The Reader Appreciation Project

Comcast is the largest internet and cable services company in the United States, with around 16 million customers in its internet division alone. With such a massive number of customers, in addition to over 23 million customers who have Comcast TV, it can be pretty hard for the company to keep up with support. Phone support is the main form of getting help from Comcast, though Comcast is working on changing that.

The new age of Twitter has brought in a lot of publicity for Comcast, with hundreds of thousands of people on Twitter and other social media venues complaining daily about the bad service or support they get from Comcast. Comcast is paying attention to such publicity, and has in response launched a set of Twitter accounts that have the central tagline: “Comcast Cares!”

In real life, does Comcast really care? Does the new @ComcastCares channel help users in ways that the Comcast telephone support cannot? Does Comcast really appreciate its customers through @ComcastCares? Is @ComcastCare effective in helping customers with their problems? This RA Project review of @ComcastCares will help you decide.

What is @ComcastCares

Read more…

If you run a blog or two, you may already know that some of the means to promote your blogs to the world are social media and commenting on other blogs in your niche. Both methods imply communication. Your avatar meets my avatar on the same page and we exchange words and thoughts.

What if my avatar has been “borrowed” from Flickr and designed to represent that other “me” I want to be in relationship with you? If you knew that your web 2.0 friends who helped you when you needed were just “somebody elses” hiding behind fake social media profiles, would this discovery lower your appreciation for them?

Is this situation similar to the one of the little boy who wanted to get his grandmother married, so he pretended to be her in some dating websites, and befriended some potential grandfathers in her name?

Most of the biggest things in life started by being small.

This is not a saying of who-knows-what-smart-personality from the past. This comes straight from my personal wisdom well, and it was issued with the occasion of getting tired to submit stories to Digg to see if I can make it to the front page. After Digg, there was Sphinn: another enigma, another trial. Here I noticed from the start that I cannot find an appropriate category for my submissions. There’s no wonder that very few members actually cared to vote for those stories, although some of them were not bad at all.

After two years of being a submitter, I decided to become the one who receives submissions. No, I haven’t got hired by Digg, nor by Sphinn. I’ve just launched my own social networking website, BlogLancer.net, a place where there is no specialization: there are lots of categories, so all readers would find a suitable place to submit their work. If they can’t find it, I’ll create it for them.

On BlogLancer.net, all members are equal and all stories are accepted. Who cares if you choose to publish them on a Squidoo lens, or on a HubPages hub, or on a free Blogger blog? If you thought it to be good for publishing, then I think it is good for reading. All you need to get promoted on the front page are 5 votes from the other members. There is also a WordPress plugin, for those of you who may want to include the “vote” button in their articles.

As the site is only four days old (or maybe I should say four days young), it is small and ignored by search engines. But Digg and all others must have looked the same in their first week of existence: small and ignored.

So, if you have stories craving for attention, I invite you to submit them to BlogLancer, so we can all read and comment them together.

If you agree that your fellow blogger is not your competitor, then what’s the origin of this need for rankings and hierarchies which makes us develop ranking tools for (maybe) intentionally left unranked services? Yes, this is about the urge of improving StumbleUpon, by putting together a ranking tool which gives users the possibility to see the top 100 StumbleUpon members, ranked by several criteria, such as number of stumbles, number of fans, or number of videos.

Ranking instruments can be highly motivational, people trying to figure out ways to become one of the top members of such communities. Some of them misunderstand the meaning of owning the community, making a hobby out of adding friends to their account only to spam them beg for their attention afterwards.

What are social networking sites? Thanks to Lyndon Antcliff, who was kind enough to post this paper on social networking sites to Sphinn, we can find out that

We define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

No word about articulating a list of Power Users of the service. (May this be the reason why the post stalled two days until hitting the front page of Sphinn? Or maybe that’s just because it goes in deep details, spread on several pages – too much for this world in a never ending rush)

Again, coming back to blogging and readers, a recognized sign of appreciation is to display the Top Commenters list. Readers appreciate the feature, and some of them may even search for such blogs with good PR and low number of comments, so they can easily make it to the top. On very popular blogs, they spend hours every day, trying to conquer and maintain one of the top positions.

Is it true that playing only for the sake of the game is not giving enough motivation to keep us moving? If we strive hard to achieve, it may occur that we forget to enjoy the journey. Why would somebody want to be called a Top Stumbler? Will his stumbling experience be enriched by this tag? One of the most beautiful things of StumbleUpon was exactly the lack of hierarchy, the feeling of a community where no member is better than the others, where the idea of “better” applied only to web pages, or photos, or videos, not to persons, where you could send your friends a page without worrying that they might think you are a spammer (because the whole idea of StumbleUpon is to show web pages to its members).

Now, when we know there is a top, will my friends think that I’m sending them pages only because I want to be on the list? Maybe not, but I still have this feeling that StumbleUpon was a better place before being discovered by internet marketing experts. At least, it was for me. What are your thoughts about this?