Category Archives: Social Networks

Exploring the political blogosphere: a tool for memeorandum

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill
memeorandum

memeorandum with color annotation

One of my favorite sites for seeing what’s hot in the political blogosphere is memeorandum. Fortunately, it’s a favorite haunt of Andy Baio, too. Baio is a writer and tech entrepreneur in Portland, OR. He’s fashioned a cool toolthat illustrates the political leanings of the blogs featured in discussion on memeorandum.

Research (Glance and Adamic) in the early days of blogging suggested very little cross-linking. In other words, liberal blogs rarely linked to conservative ones (and vice versa). This current visualization reflects linking behavior in the context of featured stories on memeorandum. In other words, what stories are the bloggers talking about?
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On Trust and Privacy: Why I No Longer Trust Google

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

Trust.

It’s a key factor in any successful relationship, whether that relationship is between two people or a person and an organization.

Privacy concerns are ongoing and have been around on the web for a long time. Kee Hinckley wrote about them in 1999. Among privacy advocates, discussions about “do not track” go back at least four years; then in 2010, the FTC endorsed the idea. (As did Mozilla in 2011.) There’s the W3C Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), now suspended, and a new W3C tracking protection group.

Although it hasn’t been battered with privacy-related consumer trust headlines as frequently as Facebook (Beacon, 2007, 2007, 2009; privacy settings, 2009, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2011, 2012; tracking, 2011, 2012; FTC settlement, 2011), Google has flirted with trust issues since at least 2004. That’s when Dave Winer warned:

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Fighting Fire With Fire: Dad Shoots Laptop, Posts Video

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

A North Carolina dad, Tommy Jordan, reached his wits end on Wednesday after his 15-year daughter posted a rant on her Facebook page, a video “disrespectful” to her parents. He pulled out a pistol and shot her laptop dead. And he videoed it, then shared that video with the world.

That is your laptop. This is my .45.

His monologue — where he reads what he says his daughter wrote on her Facebook page — includes some profanity and what I think of as a litany of teen-age whininess (based on my listening to adult friends and relatives as well as nieces). Titled Facebook Parenting: For the Troubled Teen, the video  has 3.7 million views as of this writing (125,486 likes, 9,392 dislikes):

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Listen Up! Two-Way Communication Key Lesson In Crowdsourcing Research Paper

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

How can businesses tap into the collective wisdom of the crowd? Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams explored mass collaboration in Wikinomics as well as Macrowikinomics. Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li focused on how digital social technologies facilitate consumer-corporate collaboration in their book, Groundswell: Winning in World Transformed by Social Technologies.

A undated research paper (2011?) from Carnegie Mellon [1] analyzes participation at IdeaStorm.com (@IdeaStorm), launched by Dell in 2007 as a way to tap suggestions (“idea generation”) from its customers.

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