Posts tagged twitter
Middle East is Going Off. Twitter & Facebook’s Role? Debatable…..
Watching all this stuff (Tunisia, Egypt, rioting, internet being turned off, etc) reminded me of a piece by the ever-popular Malcom Gladwell this summer. Basically, his argument is that Facebook, Twitter, an dother social media are/will be bit players at best in large scale social protest and change.
Enjoy w/your lunch. Excerpt below, full story at the link. http://nyr.kr/9Y92DZ
SMALL CHANGE
Social media can’t provide what social change has always required. At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away. “I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress. “We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied. The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said. By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted. By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.Why the revolution will not be tweeted.
by Malcolm GladwellOCTOBER 4, 2010
……..
WHY TWITTER IS SO COOL!!!
(for the extremely geeky, read the article to see the trending analysis)
Infographic of the Day: A joint team of researchers from Northeastern and Harvard have compiled a nifty visualization reflecting the ever-changing mood of Americans by state over the course of a given day based on the tweets they send out.
Not only did they analyze the sentiments we collectively expressed in 300 million tweets over three years against a scholarly word list; these researchers also mashed up that data with information from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Google Maps API and more. What they ended up with was a fascinating visualization showing the pulse of our nation, our very moods as they fluctuate over time.
Props to NY for having a perpetual sourpuss.
[mashable.]
Lunchtime Read: The Web Means the End of Forgetting
NYTMag Preview:
Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was “unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree. Snyder sued, arguing that the university had violated her First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech.
When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital age, Stacy Snyder may well be an icon. The problem she faced is only one example of a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever. With Web sites like LOL Facebook Moments, which collects and shares embarrassing personal revelations from Facebook users, ill-advised photos and online chatter are coming back to haunt people months or years after the fact. Examples are proliferating daily: there was the 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, “I’m so totally bored!!”; there was the 66-year-old Canadian psychotherapist who tried to enter the United States but was turned away at the border — and barred permanently from visiting the country — after a border guard’s Internet search found that the therapist had written an article in a philosophy journal describing his experiments 30 years ago with L.S.D.
According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants — including search engines, social-networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter and online-gaming sites. Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos and discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups.
Technological advances, of course, have often presented new threats to privacy. In 1890, in perhaps the most famous article on privacy ever written, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis complained that because of new technology — like the Kodak camera and the tabloid press — “gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious but has become a trade.” But the mild society gossip of the Gilded Age pales before the volume of revelations contained in the photos, video and chatter on social-media sites and elsewhere across the Internet. Facebook, which surpassed MySpace in 2008 as the largest social-networking site, now has nearly 500 million members, or 22 percent of all Internet users, who spend more than 500 billion minutes a month on the site. Facebook users share more than 25 billion pieces of content each month (including news stories, blog posts and photos), and the average user creates 70 pieces of content a month. There are more than 100 million registered Twitter users, and the Library of Congress recently announced that it will be acquiring — and permanently storing — the entire archive of public Twitter posts since 2006.
In Brandeis’s day — and until recently, in ours — you had to be a celebrity to be gossiped about in public: today all of us are learning to expect the scrutiny that used to be reserved for the famous and the infamous. A 26-year-old Manhattan woman told The New York Times that she was afraid of being tagged in online photos because it might reveal that she wears only two outfits when out on the town — a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt or a basic black dress. “You have movie-star issues,” she said, “and you’re just a person.”
We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.
The 2010 World Cup: a Global Conversation
To highlight how much Twitter has been pulsing with World Cup activity over the past month, our analytics and relevance teams put together the infographic above, charting fans’ use of hashflags (like #esp or #usa) during the tournament with a background of TPS over the same period.
• When you look at this graphic, think of it like a soundwave — the louder and more consistent the “sound,” the bigger the impact in all directions.
• Countries’ flags represent use of their hashflag. The size of the flag “waves” fluctuate with the frequency & consistency of tweets containing each country’s hashflag.
