For your final blog post, please predict, based on what you’ve learned and what your *imagination* says, what you think will be key to winning the 2012 election online.

I don’t know where social media will be 2012.  Mobile technology and Smartphone will likely make a huge processing leap and will likely play a much greater role.  I can see how augmented reality SRengine might be helpful in the field if combined with the face recognition technology of a platform like Flickr.   The campaigns themselves will likely place online and tech higher up the campaign hierarchy.  Governor Pawlenty’s first hires for a possible run wasn’t a top-tier political strategist but online campaign experts.  Garrett’s piece in Infonomics and Mike’s work through Edelman also both called to attention that social media tools are tools not a strategy.  Finally, the candidate’s themselves will have to not only be comfortable with a media environment influenced by social media, but they will have to thrive in it as President Obama did in 2008.

From the Book: "Obama's Blackberry"

The social media component of both President Obama’s reelection and his challenger will have to maintain (Obama) or establish (his opponent) trust with the user/voter.

First: I think that based on the impressive online, grassroots, contributor network that President Obama amassed in the 2008, it will be difficult, though not impossible for a Republican candidate to win the 2012 Presidential election.  Call it Metcalfe’s Law for politics, but while this network might not have the surge of passion of 2008, it is still there and as it grow steadily larger, it will be hard for a challenger to catch up.  Governor Palin has 3 million Facebook friends to President Obama’s seven million.  Could she overcome him? Also despite what Zephyr Teachout predicted, Organizing For America is still going strong and recently set its sites on Governor Palin.

This is not to say that President Obama’s reelection campaign will be able to just dust off the magic playbook and run the same type of outsider, grassroots campaign that proved so successful against to political brands (Clinton & McCain).  President Obama can’t run on ‘change’ or ‘outside the beltway’ as now, he is part of the establishment.  Also, 2008 was unique in that it was the first open campaign since 1920, where there wasn’t an incumbant or Vice-President running. And while I think it is unlikely that ‘progressives,’ will shoot themselves in the foot and push for a primary challenger, in the three years before the first ballot in Iowa, President Obama is going to have do more than perpetually and eloquently articulating his message and get something done.

Last year when I started a similar social media class with Garrett Graff (a class which I later withdrew from to join the campaign), he mentioned one thing that stuck out in my mind.  Then Senator Obama, like Governor Dean, had to take the grassroots social media approach because the establishment angle was both already filled (Sen. Clinton) and wouldn’t fit his political narrative.  In David Ploufe’s recent book, The Audacity to Win, he acknowledges as much that the traditional constituencies were already carved out by Senator Clinton (party faithful) and Senator Edwards (political activists).  Ploufe believed that the only way to win Iowa (which was the ball game against the formidable Clinton legacy) was to galvanize a third category of voters (young people, Republicans & Independents, and first-time voters).  Now  those constituencies are President Obama’s as well as young people and some R & I holdouts.  If social media is about ‘conversations,’ who is left to talk to?

A few weeks ago in my grassroots class we were discussing a “weird” case of marketing and how the scarcity factor help them. Of course we were talking about Will it blend? A product that has no traditional advertising. Will it blend?, has a website and many videos on Youtube. The sales of this product are based on pure word of mouth.

But Glorymar missed the most relevent video in the Will it Blend channel that is relevent to our Social media class:

Seth Godin is the self-proclaimed ‘agent of change,’ is a social media thinker who is credited for such memes as: ‘Permission marketing,’ ‘Purple Cow,’ and referring social networks as, ‘Tribes.’   His blog is also on our reading list.  He is like the Ron Popeil of social media to Shirky’s Asimov, in a good way (Comparing Shirky to Asimov may get me in trouble but I can’t think of a more respected futurist, comment if you can).  To have Godin actually participate in the Will it Blend viral marketing campaign is like Wright Brothers punking people in hand-gliders.  I am admittedly late to the weird addictive and must see things on the web, so thank you Glorymar for bringing me up to speed in the things that distract us.

