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The Archives
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06.09.09Harvard Business Studies Twitter, Finds Gender BiasThe Conversation Starter, one of the blogs of Harvard Business Publishing, recently took a look at Twitter usage patterns and found some "surprising" findings. Co-authors Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski found that men have more followers than women and that men have more "reciprocated relationships." They also found that women "are driven less by followers than men, or have more stringent thresholds for reciprocating relationships." And while men and women tweet at the same rate, men are followed more regularly than women in the Twitter world, results they describe as "stunning." Stunning, because the gender bias on Twitter is not consistent ...
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05.29.09FBI Looks Inside SL for 10 Most WantedThe FBI has been pursuing Web initiatives over the last few years, including such stand-still functions like e-mail alerts, news feeds, podcasts and widgets. But as everyone and their grandma has watched the unprecedented rise of social networks, user-generated video, and virtual worlds, the FBI is now jumping head-first into these initiatives. You can now friend the FBI in Facebook; watch FBI videos on YouTube for recruitment purposes; and read FBI tweets. You can also stick a 'Most Wanted' widget into your iPhone: if you're lucky enough to spy one of the world's most wanted fugitives, I guess the idea ...
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03.18.09Looking Out from Virtual Worlds: Web is a Tool Not a SubjectAs the Internet grows and networking seeps into all its darkest corners, social scientists, engineers and physical scientists are recognizing that the Web is becoming a "tool" for research rather than a "subject" and that virtual worlds have shifted from being, well, recursive and internally focused, to being valid platforms from which the real world can be studied. Findings from the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago that happened this month found this to be conclusive. Mark Fellows of Michigan State University wrote, Increasingly, the Web is moving beyond its use as an electronic “Yellow Pages” ...
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01.14.09Recognizing Nation States in Virtual WorldsAn intriguing post from FutureBlogger posts the question: is it possible, in the age of social networks and virtual worlds, that the definition of nationhood is undergoing a radical transformation? "If Facebook were a country," said Mark Zuckerberg, the site's founder, "it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria." In its recent blog entry, FutureBlogger used this quote to demonstrate that "these structures are among the primary drivers of a flattening world, exerting change on existing culture as they permit a new form bonding across distances, generations and (in just a ...
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11.15.08Carleton Teachers Weigh In On 3D worldsOn the Educational Development Centre blog at Canada's Carleton University, two authors have started a three-part series exploring Web 2.0 and how it relates to virtual worlds and education. The first post covers an overview of Web 2.0 and social networks and then delves into the impact of 3D worlds such as Second Life and Lively on students. They write: These virtual worlds have not only begun to attract attention from companies seeking better conferencing tools, considerable attention has been delivered by educators who believe that virtual worlds have a place in the educational discourse through ‘immersive learning’ - worlds that ...
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07.08.08While Second Life Teleports, Vivaty Gives a WidgieVivaty announced that it now offers users of Facebook and AIM the ability to host Vivaty Scenes on their social networking profiles, thus becoming a 3D virtual widget in a Web 2.0 world. Heralding the golden age of the chatty Web, the Vivaty blog reminds us that we are ALL immersed: The signs of a more immersive web are all around us: we wake up every day to more media sharing APIs, more “live” and self-expression options on IM clients, and more visual depth being added to profiles on even the most simply-designed sites like Facebook. The web is getting more ...
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