UF Social Media Scholars

Great essay from Shirky on newspapers and changes in culture.

"Your friends are turning into virtual friends. That is, they want to advertise their every move and feeling to a presumably rapt and admiring audience but do not want to participate in the give and take of actual friendship."

"The couple has been inseparable ever since-at least in a sense. In the real world, there are oceans between them."

"This is the Social Media Research done by Universal Mccann including 17,000 people in 29 countries."

discusses Facebook's use in organizing protests, when it works and when it doesn't.

Short Telegraph write-up on ghostwriters for Twitter accounts

This is YouTube channel for LinkedIn. You may find some of these videos interesting. In addition to the new "linkedIn grad guide," if you click on "most viewed" videos you will see a video from CommonCraft on LinkedIn. (Yayyyy!!)

"This is the official LinkedIn Channel, featuring videos of users, product demos, feature releases and interviews with key team members from LinkedIn's product, design and engineering teams."

"First we'll discuss four ways that small groups separated from a full river of news can help you use the social web more effectively. Then, for context, we'll briefly contrast this with the value of the full stream of information. Using both together is more useful than merely limiting the full stream to a manageably small group of sources on a given topic or of a certain priority."

" Traditional celebrity lives and dies based on raw numbers: how many magazines mention them, how many television shows feature them, how many people talk about them around the water cooler. Internet fame can be more intimate, Weinberger says, more of a personal connection between the one and the few."

Short essay from Caroline McCarthy about the "exhibitionism" of the generation of students just leaving and currently in college. Raises some good questions for discussion.

"The FTC is planning to hold marketers liable for false statements published on blogs and social networks-meaning companies or bloggers could get sued for saying a product was good if it really wasn't."

"Baby Boomers are speeding up the Web's ongoing metamorphosis from limitless void to global watering hole."

what's the etiquette for cross-posting?

"Clay Shirky visits Google's Mountain View, CA, headquarters to discuss his book, "Here Comes Everybody." This event took place on March 11, 2008, as part of the Authors@Google series."

"In technophile circles, the idea that networks and network effects will inherently provide for better decision making is an understood, a truism widely agreed. Author and New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki, argues that while there are many benefits to

"Rating the stuff you put on Pownce.com"

From Wired: case study of how to be a queen of self-promotion.

Contrasting the styles of Obama and McCain, and debating what the contrasts mean.

"Old scams never die, they just move to new venues. The Better Business Bureau has put out an alert that many of the dubious ads that have long popped up in e-mails and on websites are now invading online social networks, such as Facebook."

Probably the most important reading we will do in terms of "foundations" of social networks. Take your time with it and read it closely.

"Social network sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach. This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication brings together scholarship on these emergent phenomena. In this introductory article, we describe features of SNSs and propose a comprehensive definition. We then present one perspective on the history of such sites, discussing key changes and developments. After briefly summarizing existing scholarship concerning SNSs, we discuss the articles in this special section and conclude with considerations for future research."