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One of the things that always fascinated me with virtual worlds and social networks was how many users regard their online contacts as 'friends' in every sense of the word...with the exception that they've often never actually met.

"We may be differently occupied, but we're hanging out together, each doing our own thing. Nobody would be throwing up their hands in horror if we were all reading our books or staring into space having our own thoughts."

Let them write columns

The digitally illiterate Yes, there are people who don’t have access to the Internet and there are people who don’t know how to use it or use it effectively.   But I’d argue that these people won’t be increasingly disenfranchised because much of the real digital engagement is an as well as and not instead of .  However, there will be a real and widening gap between those who weren’t already connected in and those who have new channels of access via the Internet. Of course, as public servants we must find ways to help people get engaged and use new and existing paths to empowerment.   We will never reach full success, and we must never stop trying.  But whatever we do, we must not ignore tools because some people don’t have them yet.  And we definitely must not ignore those citizens who are already gathered online and ready and willing to engage, critique, join-in and collaborate on the services and issues that matter to them.

The digitally empowered Last night,  James Cousins, a councillor, was Tweeting from a Wandsworth council meeting.  That’s where I live.   I thought it was kinda cool to get a glimpse, 140 characters at a time, of what was being discussed about my local area.  It’s certainly more than I’ve ever had before.  I’ve never attended a local council meeting even though it’s a public meeting.

Facebook Won The Conversation Battle Published in March 14th, 2009 Posted by robdiana in Social Media Well, it took several days, but I finally got the new Facebook homepage. With this redesign, Facebook realized the battle is for conversation. Conversation makes a site more of a destination for people, and the new redesign is completely targeted towards this. As much as sites like Twitter and FriendFeed have been battling for the conversation destination title, I warned that Facebook could just decide that they need to own something. Facebook has just won the conversation battle. Why? The reasons are fairly simple. First, they have almost 200 million users staring at the “What’s on your mind?” prompt. All of the other social sites combined do not have anywhere near this number of unique users. You will probably not hear this from many bloggers, because they tend to be early adopters. Those people, myself included, will stick with Twitter. This is about the mainstream. Facebook is most definitely a mainstream site. One killer feature they have that Twitter does not is lists. I quickly created lists for groups of my Facebook friends and was able to view their updates without the noise of the “news feed”. There are even predefined filters for photos, links and videos. Search capabilities are a glaring omission, but that is not as important to the mainstream user. That is only important for people building third party applications.

The other big reason that Facebook may be crowned king is that all of the social sites in the conversation battle have either written a Facebook application or have their feed being pulled in as status updates. It is fairly simple to import your Google Reader shared items, your Twitter status updates, your FriendFeed and SocialMedian activity. The lure of a potential audience of 200 million users is too great to not create some hook into Facebook.

Society is in flux. The global economy is in meltdown. Education is in turmoil. Why? The world has, and is, changing faster than we can keep up. One of the reasons for this disconnect is our insistence on teaching our young people in the same way that we ourselves learned. We're teaching as if there were a dearth of resources, when actually we're spoiled for choice. 'Digital literacy' is a term much debated, but which allows us to grasp hold of an important concept. Literacy in the digital arena just isn't the same as it is when sitting at a desk with paper and pencil. But how is it different? And what can we do about it? Allow me to suggest some ways in which we can come up with a workable definition for 'digital literacy' and show you methods by which we can educate our young people for the blended digital/physical world they do, and shall, inhabit!

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag. Hashtags were developed as a means to create "groupings" on Twitter, without having to change the basic service. The hash symbol is a convention borrowed primarily from IRC channels, and later from Jaiku's channels.