Commentary – Page 3

Response: Is social media becoming a vast wasteland?

July 31, 2008 erichLeave a comment

Shel Israel penned a great article with an unfortunate quote from writer and blogger Ashok Banker about his retreat from social media,

There shouldn’t be writers and fans. We’re all writers on such platforms and should be all equal. The moment there are writers and ‘names,’ it’s a failure of the system. I’m sorry but after seeing the way most bloggers shamelessly abuse the medium to promote themselves and their work instead of genuinely writing something worthwhile, I realized that blogging and microblogging have also become tools to crass commercialism.

Blogging, like any other technology, is a just a tool. This one in particular has done wonders in lowering the barrier so that anyone with Internet access has a persistent soapbox. And yes, that anyone also includes crass commercialists.

I for one, hope Mr. Banker will continue to blog and engage through social media. He has already gone well beyond how most authors engage with their audience today, and it would be a shame to fall to a false defeat.

Visualize Your Network with Fidg’t

July 31, 2008 erichLeave a comment

: figd’t screenshot

There are more and more great tools getting developed for visualizing our social networks. One of the more beautiful ones I have come across is Fidg’t. While not quite a SN visualization tool, it does operate on data from SN’s.

Fidg’t is an interactive display that looks at your tags in Flickr and LastFM, and shows the relationships visually. There’s even a movie of the tool in action.

Available for Mac, PC, and Linux.

http://www.fidgt.com/visualize

Wrestling with FriendSpam?

July 31, 2008 erichLeave a comment

Please Facebook: give us filtering!

There has been a lot of talk lately about the increasing and sometimes overwhelming amount of data we are exposed to daily. [Google: information-overload]

What happens when it’s from your friends?

I have several hundred friends across the social networks I use, and even with the short updates SN’s usually enforce, these can add up. Combine that with updates internal to the SN (e.g. Bob just became friends with Sally), and I get enough information that if I were to process it all, it would really interfere with my day. However, my inability to process it all reduces and limits the value I receive from SN’s.

There are companies looking into this, including Socialmedian. If they figure it out before Facebook, Myspace, and friends do, expect Socialmedian to steal some serious thunder.

[2009 Email Photo: Will Lion; Friends photo Tavallai]

The Never Ending Quest for Data

July 24, 2008 erichLeave a comment

Luc Legay's Social Network — Radial Representation of a Social Network

Finding good data in this field is difficult, even most of the academic literature references relatively small networks of less than 100 or so individuals. I suggest that the academic research is just starting to take off now (although the field is very far from new), because of availability of large real world datasets available in the social networking sites.

Nathan Eagle (Reality Mining at MIT) was kind enough to share 330,000 hours of proximity and cell phone communications data he and the team collected from volunteers over the course of the project. To say I am quite excited about digging into it, would be an dramatic understatement.

For other large data sets, Duncan Watts is spending his sabbatical over at Yahoo!, and I can only hope there are other people looking really hard at the data available there, Facebook, Hi5, Google, and many more. Research into people’s behavior, especially in a commercial setting is not only a great thing for the unprecedented data, but at least equally as important, this also brings to front the ethical implications.

[Image: Luc Legay‘s Facebook network]