Social Informatics

It's a smaller and smaller world after all

Scary state of affairs when our content can be usurped without any possible recourse......

Some people in the class were asking about Friendster a few weeks ago. They are going to delete al of the old information (graveyards of old digital selves) and start over

dana boyd is quoted: "We want to forget our misdeeds and bad choices, but we also kind of want to remember them," said Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "These old networks are our memories."

This center explores how ICTs foster/hinder freedom, democracy, human rights & development.

This google video showing its datacenter and security, is probably in response to the amazon outage last week

The computing cloud run by Amazon suffered an outage last week. Could this inspire a lack of confidence in the technology? Our Professor may have some feelings about it.

Should all of the information on us be made available to us?

Sherry Turkle is quoted in this article that discusses how young people especially increasingly quantify everything.

People meet spouses and make other connections on World of Warcraft, as discusses in Turkle's book.

Google says that phones need to know your location to provide services.

Is Someone Keeping Secrets from You? Reveal All with the Worlds Most Powerful Spyphone

Here's the official release.

Ok, this is exciting, however, we don't know the details yet: "The company did not say how long the lending period for Kindle e-books would be, or if there were any restrictions on the number of checkouts for any books."

There is a lot of back and forth about this news in the library world. I have yet to give the Amazon annoncement the fine tooth comb treatment, but there are plenty of questions. Chief among them for me would be: What is a library's financial incentive to promote the Kindle (free or exceeding cheap content to loan would be a fine answer for me). Another issue has come up on public library list serves regarding Harper Collins' policies. It has come out that part of the agreement is that Harper Collins will have access to patron information. Although I have yet to see anyone explain the details of this aspect of Harper Collins' agrrement, would that be something Amazon would want as well?

This is data that will cause some privacy issues. Now one can really be connected.

wow, and the data persists even when you upgrade the phone! The article says "In some ways, this shouldn't be surprising. Back in June of 2010, Apple updated its privacy policy to include a paragraph that allows Apple and "partners and licensees" to collect and store user location data." But of course hardly anyone reads the fine print.

Here is the open source tool the researchers made with the location data: http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/

This is a few years old but it's a slide presentation from Paul Adams, ex-Googler, currently Facebook product manager. His work was influential in the new Facebook "groups," and the rumored Google product "circles."

Yahoo changes its policy on search queries from 90 days to 18 months.

This article also references the incident in 2006 when AOL released its search query data: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09aol.html?gwh=300ED81FDF596D5587EF12FC33E8FE03

Robert Darnton, a university librarian at Harvard, tries to dispell some of the hype regarding the "Information Age".

interesting article. I already thought a few years ago that voice on Second Life was going to alter the "game." Here is some evidence

people often think anonymity on the internet breeds contempt. this article shows it's not that simple.

Y'know if the gamers assume that the female dwarves are Chinese players and they go out of their way to kill with added anti-Asian slurs that would be racist. But they are also female dwarfs. I guess these players can also express their misogynistic tendencies to boot. Nice.

From the article: "Still, books are one of the last ad-free zones, and by showing ads on an e-reader, Amazon risks alienating some users, he said. " Libraries too are one of the last ad-free zones.

They may try to release a tablet. "An Amazon tablet could tie together the seemingly disparate parts of the company's business, Mr. McQuivey said, including e-commerce, e-books, video and audio."

Did anyone else notice this link from the previous week? Left wing gad about Douglas Rushkoff starts to question the unintended consequences for the user of social media. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc. may have created exciting new ways for us to interact "virtually", but we pay for it, even when it's free.

I really like that he advocates that students (& all people) learn to program. People resisted learning to type too! And while it is harder, no harder than learning to read or write.