I also like to use Google Readers “shared + note” feature as a quick and easy way to drop a short comment on stories I like while I’m sharing the story with my Google contacts. However, just today I realized that I’m doing myself and my fellow bloggers a disservice in the sense that I don’t leave comments on the “source” blog post page nearly as much as I used to.

I also realized that (the newly redesigned!) Online Media Cultist doesn’t get nearly as many comments as it used to. Part of this is my fault as I go through lengthy periods where I’m not posting a ton, and part of it has to do with the fact that comments get distributed on places like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc.

The “distributed conversation” thing is where the Internet and blogosphere is going, and I’m fine with that. People want to have conversations where they’re hanging out, which in fact is why I’ve become so accustomed to leaving comments via Google Reader!

But, as they say, I can control my own actions. And that leads to my new year’s resolution #1 for 2010: comment more.

I resolve to comment on the source blog page of five blogs each day, every weekday.

It’s part of my social media goodwill plan for the new year. Pay it forward, y’all.

That’s in the past, though. Today, MySpace is still one of the most popular websites on the Internet (#11, according to Alexa, down from #6 in late 2007) but it’s an aging giant. Bands are still there, and lots of people are still there, but the buzz and early adopters and press have all long since moved on.

Over the past year or so, MySpace has looked to brand itself not so much as a social networking site, which has nearly lost its meaning and cache in the age of Facebook and Twitter, but as a social media and music site. This would be a return to its roots really, as Sparxoo notes.

Now, with the completion of MySpace Music’s acquisition of popular social media music website iMeem, MySpace is making serious strides to refresh its brand while gobbling up an additional 16 million monthly users.

It’s a smart move. Bands and artists have invested a lot of time over a period of years building presence on MySpace, so the ability to integrate iMeem’s features and community could really payoff long term. And in a crowded online music space, iMeem has distinguished itself as a popular destination to discover music and socialize with fellow music addicts (for example, if I want a quick fix of “The Breaks,” by Kurtis Blow, I knew I could just head to iMeem, search for the song, sit back and get hit with the funk).

I don’t think that MySpace will ever seriously compete with Facebook again. That battle is over, and MySpace is wise to realize it. If MySpace can hang around and dominate the online music space, battling the likes of AOL Music, Yahoo Music, and startups like Pandora, it may once again have a bright future.

(this post originally appeared on Technorati)

How do we know how it's doing at the close of 2009? Check this: Dell Inc. claims to have earned $6.5 million via the power of the tweet. I'd say that's pretty big.

* Webware: Those who say that Twitter is nothing more than a place where people share inconsequential experiences in their lives might want to listen up.

* Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb is skeptical: The news will no doubt be celebrated by social media marketers all the world over but I believe there's reason to be very skeptical of this tidbit of information.

* MaximumPC: Dell keeps it’s Twitter network active with more than 100 employees sending out tweets over 35 different channels to followers in 12 countries. According to Mehta [Mehta, vice president of Dell’s online sales unit], “It’s a very vibrant channel for us and it’s growing aggressively. It’s not just our reach and growth that has progressed, it’s that it’s happening globally.”

* Boy Genius Report: Twitter.com may not have a revenue model in place, but that isn’t stopping other companies from making some green off of the social networking site.

* Fast Company: But with Dell's turnover ticking upwards of $61 billion dollars in 2008, isn't this figure just an insignificant drop in Dell's ocean? Yes, if you're talking pure dead numbers. But according to Manish Mehta, VP of Dell Online, Dell apparently sees Twitter as a "very vibrant channel" partly due to its aggressive growth and partly due to the potential global reach, on a per-second basis, of a single Tweet.

(this post originally appeared at Technorati)

I’m very happy and excited about the results. The homepage has a much more online magazine-like look, but still maintains a “reverse chronological” feel that is to me true to the blogging tradition.

I’m also using categories for the first time. Looking back at the three year history of OMC (oh man, it’s been three years already!), I realized that while most things I write about are very much tied to Internet and online media topics, I do stray far afield every now again (particularly when I get into a Posterous mode). So I’ve split things into three main categories:

OMC – All the online media cultery you can handle. Some good recent posts include Digital Curation and the Future of the Internet and an interview with Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis.