[CAUTION-This post deals with a personal loss and may be considered macabre to some]

My mom passed away suddenly two-weeks ago.  This post doesn’t begin to articulate those feelings, nor will it live up to her incredible life.  She was devote Hindu and in Hinduism, traditionally there 13 days of mourning while her soul takes the cyclical journal to the afterlife.  On the 14th day and for another 26 days, the family is to mourn.  I still don’t quite know if I believe in reincarnation, but the notion that you are reborn and made flesh again has been in some New Age circles appropriated as a good thing or the transmigration of the soul, which it is not (not in Hindu or Buddhist tradition anyway).  The funeral rites are to prepare the soul for the journey of enlightment, breaking free from the wheel of life (picture above).

The experience of a traditional Hindu funeral rites (Antiyesti)  was quite public, and something that was both enlightening and cathartic.  I had never been to or participated in Hindu funeral rites, and while doing one in the small rural town of Clarion (the only funeral home in the area that did cremation) was surreal (the cremation furnace was in what looked like a shabby garage),  the ritual while new to me, seemed by design, a means necessary to create a level of detachment from grieving and the physical vessel as a means of providing closure.  Whether these rites represent the high acts for divine passage, I don’t know.

I learned later that my mother’s sari was red because an unmarried woman or a woman whose husband is still alive wears either red or yellow.  If the woman is a widow, she wears white.  I learned that each Hindu service varies based on the specifics of the person’s life (how many children, the gender of the children, their age, and the circumstances of their caste and of their passing).  The sons carry on the tradition of Shradh.  I learned that traditionally, the body is entirely covered in colorful flowers from a time when cremation were open fires.  I know describing this will sound strange and grim to some.  It was strange to me.  And yet I can no more pass judgement on rituals of one religion (communal wafers and wine) over another (ghee and rose water).  Every culture says good-bye a little differently.  This was the good-bye she wanted, and it felt right to me.

I miss my mom. She was a bright and beautiful, strong-willed woman whose name was Sanskrit for ‘Smile.’ She touched the lives of everyone she encountered.  She was a painter, a doctor, and accountant, and a business woman. She had a great laugh and we all competed to get it out of her.  She had a great smile.   Good bye, momma.

What I learned from my experience editing a Wikipedia entry:

1. The standard form of book entries varied: Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, and Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class; were all outlined a little differently.

2. For as often as the above books are referenced, only Friedman’s had an extensive entry and Florida’s book was just a stub.

3. Neutral Point of View (NPOV) is easier said than done.  Most of the time I spent was getting acquainted with how other collaborators wrote about an author’s view-point.

4. There is a real opportunity within these social and cultural works to start a dialogue that isn’t happening.  Shirky has a few noncontroversial critiques that in my opinion make valid points despite in one case affirming a the restrictions placed on institutional knowledge.

5.  Wikipedia taught me the value of a good link.  I shied away from blog posts despite one of the most cogent arguments coming from a traditional print author turn blogger, Tom Slee.  His argument of the two voices of Here Comes Everybody (Shirky- is the, ‘perceptive and creative interpreter of the ways that digital technology is changing society AND ‘Clay-the ‘is a techno-enthusiast and an inveterate story-teller) articulates my own unformulated issues with the book.  The irony of Wikipedia, is that a user-generated post like that of Slee’s may not be authoritarian enough because it lacks the formal institutional backing that Wikipedia is the antithesis of.

I enjoyed working on the entry mostly because I appreciated the source material, have nothing to gain from it, and would be willing to defend it should it get deleted.  It cost me a little (maybe more than a little) time, I am curious to see if anyone will add to the post, and after a little tinkering, I got the hang of formatting the entry.   The experience was the kind of ‘acceptable bargain,’ Shirky writes about.

