In December, Facebook made a series of bold and controversial changes regarding the nature of its users' privacy on the social networking site. The company once known for protecting privacy to the point of exclusivity (it began its days as a network for college kids only - no one else even had access), now seemingly wants to compete with more open social networks like the microblogging media darling Twitter.
TED Talks: While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.
Without much surprise there has been significant movement within some of the social networks over the course of the last year. Brian Chappell from Ignite Social Media has put together a comprehensive report based on data from all major social networks existing on the web.
The power of collaborative effort, especially relevant to us Pittsburghers. People can report on the road and snow conditions on streets close to where they live.
Navigation is a daily part of our lives any more. Several vehicles are made with GPS built in, and most of the rest of us have a GPS device of some sort. When it comes to getting where we need to be with out getting lost, well, we are pretty much …
Social bookmarking has been around for several years, and it is finally beginning to gain in popularity because it is a powerful way to organize and share information. Harvey Raybould from OfficialWire.com gives an overview of the use of social bookmarking systems in business promotion.
You live your life online -- and anyone can read it. Should employers be able to troll your Facebook or MySpace page? Or should everything that you put onlin...
Big changes are coming to Facebook Platform. Today, Facebook is granting developers on Platform the ability to request (or require) users to hand over their e-mail ids..
One of the leading social optimization platforms for online business, providing social sharing and registration solutions that enable online businesses to increase traffic, registrations, and engagement. Gigya’s platform aggregates and optimizes social APIs including Facebook Connect, Sign in with Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpaceID, Y!OS, Google and AOL.
"Ajax" stands for "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML." It is interesting to know that the term was coined just five years ago, on Feb 18, 2005 by user interface expert Jesse James Garrett. The elements of Ajax were already in use, but Garrett's 2005 blog entry gave a name to a powerful computing movement. In recognition of Ajax' birthday, SearchSOA.com reached out to Ajax thought leaders who, via email, formed a virtual roundtable discussion on where Ajax has come and how it is expected to evolve.
Sphinn is the place for web, online, search, interactive and internet marketers to share news stories, talk within subject-specific discussion forums, build a network and stay informed of upcoming events.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.
In an effort to add one more story to the list of reasons why Facebook already rules the world and can stop trying, we find that Facebook is the social-network-login of choice by nearly 2-to-1.
Ohloh is a free public directory of open source software and people.
Ohloh is a wiki, and anyone is welcome to join our community and add new projects to our directory, or to make corrections to existing directory pages. This public review makes Ohloh one of the largest, most accurate, and up-to-date software directories available.
Ohloh is not a forge -- we do not host open source projects in the traditional sense. Ohloh is a directory, a community, and an analytics service. We use the data from our directory to create historical reports about the changing demographics of the open source world.
There certainly is a lot of commentary regarding the usefulness of social media marketing, as well as the numbers of people that are engaging in the conversation. According to recent studies conducted by PostRank, we have been able to illustrate what is happening in the Internet’s social community — how people are communicating, what is changing, and where people are doing the talking.
Tim O'Reilly attempts to clarify just what is meant by Web 2.0, the term first coined at a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly Media and MediaLive International, which also spawned the Web 2.0 Conference.
Denise Pires, a student from University of Amsterdam, wrote in the blog "Masters of Media" about why we, as human beings, tend to use the well-known microblogging service.
In this talk, Jonathan Zittrain made proposes that the seemingly lost human kindness has blossomed on the internet. The talk starts with the basic infrastructure of the internet, all the way to the simple but brilliant ideas of information sharing, to explain the act of kindness of human. This differs from ratings on amazon in that it is proactive and conscious actions of internet users who give and pass on favors.
his article describes and evaluates several peer evaluation tools used to assess student behavior in small groups. The two most common methods of peer assessment found in the literature are rating scales and single score methods. Three peer evaluation instruments, two using a rating scale and one using a single score method, are tested in several management courses to examine their effectiveness. All three instruments demonstrate acceptable levels of reliability and are found to be correlated with individual performance measures. The article concludes with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each instrument.
As collaborative or team-based projects become more popular in both secondary and post-secondary classrooms, instructors are looking for ways for group mem bers to effectively evaluate one another. Constructing effective evaluation tools can be a daunting task. As shown by a review of literature, best practices include (1) building a foundation in the classroom that supports collaborative evaluation, (2) creating effective evaluation tools by articulating specific criteria and ensuring honest student participation (3) implementing formative feedback during the col laborative experience, (4) formulating summative feedback at the conclusion of the experience, and (5) assessing the collaborative evaluation process.
Marketing research firm Nielsen has some stats on the habits of UK social networking users, and it once again shows that social networks, for the most part, adhere to the Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule).
Most any journalism professor, upon mention of Wikipedia, will immediately launch into a rant about how the massively collaborative online encyclopedia can't be trusted. It can, you see, be edited and altered by absolutely anyone at any moment.
But how much less trustworthy is the site for breaking news than the plethora of blogs and other online news sources?
In this post from the blog "The Innovation Diaries", the author tries to categorize people's tweets into a hierarchy resembling Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs for human beings. Each category is well explained and then illustrated by a few examples.
Providing fair assessment with timely feedback for students is a difficult task with science laboratory classes containing large numbers of students. Such classes are usually assessed by short-answer questions (SAQs) centred on principles encountered in the laboratory. It has been shown recently that computer-assisted assessment (CAA) has several advantages and is well received by students. However, student evaluation has shown that this system does not provide suitable feedback. Thus, the authors introduced peer assessment (PA) as a complementary procedure. In October 2006, 457 students registered for a first-year practical unit in the Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester. This unit consists of ten compulsory biology practical classes. The first four practicals were assessed using PA; the remaining six practicals were assessed by CAA and marked by staff or postgraduate student demonstrators. The reliability and validity of PA were determined by comparing duplicate scripts and by staff moderation of selected scripts. Student opinions were sought via questionnaires.
The authors show that both assessments are valid, reliable, easy to administer and are accepted by students. PA increases direct feedback to students, although the initial concerns of student groups such as mature and EU/International students need to be addressed using pre-PA training.
What does a friend of a friend of a friend know about you?Video generated by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Jennifer Stoddart. For more in...
Craiglook is a useful mash-up, which uses Yahoo Pipes to aggregate RSS Feeds from Craigslist and Google Maps to create a new-and-improved Craigslist search facility. Filtering products by location, category, cost and relevance is much easier compared to the original, not to mention the enhanced visual appeal. Check it out!
Want to have Buzz act like more of a regular application than a browser tab? Follow Mashable's guide to creating your own Buzz application for the desktop.
Our goal is to develop a probabilistic knowledge base that mirrors the content of the web. We are developing a system that uses semi-supervised learning methods to learn to extract symbolic knowledge from unstructured text and HTML. We are exploring methods of continous learning, where our system runs 24x7, continuously learning to read better, and continuously extracting facts from the web.
Taking a page out of Facebook’s open strategy, Twitter has launched a new page which highlights the open source projects that the company has released or contributed to.
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