Serendipity35 - Social Web

Flipboard: Your Social Magazine?

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:05:00 -0400

Billed as "the world's first social magazine," Flipboard is a free app that allows you to flip through news, photos and updates your friends are sharing on Facebook and Twitter in a "magazine" layout.

I heard about it and watched the video (see below). I put the app on my iPad but I can't add Twitter and Facebook until I get an "invite" from the company. (I'm not a big fan of beta teasers that require invites.)

Is it something we need? Will you discover fresh content using it? Will it make some people more comfortable by using the familiar layout of print media to view social media?

You don't scroll through lists of posts and links and you wouldn't have to switch between Twitter and Facebook (and other sites eventually).

Can it become YOUR own personalized social magazine? The idea of a home page for your social graph that brings it together in a more enjoyable way than a list or RSS feeds has some appeal.

I'll let you know - when I get my invite...

Ning Mini for Educators

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 01:11:00 -0400

A lot of educators - myself included - were disappointed when Ning announced the end of free accounts that allowed you to create your own social network site. It was one of the easier ways to get your educational institution, group or class online in a social setting.

So, educators should be pleased to know about Ning Mini for Educators. Ning is teaming up with the education and technology company Pearson as an exclusive Ning Sponsor Partner. Pearson will make Ning Mini free for eligible North American K-12 and Higher-Ed Ning Networks.

You can add up to 150 members, and enhance your classroom with blogs, forums and photos. Many Ning networks are for educators connecting with other educators. They can facilitate learning in a classroom, but also best practices, educator-to-educator collaboration, or even parental support.

Participating Ning Networks are invited to apply for sponsorship. Participating Ning Networks will include “Brought to you by Pearson” on the top navigation bar of the Ning Network and a Pearson member profile to allow verification of private Ning Networks.

To sign Up for a Pearson sponsored Ning Mini, you'll need to answer some basic questions:

What is the name of the educational focus or institution associated with this Ning Network?
What is your main role in the education community or institution noted earlier?
Where in North America is this community or institution located?
Which of the following most accurately describes the main role of most members in your Ning Network?
Which of the following most accurately describes the main student group that is the focus of your Ning Network?
What is the primary goal(s) of your network?

I don't know how deep the Pearson connection will go, but, as a business, they will certainly hope to see users connect into their eBooks and online resources.

http://about.ning.com/announcement/plans.php

Owning Your Social Graph

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 00:45:00 -0400

Even if you use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or MySpace, you might not be aware that you have a “social graph."

It's a term that seems to have come out of Facebook itself as a way to map their social network. Your social graph would be a global map of everyone you're connected to in social networks and how they are related.

If you're active in social media, you know that graph will be... well, a complicated mess.

Some businesses and networks are relying on your ignorance or naivete so that they can mine your personal data and use it for marketing purposes.

Facebook gets a lot of criticism for doing this, but that's because they are big and they are using the data and making money. Twitter doesn't seem to have figured out how to use it to make money yet, but they (or whoever buys them) eventually will figure it out.

You might be unconscious that you are even giving data. It's not just the photo, email or link you share. It's also every time you click that "like" button.

And I am not even getting into “social leverage”, your “online presence”, or gauging “social engagement.”

On readwriteweb.com they discuss how having different logins for different social networks is a problem for tracking this graph. But are you noticing how sites are "asking permission" to connect to other networks? "Can we look at your Gmail contacts and find your friends for you?" Sure. Click, and they have your contacts. Let's hope they're not storing that login info and all your friends information too, because they didn't give permission.

Google is trying to make email the center
of your social graph. Facebook wants all thing to emanate from their site.

Privacy - which everyone seems to say is gone, so get over it - is still an issue. Who owns your information? Do we need a Social Bill Of Rights?

Then there's your name space. Another new term. I define it as the center of your social graph. (Though one of my students maintains that her graph has at least three centers - professional, personal and academic.) A Wikipedia search only turns up the computer namespace as an abstract container providing context for items (ex: variables, interfaces, classes, etc.) it holds.

While we are looking at definitions, in mathematics, a graph is an abstraction for modeling relationships between things. So, using it for a network with nodes and edges is a good way to visualize a social network.

