commbasics

My Brit pal and partner in "crime," Peter van der Sluijs just did a brief post on whether "old web is dying."  His post was actually referencing a similar piece by his social media consultant Brendan Cooper  waxing wistful over the death of the freewheeling (and free) social web. There have been several much more hyperbolic articles on this over the past few months (and I've been waiting for the right push.  This was it.) about how Google and Facebook are doomed; about the corporational takeover of the web; about how it's all falling apart, blah, blah, blah.  It was actually nice to read a couple of reasonable view about how things are changing.  I especially liked Peter's pithy assessment: "It’s easy to hyperventilate about the next big thing and whether or not Blogs / Twitter / Facebook are too yesterday for words.  If you do that, you miss the big picture." That, in a nutshell, has been the problem with mo...

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...