Pilgrim Notes

Reflections along the way.

Category: Social Computing (page 2 of 3)

AARP Rocks the House

November 27, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Move over Bill Graham, looks like latest greatest concert promoter could be the AARP! Apparantly the teen set are not the biggest market of music consumers. Instead, the RIAA suggests that the 45 and older group in the biggest, most reliable music consumer sgement. According to the NYT, “Last year fans 45 and older accounted for 25.5 percent of sales, while older teenagers (a group more prone to music piracy) represented less than 12 percent.”

Watching the growing graying trend in music appreciation, AARP promoted a Tony Bennet tour and may begin a whole series of promotions and other iniatives to target this group for potential AARP members.

This may have some interesting implications for other developments online including the future of online social networks. I still expect a hybrid to develop of online/offline networking groups that relate to the older groups. We’ll see.

What do your E-mail Sign-offs say?

November 27, 2006 / / 0 Comments

NYT runs an interesting article today about the challenge of Netiquette in regards to e-mail sign-offs. It may be a bigger deal than you think:

What’s in an e-mail sign-off? A lot, apparently. Those final few words above your name are where relationships and hierarchies are established, and where what is written in the body of the message can be clarified or undermined.

Without the typical non-verbal contextualizers like tone of voice and facial/body gestures, e-mails for us to look for other signs that help contextualize and interpret the message.

“So many people are not clear communicators,” said Judith Kallos, creator of NetManners.com, a site dedicated to online etiquette, and author of “Because Netiquette Matters.” To be clear about what an e-mail message is trying to say, and about what is implied as well as what is stated, “the reader is left looking at everything from the greeting to the closing for clues,” she said.

Makes me think of I.A. Richards ideas on word meaning and word placement. According to NYT, ending an e-mail with “Best” is a clear indicator your cooling down the relationship (bordering on brush off) while “Warmest regards” is a positive move toward relationship.

Maybe we could simply stick with the cold and hot words:

Icely yours,
Frozen,
Windy but hopeful for sun,

vs.

Blazing,
Volcanicly yours,
Hunk a hunk a hunk o burning love,

I guess I better go take a look at the way I am signing off on my emails.

Your smoldering inferno,

Doug

American Popular Culture

November 16, 2006 / / 0 Comments

While trying to find out some words related to treasure chest, I stumbled across an old Catholic comic book series and eventually ended up at the Authentic American History Center. This site provides a fascinating collection of American pop culture artifacts that reach all the way back to the revolution.

There are pamphlets, comics, images and audio files from the Revolutionary War, Civil War, early 1900s, WWI, WWII, and each decade up to the present. The topic range from religion to politics to other elements that captured the national  consciousness.

Way cool! Plus the Catholic comic book Treasure Chest was pretty interesting as well.

Is the term Social Networking accurate?

November 15, 2006 / / 2 Comments

Phil Balderson recently suggested that social networking may not be the best term for the various functions that connect media, people, or ideas in different ways. When I asked what term might replace it, Phil suggested the idea of “meshing.” Playing off the idea of “mashups,” Phil suggests three reasons for meshing:

1. Individuals without prior relationships can mesh.

2. Society is meshing with technology (via Web 2.0).

3. Something new emerges as technologies, people, and sites mesh together.

I am my own social network

November 14, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Skimming through the backlog of emails and feeds, I discovered this earth-shattering news: my brain is a social network: no wonder I hear voices all day long. Roland Piquepaille ran a piece about this last month on ZDNet. Looks pretty interesting. Our brains seem to have something like gates that can open and close, allowing information to pass through or not. For a range of articles along these lines, see this issue of Science and be sure to check out all the PDFs at the bottom of the article.

Reviewing Flixster

November 11, 2006 / / 3 Comments

Every week I sign up for a new social networking site just to explore their features and see what’s out there. With so many socialnet sites, I lose track of what I’ve joined, and I usually never do much with many of them. I signed up with Flixster on Wednesday and wasn’t sure if I’d use it much or not. Flixster may turn out to be a useful site. It is definitely like Netflix’s Friends feature combined with MySpace. The nice thing is that users can simply rate movies; they don’t have to sign up for a rental plan. This makes it easy to build a larger friends database and connect with a variety of people who like movies. And for someone like me who prefers to hear movie recommendations from other people, I find this very appealing.

If Netflix was smart, they’d follow Flixster lead and offer an expanded version of the Friends feature with no requirement to join. Of course, once people enter into a network and come to visit their movie page, it would be easier to encourage them to sign up for a plan, download a film or buy a film.

Integrity and Integration

November 10, 2006 / / 2 Comments

For multiple world, our modern/postmodern world has forced many of us to split our lives and now even our identities into multiple slots such as work and home, public and private, inner and outer. Now many thinkers even suggest there is no real person behind the roles we play. I don’t have time to respond to that here, but I disagree.

The nature of personhood is more complex and interconnected than modernism may have realized and the Church Fathers offered a far more nuanced view of the person than the modern idea of the individual. This tendency to create separate identities between home, office, house of faith, hobbies, friends, and the multivarious online social computing personas is dis-integrating. It does tend to make us think there is really no me to me: just another face, another mask. This potentially could lead to many negative and even dangerous manifestations.

Since I believe the person is real, I believe that integration of these various worlds and identities are important. Thus my values at home are the same at work are the same among my friends are the same in the online world. I try to be the same person everywhere (inner and outer).

Thus this blog does not section off technology away from faith away from art or other interests, and that’s why I put the Pope Benedict XVI quote earlier. It captures some of the essence I think the word

Now enough from me. I’ll have to spend more time on this on my Floydville blog sometime. If anyone disagrees, feel free to let me know. 🙂

Disruption and Opportunity – The World of Web 2.0

November 10, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Reporting on the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Michael Calore suggests that “the theme of the summit is ‘disruption and opportunity,’ and it could be argued that it’s also the mantra of the entire Web 2.0 movement.”

Totally. Breaking down the walls between the giants and the dwarfs, the air of Web 2.0 seems intoxicating. With open source, startups, the culture of generosity, the innovation explosion, Web 2.0 is about expanding horizons and connecting people on more and more levels in multiple venues. This seems to be springtime of possibility. Will it last? Doubtfully but for now, the surge of creative juices and dripping like a giant coconut rolling around on the beaches virtual beaches bordering the ocean of Eureka.

Some of the cool developments Calore mentions include a music mentoring site called In the Chair, 3B (that allows you to put websites and photos into a personalized 3D space), Turn (a target advertising portal that uses data analysis to create perfect matches – sounds like the business version of EHarmony), and more. All of the developments continue to focus on the growing importance of a social computing model.

Of course, the Web 2.0 Summit wasn’t all about geeking out. Lou Reed showed up to brighten everyone’s day.

Flixster – Movie matchups

November 8, 2006 / / 1 Comment

I am testing out Flixster, a socnet site for sharing movie recommendations with friends. It has some interesting integration potential with MySpace and your address book, but I am not sure if it has any advantages over Netflix yet. We’ll see.

Excellent Social Network Resources

November 7, 2006 / / 0 Comments

I discovered a wonderful source of information on social networking this evening at The Belonging Initiative. They’re committed to fostering belonging and ending isolation among people with disabilities. The vision is wonderful but their comments extend beyond the vision to each of us. With the growing sense of isolation in this nation, and the explosion of social nets online, these social networking analysis resources may be a great help for those interested in exploring social networking.

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