ISP 523: Fundamentals of Information Technology

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ISP 523 Fundamentals of Information Technology

• Instructor Stephen Lackey
• November 16, 2005

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Todays lecture

• Social Computing Topics
• Blogs
• Wiki
• Social Bookmarking
• Podcasting
• RSS Recap (see prior week slides)
• anti-Social Computing

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Social Computing

• Common feature is that technology simple, yet
  highly adaptable for social interaction
• Has meaning in context of like-minded community
• Typically use web-based Content Management
  methodologies, simplified for specific
  application
• Does computing replace the social in human
  interaction, or augment it?
• Key enabling technology RSS
• Social Computing that which gets spammed

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Email / Instant Messaging

• Email electronic mail
• dueling essays
• asynchronous communication
• Limited authentication can receive messages
  from almost anyone with limited control open
  access
• Instant Messenger
• Synchronous communication
• Greater authentication, exclusivity
• Greater sanctions for misbehavior closed access

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Web Logs (a.k.a. blogs, blogging. etc)

• Online journals, reports
• Many free hosting services. One example
• http//www.bloglines.com/
• Typically hosted in CMS-type system
• Basic organizational paradigm the calendar
• Enable easy linking, trackback capabilities
• Enriched by participation in community

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What are blogs for?

• Dear Diary the 13 year-old blogger
• Is it journalism? It can be
• Political activism Dean, Rather, warblogging,
  Iraq, Paris Riots?
• Human filters of Internet content?
• Public bulletin boards

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Blogging buzzwords

• Blogger he who blogs
• Blogosphere the rarified air that bloggers live
  in?
• Permalink permanent URL of page
• Blogroll affiliated or sympathetic blogs
• Trackback pages that link to the current page

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Photoblogging

• Prevalence of digital cameras on cell phones
  cited as source of
• Camera phones cited as photojournalism or
  photoblogs
• London Underground bombings, other disasters
• The DSG (here Dog Poop Girl) incident in
  South Korea
• Impacts on Privacy

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The Wiki

• Developed in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, a software
  engineer enabling community help to discover
  design patterns
• Assertion
• Debate
• Consensus
• Refinement / reorganization into coherent
  document
• Like most web tech, developed by programmers to
  share tech information
• Works best for self evident theories or
  subjects too obscure to generate debate
• Extended to every subject matter imaginable

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WikiPedia

• Most famous Wiki the Wikipedia
• Collaborative database of interconnected articles
• Last count over 400,000
• On web at http//www.wikipedia.org
• Authoritative or convenient?
• What is it?
• Body of knowledge ?
• distillation of internet-era culture?
• Social experiment?
• Something else?

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How does a Wiki link?

• Typically the author can used mixed case type
  (otherwise called CamelCase due to its use of
  uppercase/lowercase combinations in place of
  spaces to combine words)
• Some Wiki use special notation to indicate a link
  to another Wiki article or external link wiki
  syntax similar to traditional email tagging
• Links and backlinks critical elements of
  interconnection between documents
• Each document a home page for external
  references.

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Why use a Wiki?

• Often called the post-it notepad of the web
• its part discussion board, part blog, part
  content manager, part something else.
• Rapid means to generate large volumes of
  interlinked pages content grows organically
• Useful in shared document collaboration
• Construction of reference material, procedures,
  archival of memos, email, etc.

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Social Bookmarking

• Most famous example del.icio.us
• Enables users to create accounts to save
  bookmarks on web
• Bookmark lists are shared
• Users can
• create own keywords
• see others with same bookmark
• see bookmark collections of other users

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Social Bookmarking

• How much intersection between links of
  like-minded researchers and web-surfers?
• Tag clouds frequency that you or others use
  certain keywords with your links
• Often integrated with blogs

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Podcasting

• As we know it Co-invention of
• Adam Curry (of MTV fame)
• Dave Winer (of RSS and OPML fame)
• Named as twist on iPod, as in iPod Broadcast
• Created as notion of decentralized media
  production control to the masses

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Podcasting

• Freely-distributed (MP3) audio files
• Royalty-free music (copied with permissions)
• Audio blogs
• Soundscapes / Travel journals
• Language instruction
• Audio fiction (like 40s radio?)
• Others
• Often homepaged on blog services with external
  links to Mp3 files
• Syndicated via RSS (though blogging accounts)
• Narrow audiences "Everyone is famous for 15
  people."

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Podcast examples

• Public radio
• http//radioproject.org/
• Royalty-free music
• http//garageband.com. (Its content is largely
  what one might expect from the name. )
• http//www.podcastalley.com/
• The newest 100 of the new
• http//audio.weblogs.com/
• Alternate media and the bleeding edge of fair
  use
• http//viprhealthcare.typepad.com/mashup_of_the_we
  ek_podcas/

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Anti-Social Computing

• Does electronic communication dehumanize?
• social cues and sanctions for social behavior
• Spam outlets
• Email
• Please help smuggle money out of country X
• Your ebay account is about to expire
• Etc
• Wiki spam
• Blogs sites created as spam
• Blog comment spam

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Anti-Social Computing

• Trolls
• Attempts to disrupt community with inflammatory
  discourse
• Flame wars
• inflammatory exchanges on bulletin boards, wiki,
  blogs, public comment areas
• Tend to rely on an audience
• Tend to pursue public shame