Liminal states

Facebook’s terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore.

— Chris Walters in The Consumerist

And people aren’t happy about it.  Anne Kathrine Yojana Petterøe’s People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS) protest group had about 900 members when I joined at 7:30.  By the time I posted this at 9:30 it was over 1650, which puts the growth rate at an astonishing 35%+ per hour.  After inviting another 50+ people on Facebook and retweeting, I sent mail to some colleagues encouraging them to check it out:

If you haven’t been tracking social network activism campaigns, this could be an intersting one.  The “call to action” in the protest group is very crisp; and it’s a great example of a campaign crossing social networks.

A Twitter search for “TOS” is a good way to follow the discussion; the Twitter #facebook hashtag is hopping as well.  Both have been in the top 10 trending topics on Twitter all morning, with TOS currently at #2.

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Tracy Viselli and I are working on an article for The Exception on how progressives can use Twitter.  Here’s our current thinking on recommendations:

1. progressives should get good at Twitter best practices: insiders providing information regularly, backchannels at conferences and workshops, regular Twitter-based chats by organizations and bloggers, contact lists and skills pitching to journalists who prefer Twitter, etc.
2. activists need to refine techniques for Twitter-based “flash actions” (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).  Social computing technologies are tools; we need to learn to use them effectively.
3. Twitter can be a medium for progressives to engage online with communities currently marginalized by the “progressive blogosphere”.  Shared vocabulary and hashtag structure, and respect for different norms in different hashtags, can help.
4. we should reach out to conservatives, libertarians, and greens to explore ways to engage more constructively

The full article will of course go into detail on the thinking and experiences that lead to the recommendations.

Any feedback?  Suggestions for improvements, related experiences, criticisms, ideas about how to make this happen — it’s all good.  Please don’t be shy!  We’ll do our best to incorporate the feedback in the final draft.

Thanks much!

jon

please digg, retweet, and follow on twitter

Update, 2:30 PM: please also digg and retweet the Nordstrom action alert

Update 4:30 PM: Jen Nedeau’s Can social media save the day? has more

Last Friday’s #Digg it! A proposal for women of color, feminists, and progressives on Twitter experiment went remarkably well for a first attempt.  Here’s the data.

Two of the for posts sent to Twitter with a #digg tag got significant retweeting.  While it’s hard to know for sure, looking at the names of the diggers it seems that we were also getting some additional diggs via Twitter.  The table below also includes the total number of diggs as of 3 PM Pacific time on Friday

Eight retweets may not sound like a lot, But looking at it differently, those 8 retweets reached over 700 followers plus however many people are following the #topprog, #lgbt, and #jti* channels — and had a measurable impact on digg results.  According to retweetist popular URLs get retweeted by over 100 people in a 24 hour period so there’s clearly significant upside here.  And of course there are lessons about how to do it better.

Like I say, great results for a first attempt.

So let’s try it again!  Please digg and retweet.

And please also digg at least one of the first posts (1, 2, 3, 4).  While it’s too late to get any of them on to digg’s front page, this is still a very useful way of tracking how far this discussion has spread.  Thanks!

To follow along on Twitter, using the new improved magic incantation.*

Additional discussion, and a little more data, below the fold.

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DRAFT, CURRENTLY BEING REVISED SUBSTANTIALLY.   New recommendations here.  Thanks all for the feedback!

Final version to appear in The Exception.

Collaboratively authored with Tracy Viselli.

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DRAFT!  Revised version published on Reno and its Discontents.

Thanks all for the feedback.

And please, digg it!

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Last night’s #topprog Tweetup, discussing the next steps for the new progressive Twitter hashtag, had some excellent discussions.   Chris Cardinal (aka @cacardinal) has set up a skeleton web page on topprog.org and did a great job facilitating the tweetup; he’ll be writing up a summary later today.   Somehow, though, I wound up with an action item — writing up a couple of quick scenarios for ways to use #topprog.   How’d that happen?!?!?  Looks like my meeting skills are rusty!

Still it’s a good thing to focus on.  Twitter hashtags are extremely flexible, and there are zillions of things we could do with them.  What are some of the sweet spots?  And how do we use #topprog to accomplish them?

I’ll kick things off with a couple that seem important: action alerts and events.  Suggestions and feedback  are very welcome: in the comments here, or tweeted to #topprog if it’s 140 characters or less 🙂

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Draft.  Work in progress — feedback welcome!

