WorldCat评论的著者是 bobrobboy

To Sum It Up

This is a great read and covers social media more thoroughly and more practically than any other book or or blog post I have read.

Aggregation Is Critical

Blossom accurately states that the aggregation business model is only getting stronger with the popularity of social media and social networks. We are moving toward "highly focused aggregation of content for very specific audiences...." The author terms this emerging model "The New Aggregation," which

"focuses content product and service development on the attributes of content aggregation
best suited to serve specific audiences who can themselves participate aggressively in
the product, aggregation and distribution of content.  (Emphasis is mine.)

The author describes a "shift in control in the content-production model" away from centralized redistribution and aggregation to a decentralized model that puts an emphasis on "users with strong technology." The decentralized model expands the point of value control considerably up and down the redistribution / aggregation scale. Rather than having a single point of control where what you aggregate gets redistributed, a strong user technology base within a decentralized model will provide much broader opportunities to redistribute content and aggregate content.

It's simple: More users re-purposing your content and finding more content to repurpose means more interaction and more content.

A significant value that arises from this re-purposing is that users can mix and match content from various suppliers and re-aggregate it. The juxtapositions that emerge from this re-aggregation will create new contexts for the reader. Linking expands content and thus increases perspective and the possibility of relevance for individual users. Relevance is relative to the user, not the system!

Mass Contextualization Key

Remixing content is as simple as providing new links that enhance, explain, refute or otherwise provide additional information about the content. This is the most common, most easily implemented and most misunderstood and even mistrusted value that social networking brings to content aggregation and publication. Many Web sites will balk at allowing users to redirect other users to different Web sites. Those that do balk at this model do so because they are still trying to lock in eyeballs, still following the AOL model. The users-as-eyeballs model is dead. We should embrace the users-as-collaborators model and enable them to enhance, contribute, repurpose and redistribute our content as well as provide their own content. Doing so only expands the possible contexts of our content. And by expanding the context of our content, it becomes more relevant to more users who have different contexts.

Personal Brand Management

Personal brand management is described in relation to mass contextualization in that it leads to trust. Trust leads to audience and audience keeps the cycle of content creation moving forward.

Taking personal brand management further, the author describes celebrity endorsements within old media as proof that personality is powerful. If it works on TV to sell soap, it will work online to bring in more users, more content and more interactivity. That is not to say that celebrities are the only way to attract an audience.

Users are Content

As users create content, that action and the content put them into a context that might be relevant to another user. When that happens and relationships are built and made obvious to other users, then social networking becomes informative and valuable beyond just an aggregation of friends.

"Social media shows us that value can be gained from the ability of people to access insights
from people when they want and need them on a very personal scale.

I would go further to say that personal insights benefit the whole community when those are made clear and made public.

Focus on Our Nature not on Our Tools

There is a reason that online communication tools like bulletin boards and forums derived their names from real-world objects and concepts. The comfortable familiarity that these real-world examples provide creates a positive cognitive model, a switch in the brain that causes us to open up and share information.

The author references Thomas Paine's Common Sense which came out of conversations held in coffeehouses. And talks about the third place mentioned in The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg. I think The Experience Economy is relevant here too.

True Conversational Medium

"Facebook challenges marketers to learn what real conversations among friends and peers sound like."

"[Facebook] also challenges everyday people to realize how valuable they are to one another ...."

This is the best description of Facebook and social media I have read. John Blossom describes this realization as a critical turning point in our understanding of the collective selves and us individually within a community.

"It's a simple enough human concept, but on that many modern societies have left behind as
they've ceded power over public venues to governments and traditional media nd entertainment
companies."

Blossom goes on to day that this has "forced both our public and personal lives into ever-smaller social spaces."

Facebook opens up those "ever-smaller social spaces" and allows us to experience each other without mediation from any institution.

If you consider that we are still at the beginning of a renewed "social awareness," I think you'll realize that we need to learn a new way of living within this new space of wider awareness of one another.

Is It Really a Nation?

As the book progresses though Blossom gets too dreamy form my tastes.  He becomes caught up in the potential of new, poorly understood, opportunities to reinvent human society and existence.

Despite all the great benefits that person-to-person interaction has on our societies, it will not remake us into something we never really have been. We will not reinvent our physical structures based on a renewed (and more obvious) sense of community.

He talks about the fractured, transient nature of social media--niche communities really-- and how those will cause a shift in our physical civilization. There is no need to reform the physical networks of our communities when the "virtual" aspects are already so consistent with the real world ... such as open forum debates and coffeehouse conversations.

By describing the codes of conduct, the sometimes unwritten rules of online experiences, he attempts to equate virtual worlds with our reality.

Maslow's Laws

I have never bought into the idea that Maslow's Laws apply to online environments with any real significance and certainly not with permanence. Blossom attempts to make a strong correlation between the virtual and real-world experience within the Hierarchy of Needs.

If a user does experience some aspect of the Hierarchy of Need within an online environment, it is only the top of the pyramid that has permanence. The base of the pyramid is short lived; even the middle (love) is short lived when only experienced online.

It is when these online experience are matched up to real-world experiences within our communities and relationships that the Hierarchy of Need becomes concrete (and thus important) to us.

To Sum It Up

This is a great read and covers social media more thoroughly and more practically than any other book or or blog post I have read.

Participate or Condescend

Often described as a polemic, The Cult of the Amateur is simply a screed against societal and economic change. It is a moralistic bombast against the populist notion of cooperation and collaboration in favor of a single point of reference determined and espoused by an expert.

