As I have been concentrating on untangling my thoughts on ethnography and how I will turn a list of tweets and twitterers, and various observations of their interactions into an ethnography my lifestreaming has been more random and peripheral this week so I shall keep this summary brief.
A fair amount of my lifestream this week is around the idea of building blogging communities and making community rules for blogging spaces – this is something that links both to my work and this courses community I think. Codes of conduct fit with some of themes in Bell (2001) around definitions of community based on symbolism, tradition and behaviours. And codes of conduct, terms of service, etc. are commonplace on the internet as just all sites that require registration, payment or any formal relationship require you agree to terms that may or may not be properly read by most users/participants. I’m not looking to build anything as formal as that but, as with creating many things for the internet, it is often best to start by looking at what else is already being used to get a sense of what does and does not work – hence a lot of links from delicious on this topic this week. I was also referred to an article that looks at some of the contentious consequences of online communities explored in Bell: New Statesman – Trial by fury.
In real life I attended a really interesting in person event this week:
Shared Workshop in Internet Marketing for Scottish Internet Start-ups – The Edinburgh Internet Marketing Meetup Group (Edinburgh, Scotland) – Meetup.com. — 5:51pm via Delicious
This event was a talk presented by Sean Ellis (of 12in6 Projects), who has worked on marketing start ups for over a decade, and so a whole cluster of links this week were sparked from this session on start ups, finding ways to iterate your site design to get the most out of visitors and, crucially, ways to make use of Sean’s key question to assess users interest/commitment to start up sites: “Would you be disappointed if <this site/service> was no longer available?”. It’s a simple question but gives a lot of scope for users to talk about what does and does not make the site/service work so well – Sean emphasized one of the key things was creating a sense of community around your start up as a competitor may be able to replicate your service/site/idea but they cannot replicate the people and interested community that you have set up. An interesting note to bear in mind given the growth of social sites in recent years.
Sometimes it can be tricky working out what should be public and what should be private. Twitter lists came out this week – a few of my links refer to this but I’ve already blogged them so I won’t dwell on it here. I’ve tweeted a few times this week about feeling fluey and then felt quite odd about it. I’ve really been feeling unwell – in a very vague sense – for the last few weeks but my online life and studying is so public and visible that I can feel quite self-concious when I do feel ill. I haven’t been off work this week but there have been all sorts of stories in the press (mostly a couple of years ago) over people on sick leave appearing online in ways that suggest they are fine (most notoriously when appearing drunken in pictures taken during a sick day) and whilst I would never be off work unless ill I think it’s interesting that we haven’t yet worked out the acceptable code of conduct over what is/is not OK to do online when sick. Presumably emailing in to say you are ill is ok, keeping an eye on email is ok, but replying or social networking maybe not? I would answer the phone (if I heard it) when off ill but I would think twice about an email. There is definitely an interesting observer/paranoia effect on the social web…
Finally on the topic of public/private I spotted a bizarre and interesting blog posting on the Official Facebook Blog:
Shared Facebook | Memories of Friends Departed Endure on Facebook. — 5:58pm via Delicious
This story refers to a problem with the new Facebook referrer system – as part of various site changes recently Facebook has starting suggestion not only “People you might know” but also pulling people from your friend lists and suggesting “Write on his wall” or “Poke her” or, most offensively to some “X doesn’t have many friends – suggest some!”. The problem is that trawling through friends people may have stopped actively chatting too unleashes some problems… people have been asked to get back in touch with the partner they’ve just divorced and a whole series of people have been irate to find their deceased friends are being flagged up as being inactive or friendless. So the Official folks at Facebook have found a workaround of sorts – you can now flag your deceased friend(s) status and Facebook will leave the page up but turn it into a “memorial” page, which seems a little odd but at least gives them a criteria to filter suggestions on – deceased folks will not be appearing with a “Poke him!” label again if all goes to plan…
On a similar foot-in-mouth note I was pointed at this wonderfully odd marketing story this week:
Shared When Microsoft pulls out of Family Guy, who loses? | Blog | Econsultancy. — 6:11pm via Delicious
It seems that Microsoft were happy to endorse an episode of Family Guy until they, erm, watched it. On discovering that themes in the episode included such crowd-pleasers as incest Microsoft swiftly removed funding. There has been a little speculation that this might have been a bit of a pragmatic ploy in itself – the brand get all the credibility of sponsoring something edgy without either paying the cash OR being seen to endorse it and they certainly got as much publicity from the decision to withdraw as the original sponsorship likely would. However the main reason I was interested was the fact that this story seemed to symbolize one of the persistent problems mainstream brands encounter when they try to hop onboard a pre-existing niche community or subculture without any knowledge of how that group operates. The Windows 7 ads a few weeks back were another example but the problem isn’t confined to Microsoft. Marketing departments used to purchasing a form of credibility seem to find communities and behaviours online rather baffling to deal with – the banner ad continues to persist for instance despite being a very inefficient advertising mechanism compared to it’s successor, the likes of AdWords which are lower tech but more effective as they respond to desires of browsing individuals rather than the aesthetic needs and imaginations of large corporates.
Torchwood Activity on the Sly
Of course much of this week I’ve been moving along with my Torchwood digital ethnography but much of my watching and participation around the Torchwood Tweeters has been very subtle lifestream-wise. There will be some more links appearing in the next few days as I collate materials onto my site for the work. One thing that did appear in my stream this week though was a request to see if anyone would recommend a good Torchwood tweeter or two to follow. #followfriday is a Twitter tradition for referring Tweeters to the community. So I asked for recommendations (hoping to flag up some of the links between Torchwood tweeters):
Ahead of #followfriday I’m wondering which are the best #Torchwood tweeters to follow? [suchprettyeyes] — 3:01pm via Twitter
Unfortunately I’ve so far had no recommendations but the hashtags have been busy this weekend so it seems like the right time to take what I’ve collected and observed so far and get it all down. One of my most recent activities this week in fact was commenting on Damian’s post about evaluating an ethnography – I found the criteria he shared (from Richardson 2000) super useful so will be thinking about those as I put together my own ethnography.
Mutilated Cookies and Other Social Adventures…
Finally a little light relief. I made gruesome Halloween cookies and since one picture clearly shows a horrified bloodied community I thought it would be a nice thing to include here:
Panic on the sheets of Edinburgh...
I also wanted to add that in real life this weekend I attended a film night of scary Halloween movies which was entirely about having a communal experience: viewed on your own such films are either scary or bad but rarely hilarious. But Trick ‘r’ Treat, Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town and The Lost Boys all gain immensely from community backchat. Indeed Chopper Chicks would never have been discovered without a local niche film community around the Cult Fiction DVD shop where new titles can be discovered and shared by interested community members – interestingly this is a shop that has set up only recently despite the availability of the same titles online partly because the experience of browsing can be wonderful when physical but also because of that importance of community.
Poison, Drowning, Claw, Or Knife. So Many Ways To Take A Life.
Trick ‘r’ Treat (2008)
They’re Looking for a Few Good Men.
Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town (1989)
Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire.
The Lost Boys (1987)
Like many obscure cult films – especially those featuring leather chaps, Billy Bob Thornton, midget revenge and zombies – Chopper Chicks, whilst very silly and fun, is arguably an experience infinitely improved by a full and irreverent community commentary! Meanwhile the whole group bonded, during the screening of The Lost Boys, through discussions of previous experiences of viewing the same film – we brought our individual experiences into the community space and shared both those past experiences and a communal new experience of viewing some very silly movies. Basically in much the same way as most online film communities thrive on the sharing of, often cinematic, viewing stories and the exchange of knowledge and obscure film tip-offs.