» via The Twitter Blog
![NYTMag Preview. It drops sunday, read it here now.
DIGITAL DIPLOMACY
Jared Cohen and Alec Ross, two young members of the State Department, are hoping to nudge diplomacy into the 21st century, one Twitter post at a time.
On Twitter, Cohen, who is 28, and Ross, who is 38, are among the most followed of anyone working for the U.S. government, coming in third and fourth after Barack Obama and John McCain. This didn’t happen by chance. Their Twitter posts have become an integral part of a new State Department effort to bring diplomacy into the digital age, by using widely available technologies to reach out to citizens, companies and other nonstate actors. Ross and Cohen’s style of engagement — perhaps best described as a cross between social-networking culture and foreign-policy arcana — reflects the hybrid nature of this approach. Two of Cohen’s recent posts were, in order: “Guinea holds first free election since 1958” and “Yes, the season premier [sic] of Entourage is tonight, soooo excited!” This offhand mix of pop and politics has on occasion raised eyebrows and a few hackles (writing about a frappucino during a rare diplomatic mission to Syria; a trip with Ashton Kutcher to Russia in February), yet, together, Ross and Cohen have formed an unlikely and unprecedented team in the State Department. They are the public face of a cause with an important-sounding name: 21st-century statecraft.
To hear Ross and Cohen tell it, even last year, in this age of rampant peer-to-peer connectivity, the State Department was still boxed into the world of communiqués, diplomatic cables and slow government-to-government negotiations, what Ross likes to call “white guys with white shirts and red ties talking to other white guys with white shirts and red ties, with flags in the background, determining the relationships.” And then Hillary Clinton arrived. “The secretary is the one who unleashed us,” Ross says. “She’s the godmother of 21st-century statecraft.”
Traditional forms of diplomacy still dominate, but 21st-century statecraft is not mere corporate rebranding — swapping tweets for broadcasts. It represents a shift in form and in strategy — a way to amplify traditional diplomatic efforts, develop tech-based policy solutions and encourage cyberactivism. Diplomacy may now include such open-ended efforts as the short-message-service (S.M.S.) social-networking program the State Department set up in Pakistan last fall. “A lot of the 21st-century dynamics are less about, Do you comport politically along traditional liberal-conservative ideological lines?” Ross says. “Today it is — at least in the spaces we engage in — Is it open or is it closed?”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5nq0lDPOR1qbx855o1_400.jpg)
NYTMag Preview. It drops sunday, read it here now.
DIGITAL DIPLOMACY
Jared Cohen and Alec Ross, two young members of the State Department, are hoping to nudge diplomacy into the 21st century, one Twitter post at a time.
On Twitter, Cohen, who is 28, and Ross, who is 38, are among the most followed of anyone working for the U.S. government, coming in third and fourth after Barack Obama and John McCain. This didn’t happen by chance. Their Twitter posts have become an integral part of a new State Department effort to bring diplomacy into the digital age, by using widely available technologies to reach out to citizens, companies and other nonstate actors. Ross and Cohen’s style of engagement — perhaps best described as a cross between social-networking culture and foreign-policy arcana — reflects the hybrid nature of this approach. Two of Cohen’s recent posts were, in order: “Guinea holds first free election since 1958” and “Yes, the season premier [sic] of Entourage is tonight, soooo excited!” This offhand mix of pop and politics has on occasion raised eyebrows and a few hackles (writing about a frappucino during a rare diplomatic mission to Syria; a trip with Ashton Kutcher to Russia in February), yet, together, Ross and Cohen have formed an unlikely and unprecedented team in the State Department. They are the public face of a cause with an important-sounding name: 21st-century statecraft.
