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Tag Archives: social networking
Please LIKE the new Boles Blogs page on Facebook!
As the man I am, I have over 5,000 friends on Facebook. As the blog I want us to be, we currently have seven “Like” friends on the new Facebook page for this new old Boles Blog that I created last night. Oh, the good old wild days when I could blink and I’d have too many friends to count and Facebook would warn me to be less popular:
Getting to 5,000 Facebook friends was a fascinating experience. It was easier to move from 2,500 friends to 5,000 than it was to go from zero to 2,500. I thought I’d hit that 5,000 friends limit in June, but it took to the end of August to get there.
Today, I am asking you to help build up Boles Blogs on Facebook by clicking the link below to “Like” us now and forevermore:
http://Facebook.com/BolesBlogs
The Dramatic Arc of a Manhattan Murder
Now that we know the shootings last week in Manhattan near the Empire State Building were a curious mix of both murder and bystander-gone-wrong, I’d like to take a moment to deconstruct the dramatic unfolding of events that happened that morning over a 2.5 hour arc to demonstrate how the social news spread first, as a terrorist attack on the Empire State Building, and ultimately became the truth of a revelatory revenge murder.
Who Started the Fire? Plutarch or Yeats?
Who started the fire? Was it Plutarch so many years ago, or was it W.B. Yeats not too long ago? The quotation in question — “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire” — is extensively used in education, and in arguments about scholarship and proper attribution the world over. Here’s that quote, found right on the main page of Gallaudet University’s Department of Education, attributed to “William Yeats:”
Forcing Offline Conversation with the Social Bomb
There are bombs of different natures, mostly destructive. There are few bombs that exist that could possibly have any benefit for those affected by it. In a world where people sometimes share a space but don’t speak to one another, a social bomb might be just the thing necessary to get some decent human interaction.
Nothing Left to Say: Ten Sentence Story #126
Can Social Networking Replace Academic Peer Review?
Peer review is one of the essential cornerstones of scholarly publication. Smart people with a vested interest in propagating correct knowledge get together and read and critique and fix what has been written for shared academic reasoning and publication. The danger in peer review is that people tend to bring their own agendas and prejudices to the process and they can change and mold and even censor what has been researched and written to fit their own niche or to even destroy a new way of thinking that damages their self-believed right that what they know is only what other people should know.
Malcolm Gladwell is Still Right about Twitter Failing the Social Revolution
In my October 19, 2010 article — Malcolm Gladwell Crushes the Social Network Revolution — I argued this:
I’ve always been fascinated by the people on Twitter who have 25,000 followers and they’re following 25,000 people. We all know nobody is reading Tweets from 25,000 people a day and, in reverse, nobody is reading what you broadcast to 25,000 people. So the point becomes: So What? Everybody’s Tweeting, Nobody’s reading. That’s the definition of a modern, circular, death with no end except to begin again. We all assume everyone is reading every tidbit we share, but they aren’t — and yet they assume the same about us, and that we cannot live without their every savory update morsel, but we can; and so the fakery and the terribleness of Social Networking is known and felt but never confessed. We all just keep our heads down and keep clicking and pretending we are living memeingful lives while we search for a human reality that never was and never can be.
Malcolm Gladwell was right then, as he is now. The Revolution in Egypt will be won with bloody, civilian, hands on tanks and not pristine fingers pecking on cellphones.
Amygdala Volume and Facebook
A recent study has tied the size of the amygdala to human social networking.
Do You Know About.Me?
Do you know About.me? I didn’t. I do know. About.me is a new website/social aggregator/homepage you create to connect things “About You.” I guess. I’m always sort of late to these burgeoning online enterprises, so when I read yesterday that About.me was sold to AOL for tons of money after only being live four days, I decided to hurry on over and grab a username and root around a bit to see what about the fuss was about and – http://about.me/boles — is now mine, along with all a bundled bucket of obnoxious TypeKit Fonts that still take forever to propagate and load on a page:
Social Networking and Social Justice Meet in Jumo
We know well the effect that social sites such as Twitter have had on us — bringing us together in times of crisis and helping us find jobs — but where are the web sites that bring us together for the good of social justice? Enter Jumo.
Dirty Phonebook Gives You the Finger
The tide of uncontrolled anger on the internet — think Juicy Campus and FML and Lori Drew as previously excoriated examples — rises anew in a wave of awkward hatred as Dirty Phonebook crashes against our moral shore.
SuperPoke Pets Spins Straw into Gold
UPDATE April 23, 2009: After getting an inappropriate comment on this article
from Slide this morning, my wife and I have decided to no longer play. We’re through. Any links to our SuperPoke Pets sites are no longer active
and should be considered dead. Why should we pay for that sort of
attitude from a company? We’re voting with our billfold and the answer
is, “No thank you.”
Few of us know the value of a dollar other than we can make purchases in the real world with money that is given worth based on a common exchange of economic agreements. What, then, is the value of a Gold Dollar? If you play Slide.com’s SuperPoke Pets, you know the game isn’t any fun any longer unless you use your real world dollars to buy Slide Virtual Gold. In the images of my pet’s habits below, the animated things cost Gold while the Superheroes were “purchased” with earned “coins.”
