Category Archives: Internet/Telecom/Social Media

Cyberspace, cognitive mapping and design: some stray thoughts

I apologize in advance because this is going to ramble. And be wonky. If it helps, please know that it all makes sense in my head. Our professional development program at work – yeah, my new job has an actual interest in professional development – has us doing some reading each week and informally discussing the insights. This week we

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The UNSHARE button: Can we all just step away from the propaganda?

Facebook - Unshare

Our social media activities would benefit from a dose of critical thinking. A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on. – Terry Pratchett I had an exchange with my sister earlier about something she had shared on Facebook. If you haven’t seen it, it’s the one alleging that 11 US states now have

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The New Constitution: comprehensive statement of principles (draft)

The original plan when we began this project was to offer the amendments individually, invite discussion, then produce a final document. The course of the process, though, has made a couple things clear. First, there needs to be a period to discuss the entire document in context, and second, while the original “Bill of Rights” approach perhaps had a certain

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Cost over quality: Chicago Sun-Times fires its photo staff, and journalism’s death spiral continues

That crashing sound you just heard from the Upper Midwest was the Chicago Sun-Times throwing its photography staff out the window. All 28 of them. Pulitzers and everything. The paper explained thusly: The Sun-Times business is changing rapidly and our audiences are consistently seeking more video content with their news. We have made great progress in meeting this demand and

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Google Glass: Welcome to the end of privacy

If you haven’t yet seen Mark Hurst’s piece on Google Glass over at Creative Good, you need to. You really, really need to. A lot of times cool new gadget and service roll-outs mainly just affect the manufacturers and the people with the cash to buy them. Sure, there can be collateral damage – World of Warcraft widows, for instance –

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S&R makes major change to commenting policy

Once upon a time I could be counted on to say something like “the comment thread is often the most important part of a blog post.” When you have an intelligent community of good-faith readers and commenters, the initial post need not be fully baked and comprehensive – it can instead be treated as a conversation-starter, a jumping-off point for

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What must the world’s data growth curve look like?

Vertical, pretty much? In 1993, during my first semester of doctoral work at the University of Colorado, we had a guest speaker from one of the federal administrations in a class talking about this newfangled thing called “the Internet.” (There are a number of US agencies in Boulder, and I can’t remember which one he was from. NIST, maybe.) The

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Hey, Jets Overhead – pick me! And Ronan!

Jets Overhead has an interesting little social media promotion running. Upload a photo of you telling the world what you really want… If selected, your photo will then appear in the music video for “What You Really Want” which will premiere here in October 2012. GET STARTED On a sheet of paper, write down what you really want. Be honest.

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How digital is transforming politics: a special report from Mashable that’s well worth a look

Unless you’ve been off-world for a few years, it’s not news that electronic media technologies are exerting a dramatic impact on our political sphere. However, being generally aware of the fact and having a more detailed understanding of the hows and whys, that’s another thing. Our good friend Josh Catone and his colleagues over at Mashable have just released a

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Facebook’s bad year just got worse

It’s an interesting time to be Facebook. You know, as in the old Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times.” They’ve been the target of freedom and privacy advocates for some time. All the way back in 2008 I was talking about the company’s anti-privacy tendencies and arguing that things were only going to get worse for the citizenry. More recently, I

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