Viral Loop From Facebook to Twitter How Today's Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves by Adam Penenberg

Viral Loop From Facebook to Twitter How Today's Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves by Adam Penenberg

This book is about the network effect. The idea is that for every person that is added to a communication platform like email, telephones, and the internet, the number of potential connections increases exponentially. In its earliest form, it was used by Tupperware to sell products, or people creating chain letters. The book basically says that the network effect is good. I disagree with the idea that popularity is necessarily good. It may be good for business, but not so good for society.

Because I am not a huge fan of advertising, I did not find some of the effects he was describing to be beneficial. It is just as easy to spread spam, unwanted popups, and products that have questionable effects at best, like pornography, online games, and fast food with viral marketing and networks. The tools are neutral; the content is not.

The best part of this book was the technical part. I liked the descriptions of how Facebook, Paypal, and Ning were created to scale based on people inviting others into a network. I also liked his description of how viral networks were challenging newspapers, and now film with their popular methodologies.

Whether or not this is beneficial remains to be seen. I see both positives and negatives with the new technologies. This book very much evangelizes for the point of view that new media is the best thing that is happening today. Things are changing very fast. Lots of people are losing their jobs without training to move with the changes. The digital divide between the technically capable and the not so capable is increasing, not decreasing

The descriptions of the growth of Ebay, Netscape, and tupperware are fascinating. Also the description on how to create a movie using a $10,000 digital videocamera was interesting. If you like web video or pictures, the story of the creation of Youtube and Flickr is written into this book.

The book is divided into three sections; Viral Business, Viral Marketing, and Viral Networks. If you want to learn how a social media company scales quickly, this book will help you tremendously.

This is an excellent overview of the process of building a viral business with a gushing, evangelizing web 2.0 viewpoint. There is a list of the companies which Adam Penenberg covers at the back of the book as well as notes and an index.

Daily Thoughts 2/18/2010

Starr Reading Room in Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University Picture by Henry Trotter, 2005.

Daily Thoughts 2/18/2010

I did a little shopping today for basic things. On the bus downtown, I read some more of The Talented Miss Highsmith. There is always no parking downtown. Last time I went, it took me 45 minutes to park, so I take the bus. Patricia Highsmith is living in Switzerland, quite rich now from her movie and book money. She is mostly alone away from the United States which she has an ambivalent relationship with. She is still a United States citizen, but says terrible things about it. At the end there is strong sense of prejudice and bitterness as well as worries about money and food. She barely eats, spending more time drinking whiskey and beer. There is a sense of a person who has traveled many places; Istanbul, France, Germany, England, Mexico and neither likes the people nor the food, but is seeking out the dark things which she can write about them. This has a morose appeal. The whole biography has a kind of pensive shadow over it, meant to express a mood of disaffected contrariness.

Earlier in the morning, I finished reading the last part of Viral Loop which is on Viral Networks; companies like Ebay, Paypal, and Facebook. I have a strong distaste for Paypal, I have had some difficulties with them. I am rather fond of Facebook, it was originally started at Stanford as a network of college students then moved to different college campus. This makes it have some intellectual appeal lacking from networks like Myspace. I am not that interested in photography and wish a modicum of visual privacy so Flickr has some interesting qualities for others, but not myself. Youtube is quite interesting. This book is very much a cheerleading title for new media ventures. I found some if it a bit distasteful. Corporations are not wonderful all the time; some are admirable and others not so admirable.

I also spent some time looking at http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ which I find to be useful tool to see who has been looking at my website.

I just finished reading The Talented Miss Highsmith by Joan Schenkar. It is one of the most in depth biographies I have ever read. It is clear that the author interviewed many people over a number of years, read Patricia Highsmith's diaries in depth, and also read a lot of secondary material. I'll probably write a review tomorrow. This should give me time to think about it.

Daily Thoughts 2/17/2010

Printing Press Mural, Library of Congress, United States.

Daily Thoughts 2/17/2010

I did not read a whole lot today. I did another exercise for Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management. I also walked up to my local library and returned a book.

