- Online Database of Social Media Policies
99 (and growing) policies from a variety of organisations. I haven't dug into this yet but if you're looking to develop a social media policy for your org you might find a good template here. I'd caution that while some are doing this well it's doubtful anyone's getting it completely right. - Newspapers get the kind of communities they deserve » Nieman Journalism Lab
The money quote here is "many newspapers still see comments as some kind of necessary evil: a bone tossed to readers to help drive traffic, but something that produces little else of value." And they wonder why their comments are a cess-pool? - Most comments suck. Discuss
How popular sites deal with comments from their readers is an ongoing debate and one for which there isn't a simple or universal answer, but reading this a thought occurred to me. Maybe conversation simply doesn't scale to these sites. You need some sort of limit or restriction be it numbers or subject or a more nebulous notion of community rules. This might explain why newspapers in particular who are trying to be all things to all people suffer so badly. All people talking about all things is always going to be messy. - A Brief History Of Social Media
I have a small problem with these articles which say "social media is nothing new – we've been doing this since the Internet was created." Yes, it's true that Twitter is directly descended from IRC but it's the mass adoption of Twitter and Facebook that makes it interesting. It's like me saying fanzine culture was the precursor to blogging. Sure it was, but blogging was much more revolutionary because the barriers to entry tumbled. But, that said, it's good to know your history if you want to understand these tools and this is a nice short introduction to that history - The internet society – time to get real
Matthew Taylor of the RSA: "The internet is neither neutral nor inherently liberating. It operates in the context of existing social conventions and power structures. Its impact is real but often subtle and unexpected." I think this is a no-brainer. The internet connects society in different ways – it doesn't in itself fundamentally change society and if it can it's not going to do in in a generation. Society has to change society and we're mostly applying pre-Internet thinking to these tools. But while I agree with the views in this post I think it's only looking at the big stuff – the macro, if you like. It's at a micro level where Internet connectivity gets interesting but that's much harder to generalise about. - What Happens When A Celebrity Links You On Twitter?
Tom Ewing got linked to by the 32nd most followed person on Twitter with 1.5 million people reading his tweets. While he concedes it's a single data point only 0.4% of them clicked through. I thought I'd do a bit of maths on my own account. I have about 1600 followers and when I link to a photo on Twitpic it generally gets 50-70 views. That's around 3-4%. I'd imagine someone with a normal number of followers (50-200) would get a much better percentage. Highly tenuous conclusion – it's all about the relationship between the tweeter and followers.
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