(Or, for those enjoying the puns, Nashional Guard.) Every social media destination has some sort of scoring mechanism: Twitter followers Linked-In contacts Facebook friends Blog subscribers/comments Those are the four I personally use most consistently, though I dip in and out of all the others to see what’s happening. They all have an equivalent. What’s the result of those scores? Bigger is [...]
May 27, 2009
The Foucault post yesterday seemed to go down well, so I thought I’d chance my arm and respond to a couple of criticisms in a new post rather than the comment thread. Sorry, purists. My erstwhile-friend Roger from Content & Motion launched the first counter-offensive. ;-) His main point is about the decentralisation of power in [...]
May 27, 2009
Some of my early hopes for social media, that it represented, like Kevin Kelly reckons, some kind of renaissance for socialism in the western world, are starting to run dry. There’s a splendid series of articles over at O’Reilly Media concerning the dark side of social media by Joshua-Michéle Ross. The first of these, The Digital [...]
May 11, 2009
We love our infograms, don’t we, the digerati, the twittering classes? These information graphics, or data visualisations. I don’t think there’s another field of the social sciences quite so keen on complicated graphs that half-explain themselves and suggest transparency and half are a subtle appeal to the imagination. Because these images are machine-generated, there’s a temptation [...]
May 6, 2009
I’ve recently installed a relatively new Wordpress plug-in from the good folk at Backtype. This is what it does: it scans the web, including social networks like Twitter and other blogs, for mentions of your post and draws those mentions in as comments on the post. This is a good thing in many respects. It helps [...]
May 28, 2009