Erics Tech Blog » social media

Community Participation

eric — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:30:47 +0000

The more I branch out my interests (or skill sets), the more I find myself joining communities. I am a part of Yelp (food/restaurants), StackOverflow (programming questions), Codaset (social coding), Facebook, LinkedIn (professional networking), Disqus (blog comment system), and the list goes on and on for many of my interests. There are lots of communities for almost all imaginable interests. The key thing here is not just that I am a part of these networks or communities that I am interested in, but that I am a contributor.

Being a contributor is important because without people adding something, the communities are roughly useless. What would StackOverflow be without people answering the questions? Where would Yelp be if people didn’t write reviews? Where would Allrecipes be if people didn’t contribute recipes or make suggestions on existing recipes? The short answer is that they would be in the same place as a book store with no books, nice to look at and a great idea, but not much to do once you go in.

This may all seem rather obvious, but it actually isn’t to most people. In fact, most sites offer incentive just to participate. And if you think that audience participation is always easy, try talking to most high school teachers who try to engage students. Yelp has the Yelp Elite for those who write many reviews and are constant contributors. These folks get asked to Yelp functions and invited to events by local businesses to get good write-ups. StackOverflow offers badges and a point system for “street cred” and sitewide abilities or even the possibility of a job if your potential employer wants to see your knowledge base about a particular topic. PerlMonks offers a point system in which you can level up as well. Just as with StackOverflow, the more points you accrue, the more capabilities you have on the site.

In fact, I believe so much in contribution that I even wrote a site just for skydivers to help out other skydivers (since skydiving is one of my many hobbies/passions). Now this isn’t to say that everyone needs to be a contributor everywhere. This isn’t in everyone’s nature. But if you can be a contributor or have something to say (even if you aren’t a regular contributor), then jump in. This is what builds networks, sparks discussions, and generally makes sites more useful. So if you’ve always had that inkling that you wanted to say something, give it a shot and make yourself heard. You never know where just giving your opinion could take you…

Why Idea People Should Twitter

eric — Wed, 27 May 2009 02:51:42 +0000

Let me start off by explaining what I mean by an “Idea Person.” To me, an idea person is someone who just has a knack for thinking of things that would make the world a better place (or at least make things easier for some people). They don’t necessarily need to be a scientist on the order of Albert Einstein, but they should be people who are constantly thinking. Something like, “Wouldn’t it be great if in men’s rooms in bars, there was padding above the urinals so men wouldn’t hit their heads while relieving themselves.”. It’s just an idea.

Quite often, people don’t get those ideas out fast enough and they lose them. It even could be because their minds move so quickly that they forget to jot it down. Enter age of instant gratification. If you have an idea, Tweet it. Of course you could blog about it, but then people may only get it when they read your feed or whenever they get around to checking your blog. But with Twitter, its an almost instantaneous media connection. All it takes is one person who is highly followed in Twitter to retweet your idea(s) and you instantly have high visibility.

Why does this matter? Well I’m glad you asked. Because an idea person may not always have the want or even the means to implement the ideas, but with the connections and viral dispersion of information that Twitter provides, someone somewhere will have the means and may share your desire. Someone may even be able to point out the fact that the project or idea already exists (or is in production). Who knows you might just end up finding a new business partner on Twitter if you follow the right people and the right people follow you.

Social Media Information Propagation

eric — Tue, 12 May 2009 22:37:27 +0000

This morning I read the news story Irish Student Hoaxes World Media With Fake Quote. To summarize the article, an Irish student put a few quotes on Wikipedia on the page of a composer who had recently passed away to see how quickly people would use them. He made up the quotes and they were quickly on the editorial sheets.

The point is that we are all too quickly grabbing information without verifying. Although Wikipedia provides an invaluable service to the online community, it is all to easy to abuse. It seems as though writers have forgotten the scientific part of their career; fact checking. Although I am not a journalist, nor will I ever be, I think that sacrificing fact checking in order to make a deadline may be the wrong approach.

This is just my point from the perspective of Wikipedia. Let’s take this from another social media perspective like Twitter. For example, let’s say that someone wrote on Twitter:

RT @mattcutts Google will no longer honor the rel=”nofollow” aspect of linking

This could cause a pretty big uproar. There will be a massive amount of Tweeting both letting people know that Matt did not say this as well as people blindly retweeting this. Blog entries will show up saying why Google shouldn’t do that. Matt Cutts will likely have to write a blog entry saying he said no such thing. And I am sure all sorts of other hilarity will ensure. The speed of information in this day and age is so fast that misinformation can quickly wreak havoc. This is also a testament to the fact that people are generally more likely to spread negative information than positive information.

And to think all of this could have been avoided by a simple fact check by the first person who did an RT (after the person who made up the quote). And although it would be an interesting social experiment to test such a fact (as above), I think I’ll pass. Just keep in mind, fact checking is not something that should be left by the wayside.

Recent Twitter Related Learning

eric — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:30:50 +0000

I’ve been using Twitter for a few weeks now and am starting to get used to some of the concepts. I have since also been reminded of a little of the RTFM concept mixed with the takes the experts with a grain of salt.

I started out reading some information given by Brent Ozar on his blog. These are 3 articles that kicked me off in the right direction:

That’s when I was reminded by Ryan Maplethat sometimes, depending on the people, those may be the opposite reasons. To be more specific, Ryan won’t follow people if they are consistently tweeting the fact that they have just put up a new blog post. (Although I am guilty of this every so often).

But I think the biggest element of Twitter that has since caught me off guard is the massive amount of information at ones disposal. For instance the yellow pages or wefollow.com can provide you with people to follow based on your interests. I have learned so much about things in my field just by following links that people re-tweet.

So if you are like I was and being a Twitter luddite, you may want to rethink it. I am consistently looking for more ways to make it useful too. So if you have something, let me know.