social media – Page 4 – Just thoughts

I wrote this some time ago, but never published it, perhaps I knew what was in the pipeline. There will be a sequel … that’s a promise. Here’s the problem (ie the user requirement).

I want to create a family blog for family members of very mixed IT ability and inclination. They are (believe it or not) NOT IT-geeks. I’ve tried several ways of engaging with them, emploring to comment upon blog posts, allowing the authorship to a shared private blog – so that they don’t need to set their own up. Put loads of “useful” information up, including commentary on family photos stored and linked to on Picasa, but to no avail. How can I increase the engagement with this activity? [Please don’t ask the question … “is this a desirable activity?” … that’s not allowed!]

It would appear that video (of grandchildren, of distant parents) is a hook. Is something that wakes them up to the value of social media. But how do you share videos on the internet and keep them private?

You need a video-serving solution, there’s several to choose from – YouTube, viddler or vimeo for instance – but you need to be able to keep the video private, to be shared to just a group of people (your family). After looking at YouTube, decided to experiment with viddler. The upload is fast, as is the encoding and the quality of streaming is good. You can set the default upload save to be private and then share it afterwards – if you want to. However, if you want to embed the video on your blog, you can’t unless you make the video public! In the end I plumped for Vimeo Plus – paying a subscription for the level of privacy I wanted with the ability to embed videos which run on mobile devices (including iOS) as well.

Then there’s Posterous, a really easy to use blogging service that even your granny could use (if they are on email that is). Set yourself (and all your other family members) up with an account(s) on Posterous and you have a way of sharing each others’ videos privately. PLUS, if you install the browser button “Share on Posterous” with Firefox, you can then go to your viddler or vimeo video and using the button, embed it in a Posterous blog post. If as a family you agree to use the same password for your Posterous blogs you can then watch and share securely.

All that’s needed for the serious (or should it be serial) blogger like me is to setup the links to the Posterous video-blogs on your private blog (ie Blogger or WordPress) and you have an integrated solution. Indeed, it might even be possible to send the embedded video from Posterous to your Blogger/Wordpress private blog as it has an interface that posts out to other social media applications as well as accepting in by simple email.

So, give Posterous a look for your “family blog” even if you aren’t interested in videos.

Picked-up a link in twitter back in July to a post on the SustainableCitiesCollective – a forum I’d never come across before and one that I’ll dip into again. It aggregates blog posts and I picked up one from Julian Dobson who was commenting on the RebootBritain event. On his blog he posted – I’m sorry, Clay Shirky, nobody knows you around here. This is not only a wonderful title for a blog post but was also a very insightful contribution which caused me to think about new emerging digital divides, such as those between the twitterati who profess to see the benefit of immersion in social media (using Web 2.0 tools) and those at the coal-face who either don’t (not even at the dabbling level), or who aren’t able to see how they can participate in any other way but at a trivial level – and thus contributing to the widely held assumption that indeed use of social media is all about trivia.

I commented at length and then managed to lose the comment I was making before posting it. {Don’t go there … please.} However, I wanted to record what came to mind here, because I think there are threads of a piece of work to be done here.

The most interesting point I felt is that Julian discusses the concept of place in the context of the use of social media. I didn’t know about digitalbutetown – a group in my own city. There’s no reason why I should, but it still came as a surprise to me because I like to think I’m pretty connected to what’s going on around me. It may have been discussed at the last meeting of trydan – a social media cafe group in Cardiff, but then again maybe it wasn’t. And that’s the point! Whilst we the enthusiasts are broadcasting to the world, the real value of social media moving forward will be where it is melded to social activisim linked to communities and places.

In a previous existance I was really interested in environmental psychology, and ideas of environmental perception and sense of place – how peoples’ perception of their environment could in impact upon their behaviour. Now, by appropriate use of social media we have the ideal vehicle to enable communities to come together, to share and reflect together, and to move forward (changing their environment) together.

This post has been a long-time in “draft”, I’ll be returning to this theme and considering how social media could interact with ideas in environmental psychology to create different “sense of place”.