I went to Barnes and Noble and looked at what they had. We are getting many of the titles at Barnes and Noble, plus quite a few things which are more intellectual which they are not getting. As usual, I noted a few titles that seemed interesting. Seth Godin, a prominent writer on advertising and the internet has a new book, Linchpin. There is also a fantasy novel which looks interesting, The Adamantium Palace by Stephen Deas.

I also went to Target today. They have all the bestsellers on the New York Times Bestseller list as well as the Publishers Weekly bestseller lists arrayed for sale. It is kind of interesting. Plus, they have a lot of self help books, romance books, and diet books. Most of it is pretty bland. The library gets most of the bestsellers now. It was interesting looking at the young adult bestsellers. There were a lot of vampire novels. There were a few popular diet and exercise books which looked like they might be worth getting, The Weightwatchers New Complete Cookbook, and Making The Cut by Jillian Michaels which is an exercise book.

I have had a chance to read some more of The Talented Miss Highsmith. Right now, I am reading about the contents of Patricia Highsmith's library in the Swiss literary archive. Most important for the biographer of this book, Joan Schenkar are the 38 cahiers (small notebooks), and 18 diaries which helped in the composition of this book. Some of the titles are catching and appropriate, especially Grimm's Fairytales and The Personality of Cats. Something of a writers resides in the books they keep. There are quite a few mystery novelists that I recognize that are quite good, G.K. Chesterton, Ian Rankin, Chester Himes, and Raymond Carver, I also found it interesting that more than one copy of the Merck Manual and Gray's Anatomy is listed.

I read a bit more of Viral Loop by Adam Penenberg as well. I am reading about viral marketing right now. He describes how hotmail became popular. More importantly, he describes how it is possible to make a feature length movie with a digital videocamera which costs about $10,000. This is going to get even cheaper to do. It is also possible to show a movie very cheaply as well. With a laptop, a projector, and a screen you can show a movie. This will get even cheaper as projectors drop in price. I found some of the subjects a bit off putting. Viral jokes and commercial advertising can be a bit blunt.

Daily Thoughts 2/16/2010

Cory Doctorow holding a Creative Commons notice that says "Reproduction/remix encouraged / Photography, flash, video OK" originally posted to Flickr as Portrait by Jonathan Worth 3, credit Jonathan Worth, link to http://jonathanworth.com 10 September 2009(2009-09-10), 14:04:37

Daily Thoughts 2/16/2010

I have been reading some more of the Talented Miss Highsmith. Right now, John Schenkar is writing about Patricia Highsmith doing an article on Raymond Chandler. Raymond Chandler was supposed to have moved 35 times when he was in Los Angeles. Somehow these details are what catches my interest in the biography.

There is a lot about Patricia Highsmith drinking a lot, eating very little, and moving a lot. In 1963, she is supposed to have permanently become an ex-patriot. She ended up living in Switzerland in her final days. A lot of the biography is the story of Patricia Highsmith wandering from place to place, in each place she finds a new set of lovers, then moves on when it shatters from her dark personality and addiction to drink. She is in Africa, Mexico, England, France, Switzerland, all over the United States, but especially in Manhattan, always writing, always moving on. It reminds me of the wanderlust of Jack Kerouac of whom she did not approve. This is very much a writers biography. A story about writing driving ones life.

I am on P. 415 of the biography. I read it in little bits then put it down. There are parts that are both disagreeable, quirky, and funny. She likes to kill dogs in her stories, keep cats, and has over 100 snails in her terrarium at one point.

I did my second chat session of Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management online at 11:00 a.m.. The American Library Association offers a number of very inexpensive online classes at http://classes.ala.org/ . I spent a $100 for four chat sessions and seven online training modules to complete. There is a very nice forum that goes with the class. I think I am learning quite a bit. I may take some other online courses as well.

Today, I downloaded http://www.openoffice.org/ Open Office. I am taking a look at it to see how it works. I wrote a short document in it this afternoon.

