Lesley Anderson

Social networks case study

Who is following who? Exmaine the blogs in your POD and
work out the map of Followers/Following relationship.

This Social Networking diagram shows the group of followers of the blogs belonging to RedPod.  It is colour coded according to the Pods all followers belong to.

Assign each person a letter in the same order as they appear in the dialogue as a, b, c .. etc.
For your chosen extract, draw the social network diagram and build the same matrix of 0 and 1’s as per figure 1. Descibe any patterns of people’s interactions that you discover.
If you were to repeat this analysis on another set of blogs from another POD,
would you find the same patterns?
Why or why not? [HINT - changes in context and process may be just some variables to consider]
Support you opinion with any of the reference provided or with others you find.    

The RedPod meeting that this dialogue was extracted from and from which the data was extracted was certainly full on.  In fact most of the meetings our Pod has held have been the same.  I did notice, as I looked over the dialogue that we talk about a lot of other things besides the task at hand but there seems to have been great discussion about what we have been doing, how we are doing it and what we have achieved.  This discussion was highly motivated too All members contributing at some stage, to the discussion, is reflected in the table above.  We all talked to each other at some stage of the conversation.  The diagram is fairly mundane as is the table.

One thing, these items don’t show is ‘how much’ each member of the group contributes to dialogue and conversation.  Perhaps a diagram with weighted edges as suggested by Hallinan[i] in the second of her lectures - “Networks” would better do that?    Weighting or colour coding edges could certainly aid in showing which members of the group were most actively engaged during discussion and interaction.

The type of dialogue is not reflected - agreement or disagreement, questioning or explanatory, or reveal relationships between group members. Tone certainly is not evident and that is difficult to gauge from text alone - unless it is obvious that someone is unhappy with what is going on in a discussion and expresses it adequately.

The way I have displayed my social networking diagram is not indicative of the direction of conversation either.  It basically makes the statement that at some stage during the conversation person A spoke to person B. Having the table in front of you helps a little - in this case we know that person B did speak to person A but we don’t know where in the conversation this occurred.

There are certainly factors that I believed influenced this and other of our Pod discussions.
The timing of our meeting - we had not yet started with our pod work and had had a few hiccups with how we would approach the work and workload in order to fulfil the requirements of the task set for us.
With a general feeling of urgency and need to complete work within a time frame it is much easier to get discussion happening and keep it on track.
Time zone differences - we had to make the most of the time when we were all able to get together to discuss things as one of our members is one and a half hours behind us. Not that it has caused any real problems, but I do think it makes us frugal with the time we have together.
The nature of the work - knowing that this is assessment material also helps to keep us efficient with our meeting times and stay relevant to the goal we are trying to achieve.
Size of the group - only four members discussing things over distance, makes the discussion much more productive and makes all the data look neat and tidy - there’s really not that much to handle.

If these restraints and pressures from outside the group were not there, if we had unlimited amounts of time to work together and get our task finished, if we had to communicate across a huge group of people over distance and were not all working toward a common goal,  things might well be different.  Kirshbaum[ii] talks about complex systems as being self organising - they adjust naturally to increase their efficiency and effectiveness, in response to so many stimuli from the environment around them as well as being affected by the nonlinear change that happens within them. It is amazing that all of it occurs without us even realising it.   

 [i] Hallinan, J 2005, Introduction to Complex Systems, <http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~comp4001/>, accessed 21 October 2006.

 [ii] Kirshbaum, D, 2002, Introduction to Complex Systems, <http://www.calresco.org/intro.htm>, accessed 21 October 2006.

I decided to actually take a look at a larger dialogue to compare with my original data. 
This table and the second Social Networking Diagram have been generated from dialogue from the group’s Etherpad discussion on the 5/8/09 and, even though there is only double the number of members in this discussion excerpt the picture is quite different - in both the table and the diagram. I remember feeling at the time, how disjointed the meeting felt as members of the group came in and left randomly.  The table also shows dominance by a couple of the group members and the dialogue actually reflects this - with their names coming up more often in the conversation.  It also shows polarising to a certain degree - this was quite early in our semester of work and people were still finding their way, getting to know others and understand how things would work.

