Apples not falling far from the tree
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 07/11/2007 - 12:20Will my daughter hate me for writing this? Will she be pleased? You never know with teenagers. However, I am hoping that she will be pleased. I’m pretty pleased with what she has written.
Mairead is working as a summer intern at Save the Children in their technology area. She has been ‘all marketing-coerced, and everything’ to put up a note on Facebook
to give all the stuck-up Seventy-Year-Old Muckity Mucks an idea of what they can do, as far as advertisements or recruiting or whatever, to get more people in the 18-25 type age bracket involved. Because, you know, we all have little siblings and stuff, we care about the child mortality rate too-- not just the thirty-year-old church-going mommies.
So if you are plugged into social media, stuff like Facebook, MySpace, text messaging on cellphones and all those things, and especially if you’re part of the 18-25 demographic, please stop by and take this survey. Tell all your friends. If we can get a lot of people to respond, Mairead says she’ll do a really awesome Happy Dance. It'll be better than the hamsters. Really”. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a video of it to put on YouTube.
And if you’ve got other ideas of how non-profits can reach out to the 18 to 25 demographic, add it as a comment, or send me an email. I’ll make sure Mairead gets it.
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 07/11/2007 - 08:27News of the Day
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/10/2007 - 14:52Slowly, surely, I’ve been making my way through the emails that have piled up. I’m currently at around 1450 unread emails. Some, I can delete quickly, others require responses or mention things that I’d like to talk about here on the blog. Currently, there are several topics that I’d like to explore in detail, but probably won’t get a chance to write about, so here are a few summaries.
Further explorations in the social media matrix
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/10/2007 - 11:28Yesterday, I spent a little more time surfing around blogs with tools like BlogExplosion, MyBlogLog and related sites.
I came up with a new graph of MyBlogLog connections. The style of observation has a great effect on the graph created, so let me take a few moments to talk about this graph.
MyBlogLog will be releasing an API at some point to allow better access to the underlying data. Because of this, I’ve hesitated to build some screen scrapers, but building graphs can be tedious, so I looked a little bit at the data that gets returned. I deconstructed some of the javascript and built a routine that retrieved data, stripped out the key data and threw it into a primitive database. At some point, I’ll come up with a better cleaner procedure. Since this is not using a clearly defined API, the data I’m getting back may have some inherent flaws in it.
Essentially, I retrieved the four most recent visitors to a MyBlogLog user, for each new user found, repeated the process. After I had gathered information on around 350 users, I consolidated the data. I kept only those users that had both incoming and outgoing links and had at least two links going one direction or the other. Even as is, this produced a pretty big graph. I will leave interpretations of the graph to the readers.
As I surfed around, I found that Goldy had written about a previous graph I had created and some of her thoughts about the blogging community she has found herself part of. There are some wonderful comments on that post talking about this sense of community.
I also visited Kevin Makice’s blog, BlogSchmog, where he asks, Where is the Informatics incubator? He notes the Techcrunch article about Yahoo! and Google both working on next generation social network tools.
Google has partnered with Carnegie Mellon to work on Socialstream. Yahoo! is working on mosh. There is some talk about how ‘mosh’ will relate to Yahoo! 360. What isn’t talked about is how MyBlogLog, a Yahoo! acquisition will relate.
What also isn’t talked about is how efforts to have an open social network, based on tools like XFN, FOAF and so on fit in. In many ways, Facebooks Apps seems to be moving us, slowly and surely towards open social networks. Already, there is a Facebook App for Upscoop which links together different closed social networks.
Yet much of this focuses on the technology of social networks and not the social aspects. Back in 2002, I tried to get a bunch of people thinking and talking about the social aspects of social networks. Unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of people on social networks at the time and I never found critical mass.
I set up a site called GroupMine. You can still find it on archive.org. I put up some general thoughts and initial notes. They continue to percolate in the back of my mind.
One of my recent thoughts has been about the relationship between Group Relations theory, al a Wilfred Bion, Tavistock, the A.K. Rice Institute, and later work like Social Dreaming and Gordon Lawrence, and online social networks. This came back to me yesterday when I received a friendship request on Facebook from a person who wrote about having been to a social dreaming matrix with me at the White Institute in New York City back in 2002. It turns out that, according to Facebook, we have several friends in common.
Will my graphs of MyBlogLog interactions, together with reconnecting with old friends and old thoughts about the social side of social networks lead to something interesting? I sure hope so. Perhaps we need to explore what a social media matrix really means.
