Clay Shirky: How the Internet will (one day) transform government [1,2,3] [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Sep 26, 2012 - 46 comments

"Once universally praised for founder Brad Fitzpatrick’s open-source platform and commitment to a free userbase—he once vowed that LiveJournal would always have basic (non-paying or ad-supported) accounts—LiveJournal is known these days mostly for being popular in Russia (the Russian name for blogging is “LJ.”) and Singapore, and for housing gossip blog Oh No They Didn’t."

What happened?
posted by rollick on Sep 7, 2012 - 147 comments

New Google+ Study Reveals Minimal Social Activity, Weak User Engagement Fast Company summarizes a new study from RJMetrics that looks at public posts, +1s, replies and reshares on Google+. It concludes "the average post on Google+ has less than one +1, less than one reply, and less than one re-share." Google replies that public posts are a poor metric of user activity; Fast Company replies that "Google has refused to provide clear figures and metrics for its social network's active user base" and links to Danny Sullivan's "brilliant rundown of Google's lack of transparency on the subject" - If Google’s Really Proud Of Google+, It Should Share Some Real User Figures.
There was also Wil Wheaton's recent angry "Oh, go fuck yourself, Google" rant in response to a recent experiment replacing YouTube's "like" button with a Google+ button for a small number of users, thus requiring them to sign up for Google+ before they can 'like' a YouTube video. Is Google Forcing Google+ Down People’s Throats?
posted by mediareport on May 21, 2012 - 205 comments

Wael Ghonim: Inside the Egyptian revolution [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Mar 4, 2011 - 8 comments

How (crowd) curation is making a comeback in search and how Facebook is using it to "remake whole industries."
posted by kliuless on Jan 16, 2011 - 27 comments

Right Wing astroturfing A non-scientific analysis of the patterns in forum board discussions on a variety of topics. The gist: discussions of issues in which there's money at stake (like climate change, public health and corporate tax avoidance) are often characterised by amazing levels of abuse and disruption by rightwing libertarians who are pro-corporate, anti-tax, anti-regulation. Discussions of issues in which there's little money at stake tend to be a lot more civilised than debates about issues where companies stand to lose or gain billions.
posted by novenator on Dec 20, 2010 - 79 comments

The Wall Street Journal's What They Know blog is charged with determining what information marketers are capable of learning about internet users through tracking technology. This weekend, they took aim at Facebook, after their investigation discovered that many popular apps on the social-networking site, including those by Zynga, have been transmitting identifying information in the form of User ID's to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, even if a user has enabled strict privacy settings. Additional analysis. Response post on Facebook's Developer Blog. Forbes' blogger Kashmir Hill asks if the WSJ is overreacting, and Techcrunch notes that the severity and risks of UID transferral are still being debated.
posted by zarq on Oct 18, 2010 - 56 comments

Kate Bolick tells a story of Facebook voyeurism.
posted by reenum on Oct 13, 2010 - 16 comments

StumbleUpon is now bigger than del.icio.us, counting 1.3 million users. Is it just another social booknetworking site, or a way for me to finally "surf" the intertubes? Just ten more Stumbles before bed, and this time I'm serious.
posted by Area Control on Jan 17, 2007 - 37 comments

Big Brother 101 -- Could your social networks brand you an enemy of the state? (Popular Science Mag) And one staffer finds out it might--due to a connection to the Buffalo Six. Think 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, but with tapping and surveillance and worse at the other end.
posted by amberglow on Sep 22, 2006 - 15 comments

The Internet and our social and psychological well-being : This older study correlates Internet use with declining social relationships and isolation. A more recent study (PDF) shows that the Internet has changed and positively affects social relationships.
posted by lpctstr; on Aug 31, 2006 - 6 comments

Visualising Networks is fun. So are Monkey Networks (ppt). Dolphin Networks (pdf). Ant networks can aide network design. Does the Brain Work Like the Internet? Can the Internet Think? The Social Superorganism and its Global Brain? Webog Inequality. A City Is Not a Tree. The I Ching, a network of 384 pathways. The Whole, the Parts, and the Holes. Heterarchy, the secret of Japan, Inc.? Sense/non-sense;hierarchy/heterarchy... Heterachy and Heirarchy: Two Complimenatary categorises of description (pdf). Summary: "Our most significant problems cannot be solved at the same level of thinking at which we produced them." (attributed to Einstein)
posted by MetaMonkey on Jan 26, 2006 - 5 comments

A rebuttal to the "cult of Turn Off Your Computer," or as might be more familiar here: "It's Only a Website."
Curious about others' views on this. I've been on-line for so long(shut up, not consecutively), avatars/personas/whateveryoucallem just seem like silly extra work to me, outside appropriate contexts like on-line RPGs and the like.
posted by Su on Aug 11, 2002 - 16 comments

Maybe there's hope for our social lives after all. A new study (complete report here) seems to directly contradict February's study which claimed that the Internet makes people antisocial hermits. This new study is particularly focused on the habits of women who use the web but offers many interesting numbers that apply across gender lines, i.e. "Nearly three-quarters of Internet users (72%) say they visited family or friends "yesterday," while 61% of nonusers report they had visited someone".
posted by Sapphireblue on May 10, 2000 - 2 comments