“What the heck is Twitter and why should I care?” (Alan Cann)

Thanks to David Rothman for pointing me to this.

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Technorati tag: Twitter

Blog post: 5 Ways to Find More Friends on Twitter

I mentioned this blog post to a person who attended the panel discussion on "Blogging for Business" tonight at the Tompkins County Chamber of Commerce. I had the best luck with Twubble in finding more people that I wanted to follow on Twitter.

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Technorati tag: Twitter

Article: University of Central Florida students freak out when they go tech-free

Mary Ann Murdoch, who teaches English composition at the University of Central Florida, had one of her classes go tech-free for a week. Tanya Caldwell at the Orlando Sentinel, wrote about their experience. The rules were:

No cell phones, iPods, portable CD players, text messaging, e-mail, computers, TVs, DVDs, video games.

THE EXCEPTIONS:

Computers and cell phones could be used for work and school. Land-line phones and radios were OK, too.

The results where that 24 students (out of 26) were not able to make it through the week without their technology. Only two students were able to live by the rules for the five days.

I'm quoted in the article:

It's like giving up meat or giving up something for Lent. You want to see how you could get along without it. It's more about limiting it than eliminating it.

The older generation needs to adapt to what the younger generations' technologies are, because the technology is never going away.

Unfortunately, some of the points I made, when talking to the reporter, didn't make it into the article. Could they limit their usage? No, not only because some of them didn't want to, but also because their friends and family hadn't given up technology. Using the Lent analogy, it is easier to give up meat on Friday, if your entire family is doing it. But what if you are the only one? That makes the change difficult. And since the assignment had exceptions built in, I suspect that may have automatically made it more difficult. (Is it a sweet if it is a breakfast food or only when I eat it for a dessert?)

They also didn't know what to do instead of using technology. Yes, some did useful things, but some just did anything in order to stay occupied. Like all diets, they were doomed.

As for the second point I made, a few commenters on the article have jumped all over that! Yes, a massive power outage can make technology go away. That wasn't the point. The clocks are not going to turn back to a previous less-technology focused era. Our grandparents had to get used to the technology our parents used. Our parents had to adopt to the technology we used. And now we must adopt to the technology that our children are using. That is the way it has always worked.

I wonder if Ms. Murdoch could have reached her goals of the assignment in a different way. She is quoted as saying:

I just think that to be a complete and whole human being, you have to be able to interact with other human beings. Technology is the new family. It's become the new computer-chip fabric of our lives.

Could she have built a different assignment that created face-to-face interactions, rather than technology interactions? Could she have used information on how the different generations have used technology in order to get the students to think about technology differently? Yes. And I think they would have gotten much more out of the experience.

By the way, I asked the reporter if Ms. Murdoch was willing to become hyper-connected for a week, in order to walk in the shoes of her students. Wouldn't that be an interesting experiment?

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Technorati tag: Technology

How big is Second Life?

In January, I constructed a handout for my Second Life workshops that included information on the number of islands as of December 2007 and the number of acres. I had SL at 11,873+ islands or 65,000+ acres. Both numbers came from Linden Labs, but the second number wasn't evidently for all of SL. If I had done the math, I would have realized that the acres number was wrong. Each island is 16 acres, so 65,000 is very low. So...here's the recalculated size based on mid-April 2008 statistics. SL has 13,976 + islands or 223,616+ acres. For comparison purposes, Manhattan is 14,478 acres and New York City (total) is 206,000 acres. Generally, there are approximately 50,000 avatars in SL at anytime. That is one avatar for every 4.12 acres. While some avatars may be grouped together, others may be working on an island or touring about. That leaves much of SL feeling void of activity.

When people say that they've been in Second Life and no one was there, this is why.

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Technorati tag: Second Life

What are the White House & Congress doing?

Thanks to the (almost) Bald Trainer blog for discovering that the White House, House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate are all using Twitter. This afternoon, I've received updated on what is happening on the House floor and the votes that are being taken. The last tweets from the Senate were last week on votes they were taking. What is interesting about the votes is that they come with a link to a page that shows how everyone voted! And the White House tweeted yesterday about a speech the President gave.

