Week 14 – A Resource Collection

When I was frantically hunting for materials to complete my papers during the last two weeks, I came across many materials that I thought were interesting.  Although, these are not directly related to social software, most of these materials depict the evolution of technology with respect to web and hyperlink based mediums.  And, some of these articles are very old; but, they portray a lucid, coherent illustration of the evolutionary history. It is impressive to know the visionary foundation of our predecessors.  Therefore, sharing these materials is a must.  You could have a read if you’d like. 

References

Sociology And Computers   

Davenport. Elisabeth (2005), Social Informatics in Practice: A Guide for the Perplexed, ASIS, retrieved from http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Jun-05/davenport.html

David Gibson , Clark Aldrich , Marc Prensky (2007), Games and Simulations in Online Learning: Research and Development Frameworks, Vermont Institute, USA; SimuLearn, USA; Games2train, USA

 

Hahn. Karla L. and Schoch. Natalie A. (????), Applying diffusion theory to electronic publishing: A conceptual framework for examining issues and outcomes, ASIS ,retrieved from http://www.asis.org/annual-97/hahnk.htm

 

Hongladarom. Soraj , Ess. Charles  (2007), USA Information Technology Ethics Cultural Perspectives.

Gregson. Kim, Ford. Charlotte (1998), Evaluation of Community Networks, ASIS, Midyear ‘98 Proceedings., retrieved from http://www.asis.org/Conferences/MY98/Gregson.htm

Gregson. Kimberly (1997), Community Networks and Political Participation:
Developing Goals for System Developers, ASIS ,retrieved from http://www.asis.org/annual-97/kgregson.htm 

Sawyer. Steve, 31( 5 (June/July 2005), Social Informatics: Overview, Principles and Opportunities, The American Society for Information Science and Technology, retrieved from http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Jun-05/sawyer.html

Weedman. Judith (1998), Burglar’s Tools: The Use of Collaborative Technology
in Professional Socialization, ASIS Midyear ‘98 Proceedings, retrieved from http://www.asis.org/Conferences/MY98/Weedman.htm.  

 Evolution of Taxonomy  

Aitchison J., Gilchrist A. (1987). Thesaurus construction: a practical manual. London: Association for Information Management.

 Agosti M., Melucci M, Crestani F. (1995). Automatic authoring and construction of hypermedia for information retrieval. Multimedia Systems, 3(1), 15-24.  

Beynon-Davies P., Tudhope D., Taylor C., Jones C. (1994). A Semantic Database Approach to Intelligent Hypermedia Systems. Information and Software Technology, 36 (6), 323-329.  

Kibby M.R., Mayes J.T. (1989). Towards Intelligent Hypertext. In R. McCaleese (Ed.), Hypertext: Theory into Practice (pp 164-172). Oxford: Intellect.  

SHIC Working Party. (1983). Social History and Industrial Classification: A Subject Classification for Museum Collections. University of Sheffield, UK: Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language.  

Sneath P., Sokal R. (1973). Numerical Taxonomy: The Principles and Practice of Numerical Classification. San Francisco:

W. H. Freeman and Company.  Tudhope D., Taylor C., Beynon-Davies P. (1995b). Classification and Hypermedia. Proceedings 6th ASIS Sig/CR Classification Research Workshop, Chicago, 173-192.

Week 13 – My personal favorites

I must say that of all the tools my personal favorite was the social software analysis (SNA) tools.  I was overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge and insights one could derive through these analysis.  I guess it must be due my interest in knowledge management.  I was able to integrate the two areas and find commonalities among them – amazing!

I did not like the gaming part but I certainly was intrigued by the virtual worlds.  I shall be exploring more on this topic.  What I realized was, it is an under utilized area by many professional disciplines.  I think, we should look in to this area of discovery and find ways of employing these tools as means of delivering services through these means.  I am really impressed with virtual worlds.  Other sections of the course were not so unfamiliar to me.  Therefore, although I had the opportunity to explore and take a look at others’ insights, these themes were not as impressive as the virtual worlds or SNA.  They were a little dull.

