Week 3 Completed Tasks and Review

It's already week 3. The topics I viewed this week were:

• Read The Origins of Social Media
• Read The Death of Segmentation
• Watched How to Get Ideas Spread
• Listed to the posted podcast
• Watched The Moment When Social Media Becomes News
• Read The Long Tail
• Listen to The Point of Twitter
• Completed Twitter Branding Assignment: @United

Interesting Points from This Week and Thoughts 

The main point that emerges from this week is that the speed with which information travels and spreads via resources like Twitter has changed the way we get our news and power it can have in forming opinions.  The Origins of Social Media touches on this phenomena with its blog swarm example and how AOL faced a firestorm of customer dissatisfaction due to news about their products via bloggers. I feel this is a good thing but also the scary part about the blogging and online community. In one sense it's great that information can travels fast and to thousands with the click of a button. But, on the flip side mis-information travels just as fast. Also, at least in my opinion negative comments and mis-information are far easier to dish out on a business or individual when hidden behind one's computer desk. As a business owner I know that sites like yelp, though not technically a blog, have given customer an unfair forum to post negative comments about my business from time to time.

The video The Point of Twitter also makes the same point in discussing how Twitter with its real-time impact and speed to can actually drive the stores that new outlets choose to pick up. In one part of the video the journalist mentions how often times he uses Twitter to find the beat on a new story as Twitter knows what's going on prior to the major news networks. 

In the video The Moment When Social Media Becomes News the speaker discusses how our news being formed twitter posts and various bloggers. He states that though one blogger may only have a small piece of the story, but when taken together with multiple blogs and combined a full story starts to form. He comments that this is a positive change and has improved the depth of the stories we receive as viewers. However, he also cautions that this phenomena leaves bloggers and the articles they product open to a follow the leader type of attitude even if the information turns out to be false. He uses the example of lost ant to better explain. One lost ant may find itself followed by a string of blindly following ants much the same way a blogger, reporting the wrong information, could develop a list of followers all reporting the wrong information.  

I agree that this is a possible downside to the blogosphere,  but if we're looking at the mainstream media I wouldn't say their reporting of the news anywhere close to 100% accurate. I read and hear stories all the time from the mainstream media that turn out to be false, misreported, or skewed. So I don't know that blogs should be seen as any less reliable than traditional sources. In fact I see blogging as possibly more accurate than the mainstream media because users can quickly and openly comment, re-post, revise, and view from different angles. The sheer size of the blogging community acts as a filter that gives use little slices of the news that we can then put together to form the full story.