The talk itself is very interesting. I was a little surprised at how much time was spent on how media affected a few isolated events. The talk repeated the same message that I’ve been reading in articles all over the internet lately. That’s the idea that media has gone from a one-to-one relationship to a one-to-many and finally to the many-to-many relationship that we have today. At one time people could talk to one another. Then TV networks, radio show hosts, or columnists could reach out and deliver a message to a broader audience. Today millions of people can literally communicate with millions of other people with all sorts of different messages. Not only can a person talk to a person, but an organized (or unorganized) group can interact with another group thousands of miles away if they’d like to. Shirky states that we have had the “largest increase in expressive capability in human history.”
Shirky mostly touched on Twitter and a tiny bit on text messaging. I didn’t actually catch any mention of Facebook. I think it’s just assumed that it’s included as one of the biggest networks that people can communicate through. I thought one specific quote was especially interesting.
These tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. It isn’t when the shiny new tools show up that their uses start permeating society, it’s when everybody is able to take them for granted.
It seems that this is entirely the case. Most people are still acting like Facebook is a brand new network, when really it’s been around since the beginning months of 2004. It just seems new and exciting because everyone and his brother is now a member. Or Twitter. Twitter is already three years old. It wasn’t until the end of 2008 or early 2009 that Twitter really started being dropped in conversations. In either case, both networks are now mentioned daily, if not hourly on news stations and throughout personal conversations.
As Shirky says,
The question we all face now is how can we make best use of this media even though it means changing the way we’ve always done it?
As I had touched on in a previous post, Social Media -- Where Is It Headed?, more and more people feel the literal need to get involved. This of course leads to what Shirky touched upon -- more and more of the “producers” of content are amateurs. Every second, people are connecting to new networks and adding content to those to which they already belong. Are we going to hit a breaking point? How are we supposed to filter this media, or are we?
Alright. I guess I’m not alone. I recently came across the bookmark saving site called xmarks. Like most applications, xmarks has its own add-ons/plugins for Safari, Firefox, etc. I thought, eh, why not? Figured it would be nice to be able to sync my bookmarks between Firefox and Safari. This would be especially helpful since I was actually enjoying Safari 4. I installed xmarks on both browsers and was notified that I could lose bookmarks. As I don’t really use all of the bookmarks I marked before moving to delicious, I figured I’d just import them to delicious so I wouldn’t lose my favorite ones. That was all fine and dandy. Delicious actually works.
I went ahead and synced the bookmarks. Of course, it all seemed fine….until it synced again and they all disappeared. Fine. So it was working finally on Safari, but Firefox was having a fit. I uninstalled it on Firefox thinking the add-on was gone. It should work fine now, right? Just make new bookmarks? Working working….restart Firefox. Poof! All bookmarks are gone again. Safari was still working fine, but sporadically choosing which bookmarks to delete. So I uninstalled it for both browsers? Problem solved? Of course not. Apparently this is an issue that remains unanswered by many. But I did get it to work again.
To fix Firefox, the quick and dirty solution is to create a new profile and delete your old one. Apparently it’s a known issue that xmarks messes things up. Nice. Here’s how to use Terminal on OSX to get into the Firefox Profile Manager (For other OS, see articles linked below): /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -profilemanager
I chose to create a new one and then fully delete my default user (along with deleting my files). Some people may want to chose to just delete the profile and not the files.
There may be other solutions to this problem. I suggest people post them because there seems to be a lot of confusion in forums right now with this issue. I’m not saying the profile solution is the best way to go, it’s just best solution I saw out there and it worked fine for me.
So, as you can see, the Digisqueaks blog has been completely redone. One major change included taking out Twitter and the blogroll and replacing them with the LifeStream WordPress plugin by David Cramer. The LifeStream combines my feeds from Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Last.fm, LinkedIn, and so on. I also added a small feed from my Flickr account, a tag cloud, and better access to archives and a better subscription link. There is still a link to my portfolio/homepage, but I am no longer linking my portfolio on this blog. It is still easily accessible at my portfolio. Besides changing the appearance of the theme overall, I also added icon links to a few of my social networks, as well as an icon declaring that the site is mobile friendly. I’ve tested it on older, generic phones, as well as my iPod Touch and everything seems to feed nicely.
Yet another helpful and informative post from Mike Davidson of Mike Industries. A New WordPress Plugin: Clean Notifications, is a plugin that Mike wrote to make email from WordPress a little easier on the eyes. I haven’t tested it out yet, but the screenshots he has as examples are impressive enough.
I first stumbled upon Mike’s Blog while I was searching for help to tweak my MySpace blog a while ago. If you’re interested, his Hacking a More Tasteful MySpace page has a lot of information and a lot of fun tweaks for your MySpace page.