A Birthday Wish
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/09/2007 - 16:07Let me start off by thanking everyone who has sent me birthday greetings. It is greatly appreciated. Birthdays can be a great time of reflection, especially if there are other big events going on, such as moving and trying to find a new job. It can be amplified if the birthday is a milestone or rapidly approaching one. For me, fifty is coming soon. That is well past halfway through the three score years and ten that poets of yesteryear wrote about, so please indulge a little mid life crisis reflections.
After dinner, I will blow out the candles on my birthday cake and make a birthday wish. What shall I wish for? Most practically, I’m wishing for a good job, but I’ve been wishing for that for a while. I’ve had various leads that looked promising, but never panned out.
How would I define a good job? Well, I realize that potential employers may come by and read my blog. I hope my description of my dream job doesn’t put off any of them if their opportunity isn’t precisely what I’m dreaming for. I sometimes feel as if that has happened in the past, and that perhaps I’m too much of a dreamer.
People who know me, and particularly my thoughts about writing know that I like to focus on the larger narrative. Yet I usually don’t think a lot about that narrative when I write my blog posts here. Instead, I’m finding a bit of it in retrospect.
Let me start off going way back. When I was young, I had a speech defect. I’m not sure how much I was ostracized for my funny way of speaking and how much I just felt that way, but I remember kids making fun of the way I spoke, even through high school. In college, I took some courses in speech pathology. I’ve always been searching for my own voice and been interested in helping others find their voices.
I had some poems published when I was in high school and college. I moved to New York City to become a writer. In the meantime, I supported myself working with computers. Now, nearly thirty years later, I still write and support myself by working with computers. Blogs have been a wonderful joining of the two.
When I was working as BlogMaster for John DeStefano’s campaign, I read a lot of local blogs and hyperlocal journalism sites. At the http://www.newhavenindependent.org/ >New Haven Independent, I came across posts by http://www.newhavenindependent.org/archives/gina_coggio/ >Gina Coggio. Gina was teaching English in a school in New Haven. She wrote wonderful accounts of her interaction with students in the school. I visited her class and encouraged them to take up blogging. Many of them had important stories to tell.
Back in September, 2005, I wrote in The New Orleans Metaphor,
It is my dream that just as Freedom Riders hopped on buses over forty years ago to help bring equality to blacks in the south we will see a new generation of people head to the Gulf Coast to help rebuild and help fight poverty.
In my mind, I thought of “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”, redone for a new generation and a new media. I thought of bloggers and videobloggers writing about the Gulf Coast of today. I thought of people helping people along the Gulf Coast find their voice to describe their post-Katrina struggles, sort of like http://www.bloggercorps.org/ >BloggerCorps which never really got off the ground.
A month later, Sen. Edwards came to Yale as part of his Opportunity Rocks tour. I spoke about this idea with friends there. In Freedom Riders of the New WPA, I described the event:
If Senator Edwards does the standard leftover politics, I will be disappointed, but not surprised. I sure hope, however, that he will really talk about a new generation of Freedom Riders…
So, when Senator Edwards invoked the image of Robert Kennedy in Appalachia, my friend excitedly said, “That is exactly what you were talking about.” I wondered if this is what I’ve been hoping for.
Later, I was approached by the Edwards campaign about possibly working for them. I had dreams of being able to bring about a little bit of this vision. Perhaps my dreams were too big, perhaps they were looking for something else. Whatever it was, it never worked out for me to work with the Edwards campaign.
This year, on New Years, I wrote some similar thoughts in to help people find their voice. I spoke about it in terms of media reform. I’ve followed various leads for jobs with different non-profit organizations where I hoped I could bring about some of this vision. I spoke with Jay Rosen about trying to find ways to get this vision incorporated into some of his work with NewAssignment.Net.
Now, Sen. Edwards has announced his “Road to One America” Tour. It will start in New Orleans and end up in Prestonsburg, KY, where Robert Kennedy ended his trip in 1968. I hope the campaign has great local people blogging about the trip. More importantly, I hope that they spend some time helping people in New Orleans, and Prestonsburg and the towns and cities in between find their voices online. I hope these voices find their way into hyperlocal journalism, into Off the Bus, and find a persistence in our national dialog that enables politicians and non-profits to address the problem of poverty in our country.
And I do hope that I can find a job where I can help people find their voice.