Great article on Financial Times No place to hide. It tells two alarming stories for getting the idea and then analyzes the changes and threats social networking insert into our lifes.
1st story: Graham Mallaghan was recently feeling very awkward because he started to increasingly found himself being intimidated and threatened with no apparent explanation. Both his wife and him had the brakes on their bikes cut. People were take very close photos of him on their phone. Or people waiting for him and shouting abuse such as ‘Wait till he comes out, we’ll kick his f****** head in’.
Then Mallaghan discovered on Facebook a group called “For Those Who Hate The Little Fat Library Man”, dedicated to insulting him. Mallaghan is a library assistant at the University of Kent in Canterbury and one of his responsibilities is to enforce the library’s noise regulations, and he believes the group was set up by students unhappy with his efforts.
At its peak the group had 363 members.
2nd story: In August, Laura Evans received a private message from someone she had cut out of her life a few years previously. She had changed her phone number and e-mail, and even moved house in a bid to lose contact with certain people, and now they were back in her life. The ease with which they had found her came as a shock.
The message said: ‘I bet you didn’t think you’d find me on here, well here I am. You changed your number, like a coward’ Let’s just hope we never have to bump into one another ever again.’
‘I was just sat there staring at the computer in shock for hours; I just kept re-reading the message over and over. I don’t think I ever once thought about it being unsafe – you just log off if anyone annoys you. But here, at the click of a mouse, was one of the people I had worked hard to distance myself from, and he had thrown a knife at my online social bubble.’
Evans shut down her account last month, but admits that she still feels like she is missing out on something by not having one.
Changes and threats social networking insert into our lifes.
The networking currency is ‘friends’ ‘ online camaraderie expressed in the links that users create between their homepages and the pages of others members of the network.
Social networking has rapidly transformed the way we interact with each other, and has started to redefine the idea of friendship, making it something much more nebulous than in pre-web days. But where casual friendship thrives, so does casual enmity. The free association that social networking sites put within everyone’s reach cuts both ways, creating an equally fast, free and easy tool for those who do not want to be our friends. And the social pressure users feel to create more and more connections scatters personal information about themselves more and more indiscriminately.
The rest in the brilliant article on Financial Times No place to hide, also mentioning “The other side of social networking” sites such as Enemybook (allows you to add people as Facebook enemies below your friends, specify why they are enemies and notify them that they are enemies. You can also see who lists you as an enemy, and even become friends with the enemies of your enemies), Snubster (similar to Enemybook) and Hatebook (a sort of open forum for abuse and aggression)
(photo by MegElizabeth_ licensed under Creative Commons)
Jawdropping animation of a song and its lyrics. Watch it fullscreen on Vimeo!!! It is made with processing.org (I quickly checked processing and unfortunately it does not seem something you can learn in 5 minutes…)
Wouldn’t it be fabolous to have something like this working on every song automatically, for example as a plugin for amarok?!?
(via motobrowniano)
Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.
digg.com/spy ajaxy shows in real time every action happening on Digg: a user submitting a new story, a user voting for or against a story or commenting on it. Pretty impressive ongoing picture of a lively community (below iframed for your convenience, shoot an eye while reading the rest).
I use this web page fullscreen before my presentations about anything2.0 (you know, the “let’s wait few more minutes” period in which the organizers hope 5 additional people’ll show up somehow doubling your audience). I think it unconsciusly introduce many of the memes that will percolate through the presentation (user participation, wisdom of the crowds, …)
I kinda remember someone called digg.com/spy “democracy in action”, I would not disturb a concept such as democracy for this but surely it is a rare example of transparency which surely contributes to making the system less of a black box.
UPDATE: now also with videos of Trento and bloggers of Trento.
Some time ago I started TrentoWiki.it. I opened TrentoWiki because I needed a place to store information about the places, the events, the many opportunities that this small charming city and its surroundings offer. Up to now it didn’t attract thousands of contributors but it is anyway a useful service at least for myself.
So, who can be interested in a Wiki about Trento?
(1) People who are going to come to Trento (because of a conference, such as the upcoming conference about Free Software (May 16, 2008), or BlogFest in Riva del Garda, or for working in a research centre or just for tourism) and might be able to find information in the wiki, and in fact one of the most accessed pages in “Cercare casa a Trento” (find house in Trento) and Photos of Trento), and
(2) people who lives in Trento and possibly don’t know about all the interesting stuff happening and available in the city.
So please share your local knowledge and insights and, please, be bold in editing TrentoWiki!
TrentoWiki is Mediawiki powered, just like Wikipedia.
The license is Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 which means that the knowledge created on the wiki can be reused legally elsewhere as long as attribution is given and the license remains the same; this means that even if I decide to close the wiki or anything else, all the content can be moved by anyone elsewhere.
TrentoWiki is opened to anonymous editing but you are certainly welcome to create an identity on the wiki.
For me running a wiki is also a very useful experiment, for example for experimenting with the challenge to be multilingual (there is a Category:English) which will be an issue also for the project of getting a wiki internal to my research institute adopted. And it is also an experiment because I’m curious to see if a wiki targeted to a small community can work even by reaching a critical mass of few users. We’ll see, and in the meantime, please do join TrentoWiki.it
In the future everyone will be famous for 15 persons
(myself on the shoulder of giant Andy Warhol: In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes“)
or
The trust is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed
(myself on the shoulder of William Gibson: The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed)
or some quotes from Trust in Peers Trumps the “A-List,” Study Finds by Steve Rubel:
Mediapost reports that a new study from Pollara found that people who engage in social networks and communities put far more trust in friends and family who are online than in popular bloggers, or strangers with 10,000 MySpace “friends.”
Some 58% of opinion elites 35-64 in 18 countries said they trust “a person like me.”
The question of targeting super nodes vs. smaller groups is all coming down to trust. While the marketplace – both marketers and publishers – continue to focus on reach, they are missing the big picture. Trust is by far a more important metric, one that clearly rules when it comes to influence.
The baseline argument is the following.
In the previous era of mass-media, each one of us was “forced” to trust the few of us who had a voice. And this created the Britney Spearses and the Paris Hiltons.
In the current era of easy self web publishing, each of us can choose whom to trust among the many of us who have a voice. And be sure my friend the 15 persons peers I choose to trust are already (and will be even more) different from the 15 persons peers you choose to trust. No more Britnear Spearses in the future, but just your own one.
Simply put, trust is now distributed.
And yes, in case you are wondering, I do believe in the future each of us will stay on the shoulders of dwarves, thousands of dwarves instead of few giants.