Blog roundup

A busy month – not only did the Spannerworks brand gently sail into the horizon, but an IKEA’s-worth of timber crashed onto Brighton beach. It was an event nimbly recorded by a number of iCrossing photographers, including Dean Harvey, who took this striking shot of the ‘wood slick’ near the pier.

As usual, there were diverse insights from the company’s regular bloggers. On Open, Antony Mayfield considered the fog of revolution in which we find ourselves, and how hard it is to imagine our way into the future even as we understand the technological advances of the past.

Revolutions are sudden changes, but they are also things which take place over time and the effect of which increase as time passes. The web is a revolution that will continue to bring incredible undreamt of changes to our lives for as long as we live and for some time afterwards, I expect.

However, for those wanting to try and understand the current media revolution through those of the past, Antony suggests some good starting points.

Should we be judged on our link networks? Nilhan Jayasinghe hopes not, after a school cop was put under investigation for linking to a MySpace profile that in turn linked to a porn site.

Nilhan wonders whether lawmakers and employers will be able to interpret proximity in networks, given that virtually anything is a mere click away from Google. Although he may of course just have been winding up to the punchline:

After all there’s only sex degrees of separation amongst all of us.

Nilhan’s also been enthusing about lijit, a form of social search engine that pulls in content that you or your blog network has posted elsewhere.

The principle is based on ask a friend or friend of a friend – and relies on mutual trust within these mini circles….. And unlike the doomed Wikia search launched last month, this doesn’t require me to do anything different, other than install it and carry on with business as usual.

Meanwhile, at Hackbash, Simon Handby noted an Experian report that predicts the rise of the ’super-advocate’ this year. Simon applauded the way that it described “how companies are losing the power to dictate how they’re represented online”, and how they will increasingly have to earn good relationships within their networks. However, he also noted that the accompanying press release apparently failed to run with the report’s insight.

The language of the release itself is an interesting contrast. It talks of the importance of super advocates and their “huge online following”, and gushes that they represent “citizen journalism at its most powerful”, yet it also says that they can be among a company’s harshest critics “if handled badly” – a jarring, old-school PR phrase if ever there was one.

IMAGE: Brighton Daily Photo