The lines between social interaction and commercial sales ploys are becoming ever more blurred.
I went through my email inbox this morning at a fast rate. I had an email from Amazon with some products that were supposed to be tailored to my tastes on the basis of things I had bought in the past.
So Amazon is my buddy and is passing information along that it thinks I will find useful.
Well Amazon is my buddy – they sell good stuff cheap. But it took me no time at all to hit the delete key on what appeared to be a communication that was crafted to appear personal to me.
In one sense it was personal to me. But the me to which it was addressed was just a pattern of buying habits with a credit card.
The Delete Key
Looking at my own behavior, I find it easier to hit the delete key now than it was a year or two ago.
Back then, I could hardly stop myself from quickly scanning emails to see whether that message – specially tailored for me – contained some gems.
Now I just hit the delete key. If I want, I’ll search. After all, Amazon is just a click away.
But, (says the little demon), maybe I will miss something I really would like to be told about?
Ah, no chance of that. Ten friends and six other ways of repackaging that information will be in my inbox or on one or more social media sites before I can say ‘empty the trash’.
Hitting the delete key or ignoring a message is getting easier all the time.
I know there will be more emails, tweets, wallposts, feeds, later today, and tomorrow, and next week.
The Result
The result is that I am more appreciative of people I take to, but also more turned off to the flood.
I read that blogging is on the decline. It takes energy to blog. People have initial energy and then they wilt.
Social media is less demanding of original content, but there has to be content somewhere or we are all just echoing the last message.
Postscript October 8th
Charles Arthur writes for the Guardian newspaper. Here is his take in an article of June 24 on the death of the long-tail of blogging and an interesting response in the comment section from Jen McLean from Technorati.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
This reminds me of the first email I saw in my inbox, on my birthday this August. ‘Happy Birthday’ from Bikram Yoga! I laughed a tad, and trashed the msg, all in less than a sec.
Persistent Advertising/ Marketing is becoming increasingly annoying. It has become a rat race of sorts, EVERYONE is doing it, and so should we! Even companies whose products I love and cannot-live-without, really get me rethinking about their push marketing sense, and hence about their good-will, when they invariably start suggesting how and why and what I should like, every other day. Yes, every other day.
Blogging is on the decline? I had no idea. Although I do think that too many budding bloggers wilt in no time. Still, I have no numbers to back that perception. Do you?
Technorati’s 2008 ‘State of the Blogosphere’ shows that at the time of take the snapshot of the blogosphere, of the 133 million blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002, 7.4 million had been posted to in the last 120 days, 1.5 million had been posted to in the last 7 days, and 900,000 had been posted to in the last 24 hours.
That means that 95% of blogs had not been updated in the past 4 months.
I don’t read much into the other statistic can be extracted from these figures, namely that 99% had not been updated in the past 7 days: That is not a long enough time to qualify as ‘dead’.
The Technorati report is at http://bit.ly/32NSg
There was a subsequent article in the New York Times under the title ‘Blogs Falling In An Empty Forest’ at http://bit.ly/10xDGv
In response to the NY Times article, Richard Jalichandra, the CEO of Technorati blogged about it at http://bit.ly/35tuBh and his response is interesting.
Thanks for the links, esp Richard’s post. He offers a balanced outlook.
And I am surprised at the lack of objectivity in the NYT article. As if NYT had just one agenda: to engage us in a monologue about the decline in the # of bloggers, not an iota of reflection on the bigger picture. A lopsided view at best. Clearly a case of putting down bloggers in general. What do I take home from the NYT article? The blogging phenomenon is nothing but amateur attempts by individuals that mostly try and fail, or give up.
Journalism is evolving, and they’d better wake up to that. It is actually their survival that is at stake isn’t it?
In my opinion, the blogging industry as a whole is still very very young, still evolving, and not dying by far.
We are in the midst of a huge creative wave, with a distribution system without guardians at the gates saying who will get published and who will not.
I am sure that blogging will evolve and continue to be a driving force in that creative wave.
How many will blog is an open question.