November 25, 2008

The Beginning of Something

As portfolios wither and funding dries up, I doubt I'm alone in wondering what the future of social networking sites is. MySpace and Facebook turn in disappointing ad revenue and with near daily reports of layoffs in Silicon Valley are there going to be enough opportunities to remedy this?

And what if the two giants of online social networking are forced to shift their offering to squeeze out some dollars - or even cease operating? Who would be in a position to take their place and what would happen to our copious data on these services?

Maybe this is the ideal time for social and politically-conscious (and thus probably low-cost/low-revenue) services to begin to compete. Something in the mold of Riseup or Indymedia with more of a user-centric perspective could probably gain some ground if things really turn for the worse with the big two.

This may be a possibility and an opportunity, but I'm not betting on it any time soon.

October 21, 2008

I've Said It Before: Bloggin' Ain't Easy

The advantage to posting on a less-than-regular basis is a reduction in spam comments. Apparently Swarming Media is less valuable to the truly bizarre, and occasionally brilliant, spam-commenters than it once was...ah, faded glory.

There's a few things that caught my attention tonight. All generally seem to have to do with evolving expectations and standards. Most notably, perhaps, is Paul Boutin's piece for Wired which explains how bloggin' ain't what it used to be. First of all he's right. Blogging isn't the thing it was when I got in this game four years ago with a Scottish travel blog. Maybe this is just a jaded perspective - it's not the same for me, but there are plenty of folks just discovering the medium who are loving the idea of pouring their collective hearts out to the beautifully obscured populace of The Internet. Really, it's simply the arrogance of those of us who have been in on this for a while who are getting sick of it. The medium isn't diminished only its uses by the tech-elite.

That said, I do agree with Boutin's ultimate point that what we consider to be the top blogs today are really nothing more than online magazines (HuffPo, Gawker Media blogs, etc). This is the result of the professionalization and initial maturation of the medium rather than a sign of its death. Sure things like Huffington Post are hardly blogs in the sense that Swarming Media is or might be, but we might see a comparison in a zine that started out with humble ambitions and readership and ends up being distributed across the country in record store. Other zines are out there and still small while some make it big.

I suppose what has faded is the novelty of blogging. It's much harder to gain attention because everyone and their mother's got one (I don't know if you have one, Mom) and people like to pay attention to what's relevant to them and their social circle. That's why the blogs I posted above are indicative of how small-time blogging is alive and thriving despite how hard it is now to attain blog-fame. Blogging isn't a get rich quick scheme anymore, nor should it be - that was always kind of wrong.

As for the other things that I found notable:

This and this are things that give me comfort in an over-crowded, over-hyped web world.

And maybe I've been out of the game too long, but critical theorists need some serious editors.

September 16, 2008

Blogs for Dentists

Things that are right, for the moment at least:

  • Fred's old post about Facebook - more right in retrospect than it was at the time.

  • The most accurate assessment of the tech blogosphere I've ever read is, "At the beginning of the last century being a Futurist used to be something exciting. Now it's more like being a dentist. Instead of pulling teeth they simply snip platitudes out of the pages of Wired or The Economist and announce them as a fait accompli, preferably three or four times in the same warm breath. Time to get your factoids extracted."

  • Antisocial Notworking: can you think of a better way to sum up the application of Italian autonomist thought to online social networks?

  • This makes me fondly remember the heady days of Web 2.0 back in '05

Am I getting nostalgic for the medium of nouveau nostalgia? Were blogs and social networks a passing moment when anything went and Paolo Virno seemed universally applicable? Or am I simply suffering from the all-too-common symptom of an early-adopter's early-onset jadedness?

September 09, 2008

When We Can No Longer Forget

Alex over at The End of Cyberspace writes about the functions of remembering and forgetting past acquaintances when it comes to social-archival services like Facebook. He makes a good point that these entities seem driven to eradicate forgetting in one way or another and notes that forgetting does have an important cultural role in subject formation:

"...when it comes to shaping identity, the ability to forget can be as important as the ability to remember."
Yet I don't think - given the current state of things - we're in danger of unrelenting remembrance thanks to the pattern of people moving from one service to another as they tire of its offerings. Maybe one day our networked, subjective data will follow us around no matter where we go, but until that day forgetting will happen as long as attention spans are short.

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