So true

Social Media Revolution 2011

Here's an update with figures from 2011 of Eik Qualmans' "Social Media Revolution":

There are some new numbers and predictions for the future. After the lecture today and the readings for this week these developments might not all be considered good, but it shows the global impact of Social Media on the people who can access the internet. Especially sectors like virtual goods show how deeply involved we are in this new world. Daniel also spoke about how much time we spend online and in virtual worlds, that brought me back to the story that was mentioned in one of the articles "The Machine Stops" and made me think of other examples of a world like this in "Matrix". I don't think we're that far yet, at least not most people and I don't think Internet and Social Media will ever be able to replace personal contact, relationships and life in the real world. What is your take on this? Where do you see our life in 20 years for example?

Social network for researchers

Today my friend suggested me to visit one website - http://www.researchgate.net/
The first impression of it was quite nice. To put it simple, this is the social network with the purpose to engage and interact with fellow researchers. It helps to keep up with your field in which you are interested e.g. from conferences, jobs and the latest publications, to the topics your peers are discussing.
So give it try :)

How today's kids face technology from 30 years ago?

From this video we can check how things are changing very quickly. 

Besides having fun watching it, it made me remember of Pernilla’s Lecture when she mentioned how the introduction to technology into our education was. 

Have you ever thought about the timeline of technology in your life? When you first started using a computer? Which game have you first played? Do you remember the first time you used Internet? 

Somehow it feels nice to look back and see how we are capable of adapting to huge changes like this. Let’s see how kids will react 30 years from now when we present them today’s technology.

Social Media Explained Visually

I found these two quite cute video clips.

The first one is an attempt to explain what social media is in a visual and fun way.

Link

In the second video clip two media types compete. "My horse is better than yours."

Link

Peer-production motivators

Why do people engage in peer-production? Why do they want to produce for free?

This video has a cute way of illustrating some motivators as to why some great services and products are created (and how money really isn't one of the motivators):

http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2010/05/20/illustrated-look-at-what-motivates-us/

Luncha ihop/You guys should lunch!

Jonas Larsson who works with strategies for digital media at the Swedish Television (SVT) created a service that enables you to connect people in your network.

You connect to the service "Luncha Ihop" with your LinkedIn profile, and match up two people at a time that do not know each other, so they can have a meeting over lunch. This is a great way of helping people in your network to network with others as well as find job opportunities.

English version: http://www.youguysshouldlunch.com/

Swedish version: http://www.lunchaihop.se/

Social media preassure in corporate world

Hey guys!
 Do you remember the lecture with Pernilla when she mentioned that many organizations feel the preassure of using different social media tools? I found a nice article in The New York Times about that issue. Perhaps it could be a nice extenssion to this discussion.

http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/should-every-business-invest-in-social-media/

Facebook Disconnect

In my seminar group, we have had a few discussions about privacy in social media. Facebook, and what they are doing with our personal data, has been brought up more than once. I guess most of you have heard of it, but speculations arose earlier this year that Facebook is tracking you even after you log off by using cookies in your browser. Like me, maybe you are also a bit annoyed about the Facebook widgets that keep showing on up on websites left and right, sharing your surfing behaviour with Mr Zuckerberg.

To stop sharing any external information with Facebook, I would recommend using the browser plug-in Facebook Disconnect. The software blocks Facebook widgets on external sites from automatically sending your information back to Facebook, but Facebook itself will still work as normal!

Get it here

The Future of Books

As we often discussed the topic of books in their value today and the question whether it was necessary for them to become more interactive, this youtube video on "The future of the book" seemed really interesting. This new technology introduces new ways of interacting with books and gives reading a whole new level e.g. by enabling people to interact in novels or by giving analysis on books, showing how often these are cited, how relevant they are in the area of expertise and how reliable the source may be. Just check it out.

Reflections on Jorge Zapico's lecture

I have been moderately interested in sustainable development and sustainable technology. The subject has felt a bit boring, but Zapico's lecture made a difference. He, in some way, inspired me and opened my eyes to see the importance and value of sustainable development.

I had not thought about Internet as something that needs to be managed, that needs a lot of infrastructure and power to work, even though I knew that. Internet often feels like something in the air, always available, in all situations. I learnt during the lecture to see how Internet consumes large amounts of resources and that it is not sustainable in the long run. I took the hippie-style, which Zapico presented, to my heart. I suppose that made me change my mind about sustainable development.

