Social Computing Strategist

Many tools have pleasant, user-friendly interfaces and take advantage of well-designed physical devices (i.e., they're easy to use from a human-computer-interaction perspective). But it's in the sociological and anthropological arenas where they run into trouble: most social software tools are clumsy and ineffective at smoothly facilitating interpersonal interaction. - Sachendra

"As sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook become intertwined with business uses, organizations need to establish guidelines for employees on workplace access and appropriate usage. Deb Shinder looks at 10 key considerations that such guidelines should address." - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

"Google has added a new feature to its search engine that lets users apply search terms to the updates their friends and acquaintances are making on various social network sites. The feature requires a Google account, and the user must be signed in in order for Social Search to work. However, the feature doesn't get full support from Facebook, the world's biggest social network." - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

"Whereas many analysts hear about technologies at vendor briefings and see them in demos, I have built them, shaped them, and taken them down myself. So I’d say I have had a fair share of hands-on time with wikis. With that said, I’ve come to a conclusion — MediaWiki inhibits Enterprise 2.0. Shocking conclusion considering that it was MediaWikis success that really opened things up for Enterprise 2.0 initiatives at Fidelity. But I took a long look at the screen/mirror and this is why I came to my conclusion." - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

"Meetings suck. But if there's one thing worse than meetings, it's playing email tag to schedule them. Is your company still sending out mass emails to ask for preferred meeting times? It's the pits, isn't it? Yes, Outlook has a hack whereby you can solicit responses for scheduling, but it's not much of an improvement. There's a better way, and it's a ridiculously simple concept. A Web app lets you pick a range of dates on a calendar and then notify your colleagues so they can pick the times and dates that work for them. You then view the responses and you're done. Just as wikis solved the distributed document collaboration problem (that we used to use email for), this class of online tools solves our scheduling problem. Here's our rundown of the ten best scheduling apps to be found, in order of preference. Most of them operate on a freemium basis or are fairly cheap." - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

"Starting this fall, you’ll have a new reason to trust the information you find on Wikipedia: An optional feature called “WikiTrust” will color code every word of the encyclopedia based on the reliability of its author and the length of time it has persisted on the page." - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

"Brad Fitzpatrick recently wrote an elegant and important post about the Social Graph, a term used by Facebook to describe their social network. In his post, Fitzpatrick defines "social graph" as "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related". He went on to outline the problems with it, as well as a broad set of goals going forward. One problem is that currently you need to have different logins for different social networks. Another issue is portability and ownership of an individual's information, explicitly and implicitly revealed while using social networks. As was recently asserted in the Social Bill Of Rights and as has been advocated for a while by Attention Trust Principles, users want to own their personal information - including their chunk of the Social Graph." - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

"Facebook just bought the rights to nearly everything you do online. And it cost them only $47.5 million." - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

"With the Iranian Election protests and the Big Brother governmental control of China, we are familiar with some of the bans of social networking around the globe. But what about in our own backyard? Why are some organizations and corporations choosing to block sites like Twitter and Facebook right here in the US? This is a list of the top five bans that exist today in the land of the free and the home of the brave." - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

"After spending a few hours using an early version of Google Wave today, it’s clear that in its initial incarnation it won’t be ejecting existing enterprise collaboration tools from the workplace any time soon. It’s not that it isn’t impressive, far from it, however Wave’s complex interface and open-ended feature set provides an unexpectedly steep learning curve, particularly from a company that is famous for simple, powerful user experiences. That said, Google Wave holds considerable potential for bringing next-generation Enterprise 2.0 capabilities to organizations looking for best-of-breed solutions." - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

groundbreaking things normally are. i think it will change things dramatically once they have finely honed it. they just wanted to get it out and make people aware of it. if anything the frontend (not the development elements) will make computing a little bit more easier for the masses imo. - Philip "dmouse" Campbell

"Microsoft, looking to one-up Google Apps and other online productivity suites, will give companies the option of running the upcoming web-based versions of Word, Excel and other programs from their own servers, not just from Microsoft's remote data centers." - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

Don't tell me: they still expect these businesses to purchase shrink-wrapped copies of web-enabled Office apps in order to run them off private servers? Because that would solve Microsoft dilemma of being seen as moving with the times, right. - ianf ⌘

Actually MS will be providing both options: you'll be able to run Office Web on MS hosting or on your own. The latter is a very smart option, because it ropes in businesses who DON'T want to outsource their productivity hosting for a variety of reasons (speed, reliability, data protection). - LANjackal

"One of the most anticipated days in the history of social networking site Facebook has finally come: the company announced today that it has begun making status messages, photos and videos visible to the public at large by default instead of being visible only to a user's approved friends." - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

Hash tags were cool for about 10 minutes. But then they started to remind us of IRC, Meta Data, and reading a book written in another language. - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