Research and evaluation in Government 2.0

1. Summarise the use of

• 1. Wiki drafts of papers for public discussion and
• 2. Twitter in Government.

Wikis appear to be a favoured way of creating some documents where public discussion is to be included. On the Public Sphere2  site. http://wiki.katelundy.com.au/PublicSphere2 an outline is given of the steps that were undertaken to create a collaborative document on - Government 2.0: Policy and Practice - which would ultimately be given to the Gov2.0 taskforce when it was completed.  Use of a wiki was central to this process, enabling people from throughout the Australian general public to have their say about the topic by adding to the wiki file.  This has also been the process for Public Sphere3 and other Government bodies are embracing the idea of public forum set up in this way with a view to decision making being collaborative with and transparent to the general public.

Twitter also seems to be gathering momentum for use in such forums. Both the Public Sphere reports mentioned above and passed on the Gov2.0 taskforce included documentation of twitter feeds in which members of the government and public added comments and information to the discussion taking place. On all the Gov2.0 sites are icons for twitter encouraging people to follow the government on it. Read the rest of this entry »

Is social networking a business model?

What are the arguments for and against social networking being classified as a business model?

There is certainly a lot of talk on the web about business models and whether social networking sites could be classified as having one. Firstly, tracking down a definition of a business model that I could understand - as a non-business person was challenging. I finally got some satisfaction with this definition. A business model is -
“A description of the operations of a business including the components of the business, the functions of the business, and the revenues and expenses that the business generates. ” http://www.investorwords.com/629/business_model.html

It seems that a business model is generally about how a business will generate revenue to sustain itself and satisfy anyone who has financial interests in it - monetization. Some models and the problems they may face with regard to social networking follow in the table below. Read the rest of this entry »

Aggregation, syndication and the social engine

Explain how the Elgg social engine works on a Web site where it is installed?
Is this the type of application you want on your Web server in the workplace?

Elgg is built on LAMP[i] it is open source software, released under the GPL[ii].  Elgg has its own system of plug-ins and also supports RSS, OpenID, FOAF and XML-RPC for integration with most blogging sites.

Elgg provides each user with their own blog, file repository, online profile and RSS reader and their content can be tagged with keywords - connecting them to users with similar interests and giving the ability to create their own PLN(Personal Learning Network).  It is different to other blog facilities or commercial Social Networking sites such as Facebook in the amount of control users are given over who can access the content they publish. Each individual profile item, blog post or uploaded file can be assigned its own access restriction, ranging from being fully public to only readable by a selected user or group of users.

New Elgg users begin by creating an identity which says who they are and what they are interested in. Published items can be tagged and the software uses these tags to connect other users with similar interests. Read the rest of this entry »

Aggregation, syndication and the social engine

How do you see services such as those provided at the GoToWeb20.net 
site as changing the way that YOU and your future workgroups operate?

Accessing GoToWeb20.net - I found an interesting experience. I was really unsure of the purpose of the site as there is not much explanation about it.

This is the page that I was taken to when I used the link.

From this page - clicking on a link such as Mindmap, took me to a page that listed mindmapping websites, sites that offered mindmapping tools - either for free or cmmercially available. 
Searching did much the same thing - I searched for an interest of mine - scrapbooking -  and was presented with a page of sites about scrapbooking. Read the rest of this entry »

Aggregation, syndication and the social engine

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website.
What does this mean and what are the advantages for workgroups?
Discuss how del.icio.us uses the term ‘tag’ in a different context to what Web publishers would be familiar.

With billions of web-pages, it makes sense that we are able to pull out the best or most useful pages we require, with relative ease. We could bookmark into the browser of our computer but then the links are tied only to one computer - when we switch computers we don’t have access to our bookmarked sites. 

Social bookmarking sites - such as delicious have changed this. 

Delicious doesn’t use a browser but uses a website instead. A user signs up for a free account and adds a couple of buttons to the browser - a delicious symbol and a tag symbol.

