Social bookmarking/the problem with marketing

Social bookmarking has caught my attention again. I've had one account or another for years and years, but in the last year or so I've really latched onto it.

In part, I think it has at least a little to do with my iPhone. Before this, I've (generally speaking) had two computers in use at any one time. One for work and one at home. And the work bookmarks went on the work laptop, and the personal bookmarks went on my home computer.

When I started emailing myself links to my work email address from my home computer rather than hauling out my work laptop, though: that's when I knew I was in trouble.

And then the iPhone came along. And believe it or not, it's my main mobile device. When I stopped in on the Learning Design Summer Camp, all I brought was my iPhone. No laptop. And I did fine interacting with the Live Question Tool, and backchanneling via Twitter, and all that.

But to really get the most out of whenever I was websurfing on my iPhone, I needed to be able to access my bookmarks. And putting them "in the cloud" on a social network (so to speak) has done that.

Someone a few weeks ago told me that you can tell a lot about someone by looking at what they bookmark. I'd give that more credence than judging by their shoes--though I don't know a lot about shoes past what's comfortable and looks decent.

My top tags in delicious (name change from the original del.icio.us, so named because a friend of the founder compared finding good links to eating cherries) on my professional account are as follows: socialmedia, reachingstudents, marketing, web2.0, admissions, socialnetworking, usability, content, culture, webdesign.

That's telling. Though I rather dislike that marketing shows up there: I've always resisted that label.

I'm the one usually telling my boss or my equal on the print side (who's a marketer) that we shouldn't do that when he suggests a scheme that smells suspiciously of spamming. We didn't even have an unsubscribe on the marketing email going out of our office until I got there, and our security policies were (emphasis there on the past tense) not very strong on a few points.

Is it that I'm more ethical than my marketing colleague? Possible. I do know that I'm closer to the age of the students we're trying to talk with, and way more tech-savvy than he is. And social media-minded, for that matter.

It's more that I, like many of a similar age and younger, have been totally suspicious of marketing for as long as I've been aware of it. "All Marketers are Liars" is more than a book title to me.

In this vein, social bookmarking has become really valuable to me. I'll more often trust--or at least follow--a link passed to me by a friend or colleague than one being advertised. 

So in short, those are the two big draws for me. Social bookmarking is:

• in the cloud
• with my community

It allows me to contribute and consume from people I know and trust from anywhere. Which is also the main perk of Twitter, I might add. And I'm sure it could also be extended to many other social networking applications. Care to contribute some more to the list?

One-upsmanship (internet culture)

We're creating our own language here at Penn State.

Then again, people in groups together for any significant period of time do. Does anybody outside of Penn State understand the significance of "BS Breakfast"? Probably not: they'd take it for what it sounds like. Which was, of course, the intent. (BS here stands for "brainstorming," for those not in the know.)

"Language" may be an overstatement, but it's at least a code. You're "in" if you know what we're talking about.

I'm part of a lot of these communities with their own codes: Penn State TLT groupie (joke!) is just one of them. And acronyms are just part of these codes.

One community with a ton of community-made acronyms that I'm part of is BPAL enthusiasts (keep in mind, with the following links, that their aesthetic is quite dark--don't be shocked). Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab is a Los Angeles-based outfit that creates perfume oils, and it has its own parlance. GC (general catalog), LE (limited edition), CD (Carnaval Diabolique) and the like are pretty common to see in discussions on the topic, as is BPTP (Black Phoenix Trading Post, their sister company, which produces all their non-perfume oil goods).

Other communities of a sort are more based on quotes or references. The video Shannon posted yesterday contains a bunch of these. Whether or not you notice them depends on where you spend your time online. One of the first clips is a re-creation of the Numa Numa guy.   There's also "first!" (warning: expletives, immaturity), commonly seen in comments. See also: Internet Commenter Business Meeting (same warning applies, only way more so. plus offensiveness. plus . . . oh, nevermind--it's from College Humor, so you should expect as much), which is basically what would happen if a meeting was run like virtually any popular open forum online.

And, of course, if you haven't yet been hit by a Rick Roll, you haven't been online long enough, and you certainly haven't been taking a look all the way through my links. But that may be just as well, really.

Internet Memes (warning: too many warnings than I can list) attempts to collate all these references. It doesn't hit all of them, but it hits the highlights quite well.

And there's certainly some mocking of that communal language of references. An editorial in the New York Times today, Lord of the Memes, tells us that to be on the cutting edge, we need to be "not only an early adopter, but an early discarder." We should go through these products, services and references before anyone else and then get sick of them and dismiss them with disdain should anyone else bring them up. The article ends with "remember, cultural epochs come and go, but one-upsmanship is forever."

I didn't discover that editorial on my own. In a rare reverse-crossover reference--real life to online rather than the other way around--someone told me about it at lunch and I looked at it on my iPhone when the conversation waned. There's some irony there, believe me.

But this is connectivity. Or the cost of connectivity. Or the advantage of connectivity.

The point is, that too is part of your cultural education. So choose your influences wisely--they will become your references, and part of your language. Maybe I should be a bit more selective in mine. ;)

Serendipity and complications

Amit Gupta wrote about social serendipity today, and it feels like we've got a landslide of that going on here at Penn State, though much closer to home than his examples (he's the guy behind Photojojo, for those not familiar).

As my follow list on Twitter grows, I'm finding more and more amazing, knowledgeable people out there who "get it," in the words of one of those folks, who it just so happens I got to meet for lunch today.

And the give-and-take of that community, online and off, has been amazing. You end up tapping into the collective knowledge of a ton of experts, as long as you're willing to wait for an answer.

