In quite possibly the single most shoddy piece of journalism I’ve ever read, The New York Times has been taken on a ride by a few Internet dirt balls. In a piece that ran in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, Mattathias Schwartz examined the phenomena of Internet Trolls, in a story entitled “The Trolls Among Us“. Unfortunately, neither Mr. Schwartz or the copyeditors seem to really know what the definition of an Internet Troll is. Too bad, as its…
Traffic stats – the red headed step child of statistics, damned lies cloaked inside a slathering of untruth and then wrapped in that un-Godliest of file formats, xls and used to bludgeon all that is sane and rational out of your web strategy. This is the stuff that reduces grown webmasters, those mastadonian throwbacks of an earlier tech era, to tears, and enables the airline magazine reading, conference attending execs to think they actually have a handle on what’s happening….
David Churbuck linked to the Ben Worthen story in the WSJ yesterday entitled “Why Most Online Communities Fail“. David points out that a simple typo from a Deloitte powerpoint managed the ruin the story and deflect the discussion from the matter at hand to a moot discussion on percentages. 1. Going out with the claim that 60% of businesses invest over $1 million in online communities thanks to a Deloitte typo that should have stated 6% is not a great…
Yeah, I need some humor today…
Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester has a great post up entitled ” Why Some Don’t Need to Join the Conversation“. The basic premise is that even though social media has been so very hot in the past year or two, actual participation by users remains at a relatively low percentage of overall visitors. To prove my point, let’s start with data: In most markets, (even youth) there are no bars that span 100% for creators. In fact, 18-24 year olds in…
I’ve said it before, but this post especially requires that I state it clearly again: I am a New England Yankee. That means that I possibly have a heightened sense of propriety and generally would consider a lot of things marketing-wise as crossing the line that some of you might not have a problem with. I’m noticing lately that a lot of marketing types are spending a lot of time on micro-blogging tools such as Twitter, FriendFeed (the new darling),…
In what has become an utterly bizarre turn of the tables, NameMedia Inc. has bought Reel-time.com – the site I have been working with since 1995 or 1996 as managing editor, head geek and general do-what-needs-to-be-done guy, is now owned by my current employer. It’s a great thing for Thorne Sparkman, who is now able to repay the investors in the site. David Churbuck (he blogs on this story here) and I had been almost completely disengaged and had no…
Say it ain’t so, Joe! Over the past few weeks, it’s begun to look like Social Networking, the current darling of the conference and consultant set, might have jumped the shark. I personally would peg the exact point where it went careening off track as the day that Waste Management (the guys that probably run your local honey truck) opened their own social networking site. But it goes far beyond that. Earlier this week Om Malik wrote a very interesting…
Regarding my post yesterday about the Implied Responsibility of Comms Providers, two things happened over night that bear mentioning. Twitter again was down for a couple hours starting at 4pm EDT, or so. Users were a lot less charitable in their comments. I really think they’re at stage 2 in the matrix I provided, but I’ve seen the first signs that they’re moving from step 2 to step 3, which is a very bad thing for Twitter. Jeremiah Owyang tweeted…
Okay, I promise to go Twitter free next week, but for now, an interesting observation… Yesterday, Twitter went down for about 3 hours. The general experience provoked a few thoughts. Firstly, I thought of the Twitter addicted, jonesing at their keyboards, hitting refresh endlessly in a forlorn hope the service will return. But then I thought more on the idea of what happens when your communication means becomes a part of peoples lives. I’ve been here before, since the Reel-Time.com…