The image above, which looks like a broken Death Star, is actually a visual representation of my Social Graph (at least on Facebook).
Rather than explain what a Social Graph is, I’ll just tell you this. First, there’s a new kind of geek in the world now. I’ll call them the Social Geeks™. These are the people who are dubbed “social media gurus“. Second, the Social Geeks® have come up with a fancy sounding term (so they/we can charge more per hour) called a “Social Graph”. You know it as your “friends”.
Now, if I can stop using quotations for a minute, the real point of the Social Graph isn’t for the generic person who uses the internet. It’s an analytical tool so that those Social Geeks∞ can sell their souls to the devil (a.k.a. marketing departments), telling them how to get in touch with your friends so that you can be sold that 4th burrito you really shouldn’t have eaten at lunch (and then the 24 hour fitness membership you’ll use for 2 weeks).
Ok, it’s not all bad. Plenty of academics use Social Graphs to determine behavior, affinity, and other academic stuff. And, as we all know, 99% of what academics study don’t cross over into the business world where it becomes applicable to the generic public.
All that to say….
Pretty cool picture huh?
The image to the left was created using Google Maps on Sunday, May 4th 2008. Although this map is static, it’s a replica of the map shown on the right sidebar of our Traveling Europe blog. This post will explain how I use my iPhone, a new service called BrightKite, and a [...]
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One of my favorite authors, Seth Godin, recently touched upon the subject of signal to noise in social media and the web in general. It’s interesting to me that his perspective comes at such a fortuitous time as this. Literally, the day a few of us will be getting together to discuss the [...]
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As some of you know (if you follow me on Twitter) my wife and I have been on vacation for the past week. “Vacation” is a somewhat deprecated term these days because who, really, goes on vacation? Do you really not check your business email? I check mine daily, even while I’m [...]
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Thanks to Mark Edwards of Simpler Computing, there has been a long-awaited upgrade to the Duh Gallery (the wordpress photo gallery plugin).
Mark was kind enough to make the following changes:
changed code structure to be a bit simpler
removed class wrapper
removed the use of do_action to speed up processing
added detection of ‘upload_dir’ from the Wordpress database, and [...]
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Feb
22
Posted by nate within Community, Ideas, Projects, Techie
Some days are just weird. Today was one of those. I was a little tired today, and when I get tired, I get apathetic and a little down. I really should make sure I get enough sleep at night (hence the wine in my hand and the pillow awaiting me right [...]
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Reprinted with permission from Net Squared
Do you have an idea for how a mashup could be a tool for social change?
Do you look at all of the data available online, and imagine ways to combine and connect it to increase awareness about an issue?
Do you see projects like MAPLight.org or chicagocrime.org and think, I’ve got [...]
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A few months ago I had an idea at 2:30am. I talked about the “50 photos” project before, but this time, it’s grown up a little bit.
This time, there’s a real voting application behind it.
Photographers
As a photographer who licenses your work under Creative Commons, you can submit your Flickr URLs to any [...]
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