Accept no substitutes

Category: Virtual Communities (Page 7 of 20)

Links and notes from JOMC 191.8 Virtual Communities

Isolation update in Washington Post

We were alerted by Barry Wellman that Sebastian Mallaby would be publishing an Opinion section of the Washington Post on the Social Isolation story. It’s up now (and likely in print too), but Barry and I are both disappointed. Mallaby misses the findings of Barry’s research even though he mentions them. Twenty minutes on the phone with Barry, the top guy on friendship networks living, and Mallaby can’t tell that 15 is greater than 2 or 3 without changing what that means.

No, no! We are not lonely and we do have broader social networks than ever before according to Wellman.

But that doesn’t satisfy Mallaby; once he’s told that we actually have more extensive networks, he switches his stance to tell us that having a more extensive network means that we don’t have connections that are as deep as in the networks-formerly-known-as-lonely-but-now-known-as-deep.

Mallaby’s suggestion form carpools is clever but only slightly extends your social network, only slightly deepens a couple of relationships.

Here’s a more clever suggestion: People should join bike-to-work groups. People who experience more physical exercise and who experience that exercise together are more social and more physicially healthy too. And they use no gas at all!

Or to borrow from a scandalous talk by James Watson, people are happier when they are overweight and well tanned. We all need to get to the beach and participate in that most isolationist of pleasurable activities — reading an engrossing book!

Isolation? What Isolation?

Barry Wellman gives the inside story on the study that has been widely misquoted in the press about social isolation including this one in the Washington Post Social Isolation Growing in U.S., Study Says The Number of People Who Say They Have No One to Confide In Has Risen by Shankar Vedantam published on Friday, June 23, 2006.

Wellman writes to the Association of Internet Researchers (quoted in full with permission):

Re the Washington Post story below [I have noted and linked that story above – pj] (and a similar USA Today story):

To my mind, it’s an interesting case of media distortion.

The good news: the accounts are based on a high-quality survey (US General Social Survey) by first-class reseachers (Lynn Smith-Lovin & Miller McPherson) + Matthew Brashaers whom I don’t know, in sociology’s leading journal, American Sociological Review. I was a referee on this paper, btw, and revealed myself at appropriate time to the authors.

The study replicates one stimulus Q from the General Social Survey 20 years ago about who do you have to discuss important matters with. It finds a mean of about 2 in 2004, down from 3 in 1984 (or was it 1985)?

Here’s the problem:

Based on this, the 2 newspapers have created a huge social isolation spin on this, when it’s well known that people have lotsa ties, not just 2 or 3. See our data from Pew Internet, Connected Lives study) + lotsa others. Indeed, altho we are not as parallel as the US GSS, comparing Connected Lives (3rd East York study, 2004) with the second East York study (1979 data) shows more active ties now, both intimate and significant ties.

Thus the media spin is a huge inferential leap from a decline in the super-core ties to saying Americans are socially isolated.

If you read further in the Washington Post and USA Today articles, you’ll see me quoted as suggesting that we now have more ties — and more contact with ties — but that relationships are differentiated. In other words, the relative decline in discussion partners shouldn’t be generalized to either absolute isolation or even growing isolation.

Of course, YMMV.


Update:
Barry Wellman writes again “FYI, the Wa Post is probably going to run a followup editorial in next day or 2 by Sebastian Mellaby.”

Should be Sebastian Mallaby who writes on Mondays. So keep an eye open for that. pj

Where’s Paul?


If plazes is working right, the above or this link should tell you.

So javascript doesn’t work within WP article posts, but it does work on the template (see map on side bar).

BarCampRDU sponsors (so far)

Fred has been updating the growing list of sponsors for BarCampRDU (July 22 and with a waiting list). Helpful and giving group include:

* Red Hat – Red Hat is providing the BarCampRDU venue.
* 6th Sense Analytics – 6th Sense Analytics will sponsor the BarCampRDU T-shirts.
* The Aurora Funds – The Aurora Funds will sponsor breakfast, snacks and materials
* rPath – rPath will sponsor the lunch session at BarCampRDU.
* Council for Entrepreneurial Development – CEDNC is helping to sponsor our pre-BarCamp activities.
* Blogads – Blogads is helping to sponsor our pre-BarCamp activities.
* Ibiblio.org – Technical Sponsor
* Pragmatic Programmers – The Pragmatic Programmers are donating their excellent books to be given away at BarCampRDU.
* Manning Publications – Manning Publications has kindly donated books to be given away at BarCampRDU

And more to come. Thanks to all these great folks for supporting the RDU community and to Fred for doing a bang up job of organizing.

