An Internet Explorer

Last week I visited the UBC Biomedical Branch Library and talked with Dean and Dan about various social media tools. I mentioned that I get my news almost exclusively from social media sources.  I like using RSS because it allows me to essentially build my own newspaper (including comics!). I tend to avoid a lot of mainstream media because I find that it lacks depth and can be quite negative and one-sided. Customizing my RSS feed lets me pick sources that give me information relevant to my interests.

Dean suggested that the problem of one-sidedness in the news we see isn’t automatically solved by the use of RSS feeds and social media. It is entirely possible to load your feed with one-dimensional information sources. Most people love to read things they agree with after all, and may be less inclined to go out of their way to select sources that differ from their own point of view.

It becomes important to filter carefully, but this need not be an individual task. This is social media, after all! My friends have shown me a number of great sources that provide information and opinions from different perspectives than I tend to gravitate toward. With social media we actively create our networks and improve their diversity and quality by exploring and collaborating.

Discovering the uses of Twitter might also lead you to discover things about yourself and your interests. The information you send and receive through Twitter can be manipulated in ways that reveal patterns about your usage patterns, and what kinds of ideas you like to explore. Take this post from Tim O’Reilly, for example.

Tim used Wordle (which Dean alluded to earlier in the course) to create a word cloud of his tweet stream by copying the text straight from his twitter feed and pasting it into the Wordle input box.

The result was a collection of words that reflected Tim’s common ideas and thoughts, familiar people and even his usage style of Twitter. Based on his findings he described Twitter as a “reflection of a community of shared minds, rather than of shared ideas.” Commonality between people’s Twitter feeds may reflect similar ways of thinking and the possibility to find like-minded people.

I thought this was a creative way to use online tools in combination, and it shows how integrating them can lead to interesting results that may not have otherwise been visible.

Those who have used Twitter for a while will likely have racked up a sizeable number of tweets on your homepage. Give this a try and see if you learn anything about your Tweeting habits!

Try this on your homepage, which shows you the tweets of those you follow, and also on your own twitter feed. What kinds of patterns and connections do you see?

Note: You can use “find and replace” in a word processor to get rid of common words that take up unnecessary space (to do this, find the words you want to exclude and replace them with a space or a period).

I made a word cloud out of the last 12 hours of my Twitter home page:

I’ve seen a fair amount of skepticism leveled against Twitter, from sarcastic Youtube clips to the verdict of a friend of mine: “I don’t think I need to read every brainfart that comes out of my friends’ heads.”

It seems Twitter suffers from this reputation a fair amount. To its credit, there are many other ways to engage with Twitter than just posting everyday tidbits. For newcomers it is often puzzling to see how quickly strange followers can be attracted, and how much spam can accumulate in a short period of time. How do you know the person you think you’re following is real, and how can you find people you’re really interested in following among all the confusion? Like every social media tool it needs some massaging in order to work best for you.

On Twitter the diversity of the personalities present is reflected in a diverse range of behaviours. The blog Media Caffeine posted an interesting survey of personalities you can find. Which personality group(s) do you think you fall into, and which do you prefer to read yourselves? Do any of them grate on you?

Personally I think I fall mostly into the Link Mogul category. I add a lot of people (especially in Web 2.0 and technology) who post news, and retweet their links to try and spread the word. I think Twitter is a great tool for education and news aggregation. In terms of social networking, it’s open to a far wider population than Facebook, and allows users a quick and direct way to share information.

I think of Twitter as an online Swiss Army Knife. With all its minimalism and simplicity it has tremendous versatility. Take for example Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing’s request to his readers to create a personal note organizing system based on Twitter’s hashtags. What a creative way for him to build on existing tools and engage with the Boing Boing community.

I’m starting this blog for discussion of social media in a class I’m taking at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at UBC. I’ve been interested in social media for some time and I’m looking forward to sharing ideas with my colleagues in class and with others.

Aside from participating in some online communities over the last few years I got into reading some of the literature about social media and the changes in communication (and in our daily lives!) being brought about by the development of the internet.

I think to start off I’ll just share a few links I like:

Clay Shirky – File Sharing Goes Social

I’ve been an avid music collector for many years and I’ve been a staunch defender of P2P technology and its possibilities for greater sharing and understanding of music and other forms of art.

Clay Shirky – Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

This article was interesting to me because it sheds light on the dynamics of online communities and outlines how participation on the web works.

Metafilter

A community blog that covers all sorts of subjects. This blog is a bit different because of its wide variety of contributors.

I’ll have this blog all set up in a bit. Stay tuned!