Social Blogging

Facebook users have been warned they will be among targets of a huge increase in cyber crime next year.

Content summary: Happy Thanksgiving to our US listeners; welcoming Mark Story as an FIR correspondent; we’re going to try Jeremy Hague’s Vodburner app for Skype video calls; Dan York reports on Google Wave and LinkedIn APIs, and has a neat TweetDeck tip; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits: When the plug is pulled on …

Much scorned, often misunderstood, Fight Club is now widely accepted as an American classic.

Hong Kong police said Friday they are hunting the creator of a second Facebook group encouraging teenagers to commit suicide.

A year after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai that killed nearly 180 people, most Pakistanis have little or nothing to say about the carnage that shook India.

In this weekly Media Literacy Digest, open education and connectivism advocate George Siemens, brings to you a great set of news stories on emerging media, communication technologies and education-related trends and how these directly impact your daily lives.

Photo credit: Michael Brown

Inside this Media Literacy Digest:

• More Scientists Treat Experiments As a Team Sport - Wall Street Journal (motto: we have never met a URL we cannot complicate) looks at the trend for More Scientists Treat Experiments as a Team Sport.
• Video Recording: Learning 2020 - University of Oslo has posted a video recording of my talk last week on Directions in Education and Learning.
• New Tools For Personal Learning - If you would like to get up to speed fairly quickly with the state of Stephen Downes‘ thinking on education, technology, and learning, have a listen to his presentation on New Tools for Personal Learning - slides and audio are available.
• Grading 2.0: Evaluation In The Digital Age - HASTAC is running a series of forums related to education / media / society. A current topic - Grading 2.0: Evaluation in the Digital Age - is being actively discussed.
• Connecting With Others… - During our LearnTrends conference last week, I experimented with the Cormier Live Slides method.
• Danah Boyd, Back Channel, Tocqueville - I have been reading a combination of Tocqueville and the Federalist papers over the last few weeks.In order for democracy to flourish, appropriate constraints are required. Danah Boyd shares her painful experience in using a back channel during a conference.

Here all the details:

A greyhound adoption group wants to silence rumors that hundreds of dogs could be put to sleep when Dairyland Greyhound Park in Kenosha closes.

Caption: Justin Bieber performs a free concert for fans at Universal CityWalk in anticipation of his new album ‘My World’ Los Angeles, California …. Teen pop sensation JUSTIN BIEBER became a Twitter.com pal of tourmate TAYLOR SWIFT’s before the singers ever met.

If you’re unhappy with your mutual fund, you can easily find another. After all, there are nearly 8,000 to choose from.

Social networking services available on the web are based upon proprietary software which have the ultimate purpose of advertisement-driven profit which implicitly demands tracking user activities. On the other hand, in order to allow people’s collective intelligence to fully develop by means of their self-organized social networks, communication in social networking software must be independent of intrinsic intermediaries, free of external influence.

Photo credit: Dzmitry Stankevich

In order to overcome these limitations, it is desirable to develop free and open source information technology tools that encourage large scale, dynamic social interactions and stimulates popular collective intelligence.

This open approach has the potential to facilitate the emergence of peer economic systems.

Rafael Pezzi introduces in this white paper a new concept for designing social networking services, not provided by centralized servers, but by nodes of the network forming a cloud of computers owned by individuals who are all joining the network.

Just like in cloud computing, where computer services are provided by an interconnected network of servers, the Social Cloud concept envisions services provided and maintained by a human-powered social network.

The basic idea is very similar to P2P file sharing, but in addition to files, people will also exchange ideas, products, and services in the physical world.

In this two-part paper you will also find information on the technical aspects for implementing a social cloud network based on existing technologies, a description of the software layer required to provide advanced functionality to the basic social networking layer, and some examples of how peers and communities can interact to generate a complex web of relationships.

In Part 2 you will also find more in-depth information on the hardware required to run the social network client and its possible implementation for communities with limited economic resources.

Here all the details:

Police in Hong Kong are trying to trace members of a group on the social networking site Facebook which appeared to call for a mass suicide.

A religious studies teacher was jailed for 32 months today for having sex with a teenage pupil she seduced on Facebook.

The title is a trick. Due to some recent system updates, my Xbox is becoming more and more like a personal computer.

Facebook has created a dual-class stock structure designed to give existing shareholders control over the company.

Caption: Alyssa Milano The launch of ‘How to Rule the World from your Couch,’ the new book by Laura Day held at STK Restaurant Los Angeles, California …. MILANO BUSTS TWITTER IMPOSTOR Actress ALYSSA MILANO has confronted an online impostor who was pretending to be her on social networking site Twitter.com. The Charmed star, who has over 400,000 …