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Real Conversations

Soon after President Obama’s inauguration a word cloud with a graphical-semiotic representation of his 21-minute speech appeared on the web. The three most common words were nation, America and people. His predecessor’s had been freedom, America and liberty. Abraham Lincoln had majored on war, God and offence. The technique has a utility beyond identifying themes. Social-networking sites let users “tag” pages and images with words describing the content. The terms displayed in a “tag cloud” are links that will bring up a list of the related content.

Our survey of teens also tracked some core internet activities by those ages 12-17 and found:

62% of online teens get news about current events and politics online.

...because the more recent the information, the more valuable it is."

could we have scheduled snow trucks at the right places based on the real time information inputted by people in the city

I was serving on a grant proposal committee, and I watched as a fellow judge asked his Twitter followers if a certain project had been tried before. In 15 seconds, his followers replied with Web links to the information he needed. No e-mail message, phone call or Web site could have achieved the same effect.

Twitter, in other words, is precisely what you want it to be. It can be a business tool, a teenage time-killer, a research assistant, a news source — whatever. There are no rules, or at least none that apply equally well to everyone.

The masses also came up with conventions

A less quantifiable statistic that may also have impacted the rise of mobile social networking to the point where it has surpassed desktop-based social networking is the fact that it's an activity that taps into how people - normal, everyday people - go about their lives.

computer-mediated communication use and research are proliferating rapidly, findings offer contrasting images regarding the interpersonal character of this technology.