April 24, 2008
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Last week, Julien Smith wrote about how Akon’s prison time was fabricated. The people who comment to that post talk about how his career is doomed and all. And while I don’t know enough about him as an artist to comment on that, the story does show an important point.
I found out about this from a blog post, as shown above. With the internet, where word spreads faster than ever, fakes can easily be exposed. And once exposed, the word travels faster and wider than ever before.
Akon managed to fake it for the start of his career without being discovered. At this point, even if his reputation is shot, he’s already made enough money to give him a (more than) decent life, I think.
But for my generation - the millenials? We’ve grown up in this world of super-connectivity, a world where you can’t fake it anymore.
Faking it is becoming almost impossible. You’ve got to be real to succeed.
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April 23, 2008
Twitter’s been having problems over the last couple of days. It’s led Robert Scoble to declare that Twitter has given Friendfeed a major gift. The problems caused Daryl Tay to go off Twitter for a while. And lots of people have been asking questions about what’s going on.
For me, that’s the biggest issue. Yes, it’s not good that Twitter is broken. But the biggest problem is that it’s not obvious that it’s broken. If it’s broken and the site is down and there’s an error page, yes, it’s annoying, but at least people know what they are going to get. When they try to access Twitter, they know it’s down.
But that’s not what happened. The service was accessible. But it didn’t work how it was expected to. Because of that, people were left guessing about what’s going on. And people often don’t bother to take the time to guess.
If you’re going to go down, go down. But don’t leave people hanging. The middle ground is the worst place to be.
At least that’s my opinion. What do you think?
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April 22, 2008
So Skype has added unlimited land-line calls to Europe and Asia.
From a selfish standpoint, being in Singapore, this is great news. And hopefully it’s going to make it easier for you to reach me (my number’s on my sidebar if you want to talk to me - I’m always glad to have a conversation with my readers).
But there is a bigger point to all of this. There’s great value in surrounding yourself with the right people - people who inspire you and make you better. And developments like this make it easier to meet these sort of people.
No matter what you’re interested in, there are bound to be like minded people. There are lots of interesting, intelligent, inspiring, creative people out there.
And it’s now so easy to meet them. The barriers are being removed. Distance is no longer a barrier. To an extent, expertise isn’t a barrier anymore (if a 17 year old kid like me can have conversations with an award winning marketer like Mitch Joel, how much of a barrier can expertise be?).
How are you making the most of today’s technology to interact with inspiring people?
Photo: Meeting new people by Random Shennanigans
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April 19, 2008
I’m finding more and more life lessons in pool. I think it’s because it’s very much a mental game. But I digress.
In pool, you need a light grip on the cue stick. Yes, the grip is very personal, but in general, any instructor or book will advise a light grip. I’m not sure the exact reason, but I think it’s to ensure that the cue stick follows its natural path when you stroke. If you grip it too tightly, it’s more likely that the cue stick will jerk and move off its natural path.
Sometimes in life, trying to have too much control isn’t good. Sometimes the more you try to force something, the worse it’ll go. It might be better to just lightly guide it, and let it take its course.
One prime example of this is in business/pr today, especially with social media. You can’t force the conversations. You can’t stop all negative reviews. If you try to, it’ll just make things worse. The best thing you can do is work on your brand, be a part of the conversations, and let the rest happen. Same for your personal brand.
Sometimes the most natural option is the best one.
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April 18, 2008
There’s been a lot of commotion over Twitter spam lately, with Mashable’s Adam Ostrow writing that Twitter Spam has spiralled out of control. Adam goes on to suggest that “the time has arrived for Twitter to require a CAPTCHA with every new follow you want to make”.
Personally, I never really liked CAPTCHAs because of the negative impact on usability. But that’s a post for another day, I guess (Wired’s Paul Adams asked the question of whether Captcha’s moment is passing, and you can see the discussion there if you’re interested.)
The question I want to ask here is the question in the post title. Does Twitter spam really matter? Yes, it’s slightly annoying getting the random email notifications of being followed. But other than the email notifications, I personally don’t see the big deal about Twitter spam.
Twitter, by its nature, is inherently permission based, isn’t it? You choose who to follow. So how does Twitter spam fit in? Users can just choose not to follow the spammers, and that’s done, isn’t it? And based on Andre Nantel’s study, users are more or less intelligent enough to choose who to follow.
When the user controls what messages he receives, can spam really be that big an issue? Can it even be considered spam in the first place?
The second question, I don’t have a fixed answer to. But for the first question, I don’t see how spam can be such a big isssue.
What do you think? Is there something I’m missing from all of this??
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April 17, 2008
Okay, so I’m finally back after a week or so. And there’s been a lot going on in the blogosphere over that week, not least the conversation about comments. Lots of people have written and discussed about this. Two such people were Valeria Maltoni - who asked whether comments should be portable - and Robert Scoble - who said that the era of blogger’s control is over.
For me, the issue isn’t about control. The issue is about the conversations themselves. I would love to know what people are saying, and to be a part of the conversations - to interact with and answer my readers. And also, when different parts of conversations are happening on different places, the readers might not be able to get the whole picture/value of the conversation. If a really good conversation is happening on FriendFeed, the readers on the blog itself could miss out. And vice versa.
That’s the biggest issue for me about the fragmentation of comments. And I’m looking forward to see whether anyone manages to come up with a solution. I think the Feed with Comments plugin that I’m using here (as announced in the previous post) helps solve the second problem slightly - the comments being in the RSS feed themselves makes them available no matter where the feed is ported to.
What do you think?
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April 8, 2008
You might have noticed I’ve made a couple of changes to the blog, and I’m hoping that they’ll help improve the conversations here.
Firstly, the sidebar has been changed to include my conversations from Twitter. This was inspired by Andrea Vascellari’s Twitter Comments. The idea is that a lot of conversations today are happening on Twitter, so why not bring that conversation here to the blog. I edited the pipe slightly, to include my own tweets, so that a more complete picture of the conversation is shown - my updates and the replies to those updates. If you want to use it, you can get the pipe here, and if you want to be updated on the conversations I’m part of, you can subscribe to the feed here.
Secondly, the comments on the various posts are now embedded as part of the RSS feed. I figured that since I don’t get that many comments, it won’t clog up your readers. And I think it’ll make it easier to keep track of the conversation (you won’t have to click through in order to read the comments). You can check out one of my older posts in a feed reader if you want to see how it looks.
So yeah, those are the two changes I’ve made. Let me know what you think of them.
Conversation Silhouettes picture by Brian Solis, via Flickr
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