6 degress of Separation became less than 5 degrees of Separation

There you go: http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/162314/six-degrees-of-separation-actually-4-74-degrees-on-facebook/

Reflections on Henrik Åhman's lecture

I think Henrik was really inspiring. He had a good voice that suited very well for talking in front of people. That made it really interesting to listen to him and you got engaged with the presentation.

I liked the theme for the mini lecture and the talk gave good basic knowledge for understanding the development of different medias, especially social medias. But it would have been nice to have the lecture in the beginning of the course.

It was a pity htat he had only 30 minutes to talk. I would have liked a full lecture with this theme. Maybe some other time? :)

GOOGLE

I just found this video were employees talked about the development of Google as a search engine. I found it actually very interesting as it is related to our last seminar. What would we do without Google?

In the video they are mentioning that the search engine developed in the way users were asking for it. Furthermore, they mentioned their search algorithms and when they became better it was possible to personalize the search results to the users. Of course they were not mentioning how it works and what information is actually hidden from us.

Finally, after watching the short film Google seems to be the bester search engine so far. Well, I guess everything as advantages and disadvantages. I am curious about the Star Trek Google version...probably it isn't that far in the future since Siri seems to be a big success. However, I also post one of my favorite jokes about Google and what they are able to do!

Offline

Here is the article I refereed to during the seminare... about online and offline  (The article is written in Swedish) .

Stick to your closest friends!

In the lecture last week I mentioned Path, the social network founded by Dave Morin (formerly facebook), Shawn Fanning (Napster) and Dustin Mierau. They emphasize on your closest friends and family members. Users are only able to add 50 friends to their network limiting it to people that really matter in your life.

Path - Nervous at Home from Path on Vimeo.

Path - Share Life from Path on Vimeo.

I really like the approach! In our last assignments we also focused on relationships and I for one think social media is changing how we see relationships and interact with people we know. In a network of 50 friends you of course need to make decisions that can be unpleasant for some of your friends that didn't make the cut, but those 50 people really matter to you and you also share very private moments with them, because they are not just some acquaintances.

Here is a short article about the network from Wired.

What do you guys think, how will relationships evolve further in social media? Would you be able to limit your friends to 50 people?

R&DIY: open source approach for R&D

Relating to Mathias post about crowdsourcing some time ago and of course our discusions/literature about open source and peer production I found a great examle how crowdsourcing and open source ideas can be used for R&D.


It's quite short video, but just a short summary, what it's all about. It relates to several today's hot topics: social media, open source, environment. Britta Riley present how idea growing your own food in small apartment evolved with the help of social media and open source approach. So who is planning to grow own salad? :)

Why Kids Can’t Search

The November issue of Wired has an interesting article on a new form of (media) illiteracy: the generation of so-called digital natives seems to lack the means to determine the credibility of the information they find online.

A group of researchers led by College of Charleston business professor Bing Pan wanted to know how skillful young folks are at online search. His team gathered a group of college students and asked them to look up the answers to a handful of questions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the students generally relied on the web pages at the top of Google’s results list.

But Pan pulled a trick: He changed the order of the results for some students. More often than not, those kids went for the bait and also used the (falsely) top-ranked pages. Pan grimly concluded that students aren’t assessing information sources on their own merit—they’re putting too much trust in the machine.

This reminds me of my parents generation who - if another blatant generalization is allowed - might think everything that has been seen fit to print in a newspaper must be true. Thank goodness for the X-Files teaching me not to trust anything.

Buffy - the Iphone slayer

You have probably already read this article since it appeared in the newspaper Metro couple days ago. The article is in Swedish, and it is about the rumours that Facebook is creating its own cell phone. People speculate that it is a further development of the operating system Android.

Do you think that it will be a cell phone specialized for social media?

You can read the article here.

Old school social media...

Just a nice little story about a guy who sends messages in bottles around the world and so far got over 3000 responses!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14859116

Have a nice weekend...

Sheldon Cooper Unfriending As A Master

At a certain point of the last lecture, a short discussion began, about the new terms and words brought by social media, often (improperly and/or "dangerously") applied in the real life.

