On Tue, 2011-03-15 at 12:19 -0400, Nathan Hamiel wrote: > > Oh wow, you do live in a bubble.
Not sure I would go that far, but we all live in some form of bubble one way or another. > I am not sure why you threw the papyrus reference in there, you have > to know that is complete BS. First of all in the days of papyrus most > people couldn't read much less have a basic education. Not only that > but there wasn't an instant one to many and then shortly after a many > to many relationship with written data. That is massively huge and > enormously large :) Not everyone owns a computer, and some people are still illiterate. More so when you start talking about third world countries. Think about the majority of the populations of the countries who's governments were overthrown :) > Social networks (love them or hate them) have connected the world it a > way not thought possible before. You may be feeling a certain way > about the government or your living conditions and have no idea that > thousands of people around you also feel the same way. Then you find > out that all over your country feel the same way. You may have kept it > to yourself. You may not have been aware that the government dragged > someone a few blocks away out of their house kicking and screaming > never to be seen again. That's the power of socially connecting to > people on the Internet. Hell, most news stories are broken on Twitter > before you see them on the evening news. These facts are pretty > undeniable. I would like to see a papyrus do that ;) The reference two how news comes about these days is part of what I dislike about the social networks. To be a news person used to involved a process, that now anyone with a means to communicate simulate. Without having to do the work, vet leads, etc. It has also lead to various retractions in legit media. > Why does that make you proud? I am always surprised when people say > things like this. There is no way to really know the value of a social > network until you use it. There is no way to know the long term impacts of socialization being public. That which can help you today, could potentially hurt you tomorrow. > The value of your social network experience is based on who you are > connected to as well as your contributions back to it. I realize this > is hard for you to understand because you haven't participated but I > think you would be surprised. Yes, and I know people who have lost their jobs and had other major problems in life they never considered at first. I value what little privacy I have left in this world. Every day there is less and less of that. > Often I see things on twitter days and sometimes weeks before it ends > up on something like Slashdot. What about things that would be useful > to you that might not make it to something like Slashdot? Even prior to the rise of social networks, I did not live on Slashdot. I rarely pay any attention to it, and it has no effect on my world or bubble :) > In some ways by not being a Twitter user you are losing out. In some > ways participating in Twitter allows you to directly connect with > developers of a project or other experts in your field. I have been in the trenches for years, we have a great invention called IRC. I communicate and work with people all over the world. Its how Gentoo operates, and most distros with distributed developer bases. Linus did not need Twitter, or any social network to make Linux into what it is today. Most all that preceded what exists today. > Take the security community for instance, you may find out about new > tools an techniques long before other people find out about them. You > may even find information that his helpful that never gets published > to a news aggregator. I turn a lot of security people on to Twitter > for these very same reasons. Security stuff has no business being out in the open. Some aspects as mentioned are good, others are not. Most times when a vulnerability is found, till its resolved, that information usually kept private. There are many things that go on in the security world, that is kept private for legitimate reasons. > I fail to see how any of this is a drawback. Maybe the drawbacks have not come yet. Its still in infancy. Its not like this stuff has been around for even a decade yet. People really need to keep that in mind. > Often people are going through massive amounts of information and > giving you the useful highlights. That is a HUGE advantage to someone > like me who stays pretty busy. So you are still saying this > collaborative community is something that you are proud to not > participate in? Well per the charts others have produced, you have to wade through 80% plus unwanted stuff, to get at any tid bits. But same can be said for many things rss feeds, blogs, etc. I used to waste hours with a rss aggregator. That was years before Twitter ever existed. Sure I stayed really informed, but productive I was not ;) > Once again though, it depends on the people you socially connect with. > The people with the useless babble probably wouldn't be the people you > would follow every day. For a blog, you just wouldn't read it if it > provided no value to you. Even those I have received technical value from. I cannot follow all of their activities, blogs, tweets, etc. A buddy of mine used to work at a social network aggregator, Spokeo, which has since morphed. But even using something like that, still way to much. To me there is a difference between valuing something and practical application. There is lots of knowledge that would be valuable to have, but unless I can use it in a practical application today and now. Likely just leads me one more step towards overload. > Not just some money an ass-load of money. This is a huge area of next > generation marketing. Speculative, if you read on the Wikipedia page about Twitter, the money is not there yet. The advertising and marketing aspects they are trying to figure out. I am not sure even Google has made YouTube profitable yet, given the monthly bandwidth usage/bills and all the rest. Thats with Google owning ~70% of online advertising and marketing. Likely owns even more of the over all advertising and marketing world. > This is the future so it seems reasonable that people would foot some > research in to it. I think more are researching the profitability than usefulness/relevance. > Now, even though I have a Facebook account, I don't like Facebook at > all. The only thing I do on Facebook is talk politics and call my > friends horrible names, but there are people out there who consider > Facebook the "Internet". Facebook is huge, but your usage sort of leads to my point. Great ways to waste time, that comes with big expenses. > Almost the same way that people used to think of AOL as the Internet > back in the day. Excellent point, and where is AOL today? Trying to stay relevant ;) > They get everything they want to do online from Facebook and don't > really need to go anywhere else. This is a driver for marketing people > and pretty easy to see why they are throwing money at it. Some people are still just getting online, or starting to spend a tremendous amount of time online. I some what consider it a fad just like AOL was, and MySpace has slowly become. Looking back, I see more advancements as a whole, and with regard to technology before any social network existed. Though they some what always have existed, just morphed, bbs, irc, chat, sms, twitter, etc. Even going back to my tried and true papyrus ;) Which have you noticed how things like iPad and tablets are going out of their way to replicate page flips, papyrus rolled up, etc. -- William L. Thomson Jr. Obsidian-Studios, Inc. http://www.obsidian-studios.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive http://marc.info/?l=jaxlug-list&r=1&w=2 RSS Feed http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml Unsubscribe [email protected]