This afternoon, I read some more of Viral Loop by Adam Penenberg. It is describing how companies use the network effect. This happened when telephones were first introduced. Each new person added to a network of telephones exponentially increases the number of possible connections between users. The network effect also happened when the first internet browser Mosaic was introduced. Every new user made the web of connections increase dramatically. The network effect is what powers social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and other places.

I find this a bit disquieting. It is interesting to have a crowd of followers, but not a crowd of followers without a common focus. This is what creates a mob. I try to keep my Twitter followers focused on books. The other part that is a bit questionable is how much the monetization of the internet is based on advertising. I am not that fond of many types of advertising. The dark side of viral advertising is of course spam which spreads unwelcome through computer networks. It is as viral as Twitter or Facebook.

This is a business book, so the larger the crowd you have to advertise to, the more money you might be able to make. This is part of what fuels the enthusiasm of companies like Google and Yahoo. Replace the word good with popular and it would make me more comfortable. If you believe a crowd is good, you will be more likely to attract people to advertise to.

Daily Thoughts 2/15/2010

Alfred Hitchcock, 1956, Head and Shoulders Portrait Facing Right. This photograph is a work for hire created prior to 1968 by a staff photographer at New York World-Telegram & Sun. It is part of a collection donated to the Library of Congress. Per the deed of gift, New York World-Telegram & Sun dedicated to the public all rights it held for the photographs in this collection upon its donation to the Library. Thus, there are no known restrictions on the usage of this photograph.

Daily Thoughts 2/15/2010

I am reading more of The Talented Miss Highsmith. There is a feeling that Joan Schenkar, the biographer, is very much trying to present Patricia Highsmith in a way similar to the characters in Patricia's novels; a bit mad, having a dark side, strings of lovers, terrible secrets, and slightly criminal thoughts. I sometimes wonder if Joan Schenkar is exaggerating a bit.

I am finding the best part of reading this biography is the irony it. Although Patricia Highsmith did a lot of work with cartoons and comics, she tries to deny it. Joan Schenker ties the name Ripley to the long running comic strip, Ripley's Believe it or Not. This is in reference to the book, The Talented Mr. Ripley. Patricia Highsmith even drew a book of cartoons with accompanying rhymes, Miranda The Panda is on the Veranda. I find it a bit of a shame that Patricia Highsmith did not acknowledge her part in the comics industry. There is now a very interesting womens comic group, Freinds of Lulu http://friendsoflulu.wordpress.com/ that would have matched her well.

Right now, I am doing a bit more of the exercise on how to identify groups in the community who use the library. I am going through each part of the library and thinking about which people use it, the childrens room-- parenting collection, picture books, storytelling collection, the young adult room-- fiction, nonfiction, classics, assignment titles, adult fiction-- urban fiction, mysteries, african american fiction, ispirational fiction, nonfiction, adult nonfiction-- cookbooks, computer books, and other sections.

I have started reading Adam L. Penenberg Viral Loop From Facebook to Twitter, How Today's Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves. This is the story of how many online businesses took the same word of mouth strategy as Tupperware or Avon and turned them into person to person selling strategies. There is a view that if it is popular it must be good and if it spreads quickly by word of mouth it must be useful. Quite frankly, popular and good are two different things. It opens with the story of Hot or Not, the social site which rates people's appearances and how it made money advertising.

There is something vapid about virally pulling lots of people together around a network and then having them make fragmentary statements. Social networks are quite often advertisement driven. I am not a huge fan of advertising. If they offer a useful service, I can tolerate the advertising. There is also no guarantee that once you have gathered masses of people, that what you are doing won't fade out. Myspace became very popular, but is now running into trouble. I hope Twitter and LinkedIn remain, but, I often think that social sites need more than advertisements and crowds.

A few blogs were suggested from the Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management. They are nice, clean, and orderly, unlike my mishmash of things. I liked looking at the http://stackedblog . I am even going to place a book on hold, Wanderlust A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit which I saw reviewed on the Stacked Blog. I love walking. I find it meditative. I used to sometimes practice walking meditation which is best done in gardens.