One reason many of the stories in this book seem to be populated with young people is that those of us born before 1980 remember a time before any tools supported group communications well. For us, no matter how deeply we immerse ourselves in a new technology, it will always have a certain provisional quality.  -Shirky

That is closely the vantage point I am at: the doubting user who doesn’t see online status updates as a birthright.

In researching for a future Wikipedia post, I came across a critic of Google and Wikipedia that doesn’t strike the same cord as anti-Wiki or anti-Google crowd, I’ve come across.  Tara Brabazon doesn’t take the kind of evil empire approach that makes mountains out of molehills but she does take a exception to Google and Wikipedia becoming the default position for young scholars in-training and particularly on Clay Shirky’s book regarding accessibility and, ‘his assumption that “we” can learn about technology from technology.’  She is no anti-social media demogogue.  Her credentials include: Professor of Media at the University of Brighton, United Kingdom, Visiting Professor at Edge Hill’s SOLSTICE CETL, Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA), Director of the Popular Culture Collective and Programme Leader of the Master of Arts in Creative Media.

Below is video of Brabazon talking about her recent book: The University of Google

From Product Description

Information is no longer for social good, but for sale.Tara Brabazon argues that this information fetish has been profoundly damaging to our learning institutions and to the ambitions of our students and educators. In “The University of Google”, she projects a defiant and passionate vision of education as a pathway to renewal, where research is based on searching and students are on a journey through knowledge, rather than consumers in the shopping centre of cheap ideas.Angry, humorous and practical in equal measure, “The University of Google” is based on real teaching experience and on years of engaged and sometimes exasperated reflection on it.

So not anti-social media, just against social media technology replacing the role of teachers.  Her critique of Here Comes Everybody is something that I’ve thought about but have never written about here.

They are shielded through the flawed assumption that if more “people” (and as a visitor to Second Life, I use this word advisedly …) are involved in doing “something” then it becomes important. When we were at high school, this was called mob rule. Now it is called social networking.  . . Older citizens, the poor, the illiterate and the socially excluded are invisible in Shirky’s “everybody”. Once more, the US, and occasionally the UK, is “the world” in the world wide web. The hypothesis is clear: the internet/web/Web 2.0 changed “everything”. The question remains: for whom?

I think she makes some valid points, and merely to assume that those indirectly affected by social media are some how a part of it (as a sole commenter of the post does), is in my opinion careless.  If information is power, and access to information is necessary to gain power, inaccess is connected to powerlessness.  The irony of this is that I was ready to buy up one of 10 books by Mrs. Brabazon, but found that they were too expensive for me to purchase.  I understand that a writer has got to eat, but does that mean that the price of admission is more risotto than rice-A-roni?

Should we trust Wikipedia or an expert-led encyclopedia more? How could Wikipedia be better set-up to better provide accuracy? Should it be open to everyone or just verified “experts”?

I think the potential benefits of the long tail, the limitless space by which to accumulate information, and the organic nature of Wikipedia make it formidable resource for storing and gathering information.  But should we trust Wikipedia over an expert-led encyclopedia like the standard-bearer, Britannica? Should students be allowed to use Wikipedia as a primary source for their papers? Is the potential of the tragedy of the commons too big a cross to bear for the sake of disseminating information?   Is anonymous posting on Wikipedia a gateway to misrepresentation? Finally, is there reason to believe that there may be an inadvertent bias toward white, European-descendent males? Probably, no, no, not quite, and not sure.

On the issue of trust, I favor timeliness over institutions.  I will admit that like newspapers and some books, Wikipedia can be prone to errors, but as  Nature magazine found, so could Encyclopedia Britannica. I would venture to guess that particularly for more popular articles at least, Wikipedia has not only the ability to correct them, but have anyone come in and make the correction themselves.  The group monitoring that each category undergoes ensures that there isn’t a kind of stop the presses moment or worse an acceptance of the error after its too late to recall them (something that may occur with a print reference).  So why can’t students use Wikipedia as an original source?

