Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
#followfriday Part 2.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 07/03/2009 - 17:34@jillmz, @sheilamc7, @jcnork Since I just put up a #followfriday post earlier today, I’ll skip the explanation. Read that post of you wonder what this is all about.
@jillmz has been visiting Woodbridge and we’ve been talking about getting together for dinner, coffee, or something like that. Jill and I met online when I started blogging about the Doninger case. We found that we had a lot of common interests and ended up meeting on election night at NPR studios in Washington as we blogged the results. She writes a wonderful blog, Writes Like She Talks.
When things started firming up for the Greater Woodbridge, CT Independence Tweetup, I contacted @sheilamc7. @sheilamc7 is the chair of the Woodbridge Board of Education and secretary of the Woodbridge Democratic Town Committee. We’ve often shared discussions about politics, education and social media and I thought she and @jillmz would enjoy meeting one another.
The next person I contacted was @jcnork. @jcnork is from the neighboring town. His wife is a teacher and I’ve often discussed politics, education and social media with him. He attended the first Greater Woodbridge CT Tweetup and we often share information online.
It was great that everyone managed to take a little bit of time out of busy holiday schedules to gather and talk and I look forward to the next Greater Woodbridge CT Tweetup. If you wonder what a Tweetup is, get the book Twitter For Dummies
#followfriday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 07/03/2009 - 06:01@pistachio, @gruen, @geechee_girl
Do you know what #followfriday is? Do you know why I put a pound sign or hashmark in front of #followfriday? Do you know who @pistachio, @gruen, @geechee_girl are? Do you know why there is an at-sign at the beginning of their usernames? Do you know how I am getting this message to show up on Twitter and Facebook automatically?
Regular readers of my blog will recognize that #followfriday is a ‘hashtag’. It is a tag used on Twitter so that people can easily find it and other people talking about the same topic. On Fridays, people on Twitter often put up a tweet listing people that they follow that they think their followers might also want to follow. I post my message on my blog, and then use TwitterFeed to take the post and send it to Twitter. I use the Twitter Application on Facebook to take that tweet and then add it to my Facebook profile.
@pistachio, @gruen, @geechee_girl are three people from Twitter that have gotten together and written Twitter For Dummies
In the introduction, they write
We wrote this book for the first-time Twitter users. If you’ve already created an account that has some friends and followers, you can probably skip the chapters that talk about how to sign up and get moving – but you might find it useful to review the sections on how to dress up your profile. If you’re a business and have already gotten rolling on Twitter, you can probably safely ignore many of the starting chapters and check out Parts II and IV. If you’re a Twitter pro and could have probably written this book, feel free not to read anything, use this book as a doorstop and recycle it when you’re done. Okay, we’re kidding – it’ll make a great gift for the Twitter-skeptics in your life!
Well, I consider myself a Twitter Pro, I probably could have written this book myself, but I probably wouldn’t have done as good a job as @pistachio, @gruen, and @geechee_girl have. I get bored explaining to people how to set up user accounts, what CAPTCHA is, or how to customize a profile, which is another reason this book might be good for me. The next time someone looks at me cross-eyed when I try to explain Twitter, or the next time someone asks how to get started with Twitter, I can simply hand them this book.
I unexpectedly received a copy of the book for review the publisher and like Tara Hunt’s book The Whuffie Factor, I probably wouldn’t have read it if I hadn’t met @pistachio at some social media gathering or another and decided to follow her on Twitter.
Yet this illustrates the importance of The Whuffie Factor, the social capital that people build up on sites like Twitter. Twitter for Dummies is a great book for starting to get involved in Twitter and building your own social capital online.
I must admit, I have not read closely the book. With a cursory glance, it looks like they have all the correct details of how to set up an account and get started. Instead, I spent more time paying attention to the tips, technical stuff and other brief paragraphs scattered through the book on how to make the most out of Twitter. These are useful tips and I wish more people would read and pay attention to these tips.
So, that’s this week’s #followfriday. Follow @pistachio, @gruen, @geechee_girl. Go out and get their book and either read it yourself if you are new to Twitter, or give it to that friend that you’ve been trying to explain Twitter to. Then, come back next week to find more interesting people to follow on Twitter.
#FRFF – Amy Speace, Girlyman, and Eric Lowen
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 07/01/2009 - 23:03This evening I discovered that Amy Speace will be playing at Café Nine in New Haven next Tuesday. Last year, she was one of the 2008 Falcon Ridge Emerging Artists. I liked what I heard of her online before I went and then enjoyed her performance at Falcon Ridge. I wasn’t surprised when she ended up getting the most votes to be asked to return this year.
