if there's one thing
that's more confounding than the other gender, it's how they organise themselves on the internet. or more particularly how they carve out individual spaces, identities, personal brands, and even businesses :
while building coalitions, link love, @twitter replies, meetups, and ultimately real friendships and sometimes business alliances.
metafilter has pickedup on an example of this by observing the
galadarling,
nubby twiglet,
star,
marie,
queen quilda and others femposse (
not to mention the lu_lu pictured kitta poss and the various
twitter underground brigade blogesses:P); Some common character traits are noted ("
Young female, using a glamorous pen name, mix between
personal life.. + how-tos, design, fashion, style
, likely to be an
artist/creative, blogger itself a brand, Similar layouts") and the nature of their coalition is described
if more as a question, than definitive : "
A few of these blogs cross-link to each other, but other than that I don't see anything that suggests they're part of a collective or tight group of friends. Rather, it seems to be a growing sub-trend of blogging, and
I was wondering if anyone else had noticed this and/or done some research on these blogs."
Nubby Twiglet, one of the "
Secret Society" of 'non-pareils' (as gala has dubbed her community) has
replied to the post with cautious positivity (the first rule of secret societies is not to talk about them i guess:) But Nubby's also a bit dont believe the hype : "
In a way, I’m glad that the original question was asked because it’s generated some fantastic commentary and I’m all for girls bonding with one another and creating positive content that they’re proud of. I’m inspired by others who choose to live their lives with no regrets, follow their dreams and stay positive while doing it. We’re not the first (or only) group of girls doing this and definitely not the last."
Girls blogging, linking to each other, collaborating, organising and communicating online isn't exactly OMG what r they doing. Can u believe it ? Human beings communicate. Girl:Girl.
Is this Lesbos or the final chopping of the phallic 1.0 power regime ?What I find interesting about this case study, is when you take gender out of it, and look at the
structure and characteristics of those that are building personal brands, or even a step before that, living a part of their life online, which obvs comes with pros (
who said being internet famous was all bad) and cons (u end up not being able to say anything
because google index everything for the rest of your life, people who pay your bills read/view u, and the content is going to be on the internet fore
vvvveerrr, which is a long time)
By living one facet online, u also change the potential outcome in that u r suddenly meeting and organising via twitter, facebook controls what events u go to, and twitter turning off direct sms probably got more discussion and activism than the first change of government in Australia for a decade.
The whole meta conversation behind the scene of
Web 2.0 businesses, where entrepreneurs maintain blogs updating on the status of their perpetual beta, and VC's open up their work by writing about the consumer experience they had with companies they may invest in as a way of attracting deal flow. All of the above is nothing new to us (the readers, consumer-creators) It's just another post to comment or like on friendfeed and possibly twitter about if we were mentioned in the article.
What is interesting to me, and what is totally uncracked in all this, is the identification, filtering and aggregation of these informal clusters of personal brands around fluid yet sortable topics.
I haven't seen any adequate implementation of finding the tribe you are interested in - Google blog search and Technorati index 100m+ blogs and match keywords users search for; This doesnt help u find an informal associations of watch devotees for example (whether it be casio/seiko japanese to breitling, rolex, hublot, etc) - In reality there are prob
500-1000 high quality daily to weekly publishing blogs and forums dedicated to watches. Not to mention the once every 5 years blog post by the new watch owner whose photos may be consumed by the avid watch citizens in these dedicated blogs and forums.
Same happens in auto.The recent approach by SixApart via launch of
blogs.com was to just ignore all the amazing topics and voices on Typepad and simply manually classify the A-List media and blogs to provide basically a google news experience with huffington/perez type additions.
It doesn't let you find that passionate blogger about Guitar Hero, or for me : the non-aligned network of 40 sneaker blogs that the
sneakerfreakers,
hypebeast,
caliroots of this world, as well as retailers like
sneakerhead,
size-online maintain.