Do a Google vanity search on your name. What comes out on the top of the search? Is that your name space? On Google, my top result is a site I control. On Bing, it's my Slideshare presentations - but my Facebook page is number 3 and Twitter is number 4. On Yahoo, Twitter is on top and a site that I don't even use is #2. (Yahoo, what is wrong with your algorithms?) Is that what I want at the top of my name space or at the center of my graph? Not really. Changing the search to my more formal first name, Kenneth, changes the results (favorably). Maybe I need to use that to control my name space...

Now Everyone Can Use Wave. We Just Have To Figure What To Do With It.

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 25 May 2010 09:50:00 -0400

Last week, Google made their Wave product available to everyone as part of Google Labs. Before this, you had needed an invite to use Wave.

I started previewing Wave along with a few others back in November 2009 and I was thoroughly unimpressed. Like many people who tried Wave, I really didn't even a clear sense of what Wave was designed to do. I'm not sure Google knew either - or, at least, they were unable to communicate it to the masses.

I checked out the first user guide to Google Wave, written by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash.They start by saying that "Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that's notoriously difficult to understand.

I'll be honest and admit I gave up on it. It is a solution to a problem I don't have. People who have given it good reviews find it a great place for teams working together on projects that involve lots of discussion. Sounds like it would be great for teaching online, right?

I wasn't the only one who gave up. Google even did a video that suggests we give it another shot.

Apparently, Wave is faster, more stable, somewhat easier to use and now has email notifications of changes, more permission management options and an extensions gallery.

Google posted some examples of Wave users. On the business side, you have co-workers writing software code (Lyn and Line) and coordinating ad campaigns (Clear Channel Radio) and an international As One project (Deloitte).

In education, they point to students and professors using waves to collaborate on Latin poetry translations, write academic research papers and build new functionality with Wave's APIs.

Just to keep all of us in higher education honest, there is also a teacher having her 5th-graders do their class research in Wave.

To try Wave, go to wave.google.com and sign in. Google Apps administrators (businesses, schools, organizations) can enable Google Wave for their users.

Twitter and the Library of Congress

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Sat, 08 May 2010 22:26:00 -0400

Even the Library of Congress has to worry about privacy. A few weeks ago, they decided to archive all of Twitter, but now they are "clarifying" their plans to archive all the public tweets posted since Twitter went live in March 2006.

According to the LoC blog, if tweets are deleted, they won't be archived, and they plan to embargo messages for six months before making them available. The Twitter database will only be made available to “qualified researchers.” (no definition on what qualified means yet)

Save Your Ning

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 05 May 2010 06:13:00 -0400

Ning Planning to Remain Free for Teachers - "Ning, a company that allows users to build their own social networks, says it has signed a letter of intent with a major educational publisher to keep its service free for educators, several weeks after causing an outcry among nonprofit groups by announcing that it would end its popular free service. Ning did not give any more information about the deal, which it disclosed as it outlined its plans to begin charging subscription fees to all of its users..." more at http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com

If you have one of the free Ning networks set up and you don't want to upgrade it to a premium site, you might want to look at SaveMyNing. It is a service, self-described as:

"Save My Ning is an archive service that will allow you to backup your existing Ning Network on our webservers for free. We will host ads on the sites in order to cover the cost much like your Ning Network had ads. However, you will not be able to post to your archive, only read it."

SaveMyNing.com

Alternatives To Ning

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:34:00 -0400

From the ePirateblog at Seton Hall University, comes a post by Mary Zedeck about social network alternatives that are similar to the no-longer-free Ning platform.

Six possible alternatives:
Grou.ps
Grouply
Spruz
CubeTree
Jabbster
ShoutEm

Any comments on these alternatives from users?

Social Media Privacy Is Your Responsibility

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:58:00 -0400

Facebook made the mainstream nightly news again the past week because of some new features and applications which, once again, take away a bit more of your already small privacy online.

Facebook recently held their F8 Developer Conference and if they are not already the social center of the web, they certainly want to be. Their new Open Graph API is part of that. It gives the ability to integrate websites and web apps within your existing social network. http://mashable.com/2010/04/21/open-graph-privacy/ Some big partners (Yelp, Pandora, Microsoft) are already on board.

