Some observations about social media..and my own shifting use of it, right now.Back in the day, say 2005, blogging was the main way to do the following:

• make your voice heard
• be part of a community
• establishe a reputation for your ideas
• influence thought and community

Needless to say, in those days I loved the blogosphere and participated avidly in my corner(s) of it.

Fast forward 3 years and we have a much more bifurcated set of ways to communicate:

• twitter--a great community tool--chatter with people you know and feel affinity with; be part of a virtual community
• friendfeed-post your lifestream links, influence others through comments on their links, and be part of a community
• blogging--all the of the above, but at a slower pace
• tubmlr--all of the above, only visual
• seesmic and 12seconds: join a visual video community

Point here is that I find myself using twitter to maintain community, blogging to share ideas and influence thought, and friendfeed for reputation (in that I take pride in the links I post and the comments I make on others' streams).

What is interesting about all this is that the only one of these tools that is bi-directional for real--ie there is the ability to communicate in something more closely resembling real time--is twitter. (Thought video comments on seesmic are great). 

Everything else is a publish and subscribe model, which I think is becoming less powerful as watching and commenting on lifestreams (the friendfeed model, again) becomes a way to  mimic being bidirectional (and as friendfeed keeps speeding up their crawlers, may truly become bi-directional, which would be amazing)



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"On Saturday, Mr. Stelter's wonderful article in The New York Times on how people were working around the blackout on the Olympic ceremony began as a post on Twitter seeking consumer experiences, then jumped onto his blog, TV Decoder, caught the attention of editors who wanted it expanded for the newspaper and ended up on Page One, jammed with insight and with plenty of examples from real human experience.

How much more powerful is that networked intelligence than a reporter with a phone, a Rolodex and the space between his or her ears?"

--David Carr, writing in the NYTimes on news as a viral and networked process, with the open ceremonies of the Olympics as his example.

Susan sez: This is a good article, because it reflects the crowd-sourcing that makes social networks and the Net so useful to so many people and attaches it to the venerable traditions of news-gathering in a way print people (are there any left?) can relate to.