BTRIPP (btripp) wrote,
BTRIPP
btripp

"Plus one" ...

Friday I went down to the Creative Chicago Expo, which I'd heard about at one of those Social Media workshops that the City Treasurer's office was running. I was specifically down there (at the Chicago Cultural Center) to catch Howard Tullman's talk on “Entrepreneurship, Arts and the Social Web”. I've heard Tullman speak a couple of times, and it's always interesting. If you want to check it out, he put up what I'm assuming is the text to his slides on his blog HERE.

Now, Tullman (who runs the Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy) has a couple of things that he's usually on about, like his concept of "mocial" (mobile/social), with the warning "if you're not mobile, you're not really in the game at all", but he had a couple of things in this which stood out to me, and I figured I'd pass them along in here.

As folks paying way to much attention to my blitherings will know, I'm not a huge fan of FaceBook (or "fecalmatter book", as I usually think of it), but it's the 600lb Gorilla in the Social Media space, and is hard to ignore. Tullman had a few suggestions that I wish FB would implement. Of course, everybody knows the "like" button ... but I've always wanted a "DISLIKE" button, and this is one of the things he was proposing, along with a "WHO CARES?" button and a "YOU'RE AN IDIOT!" button. I can't begin to tell you how much improved MY "user experience" with FB would be if these were put into play!

Frankly, the latter is very similar to something that I've repeatedly suggested for LibraryThing, where they have a "flagging" system for various modules. I've tried to sell the concept of a BROWN flag over there, which would be shorthand for "YOU'RE AN ASSHOLE", being concise, to the point, and not inviting escalation to a "flame war" (which I've had a few of on LT, some even equaling the classic conflagrations of the AOL chat rooms in the mid-90's!). So often there are posts (in "Talk" on LibraryThing) which are not legitimately flaggable as TOS violations, but deeply deserve to have aspersions cast upon them, without launching into detailed counter-arguments or the ever-tempting ad hominem attacks.

I'm amazed that Tullman is advocating (if slightly tongue-in-cheek) a "YOU'RE AN IDIOT" button, but it, like my "brown flag" concept, would be a simple, handy, impersonal way to express disdain for those who have earned it in "social media" contexts!


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