"What's popular?" asks George Siemens. "Tools that aren't broadcast-based: flickr (image sharing), social networks (Facebook, Myspace, Bebo), personal information management (del.icio.us), and collaborative tools like wikis." What's not popular, he notes, are things that are used for broadcasting. Yahoo, for example, closed its podcast directory. He writes, "The initial rush of 'wow, I can post my comments on the web to the world' has given way to 'wow, I don't feel like it'." And thus he links to this article that documents our move from real places to 'lifestyle' places to "discrete virtual places in which we can be different (and sometimes contradictory) people, with different groups of like-minded, though ever-shifting, friends." All very good, but I wouldn't over-emphasize the social. I think the social is one type of experience, and that life is filled with many more types of experience. It's like when people say that meaning is defined by the community, I want to respond, "what, have they never seen a tree? They have to be told about it?" Don't sell podcasting short, don't sell community long, and remember that it's about personal experience - and not any of the acoutrements to that.
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