fernandorizo.typepad.com

This showed up (accompanied by a few other skeletons, out of frame) on the shutters of an out-of-business coffee shop on Brick Lane in Shoreditch.

I was going to send it to The Man From London but I can't find his contact information on his blog.

facebook user revolts are news now

If there's a lesson that Web communities of every stripe keep teaching us it's this: people hate change. Waking up to a new Facebook user interface, it seems, is the social network equivalent of realizing that you didn't leave your housekeys in their usual place when you came home last night.

For the second time in 2009, the world's largest online social network has introduced a major UI change and (as has become their custom) the masses immediately responded with vitriolic Facebook groups* - a remarkable act of dissent not unlike picketing a sign factory. But this is a standard feature of every user revolt on Facebook. I wrote about the most recent one just this past February. But to the traditional media, the idea of a popular insurrection on Facebook is nothing short of newsworthy. Both the Old Grey Lady and the CSM** took note of the user protests in their coverage of the UI change.

Think about that last sentence for a second: two major newspapers took the time to cover a user interface change on a Website. Truly we are living in the future.

Both do a little hand-waving at the end of their posts to indicate that this is nothing new to them, of course, but I don't recall any "major" news outlets covering Facebook's UI improvements in February - and the current uproar has nothing to do with privacy, like the mainstream headline-grabbing Beacon from last year. I particularly got a kick from this bit in the Monitor piece:

"But we wonder if Facebook staffers anticipated how vociferous the opposition would get."

As much as I love The New York Times, there's a million more insightful places to turn for news about the Web. But instead of focusing on covering the things that blogs don't cover well (like the war in Afghanistan, say) your newspaper is going to start looking more like Mashable every day.

* My favorite is this one, which lists itself as a "Beliefs & Causes" group. It has only slightly fewer members than an anti-cancer group in the same category.

** Is the Monitor still "traditional media" now that it's online only? Yes. "Traditional media" is increasingly a state of mind and not a fetishization of distribution methodology as it has been for the last couple of years.

links for 2009-10-09

• BBC NEWS | Politics | Sarah Brown 'bemused' by sketch
  This is a great example of how even relatively brave old media outfits like the BBC still aren't taking advantage of hypertext. This article is literally *useless* without links. News posts are Web documents - why not treat them that way?
  (tags: EndOfOldMedia hypertextuality internet webculture media uk)

links for 2009-10-07

• Twitter Data Analysis: An Investor’s Perspective
  (tags: twitter business socialmedia statistics analytics de)

links for 2009-09-26

• YouTube - Single Ladies - Beyonce
  Pomplamoose! "A one man, one woman band". These two are just wonderful.
  (tags: bestof2009 music musicvideo pomplamoose covers)
• Your chance to host a 'totally informal' Windows 7 party! | Technology | guardian.co.uk
  Microsoft (and most likely their PR agency) think that it's perfectly reasonable to expect that people will have parties to talk about Windows 7 in their homes.
  (tags: worstof2009 bad_PR microsoft software)

links for 2009-09-22

• Online Database of Social Media Policies
  The social media policies of (at the moment) 82 companies. Via @joncrok on Twitter.
  (tags: socialmedia lists web2.0 pr)

on holiday

I'm on holiday, so there won't be much new content here this week. I might sneak a post in this week, but until my return here's a selection of the most-read posts of the last few months.

• google reader is the only social network that i need (overdue for a follow-up, this one)
• app ratings: another reason the iphone app store is broken
• on the nature of twix, space-time, and advertising
• criterion top tens

If you're coming here from my guest post on the EuroStar's Little Break, Big Difference blog, then welcome and thank you for clicking through. That post isn't really representative of most of the writing on this blog, but if it gets a response then I will certainly consider changing that.

See you soon.

links for 2009-09-11

• BBC NEWS | World | Africa | SA pigeon 'faster than broadband'
  "A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom.

  Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles - in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data. "

  
  
  (tags: bestof2009 pr stunts pigeons south_africa IT)
  
  

links for 2009-09-09

• Cash4gold: The Article Cash4Gold Doesn't Want You To Read
  The Consumerist stands up to legal bullying from Cash4Gold. I still have yet to see a case in the Western hemisphere where a blogger has been successfully litigated against for telling the truth.
  (tags: consumerist blogging law skepticism ripoffs cash4gold ben_popken meg_marco)

links for 2009-09-08

• YTMND - max's TRUE secret revealed (CONSPIRACY) WAR CRIMES!!!
  YTMND users have been in revolt over what they see as abandonment by Max Goldberg, the site's owner/admin. This is the most-viewed YTMND on the site this week.
  (tags: webculture webcommunities ytmnd chans user_revolt)
• Эй, вы можете прочитать запрещенную статью GQ про Путина здесь - Conde Nast - Gawker
  Gawker crowdsources a Russian translation of a GQ article critical of Vladimir Putin that Conde Nast tried to hide from Russian readers. Despite owning Wired and my beloved Reddit, Conde Nast seems to have learned little about the way the Web works
  (tags: gawker reddit newsflow russia conde_nast journalism politics socialmedia crowdsourcing bestof2009)
• vale 'n tina (dot) com: Visualizing gender stereotypes
  A book of inofgraphics that explores gender stereotypes as experienced by schoolchildren. Small sample size for the dataset, but beautiful graphs and a wonderful idea.
  (tags: visualization infographic gender politics books)