No SNS for Lent!

So I read this article on "giving up" social networking sites while I was at work today (hopefully they can't scan my home computer to read that!). Basically, CNN found it an interesting story that people have given up social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace for Lent. I'm sure the professor's glad no one in our class decided to do that!

But the article does have a good point, sometimes people can become so involved in SNS that they can experience "addictions" to the sites. How often do you check your Facebook, MySpace or Mixi page? I check my Facebook frequently, probably 2-3 times an hour when I'm at home and I have mobile messaging enabled so whenever I receive a message or friend request, I know immediately. Is that an addiction? I don't think so, but isn't that what alcoholics think too?

Privacy in the Workplace... Hah!

Jordan wrote an excellent post on Sunday about how emails really aren't private and I commented that even "private/personal" emails used at work can be easily read by your employer. Then I read the CFO IT article on Six Degrees of Cooperation about how software has been created that reads employee email to see who knows whom and who can form better business deals through their connections. I think this is a valid use of the company's email system to use it for all it's worth but I worry about the potential for "mining" personal emails.

The article mentions the privacy concerns and suggests that you might be asked to help based on a "business connection" with an ex-girlfriend. I think that might be a case where the connection could help prevent the deal from occurring. I like how the Visible Path software has the anonymity built-in to the software where if a connection isn't approved by the link, no one knows who that link was.

I wonder how easy that employee protection would be to circumvent if a supervisor really wanted or needed that connection to be made. How much more would the company simply have to pay out for that privacy layer to be removed?

Collaborative Projects vs. Group Projects

I was talking to my parents this weekend about the Google Docs assignment and how it was designed to make group projects more unified in theme and structure. That got me thinking about how difficult it is to make the transition from the classic method of group projects: "You do this section, I'll do that." I like the idea of making the document creation as transparent a process as possible in that I can edit my partners work and he can edit mine. It also lets us see where the other person is in completing the assignment and to see if they're on the right path or have better ideas than yours.

I think the problem with this concept is that it requires a paradigm shift to accomplish the goals of a unified voice in the paper without those awkward transitions. With our assignment, it began with splitting up the parts and then putting it all together at the end. One advantage of the
collaborative paper, compared with tradition papers, was that the awkward transitions were reduced and it allowed each of us to see how the work was progressing. I liked the assignment but I don't think I got the full benefit of using Google Docs, yet.

Six Degrees of Social Networking

I'll make it simple: if you've got room in your schedule, take this class. You will learn a lot about new social networking systems and technologies that already exist that you had no idea about. I just finished a group assignment without ever working in the same building as my teammate all through Google Docs. Professor Melander makes excellent use of technology and you will actually use the technology we're learning about and discussing in class. This class always has great discussions and we've also been having great speakers. So sign up for ITEC-333 with Melander.

Bloggers Are More Techie... Duh

Our reading from Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's Naked Conversations on how blogs might represent an "echo chamber" and what bloggers present as important might only be important to them was utterly pointless. It points out the obvious fact that bloggers are not representative of the world or US populations. So Howard Dean was very popular with bloggers in 2004... and those bloggers just weren't that numerous when it came to the voting public. Or Firefox has a greater market share and user-base with bloggers. The authors found two statistics for Firefox's market share: 10% according to "OneStat, a web-analytics company" and 38.7% according to "BoingBoing, one of the five most popular blogsites" at press time in 2006. Maybe I'm just in a cynical mood tonight but this seems to show that blogs really aren't (yet) the end-all of freeing information for the masses and may only be doing this "liberation" of ideas for a select group of users who can devote their time to using computers and Internet access to write about their favorite politicians while using their favorite web browsers. What about the regular people that are still using Internet Explorer on their Windows 98 PC... or poor people who can't afford to buy a computer or Internet access? And what about illiterate people who can't even read others blogs, not to mention write their own?

So Tom, Is The Internet Losing?

So Tom Kyte came and talked to our class about his experience with blogging and sharing his vast knowledge through the Internet. One thing he mentioned stuck out with me and then was reinforced in another class I'm taking. Tom's monthly readership is approximately 10,000 unique visitors to his personal blog; 100,000 to his Ask Tom blog at Oracle; and 500,000 through a column in a print magazine. I'm taking a weekend class on Domestic Violence that met this past weekend. One of our speakers was Peter Banks, the Director of the Law Enforcement Training Center for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. He explained how the "Internet Age" increased their monthly calls for information or help from 12 per month to 2,500 per month. However, in one case he mentioned (that was offered as typical), forensic sketches of a murdered child's reconstructed face didn't yield any information after several months in circulation, but once the child's face was shown on nationwide nightly news programs, it took literally 2 minutes for 4 calls to come in identifying the deceased child. Peter also said that the best "marketing" material they have is the "Have you seen this child" mailings that go to millions of households with other advertising via the US Postal Service.

My point in all of that is that the Internet, for all its power and ability to bring together "the masses", still doesn't reach the numbers of people that traditional media reaches. While it can be easily argued (and I'm sure someone will argue with me) that Tom delivers more developed and detailed information via Ask Tom than the print magazine, his website still misses 80% of the magazine subscribers. Similarly, although the Internet has increased the visibility and accessibility of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, it is still the traditional media that reaches people and gets the results.