Technology Doesn’t Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds.

Via the New York Times

By DAMON DARLIN

Published: September 20, 2008

EVERYONE has been talking about an article in The Atlantic magazine called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Some subset of that group has actually read the 4,175-word article, by Nicholas Carr.

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Christophe Vorlet

To save you some time, I was going to give you a 100-word abridged version. But there are just too many distractions to read that much. So here is the 140-character Twitter version (Twitter is a hyperspeed form of blogging in which you write about your life in bursts of 140 characters or fewer, including spaces and punctuation marks):

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Is a Social Media Friend Really a Friend?

Via Mashable

September 17, 2008 – 4:31 pm PDT – by Mark Dykeman 5 Comments

Would you trust a social media friend with your money? Your home? Your significant other? Your children? Your life? Your answer to those questions will determine whether or not you feel that friends, as used in social media, are friends like you had in school or if they’re better labeled as something else.

The social media friend is the key ingredient that makes digital media social. Social media users have the ability to create a user profile which lists relevant information about them. The user can then select other users to be friends, followers, buddies, contacts, or some other relevant noun. Showing that you are a friend of another social media user indicates that there is some form of relationship between the two of you. The connection may be weak, but it’s important enough for you to tell the world about it.

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How to Start a Local Support System Using Social Media

Via Mashable

September 12, 2008 – 9:58 am PDT – by Leslie Poston 4 Comments

The Real World Change 2.0 series with Leslie Poston is an ongoing look at how people are using social media tools and their personal and professional social media networks to bridge the chasm from the Internet and social media bubble to the real world and do a variety of things to effect true change.

The biggest hurdle in the quest for real world change using social media is finding ways to take the challenge into the real world. Many of us know how to connect on Twitter, Ning, Plurk, Yahoo and Google groups, forums and any of the other social media tools. It’s bridging the gap that becomes the challenge.

The first step to making real change happen in the real world using social media is a small one. To build a national real world network, you must first start by building a local one. To do this you need to tap into the power of your online network and use it to branch out. It only takes a few simple steps to make an active real world connection that starts online.

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Is Mainstream Media Really Ready to Get Social?

Via Mashable

by Steven Hodson 10 Comments

There has been a lot written over the past year or so about how the time is coming when social media tools like Twitter will become not just the toys of the early adopters of the tech blogosphere, but break through and become a fixture of the mainstream media. With its scaling problems seemingly behind it, Twitter may finally be ready to cross that line between the techies and the rest of the Web using world.

This was especially apparent during Hurricane Gustav’s visit to the Gulf Coast and the reporting being done by CNN’s Rick Sanchez; who apparently discovered Twitter for the first time and made it an integral part of his reporting. This has gone over so well that CNN will be having a show on the weekends with Rick built around Twitter; called appropriately enough – Rick Sanchez Direct.

On the other hand, Rick’s fellow anchor Anderson Cooper; who was actually on Twitter before Rick, seems to be using it only as a way to funnel out headlines. Rick Sanchez’s involvement has been full tilt to the point that he and his producer had to get Twitter to lift the following limits for his account. In contrast Anderson is following seven people.

This isn’t the only time that the Twitterverse has seen famous people in media – both old and new – who have signed up and then proceeded to only broadcast what they were doing but then don’t follow enough people to be able to use it as a way to have conversations. There is no denying that Twitter is making some really deep inroads into mainstream media, but is that media really grasping the principal behind things like Twitter? For every person like Rick Sanchez there are a growing number that are like Anderson Cooper; and those two men are from the same news organization.

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I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You

Via the New York Times – BY CLIVE THOMPSON

On Sept. 5, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg changed the way that Facebook worked, and in the process he inspired a revolt.

Zuckerberg, a doe-eyed 24-year-old C.E.O., founded Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard two years earlier, and the site quickly amassed nine million users. By 2006, students were posting heaps of personal details onto their Facebook pages, including lists of their favorite TV shows, whether they were dating (and whom), what music they had in rotation and the various ad hoc “groups” they had joined (like “Sex and the City” Lovers). All day long, they’d post “status” notes explaining their moods — “hating Monday,” “skipping class b/c i’m hung over.” After each party, they’d stagger home to the dorm and upload pictures of the soused revelry, and spend the morning after commenting on how wasted everybody looked. Facebook became the de facto public commons — the way students found out what everyone around them was like and what he or she was doing.

But Zuckerberg knew Facebook had one major problem: It required a lot of active surfing on the part of its users. Sure, every day your Facebook friends would update their profiles with some new tidbits; it might even be something particularly juicy, like changing their relationship status to “single” when they got dumped. But unless you visited each friend’s page every day, it might be days or weeks before you noticed the news, or you might miss it entirely. Browsing Facebook was like constantly poking your head into someone’s room to see how she was doing. It took work and forethought. In a sense, this gave Facebook an inherent, built-in level of privacy, simply because if you had 200 friends on the site — a fairly typical number — there weren’t enough hours in the day to keep tabs on every friend all the time.

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Social Media for Real World Social Change

Via Mashable –

September 4, 2008 — 11:08 AM PDT — by Leslie Poston —

The Real World Change 2.0 series with Leslie Poston is an ongoing look at how people are using social media tools and their personal and professional social media networks to bridge the chasm from the Internet and social media bubble to the real world to do a variety of things to effect true change.

Change can come in waves or inch along in baby steps. When you have a great need for positive change, worrying about the level of impact your effort may have or the recognition it may attain for you only slows the change down. It’s better to think of it in terms of driving action.

People in the social media space are starting to take this innate ability of social media to drive action to heart. Often, social media lovers are accused of existing in a social media bubble made up of what non-Internet types consider inane activities like Twittering or posting to sites like FriendFeed and Ning.

These activities may seem inane to some, but they carry the power of immediate connection. We toss the word conversation around like so much candy, but the power of social media has never been solely about the conversation to me. Instead the power of social media is the ability to make genuine and valuable connections between businesses or people in a matter of moments.

Leveraging these connections to effect change offers us a power to offer help greater even than some government functions. Recent examples of social media banding together online to organize and help people offline happened this past weekend as Hurricane Gustav barreled down on the Gulf Coast.

Within hours of the projected path hitting weather sources, social media types like Andy Carvin have spearheaded efforts to create a network for those fleeing from the hurricane to get help if they need it, and for those headed that way to help to find out where they were most needed.

How did something that takes massive, well funded governments and government agencies days to set up take mere hours? Carvin used tools like Twitter and Ning and the social network of contacts he had built up on tools like Twitter to form a group of willing volunteers, with each volunteer assuming a task and running with it to the next level.

Carvin’s effort to help get a network in place for Hurricane Gustav (and later to have one ready for Hannah in case it escalated to hurricane levels) is only one recent, large scale example of the fat mobilization potential of social media. Social media has also been instrumental in finding people emergency housing in floods, helping arrested bloggers, tracking police raids at the Republican National Convention and more.