Born on the Web

I really hope I'm admitted. It's going to be a fun experience. Letting my inner-geek come out of its shell ;-)

 

Quote by miss rogue from citizen agency. They travel around speaking on conferences, but also have customers, how do you handle this?

Question:

How do you guys get any work done with all of the things you are involved in?

Answer:

I wasn’t aware there was a difference between the two…I realized long ago that cutting back on the latter, rendered the former banal. The mojo comes from the being part of the community one serves. If a company prefers an agency that brainstorms in boardrooms and comes up with ideas, they should hire them.

There is nothing better then being challenged by presentations, conferences and like-minded people to keep you sharp. If you are regularly updated with fresh knowledge and insides the work goes much faster and almost automatically.

A 79 year old silver surfer is addicted to Youtube. He posts his first video blog asking for for some help and encouragement and tells us what he'll mostly do on his blog is "bitch and grumble about life in general in the perspective of an old man". Euhrm, fun. About a week later there are 178 video responses (!) by other youtube users and 6409 text responses. I didn't think of youtube yet as a video blogging and conversation platform. What I use it mostly for, and most people I guess, is to watch funny clips and old tv shows, but it seems that there's a whole lot of videoblogging and conversations going on. I did a search to see if some other people had noticed this and the Technology Evangelist had a post up 'Youtube Becoming a User Contributes Video Blogging Platform'. They say that if all the copyrighted material should be deleted from youtube because of legal reasons, the site will still be a huge success because of the thriving videoblogging community. Youtube is an ideal latform for starting video dialogs because they host the video for you, provide easy schmeazy upload features and allready have a very active community.

I wanted to talk about this a long time ago, but never came to this. But as I see my thesis evolving, I keep coming to this conclusion. With the new web techniques it's easier to become emotionally involved into communities. It's a general feeling I have when I'm browsing the different "web 2.0" communities. I found that there are a few things that can make your social connection in a community more emotional:

• Better User Experience: When interacting on a website, the flow of using the functionalities becomes more natural. It feels more direct, faster, ... I think better UE also results in more interaction. Interaction feels more spontaneous.
• Folksonomy/Taxonomy: It becomes easier to find people with the same interest/problem/feeling. You can find people with whom you can emotionally connect.
• Rich Internet: Technology now gives users the possibility to share more than just text on the internet. It has become easy to share pictures/videos/audio/play lists/bookmarks/... The person behind a profile can become more reel. You can see him, hear him or both. The more aspects of a person you know, the better the social connection.
• Share your life: This is a general trend that can be seen online. People want to share their personal stuff to the world. The trust in the internet is back, they don't mind putting photos online of their kids. Not only the technology but also the general trend makes your community richer. People want to get emotionally involved in communities.
• Subscribe to a person: With the growing popularity of feeds, it becomes easier to follow a person's life.

My personal experience has learned me that if communities have the above aspects I will get involved emotionally. I can't be attached to someone if I only read his/her opinion about one subject. I can be attached to someone if I know he/she likes going out, acting crazy, music, ... I want to know how his/her voice sounds, how he/she looks, ... This emotional connection can exist out of a real life contact and become stronger trough your online profile. Or it can exist out of an online contact and grow to a real life contact (f.e. blog meetings, flash mobs). Maybe this generally goes under the term social software, I just feel it can be more then just being social. It's about emotions, it can go further than just a common interest. People want to share their emotions as well as find out about other peoples' emotions. So the perfect online community should support every possible emotion, because my offline experience learns me that sharing emotions makes a band between people stronger than ever. I'd love to research this in my thesis, the problem is it's so difficult to prove things like this. I should talk about this with a psychologist or a sociologist. Any ideas how to prove this? So off you go buzzword emotional web, hope to see you again.

There are 2 reasons why I started this blog : The first reason was to make a database of information for myself. So I could look back to certain information, and what was my attitude towards them. The other reason was to get back some useful feedback from the community. In my research field the community is very active, especially the blog community. I hope by reading interesting blogs, and writing interesting articles I can get more information for the community. So if you got something to say, always more then welcome. Please bare with me if my English isn't always that good. You may always correct me. :)