No, I don’t mean Gnome as in the little Travelocity guy or the traveling lawn ornament in Amélie. I mean your Genome, but not as in your DNA. Your Social (media) Genome. We all have one whether we are aware of it or not.
When the DirecTV guy installed my first TiVo box, he gave me a quick demonstration after it was installed. He scanned a few channels, started the recorder and demoed the thumbs up feature. Very cool I thought as he went on his way. A week later I realized that my TiVo thought that I was a Spanish child. I couldn’t record the Celtics game because the disk was full with Spanish episodes of Dora the Explorer.
Flash forward to today and consider the volume of information that we freely produce through social media. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Delicio.us, Flickr, YouTube, WordPress, and on and on. What others learn about us through our online behavior and affiliations is truly impressive (and alarming). Marketers can use this information to personalize advertising but we have no way of using it for our own benefit.
Here’s the Big Idea: The Personal Media Gnome (I guess I did mean the Amélie Gnome)
What if we each had our own little Gnome that, given all of the information that we’ve produced and that can readily be found about us on the web (see pipl.com), constructed our “Social Genome”. The concepts and facts that he gleaned could then be used as a filter to ensure that we always received what information was most important to us (local, health, economic, educational, social, political…) and where we needed it most (email, calendar, mobile…). Just think of what you could accomplish if you had your very own personal advocate looking out for your best interests.
Admittedly, I was initially hesitant to get TiVo. I thought that I’d end up watching endless amounts of television and never leave the house. But actually, I watch less television as a whole, just more of what truly interests me.
Think of your Gnome as TiVo for your life. Anyone up for designing the icon?
My Gnome would be named George. How about yours?
