Toluu

Will Pate's Blog

Tales from a Gen Y internet guy

Social Media’s Place in the Vancouver 2010 Olympic GamesNovember 26 2008

The buzz in Vancouver is that the local social media representatives eager to help cover the 2010 Vancouver Olympic games have been left out in the cold. While I understand that VANOC Media and Press Operations  may have some initial trepidation working with a crew of folks that don’t look like traditional media, allow me to offer my endorsement for them and their work.

Several of the folks in question are colleagues of mine, and represent Raincity Studios, the web studio I’m proud to say I co-founded. Kris Krug, Robert Scales and Dave Olson are tireless social media practitioners, trainers, authors and conference organizers. They represent the best of what Canada does when it comes to the ongoing evolution of journalism through technology. They are treated with the respect due to recognized experts outside Canada, it would be a loss for the Vancouver games to overlook great talent in their own backyard. It would be a win to build on what they learned using social media to cover the Beijing 2008 Summer Olypmic Games.

Nor should social media as a force for good and bad PR be overlooked. The news has been filled in the last few years with stories of journalists, politicians and businesses tanked by bloggers and cameraphones. But my colleages

commandN 145August 22 2008

Summer travel is over and I’m back on the airwaves with Amber.

ShareThis

US State Department Using Digital DiplomacyMay 30 2008

The US State Department has set up a Digital Outreach Team. They engage with people online, answer questions and set the record straight - while always being honest about who they are. So far they seem to be a small team that focuses on Arabic, Persian and Urdu websites.

It’s a small but important step forward in governments learning how to be transparent and human online. Imagine if this program grew to have teams for every country and language. Imagine if every country had digital diplomats.

If the team reads this, kudos to you. I’ve been engaging people online in the technology industry for a few years now, it’s not an easy job. But you can change hearts and minds. I’d love to hear more about your experiences.

ShareThis

The Social SurplusMay 2 2008

Clay Shirky is talking about the idea of a social surplus. At the start of the industrial revolution people spent a generation drunk on gin because they didn’t know what to do with the massive changes in society, since the end of WWII we’ve been watching sitcoms.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation…And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today.

Clay calculated that the time spent to create Wikipedia was about 100 million hours of human thought. That’s about about as much time as people in the US alone spend watching just commercials each weekend. So a slight change in how we use our cognitive surplus can have tremendous results.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

I stopped watching TV (for the most part) and playing video games (entirely) a few months ago, and I feel like

Discovery Channel: I Love the WorldApril 16 2008