Discussions of social media platforms and their impact on communication, collaboration, sociability, privacy, and norms of information flow.
There's been an interesting thread on the AoIR mailing list lately about the possibilities of social network migration and aggregation. One list member longed for aggregation: I wonder if we would see a sort of a social network aggregator developed…
Read More Social Network Migration, Aggregation, and SocialStream
Andrew Keen's new book, The Cult of the Amateur, attacks the rise of the “amateur” amid various Internet and Web 2.0 phenomena, and outlines the various harms — economic, social, cultural and political — these amateurs will inevitably cause. I…
Remember last fall when Facebook got itself in all kinds of trouble for unilaterally creating and automatically activating "feeds" of its users' changes to their profile pages? They scrambled to try to reign in this privacy-threatening feature, and promised to…
Read More Facebook Allowing Profiles to be Crawled by Google
[This thought piece appears on the On The Identity Trail project's blog, blog*on*nymity. Thanks to the amazing folks there for the (second) invitation to contribute to the project. -mz] This post is an attempt to collect and organize some thoughts…
Increasingly, policy are regularly monitoring MySpace pages for evidence of criminal activity. Here's a recent case from near my hometown, as reported in a column in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: The 18-year-old Sheboygan guy was so proud of the pot…
On the heels of the Twitter privacy flaw, where users' "protected" data streams are automatically accessible to third parties via their API, Facebook has now been criticized for automatically enrolling all of its users (including me, apparently) in their new…
The amazing team of researchers at On the Identity Trail project have released two short videos exploring the "reasonable expectations of privacy": The first film, "Tessling-Just the Facts", is a brief dramatization of the facts that gave rise to R.…
I've just recently started experimenting with Twitter - that sexy new thing that lets users send 140-word messages of what they're doing at any given moment to the world. Some users, of course, prefer to keep the mundane details of…
A video honoring the 5th Anniversary of the Media Ecology Association has been posted to YouTube, featuring choice clips of (roughly in order of appearance) Camile Paglila, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman (including his famous stint on Comedy Central's "Daily Show"),…
Here's the latest in a string of slick flash videos about social & ethical concerns with Web 2.0: Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook? (Some additional background material is here) Most of this has been covered…
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