Archives for the 'socialsoftware' Category
The History and Social (Media) Influence of the Cheese Sandwich
Thursday, December 29th, 2011
Being some thoughts after reading Fred Wilson’s The Big Five of Social Media and Mocked and Misunderstood. With thanks and apologies to Redcliffe N. Salaman, author of a fantastic book. Shortly after Fred posted the two items linked above (both of which you should review now if you haven’t already), I found myself with a [...]
Identity : Anonymity :: Community : Network (?)
Monday, September 5th, 2011
There’s been a fair amount of discussion around Google’s “real names” policy on Google+ in certain circles. Most recently in my stream, Fred Wilson pointed to Corey Doctorow’s post on the topic, and the discussion around that post crystallized some of what I’ve been thinking on the issue. To be specific, the crystal is: The [...]
On Digital Ephemera
Tuesday, January 25th, 2011
Some time ago I said that I would write a little bit about why I don’t entirely buy the arguments in Tom Cunniff’s post The Monoculture of the Mind: How Social Media Makes Us Dumber, and then I promptly forgot to do so. Fixing this oversight now. Mr. Cunniff’s post is well worth a read [...]
Conversationlists: Some Object, Strongly.
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
For the most part, the response to conversationlist.com has been really gratifying. A lot of people found it interesting, some found it really useful, and for the most part the criticism we’ve gotten has been well thought out and constructive. Sure, plenty of people found it uninteresting, stupid, or felt that something like favstar.fm’s dynamic [...]
Reconsidering Facebook
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
Being a quick brain dump, since the Internet does not exist where we’re staying in Claryville, NY. Before we left Brooklyn I was thinking about Foursquare; I think what Jon Steinberg and crew have done with Social Great is really interesting, but it’s not the direction that really excites me about the potential of the [...]
The Twitter That Was
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
Let’s start with a couple of interesting links: first, Nate Westheimer’s post from a few weeks ago in which he notes that his own Twitter use (and that of a number of other once heavy Twitterers) has been declining over the past few months. The full post and chart are here [and you should take [...]
Anatomy of a Better Twitter Bot
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
So you may recall that I put together a Twitter bot for the lyric of the day club a few months ago. You may also recall that I mentioned that my co-conspirator Daryn Nakhuda has the ability to write code that doesn’t, you know, “fail mysteriously and silently” and such. Well while it’s taken us [...]
Patent Not Pending: Visual Backchannel
Thursday, May 15th, 2008
At least in the world of tech conferences, the existence of an audience backchannel during presentations isn’t much of a revelation: IRC has both formally and informally filled that role for years, and ca. 2008 it’s getting hard to find a big ticket presentation that isn’t being “liveblogged” by somebody. The phenomenon received an injection [...]
Friday’s Brain Dead Emails
Friday, May 2nd, 2008
The McKinsey Quarterly Goes Social The McKinsey Quarterly dropped me an email yesterday to let me know about the exciting new features that they’ve added: RSS feeds and social bookmarking! A very social and up-to-date organization, apparently. Interesting, then that they still follow the distinctly anti-social practice of sending me email from a dead address, [...]
The Twitter Metric I’d Like to See: Twitter Set
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
I’m not likely to build this, but since I’m getting a fair amount of Twitter-related traffic these days, I’ll put it out there and hope that this idea intrigues someone else. If we accept that Twitter is in large part a social technology, then we’re presented with a universe of questions about Twitter’s social character. [...]
