Social media: changing daily and here to stay

It seems like my previous post has attracted some interest. I woke up this morning after a 'refreshing' 6-hour sleep and found a number of new messages in my inbox: all new Twitter followers. About 20 of them in just a few hours, which for a social-media-rookie like me is no small thing.


The above statement might actually need to be rectified a little, i.e. I'm not completely new to social media as such. I am a longtime user/abuser of Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, and various IMs. But just recently I've got into them like never before, linking my accounts and profiles, digging and bookmarking all sort of things, writing about social media...playing the game basically.

It's addictive, ever-changing, hugely interesting, and I like it a lot.

Not all of this is just form and mindless fun though: social mavens know that Web 2.0 savvyness — brave marketing strategies, innovative design ideas, powerful networking — needs to be combined with original, solid content to make the magic happen. And I'm trying my best to follow this simple, yet not well defined, rule.

With that in mind, I was chatting with a a filmmaker friend from London yesterday, and flooded him with excited opinions about the future of traditional media such as journalism, filmmaking, and photography*. What is a working business model we can aplpy to our activity without selling out to the ad-man? Copyright and Creative Commons, new technologies and old habits, subscription versus donation models, one-to-many communication versus many-to-many conversation...all this came up. And boy, it was an animated chat.



Needless to say, we did not really reached a satisfying conclusion. Is there anybody out there who has? Confident enough to share it? Please get in touch. The way I see it, new technologies will need to be combined, as they appear, with important content, the type that is often neglected in a show-biz-orientated society like ours. We are witnessing the "largest increase in expressive capability in human history" as Clay Shirky says in his TED talk above. It is the biggest opportunity for the true liberalisation of media channels, and it is time to raise the standards of news.

I personally have a couple of ideas, and I will research them and try to implement them soon, stay tuned on this space for updates.


*Journalist and commentator Charlie Beckett talks about networked media as the future of the industry in his Supermedia: saving journalism so it can save the world.