UNLV Study Finds Bloggers Not Misanthropic Opinion Freaks After All

In January, I reported on a survey on blogging and social interaction being conducted by the research team headded by Dr. Reza Torkzadeh and grad students Reza Vaezi and Jerry Chang at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Department of Management Information Systems. Here, from Reza Vaezi--the student who originally contacted me about the survey--are some of the survey results. And they're pretty positive about us:

Weblog users are socially active people. About half the respondents helped to elaborate a special issue or concern in the Blogosphere and 32.8% of them initiated elaboration of a special issue or concern. Also, 39.3% of respondents joined a campaign through Weblogs. The majority of Weblog users said they knew in which Weblog they can find their needed information; suggesting that they are skilled Internet users and very familiar with Blogosphere.

Weblog users and social interaction. About half the respondents stated that they have met other people through Weblog and 12.6% stated that they dated people they met through Weblog; not only they use Weblog to communicate but they also meet each other. Responses to the open ended question, “how many friends you have made through Weblogs”, range from zero to 100.

Weblog influence on the individual. We received many comments about Weblogs. One respondent said, “Blogs have changed the way I work and socialize. I generally find everything, from current events (news) to cooking recipes through blogs or links to websites that were posted on blogs”. Another respondent said, “I have owed many things from writing my personal Weblog. I have become a ‘web developing’ teacher and a journalist by lessons I learned and experiences I got from Blogging. So, I’m a big fan of Weblogs, Blogging and Blogosphere.

Weblog and social issues. We received many comments that reflect how bloggers see the role of Weblog in society. “I believe that Weblogs have changed many things on the internet and in the real world, especially in the world of media”. Another comment reads, “I believe that Weblogs are an essential and valuable part of society. They allow people who would not normally have a voice in American society, in particular, to speak and be heard by others who have the same feelings, opinions, problems, experiences, etc.” Another respondent said: “I think Weblogs are a great way for people around the world to communicate and share information and ideas. One respondent said, “The best thing about Weblogs is bringing people together over a common interest.

Weblog and work. Results suggest that 6.7% of respondents tried to hire someone based on what they read on his/her Weblog. Also, 12.3% of respondents said they received a job offer or were invited to an interview because of their Weblog; an example of Weblogs use in human resource management.

The team also concluded that such positive results demonstrated "a clear need for research to explore and examine impact of this technology on the individual, organization, and society."

Here! Here!

There's now a follow up survey posted here: http://faculty.unlv.edu/rtorkzadeh/survey/


I'll be going in and taking this survey and hope you will too!

web 2.0,media, culture tech Blogs Blogging Bloggers

AOL takes Blog-esque Approach to Relaunched News Site

When I heard that AOL had re-created its AOLNews site to be a bit more "bloggy," I began to be very afraid.

And there was reason to be afraid.

Yes, it's quite blog-like. Very much like a blog that someone just started and is throwing the kitchen-sink into it to see what works. Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes. Throw it all against the wall-polls, comments, pundits, a paltry newsblogroll--and see if any of it sticks...

And, by mid-day, the more serious headline shown in the photo (from Reuters--probably of AOL's "news" page rather than "home" page) was replaced by one of Paris Hilton leaving jail....

Hmmm...not really surprising when we consider that the guy hired to do this re-design, Lewis D'Vorkin, has had super-success with TMZ (which is a joint-venture between AOL and TimeWarner)

If anybody knows how to catch those gossip-mongering eyeballs, it's Lewis!

So, I guess the big brains at AOL believe we all want to see our news presented in gossp-blog format. And we want copious polls and lots and lots of places to leave comments for....

Well, for whom? Mo Rocca? Or Dinesh D'Souza? On D'Souza's post on Paris Hilton (did we need another one???) there are some comments from various people with first names, only one linking back to the old AOLNews main page, which is now screaming about the murder-suicide of wrestler Chris Benoit and family....

Oh, and the comments to D'Souza's story is obviously meant to direct us into a conversation with other community members and not directly with D'Souza.

After all, do these perfect pundits really have the time for the people? I tend to think many are more like LA Time's Joe Stein on the matter of columnist-to-people communication.

All of this uber-bloggyness at AOLNews seems so bloody banal--a stilted attempt to make people feel like they're communicating with other people, when, at the moment, all it feels like is yelling down a well...

Yelling down a well about more bloody-ridiculous-awful celebrity gossip...

