There Is No Social Media There

January 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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By Brad King, Ball State University

“There is no there there.” - Gertrude Stein

Social media doesn’t exist. At least not in the way it’s normally discussed.

I’ve made this statement to countless technologists in the past few years without much pushback. We discussed the evolution of modern technologies, the philosophy of digital tools and the rapid expansion of software applications now available for the “humans,” the name for which I’ve long dubbed those who prefer pushing buttons to learning underlying architectures. (In other words: normal people.)

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Managing Online Communities: What Computer Games Can Teach Journalists

March 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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by Brad King, Assistant Professor, Ball State University

When Britannia opened for business in July 1997, there was a land run. Of 100,000 people. Within days, the new homesteaders had snatched plots of land, set up businesses and built homes. In other words, they created a community. They had taken ownership.

Not that it was all roses. There were problems. There was no infrastructure available. No way to address wrongs. Britannia was a jumbled mass of human chaos.

This place was the epicenter of the first commercially success massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG). This “persistent world”, which existed whether or not players were logged into the game, changed the way we viewed online communities. Suddenly, the worlds that had existed simply in text formats (e.g. The Well, CompuServe, QuantumLink) became graphical. [Read more...]

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Extreme Social Media

March 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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By Brad King, Assistant Professor, Ball State University

On Thursday Oct 15, Hallmark Homes Inc., a home builder in the Muncie, Jnd. area, approached the Ball State University Department of Journalism with an interesting request: assemble three teams of students for a project with ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, a popular television program through which a family receives a new house in seven days. The show would be coming to Bunker Hill, about 70 miles north of the university.

Derek Wilder, Hallmark’s chief executive officer, wanted to make sure that the thousands of volunteers, builders and sponsors — many of whom don’t receive recognition on the television program — had the opportunity to have their stories told. The catch for the team, though, was that the show won’t air until sometime in January, which meant we had to build not only the network, but the media outreach as well. [Read more...]

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Why Digital Rights Management Won’t Save the News

March 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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By Brad King, Assistant Professor, Ball State University

Within the last year, large and small newspaper organizations have moved previously free content behind subscription walls that require readers to pay for access. The new model is fraught with peril, mostly notably the drop in online circulation as content becomes inaccessible through traditional search.

More concerning, though, may be the Associated Press’ decision to create a News Registry, which is a fancy name for a digital rights management (DRM) wrapper around its stories, which would allow content publishers the ability to determine how, when and where those stories — or parts of those stories — are replicated across the Web.

Which seems like a noble cause.

There is just one problem: DRM wrappers have, by and large, failed in the digital age because they create an “ease-of-use” problem for consumers. In order to work, DRM restricts different activities. It may, for example, prevent you from playing a CD on certain types of computers. Which is fine if you are technologically savvy enough to figure out which devices. Most people aren’t. [Read more...]

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Misdiagnosed: Why Newspapers will Build Bad Business Models

March 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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By Brad King, Assistant Professor, Ball State University

Rupert Murdoch raised quite a stir in the publishing world when he announced last month that he would, in the near future, remove his company’s news content from Google. His reasoning: Google is stealing, making money off headlines, decks and images, which ultimately hurts his bottom line since people aren’t viewing that content on his company’s sites.

In December, the news industry fired another salvo when Murdoch’s News Corp. and four other media conglomerates announced the formation of a joint venture to develop a digital publishing platform for the Web and the emerging e-Reader market. This followed the Hearst Corp., one of the companies involved in Murdoch’s conglomerate, attempting to push its Skiff e-Reader software to e-Reader devices in 2010.

That Google — and the rest of the technology world — didn’t blink any of these ideas is telling. Google, in fact, quickly unveiled an easy solution that would allow any publisher to remove its content immediately from search. So far, none have. [Read more...]

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South by Southwest 2010: Five Good Minutes

March 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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By Brad King, Assistant Professor, Ball State University

The South by Southwest Interactive Conference & Festival is more than just a social and media technologies conference. It’s an experience. More than 15,000 people descended upon Austin this year (its eighteenth) to attend more than 250 panels and keynotes, browse the Screenburn Arcade, visit the Trade Show and attend the countless parties and networking events.

As a member of the Advisory Board and an 18-year attendee, I’ve watched the conference morph and change over the years, reflecting the evolution of the technology world. SXSW Interactive has moved from the developer and programming centric businesses and towards the social and media created businesses (that rely, of course, on the developers and programmers). However, the Geek Spirit still rules the roost in Austin. (For instance, more than 800 people lined up for a panel on analytics.)

To help capture the spirit of innovation and thinking for Tech Meme, I decided to forgo the normal panel and keynote recaps. Instead, I spent five minutes with some of the smartest people I know and asked them one question: In the media sphere they operate, what’s the most interesting thing they see.

What follows are their unedited responses. I hope you enjoy. [Read more...]

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