Accept no substitutes

Category: Virtual Communities (Page 12 of 20)

Links and notes from JOMC 191.8 Virtual Communities

Fred in Austin-American

Fred’s Facebook research gets him sourced in an Austin-American story, “Are you on the Facebook?”

A section of the story below:

Of all the online social network services, including My-Space and Friendster, Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla, said Fred Stutzman, who is working toward a doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science.

To its users, the Facebook is just as important as cell phones and laptops, he said.

“It has been totally ingrained in the social system. For the majority of undergrads, it is part and parcel of how they exist . . . online and offline,” said Stutzman, who is conducting a study of UNC freshmen’s use of the Facebook. “It’s the sense that when they’re part of the Facebook, they’re part of the community.”

This Blog on WashPost

The Washington Post has added a boxed section on selected pages that includes the Technorati search results for blogs that link to those pages. The result is that a link to the story about Dylan (below) has put this blog right there on the page to which I refered in my blog entry and on a special “links from blogs on Technorati” page. I’m not complaining since I would have used TrackBacks to that story were they available. In fact, I’m delighted to have this blog show up on Washington Post .com even if we had to go through a odd drive around the net to get to where a trackback would have taken me quickly. The advantage for the Post is that Technorati keeps trackback spam off their site and does a fine job of searching blogs that bother to register at the Technorati site.

UPDATE: By making this post, I was suddenly dropped from the Post box and from the “Links” page! A Technorati search on the Post page shows this page as the most recently updated blog (as of this writing).

UPDATE 2: Now this blog is on the Post page twice! I guess there is a bit of a lag on their Techorati driven search and update.

Tar Heel on Seigenthaler issue and Wikipepdia

Just took a phone call from a Daily Tar Heel reporter, Kyle Chorpening, who is doing a story on Wikipedia and the Seigenthaler issue. He had already spoken to Seigenthaler and to Jimmy Wales before calling me. What the heck could I add after that?
Well, maybe a pointer to the video of Jimbo’s talk here at UNC in October and some talk about owning your own words harking back to the WELL and over to Brin’s Transparent Society as a tension point with the American history of anonymous pamphleteering going back beyond the Federalist Papers. A brief mention of the Hitchhiker’s Guide site at BBC as a peer-reviewed encyclopedia too.
My take is that wikipedia is in process. It will change to meet challenges and it has already begun some changes to address problems such as this one. A year ago, Wikipedia was less good than it is today. In five years, it –or it’s online successor– will be much better.
Kyle also asked if I would accept wikipedia as a source in a paper. The answer is that academic papers should use primary sources, not encyclopedias, not Britanica, not World Book, not wikipedia. Wikipedia is a great starting point and often points to primary sources. In that way, it’s great. I would even accept wikipedia as a source for one of several definitions, but not as a major source. Not because of reliability but because good research should go to the source whenever possible.
UPDATE: Kyle’s article is here. I get the last words, but not (appropriately) the most words ;->

Paul Jones, a journalism professor at UNC, said people should be held accountable for content but can’t reasonably be restricted from publishing it.

“What are you going to do? Make people get an Internet driver’s license?” he said.

As Wikipedia has grown in popularity and reliability, students often are using it as a source for research, especially for term papers.

“I use it for general ideas, but not for specifics,” said freshman Russell Johnson. “It gives me a comfortable understanding of the topic.”

Jones said Wikipedia is useful for directing students to good information but should complement other sources.

“Last semester, I returned a paper that was comprised almost solely of Wikipedia entries,” he said. “I think by the time you’re in college, you should be using primary sources.”

Voting Day – early

Sally and I went down to the dedication of the Unsung Founders Monument this morning. On the way we stopped by for early voting. There was no waiting. Well, almost no waiting. We ended up chatting with my former collegue Bert Dempsey and his wife Molly as we all walked in. Bert who travels quite a bit with his tech company says that early voting has allowed him to participate in elections like never before. Even at that, we were in the 700s of those who voted early in this election.

Resident or Residue? Fred and Facebook Fear in DTH

Gerry Cohen notices, in a comment on this blog, that Fred Stutzman and his work on Facebook are quoted in a Daily Tar Heel OpEd called “Danger, Danger.” The article is full of Facebook Fear warning students that pictures on the Internet can lead to unintended consequences. Fred was amused to be identified as “local resident” as in Research by Fred Stutzman, a local resident, indicates that more than 90 percent of UNC-Chapel Hill undergraduates have a Facebook account[.]

Flocked!

Flock, the FireFox browser with “social network” extensions, is out for testing. The upside is that you can post directly to most blogs from the browser w/o going to the blog web pages — unless you are me and have XML-RPC turned off because of earlier exploit attempts (that bug has been fixed but I didn’t bother to have XML-RPC support turned back on. Also you can go directly to del.icio.us for your shared bookmarks. You can add Tags. History is now searchable. RSS reader is fully integrated. And there are several other nice features.

You can get Flock from torrent.ibiblio.org, your legal, reliable, authoratative, and persistent BitTorrent site as well as from the Flock site.

Podcastercon coming Jan 7

www.podcastercon.org for more details.
Podcastercon feed

WHERE: University of North Carolina, 116 Murphey Hall, Chapel Hill, NC
WHEN: Saturday, January 7, 2006, 11am – 4pm
How Much: FREE
Website: www.podcastercon.org
Blog: www.podcastercon.org/blog

Contact: Brian Russell, Event Organizer, info (at) podcastercon (dot) org
Sponsors: Ibiblio.org, Cache Networks, and many individuals

Call for Volunteers
We need volunteers before and during the event. We need help setting up signs to the event, helping participants find their way to Murphey Hall, help putting up flyers in the Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill area, basic tech support, help blogging and recording the event, etc.

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