Oh pl0gbar, the German drinking club for people who know a lot about the internet and computers, why do you scare me so much? The idea of meeting up in a pub to talk about the web and computer is not something that I would ever consider or envisage happening in my near future, it is definitely not something that I would do out of choice. Yes I am being dismissive about something that I see is rather an ace concept and has been incredibly successful. See pl0gbar is more than a drinking club, pl0g.de founded in 2006, it is a niche social network that arranges meet ups and has spread across German and Austrian cities. Unlike Facebook, Pl0g is not interested in obtaining mass market penetration at any cost but creating actual social ties that are mutually beneficial. Last week the founder Pl0g gave a guest talk from Germany on the origins of pl0g and explained that although they have little over 600 members, these members are active and some have done business, contracts, offered and gain employment, something that I doubt that Facebook could say.

The model of pl0g.de, operating a niche within the sphere of social networking might be the way of the future. Sure I love Facebook however apart from voyeurism and keeping up to date with friends and family it offers me little else. I do not gain anything of real value from it, unlike the members of Pl0g that share passions and knowledge with each other. I doubt that Facebook could move into more niche networking, it would be like a tabloid trying to become a broadsheet, the New York Post competing with The New York Times, sure the first may win on numbers but the latter always on content. I have tried to find ‘interest’ groups on Facebook, like minded strangers that share some of my passions and I have continuously failed; I tried to find a running club in San Diego to meet some people to go on a run with that failed,  I joined the ‘Brits in San Diego’ club another non starter, and so on. The system just does not seem to work and that is why it doesn’t make the money in advertising revenues.

So why with this knowledge does pl0gbar scare me? I know it is a success; it was singled out by media and web guru Tim O’Reilly . In one of the oldest clichés it would be a case of ‘its not you pl0gbar, its me’.  The fear is that I would just not get it, I would stare into my drink with people telling technical jokes and I just couldn’t get the punch line, totally out of my depth a feeling that I desperately abhor and do my best not to be in situations that would make me feel that way. Also I don’t own a Mac book, I am not sure I would be allowed entry with my little Sony Vaio,  I have an Iphone but I mainly email and check Facebook on it (that is a lie I know),  and in a more basic way I am just not that much of a geek. Pl0gbar seems like a 21^st Century version of Dungeons and Dragons, you know people meeting up to discuss a ‘make believe’ world but in this case virtual world.

In short the concept is great, in my opinion it is the future, it is just the content, if the model was adapting and people met up to talk about clothes and politics I would be there in an instant, I would go to the first ‘fr0ckbar’ in San Diego anytime.

I have not ever nor have I ever been asked to be ‘tweeted’ but according to Nicole Simon our guest speaker and an expert on the world of blogging and micro blogging, this is the way things are headed. Apparently personal emails are on deaths door, they are so past ‘it’ that they can’t see the ‘I’ anymore. At first I was dumbfounded, of course people are still on the ‘e’, heck I check mine hourly, that is if I have not heard that ‘ping’ from my phone. However when I thought more into it I knew she was right. I can’t remember the last time that somebody who wasn’t a sales assistant trying to sign me up to a mailing list asked me for my personal email, the only times I ever enter it now is for online shopping or account verification. I am a bit too sad to think about it as I thought I loved my ‘e’ accounts too much to lose them, but my actions are telling me otherwise.

When I started at CIBU, only one person asked me for my personal ‘e’ for a team project while everyone else asked me if I was on Skype. I am on Skype but I didn’t quite get the Skype thing, I used it just to call overseas, not to message, I am on hotmail and yahoo for that, but hey I guessed that Mainland Europeans did things a bit differently and now I am in to it, it just lacks the fun dancing animations of hotmail.

The only people that ever email my personal account are my mum, my boyfriends mom, my friends who are at work and are blocked off social networking sites and my boyfriend when he is ‘underway’ so can only use the ship email for contact. My mum and my boyfriend’s mom don’t do social networking sites, for my mum she just hates the idea of anyone having that much of her personal information, and my boyfriend’s mom, well she is just not into it, her time off is her time, not time to be spent in front of a computer screen. I do Skype with my mum though, as her being in Abu Dhabi would leave astronomical phone bills but it is purely as a substitute for the phone, she will uses her personal e all the time and I can not see her changing this until she is forced. They could be viewed as ‘late adopters’ or even ‘laggards’ and will only move from the personal e kicking and screaming, unlike me who gave it up without noticing.

 My boyfriend only e’s me when he is not allowed or able to communicate with me any other way, it is really a last resort. If he is on a ship and not allowed to use any IM (instant messengers) then we email and it is dull, the wait for the response, the formality of seeing fully composed sentences with proper English and grammar really takes the conversational aspect out of it. As soon as he is off the ship and somewhere with internet access we messenger, we tend not to use Skype as his usually has to share a room and people are nosey.

