Blogging
clock | September 14, 2006I'm glad I am not the only one majorly pissed I was not invited to the secret meeting of Chapel Hill (and area) bloggers wih John Edwards (some of which were not even supporting him back in 2003 and 2004). So is Anton. He is doubly pissed and rightly so.
Ed and Pam were there, though.
clock | September 14, 2006About a year ago, on October 01, 2005, I did a little stats on the self-described political affiliation of NCSU students with Facebook profiles and posted it here. I reposted it here on January 16, 2006. I was thinking about doing the same thing exactly a year later, but the new Facebook News-Feed is making many students nervous, so they delete a lot of their information from their profiles. Political and religious affiliations are usually the first to go. I was interested if there would be any noticable change from one year to another, particularly in light of increased dissatisfaction…
clock | September 13, 2006Why nobody told me that Massimo Pigliucci has a blog? And an excellent blog to boot!
clock | September 12, 2006Facebook opening up to the masses:
Social networking site Facebook is to ditch its requirement that users must have a university email address, according to media reports.
Facebook required members to have a school or university email address, but added 1,000 approved work addresses in May allowing students that had graduated to continue to access the site.
Removing the need for approved email addresses will put the site in direct competition with other social networks such as MySpace, Bebo and Friendster.
My prediction - disaster. It will not just compete against MySpace, it will become…
clock | September 10, 2006Starting today, the NCBlogs.com blog aggregator has a brand new look and much greater functionality. Go check it out.
clock | September 10, 2006ConvergeSouth is not a blogging conference - it is about the stuff that goes beyond blogging, both in terms of technology (podcasting, vlogging) and in terms of use - building online communities, for instance.
I am really happy to see that there will be a session on Facebook this year and I hope that students from NC A&T and UNC-G show up and tell us old geezers exactly what Facebook is to them, how they use it, how they think about it, and what else they need.
So far, we keep guessing as to what the next generation needs and wants, but they grew up online while we learned later in…
clock | September 8, 2006This is what you see when you log in to Facebook today:
An Open Letter from Mark Zuckerberg:
We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I'd like to try to correct those errors now.
When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better. I wanted to create an environment where people could share…
clock | September 8, 2006You may remember this chart from three days ago. Now, Rob Loftis updated his chart after the inputs of a number of bloggers and commenters over the past few days, and John Dupuis has his own chart he uses in teaching about the flow of scientific information.
clock | September 7, 2006TNG of Neural Gourmet tagged me with this meme, so how can I resist....
Why do you blog?
It's an addiction. It's therapy. It seems a waste if I think about something and don't write it down and let others see it and comment on it. And all of that would count even if I had no audience at all, but I do, and that has opened a whole new world of online friendship and community which keeps me going every day.
How long have you been blogging?
I started on Edwards campaign blog in September 2003, then started commenting on other people's blogs a couple of months later. Finally, I started my own…
clock | September 7, 2006When Ed announced that Elizabeth Edwards is coming to ConvergeSouth to lead a session about buidling online communities, a bunch of Republican commenters on his blog announced they are not going to show up because of her and found it hard (some, not all of them) to be persuaded that the conference is apolitical and that Elizabeth Edwards has more than one aspect to her - she is not just a Democrat, she is also a mother, a cancer survivor, a book author, a wife of a famous person, and an early adopter of online technology.
In the end, Elizabeth herself showed up in the comments and explained…
clock | September 6, 2006Since I do have a Facebook account and get updates, as I am interested in social software and how it is used by the next generation (including our students), I've been following this over the past couple of days: Inside the Backlash Against Facebook. People are furious with the new intrusive NewsFeed that tells you, minute by minute, every time one of your 'friends' sneezes (or worse). It cannot be switched off. Also, their Note blogging platform does not work - it updates every day or two instead of immediately and has no RSS Feed (well, the Facebook editors' blog also has no feed, go…
clock | September 6, 2006Here is a cool microbiology blog, if you can read Slovenian language (I can get the main idea of the post, but not understand every word). This blog is about science in general and this one is about food science.
clock | September 6, 2006New installment of the periodic system of ScienceBloggers is now up on Page 3.14.
clock | September 6, 2006A microbiological metaphor for the blogosphere (from November 27, 2005):
Heh! I always wanted to write this post. Being lazy is actually good sometimes. Just wait long enough and, lo and behold, someone else will write your post! Saves you time and energy.
Daniel Conover, whom I had great pleasure to meet in person at the ConvergeSouth conference, wrote a very thought-provoking post: Bacteria, blogs, holographic consciousness and The Singularity. There is a lot of biology there, but that is just a pretext for trying to understand what the Internet, and blogs in particular, are growing up to…
clock | September 6, 2006Summer is over so let's start meeting again. Anton needs feedback on the days and locations.
clock | September 6, 2006As a scientist and a blogger and someone very interested in science communication, I was quite delighted with Rob HelpyChalk's series of three charts depicting traditional communication between scientists, traditional communication between scientists and general population, and the new two-way communication between scientists and general population (here is the third chart):
Bill and PZ have some comments on the chart as well. Leave your comments on Rob's blog.
clock | September 6, 2006Elizabeth Edwards will be leading the opening session at the ConvergeSouth blogging and journalism unconference on October 14th. Are you registered yet? Let's have dinner together as well.
(Hat-tip: Ed)
Technorati Tag: ConvergeSouth