Memes & Oddball – This is kind of a grab bag of stories that include Internet memes that aren’t strictly about media and tech (like a riff on the Kanye West meme with rap star Xzibit) but is also “oddball” in the sense that it includes stories that don’t really sync up with anything else (like a quick link over to Ain’t It Cool News with regard to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds).

Television – Finally, I can’t help getting obsessive-y about TV every now and again. I try to tie it to the webs where I can (like with showcasing Slate’s amazing TV Club coverage of Mad Men), but sometimes I simply must point to some element of classic television lore).

This is not necessarily 100% locked yet. I’m going to let it go for a while and see how things play. For example, I may change the name of the “OMC” category as it’s kind of a placeholder for “most of the stories on the site.” And since I made the switch pretty much everything has been OMC. Which is a good and appropriate thing I guess.

Most of all, I’m trying to continue to write about things that turn me on about the Internet, social media, content aggregation, blogging, and entrepreneurship.

Thanks so much to all of you who have stopped by and commented over the years, and here’s to at least three more!

The result, on the webby side at the least, is awfully intriguing.

The Official Avatar Interactive Trailer is an Adobe AIR app that brings the trailer for the lavishly expensive and highly anticipated new film to your desktop, and offers a bunch of interactive and social media features along with it. As Mashable notes, “whenever you watch a trailer, special “hotspots” will come up where you can learn more about the characters. Even cooler though is the integration of Avatar’s Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube feeds. You can get all of the latest news right from the interactive trailer.”

I’m particularly intrigued by the integration of real time subject-specific content feeds that help to enhance the interactive experience, as it relates to my recent piece on digital curation and the future of the Internet. It’s cool to see this kind of content delivery – offering the right content to the right place (people who are excited enough about Avatar to install an AIR app that relates to it) at the right (real) time.

Here’s the Avatar trailer:

(this post originally appeared on Technorati)

Well, it would seem that 11 days in that this is a big deal already.

Says CNET:

Microsoft on Monday said that millions of Xbox Live members have used the new social-media features that the company pushed live a week ago.

In June, Microsoft announced it would begin offering Xbox Live users access to Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm. And while the manifestation of each of those services is scaled down on Xbox Live, the rollout has been one of the company's big pushes this fall for its hugely popular online system.

And of course it’s causing the bloggers to get their blog on:

• Kotaku: Earlier this month, Facebook went live on Xbox LIVE. Loads of people have logged onto Facebook via LIVE. "Loads" is not very descriptive. "Two million" is.

• Destructoid: [David] Dennis didn’t have numbers for the amount of people who got bored with both apps and went to play Modern Warfare 2. He also didn't have a number for the amount of people using the Twitter app, but we’re guessing a lot of people signed into that as well. Not many can resist sending that, "Hey, I'm doing this over LIVE" tweet. Not many at all.

• CrunchGear: In related “social” news, Microsoft says that around half a million Last.fm account were created with the launch of Xbox Live-Last.fm compatibility.

• TechSpot: Meanwhile, the Zune marketplace — formerly called Xbox Live marketplace — served videos to 1.7 million users in the first week available. No figures for Twitter's usage were offered, but Dennis did say that there have been "tweets from nearly every market where we have Xbox Live."

• Edge Online: With around ten per cent of Xbox Live’s 20 million user base accessing Facebook, the service may be the most heavily adopted of the new features introduced with the most recent Xbox 360 system update.

On a personal note, I have yet to play with the Xbox’s new social features as I’m suffering through a bout of the dreaded Red Ring of Death. If the stars align brightly and correct-like I will receive my receive my repaired and newly undead Xbox this very night, a Thanksgiving Miracle if there ever was one I’d say. Well, in geeky terms, anyway.

(this post originally appeared on Technorati)

Exhibit A: Steve Rubel is talking about digital curation and the role that brands can help play to find “good stuff.” In AdAge, Rubel notes that while Facebook and Google are dominating our attention online today, there’s an enormous need for a mix of automated and human tools to help us make sense of and synthesize the chaos of information overload. Rubel goes on to point out that smart companies like Microsoft and UPS are laying claim to “categories” in which they can help to provide the role of digital curator about topics that are important to them (Windows 7 in the case of Microsoft, general business news in the case of UPS).