The delicious symbol - is a link to www.delicious.com which takes the user to the main page of the site showing a list of the newest bookmarks available from users.

The tag symbol - is the button a user presses if they want to add a new bookmark to the website. Read the rest of this entry »

Aggregation, syndication and the social engine

What is RSS and explain what aggregation and syndication are  and how they have changed the nature of the Web. How do you subscribe to an RSS feed?

RSS - Really Simple Syndication has changed the way people gather and use information on the Web. For the subscriber it is a tool useful for saving or retaining updated information on websites frequently visited or which are their favourite. For the web publisher or website owner it is an easy and efficient way to distribute website headlines, update notices, and content to a wide number of people.

In order to set up these connections or feeds a user requires an RSS reader or aggregator.  These may be either web based (Google Reader) or desk-top based (MS Outlook 2007) and it is these readers that place all the information in one place for easy retrieval and interaction by the user - aggregation.

The user subscribes to a feed by entering into the reader the feed’s URL or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser to begin the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to easily monitor, manage and read the feeds Read the rest of this entry »

Data portability, FOAF and the Semantic Web

1.  Begin with the YouTube video at http://www.foaf-project.org/community

I found this video an interesting and novel way to get an IT based message across to an audience.  It does it though - reminding  the viewer  that for each social networking site you sign up to, you have to fill in the same data or information about yourself over and over again and how much easier life would be if you could just “get your date out” once.  One size to fit all, saving time and energy and letting you get on with the social side of social networking.

2. Like a chain letter, our data seems to move within and between
tools like Facebook and Twitter. Is this a good thing?

People’s web presence forms part of their identity so they should have the right to move their information wherever, whenever they wish.  It is understandable that a business - once you sign up with it - is going to do everything in its power to keep you tied to them. They may use the term ’service’ but ultimately they are businesses and like all other businesses need to make a profit to stay in business.  The number of people they have within their network has to be the clincher for the advertising attached to sites that ultimately makes them money.

Giving users flexibility to move, if they want to, from one network to another and take their data with them, could possibly be what spurs network creators to do better things with their sites and software - so that people won’t want to leave. In that way there are benefits to all parties. Sites keep their numbers and users keep their data and options to use it wherever they like.

I have to admit, I am over filling in the same information repetitively in order to access sites that offer social networking software and facilities but that is more to do with laziness than retention of my own identity or data. Read the rest of this entry »

The avalanche of applications self-interview

Try an interview with yourself  to extract your own thoughts on the topic.
Devise three (3) questions that interest you at this stage and reveal what is on your mind to yourself.
Comment on the self-interview experience in your blog.

Questions:

(2). Am I able to use some of the applications I have looked at in the classroom?
Many of the tools we have used for this course, are unavailable for use in the classroom as the age of  my students isn’t within the range required. I particularly like the look of some of the applications for classroom use.  Skype, I think, might be particularly beneficial.  I see it as having uses in the school - to connect students working collaboratively across grades, schools and outside areas as well as being beneficial for communication for administrators across schools. In fact I think our group of schools are aiming to do that during 2010 when our network is upgraded. Read the rest of this entry »

The 30-minute walk

Take a break and go a walk for 15-30 minutes.
Come back to the computer and begin writing a short narrative on the experience.

I walk often through the bushland area close to our home. My walks change with the mood of the bush itself and these are often linked to the weather.  On quiet days the bushland can be a place of solitude and reflection with any movement being quite startling. When the weather is wilder the bush seems to come alive with the sights and sounds of movement from all directions - a stark contrast.

From the moment my walk began, it was a busy one with many encounters along the way.  Like the distinctive smell that was lingering in the first few steps of my walk into the bush. There has been a lot of rain over the last few weeks with the latest shower about an hour before my walk. It gave the bushland a familiar, distinctive smell, something like a fresh mix of eucalyptus and rich earth. A favourite smell that is similar throughout the bushland I have walked in. Read the rest of this entry »