I have to give credit to Amanda for outlining a solid course. 

week 14- End notes

I think I have articulated my thoughts of social software and the best practices in the wiki.  However, when I look back on the experience, it is almost surprising to realize how much awareness I have gained during this period.  I was extremely ignorant on this topic and did not see much of a point in using social software, especially in a organizational context; but I am glad to say that this course has certainly changed my perceptions.

Although, I do admire most of the writers who has written and published materials on this topic, I must say that my best source of learning was the 757 group.  Everybody’s input and thoughts were just great – simply great!

So this is a thank-you note for all you guys and for Amanda.

Week 12 – virtual worlds

Great presentation guys!  I had no idea that there were virtual worlds like secondlife.  Thank you for the wonderful explanations and the introduction to a new aspect of online communities.

 

I am very much in to the open source technologies, and it was a pleasure to see the actual products of the community contributed open source thingys in action.  I found these virtual communities on the web, and there is a whole lot more.

à       Virtual school

à       Virtual hospital

à       Virtual florists

à       Virtual library

à       Virtual enterprise builder

 

I particularly liked the last one the virtual enterprise builder.  Though, this was not free, I think this is an optimal way of organizing ones resources without committing funds to a rigid structure.  Many organizations spend lot of money on unfeasible organizational infrastructures due to the promising nature they present.  However, the virtual enterprise builder minimizes this risk. 

 

I also liked the wikipedia blob on the virtual reality.  the article sort of summarizes the topic in a simpler manner and offers a basic understanding of the technologies and initiatives out there.

Week 11

The main focus of a social network is building online communities of people to share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others, and which necessitates the use of software.  In the recent past, whenever the topic of social networks is raised our thoughts are automatically switch and attuned to online communities.  That is because most of the “Talked about” social networks are primarily web based.  The most common phenomenon is “Message boards” that allows people to move along a thread of thought which sometimes takes a form of blogging or chatting.  What I have noticed is, at least in my opinion, channels such as instant messaging and texting is mostly used by the younger generation, where the mature public depends more on blogging and listserve type channels

Apart from being a user or a participant of these communities individuals and institutions can also become hosts of social communities. Currently, there are many commercial social networking software available that ranges from CA $50 to couple of thousands. And, these software allows users to

• Instant Message

• Personalize profile

• Customize site layout

And, get higher site ranking in popular search engines as well.  With a dedicated server, users can host these networks with databases that consist hundreds of thousands of members. 

Some of the commercial values proposed by these applications are

• help deploy own social network on a viral Social networking platform
• improve new user acquisitions, stickiness, user retention
• user participation
• and, similar benefits

I posted some of my thoughts on security and other such concerns of social software last week.  Therefore, I might detour from this theme this week, and explore more on the readings and case studies.

 

Amanda, you were right.  I have forgotten to synchronize my time and i was 5 hours ahead of Canadian time….. huh!

Week 10 – social networks (online security )

I was browsing through to see more on this week’s topic.  And I found some interesting stuff.    

Have you come across these e-social networks?  I thought it was really cool

à       futureofthebook.org that discusses interesting posts – this part of the blog is relevant to our topic

à       Bakespace – a social networking site for people who like cooking. This does not interest me, but may interest some of you

à       Respectance – to share memories, this also allows people to pay respect to people that you adore – they have one for Hemmingway

Further, I thought the below materials may interest you as they are on e-identities, an aspect that I am interested in

à       Federated Identity – this has very little to do with any of our topics but I thought this was a very cool thing to share, as it could be a possible future for online business networks.

à       Wikipedia article on online identity

à       A collection of peer-reviewed research studies on social networks

à       I stumbled upon this great page published by ALA check it out.  It has a very good collection on security issues with respect to web and online communities.  I have also tagged it on delicious this is only in case you miss it.

à       Online discussion on online social networks

à       This is the COOLEST a tool on visualizing SNW –

o      Vizter 1

o      Vizter 2

I guess I am calling quits on this subject.  This has been my problem; when I am into something I can not just stop exploring.  So, I am officially ending my researching on social networks. 

Revelation …………..

Hi guys it is Tthe Friday the Thirteenth ooopsy!

 

I know this may sound flaky, but, I HAVE to share this ….. even if it makes me look like an idiot!

In the beginning of this course I mentioned that how I do not share the passion may have on blogs, but today, for the first time in my life I understood what people are talking about.  How, social software and blogs could play a daunting role at certain times.  Let me tell you why the sudden change of heart…..

