I’ll be there, running a conversation about being a good interviewer. Not to be confused with being a good interviewEE.It’s a bit tangential to the usual stuff I do, but I’ve sure interviewed plenty of people, and I’ve taught interviewing for years and years, so it will be fun and useful for all. After all, even if you aren’t a professional interviewer, odds are you’re going to need to ask someone a series of questions at some point in your life, and doing it well is way better than doing it poorly!

It’s my first time at SXSW. Any advice on making the most of it, panels to catch, people to meet (you?), etc, most appreciated!

My Facebook news feed is overflowing with people complaining about the changes to Facebook’s news feed/live feed. They boil down to two complaints (1) the news feed has too little and (2) the live feed has too much.

Facebook has also introduced a new form of suggestion — they are prodding us to “reconnect” with people, write on others’ walls, suggest profile pictures for those without them, and other forms of what can only be described as social meddling.This is causing much mockery amongst my peers as well as some horror — one friend reports that her friends have been urged to “reconnect” with a friend who passed away last summer.

At the core of the newsfeed and the suggestions problem is the same mistaken belief, one that I think all of these sites share (I’ve seen it so often on Last.fm) — the men who run these sites are so enamored of their algorithms that they trust them far more than they trust us to make decisions about what we want to see. People know what they want but Facebook is sure that it knows better. It’s one thing when Amazon or Netflix suggests a book or film I may not know about. It’s quite another when Facebook suggests a person with whom I already have a relationship.

If I were in charge of the site’s social engineering we would have checklists that allowed us to indicate whether or not we want to see who has friended whom, who has joined which group, applications, photos, notes, etc. We would have sliders to allow us to determine how much or which kinds of information we saw about which friends. The algorithms could learn from this, and adjust accordingly to make suggestions, but the end users would always have the power to override the algorithms’ suggestions.

Facebook’s new suggestions also make the mistake of thinking that the world of Facebook is the only world there is, so that if people haven’t communicated on site, they haven’t communicated at all. Thus I am being urged to reconnect with a colleague I see several times a week, a friend is being urged to reconnect with her boyfriend, and I am supposed to reconnect with someone with whom I am working on a grant proposal right now. My own research shows that on average friend pairs on Last.fm use at least 2 other means of interacting. I would assume that number is higher for Facebook relationships.

I recognize (I’ve seen the data) that there is very little one-on-one communication that takes place through Facebook (or any other social network site), but there are good reasons for that, and it isn’t that we haven’t been reminded to do so. It’s that either we are communicating just fine off site, or we don’t want to communicate more than we already do. Thus the suggestions feel like either ignorant or invasive intrusions into our ability to manage our own social lives without their computer-generated wisdom guiding us.

I am just waiting for the sidebar suggestion: “Nancy, call your mother! She worries!” Because I’d never think of such a thing without them.

A friend told me today that this blog just came up on his list of dead blogs.

It’s not dead.

I swear!

It’s hibernating while I finish my book. Personal Connections in the Digital Age is now less than THREE WEEKS from going to press and it is sucking up all the writing energy I have (though mostly it’s tedious microediting at this point).

Cheers.

p.s. if you want to see what was sucking up my time all summer, here are pictures from my adventures in Australia.

Sneak preview:

Update: Ok, the book is done and I’m still a very inactive blogger. Sorry about that.

CD Baby have posted a half hour DIY Musician Podcast interview with me. It was a good interview and is available for streaming or download. Here’s their blurb:

Artists and musicians spend a lot of time communicating with their fan community, whether it be social networks, email, or just the music itself. With some much thought and energy going into fan communication, it funny how little time is actually spend considering the fan’s perspective. In this episodes, we hear from Nancy Baym, an Associate Professor in Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. She is an award-winning teacher on topics including the use of new communication technologies in creating identities, relationships and communities, interpersonal communication, and qualitative research methods. She has spent years studying online fandom to understand what communities like music fans a re really looking for. It might not be exactly what you think.

Sorry I’ve been back to being a slow blogger. Don’t expect any upticks soon as I’m desperately trying to finish a book draft before leaving for summer travels and I’ll be spending the summer bouncing from Europe where I’ll be doing some talks and a PhD course in Denmark to Australia where I’ll be mentoring at the Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Program in Brisbane followed by driving up the eastern coast in a campervan with my two excellent sons. Blogging’s not likely to be on my mind much.

Come on Folks! I know you’re out there! I know you have stories! Last chance to share them! Don’t be shy!

WornFree is  a t-shirt company with at least one employee who loves this blog. She’s gonna put her t-shirts where her mouth is, or something like that, and give the shirt of your choice to two of you.

WornFree finds late 1960s and 1970s pictures of cool people in rock and roll wearing cool t-shirts, searches down and licenses the rights to those images, and reproduces the shirts.

Normally I wouldn’t do something like this. I like to keep this blog an advertisement/Press Release free zone. But they sent me one even after I told them I wouldn’t write about them just because they sent me a free shirt and I like it enough that I decided it wasn’t for me to turn down a couple of freebies on your behalf. Call me a sellout. Murketing in action.

Also, they must be cool because they included Lester Bangs and in the pricey indie hipster shop in downtown Lawrence, they’ve got three whole shelves of them on display.

So here’s the deal. During the next two weeks, in the comments (or via email if you’re shy), tell us your favorite story involving fans and the internet. I don’t care what kind of fans, I don’t care what kind of internet. tell stories that make us laugh, say “wow,” feel inspired, learn something, demonstrate how NEVER to do things, or otherwise move us.

I’ll pick my two favorites (if there’s only two entries, that’ll be easy!) and get them and WornFree together.