Reactions to story from The New York Times
Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It On
http://www.nytimes.com/ 2008/ 03/ 27/ us/ politics/ 27voters.html
Younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news but conduits as well, sending out links and videos to friends.
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We Consume Information, But Where From?
http://www.brooksandrus.com/blog/2008/05/05/i-consume-inform...I’m looking sideways at Tim Bray. Almost sounds dirty or sneaky, but its actually a reference to one of the most important aspects of communication on the web — the greatest value is often personal and organic. Individuals rather than professional organizations can offer the most credible insights and the message is typically delivered organically via the social networks we’ve established throughout our lives and linked together via the net. The web is chalk full of information to the point that its overwhelming; which begs the question “where to look”? Do you settle on an aggregator or two or load up on a-listers? Tim is suggesting we “look sideways” instead and seek out credible individuals within the organizations that interest us the most and then rely on our social networks to pass us other meaty bits their unique angles offer up. There’s a safety in this approach that allows us to focus (who can keep up with the Internet news cycle after all) and bypass the misinformation created by eyeball pandering journalists who sometimes deliberately slant or misrepresent and often lack the technical acumen to provide meaningful insights even when they are being their dispassionate best. As the snapshot from the New York Times above illustrates this phenomena is not confined to the geek class inside the tech industry, but is a broader trend that’s having an impact on how young people in the States are consuming political news. This leaves us with a couple of really big questions: how are people getting their information? how do you reach your audience if its got an organic cloaking device? People are getting their information from all over — a combination of passive delivery via professional broadcast media, organic network references and self-initiated research (search) with the latter two being sourced from both individuals (sideways) and professionals (top-down). How this sourcing pie is sliced up will, of course, vary given the demographic and personal tastes of the individual. However, its clear that there’s a trend towards organic delivery of individual sources — passive broadcast, spin-handling, PR and professional journalists have jumped the shark. The more interesting question is how do you reach your target audience via the organic information stream? I’m inclined to agree with Guy Kawasaki’s suggestion to target the fat cross-section of moderate influencers rather than the a-list. Its more than a numbers game though — moderate influencers aren’t in it for the eyeballs; they’re both consumers and participants who are more interested in spreading good ideas than self-promotion (see Pistach.io or The Deck for alternate models). Below are a few of my favorite sideways looks. There are a boatload of others in my aggregator representing companies big and small (more Adobe staffers and community members than I can reveal without blushing). I would love to check out some of your favorites — leave them in the comments! Tim Bray - Sun John Dowdell - Adobe (JD’s blog is down while Adobe repairs MXNA, but its worth waiting for) John Nack - Adobe Tinic Uro - Adobe Steve Yegge - Google Greg Linden - Microsoft (formerly Amazon) Sam Ruby - IBM Michael Lopp - Apple
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Look Sideways
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/05/02/Look-Sidew...There was this little flurry of excitement when one of the Silly-Valley TechWhatever news aggregators asserted that Twitter was dropping the use of Rails. It seems not to be true. This is yet more evidence that the news aggregators are becoming part of the problem, not part of the solution. If you want care about Twitter, follow @biz or @ev. If you care about Rails, follow DHH here or here or here. If you care about Sun, read what the people at Sun say. Same for IBM or Microsoft. If you care about the Big New Thing that’s going to change your life, wait till it comes and touches your life. Then you’ll know what it’s really about, not what some overworked underslept Bay-Area meme-promoter thinks. If the news is important, and your eyes and ears are open, it will find you. The other problem with the aggregators is that there are a lot of smart, hungry, imaginative people working really hard to game them and get noticed. Sometimes it works. Me, I don’t read hardly any members of any of the top-100 lists. But I think I’m well-informed. If I’m interested in a company or organization, I find an insider or two to follow. And I follow a lot of people who are smart and interested in some of the same things that I am; the effect of feeds and tweets is that we’ve in effect developed a shared and extremely sensitive radar network. Isn’t the Internet supposed to be about disintermediation?
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Look Sideways
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/05/02/Look-Sidew...There was this little flurry of excitement when one of the Silly-Valley TechWhatever news aggregators asserted that Twitter was dropping the use of Rails. It seems not to be true. This is yet more evidence that the news aggregators are becoming part of the problem, not part of the solution. If you want care about Twitter, follow @biz or @ev. If you care about Rails, follow DHH here or here or here. If you care about Sun, read what the people at Sun say. Same for IBM or Microsoft. If you care about the Big New Thing that’s going to change your life, wait till it comes and touches your life. Then you’ll know what it’s really about, not what some overworked underslept Bay-Area meme-promoter thinks. If the news is important, and your eyes and ears are open, it will find you. The other problem with the aggregators is that there are a lot of smart, hungry, imaginative people working really hard to game them and get noticed. Sometimes it works. Me, I don’t read hardly any members of any of the top-100 lists. But I think I’m well-informed. If I’m interested in a company or organization, I find an insider or two to follow. And I follow a lot of people who are smart and interested in some of the same things that I am; the effect of feeds and tweets is that we’ve in effect developed a shared and extremely sensitive radar network. Isn’t the Internet supposed to be about disintermediation?
