social networks
Seven years ago Art Pedroza created the Orange Juice blog, considered by many as “the first political blog in Orange County.” It took almost five years for OC Register management to recognize the impact of blogs on our speed and dissemination of information of the news as acknowledged by their individual reporters now required to also blog their stories. Another area where bloggers continue to lead over the OC Register is our posting of YouTube videos with our stories. As I read the Register daily I do not find those links.
In the Business Section of the Register’s Saturday Jan 1st issue the featured story, “If you’re anti-social media, you’re insane,” addresses the blogosphere in acknowledging the acceptance of social networks by generation Y and Z. In his story Mr. Mackay states that “there are over 200 million blogs and 54 percent of bloggers post content or tweet daily.”
This is the same topic I covered in my presentation to Assembly Member Norby’s MORR Conference on May 1st of last year. The title of that presentation read “New Tools for 21st Century Activism.”
In addition to posting my stories on the Juice, and sending out hundreds of topic emails, I also post them on my Twitter account.
In my research for last May’s presentation I discovered that president Obama’s first “tweet” on Twitter occurred on May 1, 2009. His administration created the www.whitehouse.gov blog website “which will serve as a place for the President and his administration to connect with the rest of the nation and the world.”
Since that launch date the president now has 6 million followers on Twitter and 17 million on Facebook.
At the same time as our MORR conference Venezuela president Hugo Chavez joined Twitter and had 250,000 fans in less than one months time. Government leaders acknowledge the power of the blogosphere to promote themselves and their agenda and they are not alone.
Last May Sarah Palin had 1.5 million Facebook fans yet today that number has grown to 2 1/2 million. Rachel Maddow had over 1.6 million Facebook fans while professional sports hero’s LeBron James and Tiger Woods each had over one million fans on their Facebook pages as they trail Shaq who has 3 million.
Saddleback Church senior Pastor Rick Warren has 217,000 fans on his Twitter account, including myself.
We have all heard of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Are you familiar with LinkedIn, Ning, Digg or Xanga social network/blogs? Last year Xanga reportedly had 40 million users.
While there surely are more than enough sources of information beyond the local newspaper, let me caution readers that you can short circuit your mind with info overload.
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