Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
Mobile Social Media at the Democratic Convention
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 08/05/2008 - 20:51This evening, I ran a BlogTalkRadio show about Democratic Delegates to Denver Using Social Media. Jen Just, who is an Obama delegate from Connecticut called in, as did a friend of ours named Sheila.
One thing I mentioned on the show was the demconvention room that I set up on FriendFeed. It is aggregating social media from various people going to Denver, including Jen as well as many of my friends around the country. Please check the room out, and if you know of people who will be using Social Media in Denver, please let me know so I can add their material to the feed into the room.
With BlogTalkRadio, besides saving an archive of the show, which should be up soon at the link above, there is also a chat. I don't believe the is saved, so I've saved it here below the fold.
We will have this show again next week to check in on how everyone is doing with mobile social media as they prepare for Denver, so if you have things you would like to share, please let me know.
A Post Broadcast Convention?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 08/04/2008 - 18:21(Originally published at Greater Democracy.)
Much has been written about post-broadcast politics, networked politics, or any other number of phrases about the political process moving beyond the thirty second soundbite on the evening news. Obama’s use of the Internet has been compared to JFK’s use of television. JFK understood the new medium of television and used it to his advantage, just as Obama has understood the new medium of the Internet and used it to his advantage. Yet campaigns remain very top down organizations, with control centralized.
Perhaps the most highly controlled and centralized traditional media extravaganza remaining in politics is the national conventions. Yet, slowly, even these are changing. The Obama campaign has moved his acceptance speech to Invesco Field to allow 75,000 people to participate first hand.
How participatory will this be? The Associated Press reports,
Enter the 75,000 people who will have to come hours early for Obama's acceptance speech to get through security, most carrying cell phones. As they settle in their seats, campaign aides will be on stage asking them to text message their friends and use call sheets to get people to register. "There will be a lot of idle time. We put idle people to work," Hildebrand said.
While there are concerns about the bandwidth available in the stadium, this is a great start. However, I would like to see it go much further. Why only use text messages from the attendees of the acceptance speech? The convention is four days long. There are lots of interesting things that take place during those four days, much of it away from the convention floor.
Sure, the DNC has credentialed a record number of bloggers to cover the convention, making sure that there are bloggers covering each state. Yet what is really needed is to take the message from both Gov. Dean and Sen. Obama about empowering people to be the change that they want to see.
Every delegate should receive information ahead of time about how they can use all aspects of social media, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and so many others, from their cellphones at any point during the convention. They should be encouraged to publicize their social media accounts so their friends, family, neighbors, constituents, and anyone else they can get to listen.
Slowly, but surely, I’m contacting delegates and getting them to think about how they could do this. Please, consider doing the same.
To continue this discussion, Tuesday evening, 8 PM Eastern time, I will host a BlogTalkRadio show about Getting Democrat Delegates to Denver to Use Social Media. Please consider listening and if you have some ideas to share, calling in.
Democratic Delegates to Denver using Social Media
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 08/02/2008 - 09:45This morning, I had a fascinating discussion with Jen Just, who will be an Obama Delegate from Connecticut to the Democratic National Convention in Denver. One of the topics we discussed was the use of Social Media by delegates. We are both very interested in how delegates can use social media to widen the discussion around the convention and bring the message home.
To illustrate some of the tools available, I called into Utterz from my cellphone to leave this message about our discussion. It is from a cellphone in an area with poor coverage, so the voice is a little choppy, but still the message was up immediately and shows the power of how these tools can be used.
To continue the discussion, Jen and I will be doing a call in radio show Tuesday evening at 8 PM EDT on BlogTalkRadio about Democrat Delegates to Denver Using Social Media. If you are interested, please listen, and if you have some interesting comments, please call in.
There are a lot of things that delegates, bloggers, and guests to the convention can do to make it a powerful experience for everyone, but we need to start setting up things now.
Laconica 0.5.0 Upgrade and Related Developments
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/01/2008 - 17:41Last night, I began testing Laconica 0.5.0 on microblog. It is an update from Laconica 0.4.4. I created a new tarball, laconica050.tar.gz. I initially had some problems with OpenID and found that there was a patch to the OpenID code that is in the laconicadepends.tar.gz, so I created a new file, laconicadepends01.tar.gz. This didn’t fix the problem, and subsequently I found that for some reason my 0.5.0 hadn’t been properly installed and on reinstalling that the problem went away, so the depends01 file may not be necessary.
Upgrade Steps
Make sure you keep a back up copy of your installation. Then, install laconica050 and laconicadepends01 into your laconica directory. Copy over your config.php file. You should note that there are a bunch of new options in the config.php, so you may want to take the options you set in your config.php and copy them into the config.php.sample file and save that as your new config.php file.
Copy over any theme you have created. Copy over the avatars that have been created.
The Database Update
The database has changed a lot from 0.4.4 and earlier. Instead of trying to come up with all the alter statements necessary, I took a script that Evan had written and generalized it to work in my environment.
#!/bin/bash
export DB=$1
export SCR=$2
export USER=$3
export PW=$4
export HOST=$5mysqldump -u $USER --password=$PW -h $HOST -c -t --hex-blob $DB > $DB.sql
mysqladmin -u $USER --password=$PW -h $HOST -f drop $DB
mysqladmin -u $USER --password=$PW -h $HOST create $DB
mysql -u $USER --password=$PW -h $HOST $DB < $SCR
mysql -u $USER --password=$PW -h $HOST $DB < $DB.sql
It worked very nicely for me. However, just to be safe, I did take a backup copy before I ran the script, separate from the backup copy that gets created at the beginning of the script.
