I Will Not Die

I’m a huge proponent of this little piece of advice: write what you know.

But I’m going to break that rule, hence my calling myself a "noob." What do I know? I know about human tragedy, perseverance in the face of impossible odds, greeting life each morning with a vengeance unseen since the days of Ancient Greece, and about the poorly understood and fully enigmatic practice of poetic prose. That and I know a lot about ice cream.

However, there’s plenty I don’t know. For starters, one of my nagging failures has always been social media. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that when it comes to social media, I’m just plain retarded.

Why social media has always been difficult for me

I could actually probably publish a whole blog on the problems of social media, but I’ll try to summarize it into a short section. For me, the primary problem has been twofold:

1. It takes too much time, and
2. There’s too much distilling necessary in order to make it valuable (which leads back to #1)

Keep in mind that this is all just my narrow opinion. But when I’ve tried to use social media, I’ve always found it difficult to actually do much with it.

I’m open to the possibility that it’s because I go about it the wrong way, but I usually end up doing stuff like this:

• Go to Digg, Reddit, or other social media sites
• Examine the popular articles
• See almost always only these types of articles: politics, humor, technology
• Find something that might be interesting
• Read the article
• Discover that even though it’s popular, it’s not something I really like
• Read pages of rude comments made by highly cynical users
• Read pages of rude comments responding to the rude comments
• See that I’ve wasted two hours that I could have spent doing something much more valuable
• Realize that I’ve only visited one such social media site
• Give up
• Go eat ice cream
• Go to bed

In other words, I end up sifting through a bunch of junk. When I do find something I really like, I find out it has four Diggs, is completely buried, and I feel like there’s just no point to actually giving it a vote. Ideally, a feature of these sites I could use to enhance my experience would be to find people who have-like minded views, then associate with them through the site, see what they’re into, and read what they like and share things that I like. But at the rate I can find people I really like on these sites, I could spend a year trying to develop the right kind of group and that would still be on just one damned site.

A huge obstacle of mine is time. I only have a few short hours during the evenings to write articles, and read articles on the blogs I enjoy reading. My focus has been devoted to building my blog and contributing to the blogs I like. I don’t have much time for anything besides that.

But then I was rescued

Then friendfeed came and saved my soul. I’m so retarded about social media that I had only vaguely heard about it until I read this article on Steve’s blog. It piqued my interest. Thanks Steve, I owe you one. I also received some great insights from a long talk I had with a friend of mine. So I signed up.

Oh. My. God.

I love it. My initial interpretation can best be described by this analogy: Friendfeed is to social media as a feed reader is to blogs.

Only better, because I can stalk people.

Here’s why I like it:

• I can see pretty much all forms of social media in one place
• I can interact with the people I’ve met easily by commenting directly on the site
• I can find people I like very easily by seeing a variety of things they are doing, so I can get a fuller sample of their tastes
• No one is rude. I’m not sure how this is possible, given my experiences with the individual social media sites, but so far it’s true. It’s possibly because it’s much more personal. For instance, if you’re rude, everyone will know where to find you, your Flickr account, you name it
• I can sort popular items and find out what’s been busy, on any site including Digg, Reddit, Flikr, everything
• I don’t spend so much damned time sifting. I can quickly browse and even search for things I like
• It’s reverse-engineered. Instead of going to a site, looking for someone I like, then going to another site and repeating the process, I can find people I like directly and go to their profiles on social media sites the back way. In other words, friendfeed lets me start with the people, then go to good content, rather than starting from the lousy content and looking for good people

Possible disadvantages

Some people have argued that it could be adding to the noise of the Internet by aggregating so much stuff all in one place. While it is a little overwhelming to see so much going on all at once, the amount of time I’ve saved looking for interesting social media content has more than made up for it so far. I’ll keep up with it and post a follow up on friendfeed soon. If you’d like to subscribe to my friendfeed, you can go here: http://friendfeed.com/dereck

My prediction

I think the site is so cool that I’m going to make a bold prediction: I think friendfeed will have an Alexa rank of less than 3,000 by year’s end.

Dereck :: Jul.31.2008 :: Uncategorized :: 7 Comments »

Maybe I’m too new of a face in the blogosphere right now to be shaking my finger at an Internet icon like Seth Godin, but jeez. This might just be justified. It wasn’t long ago (yesterday) that I was completely enamored with Seth Godin. And don’t get me wrong, I still completely admire the guy. In a week, I’ll be over it and will be back to reading and enjoying everything he has to share with us. The tribe he invites people to join by buying his book just comes across as pompous and elitist to me. Which is, ironically, what he wants. That said, I’d like to invite each of you to join a new tribe; the temporarily pissed at Seth Godin tribe. This one’s free:

Are you in the tribe?

I’d like to invite you to join a members-only tribe. A tribe for people with raised eyebrows, concerned consciences and for those focused on wondering just how far marketing has to go these days.

This online community will live on all the sites we have, and will feature blogs, forums, social networking, comments, photos, videos and no, there won’t be a job board. And it’s by invitation only until whenever we’re not pissed anymore. Spots are not limited and early members get privileges and bragging rights. So will late members.

Members do not need a password and everyone has the privilege of meeting each other, posting thoughts, connecting to big ideas or projects and more. The sites will include excerpts from their authors’ feelings about Godin’s new tribe and if someone wants to create an e-book, let me know. The contents of the tribe’s forums will be posted to the public until the Internet is over, so it’s really the only way to participate until then.

Seth is launching his new book in mid-October, and as usual, is doing something different to take his own advice.

One of the ideas I have is that powerful tribes are open to everyone. The non-exclusivity makes it work. In this case, the non-exclusivity comes from two things:

1. I’m only announcing the Tribe here, and on the entire Internet. (Though it would be great with me if you want invite your friends to join, because your friends are my friends and they’ll probably appreciate an early invite).

2. You have to be committed enough to just read this and spread the word, sight fully seen (in all places for no more than $0), anytime you want. It’s not about selling more books (because this Tribe has nothing to do with a book), of course, it’s about removing all hurdles to get all people in the door.

The mechanics:

1. You can be anywhere in the world, and it’s fine if you’ve already ordered a book (just return it). All you need to do is forward a copy of your own article about this tribe to your friends and other bloggers.
2. You can purchase his book here: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, CEO Read (but I wouldn’t recommend it), Borders or any bookstore that will give you a full refund. Remember, it’s not about selling more books. It’s not. Really. I swear it’s not.
3. Return your copy of his book no later than as soon as possible to wherever you purchased it from. Be sure to include your website address in your article so your friends can help you promote it. This is the Internet, so please include anything you would like. Don’t send your info only to me, but to everyone. You know how to find me if you need anything else.
4. I won’t be doing anything in batches. Membership is not numbered, and low numbers mean little less than high ones. If we get too big a response, I’ll never shut down anything. The servers will simply have to deal with it like they always have.
5. After August 10th, it’s still open. I may decide to re-open the tribe a bit later, but I think that’s just silly because the tribe will really always be open.

Members of the tribe will get a chance to express how they feel about Seth’s tribe, as well as a few other goodies.

Even with just a few people in the pre-beta tribe I’ve built, I can already see how powerful it can be to have a safe, well-lit place on line where all people can connect. I hope you can join us.

Dereck :: Jul.30.2008 :: Uncategorized :: 3 Comments »