Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
#Internetweek #QRCodes and #digg
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 06/04/2009 - 09:47Recently, I’ve been writing a bit about QR Codes (QR Codes and the RAZR V3xx, QR Codes and Twitter and Snappr.net, and QR Codes and political flyers. Now, I’m back from the America’s Future Now conference, and looking at what is going on for InternetWeek in New York City.
This evening, Digg will have a Meetup in New York, and I thought it would be interesting to see if I can use #QRCodes and #digg.
So, I created this QR Code using Kaywa’s QR Code Generator to promote my blog post. Please scan it and digg my post.
Thanks. If you’re going to the Digg Meetup, keep your eyes open for me and say hi.
#followfriday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 05/21/2009 - 19:03@ct94dem @ctblogger @gideonstrumpet @ctnewsjunkie @heddahfeddah– The Death Penalty Debate.
True, it isn’t Friday here in Connecticut yet, but it is in other parts of the world it is, and on Friday, people on Twitter and some blogs list people that they follow that they think others should follow as well. So, this evening, there is a very important discussion going on. The Connecticut State Senate is debating whether or not the death penalty should be replaced with life in prison with no opportunity for release. It passed the Connecticut House and now the Senators are debating it.
@ct94dem is State Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, who has done a great job in arguing for abolition of the death penalty. He has also done a great job of engaging in dialog on Twitter and Facebook. He is adding his comments to the debate.
@ctblogger is not on Twitter as much as @ct94dem, but he is one of the key forces behind MyLeftNutmeg. He also does great stuff with video and this evening he tweeted. CTBlogger has said that he can't wait to make a video compilation of Sen. Kissel's ramblings in support of the death penalty. I commented that I can’t wait to see that video.
I’m a big fan of informed debate, but I’m not finding anything informed about Sen. Kissel’s ramblings.
Joining the online discussion is @gideonstrumpet. I’ve never met @gideonstrumpet, but I’ve talked with him on Twitter and I greatly respect his blog, A Public Defender. He has a lot of good comments and is living blogging the debate on his site.
@ctnewsjunkie saves most of her writing for the online news site, CT News Junkie. However, she’s added a couple tweets, noting that the debate started at 5:30 and the Republicans have offered 26 amendments to the bill.
@heddahfeddah is also joining in the discussion. She writes a lot of good stuff about what is going on in Hartford, both in Twitter as well as on her site, Urban Compass.
With all of this, there is a lively discussion about the death penalty taking place on Twitter, and the blogs. Consider following these people for a clearer view of what is happening at the Capitol.
Using Semantic MediaWiki as a Social Network Contact Management System
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 05/03/2009 - 08:49Back in March, I started writing about building a social network contact management system. The idea was to keep track of whom I am contacting on which social networks, similar to how salespeople use a customer relationship management system.
I started writing some simple programs to gather data from various sites and I expanded on the idea in a blog post about gathering people details. I touched upon the idea again in a post about selecting blogs to read and graphing their relationships.
Then, last Wednesday when I met with some old friends and made some new contacts at a networking gathering, and then made even more contacts at a Mojiva Party, that I felt I really needed sit down and try to come up with a good package.
One friend had just asked me if I have done any work with Django, so I set up Django to see how it would work. Django looks like a very nice platform for building powerful websites. However, it looked like the learning curve would be a bit steep and that there wasn’t a lot of building blocks to work off of.
On a whim, I decided to give another look at MediaWiki. MediaWiki is the wiki that Wikipedia uses. It is very powerful and I’ve set up a few MediaWiki sites in the past. I really like the free form way of being able to enter data into a wiki. However, the issues of permissions and how best to tag data remained a stumbling block.
In the preventing access section of the MediaWiki manual, they provided a few simple lines of code to add to a LocalSettings.php file to lock down the wiki. The documentation suggested that MediaWiki was not originally designed for private wikis and other software might be better if that is what you are looking for.
However, it appears to have worked nicely for me. If you go to my contacts wiki, you should be able to see the front page, but to see anything more, you need to get a userid and password from me. Since this is my rolodex on steroids, plus a bit more, I’m not likely to give that out.
