melanie mcbride.net

Has anybody else had a tough time explaining the value and purpose of Twitter to your non-Twittering friends, clients or colleagues? After writing several lengthy emails, I threw all my best examples and links into a single message. My “Twitter explained” boilerplate is the result.

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 [...]

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 [...]

I created the following scorecard for small publications and organisations in order to help them assess the absence or presence of social media on their site. Here are the questions. You can dowload the scorecard to calculate the results social_media_scorecard [PDF] 1. How social is your site? Rate your site features following social media (2 [...]

[TEDTALKS LARRYLESSIG-2007_high.flv] Lawrence Lessig on creativity2.0 and the law I used to think standards were for squares. Especially when it came to the wild web. That was back in early days of my online life, before I knew about Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig and Open Source. At that time, I didn’t realise that (democratic and [...]

A new report from PEW Internet illuminates some surprising trends about teens and social media. Of these findings: Content creation by teenagers continues to grow, with 64% of online teenagers ages 12 to 17 engaging in at least one type of content creation, up from 57% of online teens in 2004. Girls continue to dominate [...]

As some of us funwall our way through the day, others are using social and participatory media to shape the future. One of these people is Social Signal’s Rob Cottingham who asks Can web2.0 change the world? “It’s easy to get fixated on the shiny toys of the Web 2.0 world: the latest invitation-only beta [...]

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 [...]