(via slantback)
A California judge refused Thursday to order YouTube to remove controversial footage from “Innocence of Muslims,” the inflammatory film that sparked a U.S. backlash in the Middle East.
A woman who starred in the film, Cindy Lee Garcia, asked a Los Angeles County judge to take down the film because she said she was fired from her job, received death threats and was tricked into starring in the “hateful anti-Islamic production.” The film has possibly led to the killing of J. Chrisopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya and about two dozen others the past week.
» via Wired
BBC News - The age of information overload
It is interesting to argue about the decreasing literacy and book reading among certain groups in the light of this. An average book page has about 500 words…
(via futuramb)
(via futuramb)
And Digg, Flickr, Bluepulse, Jaiku, Pinterest… the list goes on so far where you feel like “get bounced around as everyone aggregates each others info in a loop.”
How to consume tailored, bite- sized content from multiple sources? To be precise, how to be a smarter consumer of information? Read this book for that purpose: The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption
(Source: brighteyes-baby)
We trust Facebook with so very much of our personal information — birthdays, phone numbers, relationships, pictures, where we go, what we do and when. Why not just let the world’s largest social network go ahead and automatically publish posts using your name, and stick those posts on your friends’ Newsfeeds?
No need to answer, on account of Facebook is already providing you with this automated convenience, ZDNet’s Ed Bott reports. Posts from pages you “like,” now show up in Newsfeeds, as if you posted them yourself.
» via MSNBC
At some point you’ll need to filter information from your organization’s social media systems to avoid information overload. This article discusses considerations in using ”metadata” for filtering, whether implemented by algorithm or by human trial and error.
- If someone defines their filters too narrowly, they reduce the opportunity for serendipity; but if they define their filters too widely, they are back to information overload.
- Knowing how many people have read an item is a big clue to its value.
- When you look at content ratings consider that people are more comfortable giving positive ratings than negative ones, though cultural differences exist between Europe and US [article doesn’t say which way this difference goes… anybody have any ideas on that?]
- Comments indicate how interesting something is — number of commenters suggests breadth of interest and number of comments its depth.
- While the most valued content does not always come from the most senior employees, high ratings from highly ranked employees usually have more weight.
Implement an enterprise social network without adequate filtering and you risk subjecting employees to information overload. Or if they deal with it by ignoring the social network content altogether, they end up with too little information.
Only by embracing the rich vein of content metadata that a social network provides, will employees be able to find the information they need. via InfoManagement Direct
cnet:
Here’s how much data we generate every minute:
- Email users send more than 204 million messages;
- Mobile Web receives 217 new users;
- Google receives over 2 million search queries;
- YouTube users upload 48 hours of new video;
- Facebook users share 684,000 bits of content;
- Twitter users send more than 100,000 tweets;
- Consumers spend $272,000 on Web shopping;
- Apple receives around 47,000 application downloads;
- Brands receive more than 34,000 Facebook ‘likes’;
- Tumblr blog owners publish 27,000 new posts;
- Instagram users share 3,600 new photos;
- Flickr users, on the other hand, add 3,125 new photos;
- Foursquare users perform 2,000 check-ins;
- WordPress users publish close to 350 new blog posts.
Social media marketing companies and social media analysts use these data to help clients create online and Facebook campaigns, where clients are able to track relationships and understand what drives people to share brand information with their community.
In Praise of Ignorance: Why It’s OK to Tweet, ‘Who Is Dick Clark?’
It’s totally legitimate that younger people wouldn’t know who Dick Clark is. It’s totally legitimate, even, that older people wouldn’t know who Dick Clark is: “American Bandstand” is not the most contemporary of shows, and most of us are doing other things on December 31 than watching “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.” What’s interesting, though, is what the tweeters above — and their thousands of fellow “Who’s Dick Clark?” queriers — did with their ignorance. Rather than do a Google search for “Dick Clark,” rather than look him up on Wikipedia, rather than avail themselves of the approximately 5,000 other web-based mechanisms that exist solely to rectify the world’s ignorance, these people asked their followers on Twitter.
For some of them, the question might have been simply ironic — or, more specifically, an ironic declaration of generational/sociological affiliation. (Who’s Justin Bieber?) For many, though, the question seemed like an honest one: “Guys, I don’t know this person everyone’s talking about. Help me out.” It wasn’t just that the “Who’s Dick Clark” crowd were embracing their ignorance; it was that, through Twitter, they were trying to rectify it.
But they were also publicizing it. Rather than taking the relatively introverted route toward satisfying their curiosity — Google, Bing, Wikipedia, platforms that treat a question as a silent transaction between mind and machine — the “Who’s Dick Clark?” Twitterers asked their question openly and publicly. They chose to broadcast their ignorance.
And that choice is a new thing. In the past, ignorance has been, you know, something to be ashamed of. To call someone “ignorant” has been, generally, to insult that someone; and it’s been an insult specifically because ignorance is an accusation that assaults not just a person’s knowledge, but a person’s intelligence. It’s no coincidence that, etymologically, “ignorant” is connected with “uncouth.” We have construed ignorance as a matter of personal failing.
Also relevant to anybody asking, “Who is Levon Helm?” (If those people exist.)
Ignorance is no longer stupidity. Stupidity is when you don’t want to use today’s collaborative technologies to broadcast your ignorance to rectify it. But when you want to satisfy your curiosity you find yourself ”taking the relatively introverted route — Google, Bing, Wikipedia, platforms that treat a question as a silent transaction between mind and machine”; that’s stupidity.
Undeniably, social media has changed the way we acquire knowledge. And, Twitter followers and Facebook friends are increasingly becoming people’s trusted sources of information, even more than search engines.
Bradley Kreit - Research Director, Health Horizons Program
…a semi-retracted article in The Daily Dot in which a 24-year old named Steve claimed, and reporters spent some time verifying, that he was making $1,000 a day by flooding the social networking site Pinterest with “spam” pictures and links to his Amazon affiliate account, which generates revenue for him every time someone follows one of the links. […] This sort of confusing blurring of reality is becoming surprisingly common. In just the last couple of weeks, venerable publications like the Washington Post believed that a poorly designed Tumblr site called Whodat.biz was a startup launched by Kanye West. A couple weeks ago, Mythbuster Jamie Hyneman - whose job, remember, is to sort fact from fiction - wrote a blog post about why a viral video that claimed to show a Dutch man flying 100 yards by flapping his arms while wearing an exoskeleton could be real. A couple days later, the makers of the video admitted it was fake.
Tommaso De Benedetti, a Rome schoolteacher, has posed as high-profile people on Twitter to expose weaknesses in the media, recently told the Guardian, “Social media is the most unverifiable information source in the world but the news media believes it because of its need for speed.”