User privacy continues to be an issue with Facebook whenever they launch something new. It's not unique. Google recently got a lot of flak when they launched Buzz and it grabbed all your contacts from Gmail and added them to Buzz. The privacy backlash often comes fro m the dame issue: companies grabbing or extending the information you have already given them and using it in a new way without asking.

The classic faux pas is to add a feature and have the default setting be that it's "on" or "public" when the logical choice for most users would be to have it set to "private" or "off" until you decided about it. It's like when a company gets you to put in your email and then checks the "send me a newsletter" box for you. It's how when you run a Java update it automatically selects "add the Yahoo toolbar" rather than asking you to select yes or no yourself.

In fall 2007, Facebook tried an advertising experiment that led to a class-action lawsuit. When they made big changes with your privacy settings last December there was a lot of immediate criticism online.

People started posting - on blogs and in Facebook itself - about the recent privacy settings changes. Founder Mark Zuckerberg’s “public is the new social norm” didn't go over well as an explanation.

How many Facebook users even know that there is a Facebook Security information page?

What is bothering people this time? Previously, apps that accessed your Facebook data (all those games, for example) could only store that data for 24 hours, but now the data storage restriction is gone. Some people say that it's not a big deal that they can store (not necessarily use) it without restrictions. (Apparently, many developers were already getting around the 24 hours limit anyway.)

User can not only log in or sign up for a service, but can see how many of their friends have signed up. The "Likes" feature is now universal, and those activity feeds that appear on websites will be customized for you (your view will be different than mine). So, my content is potentially viewable to more people than before.

How much privacy am I giving up when I click “Like” on a link from a friend and it shows up on a view that my "friends" see? What about if I "like" an article that's quite political in nature - does that change you concern about it going public?

Remember that with these new applications from outside the main Facebook platform, "public" means beyond Facebook and out into the "Facebook ecosystem.”

Pandora, the Internet radio service, lets you separate or opt out of linking their Pandora music selections to their Facebook account. Hopefully, others will also work that way, but inevitably a good number will not. Why? Because it works to their business advantage to get big numbers of us sharing our content. You should assume that if it's public, it's available to everyone in your "social graph."

The privacy is of more concern if you're a parent of kids or a teacher trying to protect young students - or protect their social graph from their students. Another rarely mentioned Facebook site is their Safety Center.

Like so many things, being informed is the key to using social media wisely. The site has Safety for Parents, Safety for Educators, Safety for Teens and Safety for Law Enforcers.

No one will be (or should be) as concerned about your privacy as you.

Tweets Preserved in the Library of Congress - Really?

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 12:00:00 -0400

The Library of Congress is our oldest U.S. federal cultural institution and the largest library in the world. Their mission is research and it receives copies of every book, pamphlet, map, print, and piece of music registered in the United States.

And now, the Library of Congress wants to preserve the public tweets from Twitter. Since Twitter began, billions of tweets have been created - 55 million tweets a day and rising.

Yes, some are about significant global events around the world - the Iranian elections, earthquakes and other disasters come to mind. But there's also "A TiVo in my living room just made its little signature TiVo noise." and "Wow - Detroit airport is pretty snazzy!" and "I wonder if there is a professor of art history in all the land willing to say video games should not be considered art." - all of which popped up while I was writing this post. And those are from three intelligent and well known Twitter users.

So, Twitter has donated access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress (please don't tell me that's a big charitable tax deduction for them) for preservation and research.

By the way, only after a six-month delay can the Tweets be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation. There's still time to delete that embarrassing tweet.

How Critical Is A Social Media Curriculum?

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 21:00:00 -0400

I recently read a post titled Why Social Media Curriculum is Critical in Schools. I read it because I actually do wonder about whether social media is worth including in the curriculum. Whether it is "critical" is something I question. This comes from someone who will be teaching a graduate course this year on social media. But, that course will examine the use of social media in the larger/business. Using it in the classroom is very different.

That article is concerned with K-12 classroom which have their own issues with using technology and especially with social tools. Many schools have policies restricting not only access to sites online, but also teacher/student interaction. The majority of schools try to prevent access to the sites students use to communicate socially, thereby banning the use of these sites to communicate in an educational setting.

One unfortunate result mentioned in the article is that "most schools have banned students from accessing authentic communication hardware or software, positioning school as a place where socialization is kept to a minimum, learning is teacher directed, and conversations are teacher, rather than student, driven and/or maintained."