This is far more complex than the pagerank_lite algorithm
which the blog search engines followed, and it's also not the traditional
meta-people search that wink is working on; it's a
cross between topic based group search (in which user is looking at particular topics), which identifies the high influence people in that field, shows their relationship networks, and then displays the popular cluster of lifestreams (blog posts, images, video -
show me only items with "2 likes" etc) and the relational connections between the actors.
How often am I asked by press "
Who are the top (insert topic, category, interest) bloggers ?" It's often supported by "
I tried searching using x, y, and z - and while I found some, I've got a very incomplete picture." - While sometimes I may want (and find) a particular blog post based on a keyword search (and similarly people will use wikipedia + mahalo type sites for a similar solution) nothing out there yet (that ive seen anyway, any1 got tips ?) really lets u drill into finding the influencers,
who r the prolific content creators and also likely the
most followed.I know
FriendRank as opposed to PageRank has been talked about as the Nirvana and basis of
Social Media Optimisation. Ability to relativitely rank your online buddies by their marketing value, broken down by geography and commercial segment is both scary and exciting in its
non-wasteful hypercapitalism potential. We finally won't hear anymore about
John Wanamaker's half my advertising is wasted. Neither will we hear Dave Winer's my blog is the advertising call to arms anymore because it will be true.
Not sure who will solve this problem in the discovery of
informal social media power elite networks - Will it be the Mountain View horizontal search engines, who move from dressed up pagerank keyword matching or even this much postured Seattle owned semantic search dreamers. Possibly it will come more from the social networks and adservers themselves through behaviourial tracking software and analytics.
Friendfeed (my account), Facebook and Lookery are all positioned well for this too. Then again, each vertical and niche is different and those that take a segmented approach may do better, meaning there could be as many winners as niches.
"THE powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family, and neighborhood... The men of the higher circles are not representative men; their high position is not a result of moral virtue; their fabulous success is not firmly connected with meritorious ability. Those who sit in the seats of the high and the mighty are selected and formed by the means of power, the sources of wealth, the mechanics of celebrity, which prevail in their society. They are not men selected and formed by a civil service that is linked with the world of knowledge and sensibility. They are not men shaped by nationally responsible parties that debate openly and clearly the issues this nation now so unintelligently confronts. They are not men held in responsible check by a plurality of voluntary associations which connect debating publics with the pinnacles of decision. Commanders of power unequaled in human history, they have succeeded within the American system of organized irresponsibility." (The Power Elite : they certainly got "men" as a word into one paragraph a crazy amount of times, 1956)
. But as I said, it's a confounding area, but those that are able to answer these perennial questions, and track/present the new voices in realtime across niches and locations will have a very happy time indeed. And if we think current society is a bit Mean Girls,
what happens when there are realtime publicly available FriendRanks of influence ? What Janis said in Lindsay's only hit is just the start : "
That one there, that's Karen Smith. She is one of the dumbest girls you will ever meet."
Cady: Hey!
Regina: Why were you talking to Janis Ian?
Cady: I don't know, I mean, she's so weird, she just, you know, came up to me and started talking to me about crack.
Regina: "
She's so pathetic. Let me tell you something about Janis Ian. We were best friends in middle school. I know, right? It's so embarrassing. I don't even... Whatever. So then in eighth grade, I started going out with my first boyfriend Kyle who was totally gorgeous but then he moved to Indiana, and Janis was like, weirdly jealous of him. Like, if I would blow her off to hang out with Kyle, she'd be like, "
Why didn't you call me back?" And I'd be like, "Why are you so obsessed with me?" So then, for my birthday party, which was an all-girls pool party, I was like, "Janis, I can't invite you, because I think you're lesbian."
I mean I couldn't have a lesbian at my party. There were gonna be girls there in their *bathing suits*. I mean, right? She was a LESBIAN. So then her mom called my mom and started yelling at her, it was so retarded. And then she dropped out of school because no one would talk to her, and she came back in the fall for high school,
all of her hair was cut off and she was totally weird, and now I guess she's on crack."
