Category: Social Media
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A modest proposal: use @replies and hashtags for live-tweeting and tweet chats
Any sufficiently large number of signals is indistinguishable from noise. I suspect this principle does not figure prominently in the consciousness of people who are live-tweeting from conferences or other physical world events, or participating in purely virtual tweet chats. I have filtered and even unfollowed several friends who have gone on live-tweeting or tweet…
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Using pydelicious to fix Delicious tags with unintended blank spaces
I've been using the Delicious social bookmarking web service for many years as a way to archive links to interesting web pages and associate tags to personally categorize – and later search for – their content [my tags can be found under the username gump.tion, a riff on the original Delicious URL, del.icio.us]. In December…
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Net Smart: a call for mindful engagement with technology
Howard Rheingold shared some highlights of what he's learned and taught about being "Net Smart" Monday night at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. Acknowledging the growing chorus of criticism of the growing prominence of online media – and it propensity for distraction, diversion and delusion – he noted that critique is necessary, but not…
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The Multidimensional Role of Social Media in Health Care
The first regular installment of my new Social Mediator forum at ACM Interactions magazine came out in the July/August 2011 print edition last week. Dana Lewis served as guest editor for The Multidimensional Role of Social Media in Healthcare, soliciting and compiling a fabulous collection of short contributions from some of the leading voices in…
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Any sufficiently large number of signals is indistinguishable from noise
Many people are sharing the news from Facebook's announcement today that online sharing is growing exponentially. CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims that Facebook users now share 4 billion "things" each day, which is double the rate of sharing one year ago, consistent with Zuckerberg's Law of Information Sharing first articulated in 2008. While some seem excited about…
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Socialbots 2: Artificial Intelligence, Social Intelligence and Twitter
The students in my artificial intelligence course recently participated in a competition in which they formed 10 teams to design, develop and deploy "social robots" (socialbots) on Twitter [the Twitter profile images for the teams' socialbots are shown on the right]. 500 Twitter accounts were semi-randomly selected as a target user population, and the measurable…
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Social Media and Computer Supported Cooperative Health Care
I've become increasingly aware of – and inspired by – the ways that social media is enabling platform thinking, de-bureaucratization and a redistribution of agency in the realm of health care. Blogs, Twitter and other online forums are helping a growing number of patients – who have traditionally suffered in silence – find their voices,…
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Is Reality Broken? Is Virtuality Broken? The Costs and Benefits of Online vs. Offline
Two of the most interesting and provocative books I’ve encountered recently are Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, by Sherry Turkle, and Reality is Broken: How Games Can Make Us Better and How They Are Changing the World, by Jane McGonigal. I have not finished reading either book,…
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Mobile Phones, Cigarettes, Diversions and Health
I recently read an article in GOOD magazine, Are Cell Phones the Cigarettes of the 21st Century?, which I initially misinterpreted. When I read the title on Twitter (@GOOD), it evoked an image of people using mobile phones instead of lighting up cigarettes during periods of boredom or high stress. It turns out the article…
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Nothing brings people together like ignoring each other to stare at their phones
Last night, on the Colbert Report, near the beginning of the segment on Fear for All, Part I, host Stephen Colbert announced the new Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear app for the iPhone (also available in the Android store). The app was developed by MTV Networks for the upcoming combined Rally to Restore Sanity…