Web 2.0 Analysis and Statistics

reposted from: http://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/index.php/2007/07/19/web-20-analysis-and-statistics/

Web 2.0 podcast - a beginners guide (particularly for educators) to Web 2.0 - download mp3

Students are increasingly becoming familiar with using social networking and other interactive web services such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube. This phenomenon has important implications for educational institutions as students increasingly expect such services to be mirrored in the delivery of courses.

Web 2.0 Analysis and Statistics

You may be interested in my report on Web2.0 take-up and usage which I submitted to JISC a few weeks ago. It’s analysis of some data that blogged back in March 2007. I included the responses to the data in the report. It was all very ‘participatory’. The report can be downloaded from here: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digital_repositories/spiresurvey.doc

(copy on CGS PC)

Social net offers new perspective

reposted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6989327.stm

Social net offers new perspective

Social networking has extended friendships around the globe

Columnist Bill Thompson asks whether social networking could underpin a new politics of connection.

When BBC reporter Michael Buerk brought us film of the starving children of Ethiopia in 1984 it motivated the country to action.

In 1985 Bob Geldof and Midge Ure's Live Aid raised millions of pounds, and the attendant publicity put humanitarian aid onto the agenda of the senior politicians of the day, forcing Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe to take seriously an issue which they had not, hitherto, seen as a high priority.

Twenty years later Geldof was at it again, though the cultural and political impact of Live 8 was diminished for many by the sight of too many millionaire rock stars seeking to revive their careers on the back of the world's poor.

But something else had changed. In 2005 we didn't need the Six O'Clock News to bring us pictures from Darfur or Bangladesh, and we didn't need the journalistic talents of Buerk and others to tell the stories in a way that made it impossible not to respond.

The internet, through the web, instant messaging, email and its other applications, had brought the world into our living rooms - and our offices, classrooms, cafes, clubs, bars and railway carriages.

The last decade of the twentieth century saw a transformation in the forms of communication available to the lucky billion with easy access to the network, and the impact on the way we perceived the world was immense.

Greater understanding

Online tools has transformed the way we view major events

Those new technologies kept me glued to my computer in Cambridge on that sun-filled New York morning six years ago when the Twin Towers fell, watching the TV feed, reading the news websites and talking online with friends in London, the USA and elsewhere.

Richard was in Sydney, Australia, but his colleagues from the US office worked in the World Trade Center, and I shared his concern and grief, telling him what I could learn from the BBC and other sources unavailable to him.

Now the power of that technology is even greater, and its impact on the way we understand the world will go far beyond letting us see our holiday destinations on Google Earth or finding the best bar in Brooklyn via Steven Johnson's outside.in.

The world wide web has always been about more than just online publishing and Tim Berners-Lee, its inventor, has often spoken of its importance in promoting greater understanding between people.

Now the growth of online social networks is transforming the web's ability to teach us about one another, not in broad terms but as individuals, with our hopes, aspirations and separate but equally important lives.

I have 332 Facebook friends, which my girlfriend claims makes me a 'facebook tart'. It's true that

a significant number of them are people I have never met and am unlikely ever to bump into, but that doesn't mean that I can't enjoy being part of this disparate social network, or enjoy knowing who is reading what, which events they are attending or what their problems and triumphs are.

The people I see and chat to on Facebook, and on MySpace and Orkut and the other social sites I belong to, are real people.

New friends

The distribution of my friends reflects the distribution of the network Bill Thompson

I share in their daily lives, and learn something of what it is like to be an expatriate Iranian in Canada (hi, Hoder), or a Delhi blogger like Amit or a Nigerian journalist like Edetaen.

The distribution of my friends reflects the distribution of the network and of the advanced technology needed to post on a blog, chat online or maintain a profile on one of the social sites, but it is already changing as the technology spreads further.

Smartphones, perfectly capable of accessing Facebook, are spreading through sub-Saharan Africa as people realise that they are cheaper, easier to operate and more usable than desktop PCs.

