Social Blogging

A Facebook page devoted to missing mom Susan Powell has disappeared, and now her family and friends are asking the social networking site to restore the page.

Share + Comments Jan 29, 2010 6:00 am US/Central CHICAGO Parade? They don’t need no stinkin’ parade.

Criminals are getting smarter and smarter. So, these days, it isn’t enough to just run security software on your computer.

Posting jokes, insults, or even pictures on Facebook might seem like fun, but did you ever think about the fact that it could cost you your job?Whether it’s Facebook, MySpace or Twitter, any comment posted on any social network can cause you to lose your job.

Security specialists have turned their attention to vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash-driven websites.

Is online collaborative writing the recipe to change the academic publishing process? Are blogs and wikis going to subvert the way academics publish and distribute their work?

Photo credit: Tecnologia Pyme.

Academics have long operated within a system of peer reviewed scholarship. The research process is seen as incomplete until a group of anonymous experts has commented on and approved a paper prepared according to specific criteria. Only then can the work be published in an academic journal.

Publishing a piece of research in such a way demonstrates the author’s legitimacy within a community of scholars, and such publications are the basis for advancement in any academic field.

This has been the story until now. But what if this oligarchic publishing model were challenged by a new collaborative paradigm that involved a larger group of people to review and legitimize an academic paper?

The academia could use well-established online collaboration tools like blogs and wikis to tear down those self-erected walls that separate scholars from the rest of the world and allows professors to receive feedback and critiques only by other so-called “experts“.

In this fascinating article, Janelle Ward tries to make greater sense of the strengths and weaknesses of the current academic publishing model while suggesting a new approach to academic publishing that leverages the power of the web.

Here all the details:

The Crown is seeking up to two years less a day in jail for a shooting victim who tried to buy a 9 mm handgun from an undercover cop on Facebook.

Coca-Cola today launched a social media campaign on Facebook that teases its upcoming Super Bowl commercials while raising funds for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

Jan. 27 — Gina Bianchini, chief executive officer of Ning, and Patrick Liotard-Vogt, chairman of aSmallWorld.net, talk with Bloomberg’s Margaret Brennan about the impact social-media networking has on global business growth.

Many people have over 1,000 friends on Facebook — but experts say our brains can’t cope with more than 150.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal says the Facebook and MySpace social networking Internet sites have removed the accounts of 150 sex offenders based in the state, after reviewing information provided by police.

Social television is an emerging new media term used to refer to a new form of television technology that supports and integrates social interaction, recommendations, ratings, reviews and interactive participation among viewers via text chat, audio or even video-conferencing.

Photo credit: Michele Piacquadio

While the social element of TV is not new, the term social TV is relatively new and used to describe a new breed of TV services that integrate other communication services like voice, chat, context awareness, peer ratings and integration with social media on the web, to support an active TV experience rather than a passive one.

This is why Social TV is a revolutionary way to rethink television as we know it. Social television leverages and integrates the power of social networking to create a new type of highly interactive, participative and engaging user-directed experience.

Think how great it would be to be able to watch only television content that truly matches your interests and passions, with a little help (visible and invisible) from your friends!

Comment back on shows, participate in the backchannel and say what you think, chat along with your buddies trying to guess the right answer while Googling around… or receive and read live recommendations on what is hot, review your favorite TV shows… wow, it is like having all of the benefits of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and instant messaging integrated in your TV experience.

This is why it appears that as relevance, interaction and personalization have been the key factors motivating millions of people to start shifting away from TV and toward social media, it is likely that before the television industry finds itself bankrupt, it will try anything it can to integrate new media technologies (such as P2P) and social media approaches to extend and rejuvenate its value proposition, costs and scalability to its existing audiences.

But social TV is not a revolution just for viewers.

Social TV is also a big marketing opportunity, providing a new way to approach potential customers and build relationships based not on interruption and a lucky probabilistic match, but based on affinity, value-sharing, participation and exchange.

In addition, companies that can access such personalized user preferences can better engage them by utilizing less intrusive and interruptive approaches than present-day TV advertising, by opting to participate and provide valuable relevant content, services, tools or social facilities that, without breaking my personal privacy, match my actual key interests and needs while allowing me to share and have my social world participate and contribute to it.

Richard G. Kastelein is the exploring pioneer on this emerging social media frontier, and here is his new report on Social TV:

KATE ZERNIKE January 25, 2010 A Tea Party convention billed as the coming together of the grass-roots groups that began sprouting up around the country a year ago is unraveling as sponsors and participants pull out to protest its expense and express concerns about ‘profiteering.’ The convention’s difficulties highlight the fractiousness of the Tea …

Ministry of Defence staff have leaked secret information onto social-networking sites sixteen times in 18 months.

Facebook has stripped a webpage used by a murderer to taunt his victim’s family from the internet.