Yearly Archives: 2008

Links for 2008 12 23

Links for 2008 12 19

  • Facebook | Statistics
    Statistics
    General Growth
    * More than 140 million active users
    * More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
    * The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older
    User Engagement
    * Average user has 100 friends on the site
    * 2.6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
    * More than 13 million users update their statuses at least once each day
    * More than 2.5 million users become fans of Pages each day
    Applications
    * More than 700 million photos uploaded to the site each month
    * More than 4 million videos uploaded each month
    * More than 15 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month
    * More than 2 million events created each month
    * More than 19 million active user groups exist on the site

Happiness as a contagious virus: please spread it!

Some papers are more worth than others.
Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study by James H Fowler and Nicholas A Christakis.
Solid analysis based on data from 4739 individuals followed from 1983 to 2003.

Conclusions People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon.

Objectives To evaluate whether happiness can spread from person to person and whether niches of happiness form within social networks.

Results:
Clusters of happy and unhappy people are visible in the network, and the relationship between people’s happiness extends up to three degrees of separation (for example, to the friends of one’s friends’ friends).
People who are surrounded by many happy people and those who are central in the network are more likely to become happy in the future.
Longitudinal statistical models suggest that clusters of happiness result from the spread of happiness and not just a tendency for people to associate with similar individuals. A friend who lives within a mile (about 1.6 km) and who becomes happy increases the probability that a person is happy by 25% (95% confidence interval 1% to 57%). Similar effects are seen in coresident spouses (8%, 0.2% to 16%), siblings who live within a mile (14%, 1% to 28%), and next door neighbours (34%, 7% to 70%). Effects are not seen between coworkers. The effect decays with time and with geographical separation.

(credits: Photo by beija-flor released on Flickr under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative license)

Coworking in Trento

CoworkingI’ve been somehow coworking (I just created the page in the Italian Wikipedia which was missing) the past weeks, i.e. I’ve been visiting friends in their offices for meetings and then remaining there for working: when I have an Internet connection I can do my work in any place and visiting other talented people is always a source of new inspirations and fruitful discussions and a more creative way of working and seeing your daily job from different angles and perspectives.
So this post is just to put out there a sort of placeholder: anybody interested in formalizing some coworking spaces in Trento? Anybody maybe already doing it?
(Credits: photo by “hillary h” released on Flickr under Creative Commons AttributionShare Alike license)

The IT Crowd, nerdiness and people you might want to stay away from ;)

I received the following message in Facebook: “Don’t work too hard! Is this what you do at work all day?” With a link to the first episode of the IT Crowd. So I thought I might embed episode 1 below. Enjoy!

You might also search for the other episodes of The It Crowd.

If you don’t ROFL (Roll On Floor Laughing) watching “The IT crowd”, don’t worry, we are a subculture and it is much better for yourself if you don’t understand this kind of jokes ;)
Usually during one of the first lectures at the University, I’m used to project full screen the following image “There is no place like 127.0.0.1”
No place like 127.0.0.1
and observing students telling nothing. The class can be divided in two: students who get the joke (and usually start smiling by themselves with self-complacency, self thinking “we are in the same crowd”) and those who don’t get it. And I usually tell people who cannot get it to stay away from people who get it ;) And this also gives me an index of the nerdiness level I should keep during the lectures.
By the way, the “There is no place like 127.0.0.1” t-shirt might be a good present for me, just to let you know of course … ;)

Links for 2008 12 08

Obama and keeping citizens in the loop

In a previous post I reviewed the tools used by Dellai for his local political campaign and I was wondering if and how he will keep trying to involve citizens in the loop.
Of course Obama had a much larger campaign and faces now a much larger effort in order to keep the US citizens (and partly all the world inhabitants) in the loop.
I read from a post on the Complexity and Social Networks Blog the following email, sent to Obama’s e-mail list, by David Plouffe, Campaign Manager of Obama for America.
This is an amazing time, the challenges ahead of Obama are huge and I would not sleep the night being in his shoes but what he and his staff will do is going to reshape how we think about government and participation.
The emphasis on locality (your community!) in this message is really amazing!

Exactly one month ago, you made history by giving all Americans a real opportunity for change.
Now it’s time to start preparing and working for change in our communities.
On December 13th and 14th, supporters are coming together in every part of the country to reflect on what we’ve accomplished and plan the future of this movement. Your ideas and feedback will be collected and used to guide this movement in the months and years ahead.
Join your friends and neighbors — sign up to host or attend a Change is Coming house meeting near you.
Since the election, the challenges we face — and our responsibility to take action — have only gotten more urgent.
You can connect with fellow supporters, make progress on the issues you care about, and help shape the future of your community and our country.
Learn what you can do now to support President-elect Obama’s agenda for change and continue to make a difference in your community.
Take the first important step by hosting or attending a Change is Coming house meeting. Sign up right now:
http://my.barackobama.com/changeiscoming
To get our country back on track, it will take all of us working together.
Barack and Joe have a clear agenda and an unprecedented opportunity for change. But they can’t do it alone.
Will you join us at a house meeting and help plan the next steps for this movement?
Thanks,
David

David Plouffe
Campaign Manager
Obama for America

But in Italy something is moving as well! Yesterday there was a discussion in the Italian Parliament about Internet Technologies and politics.
The video embedded by David Orban in his post is very interesting so here we go with the re-embedding. It is a video from the documentary “Us Now”, a film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet (tagline from site: “New technologies and a closely related culture of collaboration present radical new models of social organisation. This project brings together leading practitioners and thinkers in this field and asks them to determine the opportunity for government”)

Links for 2008 12 05