Green Tea Ice Cream

• Blip - twitter like music sharing
  Do I realy need another twitter? And a noisy one at that? Possibly.
  (tags: music socialnetworking online twitter Fuzz)

• Delish, a Del.icio.us Client for Mac OS X by Pine Point Software LLC
  This looks intriguing
  (tags: Mac Software Apple del.icio.us)

• On Managing A Community | chrisbrogan.com
  If only Chris had written this a few weeks ago, I could have saved myself the task of writing a new job description for a post we’re recruiting for.
  (tags: community Jobs socialnetworking socialmedia strategy)
• Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody
  “…[S]he stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.” Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken.”
  (tags: media culture society television social interaction)

A series of posts on Nancy White’s blog set me thinking about the role we’re introducing to help deal with the mushrooming quantities of social media related activities around our organization. Nancy writes about the tension between the idea of having a community manager whose job it is to facilitate open-ended discussions and happy accidents (I’m very, very loosely paraphrasing here - in fact, that’s probably nothing like what she originally wrote. So go read the original). Her other posts in this series look at the job description and skill set for such a role in more detail - all stuff I wish I’d had two months ago

It’s something that I’ve been worried about in recruiting for a vacant information role. It was originally a library based role but we’ve re-tooled the job to focus at least 50% of the time around our social media interactions, inside and outside. In fact, a lot of the components and competencies on the job description mirror those on Chris Brogan’s post of a couple of days ago. Their main internal job will be to train everyone to represent us in a social media context - to facilitate everyone else’s (micro-)community building efforts. I really don’t see social media as a technical issue, in terms of embedding it into the organisation as an everyday state of affairs but as one of attitude. The technical side of it (apart from the need to be able to type) can be learned but the core of it is quite literally a different style of life, an inner change of some kind. We make no attempt to regulate interactions with students offline (though the default nature of those interactions is another issue altogether) beyond an expected level of professionalism so why even contemplate regulating online conversations to any greater extent?

Anyway, borderline metaphysics aside, what do I hope for? At a guess, we have fifty or sixty ongoing activities at a time, all potentially overlapping and interrelating. Pull those activities and their owners into a social media context and you’ve got a chance of turning those potential synergies into something actual, meaningful and unpredictable. It’s probably a recipe for complete chaos, though I rather like chaos. Either way, the first step is to make everyone a potential community manager, provided its understood that “manager” operates precisely after Lao Tzu - by not interfering one iota and letting the ten thousand things run where they will.

Meanwhile, Chris’s post has bought a whole load more of “community manager” recruitment activity out of the woodwork, most of which seems to suggest that we’re more or less on the right track.

• Carbonite - unlimited Online Backup
  Via Bill Ives and Portals and KM. No Mac version yet but at $50 a year for unlimited storage, it’s an interesting deal.
  (tags: storage backup Enterprise2.0)

• A social media marketing campaign deconstructed | Internet Marketing News and Blog | E-consultancy.com
  This whole area continues to fascinate me, especially since we’re spending measurable amounts of money on an admittedly (at times) tenuous proposition (though we do have some empirical research that suggests our efforts are worthwhile).
  (tags: campaign marketing socialmedia ROI)
• Is writing this blog killing me? | Newsblog | Guardian Unlimited
  Gulp. Courtesy Yang-May Ooi at http://www.zenguide.co.uk/
  (tags: addiction blogging health)

• Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: Social Media ROI Case Study Slam Panel at 08NTC: Carie Lewis, Human Society
  There’s a lot we can learn from this.
  (tags: socialmedia YouTube marketing)

Reading that Pagesflakes had been bought set me thinking as to why I don’t seem to be using my Netvibes page anymore.  Seems to come down to tabbed browsing and the wonders of the Ctrl-PgDn/PgUp shortcut to navigate them on Firefox.  If Gmail/Remember the Milk, Reader, Facebook and WordPress are all a key-stroke away, do I really want to mess around with summaries?  Especially with Reader?

• Museum 2.0: How Much Time Does Web 2.0 Take?
  An issue I’m constantly pestered about.
  (tags: blog internet museums cost moderating)

Well, not exactly forget but stumbling across The Student Room sent me to Big Boards, a site tracking forum activity.  The Student Room does very respectably, enough to make me sit up and take notice but the number one board they track is Gaia Online, a role playing and anime forum with over 12 million members and 13 billion postings. It’s not the biggest social network in the world (LinkedIn, for example, has 17 million members) but that surely makes it one of the more active.

Kind of puts Ning into perspective, doesn’t it?

So why, when the likes of me talk about social networking, are forums so often left out of the conversation?  Is it because they feel like transistors to Web 2.0’s silicon?  Because forums are inevitably trees rather than rhizomes?  Or because they’re difficult to navigate, demand considerable investments of time and energy and oblige you to go out and work for your content and connections whilst the average self-styled social network simply drops them in your lap?  There’s certainly an exponentially smaller level of technical investment involved in getting one up and running, mind you.

Hmm.  Perhaps forums are more like a village square or market place where anyone can listen in to a conversation (is Twitter simply a massive unthreaded forum?) and perhaps that’s the attraction for  a demographic like The Student Room.  Of course, the same could be said of online communities like Club Penguin or Second Life but there’s nothing quite as instantaneous as low-end tech.  The most active and invaluable forums, come to think of it, are found wherever geeks congregate, be that Slashdot (still the model for forum management) and Ars Technica.

One thing I remember (from helping set up the original BBC Online forums with Lizzie Jackson, who did most of the hard work, incidentally) is that successful forums are expensive if you need to moderate them - unless you can get your users to moderate them for you.  But that’s another story (more detail from Laurel Papworth here).

(And I suppose if a forum is a village square, a blog is a bloke on a soapbox shouting randomly at passers-by.)