Web 101
Topic 3.2 Social Me(dia)
Laura's notes
Intro:
While the web was famously described as Small Pieces Loosely Joined (a unified theory of the web, David Weinberger: "What is the Web for? And why do we care so much? Why has this simple technology sent a lightning bolt through our culture? It goes far beyond the Web's over-hyped economic impact: 500 million of us aren't there because we want a better "shopping experience." The Web, a world of pure connection, free of the arbitrary constraints of matter, distance and time, is showing us who we are - and is undoing some of our deepest misunderstandings about what it means to be human in the real world".) At the begging of the millennium, since 2006, the joins are often harder to see and the pieces are getting smaller and smaller. Our output of Facebook status updates, Twitter posts (called tweets), Last.FM playlist updates, and the different posts from a thousand other services all leave tiny fragments of information about ourselves, our like, our dislikes, our habits and so on. The topic we'll be considering how those fragments are used, what they say about people, and how combined in different ways.(Curtin, 2010)
David Weinberger: Flap Copy (april 2002)
The Web doesn't exist in space, yet we talk about going to sites, entering themand leaving. Diaries move on line and suddenly they're more about creating selves than writing about Tthem. Web sites don't have fences, yet a site for auction hunters was found to have trespassed on eBay, a metaphorical offense for which it paid a very real price. Companies invest heavily in professional, polished Web sites, but the Web rewards sites that revel in imperfection. Bits are the "atoms" of the Web, but they have no weight, no size and no real existence.
These anomalies are just a few that show how uncomfortable the fit between the Web and the real world is - and how deeply weird the ordinary life of the Web is. In this one-of-a-kind book of social commentary, David Weinberger takes us beyond the hype, revealing what is truly revolutionary about this new medium. Just as Marshall McLuhan forever altered our view of broadcast media, Weinberger shows that the Web is transforming not only transforming social institutions but also bedrock concepts of our world such as space, time, self, knowledge - even reality itself.
The Web would be important enough if it hooked up our species on a global scale. But, Weinberger argues, it is doing much more than that. Unlike previous technologies, such as the phone or fax, the Web is a permanent public space that gathers value every time someone posts a Web page, or responds on a discussion board, or replies to a mail list. The result is that the Web is a second world, layered on top of the real world, that's drawing into it more and more of our social life lives together.
Weinberger introduces us to the denizens of this second world, people like .Zannah, whose online diary turns self-revelation into play; Tim Bray, whose map of the Web reveals what's at the heart of the new Web space; and Danny Yee and Claudiu Popa, part of the new breed of Web experts we trust despite their lack of obvious qualifications. Through these stories of life on the Web, an insightful take on some familiar-and some unfamiliar-Web sites, and a pervasive sense of humor, Weinberger is the first to put the Web into the social and intellectual context we need to begin assessing its true impact on our lives.
The irony, according to Weinberger, is that this seemingly weird new technology is more in tune with our authentic selves than is the modern world. Because the Web foils our conventional assumptions about concepts like space and time and self, we are led back to a more authentic view of what it means to be a person sharing a world with others-whether it's the world of the Web or the real world of atoms. Our experience on the Web enables us to recapture the truth of our experience of the real world. Funny, provocative, and ultimately hopeful, Small Pieces Loosely Joined makes us look at the Web - and at life - in an all new light.
David Weinberger is the publisher of JOHO (Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization). He is a commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered and a columnist for Darwin Magazine, KMWorld and Intranet Design Magazine. Co-author of the bestselling The Cluetrain Manifesto, he has written for a wide variety of publications, including Wired, The New York Times, and Smithsonian, and gives talks around the world on what the Web is doing to business.
Twitter as a river:
Twitter is a micro blogging service.
The metaphor of the river works well when considering 'micro-blogging' services like Twitter; users of the service rarely look at all the tweets (the twitter posts) made by their friends but rather check in from time to time and look at the most recent tweets visible at that time. It's a bit like looking into a river full of interesting fish: every time you look there will be water and fish, and they're well worth looking at, but each time you glance it'll be different water and different fish you see. Just as no one would try and chase water which has swept past, so too do older Twitter posts tend to disappear unread. Unlike a blog, for example, the sheer number of tweets means that people's engagement with their 'friend's' tweets tends to be partial and fragmented. (Curtin, 2010)
Twitter in Plain English (March 2008)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o
Shows how Twitter works as a micro blogging site, 140 characters at a time.
Activity:
Go to the Twitter homepage and log in with the account you set up earlier in the unit. In the sidebar, you'll see a section called 'Trending Topics' which lists the most talked about topics on Twitter in the last hours. Click on those topics and figure out what they've about. How do those topics compare with the sort of uses and discussions mentioned in the video and readings above? If you're following a bunch of friends yourself, look at their recent posts and see what sort of things they're discussing, too. (Curtin, 2010)
Laura: logged onto my Twitter account to find out something interesting, well anything interesting that has happened in the last few hours. Trends:
Lauer is concerning the interview that American NBC Today Show TV journalist Matt Lauer conducted with ex President George Bush. The consensus is that George W Bush is a "terrible arrogant man", this is combined with semi retaliation concerning Matt Lauer's interview techniques.
thedailybeast The Daily Beast by thejimmix: "George W. Bush Defends His Legacy ... In interview with Matt Lauer. http://thebea.st/9PKUCg
#cheatsheet via @msnbc"
MattBinder Matt Binder by pat1944 "Matt Lauer's interview with former President George Bush made me stop & think about how thankful I am for President Barack"
j_hodges Jeremy Hodges "No 'Chuck' tonight. Instead, a somewhat hostile interview of former President G.W. Bush by Matt Lauer."
amanidakar Amani Dakar "Ouch! RT @washdcnews: RT @jeremyscahill: Matt Lauer did a harder hitting interview with Snooki than Bush"
steveweinstein Steve Weinstein by awop @ .@jeremyscahill "The goat from My Pet Goat would have conducted a tougher interview with W than Matt Lauer."
