This week turned out to be a long one. Here’s a quick overview.
- With Bluesky, the social media echo chamber is back in vogue - Discussion about the return of echo chambers in social media, with Bluesky emerging as a new hub.
- Post (on) Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere (POSSE) - Introduces POSSE as a solution for publishing across fragmented platforms, emphasizing content control.
- What the prompt? - The oversimplification of AI prompts and more effective strategies.
- Your AI Research Assistant by Google - Describes Google’s NotebookLM, which enables AI-driven conversations using personal data.
- OpenAI is no longer a non-profit
- Sex, Lies, and Social Media - A reflective piece I wrote on the current state of social media.
With Bluesky, the social media echo chamber is back in vogue
The fediverse is, in my view, an amazing idea. At the same time I don’t believe it will succeed because it doesn’t come with a sustainable operation model. Setting up a fediverse server is also not an easy task.
Right now, the Fediverse includes Mastodon, Takahe, Blue Sky, Threads (to some extent), and Flipboard.
Evidence shows that with the demise of X, we have regrouped back into echo chambers. (One could argue that those echo chambers were already present on Twitter.)
“Data from Similarweb shows active daily users in the UK have dropped from 8mn a year ago to only around 5.6mn now, with more than a third of that fall coming since the summer riots. The same thing is happening elsewhere, and not just in places where the platform has been banned, such as Brazil. Over the same 16-month period, X’s active users in the US have fallen by about a fifth.
As disillusioned X users become, yes, ex-X-users, they are finding their way onto alternative sites. With Mastodon having proved off-puttingly techy for many, that tends to either be Meta’s Threads app, or Bluesky, the platform that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey helped to start. But while the former is winning in terms of absolute numbers — about 1.4mn daily active users of Threads in the UK, compared with just over 100,000 for Bluesky — it is the latter that has grown the most rapidly over the past six weeks, and that is cementing itself as the top choice for media types, policy wonks, academics and the broader chatterati.
That there is a new place for such people to congregate is all well and good, but the problem is that the chatterati — very nice and non-conspiracy-theorising and non-overtly-racist though they may be — tend to coalesce around some quite similar viewpoints, which makes for a rather echoey chamber.”
Source: FT, With Bluesky, the social media echo chamber is back in vogue
Post (on) Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere (POSSE)
Came across this post by @Molly White, a solution to fix the fragmented fediverse that I believe is the answer for Public Relations and other comms professionals to stop having to chase the next big social media site.
The constant evolution and fragmentation of social media platforms can lead to community loss and difficulty maintaining connections. The solution to these problems could be federation, allowing seamless interaction across platforms, but this is not yet fully realized. A short-term solution is POSSE (Post on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), a philosophy that encourages publishing posts on a personal site and then syndicating them on various social media platforms. This allows users to maintain control over their content and easily adapt to changes in social media platforms.
Source: https://www.citationneeded.news/posse/
@Dave Winer then echoed this idea and shared his work so far to accomplish the same goal.
Molly White’s article discusses the challenges of maintaining a presence on multiple social web platforms, a problem that began with the inception of Twitter and Google Reader, which had differing views on web writing. Previously, a cross-posting API called the Metaweblog API, based on RSS 2.0’s idea of a post, was widely supported. However, the limitations of software can impact the quality of writing, as experienced by the author when trying to cross-post to Medium and Facebook.
Source: http://scripting.com/2024/09/28/132152.html?title=interopInSocialWeb
My approach was to use #Node-RED and Zapier to keep things in sync, but Molly and Dave’s approach is more interesting. In the coming weeks i’ll be looking further into ways to use the same idea.
What the prompt ?
While I am a big supporter of using AI, I have grown weary of the prompt gurus. Their advice is mostly correct, but they focus on teaching the template instead of explaining the formula.
“Prompt Engineers” don’t want you to know that in most cases the formula is simple.
- Provide the context and goal you are trying to achieve.
- List the requirements for the output.
- Optionally, provide the work you have done so far.
On a second and better level, each field will find different uses for LLMs, each with its pros and cons. These caveats need to be explored further, of course.
A third level is to provide a better understanding of how AI technologies work. We can’t expect a LLM to “go scrape the entire web”
Your AI Research Assistant by Google
NotebookLM is Google’s take on using your own corpus of information to power an AI.
@Neville Hobson explains it well.
Google’s NotebookLM, an AI-powered note-taking and research assistant, has introduced a new feature, the ‘Audio Overview’, which creates AI personas to discuss a topic in a podcast-style conversation. The AI tool uses advanced language understanding to analyze the shared document, identifying key themes and arguments, and then constructs a conversation between the AI hosts. The final output is a natural-sounding conversation in a WAV audio file. This feature can be used in marketing content creation and internal communication and training.
Source: NotebookLM Drives AI Audio Conversations That Feel Human
This is similar to what we are trying to do with #Gregory-MS. The difference is that our system aims to integrate the whole scientific publishing pipeline and discovery.
- Find the newest research
- Filter the relevant content
- Map research areas
- Figure out connections we may have missed
The details and open-source code are available at Gregory-AI.
OpenAI is no longer a non-profit
OpenAI is planning to restructure its core business into a for-profit benefit corporation, a move aimed at attracting more investors. The non-profit OpenAI will retain a minority stake in the for-profit entity. The restructuring could also affect how the company manages AI risks under a new governance structure. CEO Sam Altman will receive equity in the for-profit company, which could be worth $150 billion post-restructuring.
Source: Reuters, OpenAI to remove non-profit control and give Sam Altman equity
I’m not surprised, I’m mostly sad to see #OpenAI change direction so fast.
The New York Times says that “OpenAI Is Growing Fast and Burning Through Piles of Money”.
Sex, Lies, and Social Media
This was the title of my latest blog post. I don’t know what to call it, and I know few people will read it, but I really enjoyed writing it.
