I’ve been thinking about the role of social media in our lives, and after reading Brian Solis’s post from the other day on The Future of the Social Web, I was inspired to make this graphic (click to enlarge):

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(click to enlarge)

Twitter Lists Demystified by Venessa Miemis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

I keep seeing this article about the importance of twitter lists getting retweeted, and I’m compelled to disagree.

Steven Hodson over at The Inquistr is making an argument that Lists are going to be the new ranking system in social media. He references an article at the Bivings Report about using twitter lists to judge influence, and then goes on to make some pretty bold blanket statements, like:

(a) “It is how you are now going to be able to measure your worth in the world from this day forth.Yes sir you can now measure your value by how many lists you have been lucky enough to find yourself on.”

(b) “Whether or not we get over being left out of other peoples lists doesn’t change the fact that Twitter Lists will become the new ranking system in Social Media. They will be the new measure of worth to a lot of people…..”

My response is that:

(a) no it isn’t.

(b) no it won’t.

My rationale:

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I just got my invitation for twitter lists this morning, and got really excited to explore how to use them effectively. I started to put together some lists that I thought would be useful, (Big Thinkers, Emerging Media Trends), and then discovered Listorious, an aggregator of all the best twitter lists. Even better. I did notice that the top lists have a bunch of people in common, so ‘lists’ have essentially been a way to separate the wheat from the chaff, and see who the crowds have decided are the most important people saying things that matter.

I decided to make a “meta-list“, combining all the top people from all the top lists that mattered to be. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that there is a 500 person limit for the lists, so I’ll have to go back in and pull some people and add others… it’ll be a work in progress. But, it’s a combination of people from the Newmedia, Thought Leaders, Tech Pundits, Most Influential in Tech, MediaWonks, and Social Media Must Follow, among many others, I’m sure.

I think it’ll be interesting to see how the information that’s been filtered can be used, analyzed, and remixed to make ever better collections of “quality content” and “experts”, and leverage these combinations to spot emerging trends or see the big picture in a new way.

I saw someone tweet that Lists is like an RSS feed aggregator. The difference is, Lists isn’t just a blast of one-way information – there’s conversation going on, and you can dip in whenever you like.

How can Lists be set up strategically? Can they be viewed as user-generated forums? Now you have the ability to put many (seemingly?) unrelated people in the same “room”…. this could be a powerful thing if everyone in the room agrees to cooperate/collaborate. Could we start assembling really smart people, the movers and shakers, into these loose, non-hierarchical spaces, in order to have a huge, focused collective discussion? Could we focus in on a topic or a problem to tackle?  Have a conversation intended for a set starting point and duration, and then move on?

A lot of twitter can be an echo chamber, but now instead of using hashtags, we can hyperfocus into forums (“lists”). Could this work?

In the past week, I’ve come across several examples of new products and services that illustrate the transformation that’s underway in how we read books and tell stories. Companies are embracing the trend towards digital. Here’s a quick overview of what’s out there:

DisneyDigitalBooks

Just this past week, the Walt Disney Company launched DisneyDigitalBooks.com, an online book service that gives its target audience of 3 to 12 year olds access to the electronic versions of over 500 of Disney’s books.

The books, which are organized by reading level, are read aloud by voice actors (complete with sound effects) for younger children in the ‘Look and Listen’ category of the site. Older children can click on any word while reading, and the word will be pronounced out loud, with an age-appropriate definition provided. For budding novelists and amateur mediamakers, there’s the ‘Story-Builder’, which allows children to construct their own stories using a drag-and-drop functionality to add character art and text. Continue reading →

What happens when you combine a disgruntled consumer, a recording device, and a distribution platform? A PR mess and a crack at social justice!

There have been forums online for years now that have acted as sounding boards for customers and employees who felt they’ve been wronged by a corporate monolith (think walmartsucks.org, verizonpathetic.com, allstateinsurancesucks.com), but we seem to be entering the era of video complaints now. Continue reading →