With all of this in place (once my 0.5.0 version was properly in place), everything started working nicely. New features include hashtags, which I’m a big fan of, and I’m glad to see incorporated into the site. I’ve gotten SMS working, at least for sending out notices. Incoming SMS probably won’t work well because of how email is configured on my shared host.
One other problem that I had, which I’m not sure if it was because of the failed initial upgrade, or something else, but the public timeline didn’t show any of the entries prior to the upgrade. This wasn’t a big concern for me, and for more active sites, most people would never notice.
I’m still having problems with people being able to remotely subscribe to my microblog. When I turn on database debugging, it works, but when debugging is off, it doesn’t work. Go figure.
Other Stuff
The next thing that I was thinking about was adding TwitterFeed like functionality. Twitterfeed checks RSS feeds and submits a summary to Twitter. To my surprise, Twitter Feed has been modified to support Laconica. What is even better is that it supports any server running Laconica, so, I’ve set it up to send the RSS feed from my blog not only to Twitter, but also to identi.ca as well as my personal Microblog.
Another very interesting development is the translation tool for laconi.ca. I haven’t played with that yet, so I don’t have any details.
So, after a few minor problems, the 0.5.0 upgrade went very nicely. I’m interested to see how it goes for any of the other Laconica sites. Please leave your notes in the comments.
Mobile, Micro, Photo, Video and Audio blogging Festivals
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/29/2008 - 20:50Barring any unexpected events, Thursday will complete another month of getting at least one blog post up every day of the month. The idea for this grew out of National Novel Writing Month. Various bloggers that wanted to make some sort of writing commitment but didn’t want to write a novel, so they created National Blog Posting Month. It grew and every month, bloggers commit to writing at least one blog post each day. Some hardcore people are even shooting for writing a blog post every day for a year.
Initially, I didn’t feel inclined to commit to this. My life is too uncertain, and I have so many other things going on. Yet, I have managed to make the goal, so far, every month this year. I had doubts about whether I would pull it off for July, since I was on vacation for a week, and then at a folk music festival for five days. However, using my cellphone, I’ve managed to get in a post every day.
How did I do it? Different people have been asking me about different ways of posting from cellphones, so I thought I would go into a little detail here. For blog posts to my blog, I send a picture to Flickr, with title and text attached. Yet I also send content a bunch of other ways, so I thought I would give you the full picture.
I like to send a mix of data. Not only do I send text messages, but I also take pictures and videos which I send as MMS messages and I leave voice messages on various audio sites.
My cellphone is a Motorola Razr V3xx, which allows me to have mailing lists for messages that I send out. It allows me to take 640x480 pictures and videos. The videos are limited to 17 seconds. I've added 2 gig memory card to it so I have more space for pictures, videos, as well as music that I've downloaded to it.
For text, I send my text messages to Facebook, Twitter, Utterz, and my wife Kim. When you set up an account with Twitter, you have an option of linking in your cellphone. When you do that, it sends a confirm message to your cellphone. Once you've confirmed, you can just send a text message from your cellphone to their special code, and it shows up on Twitter. Facebook and Utterz works pretty much in the same manner.
For pictures, I send them to Facebook, Flickr, Kim, Ringo and Utterz. Kim's message goes as a message straight to her cellphone. The others go via email. When you set up mobile accounts at Facebook, Flickr, Ringo or Utterz, they give you an email address you can send pictures to. The pictures are typically posted immediately, or almost immediately. If you add text after the picture, that goes into the description. You can set the title by entering the subject in the sending options.
Typically, I don’t bother with a description or title because I want to get pictures uploaded and pay more attention to the event. However in some cases, I would take a picture and then save it to send to a special Flickr account that is set up to automatically cross post to this blog.
It is basically the same process for videos. I send my videos to Blip.tv, Facebook, Kim, Utterz, and Youtube. They often take a bit longer to process.
Then, I tie a lot of this together with various other linking. For example, there is an application to tie together messages on Twitter to messages on Facebook, so, I could omit Facebook, and my messages would eventually show up there. However, I send it to both places to cut out some of the lag between different sites.
Likewise, I subscribe to both Twitter and Facebook from FriendFeed, although I rarely post anything directly to FriendFeed, with the exception of commenting on other people's feeds.
Now that I’ve been home for a while, I’ve had a chance to go in and add descriptions, titles, tags, and format the posts better.
For sending audio, I’ve mostly been using Utterz. It is good for messages that I speak into the cellphone, but doesn’t do well at picking up music in the background. Utterz has the ability to cross post as well, though I rarely use it.
Now that I’m home, I’ve uploaded pictures and videos from my camera to my computer. I have a Canon SD 1000 with an 8 gig memory card in it. I can store about an hour of high quality video or thousands of high resolution pictures. I typically take a lot of pictures and then select the ones I like best to upload to Flickr. The videos I run through Movie Maker to compress down to a more manageable size. You can see several of these videos on blip.tv, or on various places, like this blog and MySpace which blip.tv cross posts to.
I also have a Panasonic GV-39 camcorder, if I want to record more longer videos. However, now that I have the 8 gig card in my regular camera, I use the camcorder less and less.
To get a sense of what I did at Falcon Ridge, check out the music section of this blog, my Twitter account, my Flickr photos, my Blip TV and YouTube videos and my Utterz. Also, check out my FriendFeed which aggregates many of these sources.
One problem with posting content like this from the cellphone is that you don’t see many of the comments that people make until you get back online. However, you can build a wonderful view of a festival by using these tools.
