Social Informatics

I saw my friend use an Android version of herself as a Facebook picture. Adroidify allows you to give your phone visual attributes of how you understand your personality. I immediately thought of SI, and especially the early video we watched about MIT projects making phones more interactive via robots.

"Sites that produce original content or information that Google considers valuable are supposed to rank higher under the new system."

Ultra funny online comic xkcd used data for membership of online communities in 2007 to draw a map of them based on size.

An article from "Teaching Tolerance" magazine that deals with how social media can be, perhaps, used in the classroom to engender community based learning and social justice.

The benefit of food focused community building: contributing to a shareable world.

One of the reasons why I will likely never be good at joining virtual communities such as Second Life is that I get really, really nauseous when moving through images on a screen when I'm sitting in a chair. Apparently, people call this "cybersickness."

Shara Ashraf (2011 Feb 19) discusses online dating etiquette.

Carrie-Ann Skinner (2011 Feb 19) discusses the social network.

I kind of think that a movement can be a form of a community. In that it is still a group of people with common interests, knowledge, language and established rules. The prime difference I think is that movements are more action oriented to complete specific goals.

Interesting considering the role social networking played

In case anyone gets as lost as I do learning the online shorthand of chat slang.

This reminds me of David Weinberger's discussion of the Corbis and Bettman photo archives at the beginning of his book.

I saw this article too... Although we keep statistics on how many times a file was downloaded from a web site, a digital document does not record the same info or imply use the way a physical object can. We can extract more quantitative info from it now.

Doug Gross (2011 Feb 21) discusses a new app for breakups and recent changes in FB friends' relationships.

Young people are leaving blogs to run twitter and fb pages.... unique page views for blogger are down domestically (although up internationally). Tumblr & wordpress use remains consistent. Does anyone agree that blogger still feels like it's stuck in 2003 with its look, feel and usage?

A nice summary of the concept as it relates to style and functionality. Fashion was one of the first industries to capitalize on it, and as certain products such as computers do not noticeably improve, companies have to use style, rather than functionality, to sell them.

Sherry Turkle has a new book out...

interesting: in the new book, turkle, "takes a considerably darker view, arguing that our new technologies - including e-mail messages, Facebook postings, Skype exchanges, role-playing games, Internet bulletin boards and robots - have made convenience and control a priority while diminishing the expectations we have of other human beings."

interesting demographic info on users of top social networking sites

Interesting article from The Economist about applying distributive creativity and group piecework to journalism. "Under the rubric "My Boss Is a Robot" they are testing whether it is possible to draw on the sort of distributed creativity that the internet has made possible-and faddish-to perform the equivalent of journalistic piecework. To start with, the group has chosen to bash out the kind of article with which Babbage is all too familiar: a write-up of a newly released scientific research paper. Rather than assign the task as a whole to a single person, their system will try to tease apart and outsource different elements of analysis and production."

This article discusses SXSW-Interactive, the technology portion of the festival. This is the festival where Twitter was first launched in 2007. Theme so far: the blurring of real life and online life is happening. Other topics discussed: web 3.0, asymmetry of privacy, biomimicry (designing technology to mimic nature), work/life balance. Clay Shirky also gave a presentation on social media and revolution: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/12/sxsw-2011-clay-shirky-social-media