The way I always thought the Digg model would lead to a tyrrany of geeks dictating the news, I fear that AOL's new model will lead to a tyrrany of vapid celebrity-chaser wannabees dictating the news.

Or maybe dictating what they think is news. As for the rest of us--well--I guess news is relative.....

Journalism, AOL, media, web 2.0, Blogs

Assignment Zero/Wired.com to publish on 7/11/07

The results of all our hard work at Assignment Zero will start to show up on Wired.com starting on July 11, 2007. From what I understand, the various pieces will be published in three installments (yeah, we super-over-achieved on this one, and weren't allowed to hog a whole isssue....)

Also, Jay Rosen's next project has a website up: check out OfftheBus.Net....

Did blogging kill the CEO star?? The Street's Brett Arends writes a decent piece on social media, Eric Jackson, and the fall of Terry Semel Brett wonders: hmmm....did social media hav anything to do with it?

All I can say is, "Well, duh!" that's why I started following the story back in January....

(via the I Want Media newsletter...)

Slate V Launches

Launched today: Slate V, the video verison of Slate magazine. The sponsor messages are unobtrusive--but you can't get the embed code for several of the vids (esp. the rather funny "Damned Spot" ones. Here's one on the Gotcha! game on YouTube:


the Gotcha! game was discussed back at the Personal Democracy Forum--and the video version is really only an extension of what's been going on in print for awhile....

From what I understand, they're looking to include user-generated video on Slate V--and to pay for it. Will it be more dog-and-hula-hoop or man getting hit in groin with football stuff?

I don't know...it's kinda interesting....maybe a new way to waste time when I'm sitting around wondering when the next contract's going to fall from the sky...then again, maybe I really *like* watching pirated old Man From Uncle and Paul Revere and the Raiders stuff....

Supernova2007: How did Social Media Get to be Anti-Social?

It's taken me two days to get over the jet lag I encounterd thanks to a red-eye flight after the most excellent Supernova2007 conference ended on friday...yet I keep going over the conversation that occurred among the guys of theSocial Web panel, and find myself a bit troubled by some of their assertions about social media....

If we are to consider the opinions of this panel, they would have us believe that people use social media basically to continue their pre-existing physical world connections in an online environment--and that most of the time, people do not know what they want from social media.

To those of us who use social media on a regular basis, this is insulting nonsense.

Yet I think that when Daivd Liu of AOL (who I have a feeling I've met before) says "Lots of research shows that people don't know what they want," he misunderstood the importance of social media and confused it with what people may or may not want from information-oriented media.

There's much that says that people very in general feel overwhelmed by the plethora of choices for where they might find news and information--they're not sure about websites or blogs mostly, sometimes social news sites like Digg or Reddit if they're into that kind of thing....but this is different from the uses of most social media...

Rather, social networks built on social media, like Facebook and MySpace, which are geared towards young people of a certain age and their particular social needs--keeping in touch friends when they're away from college, finding cool new music, and making sure that mom doesn't find out they're talking to strangers--are leaving certain analyists with the impression that People only want to socialize with others that they already know. And, if they're not getting information from people they already know, that they're totally confused about their information.

I'd venture to say this is a false impression with regard to how many of us have used social media since the early days of LiveJournal and Blogger--which had little to do with finding accurate news reports (we went to newspaper websites for that.) Rather, the reasons people began to use these forms of social media has been to create their own space where people might be able to find them, and to give them an online persona that might aid in finding and sharing information with like-minded others...

In other words: social media helped to create new friends and new relationships....not to just maintain old ones, and thus expose people to new information Think about it: in the beginning, online social networks weren't populated with your friends. Often, unless your friends also had the time and money for internet access, your friends were people you called on the phone (remember that device?) Social networking to maintain pre-existing f2f friendships more than likely began with Friendster, and gained much momentum with MySpace, leading into Facebook (which is something like Friendster...only more walled....)

This panel, however, seemed to be confused about how and why people continue to socialize on the Internet outside the confines of Facebook and MySpace. Martin Varsavsky of Fon made a number of statements about how he uses his social network, created thru social media, to exchange information just among his buddies....who sounded like they were people Martin already knew f2f....

How different this was from when I heard Stowe Boyd at the Corante Symposium on Social Architecture (Nov. 2005) talk about sharing playlists with a teenager on Last.fm. He was discovering new music through sharing with someone who he knew only online--not someone who was a continuation of his f2f social network....

