The Decline Agenda

Shawn Brimley ‘Promoting Security in Common Domains’

The technology behind paper.li is impressive but more important is how it harnesses your Twitter followers, lists and hashtags to create something of  low key beauty on your screen.  

So many newspapers but not enough readers is a problem for Paper.li as more of these daily papers appear.  Paper.li may indeed be a fad but it does underline the power of Twitter as creator of conent.  In a sense paper.li is akin to a content management system that works seamlessly.  Fair enough you are limited and have little control over what appears in your paper these are determined by the quality of links  posted by your followers or Twitter list.

So how should you use Paper.li

Followers, lists or hastags?

• For the risk averse I think list of Twitter followers grouped together by a common subject they Tweet about is a good idea.  The content generated onto your ‘Daily’ will be more targeted.

• If you have a large amount of Followers this will create a Paper.li that is less focused.

• Using a hashtag poses I think the greatest threat as links appearing on these tweets could generate content on your ‘Daily’ that you wish never appeared.

How to use your Paper.li daily?

At first the thrill of seeing your Daily for the first time makes you want to share it with your Twitter followers.  However another way to use your ‘Daily’ is to cast an eye over it once a day as a web listening exercise.  This way your ‘Daily’ is a like a dashboard where you can check out what your valued followers are posting. 

Of course if you are an organisation care needs I think to be taken around what appears in your ‘Daily’.  For an organisation the most prudent course of action is to base your ‘Daily’ on Twitter list of trusted followers.  Take a look at your organisation’s ‘Daily’ and like an editor ask yourself does it look good?  would others be interested?  if the answer is yes then promote the paper.  Your ‘Daily’ will update in about twenty three hours so you can check again maybe the next one will be worth promoting.

Clay Shirky writing in Prospect Magazine

Roy Hatterlsey author of Blood and Fire: William and Catherine Booth and the Salvation Army

Picture: Life after social media

Social Media Declinists, who are they? Well they tend to write blogs or tweet articles that herald the end of social media. Predicting the end is easy but predicting what comes next is pretty difficult. Ten years ago Bill Gates and some of supposed brightest minds got together but none would have predicted Twitter. So we are left with the social media declinists who spice there prediction with a promise that social media will cease in ten years, five or when Nostradamus predicted. In my view social media will decline into the background of our lives in much the same way e-mail has for many years.

A key part of this decline will be social media’s failure to in innovate. This is not the case at present as we see innovation in the lifestreaming aspect of social media. Tumblr and Posterous it could be argued are part of this trend. In some respects social media declinists represent a desire for change. The impulse for decline and destruction represents a percusor for change. The agenda of  social media declinists is to generate an athmosphere of decline within social media to achieve  Schumpeterian innovation.

The logic being that if social media is seen to be declining whether this is real or the product of over hyped social media declinists, digital creators will be motivated to innovate the next new thing.

E-mail is an intersting comparison to social media. Though my attitude to email is mostly negative I am old enough to recall the emergence of e-mail. It was once very social ‘media’,  what better way to organise the Friday night than via e-mail. How very, very cool. Then there was the film ‘You’ve Got Mail’. To watch it now the film comes across as a horror film such is my dim view of email. Perhaps this film marks the high point of e-mail. Of course Twitter to get it’s own TV show perhaps a sign of decline.

However as we moved from e-mail towards social media we continued to us this tool (mainly at the behest of our workplace) but email like a virus infected social media. Facebook and Twitter each have there own inbox. E-mail did it’s job allowing us to message our friends and work colleagues but social media created a way to message way beyond our natural constituency.

Is the word decline an appropriate descriptor for how social media will go? The question could be couched were and how fast we will evolve away from social media?

The strongest aspects of social media will survive within a what can be called Web 3.0 (I know this is a lazy and unimaginative descriptor). An evolving social media rather than a declining social media is a more positive message. This I think is important as those responsible for the development of social media within there organisations.

To those who say “social media and that Twitter thing, there just fads” these people may or may not be influenced by digital declinists. Our response should be honest. Social media over time will evolve rather than decline.  An evolving social media rather than a declining one is in my view more motivating. So use the social media tools of today to better prepare yourself for a world without social media tomorrow. So get stuck into todays social media which will be around but more familiar for sometime to come.