There already is a social media "curriculum." But, it's outside schools and it is being "taught" without the involvement of teachers

Is there really a "don't ask, don't tell" policy in schools when it comes to social media? That policy extends into higher education where many educators also look the other way when it comes to their students communicating, collaborating, and connecting online.

Back to the starting question: Do we need a social media curriculum? Looking through the comments on that post, you can see both answers on both sides:

Would things be the same if we replace the words "social media" with "after school activities"? Would the concern be the same if we replaced "Twitter" with "skateboard park" or "Facebook" with "shopping mall"? Why is is that educators are thinking that just because this is where the kids are spending time, that suddenly we have to be there as well?

I will stand firm in my belief that unless there is A CLEAR EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVE teachers should not "friend" their students on MySpace, Facebook or Twitter and even then it should be with special account reserved for that purpose.

Thank you for the article. I shared it with my staff, but had to use email since Facebook is, of course, blocked at school. I've come to believe the mantra for schools is, "We block any site that might be of any interest or use to anyone at any time."

Social skills can be effectively developed by a face to face classroom conversation, involvement in community events, athletics teams, arts, musical ensembles, and many co-curricular activities. These skills are transferable. Lets educate for enduring knowledge and skills; knowledge and skills that are not limited by present or emerging technologies.

Well said - integrating social media will really do wonders in engaging the students. Another great point - it's not about the tools, it's about the process. Whatever the actual tool may be, the point of the curriculum should be to show students how to use new collaboration technologies in the future and manage themselves online.

Designing for Social Media Readings

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:03:00 -0400

My little social experiment in asking the world to suggest textbooks for the online graduate course I am teaching this summer is over. I had set up a disposable web page that ran for 90 days and, because all "Disposable Web Pages" are time sensitive, it disappeared yesterday.

Of course, I have archived the contributions that people made to the book list.

The projected audience for the course (which is part of the MS in Professional and Technical Communication at NJIT) are grad students majoring in PTC (designers, technical writers etc.) and those in management, communications, media, IT and design. The course will look at how organizations can use social media as communication tools for marketing, education & training and community building.

Making the "textbook" selection process itself a social media project seemed appropriate. There are not really many choices from the traditional textbook publishers in this area. Books and readings in social media are changing so fast that you can take several different approaches to it.

Since I am planning to have students each select a book that applies more to their own interest in social media, I wanted a good number of titles.

There were 16 revisions (3 by me) with 20 books suggested

Here is what the list looked like the night before it disappeared:

Book Suggestions for DESIGNING FOR SOCIAL MEDIA

If you'd like to suggest a book - click the edit link, and enter the password social. Please identify your book suggestions by TITLE, AUTHOR and include a brief blurb about the book's focus if possible. If there's a link to more about that book, that would be great! [11 of the 19 had links - I added links to the others]
Thanks for your suggestions!

What Would Google Do? - Jeff Jarvis
Power Friending - Amber MacArthur
Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices - Christopher Locke
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations - Clay Shirky
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies - Charlene Li
Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations - Amy Shuen
Designing for the Social Web - Joshua Porter
The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future - S. Craig Watkins
Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone - patterns, principles, and best practices for starting a social website - More of a design focus than a book on what sites are buzzing right now (so it might be relevant longer).
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler - Benkler is a law professor at Yale University AND he has also made the entire book available for free download at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/index.php?title=Download_PDFs_of_the_book
Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. - Mitch Joel - a business focus on using Net marketing, esp. free tools and services
Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee ~ Web 2.0 for the enterprise
Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation - Tim Brown

The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business (From Publishers Weekly) Hunt, cofounder of community-marketing consulting firm Citizen Agency, presents the hows and whys of accruing "whuffie," her word for social capital in the Web 2.0 landscape. Introducing a wide range of post-blogosphere social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr, Hunt clues in marketers to the possibilities with online success stories, influential voices and winning strategies. Detailed, practical profiles of networks and related tools make this a valuable, illuminating title for anyone looking to the ever-expanding realm of online social life for business success.
The Cluetrain Manifesto - though ten years old, the authors' 95 theses about the networked marketplace probably make more sense today. Observations about business in America and how the Internet will continue to change it.

