Category: Social Media

  • Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0

    Web2conf
    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 of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is also seeking
    to stake out a number of new disciplines in this emerging field, so
    it’s great to see some alternatives to the WSRI already springing up.

    The 2-day event has been organised by a cross section of the
    university’s social informatics, sociology and communications
    departments. The conference programme includes the controversial Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur) and BBC Backstage’s Ian Forrester.

    Curiously, sessions on Flickr, Facebook etc. don’t include
    representatives of those services. this may provide a useful
    alternative perspective to the proceedings…alternatively, perhaps the
    University simply couldn’t attract the necessary heavyweights or wished
    to keep an academic focus to the event.

    Nevertheless, I’m looking
    forward to seeing where the conference may lead and welcome its
    emergence right here in the UK 🙂 You can find out more at the conference blog and on the conference’s Upcoming listing.

    { reproduced from O’Reilly GMT }

  • Singing Messenger

    SingingimTwo 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 its Anti-Smoking efforts within MSN’s client – the ad creative includes a lo-res sample of Sinatra.

    Now, though this type of ad content is certainly attention grabbing, it’s also monumentally irritating and annoying…as bad as hunting for elusive Close buttons on overlay ads in web pages. MSN needs to consider some guidelines for advertisers in its IM client…perhaps the NHS campaign was an exception, due to its subject matter, however, I rue the day Messenger starts to popup ads around every conversation and message notification…

  • 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 tail:

    salon.com (27), wired.com (27), news.bbc.co.uk (24), imran.typepad.com (15), spiked-online.com (13), nytimes.com (11), flickr.com (8), news.com.com (7), wanadoo.typepad.com (7), longtail.typepad.com (6), guardian.co.uk (6), bbc.co.uk (6), telepocalypse.net (5), corante.com (5), foreignpolicy.com (4),
    en.wikipedia.org (4), foe.typepad.com (4),

    erickaakcire.net (1), turbulence.org  (1), xtech-conference.org (1), 37signals.com (1), pleasurecards.com (1), rssmix.com (1), big-boys.com (1)

    Surprisingly, my ‘tail’ is pretty long…from a distribution of 571 sources, only 48 yielded more than one bookmark – ranging from Salon.com to Ian’s personal site. It’d be interesting to see this visualisation, and others, built directly into del.icio.us as a concordance of a user’s sources, not just their tags.

  • Social Media & Civic Authority

    ScipionusOn 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 Tsunami of 2004 and the London Bombings, the proliferation of cameraphones, blogs, amateur video and mobile+broadband connectivity has given rise to a torrent of useful local information, complimenting and sometimes eclipsing information provided by media organisations and public organisations.

    Where FEMA, the federal government, local and national media have been struggling to disseminate information. Those with connectivity and local information are finding platforms and media to aggregate and disseminate local developments, in the case of Sciponoius, at street level.

    Built on the Google Maps API, Sciponious is enabling people to annotate maps of the Katrina impact area, with notes on observations, requests, neighborhood status and many other granular, pieces of locative information…for example:

    Looking for Dama Fountain & Royce Osborn 4014 Franklin Ave. e-mail Melissa @ melalli@gmail.com

    Worried about friends, seeking information on Mere and Ron Picou’s please email vudutu@yahoo.com

    4727 Camelia St. Flooded to roof tops. Alexander family are OK!

    Uncle Ernest, are you ok?

    Dry Dock photo indicates \"survived\"–left half wall collapse inward

    Golden Meadow – 2 shrimp boats sunk in bayou, other boats can’t get out

    Individually, each annotation is poignant fragment of an unfolding human tragedy. Aggregated across the growing thousands of geographically-located notes, Sciponoius is becoming an essential resource for citizens in the impact area but also friends and family members outside the area. It isn’t clear yet, if the authorities are utilising the data to inform their own efforts – what is certain however, is that the nature of such data must be part of the information landscape utilised by authorities in the disaster zone.

    Of course, like any grassroots media, Sciponius’ data may be far from accurate or free of malicious content. Indeed its contributors and operators lack essential quality, reputation and credibility metrics, though perhaps these elements can only be predicated on trust, goodwill and the civic responsibility of contributors.

    What is clear – from the Tsunami, Katrina and the London Bombings – is that participatory media is approaching an inflection point that is fundamentally altering the civic, national and local relationships between authorities and citizens. Perhaps, these developments presage a new debate on shared public institutions, where citizens and authorities enter into new collaborative forms of public and civic service, where the institutions that serve us will necessitate and require our direct contributions in order to serve the greater good with the aggregate capabilities, knowledge and expertise of the communities which they serve….perhaps the Second Superpower is more likely a multi-polar array of local Nano-Powers?

  • Newsreaders & Personal Portals

    AddtomyportalAs 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 the feed in question to one of several newsreaders – My Yahoo, Newsgator, Feedster, Kinja and Bloglines.

    The description of a newsreader as ‘my portal’ is perfect. As more and more content (photos, radio, TV, music, blogs, web) becomes syndicated through XML, newsreaders are delivering on the vision of personalised portals without the usual MSN/Yahoo/ISP walled gardens.