Its been quite a long time since I blogged somewhere other then here, and an equally long time since I blogged on a weekly basis. But, as of today, I will be posting weekly on greensear.ch, a group blog started by Core-Industries, a company my good friend Megan works for.

The blog is mostly about providing a communal space to discuss the intersection between the environment and technology and everything that falls neatly (and not so neatly) in between, while also encouraging readers to utilize the 'search' feature. Searching generates money from advertising, which is then donated to an environmental non-profit. There are already several authors who have become involved, many familiar ITP names. I think it will be a very interesting experience and I am excited to see what kind of conversation develops. Check it out. My first post is on RideTheCity.com.

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Finally got around to posting my final paper for the Social Facts Class. The title of the paper is:

Creating Connections for Disaster Relief in New Orleans
Looking at Social Software and Community Groups

The paper came out of observing community groups working within the city of New Orleans, research that I have done through the class on the ways that groups maintain effectiveness and translate their activities to online environments and thoughts I have had about facilitating social action through social networking.

Here is the PDF.

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Thanks to a brilliantly written paper co-authored by the freeFormed crew and put together and edited with Yonatan Kelib's own specific recent research, freeFormed will be presented at the 2006 Young Investigators Forum In Culture Technology In South Korea at the end of this month, with Yonatan traveling there to represent the group. We are all incredibly excited at this opportunity!!!! Please look for updates and more info about this on the freeFormed.org blog.

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Durring the writing of the FreeFormed paper today, Megan and I got into a rather intense discussion about whether certain social networking and media sharing platforms promote certain types of content. Megan's opinion was that people have a tendency to create certain content independent from any particular platform and that such content would be published and posted regardless of whether or not a particular platform was available to promote it. (perhaps I am simplifying or not correctly stating her thoughts, but I believe this accurate). On the other hand, I believe that many sites, such as YouTube and Myspace contain largely irrelevant and entertainment worthy content because the very nature of thier structural dynamic encoruages the idiocy. For instance, Myspace is highly marketed towards a younger generation of users and their inclusion of an 'anything goes' (for the most part) profile strategy appears to promote a popularity contest based on the number of friend connections, which can be furthered by the display of questionable and provocative personal content. Would we really see as many fifteen and sixteen year old posting their OWN half naked pictures online if platforms like Myspace did not exist to provide some kind of reward for such behavior? I personally don't think so.

YouTube functions in a similar way because most of the videos that receive extensive hits and are thus voted most popular, contain shocking or ridiculous behavior (not all but most). This is turn encourages users to create content in that vain in order to increase the chance that their videos will be viewed. This is not to say that some people would not be interested in creating such content outside of the YouTube platform, or that certain people are not using YouTube for more relevant purposes, but I feel that the constant display of silliness is feuled by YouTube's structure.

I am not in any way saying that an online platform can create interest in something that is not already there. I simply feel that in thinking about why certain networks attract certain users it is not enough to say that certain people will gravitate toward sites that represent their interests in communicating online, There does exist a certain kind of mobb mentality within some of these platforms, which encourage users to engage in behavior that they may not have engaged in otherwise.

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Thanks to Megan for finding these statistics while doing research for our paper for the Identity and Identification in a Networked World: A Multidisciplinary
Graduate Student Symposium.

Nothing too surprising here. Myspace was number one, of course, with a 367% one year growth and the highest user retention rate. YouTube was number five with 12.5 million unigue users in about nine months. According to the Nielsen/NetRatings' latest figures, the Top 10 social-networking sites now reach a whopping 45% of active Web users, Together, the ten sites have grown 47% in the past year (from 46.8 million unique visitors in April 2005 to 68.8 million last month).

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Thanks again to Yonatan for pointing me to this interesting artcile.. It is no surprise that so many companies are trying to cash-in on this rapidly growing market. It will be interesting to see how their influence shapes the development of mobile networks.

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I originally found this on Smart Mobs, although you can read the original post at
IFTF's Future Now. The book is available free under a creative commons license. I skimmed the first couple chapters. Seems like an interesting reference on how communities without even dial-up access can create their own broadband internet connections for cheap. The book also emphazies how the use of this unlicensed technology can aid activist groups in getting their messages across. Interesting.
Download the PDF

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Special thanks to Yonatan for contributing to this intial stage of research. Here are some links he found detailing the current cellular standards and providers in Africa:

statistics
Network Operators

Interesting Notes: In Kenya, as aforementioned, South Africa and Swaziland (a small country right above South Africa) the major cellular service providers seem to offer nationwide MMS messaging. However, the standard in Africa is still GSM which is second generation mobile technology,in the class of 2G, while GPRS is 2.5G, EDGE is 2.75G and UMTS is 3G. Mobileafrica, a website dedicated to reporting mobile news and technology developments in Africa, seems to suggest that development is headed toward 3G.

more research notes available soon

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