The second problem was how to tag data. I’ve used categories before, but that didn’t really work well for me. What I wanted was something like an attribute value pair. As an example, I wanted to tag my own entry with the value ‘ahynes1’ for the property ‘twitter’. Then, I wanted to be able to see the twitter ids for everyone in my Wiki.
It turns out that there is a wonderful extension to MediaWiki called Semantic MediaWiki. The instructions on installing it were fairly simple and worked nicely, so very quickly, I had a secure wiki with the ability to add attribute value pairs.
I’ve started using this, and have developed a few standard tags that I use for people. These include city, state, zip, phone, email, twitter, friendfeed, dig, party (as in political), and so on. What is nice is that the freeform nature of the wiki allows me to add whichever properties I want, whereever I want to in the wiki page.
Using the query abilities that comes with Semantic MediaWiki, I’ve created simple pages display the twitter contacts I’ve entered into my wiki as well as contacts from Woodbridge, from Connecticut and so on.
Since all the regular wiki features work, I am also using it as a reporter’s notebook, where I list ideas for coming blog posts and information for these blog posts.
I’ve also added a property, contactdate. With this, I can see a chronological list of whom I’ve contacted. I hope that as I learn my way around Semantic MediaWiki better, I can find ways of constructing more sophisticated queries, such as showing the first or last contact date for a group of people, or the total number of contacts for each person. I hope to find ways of displaying dates in a calendar and making people’s Twitter ids, Friendfeed ids and so on, functional links.
Most recently, I’ve added another tag, called upcoming event. With that, I can have a good wiki style calendar that is very easy to change.
Further down the road, I hope to figure out how to import data, such as FOAF or Portable Contacts data, and how to export data in formats like vCards or iCalendars.
So far, I’ve entered a couple dozen people, two events, and made good use of my reporter’s notebook. Stay tuned for further ideas and results, and let me know your thoughts on using Semantic MediaWiki as a Social Network Contact Management System.
Old Friends and New Networking
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/02/2009 - 08:10It was twenty six years ago that I finished a consulting contract at Bell Laboratories and decided to travel around the country and then around Europe. I handed over the keys to my Mott Street apartment to a good friend from college and hit the road.
Eight months later, I returned to Mott Street and searched for a new place to live. I ended up on a sailboat at the 79th Street Boat Basin. My friends from Mott Street would often come up to hang out on the boat.
On the ground floor of the building on Mott Street, there was a stored called the Robotorium. We would sometimes hang out there and got to know the owner and her friends. One friend was a young woman named Karen Bradunas. She would join Scott and Marty on their trips up to the boat basin.
Over the years, we lost track of one another, so it was with some surprise when a month or so ago I received a friend request from Karen on one of the social networks. As best as I can tell, she was at some networking group where they talked about connecting with old friends via online social networks and she ended up connecting with me.
She invited me to come visit a networking group she has been active with, so on Wednesday morning, I visited the networking group she belongs to before meeting with a client. I was wearing my “I get my news on Twitter” shirt because I was heading to a Mojiva party in the evening. (For the full story, read Learning about Twitter.)
As I walked into the offices of a midtown law firm, I noticed that being a white male, approximately fifty years of age, I matched the demographic. Yet lacking the fine Brooks Brother’s suit, I feared I might not fit in.
When asked what I do, I offered my standard social media consultant sort of line, “I help people tell their stories online”. Unlike the lawyers, financial planners and CPAs that I often see in such settings, these folks did not roll their eyes, scratch their heads or head for the doors. Instead, they asked seemed genuinely interested in how social media could help their businesses. These were principals of small to mid-sized firms, folks struggling day to day with how to survive in the current business environment.
It was a refreshing time and we had some great discussions. I left with a pocket full of business cards to follow-up on, and all the more need to work on my social media customer relationship management system.
Learning About Twitter
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 04/30/2009 - 10:55As I walked down Broadway, I typed ‘Heading to the Mojiva party. Hope no one spills a drink on my Blackberry’ on my old Motorola Razr and texted it off to Twitter. I have the Twitter application on Facebook, so my status there was updated as well. A few friends saw it and commented on my status.