Facebook has become my life time to my f&f’s (friends and family), they can see what I am up to, I can be as personal or impersonal as I desire, I can share my photos, keep updated with birthdays and in general plan my life. It is pathetic how much I do on it, I send my emails on it, I send birthday cards, well wishes and so on. I am worried now with the whole privacy issue as I know that companies have kept copies of emails for a while but I never felt like they could be used for commercial purposes but now with the whole Facebook issue I mentioned in my previous post I am wondering if my e’s have been too personal and things like this will send people back to personal e?

Nicole Simon mentioned that people now ‘tweet’ each other, Twitter.com is still something that I am getting the hang of and have yet to fully explore the possibilities of it. I can see that it has so many possibilities especially in the information and news arena’s however as not many of the people I know are on it I am still slightly hesitation to invest time into it. I want to leave Facebook, but I am addicted, I want to know what people are doing, I want to see the dodgy holiday snaps, the ‘Jane Doe is now single’ announcements’, just 2 days ago I read a wall post off a girl who was dating one of my friends briefly last year, on the post she was thanking people for their engagement congratulations however she has been engaged for over 2 years she just hadn’t changed her status! Wow I thought, it is that kind of salacious gold that keeps me on. Twitter is the future but Facebook is now, they are not inter changeable, they satisfy two separate needs in my view, Facebook is the is my perezhilton.com and Twitter.com is my Michael Tomasky, one fluff and one substance.  For now I will keep my personal e, I hope it doesn’t die but like the letter it might linger just loose its impact

Beware of the bloggers

Logging onto Michael Tomasky and Perez Hilton are part of my daily routine and the only 2 blogs that I ever read. I get my ‘real’ news and comment from Michael and the fluff on celeb land from Perez. And although I do not read other blogs the impact of them does affect me, as an avid user of Facebook, (I check it at least twice daily on my iPhone) the updated terms and conditions that basically meant that Facebook owned everything that you had ever uploaded and will continue to do so even when you delete your account so they can license your favourite vacation picture to a company in Uzbekistan selling Herpes cream if they wished, well it all completely escaped me. The terms and conditions must have been on the log in page, but as with many other things I would have clicked past it in a rush to find out what my ‘peeps’ where doing on that fine day. It wasn’t until I read a post slamming Facebook on perezhilton.com, that I became aware of it and the position that it put me and many others in. However great we might think that Facebook is, if from that start this was the policy I am pretty sure 175 million people would not have joined the network and an alternative would have been established.

Perez Hilton, may be the queen of celebrity juice, and has broke numerous Hollywood scandals, however in this case he was following the coat tails of a post by Chris Walters on consumerist.com entitled “facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can-do-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever”. This caused a real stir and the shock waves felt after many news organisations including FOX picked up the story after the storm in blogosphere. The updated terms and conditions had slowly creep under the radar of the 175 million Facebook users, the News organisations and pretty much everyone else and would have gone quietly unnoticed had it not been for the impact and power that some influential bloggers now have. The Fox story did not so much focus on the implications of the terms and conditions change more so the effect that the blog post by Chris Walters had had, if the story had come to Fox independently (the change in terms and conditions) I doubt it would have made it to the news desk.

Companies have to understand the sheer power of consumers and how the internet in the form of blogs has mobilised and organised their voice. In Naked Conversations<!–[if supportFields]> CITATION Sco06 \l 2057 <![endif]–> (Scobble & Israel, 2006)<!–[if supportFields]><![endif]–> the authors discuss in the chapter ‘Blogging in Crisis’ what can happen when companies just ignore what customers think on blogs and the escalations and future impact that this can have. Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg tried to wait it out, they may have thought like the whole ‘new Facebook’ backlash it would die down however when it did not Zuckerberg choose his blog to try and appease the situation, not a spot on CNN or ABC but his Facebook blog to address the concerns expressed by bloggers. Facebook have since repelled the changes until they can figure out how to satisfy all concerned, another victory for the blogosphere and another bash to corporate America they choose not to talk to their customers first.