That reminded me straight away of this scene from the latest episode of The Big Bang Theory...

Something for the weekend...

What happens after Facebook....it's just a fictive one though...

Concerning privacy

  “Do You Know Who´s Watching You? – Your lackof privacy on the Internet.”

Etiquette in social networks

Couple of days ago I had a chat on facebook with my friend (he is from Idia, but it is not relevant information). We were discussing something usual like weather in different countries. Than I got offline because I was writing an important e-mail and used facebook just for fun in parallel with my main task.

But my friend attacked me with a pile of questions - "What's up?", "Why did you go offline so unexpectedly?".

I don't equate a texting in social network to a normal conversation in real life where usual rules of etiquette (like greeting and farewell, not leaving questions unanswered) are essential. I think that talking in networks is a sort of "ersatz conversation" where you are not restricted by frameworks of place and time. But my Indian friend finds it weird.

What do you think about etiquette in social networks' conversations? Are the rules of etiquette the same in real talks and in virtual ones?

Angry Birds in real live

I found a funny Video about the famous Application Angry Birds in the Internet. Enjoy it!!

Young generation wants to make things

I found this video through Facebook and it's about a 6th-grader doing app-development. I thought it was kinda funny and it shows what the young generation are thinking about these days.

Marketing yourself in social media networks

Because we often talked about the image people create on social media networks, I thought this article about How to Create a Social Media Marketing Schedule could make an interesting read. To be honest, I think people shouldn't be so insecure about using social media. If you want to go along and post 100 Tweets a day, just go ahead (however, I might filter you out of my feeds). And if you don't want to post anything, then just leave it, but to follow some guideline on how to market yourself best, seems a bit weird. Would you guys inform yourselves on how to "behave" on social media platforms in order to make a good impression?

Participatory media, memes and virues

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I guess all of you (?) have seen some of the numerous YouTube parodies of a key scene in the 2004 movie "The downfall" ("Der Untergang")? The movie treats Hitler's final days in the Berlin bunker and the parodies treat anything and everything through their customized fake subtitles.

My favorite is Hitler's "analysis" of the Internet and social media (can't be embedded); "This confirms ever stereotype about the Internet as just one self-referential circle jerk among poorly socialized losers."

These Downfall parodies have become a genre of its own (relating to a previous post about Internet memes here on the blog). The newspaper The Telegraph even put together a list of the 25 best parodies two years ago. I can't say I've watched them all, but another good one is Hitler raging about getting banned from playing computer games on Xbox Live (can't be embedded).

For a more academic exposition about Internet memes and viral content, please see this blog post. For those who are really interested, do note that it is liked further to an academic paper, "An anatomy of a YouTube meme" and the Internet-accessible pre-print version is here.

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Four is the new six

Six Four degrees of separation

I just read an article on Mashable, which goes back to our lecture about network theory, Barabási, Milgram and the others.

Apparently an Italian university wrote a study with the help of Facebook itself, and they found that - in our Facebook dominated age - for 92% the average distance between people went down to about 4 instead of the 6 mentioned before, for another 7,6% it's 5 degrees. And it keeps getting smaller and smaller, year by year.

You can read a bit more here, it's not a long article.

Can I be your friend?

This is the video I was talking about in the lecture today:

And here is another funny video about why people hate facebook (but still don't quit ;-)):

What do you think is the reason for people always complaining about facebook, while still not quitting the service? Is it only the network effect and that they might miss something or are there other reasons that lock us in?

Skipping breakfast for Facebook

I remembered this article that I saw in SvD a few days ago that stated that 1% of Swedes prefer to use social media instead of eating breakfast in the morning. Is this a lot, or surprisingly few?

http://www.svd.se/mat-och-vin/stockholmarna-samst-i-landet-pa-att-ata-frukost_6624198.svd

Twitter more...and live forever!

I found this a very interesting use of social media for the future. Hopefully you will think so to!

In this TED video, Adam Ostro explains how it will be possible to live on as a digital persona after you have died in real life. Simply by using all of your contributions to social media combined with some smart data mining. It could be possible to create a digital you that can live on on-line.

If you are curious as to what you digital persona might post on twitter based on your current status updates, check it out here. I do not have a very active twitter-life, but I would like to know whether these predictions resemble your own in any way..

