Readings on Social Networks, Media

Technology Review: Mapping Professional Networks

Now IBM is exploring how different visualizations of the social graph could be useful within businesses, as a way of helping people work more efficiently and make better connections.

Aimed at helping workers organize around common goals, the research focused on adapting popular social tools such as bookmarking and blogging for business purposes, and integrating them with each other. The larger Connections suite allows workers to create profiles, blog, form communities around common interests, share bookmarks, and plan and track projects as a group. Each component of Connections is integrated with the others, so a user can move seamlessly between tools.

See also a recent posting on this subject on the Atlas announcement.

You Don’t Understand Our Audience, What I learned about network television at Dateline NBC.  Annotated

One might have thought that the television industry, with its history of rapid adaptation to technological change, would have become a center of innovation for the next radical transformation in communication. It did not. Nor did the ability to transmit pictures, voices, and stories from around the world to living rooms in the U.S. heartland produce a nation that is more sophisticated about global affairs. Instead, the United States is arguably more isolated and less educated about the world than it was a half-century ago. In a time of such broad technological change, how can this possibly be the case?

Networks are built on the assumption that audience size is what matters most. Content is secondary; it exists to attract passive viewers who will sit still for advertisements.

Murrow would be outraged not so much by the networks’ greed (Murrow was one of the first news personalities to hire a talent agent) as by the missed opportunity to use technology to help create a nation of engaged citizens bent on preserving their freedom and their connections to the broader world.

The author had hoped that putting the right technology in the hands of the networks would result in better news. These hopes he seems to have abandoned.

Technology is being put into the hands of the consumer allowing them to make the choices; to be the gatherers and editors of the news they consume. Works well if you have an audience that is willing to put in the effort. For those that prefer be couch approach there’s always the Daily Show.