My link

http://otrobloglatino.wordpress.com/

cheers,
M

My Project Link

http://uncmacguy.blogspot.com/2007/11/rapidweaver-community.html

Thanks!
Josh

My Project Link

http://jomc490-07edmunds.blogspot.com/

See you all tomorrow in class!

Lessons (Not) Learned

Rob Walker at murketing (also author of the "Consumed" column in the New York Times Magazine), notes the following from an NYT article:

"The centerpiece of the campaign is the Web site, artofthecookie.com, which is meant to help women — the target audience for Pepperidge Farm — improve their social lives." Is it possible that this will still exist in six months?

Indeed. "Connecting through cookies" - totally unironically - is the slogan/tagline of this site. Though it's perhaps not even as absurd as other campaigns mentioned, including,

In addition to Pepperidge Farm, the marketers going into the social media business include Jockey, with a humorous site for young men (jockeyunderwars.com) devoted to a video contest, and Dove, with an earnest site for women (campaignforrealbeauty.com) devoted to subjects like body image and self-esteem.

Social networking around young men's underwear? I mean, I know there's a market online for that sort of thing, but is it really something that Jockey wants to associate itself with?

Link post.

I'm sure this is beyond old news to most of you, but an insane portion of my last three days has gone to watching every single one of the talks on the TED talks in Monterrey.

For the others, who like me depend on better connected people to throw us a cool bone, i suggest:
Go on TED.COM - I suggest, as this should be somewhat connected to the class (as it is the class blog) to watch the conferences by Sergei Brin and Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Seth Godin, Kevin Kelly, Jimmy Wales and Richard Baraniuk. Also in our reading roll and
giving talks is David Pogue talking about design. Great way to... ehem... research...



...will anyone be in Chapel Hill?

Inbox 2.0

Very interesting article in the New York Times that talks about Google and Yahoo changing their email systems into social networks. Yahoo's version will be called Inbox 2.0 and will include features that will determine the strength of your relationship with someone by how many times you exchange emails and instant messages. They are obviously trying to respond to the popularity of MySpace and Facebook but do you think it will work?

Check out the article and let me know what you think...

Shhhh

I'm not really sure whether posting this link is kosher (which makes the transgression appropriately ironic) but here's an article on the creation of ethical codes through punishment. I only post this in case anyone was interested in the comment made in class about sustaining a communal ethos.
http://www.unc.edu/~knobe/phil-psych/Sripada.pdf
In a more informal tone, I was disappointed we didn't quite get to discussing the role of reputation in accruing social capital. I don't know where to stand on it: it may be that a bad reputation will harm ones social capital in small societies. In larger societies, however, i would guess the principle of 'all press is good press' operates to a certain degree. This is of course context specific, depending on the line of work one is in, for instance. But tokening a seems a better means to maintaining weak ties than, well, good and forgettable behavior.
Any thoughts?

Iraq Vets and Social Capital

Here's the piece from "Morning Edition" that I mentioned. The transcript up on the page is incomplete, so I recommend listening to the whole thing - you get to hear the salty old Brooklynese of the VFW hall. A sampling of the stats from the piece:

Young veterans, 20 to 24 years old, have an unemployment rate that's double the national rate. In 2006, it averaged 10.4 percent, compared with a 4.6 percent jobless rate nationally, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (The rate for young veterans varies from month to month. In October, it was a low 7 percent. But in September, it was 13.6 percent.)

Kraft is older. He's 34. But in his job search, he has found that employers often don't know what to make of the job experience people get in the military. Kraft says employers look at his resume, see the three years he was in the Army, "and it's like there's a black hole in my resume."

Today, members of the military make up less than 1 percent of the population.

Dissertation Defense

I will be absent again today to attend Ron's dissertation defense. Learning the ropes, so to speak.

