Archive - 2008
September 21st
Refining A Digital Dunbar Number
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 09/21/2008 - 16:30A little over a year ago, I wrote about a digital dunbar’s number.
Dunbar’s number, “the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships”. This is typically set at 150, based on the size of the neocortex. However, it doesn’t take into consideration that when you are working online, you can page in and out sets of people, so while your neocortex may only be able to maintain stable relationships with 150 people at a time, using a good digital rolodex, that number can expand considerably.
This raises a new question. Is there a Digital Dunbar’s Number? A number at which point you start getting overwhelmed with spam or declaring email bankruptcy?
It would seem as an expanded Digital Dunbar’s Number would be based, in part, on how well social media tools interoperate and allow you to organize your contacts. Unfortunately, so far, they don’t do all that well.
I explored the interconnectivity of different social media tools a bit last month. Rafe Needleman explored a similar idea this week as he pondered if we were heading towards a crisis in personal syndication overload.
So, we see continued refinement of various microblogging and life stream management sites. Laconi.ca seems to have constant development. New sites seem to emerge every day, and older sites, like Twitter and FriendFeed are coming out with new layouts.
FriendFeed now has features to show the best of a feed and the ability to add items to different feeds. I’ve been doing something similar by using rooms in FriendFeed. One group of friends are people that I know who are interested in blogging about progressive politics at a statewide level. Another group is people that I know who use Twitter from Connecticut and Rhode Island. I’ve set up rooms so I can see what they are saying, in the context of their groups.
It seems as if I’m not the only person interested in this. On Twine, yet another attempt at organizing social media, I was pointed to an article on TechCruch about a group of Mom’s using Twitter and using Ning.
I had a good discussion about this using another social media tool earlier this week. It seems like the tool that many of us want is something like this: Take something that gathers contact information, such Plaxo Pulse, Spock, Spoke, LinkedIn, etc.. Have it include the ability to group people, probably ideally by tags. Have it pull together all the social media for a person within a group, or with a common tag. Ideally, a user would be able to do it for people that are in a persons own universe, or across the whole universe, the way del.icio.us or Flickr handles tags. For the media gather, it should automatically eliminating duplicates, such as what happens when I use sites like ping.fm, posterous, or hellotxt to send my message to multiple sources. Then it should present a nice consolidated display, where comments can be added that are sent back to the original site as well as being posted on the consolidated feed.
Is that really too much to ask? With such a tool, we could see a giant increase in the possible Digital Dunbar’s Number.
September 20th
Social Media for the Common Good
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 09/20/2008 - 09:42It is popular these days for people bash social media as the domain of the self-absorbed. Critics ask, “Do thousands of people really need to know that you ran out of toothpaste this morning?” Yet this reflects a very narrow understanding of social media.
As an example, let’s look at two different non-profits that are making good use of Social Media.
The first site I want to highlight is Climb Up, So Kids can Grow Up, a project of the American Foundation for Children with AIDS. I learned about this site from change.org where I was asked to participate. I’m not a climber, so I am not attending any climbathon this weekend.
However, I have been running an ad about that for the past several months. People are encouraged to ‘climb, hike, run or cycle up the structure of their choice, anywhere in the world” in an effort to “increase awareness of the pediatric AIDS pandemic and raise funds for life-saving anti-retroviral (ARV) medication, food, and medical and humanitarian supplies to children affected by HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa”.
I was invited to participate in something that I wasn’t even paying attention to. I found a way to participate that met my current needs and hopefully have added a little to their efforts.
Then, yesterday, I received a message on Utterli, formerly known as Utterz about the Red Cross’s social media efforts.
I checked out the message on Red Cross Chat and wanted to highlight it here. It encouraged people to change their avatar yesterday to a Red Cross volunteer. In some places, it is important for me to keep my avatar distinct from other avatars, so I chose to keep my avatar in my standard format, but simply added a small Red Cross on my sweater.
They also asked people to post widgets. They provide two different widgets. One is too wide, and the other one is too slow. I’ve added the slow one for the time being, but I’ll probably drop it soon. It would be good if they could provide customization options for their widgets, but I didn’t see any.
