jlam | Shared With: Everyone - Feb 04 2007 | innovation, tipping point, sociology, social capital, social computing, social networking, trends, culture
In /The Tipping Point/, Malcolm Gladwell argues a tiny minority of unusually informed, persuasive, well-connected influentials drive trends. The idea sounds intuitive and compelling—we think we see it happening all the time—but it's wrong. Think about it: these charismatic individuals would need to drive the meme beyond two degrees of separation, through people they don't know.
Instead, trends take root when a sufficient number of open-minded adopters propagate the meme in chain reaction, depending more on prevailing culture than key opinion leaders.
Too much uninformed skepticism does our economy no good. This in part seems to be Rochester's problem. Even as a freshman in college, my friends and i noted how Rochester seemed years, even decades, behind in smart worthy trends.
Update: this Harvard Business School Review article is now hidden behind a paywall. At http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?ml_action=get-article&articleID=R0702A&ml_subscriber=true is a synopsis.
jlam | Shared With: Everyone - Jun 21 2007 | Faves, linkmarking, wiki, features, Web 2.0, social media, social computing, how toBlue Dot and Ma.gnolia are among the most flexible and expressive social linkmarking sites on the Web today. This wiki teaches some obscure and advanced features, such as tagged search, named friends groups, importing and exporting linkmarks.
jlam | Shared With: Everyone - Mar 12 2007 | Faves, linkmarking, social computing, social media, tagging, folksonomy, Web 2.0, del.icio.us, tool, programming interfaceIn comparison with other social linkmarking services, Faves uses the http://del.icio.us/help/api and can (with some caveats) use existing tools built for Del.icio.us such as Cocoalicious http://SciFiHiFi.com/cocoalicious/ from SciFi HiFi.
ShareViewed: 1 Time- jlam | Shared With: Everyone - Dec 16 2006 | linkmarking, linkmarks, social media, social computing, search, collaborate, license, copyright, privacy, terms, Creative Commons, opensource, legal, OpenID, End User License Agreements
We've found great websites and also tediously read terms and conditions, only to find evil legalspeak, bad terms of service: “You hereby grant us a worldwide, exclusive, sublicensable, assignable, transferable, fully paid, royalty free, perpetual, irrevocable licence to display, perform, modify, and otherwise use your work in any medium now known or yet to be invented…”; we own everything you create on our website; we may use your likeness in our promotions; you opt into our spamerator; blah, blah, blah.
We've also read clear, concise, and generous terms.
Linkmark and post them here. Cite, caption, or explain the harmful or benevolent passages you find and save others some trouble. Rate the evil sites one or two stars and the good ones four or five. Then spread the word or the shame. Magnolia uses Open ID, an emerging, opensource, portable identity standard. Here, use social computing to improve social computing.
- jlam | Shared With: Everyone - Oct 21 2006 | Blue Dot, startup, TechCrunch, social media, social computing, tagging, linkmarking, World Wide Web, Seattle
Unlike most other social bookmarking communities and sites, Blue Dot requires no login, a key to gaining participation. Instead, through a Javascript marklet and also other widgets, readers can annotate and tag pages, which they can then mail. Via custom links, recipients can then reply without first registering.
Like on similar sites, friends, others you invite, or the public, can track your posts. Blue Dot can mark not only text pages, but also other rich media content, and excerpt them for syndication.
Marshall Kirkpatrick of TechCrunch found it worthy enough to mention it again.
- jlam | Shared With: Everyone - Oct 06 2006 | photo, photography, photos, social media, social computing, social discovery, online community, Web 2.0, geocoding, OpenID, Creative Commons, my, Zooomr, self, Flickr, Vox, LiveJournal, America Online
Zooomr, an incredibly advanced, feature-rich, photo sharing community much like http://Flickr.com, offers free Pro accounts to bloggers who sign up and link back to Zooomr. For one year, they allow unlimited monthly full-resolution image uploading, storage, viewing, linking, and downloading. They promise to allow full access to the images after the first year, even if those Pro accounts do not renew, what an offer!
On the fore, http://Zooomr.com uses only an alternative login, Open ID, an emerging way to reuse your identity across multiple sites. Since developers at LiveJournal invented Open ID, naturally users of http://LiveJournal.com, http://Vox.com, and other Six Apart platforms can log into Zooomr and create an account without creating another identity and maintaining yet another password. Open ID lets users on these and all other enabled servers login into Zooomr and not only post images but also comment on others. Put simply, unlike Flickr, which now requires users create and use a Yahoo identity, Zooomr admits folks manywhere without yet another password. Quite a boon for replying, isn't this how social media should work!
LiveJournal keepers could follow the instructions at Zooomr, but rather than use MyOpenID, simply log into Zooomr and create your account! Bypassing MyOpenID frees you from its Terms of Service, a lengthy and vague license for a brave new tangled legal world with an identity service for a fourth party. Instead, Zooomr asks only a brief set of rules. Recently AOL (via http://OpenID.aol.com) and Yahoo (http://IDproxy.net) have begun providing Open ID support too, for all Instant Messenger screennames and Yahoo identities.
Send John a friend request or a personal message instead.