Shel Holtz, Communicator

All this talk of attention crash is nonsense, as the ever-articulate Clay Shirky points out in the video above. Add this snippet from a Shirky interview with the Columbia Journalism Review:

The reason we think that there’s not an information overload problem in a Barnes and Noble or a library is that we’re actually used to the cataloging system. On the Web, we’re just not used to the filters yet, and so it seems like “Oh, there’s so much more information.” But, in fact, from the 1500s on, that’s been the normal case.

So, the real question is, how do we design filters that let us find our way through this particular abundance of information? And, you know, my answer to that question has been: the only group that can catalog everything is everybody. One of the reasons you see this enormous move towards social filters, as with Digg, as with del.icio.us, as with Google Reader, in a way, is simply that the scale of the problem has exceeded what professional catalogers can do. But, you know, you never hear twenty-year-olds talking about information overload because they understand the filters they’re given. You only hear, you know, forty- and fifty-year-olds taking about it, sixty-year-olds talking about because we grew up in the world of card catalogs and TV Guide. And now, all the filters we’re used to are broken and we’d like to blame it on the environment instead of admitting that we’re just, you know, we just don’t understand what’s going on.

I'll be talking about this more today on episode 531 of For Immediate Release.

Harvard is the first university to use foursquare to help students explore their campus and surrounding places of interest.

Harvard University today (Jan. 12) announced its presence on foursquare, a new location-based, mobile social networking application. The service, which is accessible from smartphones and other mobile devices, enables students and visitors to explore the campus and surrounding neighborhoods while sharing information about their favorite places.

In addition to creating an up-to-date online rating guide of stores, restaurants, businesses, and other venues throughout Harvard Square, foursquare users can also employ the application as a game, in which they earn points, and ultimately acquire coveted foursquare “badges.” Harvard is the first university to use foursquare to help students explore their campus and surrounding places of interest. Users who have visited a predetermined number of sites on the campus will be awarded the Harvard Yard badge on their foursquare profiles.

Be sure to read the complete article. As David Armano noted in the tweet that pointed me to this article, this represents a smart use of FourSquare -- which still has plenty of doubters -- by an organization. I'm certain organizations of different natures will find a way to leverage the service to achieve their own business goals.

For all the upsides to social media, its viral nature can be difficult to handle. American Airlines learned that in the wake of the Haitian earthquake.

Several lessons here. First, you need to be vigilant in your monitoring to identify these issues as soon as they come up and address them quickly. Second, there's a phenomenon associated with being retweeted by celebrities with a lot of followers. And third, mainstream, traditional media can play a huge role in helping to remedy a situation that's gotten out of control.

A single TwitPic of a napping transit ticket collector in Toronto, Canada, has jump-started a major controversy that has made Toronto’s transit agency, the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), the target of citizen and media anger.

Another story illustrates the impact social media can have on events. Citizen journalists may not be doing much first-reporting (per recent studies), but that's not the only way to influence the news or public reactions.

The very same "media industrial complex" activists accuse of bias, inaccuracy and all sorts of underhanded agendas remains the trusted source of information, while reports using social media channels emanating from within the activist community itself remain questionable.

Nathan Schock pointed me to this article in a note to the FIR Friendfeed room. It's the first in a series by new media veteran and online activist Kevin Grandia. Grandia reports that he obtained an important leaked document while at the climate change conference in Copenhagen. but because he exposed it over social media channels nobody took it seriously. Only when a mainstream newspaper reported the document was it deemed authentic. Even the activist community waited for verification from a trusted mainstream source before believing it.

Many of us who love social media get carried away with enthusiasm, believing that more has changed than actually has. It's easy to be lulled into this fantasy because a lot has changed and we've been changed.

But the transition has only just started. We haven't thrown off our dependence on mainstream media. We have no idea what kind of media environment we're ultimately transitioning to, only that it will be very different. One thing unlikely to change is our need for an authoritative voice, someone who strives for accuracy above all things and whose track record and credentials lead us to say, "If they said it, it must be true." Some form of professional journalism will still have a place in this altered landscape.

In the meantime, Grandia's piece makes it clear that we're still in the early stages of this transition (he calls it "online activism 1.7") and traditional mainstream media still matters. It's an important piece; I'm looking forward to Grandia's upcoming entries.

Employment of public-relations specialists is expected to increase by more than 66,000 jobs, or 24 percent, between 2008 and 2018.

PR's dead, huh?

U.S. News and World Report calls public relations specialist one of the 50 best careers in 2010, which notes the medium annual wage for PR specialists last year was around $51,300.

Welcome to a movement the tech crowd is calling "Gov 2.0" -- where mobile technology and GPS apps are helping give citizens like Newmark more of a say in how their local tax money is spent. It's public service for the digital age.

This CNN piece introduced me to SeeClickFix, an iPhone app that lets you shoot a picture of a problem -- a pothole, say, or graffiti -- and send it to city officials who can fix it. You can also spot reported problems near you that others have reported.

Here's a video on the service from the SeeClickFix website:

Mashable's Barb Dybwad posted an item about this video from Whirled Interactive, proclaiming it "another intelligent use of Google Wave as a video production medium." I was just as intrigued by Wave capabilities that flashed by in this video that I haven't yet uncovered. Time to go exploring.