The Media Lab just put together a new consortium called Viral Communications. When i first heard the title, i became super psyched – someone is finally studying digital virality heads on! But alas, it seems that the focus is to create technology that permits virality rather than actually trying to figure out what makes things viral online. Is anyone other than Jonah Peretti studying meme spread and virality?
Author Archives: zephoria
halloween vaginas
Ah, V-Day….
furries
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Tonight, when you see all of those people dressed up as cute furry animals out at the Castro or romping around town, you may think that they are all innocent, or trying to make the kids happy. But little do you know about the fun they have behind the costume. So, are you wearing fur tonite?
social informatics
A while back, i was grumbling about the not-so-social focus of information retrieval and a rocking woman wrote to tell me about social informatics (with lots of resources). I must look into this further…. [Oh, and one of my classes just switched focuses for the remainder of the semester to be concerned with social technology… i am a very happy camper.]
privacy & friendster
The Wall Street Journal published an article today entitled “Having Lots of Online Friends Could Mean Privacy Trouble.” The article articulates some of the institutional privacy concerns that some users do have and suggests that more users should have.
Now, i do believe in privacy concerns and i’m genuinely worried about institutional misuses of private data, but i’m not the average consumers. As we all know, consumers will happily sell their privacy. They don’t understand the implications of this. And thus, there’s no incentive for corporations to not try to collect it and make money off of it. This is where the government should step in. But since the government is controlled by corporations….
Anyhow, i won’t follow that rant.
The big thing to realize is that most consumers are far more concerned with local privacy, or intimacy concerns. They’re worried about their friends taking their information out of context, about their mom seeing something intended for their friends, of a future boss seeing a drunken picture. Consumers are far more concerned with those who have limited local authority over them than institutional authority. [Yes, here’s an opportunity for a study…]
a 2nd WSJ article
Powerful Connections is another Wall Street Journal article on Friendster. This one focuses on the attraction of venture capital.
Venture Blog has a great little rant on these articles (and other good links and business comments)
yafro
Hot or Not folks just launched a neat little YASNS site: Yafro. My favorite is that they have this bit at the bottom called “Friend Trends” that lets you see all of the new F-o-Fs, testimonials, etc.
first, admitting suckage
second, admitting that i made up the word suckage, except that it seems to be common vernacular. Or at least results in 19,200 Google finds. As if that defines common… well….
*ANYHOW* So, i’ve been a bad blogger. Ack. (But i’m not a blogger…. more on that in a moment.) I’ve been dreadfully busy, overworked, stretched thin and otherwise feeling like my brain has been split into a million pieces, isn’t operating efficiently, critically or otherwise providing useful thoughts. Lately, i’ve been “blogging” in my notebook because i can’t deal with the issues of presenting things publicly. (More on that in a moment too…)
Anyhow, i’ve decided that it’s time to pour my rambles into my blog. But this means that i’m going to be a bad citizen and confuse your RSS feeds. Because i’m going to put things up in the date range that they belong in. But, you can feel free to ignore them. Most of them are danah rambles anyhow.
visualizations, INWYK
OOhh. It’s Not What You Know is the first site to integrate a visualization tool into your network. When you login, click on “Network” and you can see your version. Mine:
Institute for the Future
Today, i spoke on a panel at the Institute for the Future’s gathering of its sponsors. It was odd to be there because it had a flavor of Media Lab sponsor events, only i was an invited speaker not a slave doing demos who had been up for weeks on end. The Institute is a great resource for thought on technology – where it’s headed, what people are doing with it, why… Basically, it’s a collection of really really smart people who get to think through tough problems. [Needless to say, it sounds like an ideal job for a researcher.]
The whole event was around the ideas of cybernomads… how is mobility changing the way we operate?
For the panel, i had the great opportunity to ask questions of Schuyler Earle. He’s been working on this project called noCat Wireless which is a community of people in Sebastapol working on gaining wireless. It’s fascinating because we always talk about technology letting us remove geography from the equation, but this project allows us to connect to people in a given region. It’s also built a “community” through a traditional form… diverse collections of people gathering for a shared need.
The other fun thing about the panel was that i actually had the opportunity to speak with Howard Rheingold (who was on my panel). I very much enjoy Howard’s synthesis of ideas so having the opportunity to get face time was just fantastic.
Anyhow, it was great to spend the last two days thinking about the future, critiquing conceptual models. I felt like i was back at Intel. I forgot how much fun that was.