President Obama Riding on Tumblr’s Rise: Opens Interactive Campaign Blog
October 31, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
In 2008, President Obama set the standard for the smart application of social media in extreme politicking. It’s now 2012, and Obama continues on his trail-blazing streak — he’s started a Tumblr, or more precisely, his campaign staffers in Chicago started one for him. Still, it’s more than likely that Obama himself will personally contribute to the blog at some point.
In the meantime, the “fairly nice” staffers have enjoined the American population to make use of Tumblr’s submission feature to share their own stories on the campaign blog, whose exact address is barackobama.tumblr.com. In the words of the staffers:
We’d like this Tumblr to be a huge collaborative storytelling effort—a place for people across the country to share what’s going on in our respective corners of it and how we’re getting involved in this campaign to keep making it better.
On Tumblr, readers can submit text, pictures, and even video. After being up for about week, the stories they’ve collected revolve mostly around unemployment and the trials and tribulations of very real student debt. Lady Gaga and Justin Beiber, who are about as popular as President Obama at the moment, are already on Tumblr. Certainly it won’t be long before republican presidential hopefuls establish their own official Tumblr.
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A New Social Network Hits the Block
October 27, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
This week, the San Francisco startup Nextdoor released what it’s calling “the first private social network for neighborhoods.” The service is free and only available within the U.S. The dinero for the whole shebang is being provided by Shasta Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and other private investors, including Rich Barton. Nirav Tolia, Nextdoor’s CEO and co-founder, had this to say about the network:
We “friend” more people than ever and “follow” strangers we’ve never met, yet we don’t have a good way to communicate with the people who live right next door … There are many ways our neighbors can help us, but these days people don’t know their neighbors, or how to contact them. Nextdoor was created to change that.
If a Nextdoor website already exists on your block, you can join on the spot by submitting your home address. If there’s no extant network, then it’s necessary to apply for one. Nextdoor says that it does not share users’ personal information “with any third parties,” but even content that’s “password-protected” and not indexable by Google’s mighty crawlers can end up on the public Web. Nextdoor promises to open up bridges of communication between neighbors, but those living in places populated by hardened gossips might want to think twice before willingly providing even more yammering ammunition to these.
Read More:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/there-posts-the-neighborhood/?ref=technology
YouTube Regroups to Bite Into Television’s Slice of Advertising Dollars
October 18, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Not too many people would contest YouTube’s assertion that it has a very large audience worldwide, but just for good measure, the six-year-old company is flaunting some figures: apparently it receives 800 million unique visitors from across the globe each month. But to its naked dismay, there’s a glaring incongruity between its huge audience and the percentage of ad dollars it’s getting from businesses. These latter folk are not ponying up the money because while 38 percent of their advertising dollars are doled out gladly for old-school tube publicity, only a paltry one percent allocation is made for online video.
YouTube is more than ready to tilt the balance. To do as much, the company has poached itself some new talent: Lucas Watson, former head of digital business strategy at Procter & Gamble. Watson is now vice president of online video global sales at YouTube. The regroup kindles the video-sharing site’s prospects for gaining more advertising money, but all is not all certain. While advertising companies are waking up and inviting people with online video knowledge on board their ships, YouTube is losing ground as the dominant force of personalized advertising through online video because television itself is hooking up to the web.
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Concerns Raised About Children’s Use of Facebook
October 13, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Federal laws, the Federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 comes to mind, prohibit websites from collecting personal info from children younger than 13 without parental consent, but these laws are consistently flouted left and right. Last spring, Consumer Reports did the math and found that 7.5 million minors younger than 12 had Facebook accounts, which compromised, illegally, their personal information.
Facebook, of course, thrives on information gathering — Share! is its mandate and, like its tech peers (Google), it has been beefing up for increased political influence, in the form of lobbyists and a political action committee, to contest legal restrictions on its business model. Upon hearing the Consumer Reports news, Facebook had no qualms about making its position on the matter known: “That will be a fight we take on at some point,” declared its founder Mark Zuckerberg in a slightly muted rebel yell.
Facebook can provide a wonderful medium for young people to interact with friends and family, but if they lack guidelines for practicing safe engagement in social media, they risk being exposed to cyberbullying and other forms of harassment. So far, Facebook has proved to not completely dismissive of the issue — it is, after all, a proud partner of the police’s Amber alert system.
Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/magazine/why-facebook-is-after-your-kids.html?ref=technology
UCLA Grads’ Janus-Like Social Platform Gains Traction
October 12, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Jono Lee and Eric Sue — both recent UCLA grads — have set their newly created social platform, TwoSides, loose on the Internet to help conceptualize duality. In its current setup, users publicly ponder the duality and merits of political, philosophical, and other more mundane stances with the help of well-thought-out displays and argument compartmentalization.
In the manner of social networking, fellow users contribute to an issue’s elucidation by declaring whether they agree or disagree on the matter and submitting evidence to prop up their case or unfasten the foundations of the “other side.” Welcomed evidence, to be posted directly on the site, includes self-authored ranty texts, YouTube clips, scholarly articles, and anything else that’s relevant.
The site fosters social connections through debate and also through the discovery of shared beliefs, values, or ideas. In TwoSides’ terms: “Common beliefs are a much better indicator of whether two people would connect than, say, mutual Facebook friends. Easily see how your viewpoints match up with other people using our awesome data visualizations.”
A good deal of unabashed giddiness filters through the site’s details. Even TwoSides’ 2011 summer intern, Ken Yu, radiated as much: a bodybuilder with a taste for progressive trance who’s studying Engineering at Berkeley.