Visual Thinking by Rudolf Arnheim - more for art students perhaps - all thinking (not just thinking related to art) is basically perceptual in nature, and that the ancient dichotomy between seeing and thinking, between perceiving and reasoning, is false and misleading.
Building Social Web Applications: Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site - by Gavin Bell
The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success - Safko
Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins. This book puts web 2.0 technologies and trends into a much larger historical context of participatory culture.
YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green

Here's another list of related books that I found on a post at http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/162242

Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li's Groundswell
Ken Auletta's Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
Shel Israel's Twitterville
Chris Brogan and Julian Smith's Trust Agents
The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging

David Meerman Scott's New Rules of Marketing & PR
Paul Gillin's The New Influencers
Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge's Putting the Public Back in Public Relations
David Kirkpatrick The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that's Connecting the World (Jan 2010)
Tim O'Reilly and Sara Milstein's The Twitter Book
Bob Garfield's Chaos Scenario
David Meerman Scott" World Wide Rave

Adam Penenberg's Viral Loop

Designing Social Media Reading List

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:34:00 -0500

One of my projects for thus spring is creating a new course for summer session. It is an online graduate course for the Professional and Technical Communication program at NJIT called "Designing Social Media."

Picking a "textbook" and readings in social media is tough because it is changing so fast that it will be very challenging to stay current. I'm not planning on one textbook, but rather I plan on having each student select a book that seems relevant to their interest in social media. The target audience includes grad students majoring in PTC, management,communications, media, IT and design. The course will look at how organizations can use social media as communication tools for marketing, education & training and community building.

I decided to go social - as in crowdsourcing - for ideas about books to use in the course.

I asked last April for readers to contribute to a presentation that I was prepping for a conference and I created a collaborative web page at disposablewebpage.com which was set to expire (dispose of itself) after a pre-set amount of time. You can read that earlier post and see that it was fairly successful. There were 19 revisions made to the page - which is not overwhelming, but they were good responses and there was no vandalism or spamming.

I set up another "disposable webpage" on the topic "Designing Social Media Readings" and invited readers back in the end of December to participate by contributing titles of books on social media that they think would be appropriate readings for the course.

So far, there are 18 books that have been suggested by 11 people other than me. Some has given short blurbs and provided links to book information (such as on amazon.com). One title is available free online.

The list will dispose of itself on March 22. Of course, I will copy the content before that (Reminder to Ken) to use in the course, and I will post the results here on the blog.

There's still time for you to participate. All you have to do is go to the page at http://disposablewebpage.com/turn?page=9U5ryyRd4r and click the EDIT tab at the top. The Editor Key (password) is social

Please identify yourself, even if it's a pseudonym. Add your suggested book title & author to the list. If you have a few extra moments, please add a line or two about the focus of the book.

There is additional information about the course being posted to my NJIT site.
The clock is ticking and my disposable page is time sensitive and will self-destruct on .

Short Attention Span URLs

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:33:00 -0500

A post on the NYT's Bits technology blog titled "‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web" caught my attention because of the serendipity reference and because it referenced several URL-shortening services that I was researching online.

Bit.ly, the URL-shortening service, has people clicking millions of their links in social networks like Twitter and Facebook and e-mail. Last week, bit.ly processed 599,100,000 clicks, its highest number since starting in July 2008.

Many URLs now have multiple doppelgängers because of this aggregation of “controlled serendipity” with others and they with us. Are we really all human aggregators now?

URL shorteners like bit.ly ow.ly tinyurl.com are getting a lot of traffic. (By the way, I am not a big fan of the .ly domains which is the Internet country code for Libya.) One reason for the popularity of these services is Twitter with its 140 character limit. Many site and blog URLs can easily eat up most or all of the 140 character limit if you want to add a link. The shorteners can knock it down to about 12 characters by providing a redirect.

One problem is that if one of these services goes away, it will leave behind all the redirects that have been created - which would be millions of links for any of the popular services.

People can also use these shortened links to disguise the destination of a link. If you wanted to find out about consumer services from the Better Business Bureau, I could send you to http://bit.ly/2V4GXo or to http://bit.ly/2V4GXo. They look pretty much the same and neither gives you a clue as to where you are headed. One of them does go to the BBB, the other goes to a store link.

