IBM has been encouraging social networking among its employees with in-house versions of Web 2.0 hits such as Facebook and Twitter
Let's say you're a big Facebook user. One day you get an e-mail from your company. It invites you to an in-house social network, a Facebook for just you and your colleagues. Do you sign up? What about if you learn your boss is on the site? Do you "friend" her? Will you let her see those vacation pictures from Club Med?
Social networks in the corporate world involve very different dynamics, and scientists at IBM (IBM) Research's Collaborative User Div. in Cambridge, Mass., are learning all about them. Over the past two years, IBM has been busily launching in-house versions of Web 2.0 hits. "We're trying to see how things that are hot elsewhere can be fit for business," says Irene Greif, an IBM Fellow who heads up Collaborative User Experience.
Facebook, MySpace and other Web sites have unleashed a potent new phenomenon of social networking in cyberspace. But at the same time, a growing body of evidence is suggesting that traditional social networks play a surprisingly powerful and underrecognized role in influencing how people behave.
The latest research comes from Nicholas A. Christakis, a medical sociologist at the Harvard Medical School, and James H. Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego. The pair reported last summer that obesity appeared to spread from one person to another through social networks, almost like a virus or a fad.
In a follow-up to that provocative research, the team has produced similar findings about another major health issue: smoking. In a study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, the team found that a person's decision to kick the habit is strongly affected by whether other people in their social network quit -- even people they do not know. And, surprisingly, entire networks of smokers appear to quit virtually simultaneously.
Using Open Source Software and CPanel for Teaching Librarianship
on 21-05-2008 13:35
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A few weeks ago, I gave a presentation at Syracuse University on using Open Source Software for teaching librarianship. If you would like to see how this technology was used this spring in a course I taught, please take a look.
Saturday, May 17, 2008 | Last summer, the local CBS affiliate television station, News 8, aired a story about a website called BumFinder.com. The website solicited users who would spot people who appeared to be homeless and plug in their location coordinates using a Google Map. The station interviewed San Diego's most famous homeless advocate, Father Joe Carroll, who was filmed as he accessed the site and expressed outrage at its existence. In the television spot, the creator of the site remained anonymous, but responded in e-mails with the insistence that the site was only to help community residents stay safe and secure.
The site has since been taken down by its creator, 27-year-old San Diego native Brant Walker. It wasn't his first -- and wouldn't be his last -- brush with controversy online. A graduate of San Diego's Platt College with a web design multimedia degree, Walker's first business was a website called FakeYourSpace.com, which sold counterfeit friends, using stock photos of models, to MySpace users looking to juice up their online posses.
