Spannerworkers blog digest

Over at Open, Antony Mayfield has been discussing ‘facebooksofting’, a term dropped into a recent conference to describe mucking about on Facebook – apparently “softing” means relaxing in Norwegian. Antony says he quite likes the term and may start using it to irritate people.

He’s also been relating the discussion from the blogosphere, about whether the social networking site is:

about to connect the world and become the new Google or [an] inflating bubble of hype that will soon burst.

Antony also mentions a BBC Trust event he attended. Apparently the conversation immediately turned to points relating to the BBC that the Trust had not intended to address, but which were dominating conversation about the BBC in the blogosphere. In short, the Trust found itself unable to define the conversation, an observation that led Antony to talk about the new challenge facing all organisations:

You can’t set the agenda in a network. You can encourage, initiate, influence and invite, but you can’t ignore what’s there or you will disqualify yourself from the most important conversations, discount your usefulness, mark down your relevance and even your legitimacy, ultimately.

Antony has also been wondering what the National Union of Journalists is thinking, as some of the Union’s most respected members express their dissatisfaction by leaving.

One of Spannerworks’ own journalists Simon Handby has written for the Press Gazette on the subject of being noticed on the web having been, well, noticed on the web, via Hackbash.

Over at Experiences in Online Marketing, Dax Hamman has been talking about the way in which Google has become like the Hoover of search engines, as well as reviewing the new Guinness advert.

Meanwhile, Nilhan Jayasinghe has been keeping us all updated on the latest news from Google, after the Google PageRank update penalised those who have been paying for links rather than earning them.

More work for those of us in content creation, perhaps?