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Courtenay Honeycutt and Susan Herring discuss the collaborative potential of Twitter. This is of particular relevance to the discussion of Anonymous organisation tools, as Anonymous uses Twitter for a large amount of its public relations. @Anonops, @AnonymousIRC and @Youranonnews are twitter users with substantial followers, each with greater than 250,000 followers. Anonymous's favourite method of attack - Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS - works better with every additional participant. Anonymous must recruit members to participate in such attacks through Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. Twitter presents the most anonymous and easily digestible communication channel of the three, whilst also being extremerly active during past operations such as #oppayback. Therefore, Twitter plays a central role in the collaboration of anonymous, especially communicating with those who do not take an active role in IRC chats. Honeycutt and Herring examine the conversational and collaborative potential of Twitter with the use of the @ symbol to direct conversation. This activity is very prominent among the Anonymous Twitter account listed earlier. Anonymous Twitter feeds are full of responses to criticisms and answers to questions. It is worthwhile to note that Honeycutt and Herrings article was written in 2009, before use of the @ symbol became recognised by Twitter as a certified way of creating conversation. Now, it is easy to transverse conversation simply by clicking tweets with an @ symbol. During Anonymous operations, Twitter provides an invaluable resource in being able to address such a number of followers at once. Honeycutt and Herring also note similarities between Twitter and IRC channels, also noting that the hectic, crossing conversation are perhaps part of the appeal to some of IRC. This is certainly present in Twitter, but without the constraints of server based IRC channels. Twitter presents a global audience to which Anonymous reaches out, when recruiting

This article looks at the value of social media as a knowledge management platform for managing emergency responses by organisations to disasters, based on a case study of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake. The US was a major stakeholder in coordinating the emergency response to this humanitarian crisis and had, prior to this event, relied on manually intensive and centralised knowledge management systems. This was the first time the U.S. Government "relied on social media to coordinate knowledge and action between cooperating agencies" (p. 7). Data was gathered by one of the participating authors assigned to AFCAT (U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff's Crisis Action Team) to configure social media tools. SharePoint, newly introduced to the organisation, provided a new basis for knowledge sharing. Previously, the only opportunity for staff to find out what others were doing was during information briefings. The SharePoint platform supported mechanisms for knowledge sharing within the team, and Haiti specific wiki pages were developed by participating agencies using a common government MediaWiki platform. Together, these social media tools increased the flow and form of knowledge as they allowed knowledge to be: o shared - it was now visible and accessible within and between agencies o reused as new knowledge o verified and usefulness rated o removed duplication of effort o facilitated collaboration and cooperation between groups Conversely, this study found that the uncontrolled uploading of information to wikis required organisations to put systems in place to manage and monitor the content of wikis. Accuracy of information for emergency response by organisations is critical. This peer reviewed article provided a theoretical framework for social media as it applies to disaster management. I found it took several readings to absorb the content and it was difficult to work out what social media tools were actually created beside wikis.

This is a page from BitTorrent.com's Idea Bank, a messageboard where people can post the ideas they would like to see adopted by BitTorrent's programmers. This page can be used as a text in the way that it demonstrates the user attitudes toward collaboration in bittorrent. The page shows conversation in fourteen posts. Firstly, we see something of the ideology of bittorrent, coming from the culture of Open Source software it actively invites the user's input into development. The conversation is interesting because it presents distinct 'for' and 'against' arguments on the inclusion of a 'thank you pop up'. The context of the page is salient, sitting at number two in popularity on the requests board, one realises that not being able to say thanks to peers is of concern to members of the swarm. The majority of commenters see the 'thank you pop up' as a good thing (nine 'for' comments to four 'against') stating sentiments of altruism, politeness and an intent to strengthen relationships within the bittorrent community. User Jp comments: "The world would certainly be a better place to live in, if only it's people would start to be kind toward those who share. To become more polite is a small step for man and a bigger one for humanity. I will surely pop one up (a thank you window) to the man who will spread the code for a better living." On the other hand the 'against' comments relate statements as to why a 'thank you pop up' is actually harmful to bittorrent community, Jimmy Hendrix posting: " I absolutely.......... absolutely do NOT want a feature to say thanks, chat, or get to know anybody that I'm downloading from. I want to stay as anonymous and impersonal as possible. Viren......you do know that this is still illegal? request/ban viren chocha." While the swarm is by nature anonymous, users do you yearn for a way to extend a warm hand to members they are collaborating with. Whilst the extralegal nature of bitorrent inhibits the devel

This suggestion combined with the much polarised reactions in the comments section is worth looking at and thinking about. Although the majority of the comments are positive and there are a significant amount of votes for this feature, five out of fourteen of the comments are either against it or express that they would not want to use it by bringing up issues like anonymity as well as legal issues. Unlike the interactions within the close social group looked at in the paper "BitTorrents and Family Guy: teenage peer group interactions around a peer-to-peer Internet download community", it seems that some of the users' who made comments about this suggestion do not want to make contact with other BitTorrent users, perhaps because the illegal nature of the exchange makes them feel uncomfortable. Their perspectives suggest that they just want to use BitTorrent for downloading and uploading, and not directly as a kind of community. I think they may have a point, and real life social groups as well as online communities seem to function fine without communication being possible directly within BitTorrent programs. It is interesting to think if file-sharing was less taboo, perhaps it would be more acceptable for social features like this to be directly integrated into the platforms.

This article is by Mark Ramsey the author of two radio industry bestsellers. He has extensive experience in broadcasting, both television and radio, and is influential in media research and strategic implementation (Ramsey, 2010). Mark Ramsey states 'Radio can have a huge stake in social media thanks in no small part to our powerful megaphones' (2010). It is with this remark that the rest of the article can be better understood as a valuable resource when discussing mobile devices, crowd sourcing and their importance to radio if it wishes to embrace a new media platform. The ease with which users/ 'audience will give up information' (Ramsey, 2010) and participate in real-time interactions (ie.tweeting or sms stations) highlights a need of the audience to not just listen but join the conversation. Radio is shifting from a once passive 'you push, they consume ' to an active ' you join in, and they share' medium (2010). Although this article skims over any direct reference to mobile devices, it remains relevant because it highlights the driving want of audience participation and the role of radio to 'respect the audience and add value to their lives' (Ramsey, 2010). This shifting relationship is facilitated in large by current developments in mobile device technologies. Traditional forms of media such as radio have to now reconsider how their content is being consumed and respond adequately to their audience. Ramsey, M. 2010. About. Retrieved from:http://www.markramseymedia.com/about/ Ramsey, M. (2010, July 26). Radio's Social Media Performance is Pathetic. [Web log post]. Retrieved from: http://www.markramseymedia.com/2010/07/radios-social-media-performance-is-pathetic/