Social Network | The Learning Collective

Web 2.0 Expo Keynote with Chris Brogan

February 18th, 2010 | Blog, Digital Influence | David Grandison Jr. | No comments

: Image by Benjamin Ellis via Flickr

The most recent Web 2.0 Expo in the Javits Center in Manhattan was excellent. It was an event that was not to be missed if your company was willing to shell out the fees to attend. In a recession you would think the fees for these conferences could be cut down a bit, but that is just wishful thinking because it will probably never happen.

Anyway, the event I enjoyed most was Chris Brogan’s keynote speech. Chris did a great job of breaking down some the barriers that have been erected around Social Media topics to make them very straight-forward. I thought his philosophy in relation to social media advertising campaigns was very insightful, and his insights on Twitter were were exceptional. He proposed, listening and info sharing are more important than narcissistic tweets about one’s self or one’s brand. He proposed that your “re-tweet”(RT) to tweet’s of your own of your own ratio should be about 12 to 1. Ultimately, this quote, resonated with me the most: “…what is more sad than creating electric sheep.” In other words, genuine information sharing is much more important than updating people on every mundane moment of your day.

View the video (below) of his keynote for the specifics– it is defiantly worth the 10 minutes if you are interested in social media, online marketing or web 2.0.

Education and Google Buzz…A Match?

February 10th, 2010 | Blog, Educational Technology, Online Community, Social Network, Video | David Grandison Jr. | No comments

It seems, Google has thrown down the gauntlet…Google Buzz is a incredibly powerful attempt to take a piece of Facebook’s market share in social networking. Google Buzz is powerful because if you have a Gmail account you are already a member. Within minutes of logging in to my Gmail account I had followers and I was following a number of people. This is how “friending” and “following” on Google Buzz works. Google has filtered users’ Gmail inboxes and Google Talk IM contacts and used algorithms to determine the users that they communicate with most frequently. Users can then share Buzz posts with the world (and Google search), or they can share privately through their existing Gmail groups or custom-made groups in Buzz. Here are a few a videos that explain the tool in more detail:

When I logged in for the first time with buzz activated, I could not believe my father was instantly among the people I was following. I liked that, no more sending him links… he is not a “first adopter” like me, and if Google can get him to interact with the social stream I am impressed. I’m not sure liked the asymmetric follower/friend model, though, because there were a few people that appeared on my list that I did not want knowing my business… or my whereabouts, so this feature made me a bit uncomfortable.

Location (Map) Based Social Network

January 30th, 2010 | Blog, Geospacial Information Systems, Video | David Grandison Jr. | One comment

A simple overview of social mapping along with a listing of some mapping sites and
A Location or Map-Based Social Network’s is a real-time representation of social network nodes via a map interface. This environment dynamically allows users post their location and/or to geolocate personal information, events, entertainment, public places, or other information that affects the virtual communities and its evolution. Some versons also allow users to track each other via a map interface. This dynamic map interface aids social mapping and the development of an online community by connecting nodes of info around geospatial data. Groupings or categories of similar types of information can filtered via the map interface and its search tools. These grouping of mapped info is developed based on the predetermined goals, categories or tags of the community. Ideally, this data is used to guide interactions and focus the development of the community.

To my knowledge, the first such map that was launched was the Eco-mmunity (developed by David Grandison Jr. for the Sundance Channel) which was launched in 2007 to allow “green” members to geolocate their homes and demonstrate it’s sustainable features, as well as, mark their favorite “green” locations.

Other map-based social networks include:

EchoEcho.me- A twist on the location-based social network because allows you to query your contacts about their locations.

via Google Knols