Thanks for all your thoughts on social sharing... clearly you know this field really well.
I just want to distinguish what Wikimedia would be going for (at least in my opinion) versus a typical ad-revenue-driven site.
On 10/7/10 11:39 AM, Paul Houle wrote:
As for social sharing, that's more complicated.
[...]they got hacked by some S.E.O. spammers who turned it into their own private playground. [...]The site owners were basically absentee landlords
This is a good thing to watch for, but I don't see how it relates to the idea of having "share" buttons.
Wikimedia projects already have towering, monumental PageRank. And our URLs can already be submitted to social media, and there are obvious opportunities for SEO hacks already. Luckily we have a pretty vigilant community.
The "share" button makes it easier for ordinary users to share things via social media. I don't see how it enables SEO spammers any more than we already do.
But I'm not super familiar with that world, perhaps you can explain it further?
there's people out there who really hate Facebook. "Facebook", "Twitter", "Digg", "Reddit", "StumbleUpon", "Delicious".
If we want to avoid people complaining, we just have to do nothing.
And of course, until the social media sites standardize on some API, there's always the question of which sites to include in a "share" widget, and whether this means some form of approbation. Personally, I don't agree that putting a "Digg" button on the site means that we approve of Digg or whatever, it's just a convenience.
But before we do that, let's just ask what value there is in doing this at all. I think it's obvious that there is value, especially for Commons.
There's also the question of what value sharing buttons bring. Forsomething to get traction in social media, it's got to be not just cool, but ~really~ cool, [...]
Well, Wikimedia projects are not looking to be cool, IMO. We're not going for the maximum size audience, we're trying to useful and educational.
So the question is, does Tweeting, Facebook-liking, etc., serve a valid informational purpose? At least in my life, it does. I have a friend who has been working on an MA thesis on digital journalism and his Twitter stream and Facebook are a great source of information,
It's true that there's all kinds of dross that flows through those systems as well, but it's not clear to me that this brings the wrong audience to Wikimedia projects. It's not like this site is a secret or anything. ;)