The 2014 instalment of the VIRCOMM conference was the first to be organised by up-and-coming community management consultancy FeverBee, founded by the energetic Richard Millington. The theme this year was the science of community management, rather than providing a more general view of the state of play in the area, as found in previous years, […]
It was highly ironic this week to sit through an entire day’s worth of conference presentations at VIRCOMM 2013, an event for online community professionals, and hardly hear Google+ mentioned at all. In fact, the service was only brought up in the context of commenting about how nobody was referring to it during the conference. […]
Recently, my Twitter followers were annoyed to see my feed taken over by an electronic device, which was robotically announcing my travel destinations, and occasionally (when I let it) that I’d arrived at those destinations. The device in question was a new sat-nav from TomTom called the GO 1005 World, which I was testing for […]
Social media has been around for a few years, and has now reached the stage where people are starting to forecast its impending demise. They cite the saturation of Facebook memberships in some Western countries, and indeed its contraction in a few of them. David Cameron has led the vocal backlash against the perceived misuse […]
We’ve had the Middle Eastern civil uprisings allegedly fuelled by Twitter, and now we’ve had the Blackberry-powered riots here in the UK. Together, these two situations show the power of social networking to amplify and accelerate a situation, whether for good or for evil – recent embodiments of Howard Rheingold‘s Smart Mobs. Already, though, some […]
France’s banning of the use of Facebook and Twitter self-promotion by members of the French media has met with some derision in the US. But it’s really not such a crazy strategy. Both in the US and in the UK, we treat technology as something neutral – it’s just an instrumental tool to achieve an […]
