Underpaid Genius

Mexican citizens are crowdsourcing information about the narco wars in Mexico, circumventing official channels and filling a vacuum left by ineffective news media:

Damien Cave, Mexico Turns to Twitter and Facebook for Information and Survival

In many ways, the explosion of electronic crime-sharing is the product of trends that both create and destroy communities: Mexico today is both highly connected and highly dangerous. Around 40,000 people have been killed in the ramped-up drug war of the past five years, while the middle class is growing, scared and increasingly networked. Cellphones are as common as keys; Twitter has more than four million users in Mexico, according to tracking companies; and among the more than 30 million people with regular Internet access, 95 percent have profiles on Facebook.

Add to that the proliferation of Web sites and blogs dedicated to covering violence with submissions from readers (Wikinarco, Blogdelnarco, Borderland Beat), and what Mexico has ended up with is a crowd-sourced universe of morbid, frightening information — which is often not available elsewhere.

“Social media is filling the gap left by the press,” said Andrés Monroy-Hernández, a doctoral candidate from Mexico at the M.I.T. Media Lab. “In different regions of Mexico, both the state and the press are weak, while organized crime is becoming stronger and, in some places, replacing the state.”

Many Mexicans now say they trust Twitter more than local news outlets, and in some areas, parents and grandparents are being taught by their children how to get online — specifically so they can be safe.

Here is social media serving a vital social need, and meanwhile, the regional government of Veracruz charged several people with terrorism and sabotage after spreading a rumor about criminal activity that led to parents racing to schools to pick up children, and causing car accidents, supposedly.

I guess we could be charged under the Patriot Act here, if similar circumstances took place.

redlightpolitics:

My friend Negarra (of Her Brain’s Daily Churn), just brought this study to my attention: So much for digital democracy: New study finds elite viewpoints dominate online content.

From the link (emphasis mine):

Anyone with Internet access can generate online content and influence public opinion, according to popular belief. But a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that the social Web is becoming more of a playground for the affluent than a digital democracy.[…]The bulk of today’s blogs, websites and video-sharing sites represent the perspectives of college-educated, Web 2.0-savvy users, the study says.[…]

Schradie, a researcher at the campus’s Berkeley Center for New Media, analyzed data from more than 41,000 American adults surveyed between 2000 and 2008 in the Pew Internet and American Life Project. She found that college graduates are 1.5 times more likely to be bloggers than are high school graduates; twice as likely to post  photos and videos and three times more likely to post an online rating or comment.

Overall, the study found, less than 10 percent of the U.S. population is participating in most online production activities, and having a college degree is a greater predictor of who will generate publicly available online content than being young and white.

The results suggest that the digital divide for social media users is wider between the haves and have-nots than it is between young and old, and underscore growing concerns that the poor and working classes lack the resources to participate fully in civic life, much of which is now online.[…]

“The working class is underrepresented on the Internet,” the study concludes. “Without their voices, their issues are ignored.”

Disaffected people drop out, and fill their time with entertainment — TV, sports, movies, fashion — and simply do not join in social disourse on the root causes of our problems. Their voices are not heard, their needs go unnoticed.

And the issues at the core are income inequality and opportunity to work.

Then some spark makes the powder keg go off, and instantly we’ll have mobs streaming through the business district burning the banks and looting the malls.

bijan:

Yesterday, I received a few emails linking to this post on Pingdom that describes the growth of Wordpress and the faster growth of Tumblr (disclosure: I’m a board member and investor in Tumblr).

But comparing Tumblr to Wordpress is like comparing apples and oranges. They are completely different things. 

Wordpress is a publishing platform. You can host it yourself or Wordpress it will host it for you. And yes, some people use Tumblr in this use case. 

But the vast majority of the Tumblr engagement (traffic, page views, liking, reblogs, follows, etc), is on the Tumblr Dashboard which is their unique & native version of a social newsfeed. The Tumblr Dashboard is where you follow other Tumblr users and traffic inside the Tumblr Dashboard far exceeds (understatement) traffic to the aggregate page views to Tumblr powered sites.  

I think this is a misunderstood thing with people that dont use Tumblr or haven’t started following enough people. It’s not a tool.

Tumblr is a social network and the best place for creative self expression. 

I wrote a piece a while back, when I was first getting excited about Tumblr, where I describe the inside and outside view of Tumblr:

The Outside View — When Tumblr users are looking at other Tumblr-hosted blogs, they see several controls that are not visible to non-users. Along with the blog content, they see ‘like’, ‘reblog’, ‘follow’ and ‘dashboard’ icons, like this:

The ‘like’ button (the heart) is a way to create a haptic gesture that winds up on the post’s ‘notes’ list, a history of all the ways that the post has been touched by others.

The ‘reblog’ button makes a copy of the post on the user’s blog, and adds that action to the original post’s notes history.

Clicking the ‘follow’ adds the blog to the user’s list of followed blogs, which is a perfect segue to the second view in the poststream model.

The Inside View — When the user logs into Tumblr (or when they clink on ‘dashboard’ after being logged in), they are presented their Tumblr dashboard, which aggregates posts from all the blogs that the user is following, plus posts from their own blog, and notes that other users’ actions have left on posts. Here’s the third page of my Tumblr dashboard from this morning (I wanted to show a note and the page controls):

The ‘like’ and ‘reblog’ controls are displayed on all the posts in the poststream, and work in the same way as described.

You can see that wakeupfromthedramscene has started following my UnderpaidGenius blog. Other notes also are displayed, although their are none in this page of my poststream:  reblogs, likes, and answers to questions (any text post that ends with a question mark allows for answers to questions to be accumulated).

Bijan makes the case that this inside view — the Tumblr Dashboard — is a social network while Worrdpress is just a blogging platform. Note, however, that the piece I quoted above was about Wordpress releasing new social features — specifically, ‘like’ and ‘reblog’ — in an effort to become better social plumbing.

So I don’t go along with the notion that these are two discrete and different things. Wordpress, Tumblr, Typepad, Squarespace — they are all social tools with a strong publishing orientation, but all support social networks of people reading and writing, just with different appraoches to supporting those connections.

Tumblr is the technology that has gone the farthest down the path toward a new social paradigm, where all involved can become full participants in the explicit social network that Tumblr supports. People can opt to be plain old readers if they want, but they will never get wise to the social streaming in the inside view until they sign up for their own account, and jump into social curation and leaving plain old reading behind.

soupsoup:

virtualephemera:

I should have done it a long time ago. Their auto-link-dump contributes nothing to the community. They’re supposed to be the big tech experts. Why don’t they get that Tumblr is not just an RSS feed?

The only reason I was still following them was laziness. So glad I finally removed them from my dashboard. I feel like a two-ton weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

They have a more “authentic” tumblr at MashableHQ.com

The fact I have to point this out shows they’re not doing a very good job at making this clear.

If I could offer Mashable some advice, kill that RSS dump and mirror MashableHQ.com at mashable.tumblr.com

Mashable is supposed to be run by “social media experts” I shouldn’t have to explain this to them.