They also asked people to play PSAs and or videos of disaster responses. They have a lot of great videos, and I encourage you to check out the blog post. I selected just one:
The post ends off with a pointer to online tools which includes a link to The Red Cross’ Social Media Links page. That page includes not only the link to their Twitter stream, but also a link to the twitter stream of nearly a dozen people involved in media at the Red Cross. This is a great example of how none profits should use social media.
In both examples, the organizations used social media to invite people to participate, and provided different types of participation In both cases, I participated a little bit this time, and am more likely to participate in future events, perhaps at a deeper level in the future.
September 19th
Understanding the Global Financial Crisis
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 09/19/2008 - 14:31(Originally published at Greater Democracy.)
Over the past week, financial markets have been in turmoil as one firm after another faces difficulties. Everyone has opinions about how this has happened and what should be done about this. I have my opinions as well and have been writing about this in various venues. This post pulls together many of my thoughts from different discussions into an overview that will hopefully help others make sense of the global financial crisis.
September 18th
Participation
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 09/18/2008 - 13:2090% of success is just showing up.
It has been hard to stay on top of my blog here. There is so much going on. On Monday, I attended the Woodbridge Board of Education meeting which inspired my blog post, No Parent Left Behind.
Tuesday, I attended the Election Day Registration forum at Yale. Kim helped organize it and provided her thoughts about it on the Common Cause Blog.
Wednesday, I went to the Beecher Road School Parent Teacher Organization meeting at Fiona’s school. There was a lively brainstorming session about how to make the school ‘greener’.
With that, when I get a free moment, I try to read and reply to emails, blog posts and various messages on assorted microblogging sites. All of this comes back to the same thing, participation.
We need parents to participate more in their children’s educational experience. We need more voters to participate in our electoral system. We need more people to work together to find ways to address issues our communities and our countries face.
September 17th
Gov. Palin's Personal Email Hacked - An Analysis
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 09/17/2008 - 17:31Over the past couple of days, reports have started top filter out about a group of people successfully hacking Gov. Sarah Palin’s email. The report raises lots of interesting questions and requires a little background.
Major media outlets didn’t have a lot of information about Gov. Palin when it was announced that she would be Sen. John McCain’s running mate. As people dug in, one story that received some attention was the $100,000 investigation into alleged abuse of power by Gov. Palin in actions to get her sister’s ex-husband fired from the State Police. This investigation has led to the subpoenaing of Gov. Palin’s emails.
As a general rule, emails of elected officials are considered part of the public record and are subject to Freedom of Information requests. However, many people have separate email accounts that they use for personal business, or perhaps sometimes, to keep sensitive work related messages off of the work servers.
In the case of Gov. Palin, it was her personal Yahoo! Account that hackers claim to have compromised. A small amount of information has been released from the claimed attack, and none of it appears particularly incriminating.
So, what do we make of the claimed attack? One question is whether or not people believe that the attack actually happened, or if this was a carefully created hoax. Everything released so far looks probable, but it is unlikely that we will ever know for sure.
Another question is who did the attack and why. Reports are that the group ‘anonymous’ is claiming to have done the attack. The group first came to fame for obtaining and releasing information about the Church of Scientology. Given their propensity to attack notorious groups with extreme religious beliefs, it is easy to see how they might target Gov. Palin. However others claim that the group anonymous is also known for attacks on high profile women. This might provide a different motivation for the attack.
What are the privacy issues involved with the attack? First, I think it is fair to say that anyone who uses email, especially email service like Yahoo or Google needs to keep privacy issues in mind. Whether or not the attack actually happened and whatever the legalities or justifications of the attacks, email remains fairly susceptible to being read by people other than the intended recipient.
How do we understand the privacy issues? To the extent that the emails in Gov. Palin’s Yahoo Account is considered part of the public record, it may be an inappropriate method of gathering public information, which might even raise issues about whether or not the information can be used in an investigation or legal proceeding. This could also explain why the only information released so far is not particularly incriminating.
Yet what are the larger aspects of this? Will it get more people focusing on the privacy issues around email, or what emails by Government officials should be considered part of the public record? Will it get more people looking at the issues of whether or not Gov. Palin abused her power in her efforts to get her sister’s ex-husband fired? Given the geeky nature of the latest developments, it may catch a lot of attention of technology oriented sites, but we’ll see if it goes beyond that.
