Not to hate on people with a large number of following, because I have quite a few myself, but apparently you cannot maintain a good relationship outside 150 people. Yes, this has been covered in the Mashable article Your Brain Can’t Handle Your Facebook Friends.

Where did the number of 150 come from? It is from Dunbar’s number. Dunbar’s number, according to Wikipedia:

Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.

Continued…

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Since then, McDonalds has expanded from one restaurant to a franchise that is around the world. Literally McDonalds is one of the most recognizable brands. Even children know McDonalds by just seeing the golden arches for their signs. How to I know. My own son right before he was 2 years old, he knew exactly where I was going and would get really excited about it.

How did they do this? Well, it certainly was not a one man army through the years who worked on marketing McDonalds. Word of mouth, television advertising, radio advertising, gimics, and more. McDonalds pulled out all the tricks. Today, they can be seen on banner advertisements across the Internet. And of course, they have their own fun-filled and fact-filled website.

continued…

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There are ways to market yourself on Twitter and to market your brand. My preference as a user of Twitter is if I mention a brand, they comment at me. I don’t necessarily want them to follow me with me following them in return. My comment is probably a one off and I likely won’t mention them again. There is no reason to watch me. There is no reason for me to follow them unless I want to get marketed at.

I don’t want random brands commenting at me using @ replies. There was some spammer who was @ replying to lots and lots of people with info on their Blackberry application. The problem? I’ve never mentioned Blackberry on Twitter and I don’t own a Blackberry. That’s really annoying and Twitter should really crack down on those more.

The one that also annoys me is the brand, personal and business, gaming for followers. The most recent one I’ve run across is EcoInteractive.

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The “web elite snobbery” is really a loose term. When I mean web elite, I mean the following:

1. Those who have high standards when viewing websites and eagerly badmouth those who do not meet them
2. Those who have no idea that the Internet exists beyond their circle and this limits their topics
3. Those who profess to connect successfully in the social network crowds, yet fail to connect with those who they might learn more from as well as share their own knowledge.

Social Media is the ability to push your content out to the masses successfully. Successfully? – You might ask. Well, it means being able to influence others in an understandable way and allow those you connect with to learn and share with others. There are no secrets. You can read any book out there that has not been said already online – THIS IS A FACT!

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Social bookmarking is defined as:

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.

taken from Wikipedia

The idea of Social bookmarking is to share plugworthy material with the public whether is it links to pages, links to pictures, links to music and more. Social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious (aka Del.icio.us) allow internet users to receive the traffic they need by submitting their sites to the proper categories related to their post and seek out others with similar interests.

Benefits of social bookmarking:

* More traffic
* More links directing to the site/ post/ page
* Ability to find out more on same subject
* Ability to actively bookmark other websites you enjoy

In using social bookmarking, it is somewhat like a super link exchange…

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Today’s blog isn’t so much directly about fandom, but the ways in which I’ve recently seen a number of people (inside and outside of fandom) completely miss the boat on the way the internet works–in particular on issues of etiquette and privacy.

Unfortunately, there is no one “bible” on internet etiquette out there to follow; no international rules and regulations beyond those that evolve within the community of internet users through the years. But some of these things really shouldn’t be that difficult to figure out if you are at all familiar with technology and net culture–and have some small amount of common sense about you. They are also things which are worth contemplating from time to time, to determine if your personal expectations of privacy and etiquette can really be automatically expected to be followed by others–or are completely off the mark.

Public postings are exactly that: PUBLIC.

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An interesting new on-line journal launched this month, Live 2.0, which focuses on the changing face of live entertainment: sports, music, theater, etc. The premier edition pointed out how, in our current technological age, so much of where entertainment consumers spend their money and how they spend their money has changed. Stewart Copeland, drummer of The Police, is interviewed in a fascinating look into how the ‘record album’ (or these days more likely the compact disc) has become so inconsequential as compared to the live concert as far as a musician earning his keep. The concert promoter now trumps the record executive. As Copeland points out,

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This post is loosely a follow-up to Laura’s post from yesterday on Fan fiction, social media & chasing the numbers with quality content (Hint: Doesn’t matter). If your main goal in writing fan-fiction is getting feedback and readership, Laura’s article offers some blunt but honest advice: go for the big fandoms and ’ships. The hard truth of the matter is you’re never going to get the readership for say, a Philadelphia Eagles, Police, or Ocean’s 11 story the way you would writing Twilight, Harry Potter, or Naruto. It doesn’t matter if you write the most brilliant piece of fan-fiction ever; the audience just isn’t going to be there for it. So rule #1 of being an obscure fandom author is to accept this fact: you have to write more for yourself than for any potential audience, because otherwise you’re setting yourself up pretty quickly for disappointment and discouragement.

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Fan fiction in this case isn’t about numbers, or so many people suggest. Social media is. But social media shouldn’t be about numbers. Social media should be about having quality conversations where there is some return that you can measure from that, so numbers shouldn’t matter that much. And the fan fiction community might say it isn’t about numbers but lots of people obsess about the number of readers they have and how they can improve those numbers…

… and the quest in both social media and the fan fiction community is often characterized by that chase for numbers. The goal is to increase your metrics. More readers. More followers.

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I had a conversation yesterday with some one doing something similar to what I’m doing. One of the things we talked about was the new power structures. He talked about it in the context of business and I talked about it in the context of fandom as it pertains to fan fiction communities. For this post, I’m defining power as the ability to influence beyond your personal sphere and the subcommunities which members of fan fiction fandom belong to.

My perspective on this in fan fiction fandom is skewed based on my involvement… but the way I see it is that older power structures, in the pre-Internet days, were based on two variables: Access to TPTB and Capability of getting things done coupled with information brokering.

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Fans and those they fan over frequently have competing interests. This can and does inevitably set the two parties up for conflict. Unlike objects of fannish adoration, fans aren’t unified; there is no group which has networked in fandom, which has worked with fans to organize them. There is no fan group which has stepped up, explained the position of the fans, explained the position of those they fan and offered to mediate the disputes that have happened. Such an organization, one which had respect and support from both parties could prove to be beneficial for business operating in fan space and for fans themselves as it would allow both parties a good platform for their positions with the idea of creating a more open environment where more effective communication can take place. Similar organizations and efforts have been made in other spaces. The most notable of these probably is UStream facilitating a town hall event for Digg users.

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From May 9 to May 11, I attended RecentChangesCamp 2008 in Palo Alto, California. It was a camp, conference, gathering of people who are involved in some ways with wikis. People who showed up included representatives from of Wikipedia including their CTO and a few people really involved with the organization, people affiliated with Wikia on the technical, business and community end, representatives from wikifarms including WikiSpaces, a few academics interested in the collaborative possibilities for using wikis in an educational setting, a number of people involved in all levels of WikiHow, representatives from AboutUS, people who had taken their wikis into the commercial realm, and people who run smaller wikis that are in various stages of content and audience development.

I attended this event with pretty much zero expectations regarding it.

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