Skip to main content

Content is the person

In discussions about farmfoody.org, the idea came up that recipes represent people in a way similar to the way avatars represent people, only much richer because they contain search engine friendly content. The recipe becomes a way for people to explore farms by navigating to the profile the recipes belongs to, then exploring the connections between users (producers and consumers who are friends).

Content is the person. I think we will see more of this as social media continues to expand an evolve. This can be seen, again on Twitter, where the person is represented by the content. When you go to a person's Twitter page, you see mainly their content. The "profile" is in the background. This allows Twitter to prominently display information about the content stream, because they do not have to deal with ten different kinds of content under ten different categories. Tweet streams have following friends, followers and the number of updates counted. If there were ten types of content on the page, if each time personal information was updated, what would constitute an update? It is clear updates mean the number of posts. Following, followers, post stats. That's it. Clear and concise.

Twitter succeeds by not being all things. It is a tool. Putting the profile in the background the content on the page. We can speak of a "Twitter page" because we know what is on it, unlike a Facebook page, which has almost anything on it. People know what you mean when you say "go to my Twitter page."

Our thinking about the direction farmfoody's features should go in are being directed by these concerns.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blogging the Archives

A vital interest of mine is access to archives. I've been interested in the possibilities inherent in the web and network for increasing access to archives and enabling a greater number of non-academics to browse, organize and surface archive holdings. One of the most significant ways of exposing the holdings of an archives is blogging the contents. We really haven't got there yet, but I've noticed a small trend, which I hope signifies the beginning of exponential growth, of people blogging artifacts. I do not remember the first site I came across where a blogger was posting pictures of artifacts, usually photographs from an online catalog of a museum, but here are some recent finds. Illustration Art All Edges Gilt If we could just get every artifact in the world's museums and archives photographed or scanned and online, give the tools to blog the contents to millions of ordinary people interested in telling the stories of these cultural objects, think of how rich that ...
2 comments
Read more

Reading Tweets

I see a new kind of writing being created on Twitter, including hashtags, mixed into the text, in a variety of creative ways. In future, we should see a system that allows users to make these kind of connections, but without needing to include obscure computer-like commands in their text. I sometimes feel I'm reading a Linux command line or script when reading some tweets. Sometimes, it takes a moment to figure out what the tweet means.
Post a Comment
Read more

Yahoo Pipes

I made my first pipe today at Yahoo Pipes , which takes our Folkstreams recently additions feed and finds Flickr images that correspond to the folkloric subject categories associated with each entry, rolls them into the feed. I'm not sure if I constructed it properly of if it's useful, but it works, the Flickr images do show up in an element of the RSS item for each film. It's a fascinating concept, although a feed mashup is not a new concept, Pipes is very broad, powerful and slick. It borrows from several novel websites, shades of Ning where users build technology using Lego-brick-like software components. Of course, it's like Unix, a set of simple tools with standard input and output that can be endlessly combined into new, useful tools. It also draws upon open source software development, since others can see how you constructed a pipe, copy it and make it their own to study or build their own tools on. Pipes is a social network version of a RSS feed mashup servic...
Post a Comment
Read more