BarCampRDU full up! Organizers needed

We have 150 folks signed up for BarCampRDU (way to go Fred!) — OpenNMS’s Tarus Balog is number 150 (oops one person dropped so Tarus is 149 — YOU can be lucky 150! Go sign up NOW!).

Fred has sent out a call for Organizers (5) and Volunteers (10) on the BarCampRDUBlog. If you are already signed up for BarCamp, read the Call and join the Organizers and/or Volunteers or even consider being a speaker by adding that to the Wiki.

BarCampRDU

Lyceum – Smallwood Press Release

The news is going out on the Smallwood gift to ibiblio and the Lyceum project. I actually said/wrote some of what I’m quoted as saying. Thanks to Kelly and Wanda and especially to the Smallwood folks and to the Lyceum developers — here at ibiblio that’s JJB, Fred and Jameson.

Lyceum—innovative software for blogging

By KELLY MURPHY and WANDA MONROE
UNC School of Information and Library Science

Chapel Hill – Great news for those who create or wish to create two or many thousands of blogs (Web logs) with just one installation! Staff and students of ibiblio, located in the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, are developing innovative blogging software that allows individual communication exchange as well as large and varied group communication.
A powerful Web publishing system, Lyceum builds on WordPress software and allows for ease of use while maintaining high performance and security.
Lyceum, the multi-blog WordPress derivative, may accommodate installations with two or 200,000 blogs. It is ideal for corporate intranets or universities that need secure, manageable, and high performance blogging services for thousands of users. It expands on the familiar features, interface and tools of WordPress for users and administrators.
“As the Internet has grown and evolved, it has become a place of collaboration, a forum for discussion and a medium used to exchange information at the click of a button,” said Paul Jones, director of ibiblio. “This growth is exemplified by the open source software, blogs and other communication tools being used every day on the Web. What better way to expand on enhancing these opportunities to share ideas and thoughts than to offer software to make it easy to create and install blogs?”
The emerging generation of Web tools is often described as Web 2.0. According to the O’Reilly Network, which spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazine, and conferences, the concept of Web 2.0 emerged during a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. Web 2.0 is an emerging generation of Web tools and one of its components is “social software.” Among this new software are blogs, wikis, trackback, podcasting and videoblogs.
A gift of $25,000 was awarded to SILS to create a fellowship in open source. The fellowship will be used to continue the development of the Lyceum blogging system, which is open source. The funding provided by the Frances C. and William P. Smallwood Foundation, a grant-making foundation that promotes technology and education, will assist in refining the program and making it available to users around the world.
“The visionary gift from the Smallwood Foundation will allow us to take the next steps in innovation with Lyceum, that is to move the project from an early test state to software that can be widely used by a vibrant contributing community,” said Jones.
The $25,000 gift counts toward the university’s Carolina First Campaign goal of $2 billion. Carolina First is a comprehensive, multi-year, private fund-raising campaign to support Carolina’s vision of becoming the nation’s leading public university.
Home to one of the largest “collections of collections” on the Internet, ibiblio.org is a conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies. ibiblio.org is a collaboration of the Center for the Public Domain and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. To access the collections of ibiblio, visit the Web site at: www.ibiblio.org
To test the Lyceum software, visit the “Lyceum Demo Installation” site at: http://demo.lyceum.ibiblio.org

Mugshot testers?

Want to be a Mugshot tester?
I have a few invites that I will share under some not too onerous conditions:

  1. You should be someone I actually know.
  2. You should join the ibiblio group so we can be in touch.
  3. You should be able to use the client — that means for now that you are running Windows XP or Linux Fedora (this makes me sad).
  4. You should then actually use Mugshot for a while.
  5. You should let me know what you think of it and how we might make use of Mugshot here at ibiblio.

That’s it. Drop me a note if interested. Supplies are limited.

Mugshot for your own MySpace

Cory, Ryan and Fred are both writing about Red Hat’s new open source social networking release, Mugshot.

The Mugshot developers on their blog are dissing the MySpace claims and making broader and fairly claims about how Mugshot is to be used — like email but more so, says one.

Their Press FAQ is more informative. But this part makes me, a Mac user, sad:

The Mugshot client software is currently available for Windows XP and Linux. The Mugshot web service also offers limited support for Apple OS X and other platforms.

I’m trying to get a login now…

UPDATE:
Got one! Thanks David and Havoc.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 The Real Paul Jones

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