I have come across some podcasts at iTunes U.  Look up the Oxford Internet Institute and under that a podcast with Bernie Hogan (Sociologist and Social Network Analyst) on “Facebook: The Strength of Weak Ties”.  It looks at and perhaps offers a different view of Facebook and the relationships we have there vs our other relationships.

Facebook is #1 in UK and Canada, MySpace is #1 in US, Orkut is #1 in Brazil and India.

He looks at what happens when people do not participate in FB (for example, within a family) who miss certain interactions because they are not engaged. He talks about how some people equate being online = not being social while others feel the are being social on the internet.

Issues of equality, context, and information overload are also addressed.  Enjoy!  Sharon

The web 0.0 article was a good read. I have often wondered what the revenue model is for a lot of this web 2.0 activity and thought that maybe I was missing something.  Certainly for some services, humanistic, creative commons attitudes drive development (as opposed to annoying pop ups and blinking banner ads.) It was interesting to read about Twitter’s founder.  He can obviously afford to forge ahead without a solid game plan.  Internet users are more than happy to use free services (even if it is free as in beer and not free as in speech).