My belief is that information is most constructive when it is static.  Wikipedia is a great resource for general timely overviews, but when formulating an idea, static information provides the sturdiest foundation for critical thinking. This can be particularly important when it comes to the descent by a minority view.  Even if this minority viewpoint is not accepted as correct, having the ‘mistakes,’ ‘visible,’ means that other can learn from it.  Using Wikipedia as the primary or sole source would be akin to believing that the first item that comes up from every term you type in a search engine will be exactly the item you need.  The act of rejecting a premise is as important as accepting one.

The story of John Seigenthaler is that often cited cautionary tale of the limits of Wikipedia and additional stories of the possible M15 mole SlimVirgin, EssJay, and Vandalism on Wikipedia Watch, if true, represents a disturbing vulnerability to Wikipedia’s open approach.  That said, the Britannica makes mistakes a 12-year old can find, textbooks can tell half truths or outright lies, ‘journalists‘ can make up stories out of thin air.  Wikipedia has demonstrated a willingness to refine their process to mitigate the possibility of the tragedy of the commons just as Britannica, modern textbooks, and MSM eventually corrected their own vulnerabilities.  The advent of WikiScanner, also goes a long way toward mitigating ‘foul play’ on the playground of the ‘people’s encyclopedia,’ while many textbooks have articles without attribution and newspapers are still allowed to print articles with, ‘sources close to . . .’

The last question was first brought to my attention at Antonella Weyler’s post last week about the relative homogeneity of Wikipedia authors.

If so, does the fact that the 83% of contributors are men, mostly white, put Wikipedia’s “representativeness” in check? Who is expressing the knowledge and experiences of the ones who have no access to internet: 93% of the population in African, 80% in Asia, 75% in the Middle East, and 70% in Latin and Caribbean American? Is Wikipedia articles biased by a limited perspective?

This might simply be an access issue but again, the over-representation of white mostly male techno-class isn’t unusual to the web generally but the same argument can be true for the gender inequity of collage professors or racial equity in media.

When it comes down to it, many of the issues with Wikipedia seem to be issues of scale and access.  If it were possible for Britannica to have over 32,000 (as one report has it for Wikipedia) contributors to their English language version, would people be criticizing them too? If Britannica could manufacture and distribute its volumes for free, would people criticize that Britannica is too accessible?

Scarcity creates a level of urgency that when it hits, it soars. The particular challenge of typing words on a manual typewriter and their place on the physical page means that one poor choice effects the rest of the page.  This creates a strong filter for mediocre work (both leaving the X’d in mark of the mistake or even whiteout don’t erase the mistakes only covers them like mistakes in our own lives).   Our mistakes offline usually leave a permanent mark somewhere, even when well-hidden, and while holding on to them is not good, forgeting and/or never learning from them is how we evolve.  In the world of crowdsourcing, your mistakes are often pointed out by someone else, but often become little digital cautionary tales for others, leading to potentially a strong work in aggregate. My question is, does it make the individual writer better when the pressure is off on making mistakes.   If anyone comes across anything along these lines, let me know.  Thanks.  I hope to pull something together in the next few days.

AND

I don’t know if I am following protocol here but I wanted to post on some other classmates blog post from each week’s assignments (this week crowdsourcing)  to make my list of what I am looking for in a blog and what makes me want to linger on a site (visual, content)? I am trying to practice the below approach but don’t always hit the mark.

1. Lead with clever or new: I have a short attention span and get bored easily. This week’s posts by Angie and Antonella’s brought something to the table that I hadn’t thought about: Angie’s recent post on Girliegirl1965 brought the new technology (crowdsourcing) to the traditional activity of practicing faith.  I don’t know if it was her intent but it got me thinking about how the church has long been a place of belief, relationships and sometimes gossip, and how crowdsourcing is very similar. Antonella fed my quiet distrust of homogeny with In Wikipedia we trust. Should we? My biggest beaf (and likely misstep) with the rise of social media is that the demographics of the techonocratic class skews largely white and male (or at least it feels that way).  This doesn’t necessarily mean that wikipedia and the like are biased.  But I think race or identifying with a particular race does determine context and perspective.  I don’t think it can be avoided but I also don’t think it should be taken for granted.

