commbasics

This post was going to focus, primarily on Dehood , but since writing part two of this series, I fell into a new world of the Social Web companies from all over the world and I have discovered they fall mostly into 5 buckets: sharing stuff rating stuff measuring stuff organizing stuff selling stuff  All of that is great for marketers.  The more people participate in all of that stuff, the more information marketers have on the participants, so it's easy to sell stuff, which is the biggest part of the Social Web.  That's where it leaves a lot of people out of participation because there is so much emphasis on the latter, that the rest seems to be rather manipulative.    That's a big problem because the whole point of the web, in the first place, is to bring people together and the social movement has been co-opted by the sales departments of the corporate world.  If you pay attention to the big players in the Social Web industry -- Facebook...

Last week I started a series on the importance and future of geolocal (also called geosocial) apps and outlined a few of the roadblocks to success including the lack of widespread adoption of the underlying technology (smart phones), holding the interest of the audience, and the lack of community building inherent in the current options.  Today I want to look more into that last problem and how some players are overcoming it. As I said last week, the big benefit of social media is its ability to build communities through the web.  But those communities are, for the most part, virtual.  If you are in Facebook or any other platform, you have a large group of people in your network that you have never actually met face to face.  Yet, you are in contact with them regularly no matter where they are in the world.  you know a lot about them and you have several common interests.  However, try to do that on a local level with social media and you run into a p...