In the last week of holiday I’ve downloaded and watched most of the TED talks in the “What Makes Us Happy?” theme. Below is one by Daniel Goleman. In it he relates a study conducted at Princeton Theological Seminary indicating that personal acts of Compassion become increasingly unlikely as a person becomes busier. So the more hurried we feel, the less we seem to care for others. ( Link )
It seems to me that many of my peers in Marketing have been busier than ever before in the past year. Certainly I have been. If we want a more fulfilling 2008, we’d better get savvy about how much information spam we’re taking in and putting out,
In the New Year I’ll be writing alot about Attention Age tools and tactics which serve to reduce our processing load. In the meantime: “Mark As Read” all those emails that have backed up while you were on holiday;-)
Here’s to a more conscientious 2008. Happy New Year all!
One of the most interesting lessons of Web2.0 is that even the most open communities need a form of hierarchical governance if they are to continue to serve their members well.
As as any web platform becomes very popular, so it becomes more enticing for people to game it to promote their own interests. If this is allowed to continue then the system can become cluttered and the ordinary user’s experience suffers. So, regrettably, it’s often necessary for someone to decide what is allowed and then kick out people who aren’t playing by the rules.
Here’s a talk by Jason Calcanis at Le Web which I think pretty much explains the importance of curatorship of web communities (with thanks to Charl for the link):
It is also important to clearly state the Terms of Use for any community site. We learned this lesson when Muti.co.za was criticized for the founder’s direct involvement in blocking certain users who were deemed to be spamming the system. Although I believe Neville’s actions helped keep the site useful to it’s users, not having public guidelines may have made it seem like a personal decision taken against certain users. Muti now has clear Terms of Use, and the community is flourishing.
On Tuesday night, a small group of us had the pleasure of having dinner with Joseph Jaffe, one of the world’s top new-marketing bloggers/podcasters. He’s president of Crayon, and wrote the bestselling “Life After the 30 Second Spot“.
During the dinner he wanted to give someone a signed a copy of his just-released book called “Join the Conversation” (which he’d brought to SA for his mom!), but has instead dedicated it to the Cape Town blogging and podcasting community to be passed around.
The inscription says:
“To the wonderful Cape Town community, I’m proud to represent you in the big US of A and I hope this book inspires, motivates and reflects the power of us“.
I’m almost done reading it, so if you’d like to get it next (and you’re in Cape Town) then just write a blog post mentioning the words “Join the Conversation” and then let’s meet for coffee and I’ll pass it on to you:)
One of the cool things about the book is that Chapter 10 was written by a bunch of people interested in the subject using a wiki. Interestingly, if you feel compelled to write more about it, you can become a contributor on the official blog by registering yourself there.
A couple of weeks ago Nic and Matt posted pics and commentary about the world first public screenshots of the Wikia Search project (also picked up by Mashable and TechCrunch) that were recently shown in Johannesburg. Well, now I see that iCommons has released the video of his whole talk (here). I’ve edited it down to a short clip just about the Search project:
In the clip, Jimmy explains that Wikia is developing a freely licensed search engine, using open source software, to compete directly with Yahoo, Google and all the big search players. It Aims to match or exceed the quality of the major search engines
He also makes a strong “political statement” that it’s not healthy that so much power is in the hands of a few search companies who are secretive about how the information is ranked (other’s think so too).
Lastly, he showed screenshots of the Facebook-like contributor interface, dubbed by others as his “Socialpedia”.
I'm a Digital Media and Marketing educator based in Cape Town, South Africa.
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