What I learned from Angie and Antonella: DON’T BURY THE LEAD.  One of the ways good blogs are like good writing is that though writing blogs is often more free form,  the best part of the blog can often come at the end of the post.  If it takes reworking the beginning and putting the juiciest links (with the cleverest anchor text) at the top, do it.

]]> http://mediaindigest.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/upcoming-post-and-thought-on-what-makes-a-good-blog-rule-1/feed/ 0 nishsuvarnakar http://mediaindigest.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/response8-crowdsourcing-vs-groupthink-or-looking-for-20-or-why-halfbackery-com-gets-it-right/ http://mediaindigest.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/response8-crowdsourcing-vs-groupthink-or-looking-for-20-or-why-halfbackery-com-gets-it-right/#comments Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:31:12 +0000 nishsuvarnakar http://mediaindigest.wordpress.com/?p=67 Continue reading →]]> My questions for evaluating crowdsourcing sites:

1. Does it follow Clay Shirky’s Principle of Promise, Tool, Bargain?

2. Who can actually join this ‘crowd’ or How easy is it to join the crowd?

3. Would I want to join this ‘crowd’?

4. Can I be myself and still be a part of the crowd (avoid groupthink)?

Josh Catone has even come up with rules (bottom of post) for successful crowdsourcing  on a ReadWriteWeb post from 2007 that were helpful but for me the key is whether a particular activity meets my personal sustained engagement threshold (me be the baromater for what any yahoo would do).  I poked around the crowdsourcing directory and a few other listings for different types of crowdsourcing sites (both ones clearly with marketing in mind or others that were meant for amusement-hat tip to classmate).  I admit the ones that are still going strong are genuinely neat.  Some were a little creepy like Perverted-Justice, some seem uncomfortably corporate like YourEncore and some were silly like Halfbackery.  What I couldn’t find was a crowd that is something more than momentarily interesting.  I look at something like Threadless and I am certainly impressed with the collective intelligence and it follows Catone’s rules.  I can’t confirm that Threadless follows the 80/20 rule, but I think I’m definitely in the 80.  Where I think sites fall a little short is when the psychological lift of viewing let alone engaging is higher than any red-blooded lurker is willing to go.  Threadless averages 5.6 pageviews a visitor based on Alexa.

If I had to pick one site that I keep coming back to it’s Halfbackery. I enjoy the mix of funny posts like the tumbleweed dispensor and creative like the phobia alarm clock and appreciate that its intent isn’t to be a repository for the next big idea like Cambrian House or bzzagent, but really just a place to share weird ideas.

From What the halfbakery isn’t

The site is also not a resource to help people guide their inventions from conception to completion. This is the place where you post the things you’re not going to be working on – because you can’t be bothered, or you don’t know how to, or because it’s not such a stellar idea after all.

The site is also not a marketplace where owners of patents find interested developers. Such sites exist (some are listed under links), but this isn’t one of them.

And finally, sending me email isn’t a good way of contacting the Dunkin’ Donuts corporation (but clicking on the preceding link is).

Any site that keeps my short-attention span for more than two pages, is about half-way to being a success in my book.  Halfbakery is simple enough a concept and its interface is ridiculously self-explanatory. The titles of the intentions draw you in for at least 3-5 inventions and the comments can be informative and are generally funny but the format is such that people don’t fall into the Borg mentality and stupid or brilliant (favoring stupid) your idea is given a fair shake from the group.   This is a fun group of 20% and I am about 50% sure that if I come up with something off-the wall crazy, I would post it on this site.

Links that I found interesting that I couldn’t fit into this post:

Dumbness of Crowds by Kathy Sierra

Top 100 Digg users control 56% of homepage content -80/20 Rule

Digital Maoism-Jaron Lanier