Learn More:
http://allthingsd.com/20111012/compare-candidates-debate-issues-at-twosides/?refcat=social
Social Media Urges On a New Statistics
October 11, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
The world’s twitter and Facebook output — along with its googling and cell phone geo data — is about to be stirred, strewn out on a researcher’s desk, and examined like a sacrificed animal’s entrails during the heyday of ancient Greece.
It seems that social media has done wonders for the acceptance of an old ritual of the occult — divination. Online output, as part of “big data,” is about to be put through a major statistical grinder by scientists claiming a humanistic bent in an attempt to derive “sociological laws of human behavior,” as John Markoff of the New York Times so eloquently put it, to “predict political crises, revolutions and other forms of social and economic instability,” much the same way that natural scientists foretell the weather and try to do likewise with earthquakes.
Next year, a division of the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), is funding a three-year study on “big data” involving 21 countries in Latin America. The tools employed by these scientists will likely resemble those being developed by Revolution Analytics, Norman Nie’s company of new-wave analytical tools for “data sets with trillions of entries.” Perhaps the time for a new Delphic oracle has arrived.
Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/science/11predict.html?ref=technology
http://www.iarpa.gov/offices.html
Facebook Gets Friend.ly, But Will It Also Get Sweet?
October 10, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
At just two years old, Friend.ly has entered the whale’s mouth that is a Facebook acquirement. It seems like a fitting cap for a very eventful sophomore showing — this was the year, after all, that the startup experienced a robust growth spurt in user numbers, clinched $5 million in venture funds, and scored a magnate-ish deal with the Palo Alto/Menlo Park young folk.
The media has already gotten in a few jabs, pointing out that calculations from AppData suggest that although the number of registered users has grown — there are currently 25 million of them — the number of active users has seen a phenomenal decline: 6.9 million earlier in the year and only a measly 300,000 today.
In Friend.ly-speak, Why the drop? Perhaps it’s growth cycle is normalizing; the first jump in numbers was a prompted by successful infrastructural changes designed to improve the sharing rate of Friend.ly content on Facebook.
Friend.ly is supposed to strengthen bonds with old friends and spark new acquaintanceships through online posing and answering of questions, some with a good heaping of mawkishness. Recent questions featured on the Friend.ly blog included “What made you smile today?” and “When was the last time you walked barefoot through the grass?”
Concerning the big news, Team Friend.ly issued a statement thanking users and investors “from the bottom of [their] hearts,” while Facebook praised its new addition for the “really compelling way” it created “for people to express themselves and meet others through answering questions.”
Read More:
http://blog.friend.ly/2011/10/facebook-friends-friend-ly/
http://allthingsd.com/20111010/facebook-acquires-qa-site-friend-ly/
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/04/15/friend-ly-question-answer-connect/
Two Nobel Laureates Hangout on Google+
October 7, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
It could only be expected that a figure who all around the world is greeted with hundreds of people camping out for days to hear him speak, would be no slowpoke when it came to embracing social media. That’s certainly the case with the Dalai Lama. He’s set a date for a Google+ hangout with Archbishop Desmond Tutu — both men count a Nobel among their ribboned hard metals.
There’s a reason for the hangout: Archbishop Tutu’s home country, South Africa, denied the visa request filed by the Dalai Lama to attend his friend’s 80th birthday celebration. It’s believed that South Africa was pressured by China, whose economic investment in the country is significant, to deny the request. The Dalai Lama is considered “subversive” by the Chinese government.
Regardless of their geographical separation, the two spiritual leaders will be coming together for some screen time this Saturday, October 8th at 1:30 am PT. Archbishop Tutu’s birthday was on Thursday, October 6th.
The Archbishop had some harsh words for his president: “Hey Mr. Zuma, you and your government don’t represent me,” and went on with: “You represent your own interests.”
Tony Ehrenreich, a leader of the important coalition of South African trade unions, Cosatu, preempted him earlier in the week with the following comments: “Even though China is our biggest trading partner, we should not exchange our morality for dollars or yuan.”
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RIP Steve Jobs
October 5, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Today Apple announced on their website that Steve Jobs, ex-CEO and visionary founder of Apple has died at age 56. Jobs was battling pancreatic cancer and resigned his position as CEO about 1.5 months ago.
Apple posted this message on their website:
Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple. If you would like to share your thoughts, memories, and condolences, please email rememberingsteve@apple.com
Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg posted this in his Facebook fan page: “Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.”
Bill Gates conveyed his sadness, telling AllThingsD: “I will miss Steve immensely.”
All of us here at Submit Express, would like to send our condolences to his family and thank him for all the good he has done to the technology world. You will always be remembered with us.
Are Your Online Manners Polished and Refined?
October 5, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Has life on the digital sphere been making you feel like your manners and etiquette are in need of an updating? It’s likely you’re not alone. Publishers have apparently caught wind of a general clamoring for guidelines for navigating online lives with grace and two books on the subject were recently released: How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age and Emily Post’s Etiquette, 18th Edition.
Both are 21-century updates of beloved American classics: Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which first came out in 1936, and Emily Post’s Etiquette, first released in 1922. No doubt times have changed since then. Unfortunately, if one goes by Dwight Garner’s unfavorable and less unfavorable reviews of the two tomes — published in today’s New York Times’ front page — the books aren’t really up to task.
Garner excoriates the folks responsible for the Dale update, that would be Dale Carnegie and Associates Inc and Brent Cole, and refers to their work as a “retooling” that vitiates the expressive and “homespun” charm of the original. The authors of the Post update, all descendants of the original author, fare only slightly better. Garner says they “mostly repris[e] information to be found in earlier versions” and that the “volume is friendly but largely humorless.” Faint praise, indeed.
But if you’re clueless about proper online socializing, you might still want to take a peek at the two texts.
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