I'm eager and patient to better understand where connections can be made between our everyday lives and social media. Two questions I've had in the back of my mind since I left FriendFeed earlier this week - What are the most desired connections? What are the most appropriate connections? - for people and technology not using social media today.

When is the right time to make these connections? We've been giving our undivided attention to a subset of the mainstream population that is small and in love with what they're doing - the early adopters. How can we learn anything about the people not using social media if we're always in front of our screens participating with and analyzing the same crowd of users?

Inside The Blogosphere

Mark Dykeman wrote a great post noting a few observations about the earliest of early adopters and how the later early adopters are getting in the mix:

  • the blogosphere is built on niches while the bloggers themselves are more complex
  • explains why today's newer blogger might be a jack of all trades but master of none

Niche blogging is extremely competitive and almost not worth the time and energy required to bid an entry into an already established landscape. Now we have social media bloggers who create and participate in conversations about anything web and technology to share their opinions, thoughts, disagreements, etc. Sure, some are more focused than others, but we're all interested in less of a virtual store front and more of a welcome to my home on the web feel.

The bloggers I follow are chosen based on whether or not I enjoy reading their perspectives. I don't know what they're going to write about next because they aren't niche bloggers. I know that whatever is written will most likely pertain to the web and technology in varying concentrations, possibly include a little philosophy from the users experience and not necessarily be closely related to the previous conversation they participated in or started.

Outside The Blogosphere

In response to Mark's post - I created my own grid to show the four most time/energy consuming aspects of my life as a college student. What am I trying to understand? The idea is to identity which types of activities fit the description above and ponder how social media enriches other areas of life. We've lived completely fine without social media for thousands of years - do enough people living today unknowingly have an interest in this space such that social media will become more than an early adopter haven?

The grid below assumes no quantitative values (i.e - percentages). By choosing not to rank the activities, we can take a more general approach to consider the importance of social media in other areas of our lives. The four most time/energy consuming activities are exercise, partying, academics and participating in social media - conversations.

What potential is there for social media to exist as part of the three red underlined activities in the grid above?

EXERCISE

Nike+ is one of the best examples of exercise meeting social media that I've come across this year. Runners can visualize, post and share data they collect from their runs with other members of the Nike+ community.

PARTYING

Facebook is used by a lot of college students to post and invite friends to events (parties). Twitter might be used to communicate with friends at a party but more likely is old-fashioned text messaging. YouTube is pulled up frequently with friends wanting to show other people something they've seen before and thought unique. I've had friends pull up imeem and Grooveshark to play music as well.

ACADEMIC

As far as academics is concerned, social media does not exist. I'm sure that's not true at all schools, but in my experiences, social media never proved beneficial enough for the professor to see ways it would improve how we learned.

What potential DO YOU SEE for social media to exist as part of the three red underlined activities in the grid above or better yet, your own grid?