This morning, when I blogged the absurdity of its founder suggesting that Facebook users can “sequester” information about themselves and “can prevent ‘even their siblings’ from seeing certain photos they post,” this is the type of sequestered information I assume he was talking about. As I always say, I am a fan of Facebook, but there is nothing “sequestered” about what you share there.

(via: Fimoculous)

Technorati Tags: facebook, privacy, social media

New media lessons from major league baseball: From Alan D. Abbey on Poynter Online comes this quote in praise of the coverage of baseball found on MLB.com: “When the sponsoring organization does better than the news media in covering events of interest in real time, it certainly should be troubling for those concerned about the media’s future, and damaging to their online traffic patterns.”

Technorati Tags: mlb.com

Scott Karp, in a typically insightful post, lobs a grenade disguised as a statement-in-the-form-of-a-question at the end of the post. He writes, “Does media have anything to do with content anymore, or is it all about aggregating people’s attention by any means? Was media ever really about content?”

When it comes to media companies and the executives who run them, the three words “content is king” is the comfort blanket they cling to as they attempt to fall asleep at night. While Scott is saying (in the form of asking) something that appears obvious to the world, he’s doing something akin to yanking their sleeping aid out of their arms and scream, “It’s just a dumb piece of cloth. Get over it.”

Of course, Scott is correct. Content is not king. I’m sorry. Frankly, I could make a strong argument it never was. Frankly, I could make an even stronger argument that the word “content” is stupid when used as a metaphor for writing, reporting, film-making, song-writing — however, Doc Searls has done that so profoundly, I’ll skip that one. (Also, the last time I did that rant, a wise reader of this blog asked me what I was going to rename the Table of Contents in our magazines.)

The ability to attract an audience is king. The ability to create a foundation (a platform, a brand, a community, or whatever you want to call it) that attracts readers and visitors and users who are enticed into creating with you, an entire (since I’m using buzzwords) ecosystem to which they all belong to, add to and gain identity from, is king.

But don’t fret, traditional media companies. Some of you are great at this. For instance, business-to-business media companies who have created conferences, tradeshows, databases, publications, websites, etc., that serve as a part of the eco-system that holds together their market. That’s king. Associations who have loyal members who attend conventions and read magazines about other members and participate with each other online — that’s king.

Audience (in the form of readers, watchers, users, listeners, members, contributors) is king. A “media business” better be about making them happy, healthy, wealthy and wise — any way possible. We (and I’m speaking as an audience member, not a media creator) are quite fickle when it comes to the “content” we “consume” — but we always are loyal to those things we think bring us happiness, health, wealth and wisdom. We “belong” to those things we believe belong to us. That’s king.

(From the post, “What Google didn’t buy“) “(For $1.65 billion) Google could have bought the New York Times…(That Google) bought YouTube, not a media company, and the fact that doesn’t even surprise anyone one anymore and that it makes perfect sense, that, dudes, is a paradigm shift.”

Technorati Tags: google, youtube

From an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, 22, founder of Facebook, with Fortune magazine senior editor David Kirkpatrick, comes a couple of snippets I find interesting.

Quote:

“Zuckerberg says the ($200 million advertising deal with Microsoft) frees Facebook to focus on what it considers the bigger opportunity - more original forms of Facebook-only advertising like sponsored groups.”

Observation: By “sponsored groups,” I assume he means doing things like the iTunes promotion in which Facebook users who are members of a group sponsored by Apple get free iTunes downloads each week. To me, this is brilliant — perhaps the finest example I can think of in which a marketer can be a part of something and play by rules that haven’t even been written yet. Lets say, for example, if Nike wanted to sponsor a group of Facebook users of its Nike+iPod products — I can think of all sorts of ways that could benefit all involved — and the users would never consider it “marketing” since, well, marketing is something that “targets” me and this is something I dance with. (That was a subtle nod in the direction of Doc Searls.)

Here’s another, less insightful, item from the interview regarding the ability Zuckerberg claims Facebook users have to “sequester” information about themselves, so that, for instance, they can prevent “even their siblings” from seeing certain photos they post.

Quote:

“Users are so confident that their information is sequestered from intruders that more than a third post their cellphone numbers.”

Observation: As I have said repeatedly, I am a fan of Facebook. Think it’s great. However, I would describe such “confidence” by users of the service as naive and, further, would caution Zuckerberg from heading down the path of telling the media that such a thing exists on the Internet as “sequestered” information. Sure, a user can keep information they post as locked-down as they want. But that doesn’t keep their friends from re-posting the sequestered data. For example, there exists on Facebook a tagging scheme (much like adding notes on Flickr photos) that allows users to identify other users of the service on photos they post. If you belong to a common group with anyone tagged in the photo, you can see that photo. What about everyone else in that photo? They didn’t get to sequester the fact they were users of Facebook from the person three-degrees separated from them. What if they don’t want a specific user of the service to know they were at the specific spot at which the photo was made? So much for sequestered information. Again, I’m a big fan of Facebook. I just caution its users and its owners from getting too caught up in making claims that will come back to bite them later.