This has happened to me before, in other forums and communities, but this is as close to home as it's come. And while it's really cool to have connections wherever you might need them--an online shout-out for info about Buffalo a couple months ago turned up online friends that I didn't know were out there, for example--having them right in your backyard is amazing.

I mean, hey. Impromptu lunches are a possibility, even.

But it does cost attention. Design for Emotion and Flow describes this really well in the second paragraph of the article. The rest is no less important, but it's unrelated to my point here.

There's a point of balance that I think most of us are still trying to find in this newfound community:

• how to give and take equally to one's network;
  
• how to enjoy oneself and others evenly;
  
• how to find a sympathetic ear to vent without alienating others;
  
• where "no invitation [is] required" and crashing the party;
  
• expansion of connections and input overload; 
  
• "value" of contribution and "just being yourself."

Some of this, no one has talked about at much length. But I'm feeling it out there. And it's something we all have to work through. Personally, I worked out some of this by dividing my Twitter presence into personal and professional. Folks I meet at conferences may get one or the other depending on the context.

Some folks have made parts of this problem quite plain: Shannon posted two videos to explain why she might "unfollow" someone on Twitter. Other bits of this are way more unspoken.

It's exciting to me that these new modes of being create new problems, bizarrely enough. It means we're progressing, expanding. Perhaps not in a geologic time sense, but significant nonetheless.

I'm looking forward to solving these problems for myself and seeing what they mean on the grander scale, especially as re-localization becomes a trend.

Facebook and recruiting, initial thoughts

Wish I had more time to address this today, but this one will have to be quick. Keep in mind most of this is supposition.

Sometime during their search, I bet students looking at colleges and universities are likely to tap into Facebook. While this is still theory, it's supported by others such as James Howell, in his entry a few days ago.

Unfortunately, right now I don't expect that Penn State Admissions will be headed in that direction just yet, despite the presentation I made this past spring at our Penn State Admissions conference. The basic gist of that presentation was a suggestion to use Facebook Pages rather than Groups or Profiles for an "official" presence there. The "fan of" dynamic is just easier to deal with. That aside.

So for those students who choose to take a quick peek via Facebook into the ins and outs of a university, they'll probably breeze through the groups, maybe take a look at some interesting people.

If I were to give some advice to that student, it would be: don't judge us by a quick run-through, by our more popular groups, or even by our more active students on Facebook, necessarily. Take a moment to search for faculty. Look through staff like advisers, if you can find them. Look through the clubs and organizations with an official presence there. And better yet, contact people. Ask the question you've been wanting to of that student leader, that professor whose department you're interested in, especially if they've been active recently.

The head of the Undergraduate Writing Center, Jon Olson, resisted getting onto Facebook for years. The peer tutors he works with created a "Get Jon Olson on Facebook" (or some such title) group. He finally relented recently and has been posting enthusiastically since: status, photos, even video.

It's a hurdle for faculty sometimes, but I think most of them find that it's super easy (and maybe even fun). But it does present some interesting quandaries: do I provide advising for the student that contacts me on Facebook, or do I refer her/him to email? That sort of thing. And while they all make their own decisions on that end, I would hope they would at least answer you. So reach out.

Social networks are for interacting, after all.

Geology and tech: the end is the beginning is the end

I think I prefaced over this last weekend that I wasn't going to have a theme with this entry in mind.

I started college as a geology major. Somewhat obviously, I didn't stick with it, but it's still a great interest of mine.

Some of you know and some of you don't that I have an MFA in Creative Writing. So a lot of my so-called "personal" reading is actually keeping up on that end of things for me.

And to combine both interests, I recently read Threshold, by Caitlin R. Kiernan. It's very much in a genre I used to write--a pseudo-magical realism, if magical realism in literature could be divorced from its Latin American roots (which it can't be, really). It starts out gritty, modern, and then wanders gently into science, myth, urban legend, and a particular superstitious nature you find in the south.

But my main point in addressing the experience of reading this book was the following passage, voiced by our narrator, Chance, who was in college as a geology major at the time:

"Can you think of anything else I could do with my life that could ever possibly be half this splendid, half this important? I'm learning to read, Deke, and not just the handful of things men have been around long enough to write down. The history of the whole damned planet is written in rocks, just lying there waiting for us to learn how to read the words." - p. 177

It's this urge that drives me, strangely enough, in my current work as well.

I'm learning to read in a larger sense than I've ever read so far. And to some extent this was an evolution: I did, after all, start on email quite awhile ago, then moved to forums, then Livejournal, then Blogger, then Facebook/MySpace, then Twitter, and Google Reader and the big feeds (Slashdot, BoingBoing, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, etc) got stuck in there somewhere too (and I may be skipping steps, of course: on the multimedia end, Flickr and YouTube are two examples, but I'm talking about text here, in the main).

But in terms of an educated and informed community that I can have face-to-face contact with and shares my academic/work interests, this is a first (which might be, I might add, because my college/grad work had little to do with technology). Not just casual friends giving updates on their lives, but I get a touch of friendliness and personality alongside the theory.

So I get these fantastic ideas as well as the context surrounding them: the problems that were faced to prompt them to come up with these ideas. It's good stuff.

But larger than that, and for a longer period of time, I've been learning to read people and their interaction with technology; learning to read the evolution of society due to technology's influence; learning to read how technology is changing our minds and changing our spaces.

I'm reading the future. I've already learned to read the past.

So between geology and tech, I feel like I've got the span of things.1 And while this current tech iteration is more minute than an atom in a drop in a bucket in terms of geologic time, it's monumental for us living in it.

And I get to read it. And better yet, write some of it.

[1]Oroboros.