Five Collaboratively-Created Soup Recipes
In our UBC course last Monday, we wanted to teach the students a lesson about real-time collaboration. We divided them into groups of four and assigned them the following tasks: You’re going to create...
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The Book, It Has Arrived
Can I get an amen? That’s good news. I wasn’t looking forward to selling little USB drives at our book launch if the actual books got held up in customs. They smell a little odd, if you stick your nose...
View ArticleThinking About Sponsored Tweets
Over on our book blog, I wrote a longish post about the hot social media topic du jour: sponsored tweets in your Twitter stream. Here’s an excerpt: Things get punchy whenever people explore monetizing...
View ArticleSharing My Location With Strangers is a Bridge Too Far
A couple of months back, I wrote about Foursquare. It is, as far as I can tell, the location-based social network with the most legs. It enables you to share your physical location, in real time, with...
View ArticleCitizen Journalism: Covering and Uncovering the News
“Media is a word that has come to mean bad journalism.” –Graham Greene This weekend I received an email from a local arts organization that began: We appreciate your work as an active citizen...
View ArticleFour Infographics
To me, it feels like 2009 was a banner year for infographics. Those sometimes-beautiful, always-intricate images that help us understand big or complex topics used to be the strict purview of news...
View ArticleThinking (a Little) About New Forms
You know, one of the under-recognized benefits of the web is that its enabled new forms (or maybe micro-forms) of creativity, or new veins of expression. We can thank the reduced costs of technology,...
View ArticlePSAs: a Webby, a Party and Two Workshops
A few items that are in my orbit this month: TckTckTck, the global climate change campaign Capulet worked on last fall, is up for a Webby. If you’re going to vote in the Webbies, please consider voting...
View ArticleIdea du Jour: Auctioning Off Not Blogging
I was out of town with some friends this weekend, and–I forget how–this idea arose in conversation. The premise is simple enough: bloggers, tweeters, tumblr users (is there a short form for them?) and...
View ArticleA Twibbon For Every World Cup Team
Occasionally I have odd little ideas. Sometimes I actually do them, sometimes I just write about them or sometimes I disregard them out of hand. The other day I had the notion to create a Twibbon–a...
View ArticleBad Idea du Jour: A Filtering Service for Social Media Channels
I have a small problem. I really like the World Cup. Yet the games are played in the morning, with the last game finishing up shortly after lunch. I sometimes watch one game in the morning, but I have...
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Comparing Movie Ratings Sites
The other day, somebody sent me a link to fflick (myself, I’d have capitalized the first ‘f’). It’s a site which (I assume) uses language analysis to aggregate movie reviews off of Twitter. They...
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Caught by Facebook Spam
Incidentally, if you got a message from me in the last half-hour or so that looks like this, don’t click any of the links. I received this from a known Facebook friend, but clearly I should have worked...
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An Delightful New Map of Online Communities
In 2007, famed web cartoonist Randall Munroe drew this great map of online communities. Today, he released a wonderful new version of the map. He’s worked hard, apparently, to build the map to scale....
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Who clicks your shortened URLs?
About 18 months ago, I did a pretty unscientific analysis on Mashable regarding the clickthrough rate for Twitter accounts. That is, when you share a link on Twitter, how many of your followers click...
View ArticleThings I recently learned
Over the past year ago, I’ve been more active on reddit, a geeky social news site that’s gained a lot of steam in recent months, benefiting from the long, slow decline of Digg. Reddit is organized into...
View ArticleHas Facebook wrecked high school reunions?
The other day I received an invitation to my 20-year high school reunion. Man, I am old. The reunion is, of course, being put together on Facebook. The organizers have created a ‘Grad 91′ group, spread...
View ArticleHow can Google+ win?
I’ve had a few days to kick the tires on Google+ (pronounced ‘Google Plus’), Google’s shot across the bow of Facebook and, to a lesser degree, Twitter. It’s a nascent social network built around the...
View ArticleHow seriously do you take Facebook event invitations?
Because it sounds good, I occasionally like to warn audiences to whom I’m speaking that “email may be the fax machine of my generation”. By which I mean that, in 20 years, we’ll all be looking back and...
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Notes from today’s iMedia talk
UPDATE: Here are the slightly revised slides (PDF) I presented today, in PDF format. This morning I gave a talk entitled “Trackbacked: A decade of social media” at the iMedia conference in Edmonton. I...
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