Laura: My friends are out across the globe; my newer friends are more to do with Open University/Curtin University. In addition, the consensus is that all seem stressed about assignments due to be handed in over the next couple of weeks or sooner.
Q: How do those topics compare with the sort of uses and discussions mentioned in the video?
Laura: They don't compare really, as I have friends who share different interests. They are not all following the same conversation link as each other.
Friendfeeds: aggregating Me(dia)
While most Web 2.0 services create tiny pieces of information about us, there is a new breed of service which allows us to grab all of these pieces and join them together (that is, aggregate them) into one single feed which contains all of the fragments we're creating across the web. The most well known of these services is Friendfeed; take a quick read of their About section (Curtin, 2010)
"FriendFeed is a service that makes it easy to share with friends online. It offers a fun and interactive way to discover and discuss information among friends.
Sign up for FriendFeed, invite some friends, and get an instant, customized feed made up of the content that your friends shared — from photos to interesting links and videos to messages just for you. And your friends get their customized feeds, full of the cool stuff that you've shared. It's fast and easy to start a conversation around shared items, or to show that you like something a friend has shared. You can subscribe to updates from individuals and groups, such as your family or a team of people you work with. On FriendFeed, you and your friends contribute to a shared stream of information — information that you care about, because it's from the people that you care about.
You don't need to install anything to use FriendFeed. You can read and share your FriendFeed however, you want — from your email, your phone or even from Facebook. If you make your FriendFeed publicly visible, your friends can see what you're sharing without creating an account, and you can Friendfeed account and aggregate the RSS feeds from the Twitter and delicious accounts you've signed up for during the unit; also add in the RSS feeds from any other services you have accounts with. Now that a look at the resulting 'feed' that results. embed your feed in your home page or blog. FriendFeed also lets you pull in updates from other sites around the web, and even publish your feed to services you already use, like Twitter.
So sign up and try it for yourself. Why FriendFeed? Because it's fun, fast and conversational. And because everyone has something to share." (http://friendfeed.com/about/ )
Activity:
Sign up for a Friendfeed account and aggregate the RSS feeds from the Twitter and delicious accounts you’ve signed up for during the unit; also add in the RSS feeds from any other services you have accounts with. Now that a look at the resulting ‘feed’ that results.
Laura: I've signed up for Friendfeed. Interesting that they utilised my Facebook account to initiate the signup (to "save time") and you can find me here -> http://friendfeed.com/loulouherbert
Laura: my post to Blackboard (BB)
Readings:
How does the idea of 'Continuous Partial Presence' work in terms of building a picture about someone from their microblogging (think about the Twitter in Plain English video in this context, too)? How does Anne Helmond's concept of 'Identity 2.0' work with the concept of web presence? (For the longer paper from Akshay Java et al, feel free to ignore all the maths in the middle and just focus on the discussion and conclusion; pay particular attention to sort of activities people undertake with Twitter and similar services.)
How does that feed represent you or your interests? (And how would that work if you have more posts using the individual services?)
If you can, post your Friendfeed details on the discussion board and take a look at each others'.
What sense of other people do you get from their feeds?
Laura: I've signed up for Friendfeed. Interesting that they utilised my Facebook account to initiate the signup (to "save time") and you can find me here -> http://friendfeed.com/loulouherbert
Laura: my post to Blackboard (BB)
| Subject: RE: Official Thread: Friendfeed Activity | |||
| Author: Laura Herbert Posted date: Tuesday, November 9, 2010 2:50:14 PM WST Last modified date: Tuesday, November 9, 2010 2:50:14 PM WST Total views: 2 Your views: 2 | |||
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Readings:
Tama Leaver (2007) 'It's a Small World After All: From Wired's Minifesto to the Twitterati', Tama Leaver dot Net, March 11.
Available:http://www.tamaleaver.net/2007/03/11/its-a-small-world-after-all-from-wireds-minifesto-to-the-twitterati/
Available:http://www.tamaleaver.net/2007/03/11/its-a-small-world-after-all-from-wireds-minifesto-to-the-twitterati/
Look on my blogspot for the above full extraction. Or http://www.tamaleaver.net/2007/03/11/its-a-small-world-after-all-from-wireds-minifesto-to-the-twitterati/
Akshay Java et al (2007) 'Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities', Procedings of the Joint 9th WEBKDD and 1st SNA-KDD Workshop 2007, August 12.
Available: http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/get/a/publication/369.pdf
Available: http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/get/a/publication/369.pdf
Anne Helmond (2010) ' Identity 2.0: Constructing identity with cultural software.' Anne Helmond. New Media Research Blog.
Available: http://www.annehelmond.nl/wordpress/wp-content/uploads//2010/01/helmond_identity20_dmiconference.pdf
How does the idea of 'Continuous Partial Presence' work in terms of building a picture about someone from their microblogging (think about the Twitter in Plain English video in this context, too)? How does Anne Helmond's concept of 'Identity 2.0' work with the concept of web presence? (For the longer paper from Akshay Java et al, feel free to ignore all the maths in the middle and just focus on the discussion and conclusion; pay particular attention to sort of activities people undertake with Twitter and similar services.)
