June 2008 Archives

This post originally started life on Nikki Massaro Kauffman's blog, in response to her latest posting on listservs and social media. Once I started having to scroll down multiple screens, I decided it would probably be best to transfer my diatribe over here and trackback so that other comments could actually be posted and read. Here is my extended response to her post which posed the question:

Is the listserv dead yet?

Here are some related thoughts/questions...

1. In what cases (or for what UP listservs) would Ning be a good substitute?
2. What about using Twitter to get immediate answers to questions we used to clutter others inboxes with via listserv?
3. What other solutions/technologies do you see helping us kill off the listserv?
   
4. What is our listserv exit plan to get people to move from listservs to adopting new technologies?

I have so much I want to say about things I got to explore at Web 2008 Conference earlier this week. I have to say that, to me, this had a much different feel than previous Web Conferences. I felt there was a lot more to offer this year under a greater variety of topics. I think Birds of a Feather and Lightning Talks were even more successful than before and, IMHO, I think the conference is going in the right direction. Agree? Disagree? In either event, make sure you give them your feedback in the evaluations for both the conference and the next day tutorials. Your opinions are very important to future directions and risks that the conference will take. In the meantime, there will be more posts about other things (believe me; I know I've got one or two about Steve Krug alone) over the next few days as I sort them out of my brain. Today, however, I want to share an idea that stems from one of the tutorials I had on Tuesday.

Tuesday morning was Mark Greenfield's tutorial on The Long Tail of Social Networks. It was inspiring, and I keep finding myself resonating with what our social networks have to offer that really isn't captured effectively elsewhere. (I had to thank Mark later, because his book list alone is gonna run me about 200 clams and a couple of months to read it all. The Long Tail, Groundswell, Millennials Go to College and Here Comes Everybody, to name a few—and this doesn't even include Small Pieces Loosely Joined or Everything is Miscellaneous, which are already on my To Read list. My husband will be so thrilled.) I especially love the term groundswell, which is defined as a social trend where people use technology to get things from each other. That's my kind of social trend.