Category: Social Media
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Empowered: More Platform Thinking, De-Bureaucratization and Redistribution of Agency
The new book, Empowered, by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler of Forrester Research, proclaims an inspiring message: social media is increasingly empowering customers to draw attention to their problems, and the best way for businesses to provide effective solutions is to empower their employees with the same tools. The book makes a strong case for…
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The Starbucks Digital Network, Engagement, Enlightenment and Third Places
In a recent interview at TheGrill media and entertainment conference, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz extolled the virtues of video streaming and other proprietary media that will soon be made available via free Wi-Fi on the Starbuck Digital Network. At the end of the interview, he briefly mentions the unique opportunity that Starbucks offers as a…
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Wine, Cheese, Technology and Jobs in Seattle
The Eastside Networking Event last night, organized by Andrew Vest, included an interesting mix of wines, cheeses and Seattle area technology companies looking to hire people – primarily, but not exclusively, engineers. At one point, one of the speakers asked how many people in the room were engineers, and only about one quarter or so…
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All models, studies and Wikipedia entries are wrong, some are useful
A sequence of encounters with various models, studies and other representations of knowledge lately prompted me to reflect on both the inherent limitations and the potential uses of these knowledge representations … and the problems that ensue when people don't fully appreciate either their limitations or applications … or the inherent value of being wrong.…
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Preemptive Self-Disclosure: Still Unpacking Privacy for a Networked World
I have long attributed the idea of preemptive self-disclosure – sharing information about oneself in order to forestall negative consequences from not sharing – to Paul Dourish, but over the years, I'd forgotten exactly why. A couple of recent articles I've read about disclosing what many might consider private information – coupled with the 19th…
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Platforms for Knowledge Re-Presentation: SlideShare and Scribd
As a remote "participant" at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this week, I was eager to utilize various online channels for enriching my experience of the knowledge, observations and insights shared by the presenters at the event. During the conference, I watched some of the keynotes on the web20tv LiveStream; now that the…
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Serendipity Platforms, Unintended Consequences and Explosive Positivity at Web 2.0 Expo
The keynotes on Day 1 of the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco exposed a number of common threads, perhaps best summarized by a quote attributed to Tim O'Reilly by conference co-chair Sarah Milstein: We're trying to maximize the surface area of serendipity. The official theme of the event is "Platforms for Growth", and all…
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There’s no data like more open data
When I was working on natural language processing and speech recognition systems in the 90s, one of our mantras was "there's no data like more data", i.e., all things being equal, the accuracy of recognition tends to increase with the addition of more labeled data. The Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania was…
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The further commoditization of Twitter followers
A few months ago, I wrote about the commoditization of Twitter followers, after discovering a number of automated, semi-automated and manual strategies that people – and non-human systems – were employing to artificially boost their Twitter follower counts. My earlier discovery was sparked by noticing some unusual numbers in the profiles of some recent followers…
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Some highlights from CSCW 2010
CSCW 2010 – the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work – is the first CSCW I've missed since 1998. I tried following along remotely via the Twitter #cscw2010 hashtag, which may have been the next best thing to being there … but it was a distant second. I was glad to read a few…