Given how rapidly magazines are crashing around them, it's not surprising some journalists may act confused, but the recent call to the populace at large by Bizsweek writer Stephen Baker seems more designed to satisfy his boss and new Twitterer John Bryne's desire to make BW all social media-y and transparent than to actually find the best interview subjects to talk about social media with.
The ask--"Who should we profile as a social media maven?"--came with a list o' names that seemed like linkbait central (i,e. link to lots of people and get lots of traffic), but was low in any real critera, suggesting either that Baker, a usually keen journalist, was bowing to a Digg/twitority wisdom of crowds thing (in which case, why does anyone need him?)--or this was a stunt, pure and simple.
Yeah, I'm on the list, and yes, of course I'd like to be interviewed by BizWeek again, especially since I have a new startup that is right in the zone launching in Q1 (and yeah, I am slammed working away) but without Baker telling the planet what his criteria might be, this is a pretty sloppy mess.
Or the basis for an article about the socialable web and what--when you cast your net out--you actually get back. (That piece would be amusing indeed, but isn't there a less crude way to arrive there?)
Hmmmph.(Practicing curmudgeonly skills).
The ask--"Who should we profile as a social media maven?"--came with a list o' names that seemed like linkbait central (i,e. link to lots of people and get lots of traffic), but was low in any real critera, suggesting either that Baker, a usually keen journalist, was bowing to a Digg/twitority wisdom of crowds thing (in which case, why does anyone need him?)--or this was a stunt, pure and simple.
Yeah, I'm on the list, and yes, of course I'd like to be interviewed by BizWeek again, especially since I have a new startup that is right in the zone launching in Q1 (and yeah, I am slammed working away) but without Baker telling the planet what his criteria might be, this is a pretty sloppy mess.
Or the basis for an article about the socialable web and what--when you cast your net out--you actually get back. (That piece would be amusing indeed, but isn't there a less crude way to arrive there?)
Hmmmph.(Practicing curmudgeonly skills).
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The thing that bugs me most about these kinds of efforts goes back to your post the other day about twitority, or general authority and how we rank and find out about people in the social media sphere. Acts like BizWeek's goes on to reinforce the same swirl of folks, and not only is that tiresome for many of us, but it's also killing the gene pool. I wrote a post about the conference-version of this phenomenon here:
http://www.deannazandt.com/2008/06/27/conferences-and-the-shallow-end-of-the-gene-pool/
There is obviously a lot to know about this..
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