So, is it coming to this: that our social media contacts are only people we know f2f? As I said, this is one thing when it comes to professional networking as in LinkedIn where you have either met the person or worked with the person with whom you are exchanging links. Professional-level online networking, however, is different when one is simply going online to be social. (Note: I have several contacts on LinkedIn that I have never met f2f, but have built strong and important relationships via open online communication.)

Or have we come to a point where we don't do that kind of thing anymore?
We are, perhaps, no longer free to be as social as we'd like to be. Maybe now we must be vetted by Facebook, approved of through MySpace, and stamped with the Twitter seal of approval before we can even begin to communicate with someone we don't know...

If we listen to this panel's assessment of The People, we're nothing more than a group of scared, clannish folk who can't make up our minds about where we get our news, nor with whom we want to make friends.

We can't be trusted to do that on our own. We're just too confused and vulnerable.

Gosh, that's insulting.

Which makes me think that, if we continue to listen to certain pundits about social media, we will find ourselves in very much a position where we are back to a broadcast/gatekeeper model of media within the Internet space.

And, who knows...maybe that's what they want after all....

But is it what We want???

Update: The BBC reports on research about Facebook conducted by danah boyd at UCBerkeley shows that Facebook is predominantly white and upper-crusty (also see danah's post.) It's the social network of the college "in crowd"--well, I stand by my opinion that to use Facebook as a way of vetting who's who and what's what in social media is a very, very bad idea. And we all might think a bit more about what Andrew Keen has to say about the long-term effects of this new brand of digital utopianism that's eminating from the Silly Valley (more on that in another post...)

Judge's missing pants not worth $54M

Sometimes common sense does prevail in the courts (which prompts me to write about it): the owner of Washington D.C.-based Custom Clearners will not have to pay $54 million to the crybaby who got his knickers in a bunch when the dry cleaner lost his favorite pair of pants.

Judge Judith Bartoff ruled that Custom Cleaners did not violate its "Satisfaction Guaranteed" policy and wrote: "A reasonable consumer would not interpret 'Satisfaction Guaranteed' to mean that a merchant is required to satisfy a customer's unreasonable demands" or to agree to demands that the merchant would have reasonable grounds for disputing. . .

We can now say that $54 mil to replace a pair of fancy-pants is indeed most unreasonable. Plaintiff Roy L. Pearson (also a judge) should have taken the $200 offered, got himself some new fancy-pants, and taken them to another place for alterations. Then, he could have simply used the power of word-of-mouth to express his true feelings about Custom.

Rather, he got greedy trying to make a point.

Pearson was ordered to pay Custom's court costs.

More shake-ups among Yahoo! top brass: according to a breaking report Chief Sales Officer Wenda Harris Millard is leaving as part of an ad sales reorganization... Perhaps the departure of Terry Semel last Tuesday was only the beginning.

Blogging Supernova2007: Can we innovate social structure?

Here at the Westin St Francis Hotel, I am lost in a sea of Illuminati--but I smile a lot. I'm attending Supernova 2007...spoke a bit at the Challenge Roundtable...everybody's on Twitter, using Jaiku....sending messages back and forth, but I look at the feed and wonder why I might want to read the musings of all these people...then again, why might they want to read my musings....series of thoughts expessed (by some) emphatically and declaratively....

At conferences like this--those that are high on techology--I sometimes feel the human element is lost in the massive conversations that take place on the stage. Theoreticals are great--but many of the theoreticals sound like oh so much "Technology, yay!" that I begin to wonder if the people are just a bunch of declaratives pumped out across the most AmazingNewPlatform....

But I got to meet Clay Shirky yesterday, and it was like encountering an old friend--who knows that community isn't just an abstract concept that needs just the right tool.

It's more than that. And we won't see how much more it is until everyone gets over the giddyness of MySpace and The Facebook--when all the dabblers and gawkers are burned away and we're just left with people who strongly believe that This Space is transformative and that there is, within this space, a capacity beyond tools to change human interaction...

So, I was very much looking forward to this morning's session with Clay and Denise Caruso on (I'll put up links to the recorded conversation as soon as it becomes available) Both talk about the human element of the Internet.

Denise raises several excellent points: about collaboration yielding better resuts, and how fears often hold it back. How many of these AmazingNewPlatforms (tools) aren't making us more social, but, rather, promoting something anti-social.

