Putting Social Media in Context

Via Daniel Tunkelang’s outstanding blog The Noisy Channel:

Just a heads up that Danah Boyd has published her PhD dissertation entitled “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics“. Danah is a rock star in the social networking research community; you might have noticed that I cite her Master’s Thesis from time to time. I’m looking forward to reading her latest work, and to welcoming her to the Boston area, where she’ll be joining Microsoft Research New England.

Though it does read like a dissertation, it’s worthwhile for anyone interested in the implications of social media. A sample:

Just as many of the properties of networked media extend those of broadcast media, many of the dynamics that play out in networked publics are an amplification of those [Joshua] Meyrowitz astutely recognized resulting from broadcast media: 

• Invisible audiences: not all audiences are visible when a person is contributing online, nor are they necessarily co-present. 

• Collapsed contexts: the lack of spatial, social, and temporal boundaries makes it difficult to maintain distinct social contexts. 

• The blurring of public and private: without control over context, public and private become meaningless binaries, are scaled in new ways, and are difficult to maintain as distinct. 

In unmediated spaces, it is common to have a sense for who is present and can witness a particular performance. Through persistence, replicability, scalability, and searchability, networked publics introduce the possibility of audiences that are, for all intents and purposes, invisible. It may not be possible to see who is actually present at that moment, because either they are lurking and not showing themselves or because the technology does not make their presence visible. Furthermore, because audiences often perceive performances asynchronously, the audience may not be present at the time of the performance. When performing in networked publics, people are forced to contend with invisible audiences and engage in acts of impression management even when they have no idea how their performances are being perceived.

Great work Danah, and thanks Daniel.

How I Gained Traffic and Lost My Soul: Google Garbage™ Post-mortem

Last Thursday I detailed a rather questionable technique for achieving a quick increase in web traffic through the use of Google Trends. In a nutshell it involves using Google Trends to find rapidly-rising search topic with little competition, getting up a quick and keyword-heavy post, and pinging Google to get indexed.

On Friday I executed a crude proof-of-concept experiment, sacrificing this blog (and my own integrity) at the altar of scientific research. I made a total of 10 posts in the course of this experiment, which covered two updates of Google Trends (about four hours apart). I used different formats for each, ranging from all pictures to all text, from well-formatted for human eyes to pure data dump, intended only for Google’s robotic eyes.

I also posted on a wide variety of hot topics, from the death of painter Andrew Wyeth, to the Presidential Oath of Office, to some things I still have no clue about. Who is the “Numbers Lady”? Why were people seeking information about her on Friday? I have no idea, but I simply dumped the first page of Google results about that phrase into a post.

So what were the results? 

The Good

Google BlogSearch was easy to dominate. These posts had the number one position for most of these topics within a few minutes. However, Google web search was another matter. Since this blog is only three weeks old, has no PageRank yet, and few incoming links, these pages were buried deep in the web results.

Traffic tripled compared to normal. This will artificially pump up the numbers for the month – something I could use if I was negotiating with advertisers. Also, virtually all of these visitors were “uniques“, making the numbers look even better. And if I had CPM (pay-per-impression) ads on the pages, that would have made me some easy money. 

The Bad

On the other side of that coin: these unique visitors are people who will not return, so there is no long-term benefit.

Also, some of the pages had few hits. In retrospect I can see that they simply had too much competition – for example, a bio of the pilot who landed the plane in the Hudson River. Every major news outlet had this covered, so almost no one found this little corner of the web.

The Ugly

Because all that traffic was hit-and-run, there were no comments and zero interaction. Because I was posting on topics I knew nothing about, the experience was completely clinical, and in the end somewhat soul-crushing.

Worst of all, the most popular post by far was one entitled “Amanda Knox pics“. I had no idea when I posted this that Amanda Knox is apparently an attractive 21-year-old alleged murderer and sex criminal. I only knew that she was a hot search topic, and probably some new starlet – not far from the truth, as it turns out. So I did a Google image search for pictures of her, and dumped the results into a post. 

It was hugely popular; by far the most-visited of the day.

The lessons of this experiment are not pretty. What do the people want? Sex and death. How do they want it? In color.

So there it is: I did what I had to do; I visited the Dark Side, and I don’t care how much it pays – I’m not going back.

Tumblr Updates to v.5, Gets New Features

Via Mashable/Vimeo:

A great-looking update to a service I’ve raved about:

Tumblr v5 “Sexy As Hell”

January 16, 2009 – 11:11 am PDT – by Pete Cashmore

The changes have been universally welcomed by Tumblr’s self-reported 625,000 account holders, and we see them as a welcome upgrade to an already enjoyable service.

Blogging service Tumblr launched its fifth version today, with features including a revised Dashboard (Tumblr’s take on a RSS reader), a directory, a theme garden and a new version of its Goodies pages (where users find extra features like the iPhone app and Dashboard widget). It is, claims founder David Karp in the video below, “sexy as hell”.  

Perhaps most interesting: a complete revision of its Radar page, a novel way to find hot content that shirks the obvious “Digg like” interface for a more inventive grid layout.

Introducing: Tumblr v5 from David Karp on Vimeo.