Category: Social Media
Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0
The emergence of web culture continues in the North of England with next week’s inaugural Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0 conference, hosted by the University of York and focusing largely on the emerging culture around social media and its implications for the social sciences. MIT’s Web Science Research Initiative, augmented by the participation…
Singing Messenger
Two days ago, my MSN Messenger client began singing to me. At first I was puzzled, there were no applications other than Messenger running and yet I could distinctly hear Sinatra’s I’ve Got You Under My Skin emanating from my VAIO’s speakers. It turns out that the National Health Service has been buying advertising for…
My Delicious Long Tail
A couple weeks ago Nivi, a fellow FooCamper, laid down a challenge – to create an application that would interrogate a del.icio.us user’s bookmarks and return a list of the most frequent sources…in essence visualing the Long Tail of a user’s bookmarks. Pascale Van Hecke answered the challenge (winning $50!). So here’s my del.icio.us long…
Social Media & Civic Authority
On Friday, Wired News covered the ongoing development of Scipionus – a ‘mapping wiki’ for those seeking information on the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina. Scipionus underlines the confluence of recent trends in social software, citizen journalism, locative media and most notably a perceived disillusionment and mistrust in public services and institutions. Like the Asian…
Newsreaders & Personal Portals
As more RSS newsreaders begin to introduce APIs, the integration of syndicated content with such applications is becoming gradually more elegant. Rather than copying and pasting feed URLs from content sources into your newsreader, Weather Underground has replaced the ubiquitous orange XML and RSS buttons with a pulldown Add To My Portal menu that adds…