Social Blogging

Alicia Marie Martin’s Facebook posts unfold like a typical story of young adulthood: hopes and minidramas as well as tidbits about her work at one of Texas’ largest animal shelters.

As more employees visit social networking sites while at work, network managers are seeing a rise in accidental malware infections known as drive-by download attacks .

With all the hoopla surrounding Twitter these days, I thought it might be useful to devote a Bugs & Fixes column to this social networking site.

Paris - President Barack Obama on Sunday wrapped up a Middle East and Europe tour steeped in history and intense diplomacy, confident he has cleared the “debris” thwarting US relations with the Muslim world.

A western Minnesota prairie town put together the celebration of its founding in the 19th century by using a very 21st-century approach.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom are blazing a new trail in political discourse from opposite sides of the country as they build huge Internet followings on Twitter’s fast-growing social network.

Hi. This is my first time sharing about Twitter. I’ve tried to keep up with all these social networking fads, even getting a Facebook page.

A Tampa International Airport detective says a social networking Web site helped her nab a suspected jewelry thief.

“Media literacy is an expanded conceptualization of literacy. By transforming the process of media consumption into an active and critical process, people gain greater awareness of the potential for misrepresentation and manipulation, and understand the role of mass media and participatory media in constructing views of reality.” (Source: Wikipedia)

Photo credit: mseyfang

Inside this Media Literacy Digest:

• Where We Are Spending Time… - Facebook and Twitter are recording enormous increases in amount of time spent on their sites by visitors.
• Privacy Online: Google Is Watching - Offline, very few things are private - it wouldn’t take someone much time to find out my daily commute, coffee drinking habits, etc. Online, however, this information is more readily available. We can discover personal information about others with very little effort.
• Investigating The Application of Social Software To Support Networked Learning - …suggests that “university students need to learn new network and software literacies to become digital citizens”.
• Google Wave - While Google has somewhat stalled in innovating in search, they have (with Apps, Docs, Knol, and now Wave) started to position themselves as a productivity and collaboration company.
• We Are Witnessing The Passing of Working-Class Masculinity - We are witnessing historical shifts as society re-creates value points not based solely on physical work and property.
• Modernizing Corporate Training - this post on modernizing corporate training is worth a read, even if only for the irony. It explores the history of corporate learning from 1980’s to today.
• How Much Information? - …information workers, who comprise about 63% of the U.S. work force, are each bombarded with 1.6 gigabytes of information on average every day through emails, reports, blogs, text messages, calls and more.

Here all the details:

A former emergency medical technician arrested after allegedly snapping a photo of a murder victim in March and posting it on his Facebook page, has been arrested on charges of official misconduct, according to District Attorney Daniel Donovan.

As power is moving away from hierarchically-structured organizations to newer forms of collaborative, bottom-up, open-sharing approaches, what is organizational leadership to do to embrace such change without losing complete control of its traditional mandates?

Photo credit: Stelian Ion

New media technologies have ushered us into a new extended environment in which the ability to share, exchange, collaborate and reach out are rewarded spontaneously by the system itself. Inside traditional organizations the forces of hierarchical control and bottom-up spontaneous sharing have finally come to collide on the main deck.

In other words, hierarchical control meets distributed and open self-organizing systems. The tower, meets the cloud. But this needs not be an either / or choice. “It could be a future of and-and-and, where both forms continue to co-exist peacefully.”

The “tower” of hierarchy control and the “cloud” of open collaboration are the two extremes of a new continuum in which organizations need yet to learn how to move swiftly.

Today, There are indeed huge opportunities awaiting for those organizations which have not only the courage to acknowledge these deep transformational changes but which have also the will to embrace and integrate these new trends in their own way of working.

Those institutions still resisting these changes are well set on a tragic path of increasing problems, internal tragedies and failures which will become more evident as the two opposing approaches grow further in an open contrast.

On the other hand, our culture, outside large organizations has already converted itself to the new way, embracing in most of its aspects, the distributed power of the “cloud“.

“All of you have your own hierarchical organizations – because that’s how organizations have always been run.

Yet each of you are surrounded by your own clouds: community organizations (both in the real world and online), bulletin boards, blogs, and all of the other Web 2.0 supports for the sharing of connectivity, information, knowledge and power.“

If your organization is evaluating how to best tackle such strategic issues and approaches to power control, I suggest you reserve a little extra time to immerse yourself in the fantastic journey that Mark Pesce has created in the following essay on Sharing Power inside Organizations.

Reading it and having those in power reflect upon it may open some new doors to transforming organizations to leverage the powerful changes already taking place in their internal ranks rather than succumb tragically to painful internal revolutions which only need a little extra time to fully come into full bloom.

Is your institution ready to adapt itself and find its way forward into this emerging approach to open sharing power? If not, here’s an inspiring tale:

The manager of the St. Louis Cardinals is suing Twitter. Tony LaRussa claims someone set up a false account under his name and his reputation has been damaged as a result.

www.vreebit.com is a new website coming at the end of July - Vreebit is now accepting pre-signups. If you log on to the site now you can reserve your username and your free website.

Vreebit combines a lot of the features of Facebook, Yahoo Groups, LinkedIn, Google Docs - great for organizing, sharing, advocating. Looks very cool.

The Chinese government cracks down on social networking sites this week.

The Twitter phone isn’t expected to arrive until the holiday season, but here’s the INQ1, or Facebook phone, shown at CES in January.