Posts tagged as:

socialnetworks

my social network pause button

August 28, 2008 · 3 comments

in general

Merlin Mann wrote a great post called “Social Networks: The Case for a Social Network Pause Button“, where he suggests we need a few more states of engagement with social network applications as a way to manage the deluge of data.
I’ve got a better solution. Walk away. Do something else. Here’s my social network pause [...]

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on the danger of twitter

July 21, 2008 · 17 comments

in general

Twitter has been bugging me for some time now. No, not the single-digit uptime. No, not the constant “Down for Updates” notices. No, not the slow unresponsive website and throttled API.
I just realized that Twitter is actually dangerous. Harmful. Damaging.
It has changed the way that I think, but not for the better. I find I [...]

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visualizing the Network

May 5, 2008 · 1 comment

in general

I’ve been prepping some resources to use during the Faculty Technology Days session on Social Networking tomorrow. How to best show what the Network is? What do the connections between people look like? Then, this morning, I see a post by Clarence Fisher describing Tweetwheel. It’s a cool little web application for generating a display [...]

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sharecropping clarification

April 21, 2008 · 3 comments

in general

I should probably clarify a couple of things about what I was trying to say about social networks as sharecropping activities.
First, I am not trying to suggest that hosted services are inherently bad – I think it’s great that services like WordPress.com and Edublogs are available – and they are not sharecropping. Hosted services can [...]

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on social network sharecropping

April 14, 2008 · 22 comments

in general

Heather posted something this morning that’s had me thinking about this pretty much all day.
Occasionally, Tim Bray talks about “sharecropping” as related to the world of open source vs. proprietary software and APIs.

What‘s a Sharecropper?· I found a good definition at InterAction Design:
“A farmer who works a farm owned by someone else. The [...]

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my network (via Facebook)

March 25, 2008 · 0 comments

in fun

I found a link to Nexus in my reader this morning thanks to a post from Information Aesthetics, and decided to check it out. It’s an app for Facebook that graphs out a member’s network, indicating connections and clusters. Here’s my network:

Moving the mouse over any dot within the Nexus app highlights that person, and [...]

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Eduglu and the aggregate social tag cloud

February 13, 2008 · 11 comments

in fun, general, work

I’ve been monkeying with a Drupal site that looks like it could fulfill most (even all?) of the mythical Eduglu concept – a website that aggregates all feeds published by students in a class/department/institution, and helps contextualize them in the various groups/cohorts/courses each student participates in. It’s getting really close – it can currently suck [...]

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Blogging vs. Social Networking

April 30, 2007 · 10 comments

in Uncategorized

I've been posting to my blog far less frequently than ever before, in the entire history of this blog. Why is that? I'm still busy doing stuff. I'm still active in all the same places. The only shift lately is that I've also been much more active in social networking sites, specifically Twitter and Facebook.

Now, both Twitter and Facebook are essentially social networking systems. They are about forming and building connections between people, rather than publishing content. So, that shouldn't have an impact on my posts here.

The only thing I can think of is some kind of defusing effect that activity on social networking sites may have – I post there, and it satisfies the social component of posting here. Posting here doesn't affect posting there.

So, I'm starting to think about the relationship between social networking and blogging. They're definitely related, partially overlapping activities, but they also have their own subtle difference. Blogging is (for me) about personal knowledge management. Capturing the content and context of what I'm doing. Social networking is about context more than anything. Which looks at first blush to be purely banality. And yet, it affects me on a deeper level.

I was in Vancouver for an "eCOP" pathfinding meeting, and found that I flipped open the MacBookPro during breaks. What did I check first? It wasn't email. It wasn't my blog (or blog stats, or blog referrals). It was Twitter. I felt more connected to my distributed community of edubloggers (and others) because they're always there with me, no matter where I am. That's powerful stuff. Now, how to better make sense of that? Or does making sense of it suck the soul out of it? 

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