MySpace vs. Friendster

I decided to share the paper I wrote, along with assistance from Pete Ramsey, Megan Hendershot, and Ellen Whisler, in spring 2006. Some of the scatter charts got lost in translation through Google docs, but it's mostly quite readable. The link to the paper is here. I still like the title:
"MySpace vs. Friendster: Loving the Graffiti Park, Leaving the Police State" (with props to danah boyd).

I may take up Lorraine's suggestion to repeat the research and try to publish it as a more longitudinal study.

Here's the Abstract:

The age of online social networking has arrived, but what are the implications? Is this a clearly youth-driven phenomenon, used primarily for dating and making new friends? How much are the people using such sites revealing about themselves? Has the blogosphere intersected with social networks or do they represent separate realms in cyberspace? In examining two of the most popular and well-known social network sites, MySpace¹ and Friendster², this study hopes to answer these and other questions. Furthermore, it aims to elucidate the underlying reasons for why MySpace has clearly overtaken Friendster as the more popular choice, based on its phenomenal and unprecedented growth over the past few years. By creating a random number sample of 140 user IDs on each site, we analyze the profiles of these users and show that, indeed, young people heavily dominate these social networks; most users have few friends and reveal modest amounts of information about themselves; the sites are used for more than just dating and relationships; blogging does not play a major role; and MySpace is vastly more popular among Americans than Friendster, which appears to be the favored choice of southeast Asian youth.

The Social Capital Gateway

Another great social capital link is the Social Capital Gateway, managed and maintained by Fabio Sabatini. It is an "everything you always wanted to know about social capital, but were afraid to ask" type of site. It contains links to writers who both agree with the notion of social capital, and those who are critical of it (i.e., suggest that it either doesn't provide new information that can't be gleaned in other ways, or suggest that it is so vaguely defined as to be unusable as a social scientific/empirical concept).

With you today in spirit, if not in body,
Lori

Farr's Conceptual History of Social Capital

James Farr wrote an interesting conceptual history of social capital.

Abstract:

Taking its departure from current debates over social capital, this article presents new textual findings in a backward-revealing conceptual history. In particular, it analyzes the texts and contexts of Lyda J. Hanifan who was rediscovered by Robert Putnam as having (allegedly first) used the term; it offers discoveries of earlier uses of the term and concept—most notably by John Dewey—thereby introducing critical pragmatism as another tradition of social capital; and it recovers features of the critique of political economy in the nineteenth century—from Bellamy to Marshall to Sidgwick to Marx—that assessed "capital from the social point of view, " especially cooperative associations. While it ends with Marx’s use of "social capital, " Dewey is its central figure. The article concludes by returning to the present and offering work, sympathy, civic education, and a critical stance as emergent themes from this conceptual history that might enrich current debates.

This can be found via the UNC eJournals link.

Farr, James. (2004). Social Capital: A Conceptual History. Political Theory 32(1): 6-33. Available at Sage Journals Online.

Social Networking and Advertisements

I just now read this article at the New York Times. It is rather unnerving (but not surprising) that Facebook would sell itself and its users' profile information to third-party advertisers. This led me to wonder what each of you think about this maneuver. How much is too much? When will you begin to second-guess your continued participation in such an advertising-centric social network that publicly sells your profile information to third parties for the sake of targeted advertisement? Or will you continue to support and participate with such a social network?

Software, rules and community at Orange Politics

Perfect timing for our Preece reading to be seen in an applied way: The Orange Politics group blog is moving to new software and with that move is changing some of the rules of the blog or at least enforcing the existing rules that has been ignored or transgressed previously.

Ruby explains here on her personal blog which causes one participant to announce his leaving the blog/community.

The Man Behind the Google Phone

I enjoyed reading this article yesterday, prior to today's big announcement about the Google open source mobile phone software initiative. Rubin's past is quite interesting, and I really like the bit about him trying to reconcile his obvious lifelong love of gadgetry with Google's stated stance against "conspicuous consumerism." Really?? Google--the little company that is making its fortune from targeted consumer advertising--is strongly against "conspicuous consumerism?" Oh, puh-lease.