Anyone who saw my message on Twitter or Facebook probably knew what I looked like from my picture on Facebook or my avatar on Twitter. To top things off, I was wearing my black shirt proclaiming, “I get my news on Twitter”. So, when I walked into the Mojiva party, several people came up to me and commented about my tweet.
Before I go much further, I need to explain how this was an inside joke for people interested in mobile marketing. At Digday:Mobile last September, Dave Gworzdz, CEO of Mojiva was asked about how Twitter fit into their mobile advertising strategies. He made a comment, comparing it to Facebook statuses, and noted that he had recently seen a status saying, “I just spilled water on my blackberry”. He went on to say that he didn’t think he needed to know that sort of information.
What he did not seem to know was that a large number of the participants of Digiday:Mobile were busy providing a running commentary about the conference in Twitter, and many people commented about his comments being a classic fail. He didn’t know the audience well enough, and his comment about the Blackberry that became a running joke.
That said, placed in context, his comments were not that far off the mark. Getting updates about water being spilled on a Blackberry doesn’t especially fit into a Twitter based marketing strategy, unless, perhaps, you are somehow involved in making, selling or supporting Blackberries.
Dave has gone on to start using Twitter and talked about how he used Twitter to provide a running commentary about a lacrosse game that his kids were in. As we talked at the Mojiva party, I pointed out that his commentary on a lacrosse game illustrates how Twitter really works. Personally, I’m not all that interested in lacrosse, especially the lacrosse game that the kids’ of some marketing CEO that I don’t really know were playing.
Yet the discussion about his kids’ lacrosse game, made Dave seem a little more real, a little more authentic, a little more human. One of the problems with so much advertising today, is that it lacks this authentic human feel, and adding in a little unrelated ‘noise’ can be a great help.
On the other hand, not being in the community when you start a marketing campaign can have some significant negative repercussions. The famous Motrin ad illustrates this. (For more information on this, check out my commentary and parody of the Motrin Ad.)
As Tom Friedman commented at a Personal Democracy Forum, on the Internet, either you do it, or someone else does it to you.
I was pleased to see that Dave is now getting Twitter. However, there were others there that didn’t get it and I had several other great conversations.
One objection is questioning how much information you can put into 140 characters. If you are looking at Tweets as 140 characters, standing alone, sort of like a mini-billboard online, there isn’t much you can do, and I’d just as soon people not look at tweets as mini-billboards.
However, if you look at twitter as a conversation, much like conversations at cocktail parties, then 140 characters works pretty nicely. You say your 140 characters, and you give other people a chance to respond. You pick up parts of one conversation or another and respond to them. If you are good, you manage to weave together several conversations, and everyone feels included, has a good time, perhaps learns something, and your social capital grows. If you are using Twitter the same way, it can be a wonderful conversation.
In addition, as I mentioned with my Tweet that started this blog post off, there is a lot of interesting connectivity. Using the Twitter application on Facebook, my tweets show up there. However, you can push it much further, as I illustrated in this quick mobile post about the Mojiva party.
I took the picture with my cellphone. Sure, in this illustration, it wasn’t a great picture. However, what was interesting to the folks I was speaking with is that I sent it from my cellphone, to Flickr. The Flickr account that I used is set up to automatically cross-posted my picture to my Blog. Using TwitterFeed, my blog posts automatically get highlighted on Twitter and the Twitter application on Facebook grabs the Tweet and adds it to my status. With one email from my cellphone, I got my message on four different platforms. As an aside, there can be some delay for the message to automatically make it to each platform, and in this case, TwitterFeed was running very slowly, so it only made it to Twitter and Facebook much later.
In the discussion, I asked a creative director how he would craft a message that takes advantage of all nearly instantaneous cross linked communications. He found it a fascinating question but didn’t have any ideas to share over the hors d’oeuvres. So, I leave this out for all of you: How are you using Twitter? What are you doing to integrate all of your online social presence? What interesting ideas do you have?
