Social Blogging

"If you don't grab this real estate, someone else will be talking for you"

Celebrities have a new home on one of the Internet's most popular social networking sites. via Montgomery Advertiser

"What we have now is a gentleman's agreement. Now, it will be up to them (gesturing towards a Confederation of Indian Industry official) to get the ball running. Maybe we will need to sign a formal pact."

It's not just wired youngsters who think in terms of online social networking - even Indian government officials are planning to use them for foreign collaborations. via India Gazette

"I heard a bottle hit the police car ... and then everybody started yelling"

POLICE are investigating how social networking websites, email and SMS messaging may have been used to draw a crowd of up to 500 teenagers to a house party, hosted by a 16-year-old boy while his parents were ... via The Age

A message to be heeded? Police are investigating how a suburban house party, hosted by a 16-year-old boy while his parents were interstate, came to draw a crowd of up to 500 mainly uninvited teenagers . via The Age

"Facebook is a platform that allows a lot of facets of your life to come together for the first time"

Lest anyone is inclined to declare 2007 the Year of Facebook, here's a clarification: The Facebook era actually started back in September 2006. via The Triangle

The pundits and pollsters were wrong. Again. So, again, was the Internet vote. After predicting a win for Sen. via CIO Insight

"Our best guess is [the owner of the one MySpace profile] just got their password and user name phished"

There's now one more reason to be security-conscious while using MySpace.com: fake Microsoft updates. via ComputerWorld

"This is why we have already registered 1.24 million users in just five months and have nearly 15,000 people signing up everyday! That's the need and we want to reach out to each of the estimated 35 million internet users in India and beyond."

Check the scribbles in your phone scrapbook, send friend requests on the wireless, have discussions in as many as eight different languages...all on India's social networking site, BigAdda, which could give ... via India Gazette

"I'm a parent of three. It's hard to know who they're contacting online"

Jeffersonville - Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter is urging state lawmakers to pass a bill that would make it illegal for convicted sex offenders to use social networking Web sites frequented by children, ... via WTHR-TV Indianapolis

"A lot of Web 2.0 applications will allow government to change the nature of what they can do, in terms of interaction, but apart from the technical side of things, there will be a greater focus on improving the business of government"

By Marcus Browne , ZDNet Australia Published on ZDNet News : Jan 10, 2008 9:09:00 AM New research has indicated that tech-savvy government departments will begin to adopt Web 2.0 applications this year. via ZDNet

For the last few days, the company has been forced to revisit an episode involving a Ms Megan Meier , a teenager taunted last year by a schoolmate's deceptive parent to the point of suicide. via Mashable

Related Story: Student rights on Facebook Original Story: Eden Prairie High School students on Facebook More than a dozen Eden Prairie High School students walked out of class to protest the school's punishment ... via KARE-TV Minneapolis

"He just didn't talk to many people"

The LHS student who allegedly wrote a "death list" with names of his fellow students is being described as an energetic but quiet who often dressed in dark clothing. via Union-Sun & Journal

In the near future, are you going to interact with computers without using a keyboard and mouse? Do you know you can get into the video publishing frenzy with just a cool $120 camcorder?

Photo credit: Victor Gmyria - edited by Robin Good

How about mobile phone projectors, have you yet seen one of these? Is the IT department of your organization going to be soon replaced by utility computing companies? These and a lot more are the new media and communication technology-related news that registered the most interest with George Siemens' weekly "making sense of new technologies and media" report.

But there is a lot more interesting stuff indeed:

a) Scott Karp, traditional media need to reinvent itself could serve as model for what is coming next in the world of education.

b) Challenges ahead as the existing and growing pattern seeing third world countries export their brightest to the first world is going to gradually change as access to higher education is provided through the internet.

c) Adoption cycle for new media technologies and their uses getting faster and faster.

d) If you haven't yet heard about it, Google Custom Search allows to create custom search engines that search only the sources you select. Lijit and Rollyo are other similar tools that can help you achieve the same.

Here in more detail, George Siemens analysis and reflections on some of the most interesting media and technologies emerged in the last week:

"Celebrities will figure out how to use their blogs to beat the paparazzi at their own game"

Celebrities have a new home on one of the Internet's most popular social networking sites. via Detroit Free Press