Scratch Notes: "It's on the Wiki" Means What?, Corrupting Social Media, and Hyperlocality

Lately, I've been using Google Docs as a scratch pad/dumping ground for stuff I might want to write about, both for work and personal consumption.

I've always been ambivalent about writing stuff down -- in my mind, it's how I give myself permission to stop thinking about something.

Anyway, I split my scratch docs among a bunch of different places -- drafts in PINE (remember: Pine Is Not Elm), AOL, Blogger, and of course the Google; text and HTML files on my computer, and of course, the old standby, paper notes in a spiral notebook, convenient napkin, or sticky notes in my wallet.

A lot of the work-y stuff eventually evaporates, since a lot of it doesn't really fit with my current primary audience, which is consumer (though we're working on reaching out to the rest of the social media universe). Sometimes it goes to internal listserves; other times, I just hang onto it until it goes stale and then forget about it.

I've always been kind of an information hoarder anyway, which is kind of wasteful. So, in the interest of sharing and using social media for knowledge management, I'm going to be posting more stuff. Though not necessarily here -- I'm a big proponent of using social media for internal knowledge management, where appropriate.

(It's still Sunday and I'm breaking out the buzzwords.)

Appropriateness is a big consideration -- I do know that blogs and wikis aren't a magic bullet for institutional knowledge-sharing. Without structure and norms, you just have a wild profusion of blogs and wikis that don't talk to each other.

For example, I haven't decided if "It's on the wiki" is Web 2.0 for "Take two aspirin and call me in the morning", "Go away, kid, you bother me", "RTFM" or to butcher the saying, what "Trust me" means in Hollywood (namely, "fuck you").

Anyway, here are two links for those of us on the wonkier side of the social media endeavor:

* "The Corruption of Social Media and the "New" New Media Literacy" [via Digg]: I'm still processing this one -- the thrust of the blog post is that the love of money is sinking its hooks into social media (shocking, I know), so it's not particularly relevatory (there's a reason this Bubble/Web-thing is called "2.0" -- we've seen this movie before), though it does wrap together a few different examples, including:

• Some implications of PayPerPost
• Vote-buying and other ways to game social bookmarking and link-sharing sites (primarily digg), such as SpikeTheVote and User/Submitter
• Friend-buying, especially the ability to buy cool (or make that "hot") friends for your profile (FakeYourSpace)
• And of course, companies' use of fake profiles, astroturf and other non-authentic, non-transparent content.

I've been trying to do some thinking about quantifying the Attention Economy, so the examples were useful.

* "A Newspaper Chain Sees Its Future, And It's Online and Hyper-Local": So Gannett is running a test down at the Fort Myers (Florida) News-Press, focusing on "hyper-local" news coverage, as well as other aspects of community, user-generated content, social media, and all that good Web 2.0 stuff.

Oh, and the new reporters are mobile journalists, or "mojos" for short, which is charmingly irritating.

Again, I will have to reserve judgement (spelling note: I prefer the UK variant) until I dig in a little deeper (and I'm not even going to get involved with the lowering of the wall between business and reporting), but I am reminded of two things:

1. If memory serves, when NY1 first rolled out in the early 90s, they did local TV news, only a lot lighter and faster. For example, reporters were their own camera operators (Shades of the 'Edison Carter Show.' And just why exactly isn't 'Max Headroom' on DVD yet?)
2. The One True B!x and his Portland Communique blog, which sounds a lot like a political version of what the News-Press folks are playing with, albeit earlier, unpaid, and much more obsessive.
   

So, in closing, my thoughts about this entry:

• Too long and digressive for mere link sharing
• Little substance and no audience to make it as commentary
• Ambivalent, since I still try to keep the work blogging separate, which means I still compartmentalize my thinking on industry stuff
• Completely redundant, since I still plan on doing something with the links elsewhere.

Tags: scratch notes, it's on the wiki, internal blogging, payperpost, attention economy, hyper-local, mobile journalists, web 2.0, social media