Tag: tummeling

Read Here Comes Everybody - Tummlers, Geishas, Animateurs and Chief Conversation Officers help us listen by Kevin MarksKevin Marks (epeus.blogspot.com)
Bob Garfield's de haut en bas attack on web commenters upset two very skilled conversational catalysts, Ira Glass, and Derek Powazek. The false dichotomy of 'we choose who you get to hear' and 'total anarchic mob noise' was dismissed by Jack Lail too. At the same time, Ben Laurie explained how the IETF's open-to-all mailing lists can be hijacked by time-rich fools, talking about the Open Web Foundation.
In the last few months I came across Derek’s side of the story and so I dug back into archives (literally archive.org) to find the original show and catch the blog post conversation around this controversy. I particularly recall Ira and Jeff Jarvis’ conversations. Somehow I didn’t see Kevin’s portion of the conversation in the comments sections of the others, but I’m glad to have it pop up just a few weeks later to complete the circle.

Of the group, Kevin, as usual, provides some of the best analysis, but he also adds in a huge amount of additional context by way of links.

Society seems to have ripped itself open recently and I can’t help but think that we’re going to need some strong tummelers and heavy work to allow everyone to speak, be heard, and create some change. Kevin’s piece here may be a good starting point.

Perhaps this is the piece some of our mainstream media have been missing from a journalistic perspective? For too long they’ve acted as aggregators and filters, but perhaps they should be spending a larger portion of their time doing some tummeling work on our behalf?

Watched Wedding Crashers (2005) from Warner Bros.
Directed by David Dobkin. With Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Rachel McAdams, Christopher Walken. John Beckwith and Jeremy Grey, a pair of committed womanizers who sneak into weddings to take advantage of the romantic tinge in the air, find themselves at odds with one another when John meets and falls for Claire Cleary.
Another movie that needs to be watched regularly. Hilarious. Well-plotted. Well-cast. Lots of heart.

Something in this neighborhood about tummellers might be interesting.

👓 How do we replace Flickr? #Indieweb #Yesvember | Kevin Marks

Read How do we replace Flickr? #Indieweb #Yesvember by Kevin MarksKevin Marks (Kevin Marks's Known site)
Flickr, like all successful social software, is different things to different people. When something is done well, we internalize the communities that we interact with on it as part of the character of the place. Just two average guys, minding their own business, walking down the street in SF. The u...

👓 Instagram’s Wannabe-Stars Are Driving Luxury Hotels Crazy | The Atlantic

Read Instagram’s Wannabe-Stars Are Driving Luxury Hotels Crazy (The Atlantic)
Hotels are being forced to figure out how to work with a new class of brand-peddling marketers.
Just because you’ve got the desire to be a social media influencer doesn’t mean you don’t need to treat it like a serious business.

Social platforms have such huge scale now, I’m surprised they don’t crack down on bots and fake accounts so that it’s more transparent what kind of true value accounts actually bring to the table. They could even leave them in the system so they can show to investors that they’re getting the traffic and “engagement”, but they’re throwing away a lot of actual value by not disclosing actual accounts and real engagement by real people (aka potential customers). Bots are second class citizens because other than the veneer of value, they’re really not adding much to the conversation other than a weak form of tummeling.

This makes me wonder if anyone in the social networking space is doing research on bots as tummelers?

👓 Do Things that Don’t Scale by Paul Graham

Read Do Things that Don't Scale by Paul Graham (paulgraham.com)
One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist. Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.
This is a slightly older post, but still has some generally sound advice for start up companies.

As I read it, I can’t help but think about how the structure and set up of the IndieWeb community is mirrored in a lot of this advice. The fact that everyone is diligently selfdogfooding the ultimate product that we all love and are designing specifically for people gives me great hope that we’re all onto something that has great potential.

I’m curious how we can take the rest of the playbook and put it into action as well. This is certainly something I’ll have to come back and think about more in the near future.

Big portions of the article also skirt around the idea of tummeling without actually using the term. It such a useful concept, I’m surprised that it’s not more commonly known.