Today the comparative-media-studies home page (http://cms.mit.edu) hosts feeds from seven different blogs affiliated with our various research groups and faculty members. Our site regularly offers podcasts from conferences (like Futures of Entertainment and Media in Transition) and colloquia we hold at MIT. My own blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan, attracts several thousand readers a day. We also recently made the decision to offer our masters' theses online so they can be read by researchers around the world. These efforts have had an impact on our relations with our current students, prospective students, alumni, faculty members, the news media, the general public, and other readers.

Ilya Vedrashko, for example, started a blog called the Future of Advertising, which quickly became a favorite among industry insiders and reporters. The blog's visibility opened up new contacts and resources, which supported his research.

Something similar has happened for subsequent student bloggers, who have gained visibility for their writing about "serious games", hip hop culture, music distribution, data visualization, and media policy. In each case, their work brought them into contact with key thinkers and professionals.

neue Studie, die die Fachhochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg und die Freundliche Netzwerke GmbH Ende 2007 durchgeführt haben. 46 Community-Betreiber und 172 Community-Nutzer wurden ausführlich befragt, 14 große Netzwerke à la MySpace inhaltlich analysiert. Das Ergebnis: Was Portalbetreiber für wichtig halten, ist den Nutzern oft schnurz - und umgekehrt. Laut Studie will der Durchschnittsnutzer weder Blogs noch Minigames. Er will einen Gratiszugang, eine gute Suchfunktion und aktuelle Nachrichten auf der Startseite.

Laut Studie legen Besucher von Online-Netzwerken am stärksten Wert auf den Schutz ihrer Privatsphäre - und auf einen Dienst, der sie an die Geburtstage von Freunden erinnert. 

Laut Studie kommunizieren 70 Prozent online fast nur mit Menschen, die sie ohnehin kennen - zum Teil über mehrere Plattformen hinweg.

Dynamic profiles redefine what users should expect in terms of how they can represent themselves in a social or business network

OpenSocial consists of APIs for profile information, friend information (social graph) and activities, such as a news feed.

This openness is part of what Vic Gundotra, Google’s head of developer programs, meant when he said last week, “In the next year we will make a series of announcements and spend hundreds of millions on innovations and giving them away as open source.”

Constraints create the “field” in which a style can emerge upon a practice.  The name I’ve given to the posting style I favor is mindcasting.

“I could work on the concept of a Twitter feed as an editorial product of my own.”

that product is itself a distillation of the huge stream of input he gets from the nearly 550 journalists, analysts and news outlets he follows on Twitter. “I’ve hand-built my own tipster network,” he said. “It’s editing the Web for me in real time.”