It's like Professor Adams said, four years is pretty much an eternity in "web time," so many of the examples cited by Dearstyne could definitely use some updating ... For instance, his description of videogame industries on the web (that create an "imaginary world where users interact and can spend real money") mentions Second Life, which has definitely lost steam over the years while being usurped in the "overhyped and heavily-touted" category by social-networking games such as Farmville.
It kind of reminds me of the book "Stealing MySpace: the battle to control the most popular website in America," whose subtitle became obsolete almost immediately after hitting store shelves ... Attempting to speculate on internet-based subject areas via the print medium (even if one uses something with a relatively "quick" turnover rate like newspapers or scholarly journals) is almost guaranteed to be a losing battle. The online world is just too "fluid" (for lack of a better term), so the "next best thing" or "latest innovation" is always right around the corner, ready to take the place of the current "flavor of the month" (or "week", or "day", or "second", etc.).
However, I did recognize the name Robert Scoble from Dearstyne's list of knowledgeable people who maintain blogs on Web 2.0 topics; he's been a guest on several podcasts I listen to, and always seems to have something interesting to add to the conversation.
Checking his blog, Scobleizer, I found the following posts of particular interest:
There was a video portion to this post (not quite a "vlog" but close enough) where Scoble interviewed the co-founder and CEO of the website Klout, Joe Fernandez, which serves its users by tracking and verifying the "influence" that a person exerts over his or her social media networks (i.e. whether or not a person's suggestions/recommendations made via social-networking tools directly influence their followers to take action and follow their lead).
This sounded like a very interesting (although inherently flawed) way to see if people - such as, say, librarians - are getting the most out of social networking sites, in terms of whether or not they are using them to their full potential; Fernandez explained that Klout creates a "social credit score" for people to measure their "social standing", based on "algorithmic [calculations] on top of Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, and looking at what you do on the social web."
He also took the opportunity to discuss the site's new "+K" influence-vouching system, whereby real-world influences (not just the online component) are taken into account ... He gave the example of Person A logging onto FourSquare and seeing that Person B has just eaten at a local restaurant, so Person A tries out that restaurant himself and ends up liking it; with "+K", Person A can acknowledge that Person B influenced his decision via their unofficial recommendation, and can reward Person B by adding Klout "currency" to their "social credit score" through a tweet or blog post.
Fernandez mentioned that his advice for building influence online is "consistently creating content that your network responds to and engages with," which is a lesson that librarians should definitely take to heart (if you don't keep your blogs and other social media outlets updated, patrons will lose interest and stop paying attention).
Scoble seconded that notion, stating that value plays a big part in how much influence one exerts within their social media realm ("I looked at the value that people were providing me, [and] were they stupid cat videos or were they about the tech industry, and were they good quality or were they bad quality?") ... If users aren't getting value (perceived or otherwise) out of your social-networking content, then you become a "liability" to their information-gathering needs and they will simply ignore/unfollow you.
Also, Scoble and Fernandez both pointed out that this service has been utilized mostly by big corporations or people looking to impress potential employers (having a high Klout score demonstrates "your ability to have an audience [and] drive your content to them"), but I don't see why people like librarians couldn't use it - or some similar service - to try and calculate their level of "popularity" with patrons. For example, if a librarian helps a patron find a book that they're looking for or answers their question at the reference desk, that patron could blog or tweet about their positive interaction and increase the librarian's Klout score (which could thus influence other potential patrons to seek out that librarian via Facebook or Twitter the next time they themselves need help).
In this regard, an ability to measure the amount of influence that libraries have through social media could go a long way towards justifying the use of these tools as an essential part of the library's overall strategy for interacting with their respective user communities ... After all, Fernandez says that "every user that creates content has influence"; that includes librarians!
This post had some unflattering things to say about the current state of Google's business practices, as well as throwing out some speculation/predictions on what the company (as well as the technology world as a whole) will look like in four year's time ... The time span chosen struck me as sort of a funny coincidence, since we just saw in Dearstyne's article that a lot can change in four years, so that trying to predict how things are going to play out over that span of time is a bit of a fool's errand.
Anyway, Scoble did make some dire observations about where Google could be headed as a company when 2015 eventually rolls around, as they are currently lacking in innovatie design when it comes to areas such as nuanced social networking (Google Buzz has pretty much been a colossal failure, and Orkut has little traction outside of India and Brazil) and socially-influenced news displays (sites like Zite and Flipboard have real-time interactive news feeds available via tablets, while Google "isn't even a player here yet").
Again, it's impossible to accurately predict where current trends will lead in the future (Scoble admits as much with the statement: "Quick, what was Facebook when it first came out? 'A way to meet girls at Harvard.' You really were gonna fund that?"), but he does make the compelling argument that Google - one of the most ubiquitous presences on the internet right now - is really lagging when it comes to innovation (especially in fields like social media), and is in danger of falling behind its competitors and perhaps even becoming irrelevant as a company by 2015.
It's hard to imagine a world without Google, but it could happen!
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