Protect-IP

A new bill has been proposed in USA which would give them the right to censor the internet in different ways. Take a look at this video, it explains what it's all about and what could happen if it was to become reality...

PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Qantas Airlines epic social media fail!

Be careful with using Twitter hashtags in your company's PR campaign. Things might go incredibly wrong!

Qantas idea:

(a) log onto www.twitter.com;
(b) tweet a response in 140 characters or less to the @QantasAirways tweet 'What is your dream luxury inflight experience? (Be creative!)?'
(c) tweets must include the hashtag #QantasLuxury.
(d) ...
(e) PROFIT?

Not so much!

The airline posted a seemingly innocent tweet this morning using the hashtag #qantasluxury asking for entries to a competition with suggestions for a dream in-flight experience

Little did they know just how "creative" - and angry - the responses would be as Twitter users seized the opportunity to have their say in their hundreds.

While many of the tweets were sarcastic, most were from passengers unhappy with the state of the airline or who had experienced the disruption first-hand.

http://www.news.com.au/travel/news/fail-qantas-red-faced-after-twitter-campaign-backfires/story-e6frfq80-1226202445747

Extract from Twitter.com/QantasLuxury:

#qantasluxury was being abandoned at Heathrow for 4 days in the snow with no customer support while trying to get home to 8mo pregnant wife!

#qantasluxury is sitting on the tarmac for 90mins staring at a full-page SMH ad claiming "We're back on schedule!". Then returning to gate.

#QantasLuxury "Still calling Australia home" even after you've driven the airline into the ground to offshore it.



/Olle Westerlund

Social Media Services Overload

http://xkcd.com/927/

I really like this comic strip which touches on the subject we discussed during this week’s guest lecture with Pernilla - the problem that we often need to use so many social media services that we can’t keep track of them all. In the lecture we discussed this problem in the E-teaching context - we students now have so many effective, totally comprehensive platforms that they simply stop being effective. If all teachers just used one of the platforms either one would be fine. But when some teachers use the course homepage, some Bilda, some KTH Social, some a separate homepage, some use 2 different blogs =), some email most information, and the majority use a combination of 3 or 4 of these ways of getting information to the students, the advantages of having the most effective path of communication for each separate message are lost to the disadvantage of too many paths. And by the way, isn’t this really a “social media tool”-related extension of the babel objection phenomenon? Anyway, in my opinion, this strip kind of describes why there always will be so many social media services out there..

Freedom, democrazy, ethics, social media.

A pretty cool article on the power of twitter and the power of social media as a "game-changer" (I know it's a lame metaphor). Concerning fashion and making the world a little better place to live in.

The Guardian - Topman removes shirts

Participation and crowd-sourcing

Here is a nice example of how the participation of consumers can be leveraged by companies and brands in the networked information economy:

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/220565

Through "Genius Crowds" they create products designed by the consumers for the consumers. I think crowd-sourcing is a really good approach to use social media and the web to get feedback, ideas and critique directly from the consumers and get in touch with them.

What is your take on crowd-sourcing? Would you participate in such product development platforms?

FRA: "Show me the mooneeey!"

This might be somewhat old news (at least in this day and age) - but I just read that FRA, the National Defence Radio Establishment of Sweden, may get an extra budget of 200 million SEK to improve their monitoring technology. Why? Well, they need it to be able to also monitor communication through mobile applications such as Skype, Viber and Wordfeud (of course!).

You can Google-search “FRA law” for more information about the controversial law in Sweden if you haven’t heard of it before.

What do you think? Is this money well spent? And especially to all (none Swedish) students: What is your opinion about the Swedish FRA law?

I just find it a bit funny that they need these extra millions just to e.g. be able to monitor the popular game Wordfeud and even more so because of what technology they already posses. Back in November 2007, FRA bought a supercomputer from Hewlett Packard, which then was ranked as the 5^th most powerful supercomputer of the world. But hey, that was 4 years ago, and according to the organization TOP500’s ranking of November 2011 the computer is today only the 126^th most powerful supercomputer of the world. And honestly, who hasn’t bought a new computer the last 4 years?

Footnote: At #44 you find KTH's "Lindgren" with its 36384 processor cores, peaking at 305 teraflops.