event many months ago. More recently I went through the city on my way to a Via Ferrata near La Chaux De Fond.
From the 1970s to 2007 we had threaded conversations through bulletin boards, forums, groups and other centralising discussion points. For a brief window of about two years conversations became so captivating that people wanted to meet in person as strong friendships were established. By 2009-2010 the threaded and personal conversations between web users was hijacked by “social media” marketers and so the speed of conversation and quality of interactions collapsed. In it’s place hashtags would replace user engagement with quick metrics.
Facebook engagement has declined since farmville distracted people away from conversations and towards mindless interactions with games, the sharing of tabloid content and emotional posts. These changes have had an adverse effect on social networks and the way in which we engage with people. I have noted a shift away from individuals towards following “celebrities” and “thought leaders”. Rather than interacting with 300 people on your timeline, becoming engaged and getting to know people well we have moved to a “yelling to be noticed” model.
I have started to mute news sources that provide us with headlines that tell us how to feel rather than give us information about the content of the article. On Facebook the alternative would be to unfollow people I have met in person, friends. I prefer to mute news sources and get updates from friends. We will see when social media “experts” and headline writers go back to writing headlines that tell us about the content of articles.
The American blogosphere is corrupt. Google Plus is an excellent product. It provides it’s users with an elegant amount of control as to who sees which post and whom it can be shared with. It provides groups and communities. It allows you to create your own circles. In Essence Google Plus is an extraordinarily flexible space where community building should be encouraged. Why does the American Startuposphere and blogosphere hate Google so much?
What makes the situation in Cairo so interesting is the number of media outlets that you can use as sources. From 24 hour news channels like France 24, Al Jazeera, BBC World and others to individual people with mobile phones. For France 24 you have three languages to chose from, with Al Jazeera to you have three languages to chose from. With Sky News you have the choice between Standard definition and High definition.
Remember Jaiku? it’s that site that was compared to twitter and behaved like friendfeed before friendfeed existed. Over the last two days activity has increased on that site as at least twenty people go back to communicating on the site. It’s a throw back to a community that had been quite lively. Online communities are funny in the way they cluster back to a place where they used to be. It’s like a migration but of an electronic kind.
Glympse is a real time location software that allows you to share your location with twitter, facebook, by e-mail or via a number of other social networks. It is simple and intuitive to use. Connect your facebook, twitter and other services with the application. When you are heading to work or to the mountains for a ski trip you can start to share your location in real time. You can set the amount of time that the location is shared.