So, this got me looking at the list of performers for this year’s Falcon Ridge. The first name that jumped out at me was Girlyman. If I recall properly, Girlyman was Miranda’s favorite band for a while and we went to see Girlyman perform in Hartford. From there, I looked for one of Kim’s favorite bands, Lowen and Navarro. The performer’s list included Dan Navarro, but not Lowen and Navarro. I quickly went to the LowNav website.
A black and white picture is front and center. There is a crack in the middle of the road leading off to mist covered mountains. Next to that are the words, “El Fin Del Camino”.
It's been just over five years since Eric Lowen's diagnosis with ALS, and after 250 performances logged since that giant day, we now find our shows this weekend in Annapolis Fri June 5 and Alexandria VA Sat June 6 must be our last.
I sit in front of my computer, trying to find words for my reaction. If I had known that that would be their last performance, would I have tried to make it to Alexandria? Would it have been too difficult? I don’t know.
As I prepared to write this blog post, I thought I would check to see who this year’s emerging artists would be. Ron Olesko has the list up. Last year, I listened to most of the emerging artists before going to Falcon Ridge and writing my initial reactions. I figured I would try to do the same this year, if I can work it into my writing schedule.
The first artist on the list is A. J. Roach & His Strange Pilgrims. The site is in Drupal and has links to ten different social networks. I’ve followed him on Twitter, and became his fan on Facebook after listening to a few of his songs on sonicbids.
It is late now. I will find time to listen to more of the emerging artists later, but now I should head off to sleep.
#followfriday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 06/26/2009 - 11:12@ltoomre @mrkwpalmer @ltabb @johnjcoulter @kw2dio The #SIFMA edition:
Since March, I’ve been posting #FollowFriday posts on my blog, highlighting people that I find interesting. Often, these posts focus on specific groups of people; friends from Connecticut, Connecticut news outlets, political activists, people doing interesting stuff in online marketing, and so on. This week, I’m highlighting a few people doing saying interesting things about financial markets.
As is my standard, I write it as a blog post, so people can get additional information on why I am following these people, and TwitterFeed sends the key part to Twitter.
@ltoomre – I have known Lars since the 1980s when we worked together at Lehman brothers. We have worked together on and off ever since then. I first started using Twitter back in October, 2006 and in March, 2007, I wrote a blog post for the Toomre Capital Markets website entitled Web 3.1: Real Time Enterprise Internet Presence. I wrote about Twitter and how “More and more, the data is becoming real-time”. I ended my post by suggesting “System which provide real time processing of events, like Streambase, Coral8, and Apama may become key components of a Web 3.1 architecture, but they may have some difficult enhancements to develop to get there and some very smart thinking to figure out how to take advantage of it.” Well, Wednesday, Streambase has announced that they have connected their stream processing engine to Twitter.
At the SIFMA show, I asked people from Streambase for details of how they are connecting and what people are doing with these connections. The details were sketchy, but I did hear that some algorithmic trading firms are using signals from Twitter to stop automated trading of specific stocks if there is a spike in buzz about the stock on Twitter. This makes a lot of sense and I’m glad to hear that Streambase is now talking about their Twitter Connector
With that, the second person that I list for FollowFriday is @mrkwpalmer. Mark is CEO of StreamBase. In the Streambase press release, they also referenced Larry Tabb of the TABB Group. He tweets as @ltabb and is probably worth following as well.
@johnjcoulter of Vhayu, a competitor of Streambase, also posts on Twitter and tweeted about the SIFMA show and complex event processing. I’m not sure that he really understands what is going on with CEP and Twitter, which seems a bit surprising. In one message, he wrote “Factoring Tweets into trading algos is so dangerous its nonsense.” It seems like ignoring non-technical market signals, such as the buzz around a stock, whether it is buzz on the floor, or buzz on Twitter is dangerous nonsense for algorithmic traders.
One final person to add to this week’s FollowFriday is @kw2dio. Lars and I have worked with Dio in the past on financial services related projects. He seems to be spending more of his time on photography these days, but he is another person that should be followed.
So, that’s it for this week’s FollowFriday.
(Cross posted at the Toomre Capital Markets website.)