The revised version will (hopefully) be posted on The Seminal

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Update: #topprog Tweetup : Tuesday Night 7:30 EST : Subject – topprog.org features, functionality, and community. Please Retweet!  H/T @cacardinal

The new #topprog Twitter hashtag for progressives continues to make progress with a good range of topics and tweeters — including big names like @blogdiva, @PunditMom (who’s moderating a breakout session at fem2pt0 tomorrow), and @JoeTrippi.

The progressive blogosphere’s ignoring it, of course,* but the conservatives of #tcot are nervous enough that they’re already labelling it a #fail, thinking about flooding it, and coming up with euphemisms for trolling.  And in fact @The_Anti_Guru’s “active engagement” probably accounts for over 50% of the traffic, counting replies.  Guy attempts to disrupt and dominate conversation in potentially-woman-friendly-space, film at 11!

Gender issues aside, a lot of people are skeptical whether it’s possible to have meaningful conversations on Twitter.  Won’t the loudest voices drown everybody else out?  The three loudest tweeters yesterday had 46, 30, and 29 tweets yesterday.  As calibration, @drdigipol, aka Alan Rosenblatt, who as the creator of the list presumably has as much to say as anybody else, had 7.   So it’s easy to overlook @lizandra311’s updates on the Rootscamp in Philadelphia, or the occasional posts from @blogdiva, @Heardtfelt, @myrnyatheminx, @GetFISARight and others.

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It still bugs me that Steve Elliot’s Get FISA Right: Last Chance To Vote Against Domestic Spying was buried by pro-surveillance diggers after I foolishly twittered it to the #tcot (Top Conservatives on Twitter) channel.  So when I got Alan Rosenblatt’s email about a new #topprog hashtag, my immediate response was that we should think about how to use it for information diffusion including posts that might be worth digging.  Not that I’m competitive or anything ….

Of course as Twitter Vote Report and the Motrin Moms have shown, Twitter hashtags are potentially useful for far more than that.  From the Get FISA Right perspective, for example, it’s another great way of broadcasting our dailyish update — and the same’s true for every other grassroots campaign out there.

One especially intriguing aspect of this to me is that Twitter is a far less male-dominated environment than digg, email and the blogosphere — and indeed the early posts to #topprog include @WomenWhoTech, @nerdette, @PunditMom, @myrnathemynx and many others.  So it’s a great chance for a key piece of progressive infrastructure where feminists and womanists — and women in general — can participate on a fairer basis.

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Katja Presnal’s Motrin Ad Makes Moms Mad

Motrin’s “viral” video making fun of babywearing mothers — timed for the start of International Babywearing Week — has, much to their PR firms amazement, led to a backlash.  As Allyson Kaplan’s Motrin’s Pain: Viral Video Disaster on Fast Company’s Radical Tech describes:

The viral video worked in the sense that it went viral but not in the way the marketers of Motrin were hoping for. Just hours after the campaign launched moms began blogging, tweeting and posting Facebook updates about how offensive the new Motrin campaign is to mothers. Women were so angered by the video that it became one of the most popular subjects tweeted about this weekend on Twitter. Talk about a PR disaster. Over 100 blogs featured headlines such as “Motrin Makes Moms Mad” to “Motrin Giving Moms a Headache”.

Tweets on Twitter are flying across the screen by the second using the hashtag #motrinmoms. Tweets read “RU FREAKING KIDDING ME? So many things wrong with that I don’t know where to start,” said @thecouponcoup. “I am shocked by that Motrin ad. Count me in on the boycott,” said @blondeblogger. “They totally do not get us at all,” said @DealSeekingMom.

Gosh.  Who’d a thunk it?

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Executive summary

Please take a minute to help by providing test data for an election monitoring project!

Details

Momentum on the Twitter Vote Report continues to build — Nancy Scola and Allison Fine’s excellent update from Monday already looks out of date, and as the steadily-growing partners list implies, we’re making excellent progress towards the ambitious goal of  providing national real-time feedback of election problems.  Most importantly, we’ve got a logo — designed by TechGrrl Deanna Zandt, and it’s gorgeous!

Also importantly, the planning for Friday’s Jam Session is coming along nicely, including on the software side: we’re getting user stories in place, as well as firming up the grammar for hashtags and the database design.  There’s enough in place that people are prototyping the first applications … and this morning, in the chat room, Dave said he was at the point where he could really use some test data for an iPhone app he’s working on.

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