Against social. Siloing us off from one another in our own hermetically sealed thought bubbles....

Caruso raises the issue of how can we automate serendipity--well, we kinda do that now, but we complain when the app that recommends a new band isn't recommending the right kind of new band. We want directed serendipity. A serendipity that conforms to our tastes and likes and doesn't leave us with a nasty taste in our mouth or stale information about a travel destination we've already visited...

So, automating serendipity is, perhaps asking a bit too much. And automating a kind of social network serendipity--well, I'm not sure that would work either. Imagine the parents freaking out when, in the new social network, someone gets recommened to be a friend to their teen-ager, and they don't approve of this person....

Actually, that might be telling parents more about a kid than they'd like to know...shattering the illusions...

Denise leaves with an interesting question: can we build social networks of people who aren't like us??

All depends. I've kind of done it. We have some underlying commonalities, but most of the people I know are much higher up on the economic food chain than I am at the present moment, and sometimes we're not the people who might "friend" one another just on an arbitrary list of literary and musical likes and dislikes.

Shirky talks about a particular Shinto shrine, which is torn down every certain number of years, only to be re-built with wood from the same forest where the first of this particular Shinto shrine was built many, many centuries ago....

He talks about the "love" that flourished (flourishes?) in the perl community--how over ten years ago he could point to this community and get answers there quicker than from a manual...

And he brings up the "echo chamber" concept--and why don't we have a metric to help us understand when exactly the group has become so tight that it devolves into groupthink...

(because, really, sometimes echo chambers are communities of support--even in politics...)

Yet how do we get people to talk across boundaries?

Underneath all of this, we're talking about a fundamental social change in the way we view one another within This Space. Yet we talk about innovation with tools and technologies, as if these things are going to make it easier to be human....

But the thing is, no matter how much we worship at the altar of techology, it's still the face to face human interaction that gets us to stop disliking one another, that helps us to see, hear, touch, smell the humanity of another person, and helps us bring them into our tribe.

Still, I think, how are we going to innovate changes in social structure? It's like Journalists getting mad at the People who leave nasty comments on their sites--when they gave people only a legal Terms of Service and never a social Code of Conduct. As if good conduct will somehow inhibit Free Speech. Isn't that kind of retro-hippie thinking? and it's been a long time since the Summer of Love....

Bottom line, isn't it kind of condescending? Only those on the Inside know how to behave. The rest--the unwashed masses--can never learn.

oh. please.

So, where can we begin to innovate changes in social structure? Where can we begin to encourage people who transgress boundaries, the pionneers who are beginning to bridge the new social classes/tribes that are forming on and around the Internet. Because tribalism happens. We have an "A-list" and "B-list" and The Rabble.Even the Rabble has a Rabble. And, like information, the tribes tend to exist in silos, separate and rarely interacting with other tribes....

Is it about more face to face? or better tools--like live streaming--to help us facilitate face to face?

Or is it just that we need to present examples--people who move in and out of cultures, and classes, ages, and tribes. Peopel who teach and who will become the kinds of people who cause the social structure to change.

Maybe it's just too early for this. Then again, what I see in social networking is, in many ways, an encouraging of young people to hang around with people only like themselves. Will they venture out? Do they feel safe enough?

I don't know.

So, I'm here for another day. In a very expensive hotel room with a super-comfy bed and hamburgers made from Kobe beef. and I think "well, how did I get here?" and maybe it was transgressing a boundary, and making friends, creating connections and understanding that transgressers have to form there own tribe within a tribe....

And maybe this is how we being to change the social structure....

Maybe...

Sorry for the silence! At Assignment Zero we're still wrangling a bit with Wired, wating to hear about publication--and I'm prepping to speak atSupernova on one of the Challenge Day roundtable discussions. I may do some blogging from Supernova if I'm not too exhausted!

Yahoo Stockholder Meeting: Jackson Confronts Semel

This a.m, while imbibing of my morning coffee, I caught a vid on CBS of Eric Jackson confronting Terry Semel, Yahoo's CEO, about the drop in Yahoo's stock....