I heard this song “Vincent” or “starry starry nights” many years ago, and I was haunted by that song ever since.  I did not understand the full meaning of the song as it was mostly based on abstract concepts of the artist, Vincent.  Further, I do not have a theology background.  But, there was something about this song …. I could not overcome.  Today, I found a blog that discussed the lyrics of this song……. that is when it hit me…..some kind people have explained the meaning of the song and published the lyrics…. How wonderful!  Blogs ARE a great way of sharing things and learning things that you are most passionate about.  It creates various threads of thoughts in different directions and sets you out on exploring on them. 

It is funny how a single incident within a split second could change your whole perception on something.  So, I hear all of you out there……..loud and clear…… I formally apologize to everyone for being a skeptic all this time.

Now, I have a sudden urge to read the biography of Van Gough and understand how his mental illness played a compelling role on his work…. hmmmm ….

Hi Amanda, I was just wondering, why the date is appearing as 14^th, when it is still 13^th.

Week 10 – Social networks

Nice presentation guys.  It made me feel bad about my blog (ooops!)  

It is wonderful how yasns wiki uses social network to construct the “history” of social networks.  This was a very good blog and it also gave me the bright idea of how to collect and pool knowledge by different people on subjects that I am interested in.  Though, the blog contributors traces the early inception of online social networks to 1988 AOL, I had trouble finding materials to backup this statement; however, the blog by Christopher Allen, a blog that I trust and keep track of frequently gives some insights on the social software history.   I have to say that I do not like Hi5.  Though I am not crazy about Facebook, it does provide benefits –  I particularly like the way it allows discussions threads on topics in a very user-friendly manner.  Since these are the networks that I have used for a considerably long time, I am unable to critic on the other networks.  

It is disappointing that how everybody concentrate on the north-American based organizations when it comes to technology.  There are many social networks and initiatives that are non-American based, south Asia in particular.    

I also encourage you to take a look at the below materials, a couple of links for some of the articles I read on Social netwroks

• News release on 3D social networking by Mobinode.  
• Social network conference Website in Asia
• Businessweek article on cloning of popular networks  
•  A blog on social network stats

One of the businessweek articles mentioned that firms are installing enterprise software that automatically tracks employee e-mail to unearth potentially useful relationships with executives at other firms for sales purposes.   Other than job posting networks executives also use these sites to re-establish contact with former colleagues and to open doors to new relationships.

Week 8 – posts

Probably due to my ignorance or unawareness, while I was reading posts on folksonomies and tagging, I could not help wondering the difference, other than web-enability and the individualization, between the traditional taxonomies (Google directory, etc) and folksonomies. 

Week 8 – Thoughts on wikis

Wikis

Though many scholars, professionals, and LIBRARIANS think wikis do not account for scholarly materials, we all use this tool, if not for in-depth research, at-least, as a way of making sense of things that are new to us.  I mostly rely on wikis to get acquainted with themes and ideas that are unfamiliar to me or to get a better grasp of subjects that are of contentious nature. 

 

There are few unique reasons, in my opinion, why people rely on wikis for familiarization

• Simplicity

• Diverse social opinions

• Unlike other Social software tools, Wikis enables multi- author environment

Simplicity

-         Wikis are usually written in simple language; and, usually the content could be understood by any reader. Contributing to wikis is also simpler.

-         Dissimilar to other social software, for some reason, people rarely get lost in wikis – this is my personal experience.

Diverse social opinions

-         Different people of diverse backgrounds contribute to wikis.  People who are at different educational, professional, demographic, and etc sectors may contribute to the same wiki.

-         And, thereby, creates a pool for cross-discipline, mixed-cultural environment that pools diverse experiences of a variety of demographic sectors to table their thought of a single theme in concern.-           

Unlike other Social software tools, Wikis enables multi- author environment

-         A single wiki may be edited and modified by many authors who are completely unknown to each other.

-         At the end, a piece on a wiki may be shaped completely different from what it started out to be.

-         This criterion, as I believe, is the most unique criterion of a wiki, which allows people to create a real-time, curative environment; while exploiting and utilizing the best of social software.