Eventually, the people with the phones are going to start using these new sites, and I imagine many more listeners to the BBC's Digital Planet - a radio programme devoted to the way technology touches lives around the world - will come online and join in the conversation. As one of Digital Planet's regular contributors, I hope some of them will add me as a friend on one of the social sites.

Students coming back to UK universities from gap years abroad will find that their friend lists include mates from Somalia, Siam and Syria, and anyone with even a passing interest in global politics will find that their friendship networks cover the globe.

What will happen when these people start dying in famines or wars, or when the climate changes caused by global warming lead to floods and droughts and natural disasters?

What happens when the photos on Facebook and Flickr show devastated crops and starving families - and these people are not just faces on the television but old friends, people whose likes and dislikes and reading habits and favourite films we know and share?

The world is different when it's the people you know, and I do not think we will be able to resist the forces of change when our friends are dying on screen, in front of us, and we know that we could do something but have decided not to.

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Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.

Get a (second) life

Why are some people so worked up about virtual online worlds such as Second Life? They are just a delightful bit of fun.

January 27, 2007 08:50 AM |

reposted from: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk & view Readers comments
my highlights / edits

I have an alternate identity. Some evenings I am Misty Trilling, a girl who likes nothing better than to put on her pink fluffy bunny slippers and fly over chimney tops looking for mischief. Yes, I am a Second Lifer, one of the growing network of users of the online virtual world currently attracting a whirlwind of attention. Believe some commentators and it's all about making money, whether by big corporations with imaginary offices or the lurid trade in virtual sex. To others it is a disengagement from reality, heralding another nail in the coffin for society, and the rest find it so tedious they can't imagine why anyone but the gawkiest of geeks would bother.

Well I bother, and here's why. It's fun. I've jumped off the Eiffel Tower, tangoed the night away, got a pet kitten, and tried to steal a Harrier jump jet. I've got into fights, refused to pole dance, and worn a coot on my head like a hat. I've even borrowed my friend's login and gambled all her money away at virtual poker while she was cleaning the bathroom, but no one's supposed to know about that.

I've met loads of people along the way. Mostly cybergoths, dominatixes and small furry-tailed animals wearing trousers and deck shoes. But who am I to judge? That's the beauty of it. I can dress as ludicrously as I want and other residents have no idea who is at the other end of the computer.

It would be easy to imagine that the anonymity this brings would encourage us to break free from normal social constraints but that's not necessarily the case. Second Life residents spend a lot of time and money perfecting their avatars, and they attach real feelings and emotions to them. It's not hard to see why. A friend once phoned me in a blind panic because she had arranged to meet a colleague within Second Life. Upon logging in, however, she realised she had taken her avatar's clothes off when feeling a bit tipsy and experimental on Christmas day and couldn't work out how to put them back on again. It may be far removed from actually being caught without your undercrackers on by your boss but it conjures up similar emotions. It's the same logic that made me turn down the chance to pole dance for money. I felt that somehow it was degrading to my pixelated self, so she and I remain poor but virtuous. Real life principles still apply.

I've had my run ins with the darker side of Life. Exploring a wasteland one day we spied a pair of flag-waving skinheads in the distance. Suddenly one was in front of me, all tight jeans, tattoos and bovver boots, face pressed up close to mine, typing "u see this baseball bat? I'm gonna smash yr face in with it". It was an absurd situation, especially when you consider that avatars in Second Life are unable to lift their arms without a specially written script and are even less able to inflict damage on one another. He didn't seem overly taken with me pointing this out, however, and accused me of having "no arse" - which confused me as I wasn't sure if he meant me or my avatar. The whole sorry escapade only came to an end when a sympathetic bystander dropped a yacht on his head and he teleported away. I sometimes wonder what sort of spotty 13-year-old would sit at home in their bedroom thinking it might be a good idea to pretend to be a skinhead on the internet, but I'd rather they played out their fantasies there than went out to bother the rabbits at the local pets' corner. That's the thing about virtual worlds, they allow us to play out roles in a safe, limited environment that we can just switch off when we've had enough.

