Matt Bigelow – Digital Media Manager

The Evolution of Blogging

Over at GigaOm, Om Malik argues for an evolution of blogging toward real-time, social publishing. Basically, context matters now more than ever after the rise of real-time mass messaging services such as Twitter, Facebook’s News Feed, Friendfeed, and the like. This explosion of short snippets of information and data points makes context paramount.

The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real

Anil Dash describes a new set of technologies he dubs the “Pushbutton Web,” which he says will push online publishing ever further into realtime communication. He writes for a technical audience, but it’s certainly apropos in the wake of Facebook’s purchase of Friendfeed. I say that because I’ve had quite a few friends ask me in the last few days why Facebook buying friendfeed matters (many of whom had never heard of friendfeed before the news hit). My answer is that the Web values immediacy. Facebook, which has always been more ‘turn-based,’ can better compete with Twitter with friendfeed’s technology (not to mention their development team, which includes a bunch of ex-Googlers).

Distribution…now

John Borthwick, CEO of a company called betaworks, describes the emerging Web as a stream, and offers some great analogies to the uninitiated for understanding what’s happening online.

Over this Thanksgiving break I’ve given some thought to an industry’s business model that is based on a monopoly that no longer exists. Like real estate agents who enjoyed premiere access to listings, foreclosures and a mountain of sales data that the average consumer couldn’t easily study, the gatekeepers of this industry have leveraged their 20th century model to the breaking point. I, as a consumer, am ready for the revolution.

I’m talking, of course, about wedding photography.

The revolution will be digitized

Excuse the melodrama…it’s Monday morning.

Here’s the problem. Our wedding photographer took hundreds and hundreds of pictures – maybe even a thousand. We paid her an enormous amount of money (all things are relative, I know, but I’m a pretty frugal guy). And now we have five photographs which we’ll frame for display in different parts of our house, plus a coffee table-sized book she’ll lay out for us that features another couple dozen of our photos. The rest, the vast majority of the photographs she took, will sit on a hard drive somewhere in a closet until enough years have passed that she feels comfortable enough to erase them.

What an incredible inefficiency!

No one else will want copies of those photographs other than my wife and I (and our mothers of course), but we’re also not going to fork over enough money to cover the cost of printing each and every one of them.

What needs to happen, of course, is that we should receive digital copies of all of our wedding photographs so that we can do with them what we see fit. It’s our special day, and we have 1/100th of the work she did to capture it in our possession.

The business model’s to blame…

To me, this is a great example of the business model getting in the way of the technology. The technology is there, it’s just figuring out how it all shakes out. Personally, I don’t think our wedding photographer should make any less money. I just don’t want to pay her for the production of our photographs in the form of physical photographs. The means of production cost near to zilch. I want to pay her for the expert photography and lay out of our photographs (which she did a tremendous job of, by the way). She’s an incredibly well-trained photographer with a lot of experience. I want to pay her for that, not for printing our photos. Heck, I can do that at Wal-Mart.

What do you think

Are most photographers already upping their initial fee or hourly and offering the photos digitally? Can you normally get these on a CD and I just need to be persistent? Do excuse the Monday morning rant, but hey, don’t even get me started on the videographer…

(I’m targeting this query primarily at my friends involved in the space of social networking, attempting to glean insights ahead of a speech I’m giving on the topic.)

Is it a Facebook group? Is it Twitter? Is it a more targeted approach, like listing something on ThePoint.com? Is it good old fashioned e-mail?

There’s no one size fits all

I realize this. That’s why I’d like to learn what specific ways you’ve tried to organize people online, and how that affected what tool you chose to do so.

Thanks in advance.

For anyone in the Greater Nashville interested:

Web Analytics Wednesday

Thousands of people around the world have participated in Web Analytics Wednesday since it’s inception in 2005 and the number continues to increase every month. You can now share your experience at these unique events!

From an article in the Nashville City Paper by Richard Lawson on the glut of homes on the real estate market, and speaking of a builder who works on both custom and spec homes:

Still, he won’t drop the price to encourage a sale, saying it’s better for property values in the neighborhoods where he builds. Instead, he has been offering buyers’ agents more commission or other concessions if they bring a full-price offer.

My gripe with old media: great tactic by the builder, now what about the consumer?

