Twitter is not a social network, rather it’s a way of life. The more you use Twitter the further it gets into your way of life. It allows you to follow current affairs, geek out about social media and keep in touch with friends that uses the social network. What’s more it’s a network that does not require any specific device. At first it’s a confusing place. Look at the public timeline and it’s a torrent of junk and sifting through it will take hours a day.
I found yet another toy to play with in the form of alerthingy and one question springs to mind. Will this one be able to cope with my stream of actions. It’s an adobe air interface that allows you to keep track of friendfeed. I’ve only started playing with it but it looks like a useful tool for when i’m at home after a day’s work.
A few days ago I was in Paris to meet the Francofous and in the process I passed by La Cantine where they were holding a Videocamp. It’s like a barcamp but rather than talking about radio and podcastng people talked about peer to peer video sharing, citizen journalism and other topics. I filmed a few people presenting what their seminars had been about and finally they’re available via my website.
I’m back from Paris and what you can expect from me this week are a post with two or three short video clips of people exposing what they discussed at Podcamp uk as well as two or three amusing videos from the Paris Seesmic meetup.
Next Saturday I’ll be catching the TGV to Paris to meet with a few friends from the Seesmic community. I had planned to do this for over two months but never got the opportunity due to various events. It’s fun to go to meet people who you know via online social networks because of the friendships and the inspiration they may provide. In London whilst looking for work i took great advantage of all these events, trying to go to as many as possible.
The month is almost over and I’ve got fourty megabytes of streaming left to play with so I’m going to take advantage of that with my mobile phone. Since cities around Switzerland are covered by 3g you may find that I’m using Qik, Bambuser and Flixwagon to stream what I’m doing. Today I actually got Flixwagon to stream live over wifi which is better than i got yesterday and I found that streaming via qik works well on 3g.
[
](http://www.main-vision.com/richard/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/rich95.jpg “Richard and the Nokia N95”)Because three or four, I’ve lost track of how many, live streaming applications for the phone aren’t enough i’ve started to play with flixwagon as well. So far it’s taking some getting used to but I hope that by tomorrow I’ll have learned more. It’s still an alpha and only works with select phones. I could test it from here and now but it’s night time and there are more interesting places from which to play.
Quotably is a new service that allows you to easily follow people’s conversations by typing in their username. It displays the most recent conversations and shows the original post as well as the discussions that have occured as a result. It appears to work by taking the most recent @ reply from one person to another and displaying. Here are a few examples: Warzabidul Jeff Pulver Fred2baro These are examples where you can see a lot of conversation because these users are active in their responses with those following them.
However, many purported Social Media experts are merely engaging in cultural voyeurism at best. They look from afar and roam the perimeters of online societies without ever becoming a true member of any society. This means, they don’t truly understand what, where, or why they’re “participating,†only jumping in because they have something to say and have access to the tools that will carry it into play. This is unfortunately a representation of the greater landscape of Social Media Marketing and it’s time to take a step back and study the sociology of Social Media in order to keep communities intact and unaffected by outsiders.
This Week in Media 85 is an interesting conversation about media news for the past week with a technological slant. This week’s interesting is particularly interesting as it explored the future of television and how people consume media. From the PVR and the ability for people to discuss the content they enjoy to machines that talk to each other they cover many topics. They also discussed computer literacy and whether the youth of today are as computer litterate as previous generations.