Back in January, I posted about Jackson's Yahoo Plan B--a bold attempt to organize stockholders using social media to take action against Semel. He did pretty good with a wiki and several videos Jackson made himself (here's one)

And while things may not have changed at Yahoo, Jackson's getting press in lots of pubs, including Business Week, and the WSJ noted the Board was approved with a low margin...(check out Jackson's Breakout Performance blog to see more reports)

Also check out Kara Swisher's report on the meeting. Kara notes: "Shareholder proposals–centered on performance goals for executives and also on human rights–did not pass, although some got a very high approval vote." So, Jackson wasn't the only shareholder with a proposal (you'll see another in Kara's video below) and it is indeed surprising that the proposals got high approval votes, even if they didn't pass...



It's just fascinating to note the use of social media to make an impact on a corporate board meeting. It may not have changed anything just yet...but there's a generation who's getting very comfortable with these tools....and eventually they'll have their own ideas about CEO salaries and the social consciences of corporations...

Journalism, citizen journalism, media, web 2.0, yahoo social media

NBC to allow User-Generators to post NBC video on blogs

Oh Joy! NBC has announced

Independent Web site and blog owners can embed software widgets -- small bits of code that function as dynamic applications when installed on a Web page -- linked to text and video clips from its shows.

If you think about it, the way NBC has asked for, and retains the rights to, any "user-generated content" The People submit to its site, this little widget could represent some sort of reciprocity with the user-generating community....

but I'm sensing some kind of 3-card monty shell game here...

Knowing there's no such thing as a free (widget-based) lunch, I wonder: what sort of code will be embedded in this widget? What sort of information will it be sending back to Big Media Brother about our "habits?" And will all this info end up coming back to bite us in form of endless adverts? Or something else? And will NBC let the user-generators know if they embed something like spyware in their widgets?

Still, will NBC only offer celebrity-soaked entertainment crud to be widgetized, or will they also let user-generators post snippetts of the presidential debates?

the latter would stimulate conversation about important democracy issues. the former will only perpetuate user-generated numbing-out.

Only time will tell if NBC decides to use its powers for Good--or for just the same old, same old...


Journalism, citizen journalism, media, web 2.0, Blogs

Assignment Zero: Putting the Baby To Bed

We're in the final push at Assignment Zero, getting ready for publication at Wired.com tomorrow....

I've been a bit tired and ill today from an unknown food allergy--but I've been doing what I can. And I know my feeling are up and down, a bit mixed about being part of something really important, and that important thing ending. At the moment, I'm holding my breath. Tomorrow's the final pub. I'm worried about an emotional drop-off. I'm worried about drifting away. I'm worried about feeling lost.....

Because it's been a lot of work. A lot of different moving parts from the very beginning--putting together a list of projects, to organizing a community, to shaping the project-in-process into something different than what it was originally drafted. There's been a lot of emotion in that. There can be no denying that aspect.

And I'm not that dis-passionate about anything that I do...

The thing is, this has been a trial-and-error process- learning just as much what may be workable in a particular length of time as how to harness the interest of "amateurs" (who turned out to be not as amateur as first thought...more on that in another post)

It's been a lot of thinking about the nature and consequences of what we're doing.... sometimes feeling like Den Mother....Sometimes being a real Brat (or, some might say, Bitch...sometimes hard to tell the difference...)

Getting people involved was perhaps the hardest part. Not necessarily because we didn't offer interesting topics--but mostly because of simple human nature. The Internet is still full of lurkers and people often like to volunteer for for "a good cause" while it's unclear what they can do. That's not a bad thing though. That's just the way we volunteer for stuff--and how we lurk online.

Assignment Zero has, at times, been terribly exhilarating and at other times horribly frustrating. Throw-a-computer-across-the-room frustrating and "wow! that's amazing!" exhilarating....

I think the project definitely shows who might pitch in, and how to construct, an open-source journalism project on a topic of cutting edge high geekery. Because that's pretty much what we did...

Perhaps this is a bit disjointed because I'm a swirl of emotions and thoughts and wondering what's next--for the project as much as for me. What are outsiders going to think of all our hard work? Will it bring any insight on the topic? What was my contribution? Was it appreciated?

Could it have been done without me?

Frankly, I'm pretty darned proud of all the work so many people have put into Assignment Zero. Many people who've put up with the ups and downs while we've figured it out as we went along. Many people who've put in overtime to get it to this stage....

I've always been one of those people who's thought the word would go on quite fine if she wasn't here....

Maybe, this time, it couldn't have.

Tomorrow's another big day....

Journalism, citizen journalism, media, web 2.0, Assignment Zero

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