My gripe with real estate agents: Jarvis over at BuzzMachine has written a couple of times of “freeconomics” and the new business model of the Web. Having just worked with a real estate agent to buy a home (a professional and hard working one at that) I still have to say that the ability to peruse a plethora of market-specific data on Zillow in the comfort of my home made me immeasurably more comfortable with the purchase.

Their ability to force a consumer to bring a full-price offer rests with the fact that they hold more information than the buyer, an advantage Zillow obliterates.

Growing up with the Internet (my parents got dial up when I was eight or nine years old), I always despised the television, but lacked the historical framework to explain why. Broadcast news and sitcoms were my usual targets, and I would contrast the passive isolation of watching television with the participatory, group nature of the Web.

Clay Shirky offers a persuasive framework for understanding how the Web is changing/has been changing/will continue to change society.

Enjoy.

The so-called “evangelical vote,” often cited by media analysts as a crucial constituency in securing the Republican nomination, is likely to exercise considerably less influence this cycle, according to a series of interviews with clergy and political analysts conducted by HuffPost’s OffTheBus {citizen journalism project.}

I recently participated in the Huffington Post’s OffTheBus citizen journalism project, which can be read at the above link. I interviewed Executive Pastor Marty Thompson of Bethel Evangelical Free Church in Fargo, North Dakota, for the piece.

It was my first such participation in a citizen journalism project and I was both impressed with Amanda Michel, Marc Cooper and Dan Truel for coordinating the effort, as well as pleased with the final result. Although many of the issues discussed in the article fell outside the scope of my specific conversation with Pastor Thompson, I still felt my interview informed the article and helped the group arrive at a collective truth regarding the so-called “Evangelical vote” leading up to Super Tuesday. Namely, we dispelled the notion that evangelical Christians are somehow to be perceived of as a homogeneous voting bloc in the United States, a notion reflected in my particular interview with Marty Thompson.

I just wanted to take a moment and recognize the folks over at Popular Science magazine for their Web efforts. They quietly launched a redesigned site, PopSci.com, in 2008. It’s built on the Drupal platform and one way of looking at it is that, functionally, it’s a group blog. Each navigational bucket along the top represents a category, but all posts/articles/stories appear time-stamped in reverse chronological order on the home page.

If you haven’t checked it out, I recommend.

It offers a unique model for a traditional print company to leverage their assets on the Web. It also gives me hope that old media companies will come to realize that a blog is just as easily (and perhaps more helpfully) understood as a medium, not as a genre.

A friend of mine sent me the following story of a Canadian union organizer banned from Facebook for making too many friends:

He then asked me, “Does this thwart the potential for organizing through Facebook?”

No, I said. And here’s why:

Obviously, if you want to get a message out to organize a protest, a prayer service or anything else , you’ll get that message out most QUICKLY by having a lot of friends, say, more than the 5,000 limit. Note I said most QUICKLY. (This is the equivalent of broadcasting a message through a traditional one-to-many medium).

But not necessarily most EFFECTIVELY, nor most SUCCESSFULLY, if the barometer for success is how many people take the desired action you’re hoping for.

Here’s the key

Successfully organizing on Facebook doesn’t necessarily mean one person broadcasting a message to 5,000 people. If anything, that message is going to be watered down for broad appeal, less relevant to each specific person, and prompt the least (percentage wise) action.

The KEY is getting 50 people to each tell 50 people to teach tell 50 people, etc., etc., etc. (Or, really, 5 people to tell 5 people, etc., etc., etc.) Each message then becomes a relevant, targeted message, and a message that the recipient of which is most likely to pass on.

And that’s what gives social networking sites, such as Facebook, such a great potential for organization.

So you sort of have two issues: 1) crafting the right message and 2) getting that message to the right people.

Obviously what I’m describing here is simply viral marketing in theory (the practitioners of which will tell you in reality is anything but simple).

Each year Call to Action, a progressive, reform-minded organization within the Catholic Church, convenes a National Convention. This year the group aims to hold a few sessions on how to utilize new media technologies to inform and galvanize the laity to action. Some suggested sessions include blogging, podcasting and social networking. I had a conversation last night with an organizer, and hope to sit on a panel for the group. The convention is in November and preliminary information can be found here. More to come soon…