michaelweiss.ca

The levels of engagement in Twitter are analogous to those observed in other communities. At the periphery of this onion model, we find passive users (in this case, users are ignoring tweets), and as we get closer to the core, users become more active and their interaction is more intimate. Thus you find conversing, retweeting and direct messaging at the core of the figure.

Pirate Bay founder to introduce a micropayment service for web content called Flattr.

Take a break and enjoy this great podcast on saving the newspaper.

Two important changes to the social media landscape over the past couple of days:

• Google’s move into social media (from Google’s blog) and Google taking on Facebook and Twitter (Buzz)
• Flickr co-founder returns to roots by launching an online game (Glitch)

Google’s moves are a good example of countermoves (Google’s response to Facebook’s newly announced webmail product, code-named Titan) as described in Ferrier’s framework on competitive agressiveness.

One interesting play will be the integration with other services such as GMail, Google Maps, and their mobile versions in the case of Buzz. Which side will be in a better position to leverage their existing user base?

Hard to believe, but true. The submission deadline for EuroPLoP is nary two weeks away (Feb 15). The submission is now open and ready to receive your submissions. Just click on the submission tab on the conference website. If you have any questions, please email me at weiss@sce.carleton.ca or Paris at paris@cs.rug.nl. We are also looking for focus group proposals at this time.

Is this how valuable MySQL is to Oracle?

Great art work by Oliver Weiss visualizing twittering. It illustrates an article on nonprofits using Twitter.

Last week’s Digital, Life, Design (DLD) conference in Munich features an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, and many other interesting speakers.

Perhaps the most thorough discussion of the changes to privacy created by today’s Internet is carried out by Abelson, H. et al. (2008), Blown to Bits, Addison-Wesley. This book is written by three MIT and Harvard professors, one of them (Hal Abelson) a co-founder of the Creative Commons initiative. 

Its subtitle is Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion. One of its most provocative chapter titles is Naked in the Sunlight: Privacy Lost, Privacy Abandoned.

Next time you do a search on Google, you may want to think just how much information you are revealing about yourself. As you are probably likely also logged into Google Mail at the same time, Google already has a pretty good picture of you. It’s a trade-off we face (see What the Web Knows About You). Can we live without search engines? Probably not. Social media sites are not that different in that light

The new BUGbase interface will be designed in collaboration between Bug Labs and IDEO. What excites me most about this collaboration is that the design will be carried out as an open source projects. CAD files for the initial design concepts have been posted to the project blog already. More information will be available from the project blog shortly. Stay tuned on this one.