From danah boyd’s “Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8: Writing Community Into Being on Social Network Sites” (First Monday: December 2006)
John’s reference to “gateway Friends” concerns a specific technological affordance unique to Friendster. Because the company felt it would make the site more intimate, Friendster limits users from surfing to Profiles beyond four degrees (Friends [...]
Posted on December 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, business | No Comments »
From danah boyd’s “Facebook’s ‘Privacy Trainwreck’: Exposure, Invasion, and Drama” (8 September 2006):
Why does everyone assume that Friends equals friends? Here are some of the main reasons why people friend other people on social network sites:
1. Because they are actual friends
2. To be nice to people that you barely [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, language & literature | No Comments »
Robert Salisbury
From “Man scammed by Craigslist ad” (The Seattle Times: 24 March 2008):
The ads popped up Saturday afternoon, saying the owner of a Jacksonville home was forced to leave the area suddenly and his belongings, including a horse, were free for the taking, said Jackson County sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Colin Fagan.
But Robert Salisbury had no [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, law, security | No Comments »
From Tim O’Reilly’s “Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing” (O’Reilly Radar: 26 October 2008):
Since “cloud” seems to mean a lot of different things, let me start with some definitions of what I see as three very distinct types of cloud computing:
1. Utility computing. Amazon’s success in providing virtual machine instances, storage, and computation [...]
Posted on October 31st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
From Bruce Sterling’s “Viridian Note 00459: Emerging Technology 2006” (The Viridian Design Movement: March 2006):
Here we’ve got the canonical Tim O’Reilly definition of Web 2.0:
“Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a [...]
Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, commonplace book, technology | Comments Off
From Clay Shirky’s “Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software” (Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet: 5 November 2004):
This possibility of adding novel social components to old tools presents an enormous opportunity. To take the most famous example, the Slashdot moderation system puts the ability to rate comments into the hands of [...]
Posted on August 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, history, technology | Comments Off
From Clay Shirky’s “Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software” (Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet: 5 November 2004):
Learning From Flame Wars
Mailing lists were the first widely available piece of social software. … Mailing lists were also the first widely analyzed virtual communities. …
Flame wars are not surprising; they are one of [...]
Posted on August 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, history | Comments Off
From Charles Arthur’s “What is the 1% rule?” (Guardian Unlimited: 20 July 2006):
It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.
It’s a meme that [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, business, technology | Comments Off
From Reuters’s “YouTube serves up 100 mln videos a day” (16 July 2006):
YouTube, the leader in Internet video search, said on Sunday viewers have are now watching more than 100 million videos per day on its site, marking the surge in demand for its “snack-sized” video fare.
Since springing from out of nowhere late last year, [...]
Posted on July 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Webster U: infosec management, business, technology | Comments Off
From Nate Mook’s “Cross-Site Scripting Worm Hits MySpace” (Beta News: 13 October 2005):
One clever MySpace user looking to expand his buddy list recently figured out how to force others to become his friend, and ended up creating the first self-propagating cross-site scripting (XSS) worm. In less than 24 hours, “Samy” had amassed over 1 million [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, security, technology | Comments Off
From Annalee Newitz’s Cracking the Code to Romance (Wired: June 2004):
Moore’s buddy Matt Chisholm chimes in to tell me about a similar hack, a JavaScript app he wrote with Moore that works on Friendster. It mines for information about anyone who looks at his profile and clicks through to his Web site. “I get their [...]
Posted on June 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, security, technology | Comments Off
From John Diamond and Leslie Cauley’s “Pre-9/11 records help flag suspicious calling” (USA TODAY: 22 May 2006):
Armed with details of billions of telephone calls, the National Security Agency used phone records linked to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to create a template of how phone activity among terrorists looks, say current and former intelligence officials [...]
Posted on June 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, law, politics, technology | Comments Off
From Mark Granovetter’s “The Strength Of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited” [Sociological Theory, Volume 1 (1983), 201-233.]:
The argument asserts that our acquaintances (weak ties) are less likely to be socially involved with one another than are our close friends (strong ties).Thus the set of people made up of any individual and his or her [...]
Posted on May 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society | Comments Off
From Clay Shirky’s “File-sharing Goes Social“:
The RIAA has taken us on a tour of networking strategies in the last few years, by constantly changing the environment file-sharing systems operate in. In hostile environments, organisms often adapt to become less energetic but harder to kill, and so it is now. With the RIAA’s waves of legal [...]
Posted on May 9th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, business, law, technology | Comments Off
From David P. Reed’s “That Sneaky Exponential - Beyond Metcalfe’s Law to the Power of Community Building“:
Bob Metcalfe, inventor of the Ethernet, is known for pointing out that the total value of a communications network grows with the square of the number of devices or people it connects. This scaling law, along with Moore’s Law, [...]
Posted on May 9th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, commonplace book, technology | Comments Off
Disemvoweling: removing the vowels from a message board troll’s posts. First performed (to my knowledge) by Teresa Nielsen Hayden at http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/001551.html#001551.
Related posts
Word of the day: Froschmäusekrieg
Why people “friend” others on social networks
What’s a socio-technical system?
The value of Group-Forming Networks
The NSA and threats to privacy
Posted on April 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: word of the day | Comments Off
From Ulises Ali Mejias’ “A del.icio.us study: Bookmark, Classify and Share: A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community“:
A socio-technical system is conformed of hardware, software, physical surroundings, people, procedures, laws and regulations, and data and data structures.
Related posts
When newspapers began to cover trials
What is a socio-technical system?
The Mann Act as problematic law
The [...]
Posted on April 29th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, commonplace book, technology | Comments Off
From Ulises Ali Mejias’ “A del.icio.us study: Bookmark, Classify and Share: A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community“:
This principle of distribution is at work in socio-technical systems that allow users to collaboratively organize a shared set of resources by assigning classifiers, or tags, to each item. The practice is coming to be [...]
Posted on April 29th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From Ron Dulin’s “A Tale in the Desert“:
A Tale in the Desert is set in ancient Egypt. Very ancient Egypt: The only society to be found is that which has been created by the existing players. Your mentor will show you how to gather materials and show you the basics of learning and construction. These [...]
Posted on April 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, commonplace book, education, technology | Comments Off
From Julian Dibbell’s “A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society“:
After all, anyone the least bit familiar with the workings of the new era’s definitive technology, the computer, knows that it operates on a principle impracticably difficult to [...]
Posted on April 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, commonplace book, language & literature, technology, writing ideas | Comments Off