Unless we find the tools to silence the chatter, that is. Om Malik at GigaOM has started a thought-provoking conversation with his post about the challenges facing the social web, itself inspired by Elliot Ng’s comment posted in response to the question posed by Steven Hodson at The Inquisitr: Is social media becoming a social mess? (which, in a nutshell, just demonstrates the reflexivity of the social web more succinctly than any explanation ever could.)

Malik cites an observation made by psychologist Herbert Simon — “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” — to make his point: “Our communication and our attention is going to flow to a few services — the ones that make it easy to have those conversations. Twitter and Facebook seem to be in that camp… at least till something new comes around!”

Malik and Dave Winer have been chatting around this subject, fuelling Winer’s belief that “there is space between Twitter and FriendFeed for a service that’s dumber than FriendFeed and richer than Twitter. Start with what Twitter does and add the graphics that FriendFeed has. I know some people will say that’s Pownce, but it’s not (though Pownce was pretty nice). I don’t want full blog posts, I like the 140-character limit, and I can skip out on the discussion features that FF has that Twitter doesn’t. But I think a graphic and visual Twitter would kick ass, the same way the Macintosh eventually kicked MS-DOS’s ass in the 80s and early 90s.”

Multimedia reporting is all about making it up as we go along
Talking about new tools and ways of doing things better/smarter/faster, here’s an interesting four-or-so minutes from the Nieman Journalism Lab featuring NBC Nightly News multimedia journalist Mara Schiavocampo, speaking about how her job came to be.

Schiavocampo speaks with refreshing candour about how she fell into multimedia reporting and proffers two lessons to Big Media about this branch of industry development: “Authenticity is extremely important in how we’re trying to serve the audience now … it feels like Big Media are the parents putting on ripped jeans and going to rock concerts so the kids will think they’re cool – it’s not genuine. … If you’re not consuming media in all forms and you’re not really getting how people are consuming it and sharing it, how can you serve that audience?”

Her other lesson is to accept that no-one has yet hit upon the definitive model of successful multimedia reporting: “Whoever has the answers is a billionaire in the making, we’re still figuring it out …  and allowing ourselves the leeway to figure it out the best way to serve the audience.”

The key thing for those with an interest in the intersection of social media and journalism is Schiavocampo’s description of the disconnect that led her down this particular path; she started the whole multimedia thing because she realised she wasn’t producing news in the same way she wanted to consume it — a fundamental paradigm which must be internalised by anyone wanting to survive the ongoing transition to the social web.

Weathering recessions and leveraging new media
John Battelle has been so impressed with the attentive customer service he’s received from Comcast via Twitter that he interviewed Frank Eliason, aka @comcastcares. He says Comcast is “perhaps the best example of a company leveraging new media to turn nasty customer complaints into happy customer evangelists.” Recommended reading for larger companies struggling to figure out how to integrate a social media tool like Twitter into existing channels for customer feedback.

Elsewhere, Jeremiah Owyang says social media is one way for web professionals to be proactive in the current recession: “Social media has an opportunity in a recession, these tools are cheap, some marketing campaigns range from 10-50k on the low end, far less expensive than any traditional marketing. Of course, with comes great risk: doing it wrong can result in a punking, not doing anything at all could leave you exposed, and most brands overlook the amount of labor required to develop these programs. As a result, I’m working on an upcoming report, and we’re surveying social media marketers to find out if they’re going to increase –or decrease –their social media resources during a downturn. In fact, we’re re jigging some of my research agenda to meet the needs of the market and client –so stay tuned.”