And I do switch it off. I confess that I'm a fairly heavy internet user. I share my thoughts, photos, videos and choice of bunny slippers with people across the world. I've made friends online, met boyfriends, even made enemies that way, and all the while managed to lead what resembles a perfectly normal real life. I have a job, lovely friends and my bathroom is as clean as it's ever going to be, even should I have an epiphany and throw my overworked laptop out the window. Second Life is just another delightful opportunity to muck about. Anyone who claims otherwise gets a yacht dropped on their head.

the ever-accelerating Empowerment of people

Reposted from: http://edge.org/q2007/q07_13.html
my highlights in blue

BRIAN ENO
Artist; Composer; Recording Producer: U2, Talking Heads, Paul Simon; Recording Artist

And Now the Good News

Things change for the better either because something went wrong or because something went right. Recently we've seen an example of the former, and this failures fill me with optimism.

The acceptance of the reality of global warming has, in the words of Sir Nicholas Stern in his report on climate change to the British government, shown us 'the greatest and widest ranging market failure ever seen'.

The currency of conservatism for the last century has been that markets are smarter than governments: and this creed has reinforced the conservative resistance to anything resembling binding international agreements. The suggestion that global warming represents a failure of the market is therefore important. Technical solutions will hopefully be found, but the process will need to be primed and stoked and enforced by legislation that would be regarded as big government socialism in the present climate. The future may be a bit more like Sweden and a bit less like America.

If a single first instance of global governance proves successful, it will strengthen its appeal as a way of addressing other problems —such as weapons control, energy management, money-laundering, conflict resolution, people-trafficking, slavery, and poverty. It will become increasingly difficult for countries to stay outside of future treaties like Kyoto—partly because of international pressure but increasingly because of pressure from their own populations.

Which brings me to my main reason for optimism: the ever-accelerating empowerment of people. The world is on the move, communicating and connecting and coalescing into influential blocks which will move power away from national governments with their short time horizons and out into vaguer, more global consensual groups. Something like real democracy (and a fair amount of interim chaos) could be on the horizon.

The Internet is catalyzing knowledge, innovation and social change, and, in manifestations such as Wikipedia, proving that there are other models of social and cultural evolution: that you don't need centralised top-down control to produce intelligent results.

The bottom-up lesson of Darwinism, so difficult for previous generations, comes more naturally to the current generation. There is a real revolution in thinking going on at all cultural levels: people comfortably cooperate to play games for which the rules have not yet been written with people they've never met, listen to music and look at art which is emergent, not predetermined, and accept the wiki model of the open-source evolution of knowledge.

All these represent dramatic and promising changes in the way people are thinking about how things work, how things come into being and how they evolve.

Metcalfe's Law of Minds

Reposted from: http://edge.org/q2007/q07_11.html my highlights in blue

CHRIS ANDERSON
Editor in Chief, Wired Magazine; Author, The Long Tail

Metcalfe's Law of Minds
Our species is unique in its ability to use communications to spread learning across populations, allowing us to get smarter and more capable far more quickly than evolution alone would allow. What makes me continually hopeful is that those tools of communications continue to get so much better, so much faster. Anyone who can explore Wikipedia and not be both humbled and filled with confidence in the collective potential in the people all around us is a cynic indeed. And we've only just scratched the surface of such networked intelligence.

Metcalfe's Law says that value of a networks grows with the square of the number of nodes. Today's Web, which is as much about contributing as it is consuming — two-way links, as opposed to the old one-way networks of broadcast and traditional media — allows the same to apply to people. Connecting minds allows our collective intelligence to grow with each person who joins the global conversation. This information propagation process, which was once found in just a few cultures of shared knowledge, such as academic science, is now seen online in everything from hobbies to history. The result, I think, will be the fastest increasing in human knowledge in history.

This morning I was explaining to a nine-year-old about Moore's Law and the magical power of the continuous learning curve. "Will it ever end?" he asked. "I don't see why it should," I answered. That's optimism for you.

The Online Social Networking Revolution

Great series of articles in 14th September New Scientist magazine explaining the rise and rise of Online Social Networking titled "Living Online". Discusses phenomenum of myspace.com, MSN Messenger etc.