Clipmarks | edtechnnorris's 'social networking' clips

Social Networking is the new porn

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 02:03:06 GMT

clipped by: edtechnnorris
clipper's remarks: More young people are using social networking sites so they don't have time to surf for porn.

Clip Source: www.msnbc.msn.com

CANBERRA - Social networking sites are the hottest attraction on the Internet, dethroning pornography and highlighting a major change in how people communicate, according to a web guru.

Bill Tancer, a self-described "data geek," has analyzed information for over 10 million web users to conclude that we are, in fact, what we click, with Internet searches giving an up-to-date view of how society and people are changing.

He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.

"As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased," said Tancer, indicated that the 18-24 year old age group particularly was searching less for porn.

More Bosses Using Social Media Profiles to Evaluate Potential Hires

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:08:12 GMT

clipped by: edtechnnorris

Clip Source: www.mediapost.com

The thin line between personal and professional social networking just got thinner, as the use of sites like LinkedIn and Facebook to get the inside scoop on job candidates is on the rise.

A new CareerBuilder.com survey found that 22% of all hiring managers have combed through social media profiles to help evaluate potential hires, up from just 11% two years ago. HR execs from media and creative agencies like MediaVest and AKQA weighed in on the practice, identifying LinkedIn as their site of choice for new hire research.

"We look at their handles on Plurk or Twitter," Misukanis said. "They can be very telling, because they're quick sound bytes about how a person feels, what they like or don't like, and whether they're a generally negative or positive person.

It's Social Networking for Babies - Twitter From the Cradle

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:40:49 GMT

clipped by: edtechnnorris
clipper's remarks: Facebook generation has kids

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

But considering that relatives clamor for updates, she enjoys being able to catalog 10-week-old Cameron’s doings in one Web-accessible place. “Knowing his daddy, it won’t be long before he’s blogging about himself anyway,” she said, referring to her husband, Nathan, 29. He joined Odadeo, a site still in beta that allows dads to blog on behalf of baby as well as meet other fathers.

“We’re seeing a rising tide of parenting interest on social networks,” said Adam Ostrow, the editor of Mashable, a news blog about social networking sites. “Recently, I’ve noticed a lot of Facebook users are adding their children to their profiles.”

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Founders of this new breed of baby sites, for all their networking aspirations, allow parents to choose whom they want to invite to view and share information about their child. Totspot even has a feature that allows users to track who has visited their child’s Web page and when.

Twittering in a Hurricane

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:27:47 GMT

clipped by: edtechnnorris
clipper's remarks: Chicago Tribune using twitter for citizen journalism

Clip Source: www.chicagotribune.com

Faced with the kind of story that spans hundreds of miles, the Tribune is experimenting with online citizen reporting under the watchful gaze of seasoned journalists.

But after conversing with Gulf Coast residents on the social networking site Twitter—creating the online persona "GustavReporter" to do it—I found myself with 670 followers Monday, and also a duty as the storm rolled past to pass along their factual statements and dampen falsehoods.

Facebook More Popular than Porn

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:53:07 GMT

clipped by: edtechnnorris

Clip Source: www.time.com

where college students are going online is to assess which of the 172 web categories tracked by Hitwise get the most hits from 18- to 24-year-olds. Here's a shocker: Porn is not No. 1. I've actually been puzzled by the decrease in visits to the Adult Entertainment category over the last two years. Visits to porn sites have dropped from 16.9% of all site visits in the U.S. in October 2005 to 11.9% as of last week, a 33% decline. Currently, for web users over the age of 25, Adult Entertainment still ranks high in popularity, coming in second, after search engines. Not so for 18- to 24-year-olds, for whom social networks rank first, followed by search engines, then web-based e-mail — with porn sites lagging behind in fourth. If you chart the rate of visits to social-networking sites against those to adult sites over the last two years, there appears to be a strong negative correlation (i.e., visits to social networks go up as visits to adult sites go down). I

Educational Benefits of Social Networking Sites Uncovered

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 01:02:33 GMT

clipped by: edtechnnorris

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

esearchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered the educational benefits of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. The same study found that low-income students are in many ways just as technologically proficient as their counterparts, going against what results from previous studies have suggested.