How do they do this? Turns out you can send an RSS feed to Twitter, which then people can follow (the Twitter term for "sign up for").

Besides following the government, I'm also getting news updates and a few blog RSS feeds. While this does duplicate what I can receive elsewhere, I'm using a FireFox add-on called TwitterFox that gives me a collapsible window in the lower right corner of the screen where the tweets appear. This has turned out to be very handy. Someone has constructed a wiki on Twitter that contains a list of informational feeds that are available. The variety is pretty amazing.

mmm...I wonder if "W" knows he's Twittering?

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Technorati tag: Twitter

When your virtual world life merges with your real life

Normally we think of taking ourselves into a virtual world, so that our avatar has aspects of our real world personality. However, the reverse is occurring for some. They are merging aspects of their avatar or in-world existence with their real lives. For example:

• Having an email address that using the avatar's name
• Setting up meetings/events using the time zone for the virtual world
• Answering to their avatar's name
• Having business cards for their avatar
• Owning a blog in the avatar's name

Will blurring the lines between real life and virtual life end up being confusing? Will it actually allow the person to have one life that spans two realities? I don't know the answers...do you?

BTW you know someone has got to be studying this!

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Technorati tag: Second Life, Virtual Worlds

Lovin' the tools

Last week I was at a conference of 2200+ people where the social networking tools where not just talked about, they were used. The conference generated 300+ blog posts and many photos (3,000+). With more 40 bloggers at the conference, a tremendous amount of content was created that summarized and discussed the sessions as well as provided other information. Since most of the presentations (e.g., PowerPoint) will be online eventually, I wonder if a formal proceedings is needed anymore for this conference. The documents in the proceedings were submitted weeks ago and may not mirror what some people presented. In fact, not everyone submits materials for the proceedings, so what you have access to via the blog posts, etc., is more complete.

The photos allow you to see what the conference really looked like and what the attendees did. If you had never been to this conference and wanted to know what to expect, the photos would tell you!

I haven't used the word "wiki", but there was also a wiki for the conference that was begun months before the conference took place. Many people contributed to the wiki and even more used the information that was placed there.

In addition to those tools, people were using Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Meebo and other tools both day and night. People used the tools to talk about the sessions (as they were going on), make plans, ask for help, and do networking.

Did everyone at the conference use these tools? No. And given the problems we had with wifi at the hotel, I'm glad that all 2200+ people weren't trying to blog, twitter, and updated their Facebook status. However, enough people were using the tools so that it had a discernible impact on the conference. More was organized on an ad hoc basis, more was being accomplished and more people were "in the know" even if they weren't using on of the tools.

The result was a very active conference with information flowing freely and quickly. And isn't that what we want?!

What tools will you be using at your next conference? Can you incorporate some of the tools I've mentioned in order to make the information flow more freely?

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Technorati tag: Social Networking Tools

Article: IBM Project Aims to Put Second Life Inside the Firewall

Embedded in this article about the work IBM is doing with Second Life is a quote from me.

As virtual worlds continue to grow in popularity, "government should be aware of virtual worlds and how they are impacting business, education and general society," said Jill Hurst-Wahl, a social-networking consultant, in an e-mail. "With all of that activity, governments should be aware of virtual worlds, understand how they are being used, and then look for ways of interacting with their citizens through those worlds."

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Technorati tag: Second Life

Social Networking Tools and Second Life

Last week, I did a presentation at SUNY Cortland on Social Networking Tools and Second Life. Gail Wood, library director at Memorial Library at SUNY Cortland, wrote a blog post about the event that includes the five trends I discussed.

What truly pleased me about the event is that there were staff, faculty and students there. The students even asked questions, which means they were engaged.

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Technorati tag: Second Life

Article: Facebook vs. LinkedIn: Which is better for business?

Which is better for business? ComputerWorld created six business scenarios to see which networking site performed better. While they found no absolute winner, you might read the scenarios and decide to select one site over the other.

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Technorati tags: LinkedIn, Facebook