"Metadata is "data about data" -- information like keywords, page-length, title, word-count, abstract, location, SKU, ISBN, and so on. Explicit, human-generated metadata has enjoyed recent trendiness, especially in the world of XML. A typical scenario goes like this: a number of suppliers get together and agree on a metadata standard -- a Document Type Definition or scheme -- for a given subject area, say washing machines. They agree to a common vocabulary for describing washing machines: size, capacity, energy consumption, water consumption, price. They create machine-readable databases of their inventory, which are available in whole or part to search agents and other databases, so that a consumer can enter the parameters of the washing machine he's seeking and query multiple sites simultaneously for an exhaustive list of the available washing machines that meet his criteria. If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the purposes of describing their... more... - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

"There are literally thousands of "web 2.0" companies, and until now, there's been no easy way to compare which ones are getting traffic. The list of 952 sites below was inspired by the list started by Bob Stumpel and then added to by many others" - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

"With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Future Internet, an initiative driven by the European Union, has become a prime research focus of STI International and the Service Web 3.0 project. In order to explain, promote, and attract new contributotrs, we created a video to be viewed by stakeholders, who may be non-experts, in a new generation Internet. The video outlines the basic themes of the European Union's Future Internet initiative. These include: an Internet of Services, where services are ubiquitous; an Internet of Things where in principle every physical object becomes an online addressable resource; a Mobile Internet where 24/7 seamless connectivity over multiple devices is the norm; and the need for semantics in order to meet the challenges presented by the dramatic increase in the scale of content and users. The video has proved to be popular and has already appeared on the main pages of the EU Future... more... - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

"CIOs think about privacy the way some people think about exercise: with a sigh and a sense of impending pain. Outside of regulated industries like health care - where patient privacy is paramount - privacy affects CIOs as a corollary of security when, say, a laptop holding millions of people's records is lost or hackers siphon off customer data. "CIOs generally don't care about privacy," says Peter Milla, former CIO and chief privacy officer at Survey Sampling International (SSI). Milla says most CIOs either focus on technology, or regard privacy as outside their domain, the province of a chief privacy or chief security officer. He finds both attitudes wrongheaded. CIOs, Milla says, should "want to be ahead of the curve" on privacy." - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

"First came the social networks: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, LinkedIn, and the rest -- places to find and connect with people, share daily information about work and personal life, post photos, display content, and so on. Though their profit models remain somewhat elusive, their identities in the market are by now well established. Now here come the aggregators: FriendFeed, Ping.fm, MyBlogLog, Plaxo, and dozens more, with the promise to simplify and consolidate the process of participating in multiple social networks and bringing status updates together with social bookmarks, instant messages, blog content, RSS feeds, rich media, podcasts, gift lists, and even Netflix queues -- all in one simple view. Is this a radical move toward a truly open Web, where social relationships are detached from the custody of proprietary systems? Or is it a simple ploy to divert eyeballs -- and therefore advertising revenues -- away from the underlying networks? If so, what if it works? What if... more... - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

I'll need to take some time to read that article thoroughly - Zackatoustra

"A Practical Guide to Implementing Web 2.0 (aka Social Networking Tools) in Your Organization A lot of organizations are struggling with what to do with a host of costly, high-maintenance technologies that they have introduced in the last decade, hoping these technologies would produce (a) improved internal productivity, and (b) better relationships with customers" - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

"There are a slew of social media aggregation sites willing, waiting, and wanting to pull your updates, videos, photos, links, music, "shares," "likes," and other content from all around the web. A few of them work well, some have really cool features, and others have critical mass. But none of them are as drop-dead good-looking - or as customizable - as AmpliFeeder, a free, open-source distributed social activity aggregator. The only major drawback: It's the kind of web app that needs to be installed on a server. But a hosted version is in the works, and the screen shots prove it's so worth the effort. AmpliFeeder aggregates items from Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Google Shared Items, Tumblr, Digg, Reddit, LastFM, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Upcoming, Mixx, BrightKite, and more. It can also handle any RSS feeds you throw at it." - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

"Brad Fitzpatrick recently wrote an elegant and important post about the Social Graph, a term used by Facebook to describe their social network. In his post, Fitzpatrick defines "social graph" as "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related". He went on to outline the problems with it, as well as a broad set of goals going forward" - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

Media creation and editing tools for graphics, animations, video, audio - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

One of the most complex features of Twitter (Twitter reviews) for new users to understand is the hashtag, a topic with a hash symbol (”#”) at the start to identify it. Twitter hashtags like #followfriday help spread information on Twitter while also helping to organize it. - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet

"As web users demand more convenience and interactivity, the old model of having a unique username and password on each site is being placed with a universal web identity." - Stephen Dale from Bookmarklet