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Look Sideways
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/05/02/Look-Sidew...There was this little flurry of excitement when one of the Silly-Valley TechWhatever news aggregators asserted that Twitter was dropping the use of Rails. It seems not to be true. This is yet more evidence that the news aggregators are becoming part of the problem, not part of the solution. If you want care about Twitter, follow @biz or @ev. If you care about Rails, follow DHH here or here or here. If you care about Sun, read what the people at Sun say. Same for IBM or Microsoft. If you care about the Big New Thing that’s going to change your life, wait till it comes and touches your life. Then you’ll know what it’s really about, not what some overworked underslept Bay-Area meme-promoter thinks. If the news is important, and your eyes and ears are open, it will find you. The other problem with the aggregators is that there are a lot of smart, hungry, imaginative people working really hard to game them and get noticed. Sometimes it works. Me, I don’t read hardly any members of any of the top-100 lists. But I think I’m well-informed. If I’m interested in a company or organization, I find an insider or two to follow. And I follow a lot of people who are smart and interested in some of the same things that I am; the effect of feeds and tweets is that we’ve in effect developed a shared and extremely sensitive radar network. Isn’t the Internet supposed to be about disintermediation?
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Look Sideways
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/05/02/Look-Sidew...There was this little flurry of excitement when one of the Silly-Valley TechWhatever news aggregators asserted that Twitter was dropping the use of Rails. It seems not to be true. This is yet more evidence that the news aggregators are becoming part of the problem, not part of the solution. If you want care about Twitter, follow @biz or @ev. If you care about Rails, follow DHH here or here or here. If you care about Sun, read what the people at Sun say. Same for IBM or Microsoft. If you care about the Big New Thing that’s going to change your life, wait till it comes and touches your life. Then you’ll know what it’s really about, not what some overworked underslept Bay-Area meme-promoter thinks. If the news is important, and your eyes and ears are open, it will find you. The other problem with the aggregators is that there are a lot of smart, hungry, imaginative people working really hard to game them and get noticed. Sometimes it works. Me, I don’t read hardly any members of any of the top-100 lists. But I think I’m well-informed. If I’m interested in a company or organization, I find an insider or two to follow. And I follow a lot of people who are smart and interested in some of the same things that I am; the effect of feeds and tweets is that we’ve in effect developed a shared and extremely sensitive radar network. Isn’t the Internet supposed to be about disintermediation?
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Watch Your Mouth!
http://abm.typepad.com/mediapace/2008/05/watch-your-mout.htm...Deceiving your customers just got illegal … at least in the U.K., where word-of-mouth marketing is about to face a major crack-down. According to Advertising Age, beginning May 26, “it will become a criminal offense for brands to seed positive...
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If the news is that important, it will find me
http://omnivore.us/blog/2008/05/01/if-the-news-is-that-impor...Brian Stelter’s story in late March in the NYT has been abuzz on the interwebs. I think there is some interesting insight to be gleaned from it, related to how we pitch colleges to prospective students and in the ways we intend to ‘inform’ them of our institutions: It is not news that young politically minded viewers are turning to alternative sources like YouTube, Facebook and late-night comedy shows like “The Daily Show.” But that is only the beginning of how they process information. According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one. “There are lots of times where I’ll read an interesting story online and send the U.R.L. to 10 friends,” said Lauren Wolfe, 25, the president of College Democrats of America. “I’d rather read an e-mail from a friend with an attached story than search through a newspaper to find the story.” In one sense, this social filter is simply a technological version of the oldest tool in politics: word of mouth. Jane Buckingham, the founder of the Intelligence Group, a market research company, said the “social media generation” was comfortable being in constant communication with others, so recommendations from friends or text messages from a campaign — information that is shared, but not sought — were perceived as natural. Ms. Buckingham recalled conducting a focus group where one of her subjects, a college student, said, “If the news is that important, it will find me.” Young folks these days prefer not to be preached to and they certainly have no interest in having someone tell them why they should or shouldn’t do something. They’d prefer to hear it from someone they trust or do the research themselves online to find the information fast and then make an “informed” decision based on what they figured out. This isn’t a very good example, but it came to me as I was typing this post and decided to share it. In the Jack Black movie “School of Rock”, he tells one of the precocious head-of-the-class types in the front of the room that she could be a ‘groupie’ to the class band. Here’s what she tells him a few days later after doing some research: Summer: You want me to be a groupie? Dewey: Well groupie is an important job. Summer: I researched groupies on the Internet. They’re sluts! They sleep with the band! Dewey: No, that’s not true! They’re like cheerleaders. Summer: Look, my mom is a room parent, and she’s not gonna be happy when she hears about this. Dewey: Summer, I do not want to tell you this in front of the class, but I made a special position just for you: Band manager. Summer: Band manager? What’s that? This might not seem all that applicable in the way that we sell our institutions to students, but I think that the only way to truly get in front of things going forward, is when we find ways to highlight the student voice in as authentic a way as possible, without diluting our own institutional messages. Trusting someone they can relate to or seem themselves in, is going to be a far more credible voice than someone older who is road weary and repeating themes that make their parents happy and not the customer — the student. No more posting though, it’s Flunk Day!
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