Will Buzz Gain Social Buzz?

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:17:00 -0500

Today, I opened up my Gmail and was asked if I wanted to connect to Buzz.

Google is really making a push for the social web audience that has so far eluded them. As I wrote recently, they haven't brought to market a successful social web product - at least in the U.S. (Their Orkut hit in Brazil and India.)

Wave hasn't crested yet. Maybe it never will build into a big wave. Most people I talk to in and out of education can't see what it's supposed to do.

Now, Buzz has arrived unbidden and slipped into your Gmail world (and that's a big world and well populated). When I activated it, it grabbed all my Gmail contacts (and some of my non-Gmail users).

Buzz is obviously an attempt to get some of the ever-growing Facebook user base. It has some social-media tools similar to those found on Facebook like photo and video sharing and status updates. I clicked some buttons and it started sharing things I have on blogs, Flickr and other social sites. Actually, I think my "friends" online will soon be sick of seeing the duplication of my online activities in every network they visit.

People had predicted a year ago that Google would buy Twitter as its social stream, but it didn't. For Buzz to work, it will need to connect with existing social networks. It connects right now to Google properties, Twitter and a few others. Actually, it can pull your Twitter posts, but it can't push your Buzz posts to Twitter. Ironically, it probably needs to connect to Facebook to compete with Facebook. If you were Facebook, would you allow that to happen?

Right now, Facebook has 400 million users and is is the world’s largest social network. Twitter, with all the attention it has had the past year, has only about 18 million users.

If Google was able to get all its Gmail users to start using Buzz, it would have more than 36 million (2009 stat). That would make it twice as big as Twitter but still far behind Facebook.

Google Buzz Explained

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:00:00 -0500

Google Buzz explained by Google.

Blogging Is For Adults

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:16:00 -0500

I got a nice email from Slideshare this week saying that one of my presentations - "Using Student Blogs As Reflective Practice" was "being tweeted [on Twitter] more than any other document on SlideShare right now. So we've put it on the homepage of SlideShare.net (in the "Hot on Twitter" section)."

Pretty cool. But then today, I was reading a new report from the Pew Internet Project on "Social Media and Young Adults" that says that particular group of online users are no longer interested in consuming "long-form" content like blogs. (I know some educators would have trouble accepting blog posts as long-form content, but read on...)

Communication among teens tends to involve brief bursts of information - status updates and text messages. 14% of online teens (ages 12-17) now say they blog and that's down from 28% of teen internet users in 2006. There has even been a drop in just commenting on blogs within social networking websites - 52% of teen social network users report commenting on friends’ blogs, down from the 76% who did so in 2006.

By comparison, the prevalence of blogging within the overall adult internet population has remained steady in recent years. Pew Internet surveys since 2005 have consistently found that roughly one in ten online adults maintain a personal online journal or blog.

73% of wired teens now use social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, a big jump from the 55% who did so back in 2006. (Only 40% of those 30 and older do the same.)

What killed blogging? Facebook. Updates take seconds to read, and seconds to write. Blog posts take time. I probably average about an hour per post and that doesn't include the research that some posts require. Teens don't have any interest in spending that kind of time.

I notice that many of my short posts here get more hits than the longer and "more thoughtful" ones. It's not that no one is willing to read. My weekend posts on the blog Weekends in Paradelle have found an audience in the past six months and they tend to be longer and more thoughtful, and I suspect the readers are not teens.

It's not hard to conjecture that teens are overloaded with information online. If I check in only once a day to my Facebook account, I'll probably find about 500 unread updates in my "News Feed." Too many "friends"; too much updating. Who has time to read a blog post, let alone write one?

Perhaps, blog posting will become an activity for the classroom like the five-paragraph essay, and for professionals and adults.

Social Strategy

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:10:00 -0500

More and more companies are creating a social media strategy. Although the jury is still out on whether Twitter, as one example, will be profitable itself, it's even less clear whether or not the use of social media like Twitter will make other companies more profitable.

It is clear that Facebook earned about $300 million in 2008, more in 2009 and probably even more this year. That has the attention of other companies.

