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Global Voices, Media Development, Social Stratification

Submitted by stevenmansour on May 2, 2007 - 8:43am

RE: Economics of Social Media on el oso, el moreno and el abogado

I usually cringe when I see a post with "Social Media" in the title, but this was great.

- The monetization of social authentic media is the digital equivalent of media consolidation. Yahoogle (Goohoo?) don't deny it - "Um, yeah... we're kinda just all about the money." Online media is still the domain of those who would build the web and its media structure vertically instead of horizontally.

Horizontal Development: Building outwards, developing capacity in a sustainable way in order to create services and tools that are the most useful to the broadest number of people possible - especially those on the margins or outside of the technological spectrum.

Vertical Development: Building all these nifty web services (Flickr, Youtube, etc.) that all end up serving the same hipster clientele who clusterspooge on it until the next big thing comes along.

Walk into a cafe with free wifi, or look at a random cross-section of members on Flickr or Youtube, or even your an average Twitter buddy list. Odds are, you'll find upper-middle-class whites making up the lion's share of all these groups - a continuation of the class and economic segregation (not just in the US) that dates back well past either of our memories. Sure, you'll find the occasional powerful photo from a Peruvian photo journalist or a quick videophone post of riots in Kampala, but they're the exception to the rule - and they've been around in National Geographic for much longer.

Have we all come to the point...

Submitted by stevenmansour on April 12, 2007 - 2:32pm

... where “value” is nothing more than the number after the dollar sign on our cheques? What if spending $45 dollars on a book helps you help someone else in their time of need, better equips you for dealing with a crisis or emergency, or teaches you a bit about what you can do to make the world a bit of a better place? Is there no “value” in that? When did your definition of “value” change?

“We must seek out value for money” is the saddest thing I’ve read all day.

I find it interesting that "web2.0" is a chronological marker for you...

Submitted by stevenmansour on February 18, 2007 - 9:02am

dose · no-jargon 10-point pledge

I find it interesting that web2.0 is a chronological marker for you - when exactly were you “able to begin participating in the web, without any technical knowledge”?

Because let’s face it - a true “non-techie” who has never used a computer before hasn’t got much more of an easier way to put info on the web than they had, say, in 1998. Sure, the barrier of entry is lower - you can get up and running with blogspot a little quicker than you could with Geocities way back when. My aunt hadn’t ever done much else than send an email, but she had her neighbour’s photos up on Tripod in less than an hour. Ten years ago.

So what changed? The “definition” of a techie, and the scale. Today, anyone with a myspace page is a techie - the fact that it takes a couple minutes to set up doesn’t change that. Then, we’ve got this entire generation being raised on IM (to stay “in the loop” with their friends), Google and Wikipedia (to plagiarize homework reports) and Myspace (god knows for what, but presumably for the same purpose as IM). They’re doing the lion’s share of the propagation behind much of this (just look at the comments section of any Youtube video), because it happens to be the state of the web at a time in their life when these tools are useful to them.

These enabling technologies (xml, wiki syntax/versioning, trackbacks, syndication, “blogging”, podcasting, youtube, etc) have been evolving slowly over the past 10 - 15 years, and didn’t just appear when O’reilly uttered the words “web two point oh”.

[”Web 2.0″] was coined by Dale Dougherty during a meeting betweenO’Reilly and Associates (a computer book publisher) and MediaLive International (an event organizer) as a marketable term for a series of conferences.

There you have it. A slogan. Most marketers have them.

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Zinc treatment of childhood diarrhea

Submitted by stevenmansour on November 8, 2006 - 10:25am

Zinc treatment of childhood diarrhea | Mother-Child

Here's the direct link to the ICDDRB-SUZY homepage:

SUZY - Scaling Up Zinc treatment for Young children with diarrhoea in Bangladesh.

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