Why access to a billion presentations isn’t helping me!
Howard Lake | 16 December 2008 | Blogs
I’m now officially tired. My Nan used to tell me that I would get square eyes if I stared at the TV screen for too long. I can’t imagine what she would think of our obsession with screens on everything today.
I’m tired because I’ve been searching for some precedents to support a theory I’m trying to develop. A friend recommended slide share some time ago but I hadn’t really had the occasion to review it in any depth until this afternoon. Wow!
For the uninitiated, it is a web-based community portal onto which any member can upload presentations. Generally it is more work focused that social so automatically presents a useful filter which simply doesn’t exist on You Tube or Facebook.
However, having said it is better, that doesn’t mean it is easy to find anything! After three hours, I’ve given up and will revert back to using my own imagination coupled with a sense check from a few valued colleagues. I did wonder about the scale of the site though so tried to find out how many presentations are actually uploaded.
I failed in this as well as the in-built search engine seems to stop categorising after the first 5,000! There are hundreds of categories and countless community groups set up by users, all supposed to make finding something useful or fun easier.
So what’s the issue, I hear you cry. Well, I wonder how long it will be before there is so much information available on such communities that we stop using them altogether because life is too short.
We do have a precedent for this kind of growth in the form of search engines. I can’t remember the last time I used Google or Yahoo or MSN search and wasn’t bombarded with tons of useless ‘white noise’. We’ve all seen the sponsored search returns which simply insert your search phrase into the advert wording!
Things have got better recently but this is mostly due to heavy pressure being applied by advertisers, media agencies and SEO specialists. Facebook, slide share and other social media don’t have these pressures yet and I am prepared to suggest that a significant proportion of society (admittedly I’m talking about the UK predominantly) will simply switch off.
I wonder if social media will be the gym of the next decade? IE; loads of people joining with the best of intentions and then realising over time that it’s not really for them, leaving only the truly committed to enjoy more time on the cross-trainer!
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.