The author, Andrew Keen, pulls out all of the goblins of the Internet to warn readers that their culture is under siege by know-nothing friends and neighbors bent on self-expression and actualization at the cost of a national dialog.  He blames our down fall on the Internet goblins of:

• Narcissism
• Lying
• Thievery
• Gambling
• Pornography

To believe the premise, our society will unravel — even our economy is at stake! — if my neighbors and I allow ourselves to chronicle the times we live in without heeding the checks and balances of experts.  We are, with each visit to Wikipedia, with each blog post and each download; jeopardizing jobs in traditional publishing, distribution and media.

What purports to be a defense of our national character ends up being a defense of the hayday of mass media where three networks and a handful of newspapers made the news and controlled the water-cooler-conversations through a self-chosen circle of "experts."

Is it the book or the author?

I have found it impossible to separate the words on the page from their outspoken author, Andrew Keen.

Lacking direction and focus, Keen leaps from conclusion to conclusion often contradicting himself: as in his mourning the loss of niche knowledge among the staff of Tower Records and lambasting the uncontrolled blogosphere for perpetuating a never ending series of narrow interests.

Keen’s academic pedigree shines through each sentence and illuminates his general distrust of the common man.  This book is an unconscious paean to media darlings of a by-gone era: the condescending, idealistic academician as talking-head.

About those gobblins.

1. Yes.  Gambling can be dangerous.
2. No.  pornography is not for children.
3. No.  The crowd is not imbued with wisdom.

Our society is experiencing significant growing pains and experimenting with new technologies and freedoms.  Through seven chapters, Keen focuses only on the negative consequences of technological advances and condemns our innate human curiosity and need for expression as irrevocably bad.   In the eighth and final chapter, Keen finally allows that there are benefits and acknowledges that we may yet reign in this beast of Web 2.0 and realize our own folly.

He might be right.  We may yet welcome experts into our conversations, should they decide to participate rather than condecend.

On that day Web 2.0 will strike a balance between narcissistic echoes in the blogosphere and self-referential experts espousing their wisdom.   It is a bit of a strain to think how Keen, after seven chapters of self-righteously divisive language (mea culpa?), can make that allowance; but the final chapter is a welcomed return to reality and pragmatism.

If you must read this book, I highly recommend checking it out from an American library—where royalties are not paid.

My sons and I are loving this book. The story is just a wonderful and imaginative romp through a world where real, living dinosaurs are handed out like cheep plastic toys. It shows imagination and practicality. And it is funny. Now that we've read the story countless times, we're devouring the illustrations and finding something new in them almost every time. This was a great birthday gift from Grandma! Thanks Grandma!

Joe Trippi provides a glimpse into the presidential nomination process and gives the reader a solid tutorial on community building which is the best take-away from this book. Trippi's narrative form jumps from autobiographer, biographer of Howard Dean, to marketing consultant.

He is at his best as marketing consultant.

The revolution
This book should be read primarily for the insights Trippi came across inadvertently during his tenure as campaign manager for Howard Dean in the 2004 United States presidential campaign.

Without setting out to do so, the Dean campaign created a strong, grassroots organization that propelled their candidate to the forefront of the media and raised a lot of money in a very short time. In the process the campaign, and Trippi, learned a lot about community building on the Web. Communities grow when given the opportunity to flourish and the Dean campaign provided the right environment for that to occur. Trippi merely looks back with near 20/20 perspective.

This is obviously a classic and for good reason. Dahl sets up a multi-layered narative that juxtaposes the ellusive imagination of children with the real-world realities of the adult world. Mr. Wonka apparently found near immorality in his youthful enjoyment of the impossible and the magical. All of the children invited to the factory appear to be mini-adults and display all of the foibles, quirks and nastiness of their parents, except for Charlie and his child-like grandfather who win it all in the end. I love the messages I got out of rereading this with my children: Believe in the impossible and don't take life too seriously.

This is as much fun to read out loud as Dr. Seuss' Sleep Book or Too Many Daves. Dahl's descriptions of the fantasy world of the Chocolate Factory builds better pictures in young minds than either movie manages to create.

This book describes a number of situations that impact our individual ability to control what other say or think about us. The first situation is a bit extreme and involved but clearly illustrates how a mob mentality could grow to work woe on a person's reputation...and how that can play out in real life as well as on the internet. While the situation is accurately described, it is a bit extreme and in my opinion does not reflect the majority of situations we will face in day to day activity. That is not to say that the author is incorrect. Managing our reputations is going to be come an activity that requires conscious effort.

This seemed to be an exercise in character studies and is very interesting. I only wish there was more to tell in regard to some of the characters. I really left the book with a desire to read more about many of the people in town. I especially enjoyed the father-son relationships in the stories.

Another story that my sons and I really enjoy.  The illustrations are so detailed and realistic while maintaining the cartoon-ish nature of imagination.

The story is simple and fun.  The pictures add twice as much to the reading as the text.

Spend some time talking about the details in the illustrations, it can be a bit like an I Spy book if you look closely.

Great Pictures

This is one of our more interesting picture books.  Tar Beach presents a lot of questions, like why can't her father join the union and what is a half-breed.  My sons usually ask "Why" a lot while reading this book.  Reading it is a good way to generate conversation about how things were in this country and how we are trying to change for the better.

Imaginative Play

Plus my sons and I enjoy the imagination behind flying to anywhere you cannot get to otherwise.  And who wouldn't want to wear a bridge as a necklace!?

This is one of my favorite books.  I can reread it every year and still enjoy it.

This dark comedy of Soviet fantasy and sci fi has soo many nuances.  The book provides a perspective into Moscow's society as seen by the damned.  Not surprising considering the conditions Soviet authors published at the time.

I love rereading this book.

Considering my deep appreciation for the coffee bean, I can't help but love this book. A fun trek through the history of civilization as the reader follows the coffee bean from country to country, population to population.

Ever wonder what ended the Dark Ages?  Coffee.

Caffeine to the rescue!