Rural Connectivity

Since I've been harping on the importance of this point most of the semester, I thought I'd take the time to point out an excellent blog post (from an online community [of sorts] that I had a hand in establishing), and that simultaneously shares my optimism and raises concerns that others have echoed:

Ericsson is partnering with The Earth Institute and with pan-African telecom MTN to bring mobile broadband connectivity to the Millennium Villages, beginning with the village of Mayange in Rwanda, with plans to extend to all seventy-nine Villages across 10 countries, reaching approximately 400,000 people.

According to the article, there will be a toll-free phone service for medical emergencies, connecting patients with on-duty personnel at the Village’s health centers, and mobile sets will also be used as a tool for training community health workers in collecting and sharing basic health information.

...

...if in five years Ericsson doesn’t come back around and give out new phones, and if no one continues to maintain the mobile broadband connectivity indefinitely for free, will that service still be there for you and your kids? If you came to rely on that service, would you suddenly be able to afford it yourself?

...

For people in the Millennium Villages, free may be the only price they can pay right now. But if Ericsson is really looking to get long-term bang for its philanthropic buck, it should also be looking to construct service models that do not just lay the groundwork for increased economic activity, but are models of economic scale in themselves.

Perhaps superfluous to note but -

• creating communities of practice,
• integrating new practices into communities, and
• creating online communities

are, in the end, all very similar enterprises.

Moving the Furniture Around

OK, I saved a different template. Only two reasons, really: (1) was getting bored with the color scheme that matches my personal blog, (2) wanted to see if the different color scheme makes the blog seem more inviting, less inviting, or just "different" to anyone, ala a house redecoration or furniture rearrangement. Kept the same general template, this one really just seems to be a different color scheme (I think). Anway, if you don't like it, feel free to put it back the way it was -- that would anyway suggest that it does seem less inviting, lol.

This may be interesting to some

So I am being sneaky while I wait for several things to print at work and thought I'd post some links, as I can't access my Delicious from here...

• Against academic blogs: Adam Kotsko criticizes the effectiveness of the practice
• Against against academic blogs: the flipside of the same issue, this time by Scott Eric Kauffman

Anyways, thought it might be an interesting read. Enjoy!

Social Media and Public Relations

This morning in my Principles of Public Relations class with Dr. Craig Carroll, I listened to the founder and CEO of KDPaine and Partners via Skype. She first presented a Powerpoint presentation that yielded several surprises. KDPaine and Partners is a public relations agency focusing on the measurement and reporting of public relations in target markets and, apparently, in social media.

Her presentation and lecture told how she and her agency leverage Podcasts, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Google, and blogs as channels both to distribute messages and to measure the effectiveness of messages. She also told how she uses Twitter more than email; she is the first CEO of a larger business I have heard to admit such.

This demonstrates the real-world emergence and importance of Social Media, and how it can certainly be leveraged for related fields of study. This also further supports my previous blog post below and the monetization of social media on the web (see this post). I might pursue an interview at a later time. Also, I was called out in class while blogging this and Twittering it (I blame my loud Macbook keys), so I hope this post is appreciated :)

MySpace jumps on board OpenSocial

What does this mean for Facebook? I believe Google is already very successful at gleaning major mindshare in the Social Networking sphere. Now that MySpace is on board, Facebook faces some major competition. But should Facebook view this as competition? Or as a good opportunity?

I believe Facebook should accept OpenSocial, too. Unfortunately, this would sacrifice security, control, and alienate the thousands of developers who have already contributed time and money to develop Facebook applications with FBML and FQL (see http://developer.facebook.com/).

I do think this will make the lives of developers easier. But ultimately, it must make the lives of users easier in order to become widely adopted. And it will. Users can centralize core profile and activity information in a single location, making it easy to change and distribute profile changes to numerous social networking branches.

Overall, I see OpenSocial (assuming adequate privacy protections are put in place) as a major step forward both for developers and users, and a move toward unified/persistent web identities.

Sources:
MacWorld
New York Times
ArsTechnica