Group items tagged

“One of the holy grails of social science is the degree to which taste determines friendship, or to which friendship determines taste,” said Jason Kaufman, an associate professor of sociology at Harvard and a member of the research team. “Do birds of a feather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?”

Facebook’s network of 58 million active users and its status as the sixth-most-trafficked Web site in the United States have made it an irresistible subject for many types of academic research.

Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, and colleagues found that Facebook use could have a positive impact on students’ well-being.

I wasn't surprised by most of their findings, but one of them did make me raise my eyebrows: Teens from lower-income are more likely to blog. Because of how Pew collects data, they cannot answer the question "why?" when they find such correlations, but I figured that my qualitative data might provide some insight and so I went back through my data. When asked about blogging, most of my MySpace-dominant users would immediately talk about the blogs that they kept on MySpace while my Facebook-dominant teens would talk about how Xanga was "so middle school" and that "everyone stopped" because "it just felt really weird writing about my day to people that I didn't even care about." And then it clicked. As I pointed out last summer and Eszter saw in her survey, the MySpace/Facebook split is correlated with socio-economic status. Because MySpace supports blogging and Facebook does not and because many of the teens who were once on Xanga are now using one of the SNSs, it makes sense that teens from lower-income households are more likely to blog now. They are blogging on MySpace. Now, that outta be interesting when these kids hit college where blogging is used as an educational tool.

Sept. 27: What's in a Blog? (Kevin Champion) If such key phrases as "web 2.0" or the "democritization of the internet" are appropriate for our internet lexicon circa 2007, then blogging must be a part of the conversation that got us here. This talk explores the concept of the blog in real examples, from creating a blog, to basic blogging, to expanding the definition of what a blog is. From community portal, to dynamic database, to collaborative organizer, along the way we will find out that a blog is not just a "web log" anymore.

Oct. 4: Social Bookmarking (Adam Bohannon) Social bookmarking is used to collect and organize on-line research materials, allows groups to collectively gather Internet information, and is an easy way to keep and access your bookmarks on any Internet-connected computer. This presentation will show you the conveniences, benefits, features, and even how to create a social bookmark using tools such as Diigo, del.icio.us, and Digg.