[LINK] Largest Facebook group in Australia?

[grove at zeta.org.au]

On Wed, 7 Jan 2009, Rick Welykochy wrote:

> I don't think the designers of these sites "get it". When I am
> notified by email, I want to be told the whole story. Not forced
> to waste time logging in, etc.etc.

The designers "get it".   The marketing foofoos "don't want it". 
They want the user to login and click through.   Clicks == revenue 
in the eyes of the foofoo.   When the page stats come up each month,
the foofoos want to say "we had 21 million impressions", with 48% 
being return visitors" and so on.    There is no payoff in email 
as it involves energy and expense with no ROI - you can't really 
tell if someone got that email or read it, so there is no log 
of any "impressions" or interaction with the site so they need to 
tease the user to return.   And my problem with the blogs is that they 
are not particularly well searchable.   Blogs are being used more 
and more to impart techy information, walkthroughs, howtos and the like.

But as they tail off and get archived the data is lost, even after 
a relatively short amount of time.  So when I used to be able to 
search the net and troll through newsgroups, listserves and so on, 
now you have "forums" and blogs which tend to only contain current 
or recent data.   No good if you want to hunt down a problem and 
then come back a year later.   Case in point,  I have a synthesizer 
that had a design flaw.   Someone posted the solution on a blog 
with a complete breakdown on the repair required.  Sometime last 
year, this blog tailed off and archived.   The site is not searchable 
anymore and even my bookmark of the site only returns the most 
recent blog entries totally unrelated to my search.

So the whole dynamic of the web is changing.    Information is being 
lost. Users are being forced to keep updating so the archives 
are being stretched out.   Punters (searchers like me) are getting 
links to the source but the source no longer exists.   Zangelding is 
being institutionalised -  There are "blogs of blogs" with references
to one another but the source is gone.

And the Internet is not as distributed as it used to be.  Gopher and 
so on was a distributed environment.   You could get data from 
several sources and formats.   Now if you go to a "site" or "portal", 
if it's down, you can't do anything.   There's no distributed backup 
or available archive.

> And interestingly, many of the Gen-XYZs on these sites "don't
> get" email. The only way they communicate with me is via their
> social sites or they might try (in vain) to get me to use MSN.
> When I mention IRC, I get blankness and void in return.

When I am encouraged to join an SN site I just ignore it.  I am 
on "Linked In" but I really never log in.    Twitter is no good to me as 
there is no information and I don't use handheld devices.  Myspace 
kills my computer.   Facebook is annoying.    I am subscribed 
to several web forums, but I wish they were email lists.   And the 
ones that do provide lists are too high volume so I use the web forum 
to filter out.    But the crappy in-page editors are evil.    And your
info will disappear after a while.   And web forums do not allow any level 
of privacy as a comment made on one will eventually make it to the web, 
so you can't define a message as "not searchable" in any case.

> Many newcomers to the net don't "get it", "it" being where the
> net has come from, and how to use it effectively.
>
> Social posing and time wasting, imho.

I agree.    And it is weakening the persistence of information 
by cluttering with twittering noise, bot-postings and the like.


rachel

-- 
Rachel Polanskis                 Kingswood, Greater Western Sydney, Australia
grove at zeta.org.au                http://www.zeta.org.au/~grove/grove.html
 		The price of greatness is responsibility.