Archive for the 'Social media' Category

Runner’s High: Twittering runners unite

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As some of you already know, I love running. I may be a slow runner but I’m quick to see the value of social media for my chosen sport.

[FULL STORY continued below]

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Social media: Essential user controls

What are the most essential user controls for social media?

NOTE: When I created this little poll it was my first time using poll daddy. I configured it to allow people to choose more than one option. I’m not sure the results say as much as I’d like them to. Thanks to all who participated in the experiment. Next one will be better.

What is your ideal vision of a social media network? Think about what’s presently available and consider how you might change it to better suit your own needs. Drop your ideas into a comment below. I will aggregate your responses into a single post and twitter, delicious and RSS the results.

Attention rabble-rousing with Wayne Macphail

A couple of months ago I started experimenting with the use of Twitter and other social media in my wired college classrooms. Meanwhile, out in California, Howard Rheingold was exploring the question of wired attention spans with his UC Berkeley social media class. Rheingold turned these explorations into a series of compelling vlog posts called “Training Attention.”

All of this got me thinking about the nature of engagement in a wired world. It struck me that we’re in need of some form of scaffolding for particpatory and social media use. Specifically, the creation of some sort of attention scaffolding that transports the user beyond a state of random gratification and sensory overload.

These thoughts led to an inspiring conversation with fellow educator and webby Rabble.ca columnist Wayne Macphail. Macphail turned this dialogue into a Rabble column he called “May I halve your attention please?

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[steal] My Social Media Policy

Despite the popularity and widespread adoption of social tools, there’s little agreement when it comes to matters of our individual terms of use. Without a collective social contract for social media, many of us are left wondering: How do I define my own social policy? Until now, corporate social media developers are defining those policies for us. Some of us feel it’s time we defined social media according to our our own terms.

In 2007, Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington created A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web. Their bill was intended to “spur conversation and debate” around the need for users to be more proactive about the ownership and use of their personal social media content. For example, the right to:

“Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats.”

I was inspired to extend this idea to speak to the more elusive question of social granularity. For example, to define my own policies around connecting, professionalism and signal to noise. The need to define these things along more personal terms was the basis for developing my own policy for social networking and media.

The following is a template based on my own personal Social Media Policy (SMP) for you to hack and remix. As ever, the content, tone and format is entirely up to you.

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My Twitter survey: results

About a month ago I created a short Twitter survey. The idea for this survey emerged out of discussions about using Twitter in learning environment and the varied responses I received from students and educators. This inspired me to capture and share these responses in hopes that we might, collectively, demystify this weird new moment of microcontent. I distributed the survey via my blog and Twitter network and solicited responses for two weeks.

Download it here: Twitter Survey [PDF]

Of all of the questions I asked, I was most interested in knowing HOW we can use Twitter for productive ends. Read on (below)

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PEW Study: Tagging on the rise

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Depending on where you stand in relation to the technology adoption lifecycle, tagging is either old news or a recent discovery. Regardless of where you’re at, a new PEW report on tagging has confirmed that tagging is on the rise among mainstream internet users. Here’s a great overview of the trend, with explanations, from the BBC:

“According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the trend in tagging is growing among US web users.

It found that over a quarter of online Americans - 28% - had tagged content such as a photo, news story or blog.”

New to tagging? Read on for some what, why and how-to resources.

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