I then recalled that Rubel echoed these thoughts when I interviewed him recently for Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere:

There's a huge role for professional digital curators – people who can separate art from junk in high-value niches. Blogs do so. But so do automated sites like the ones Sawhorse is building. There will also always be a market for content creators who know how to stand out from the din.

Exhibit B: Also involves an interview, in this case one that I just completed with Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis last week. In response to my question about Netscape’s influential role in creating a hybrid approach to user generated and human curated news, Calacanis talked about how products like Digg Dialoggs are “laying produced content on top of community content” and ended by stating flat out that, “Curation is the future of the Internet.”

I’ve long felt that this “post-web 2.0” period that we’re in has a great need for platforms that allow for the curation and aggregation of specific topics and themes to meet specific needs, which might range from online communities to product launches to subject specific websites or blogs. And it’s exciting to see leading voices talking up this trend and products launching from a bevy of sources to satisfy this need.

(this post first appeared on Technorati)

At this point, Twitter is my only social networking website, getting sporadic use. Much to my surprise, I’ve enjoyed this self-imposed exile quite a bit. [...]

Overall, spending less time on speculation, discussion, and criticism, and more time doing and creating things. It’s been a while since I actually built stuff. Feels good. At this juncture, I won’t return from this camping trip for a while.

Would love to hear what other people think about social media participation, discussion, sharing, criticism, versus “creating things.”

Personally, in action if not in spirit I’m not too far off where Jason is of late. I’ve been enjoying sharing stories on Google Reader, throwing down an occasional tweet, and exploring the use of Posterous, but beyond that my social media participation has been rather light.

Maybe it’s “summer vacation” on the webs, or maybe it’s a growing realization that you just can’t stay completely plugged in for months on end without taking breaks to refresh and reorient.

I realized that at best social media is entertainment disguised as “useful” information or crowdsourced “knowledge”, and at worst is distraction disguised as entertainment. The later being most of my experience with social networking sites, specially Twitter. See, when you watch Television to kill time and distract yourself because you’re bored, it is easier to realize it. Most TV junkies are aware that they are TV junkies. But the web is constantly shifting your attention and it makes it harder to realize that you’re distracting yourself.

Now, of course I’ve heard the Twitter: What’s The Point Again? and Social Media Is A Waste Of Time arguments as we all have. I suppose I’m being challenged here to think about the usefulness of Twitter and social media above being entertainment, fun, distraction, conversation, connection, interaction.

I’ll lean toward saying that Twitter and social media can be quite useful… provided you use it in the right way. And of course that right way can vary widely! That’s the beauty of it, in part.

And a goodly dose of moderation also can’t hurt. It can be awfully hard to find the right balance at times to be sure.

Increasingly, social media web sites are becoming much more than places to keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues online. They’re becoming major hubs of information consumption, analysis and distribution as well, so it’s important to understand how this trend is playing out on some of the more popular destinations on the social web.

In fact, social media web sites such as Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook have the potential to take over many of the functions of RSS readers such as Google Reader, Newsgator and Bloglines.

Twitter
Amidst all the hubbub of Ashton Kutcher and CNN and Oprah Winfrey and Save Chuck, Twitter has become a nifty and dynamic way to receive inbound alerts about news stories and information, giving the ability to turn your Twitter stream into an “RSS reader” of sorts.

There are a few different ways to use Twitter as an RSS reader. The first is to simply follow those users who broadcast links to stories and web sites that you find interesting and relevant (Robert Scoble, for example, when it comes to all things tech, Internet and geek). This is a means of crafting your own “smart people network” that sends the best stories and links to you. As David Drager at systemBash writes, “I find it awesome to be able to see what is going on, without having to manage ‘feeds.’”

(read the the rest of this piece at Web Worker Daily) ]]> http://onlinemediacultist.com/2009/05/05/using-social-media-sites-as-rss-readers/feed/ 0