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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.

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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.

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Amygdala Volume and Facebook

A recent study has tied the size of the amygdala to human social networking.


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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:

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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.

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