What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today,"

educators can help students realize even more benefits from their social network site use by working to deepen students' still emerging ideas about what it means to be a good digital citizen and leader online.

"Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content and thinking about online design and layout. They're also sharing creative original work like poetry and film and practicing safe and responsible use of information and technology.

BTW, teen writing may cause teachers to :(

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 02:24:53 GMT

clipped by: edtechnnorris
clipper's remarks: Many teens slip non-standard english into their writing projects. Here's a thought: If students were blogging for their teachers and held accountable for their grammar and punctuation, maybe their facebook pages would improve.

Clip Source: www.cnn.com

NEW YORK (AP) -- It's nothing to LOL about: Despite the best efforts to keep school writing assignments formal, two-thirds of teens admit in a survey that emoticons and other informal styles have crept in.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project, in a study released Thursday, also found that teens who keep blogs or use social-networking sites such as Facebook or News Corp.'s MySpace have a greater tendency to slip nonstandard elements into assignments.

"It's a teachable moment," said Amanda Lenhart, senior research specialist at Pew. "If you find that in a child's or student's writing, that's an opportunity to address the differences between formal and informal writing. They learn to make the distinction ... just as they learn not to use slang terms in formal writing."

Science 2.0 - Is Open Access Science The Future?

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 04:05:01 GMT

clipped by: edtechnnorris
clipper's remarks: The impact of social networking on the scientific community.

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

The first generation of World Wide Web capabilities rapidly transformed retailing and information search. More recent attributes such as blogging, tagging and social networking, dubbed Web 2.0, have just as quickly expanded people’s ability not just to consume online information but to publish it, edit it and collaborate about it—forcing such old-line institutions as journalism, marketing and even politicking to adopt whole new ways of thinking and operating.

Science could be next. A small but growing number of researchers (and not just the younger ones) have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open tools of Web 2.0. And although their efforts are still too scattered to be called a movement—yet—their experiences to date suggest that this kind of Web-based “Science 2.0” is not only more collegial than traditional science but considerably more productive.

Acceptance of such measures would require a big change in academic culture.

The New Job Application: No E-Mail or Resume

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 03:51:05 GMT

clipped by: edtechnnorris
clipper's remarks: Using web presence and social networking to demonstrate writing skills, professional networks, and contribution to the professional community

Clip Source: www.usnews.com

He's looking for a PR director and a social media marketing manager, and these are his rules:

1. No resumes. At least not the kind written in MS Word.

2. If you want to get me your background, do it in the "community way." Either blog about why we should hire you or get me to your profile on LinkedIn (or your preferred social network.)

3. DON'T e-mail me. If you are a community-centric person, connect with me on Twitter or Facebook—you can DM me on Twitter or email me through Facebook.

Is this the future of job applications? The information and requirements are announced on Strout's Mzinga blog. He includes links (and shout-outs) to other bloggers he's referring to in the post. He links to his own social network profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn, and to his personal blog.

Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass it On

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:44:32 GMT

clipped by: edtechnnorris
clipper's remarks: Social networking and the media

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Fully two-thirds of Web users under 30 say they use social networking sites, while fewer than 20 percent of older users do. MySpace and Facebook create a sense of connection to the candidates.

According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.

Candidates are capitalizing on this social development, and so are their supporters.

Student Dodges Expulsion Over Facebook Study Group

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 02:09:19 GMT

clipped by: edtechnnorris
clipper's remarks: College professors need to get a clue about how students are using social networking

Clip Source: www.pbs.org

your students are more comfortable organizing their own online discussions than most of us ever will, so you better lay out the rules as specifically and openly as possible. And when students break those rules, the punishment should match the severity of the academic crime committed. Otherwise, you too could find your school in the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

The lesson to be learned from this mess is that schools need to get a better grasp of how students create and use online study groups. They need to understand the spectrum of activities that can take place in them, from innocent - even productive - collaboration activities to organized cheating. Participating in an online study group isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s how the group is used that should taken into consideration. If a school’s acceptable use policy and academic rules in general don’t address a student’s rights and responsibilities when it comes to online study groups, they need to be re-examined.

