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Posts Tagged ‘DIGG’
Creating social media versus social networking
An interesting comparison and contrast with two recently added time-sink temptations while online.
As of a few weeks ago, you can submit news stories to the new WriterRiver.com, a digg clone site with the clever Sink or Float capability on news stories, built by Tom Johnson who writes the IdRatherBeWriting blog. A few months ago, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler blogger, started TheContentWrangler.Ning.com, where you can build a profile for yourself and interact with other members via discussions and postings.
So, all technical writers, technical communicators, information designers and architects and other such content wranglers: which online activities do we prefer? Are we networking online or creating online media?
In the last six months or so, have seen shift in thinking towards social networking as a preferential term rather than the phrase social media. I think that this change in the terminology is a result of the constant comparisons of old media versus new media, such as comparing printed newspapers to online blogs. But, for a set of future thinkers, blogs and blogging feel like old news, especially to the leading web design people. So perhaps this crowd is the one preferring the term social networking. I know I heard social networking much more often than social media at SXSW Interactive 2008.
It’s interesting, though, in contrast, Danah Boyd points out in a November 2007 O’Reilly Network interview, “I don’t call them social networking sites because most users aren’t “networking” per say [sic]. They are modeling and maintaining their pre-existing social networks.”
So this rambling brings me to our two new social sites. In the case of TheContentWrangler.Ning.com, people who are perhaps not natural networkers won’t “get” the site right away.
For WriterRiver.com, I’m not sure if non-natural networkers will “get” the site right away either, but there’s also a little bit of journalist enthusiasm and “scooping” a story that will help you “get” the usefulness and entertainment out of the site.
For anyone who has read The Tipping Point, I ask this (and I’ve mentioned this to Gordon McLean so I hope he gives his take as well): are people who tend to be technical writers naturally Connectors or naturally Mavens?
Connectors are the people who “link us up with the world … people with a special gift for bringing the world together.”
Mavens are “information specialists”, or “people we rely upon to connect us with new information.”
With all this in mind, I offer my personal take on how I can use each site.
How I use WriterRiver.com: If I like a story, and think it’s relevant to writers, I copy the URL, then go to WriterRiver.com and enter the URL along with a brief description of the story. Others can come read the story and my summary and “float” it further up the river. I check in on it every few days to gain new insights or see the freshest stories. I also see how far up river my submissions have gone, and check on any comments, especially from writers I know through online communications and in real life.
How I use TheContentWrangler.Ning site: I built a Profile page with my blog feed as content, then I started or joined groups that I think would give me connections to mind power that I wouldn’t already have through some of my other connections. I set notifications only to email me on specific discussions that I started or want to watch, and I pop by every week or so to see what’s going on with discussions, the blog entries on the front page, and other media.
Please, let me know if you find this helpful, or if you have suggestions for your own uses that are different from mine.
Watching web goings-on live with visualizations
I have a fascination with the “live” sites where you can visualize what’s going on across an entire site such as Twitter, Flickr, Digg, or Del.icio.us. It appears to be mostly for entertainment value, although I’m sure that researchers and journalists have these toolkits in their toolbelt when they need a fresh take on a story. I find it also sparks creative ideas or sends you along paths you never would have found otherwise.
Here are some of my favorites to watch. Check out the screenshots for a preview of what awaits behind the link. The map-based visualizations are enabled by Google Maps geo-developers, and they recently had a conferenced named “Where 2.0″ (great name).
- Twittervision - I managed to capture one from Austin, TX, while I too was hiding from the thunderstorms that were coming through. Since there’s often a rate of over 20 Twitters in the time period that this algorithm uses, I only tried a few times to capture one of my own twits. This is the 3D version with a glowing globe that spins around and then marks each twit. Very cool.
- Flickrvision - This is the classic view of the flat world map. This particular picture is of a chipmunk and I apologize for the poor screenshot quality but the layout that I’m confined to won’t like even this size of graphics, so I encourage you to click the Flickrvision link and see it for yourself.
- LiveMarks - This visualization lets you watch the bookmarks as they’re being added by all users of del.icio.us. One of the neatest visualizations that I believe was popularized by del.icio.us is tag clouds.
- Digg’s API contest winners for visualizations - This screen shows Digg Charts, which isn’t nearly as fun as the winner, Digg City, but it looks so much like a dashboard I had to include it. BSM Dashboard offers views not of popular stories but of high priority
- These aren’t “live” viewers, but TouchGraph offers neat visualizations of connections between objects, such as books or movies on Amazon, or connections between “web 2.0″ or major retailer’s websites via Google’s related links database.
Wow, I think we need these types of visualizations for all the connections that BMC’s products have because we have done so many integrations to get the BSM story just right. I suppose Topology Discovery has the closest match to these types of visualizations.
I’d better tear my eyes off of TwitterVision long enough to post this entry… what visualizations help you with your job lately?
Facing the Dell laptop with a Sony battery recall… can a CMDB help?
So, was your laptop affected by the recent Sony battery recall? I have a Dell Latitude D600 and had to check the serial number but fortunately the battery number did not match those on the recall website that you check to see if you need to get a new one.
Now, if a CMDB had contained the serial number of my battery, could I have been saved that extra step? It’s a question of granularity for the CMDB – when would you kick yourself for not going more granular on your CMDB? And is it possible to think of all scenarios such as this, especially for all hardware parts that go into laptops and servers and desktops? I sincerely doubt it’s worth the trouble… until something like this recall comes up and then I wonder.
It seems like entering all that information into your CMDB is not worth it for these rare exceptions when you want the information. Until the information could be automatically discovered somehow, it’s just as easy to have your end-users look it up for themselves. If the serial number information was available from the manufacturers or through discovery, it could be a federated attribute in an Asset Management database rather than stored in the CMDB. But, for a level of granularity that helps you pinpoint a subset of your entire collection of hardware, you could use the CMDB to help you determine who might be affected, based on who has laptops or who has Dell laptops with the exact model numbers that are affected. This sounds like a sensible and balanced approach.
How about you? Any ideas on the practicality of granularity for these recall situations? What is the next step — Change Management for tracking all the replaced batteries?
Updated to add: Here’s a link to a relevant podcast with Tom Bishop, where he talks about the relativity of data. Thanks to Ynema’s comment I can get even more familiar with the best approaches to these types of CMDB design questions.