More #TOR and #iranelection
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/23/2009 - 19:32Well, it was bound to happen. It appears as if someone was using Bittorrent over TOR to copy copyrighted material through my gateway. Yesterday afternoon, I received two emails from Slicehost. They both started:
We have received a notice pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) from Bay TSP regarding certain content appearing at the above-referenced website (the “Website”). This company alleges that material posted on your company’s website infringes on their copyright. Please remove the content claimed to be infringing from the Website and confirm to me in writing that you have done so by 8:00 A.M. Central Time, Thursday, June 25, 2009. If the allegedly infringing content is not removed and/or I have not received your written confirmation by that time, Rackspace will suspend network access to the server(s) hosting the Website.
Please note that you may provide a counter notification, stating that the posted material is not infringing the alleged copyright, in accordance with the provisions of 17 U.S.C. §512(g)(3) to Rackspace’s designated agent:
I responded using the Response template for Tor relay maintainer to ISP that was written by the Electronic Freedom Foundation. The gist of the response is that there is no infringing material posted on the website, and it just appears that way because of the way TOR works as a conduit.
Slicehost responded:
Unfortunately, as you have stated your intention to take no action over this incident we have had no choice but to suspend your account. Please do note that running a TOR is not against our ToS, however, seeding and sharing copyright material is.
Unfortunately, I never received that email until after my account had been suspended. I contacted support and they re-sent the email. I responded pointing out that I am not seeding or sharing copyright material, so there is no action, other than shutting down TOR that I can take.
Slicehost responded:
I reactivated your account for the time being. In other cases similar to yours, we have had customers block the ports being abused through the torrent service. We need some way of ensuring that copy written material is not being served from your slice. Regardless of where the content is hosted, Bay TSP and Warner Bros. were able to download their material through your IP address. You need to find a way of blocking these from happening again. Please update this ticket with your plan of action. I need to know that this issue has been resolved and we will receive no further complaints.
Based on this, I followed the advice of Chris Brunner on Why You Shouldn’t Run BitTorrent Over Tor and disabled the most common BitTorrent ports. Ideologically, I’m a little uncomfortable with this. While BitTorrent is often used for illegal copying of music or movies, it can also be used to copy important open source software which could be used in promoting democracy and free speech.
From a practical stand point, if what I have to do is shut down the most common BitTorrent ports to be able to keep TOR up, so be it. In addition, it may allow me to keep TOR active for longer periods without using up too much bandwidth. Yet there is another concern here. While this is likely to significantly limit the chances of someone illegally copying content, as long as you run TOR or any sort of proxy, people will be able to access copyrighted material.
This is why one section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is so important. The EFF letter puts it this way:
The "takedown notice" provisions do not apply when an ISP merely acts as a conduit. Instead, the "conduit" safe harbor of DMCA 512(a) has different and less burdensome requirements, as the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals held in RIAA v. Verizon (see http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/RIAA_v_Verizon/opinion-20031219.pdf) and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed in RIAA v. Charter (see http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/Charter/033802P.pdf).
TOR acts merely as a conduit. In light of this, I believe that Slicehost was incorrect when they suggested that the access of copyrighted material via TOR was a violation of their Terms of Service. However, one of the problems with Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policies is that there is normally no due process or recourse available to clients of a hosting service when a dispute occurs.
In light of this, I will do whatever I can to keep TOR up and running in a manner that is acceptable to those in charge of AUP at Rackspace and Slicehost.
Yet why am I running TOR anyway? Friends have been asking me that, and I thought the best starting place to explain this is to look at recent blog post on the TOR Blog. In Measuring Tor and Iran they note that prior to the disputed election in Iran, there were normally less than 200 TOR clients in the Iranian IP space. Since the election and the ensuing turmoil, this has rapidly climbed to around 1000 TOR clients.
I believe this illustrates why TOR is so important, especially now. Related to this is NedaNet. Regular readers of my blog will already know the story of Neda Soltani, twenty-six year old Iranian woman whose death has caught the attention of the world.
NedaNet’s “mission is to help the Iranian people by setting up networks of proxy severs, anonymizers, and any other appropriate technologies that can enable them to communicate and organize — a network beyond the censorship or control of the Iranian regime.”
I would appreciate thoughts and suggestions from everyone on best ways of helping keep the Internet open in all countries. In particular, if anyone who has run into issues with the TOR and hosting services, especially if it involves BitTorrent, I would love to hear how it has been dealt with in your situations. I have also contacted counsel at the Electronic Freedom Foundation to get any guidance they can provide.