Now, it looks like Google is getting more serious about social networking and has created a Social Web team. It's not that Google hasn't had any social web presence before. Back in 2006, I wrote a few times about Orkut, its social network. (Still big in Brazil, but still a dud elsewhere.) They also have their OpenSocial and Friend Connect projects, but Facebook totally beats those too. Google likes to buy companies and they tried (unsuccessfully) to acquire Yelp which is a business reviews site that has large and active community.

I suppose that if the business world is embracing social media strategies, it will onnly be a decade or so before schools do the same thing. Educators, you still have time to learn and be the early adopters in your school.

Getting Social With Learning Content

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 22:09:56 -0500

I was reading another one of the many posts predicting what "The Year Ahead in IT" will be. This one was written by Lev S. Gonick on InsideHigherEd.com

His list, in brief, looks like this:

- Public Cloud Services Go Private
- The President’s Climate Commitment Meets the Campus Data Center
- Big Science meets Next Generation Cyber Infrastructure
- Time to Declare the PC Dead and Embrace the Mobile Platform
- The E-Book Reader Grows up and Goes to Campus
- Social Networking Finds its Niche at College
- Course Management Platform Alternatives Make Major Inroads
- Serious Gaming Gets Serious
- Mobile Security Hits the College Campus
- Open Content meets the Open University and the Vision of the Metaversity

A closer look at #6, "Social Networking Finds its Niche at College," reveals that what Gonick means is that the "next killer app for social networking in support of the traditional curriculum on campus will be student tagged, rated, reused, and remixed learning content." That's very different from saying that teachers will be using Twitter and Facebook in their courses.

If students are truly spending more time on social networks, than they do watching traditional television, talking on the phone, in the campus library or all their classes combined, then we do need to adopt some things from that world.

I don't think that building connections from your online campus to feed into popular social networking platforms is the answer. At PCCC, we have been using LibGuides for the past two years with great success. Users can share their LibGuides on delicious, Facebook, Digg, etc. and add a Facebook widget, but I don't know that any of our students use it. I installed it, tested it out and haven't used it since.

Some of this may be the "creepy treehouse" effect of treading carefully when mixing academics and popular social tools. For every features list that tells you that you can "meet your students where they are," there will be some some students saying Stay Out.

In the search for the Social Media Holy Grail, Gonick feels that the social network effect is strongest with video content that is already in and around the learning environment. There are plenty of players in that area: some have business models (publishers, campus media consortia, platform players), some are our students and faculty innovators repurposing and reusing video content for learning.

Social Media 2009

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 01:04:40 -0500

Social media in 2009 - in a cartoon parade from Signal To Noise...

GIF versions and lots more social media cartoons at Rob Cottingham's site.

Suggest Readings On Designing For Social Media

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 14:06:00 -0500

I asked last April for readers to contribute to a presentation that I was prepping for a conference and I created a web page at disposablewebpage.com which was set to expire (dispose of itself) after a pre-set amount of time. Basically, I crowdsourced some of my research.

You can read that earlier post and see that it was fairly successful. There were 19 revisions made to the page which is not overwhelming but they were good responses and there was no vandalism or spamming.

One of my projects for spring 2010 is creating a new course for summer session. It is an online graduate course for the Professional and Technical Communication program at NJIT called "Designing for Social Media."

The target audience includes grad students majoring in PTC, management, communications, media, IT and design. The course will look at how organizations can use social media as communication tools for marketing, education & training and community building.

Picking a "textbook" and readings in social media is tough because it is changing so fast that it will be very challenging to stay current. I'm not planning on one textbook, but rather I plan on having each student select a book that seems relevant to their interest in social media.

Once again, I am going to try some crowdsourcing...

I have set up another "disposable webpage" on the topic "Designing For Social Media Readings." I am inviting you to participate by contributing books on social media that you think would be appropriate readings for the course.

All you have to do is go to the page at http://disposablewebpage.com/turn?page=9U5ryyRd4r and click the EDIT tab at the top. The Editor Key (password) is social

Please identify yourself, even if it's a pseudonym. Add your suggested book title & author to the list. If you have a few extra moments, please add a line or two about the focus of the book.

Your contributions are much appreciated. (If the whole web page experience is too much to deal with, leave the book/author as a comment here.)

NOTE that my disposable page is time sensitive and will only exist until and then it will - poof - disappear.