We no longer live in a time when a story is only broken by the major news corporations; they do not control what news and information we consume or how we get it. Gone are the days when a lone ‘whistle blower’ would have to break down the doors of ‘The New York Times’ to share her news. Now the major news companies are increasingly reactionary in their reporting, ‘citizen journalists’ <!–[if supportFields]> CITATION Sco06 \l 2057 <![endif]–>(Scobble & Israel, 2006)<!–[if supportFields]><![endif]–> are the first on the scene and the news crews are playing catch up. Scobble and Israel discuss this in the same chapter and the 2005 bombings in London. I remember that day, I was on my way into work and I couldn’t get on a train, there was no word on the bbcnews.co.uk site as to why everything was shut down it just was. I called my boss and she told me to get the bus if I had to just get here as the samples were back and she needed me in ASAP. I then started to get texts from my friends already in town, crazy rumours were flying around, and it took about 15 minutes before it was clear there had been bombs not only on the tube but on the bus. I did what we all do and phoned everyone I knew and got busy tones as they were phoning everyone they knew, I sent out group texts to say I alright and tried to make my way home. At one point I was in Wimbledon on the tram and someone read out what they had been emailed, as strangers we sat with tears streaming feeling guilty in the relief that we were OK but so many had felt such horrid loss. Still there was little real news from the established news organisations, maybe they had to abide to police cautions on information, or where weary of giving out information. We relied on emails, texts, posts, just anything we could find out, I am sure if Twitter.com had been around then and the market had as many Blackberry’s and IPhones as we do now, the news would have been more rapid. The stories in the papers that evening and the next day were a culmination of ‘citizen reporters’; their images, their stories, their emails, and this is news now.

Weeks later, when there was a foiled bomb attempt, a guy who worked with one of my friends was in Notting Hill, he saw tonnes of police and decided to follow, and on his camera he took a video of the police apprehending the suspected bomber from his flat. He sold this footage to Sky news and was paid in excess of £30k, his footage was shown around the world and would have made Sky (sister company to Fox) a small fortune.

Yesterday as I was getting ready and watching the morning news on CNN, they were discussing the Turkish airline plane that came down in the Netherlands and the reported said that the first they had hear of it was on twitter.com. The CNN admitted openly that they story they were reporting on came from Twitter! It is a changing of the guard that will continue to evolve the way we view and digest news

Works Cited

<!–[if supportFields]> BIBLIOGRAPHY <![endif]–>Scobble, R., & Israel, S. (2006). Naked Converstaions. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

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I have a thoroughly self-concocted notion that I would not be able to survive if I couldn’t check my email and phone at least 20 times a day, the dependence I have on my iPhone and being contactable is embarrassing. It is as though all primal instincts have been replaced by a 16 GB white and black device made of glass and plastic. Now decisions are not just my own any more, they are mine and one of the numerous ‘apps’ I have on my phone, from where to eat (urbanspoon), what to wear (weather channel), to ‘can I stop running yet?’ (runkeeper). Early last year I was still a ‘Crackberry’ addict, I would be the last one to shut down the device on the flight and the first to turn it on when we reached the tarmac, I came to love the ‘Qwerty’ keyboard and flashing red message light (I did once turn the light off however I found I would spend more time checking to see if I had messages than actually checking the messages with the light on). We ‘Crackberry’ addicts felt slightly superior over the iPhone crowd, we lead ourselves to believe we were in it for function-ability not ‘coolness’ like them.  The iPhone crowd of 2007 were too discriminating, there was no way  to own an iPhone over 35 or in a suit without looking too affected, they were not for business but for play.

This all changed moving to the states and living temporary with a pay-as-you go Sony Ecrisson K510i, with no color screen, no email, no messenger and 1.3 mega pixels camera. This was supposed to be where I had the epiphany that my immense need to be constantly connected was an illusion, that I didn’t need to know what the girl that sat behind me in History class when I was 14 was doing on Friday night or if one of my friends had emailed me back, I would discover the joy of waiting to checking my email maybe twice a day and in turn it would be more rewarding blah blah blah. Well it just didn’t happen, not being connected was hell, not only that but the not being connected makes others worry, you cannot go from a person that replies to emails in an hour or less to someone who doesn’t reply within 2 days and not expect people to think that you have been eaten alive by a mountain goat. Once connected you have to stay connected.

The ‘I am not home’ yet reply is not an excuse anymore, the joy of being connected goes hand in hand with being constantly contactable. It is a sacrifice that I am willing to make and one future generations won’t even consider. The blog post http://crackberry.com/getem-while-their-young-leapfrog-launches-baby-blackberry-kids,  got me thinking about need to be connected made me realize just how different it will be for future generation, when I was a kid it was still a big deal to get a phone in your room, I had to physically go and see my friends and see if they wanted to come play, my immediate circle was small, I would be hard pushed to fill my speed dial slots but now, with all the social networking sites the dynamics have changed but become more impersonal, going to the park and playing for an hour with friends can never be substituted with an hour’s Skype chat. Getting kids connected at such a young age may have repercussions not yet considered.
Me, well after the low tech nightmare I decided I needed even more and the iPhone ticked all the boxes. I check Facebook (on my iPhone of course) thrice daily to indulge in my voyeuristic pleasure of knowing what my casual acquaintances are doing, my device is my constant companion and one that I will not do not without.