As you’re painfully aware by now there are hundreds of social networking websites but none of them have a communal database. If you’re on orkut your data stays there, if you’re on yahoo communities your data is there. All these social networking websites are very similar in what they ask of you but different in how they link you. Loudmouthman got me thinking about how you could use a database like freebase to share this data between networks, sort of like openid but with more data.
There are a great diversity of websites out there and each one has it’s own strengths. As a result of this it is not unusual for me to visit twenty to thirty websites on a daily basis, from the likes of twitter, my own website, news sites and more. What this means is that I find the tools that are best for what I want to do on a variety of websites.
After a long but great day of work I came home to do The Twitter Vox show with Loudmouthman and two guests. We were joined by Goldie Katsu and Malburns. We discussed what it’s like to reach 3000 tweets and the conversation moved towards the advantages of using twitter when part of global communities like Second Life. We had some interesting insights and the conversation progressed well. It’s a good show and can be found here.
Recently I have been trying to categorise websites and how they are used into single words. To this end I have recently started to view facebook as a self actualising phonebook. There are a number of factors which help to contribute to this feeling. One of these is the ability for me to add all “real life” friends without adding any “virtual friends” - friends I do not know in person.
“The simultaneity of electric communication, also characteristic of our nervous system, makes each of us present and accessible to every other person in the world. To a large degree, our co-presence everywhere at once in the electric age is a fact of passive, rather than active, experience. Actively we are more likely to have this awareness when reading the newspaper or watching a tv show.”
Marshall McLuhan - 1964
The concept of community is an old one, coming from an evolutionary need for more than one pair of eyes to watch out for predators and other threats. over time the sense of community has evolved and become as great as it is today. There are however pockets of social discord. I believe that forums are the sandboxes of the World Wide Web. In chatrooms, there are always three or four people who chat together in the public space, whilst all around people ask A(ge), S(ex), L(ocation) - or at least they did.
A recent article has brought to the world’s attention that Wikipedia has over 2 million articles on its website and that’s great. What it means is that thousands of people have taken a little time out of their day to provide what knowledge they had to a global audience through their small contribution.
The World Wide Web was not always as easy to use as it is today. Back when I started using the world wide web there were less than six million web pages.
When I heard with what hate one podcaster talked about the Cult Of The Amateur I told myself that I should read this book because it addresses a question that is at least two hundred years old, mainly the difference between high culture and low culture. High culture is seen as everything that has taken research and thought to create whilst popular culture is anything else. High culture might be a painting displayed in a museum whilst popular culture is something that most people could succeed in doing themselves.
A journalism student at the University of Westminster worked on an item about addiction to technology and this is quite an old item. In 1998 (if I remember correctly) I was speaking to a security guard in Martinique about the internet and he talked about it as if it was a disease as if it was bad. Back in my high school days would argue with my teachers trying to get permission to draw the graphs by computer rather than doing them by hand.
the future of the web the search engine was the king, now it’s social networking. People had their own home page, now it’s grown to their own website. The blog was grown and grown, replacing webrings to be developed For several years the search engine was king. This was the place where everyone went to find content because all the information was so disorganised. Recently though this has changed. The way people use the world wide web has evolved.