To hear Ross and Cohen tell it, even last year, in this age of rampant peer-to-peer connectivity, the State Department was still boxed into the world of communiqués, diplomatic cables and slow government-to-government negotiations, what Ross likes to call “white guys with white shirts and red ties talking to other white guys with white shirts and red ties, with flags in the background, determining the relationships.” And then Hillary Clinton arrived. “The secretary is the one who unleashed us,” Ross says. “She’s the godmother of 21st-century statecraft.”
Traditional forms of diplomacy still dominate, but 21st-century statecraft is not mere corporate rebranding — swapping tweets for broadcasts. It represents a shift in form and in strategy — a way to amplify traditional diplomatic efforts, develop tech-based policy solutions and encourage cyberactivism. Diplomacy may now include such open-ended efforts as the short-message-service (S.M.S.) social-networking program the State Department set up in Pakistan last fall. “A lot of the 21st-century dynamics are less about, Do you comport politically along traditional liberal-conservative ideological lines?” Ross says. “Today it is — at least in the spaces we engage in — Is it open or is it closed?”
Google Gears Up to Take on Facebook, Twitter
Google is preparing another attempt to crack the social networking world owned by Facebook, and to a lesser extent, Twitter.
Why is Google traveling down this path once again? Aren’t the failures of Dodgeball, Orkut, Jaiku, Buzz, Wave, etc. enough for Google to realize that it just doesn’t understand social networking? Maybe, but Google can’t afford to watch the web become social without it.
As Google researcher Paul Adams explains in a huge deck of slides getting passed around on the web, people buying things are more inclined to trust their friends than strangers—or search ads.
Do you think Facebook or Google is more trustworthy if you’re thinking about buying the new Prince CD? What about a new toaster? Or a new golf club? Today, it’s probably Google, but soon enough you could be asking Facebook friends what to buy. It’s this threat that should (and probably does) scare the pants off Google’s executives.
Adams revealed some of these threats in his presentation—a great read in the context of him presenting these results to Google execs who are plotting “Google Me.”
A couple things to keep in mind: This presentation isn’t new. And it’s not necessarily indicative of how Google feels. The company has hundreds of researchers. Still, we think this is instructive for people wondering why Google wants to get in the social network business.
The Real Life Social Network v2
View more documents from Paul Adams.
Coach and Twitter - Why Jim Harbaugh is a Recruiting Genius
Great find by reader Scott….
Jim Harbaugh’s cryptic tweets have allowed him to walk the line between benign recruiting updates and NCAA rules violations.
I almost gave up. I thought he’d finally stumped me.
For the past few weeks, I’ve followed Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh’s Twitter feed the way Entertainment Weekly’s Jeff Jensen followed Lost. Just as Jensen did each time a book surfaced in Sawyer’s tent or an ancient Egyptian fertility goddess statue popped up on the Island, I scour the Web every time Harbaugh steps out of his $50,000 office bathroom and blasts a 140-character-or-less missive into the ether. Usually, a few Google searches allow me to understand the man who has the school with some of the toughest academic standards in the FBS poised to compete for the Pac-10 title, but I spent the weekend pondering this Harbaugh tweet from last Friday. It wasn’t until I’d written three-quarters of this column that I finally discovered the true meaning behind it.
I was reminded this week on a warm summer evening that there is nothing I appreciate more than AC. Must have!
Harbaugh wrote this at 2:28 p.m. eastern time on Friday, June 25. To the untrained eye, it appears the coach simply expressed gratitude to Willis Carrier for inventing a way for us to keep from boiling in our own skins in the summer. But if you believe that’s all it was about, you haven’t been following Harbaugh.
The Scrambler is on Twitter
@scramblerblog.
That’s right people- The Scrambler is on Twitter.
You may have noticed the little birdie in the left hand corner. We’re auto-publishing all the content that you see on the site.
But even better, we’re gonna work to highlight extra content. We actually look at a TON of stuff everyday, and not all of it makes the cut (ie, we’re too busy to post/write). Twitter is perfect for that. So check us out. The handle is @scramblerblog. Follow us, retweet, etc.
Stay @thirsty my friends.
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