Just Add Social Noor on social media

I’m organizing a social TV workshop at UXTV 2008.  Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• How can TV-mediated social scenarios augment TV watching?
• What can interactive TV learn from the social web?
• What are some of the challenges in developing and implementing social TV? How can they be addressed?
• How can social TV concepts move from the prototype stage to actual products in viewers’ homes?
• What are some of the privacy implications of social TV? How can those concerns be addressed?
• Who are the target users of social TV concepts?
• What is the future outlook of social TV?

The idea of social TV is still fairly new and I’ve yet to see a mainstream TV system take advantage of social networks (Netflix Friends/Community is probably the closest).  I’m excited about the workshop and I think it will be pretty interesting.  If you’ve been involved in a social TV project or are interested in the topic, please consider attending and submitting a position paper.  Submissions are due September 15th.

A few days ago at SXSW, I attended Derek Powazek’s talk - Weird Turn Pro: Crowdsourcing for Creatives. What a treat! This was my second time attending a Powazek talk and he always manages to be both engaging and informative. In this talk, Powazek offered strategies for soliciting and incorporating user generated content into online communities. Powazek first started the talk by debunking three common lies for not incorporating UGC - everyone is an idiot, the good stuff is hard to find, and you can’t make any money off of it. To debunk the idiots myth, he pointed to a number of projects, including Wikipedia. He was quick to point out that Wikipedia is hard to replicate since it involves a certain altruistic element that may not be true in all community projects. Powazek then talked about different ways to better enable discoverability of UGC - human powered (e.g. editors), computer powered (e.g. Google PageRank, Technorati), and hybrid (e.g. Flickr interestingness).

He also emphasized that UGC isn’t about getting *free* creative labor. You have to offer your community incentives to generate stellar content and those incentives have to be appropriate for the community and the level of work involved. Powazek pointed out that Threadless offers multiple incentives for participating - bragging rights, money, and access to special features of the site (thus creating a class of membership that others in the community aspire to be).

Powazek also warned that just because you own the content, doesn’t mean that you should do with it what you please (again the old mantra of just because you can doesn’t mean you should applies here). You can’t violate the community’s trust. He gave an example of Yahoo! creating a Wii portal that pulled in Wii-tagged Flickr photos. Even though Yahoo! could do that (technically and legally), they should have asked the permission of their users. Instead, they angered their users who retaliated by posting inappropriate photos and tagging them as Wii - hence having these photos appear on the Wii portal.

Finally, Powazek stated that you can’t build a community - you must grow it. He offered the following tips for growing communities - give users the tools they want, trust people to be good, reward good contributions, punish bad contributions, and expect the unexpected.

I really enjoyed this talk - you should watch Powazek’s blog for the slide deck and the SXSW site for the podcast.

Since I’m still formulating what I’d like to discuss in my first real blog post, here are a few social media related posts from my personal blog:

• thoughts on microblogging - my widely-cited post about Twitter and microblogging in general
• worlds collide - a more recent post about managing (or not) different identities on Facebook