Tags: optional. separate by commas., social networking, education

Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 03:05:28 GMT

clipped by: edtechnnorris
clipper's remarks: Interesting article about parents and children using text messaging. In some cases helping communication with parents and their kids. Parents need to learn to text.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Children increasingly rely on personal technological devices like cellphones to define themselves and create social circles apart from their families, changing the way they communicate with their parents.

“For kids it has become an identity-shaping and psyche-changing object,” Ms. Turkle said. “No one creates a new technology really understanding how it will be used or how it can change a society.”

So far, parents’ ability to reach their children whenever they want affords families more pluses than minuses.

But as with any cultural shift involving parents and children — the birth of rock ’n’ roll or the sexual revolution of the 1960s, for example — various gulfs emerge. Baby boomers who warned decades ago that their out-of-touch parents couldn’t be trusted now sometimes find themselves raising children who — thanks to the Internet and the cellphone — consider Mom and Dad to be clueless, too.

Tags: optional. separate by commas., parenting, social networking

Forget E-Mail: New Messaging Service Has Students and Professors Atwitter

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 04:52:31 GMT

clipped by: edtechnnorris
clipper's remarks: Higher education is using twitter to "help the students feel more like a community, and break down that barrier between inside the classroom walls and outside the classroom walls."

Clip Source: chronicle.com

Anyone who feels overloaded with information from e-mail, blogs, and Web sites probably won't want to read this. But some professors, librarians, and administrators have begun using Twitter, a service that can blast very short notes (up to 140 characters) to select users' cellphones or computer screens.

Twittering also creates a public record of every message sent — at least on the service's default settings — because all Twitter users get Web pages where archives of their messages are posted. So students and professors should be careful what thoughts they share.

Some college officials are using Twitter to keep in touch with colleagues at other universities.

Twitter can be a much faster way to get help from colleagues than sending an e-mail message to a list or posting a question on a blog, says Ms. Little. Once when she was preparing a presentation, she posted a question to her contacts on Twitter and got an answer in just a few minutes.

Tags: optional. separate by commas., social networking

How Dangerous is the Internet for Children

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 04:35:05 GMT

clipped by: edtechnnorris
clipper's remarks: Great article that puts everything in perspective. The internet's danger is highly overstated. Thanks David for this great post!

Clip Source: pogue.blogs.nytimes.com

A few years ago, a parenting magazine asked me to write an article about the dangers that children face when they go online. As it turns out, I was the wrong author for the article they had in mind.

Its chief message was this: “Sure, there are dangers. But they’re hugely overhyped by the media. The tales of pedophiles luring children out of their homes are like plane crashes: they happen extremely rarely, but when they do, they make headlines everywhere. The Internet is just another facet of socialization for the new generation; as always, common sense and a level head are the best safeguards.”

I could not find a single example of a preteen getting abducted and murdered by an Internet predator.

You’ll learn that some fears are overplayed, others are underplayed, and above all, that the Internet plays a huge part in adolescence now.

Tags: internet safety, parenting, social networking

Youth vs. Adults in Gadget Wars

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 03:51:58 GMT

clipped by: iteachcomputers
clipper's remarks: too bad if kids think it's "creepy" for their parents to by IMing and owning a myspace page - technology isn't just for kids!

Clip Source: www.chicagotribune.com

Increasingly, however, he and other young people are feeling uncomfortable about their elders encroaching on what many young adults and teens consider their technological turf.

Long gone are the days when the average, middle-aged adult did well to simply work a computer. Now those same adults have Gmail, upload videos on YouTube, and sport the latest high-tech gadgets.

Young people have responded, as they always have, by searching out the latest way to stay ahead in the race for technological know-how and cool. They use Twitter, which allows blogging from one's mobile phone or BlackBerry, or Hulu.com, a site where they can download videos and TV programs.

Clip Source: www.chicagotribune.com

She says it's especially important to help young people understand that social networking is often more public than they think. Sometimes monitoring them is the best way to do that.