Being+There

== =Being There.. in that Unevenly Distributed Future= Hobart (Oct 15), Melbourne (Oct 16), Sydney (Oct 18), Canberra (Oct 19)

Available as a flickr slideshow set http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/sets/72157602527517609/

media type="custom" key="241103" http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/audio/being-there-hobart.mp3 (1:29:00; 59.3 Mb mp3)
 * Audio recording**

media type="custom" key="245237"
 * utream.tv video recording (Sydney, Oct 18)**

URLs from presentation
Being There http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078841/

twitter http://twitter.com http://twitter.com/cogdog

George Siemens / Connectivism Connectivism web site http://www.connectivism.ca/ eLearnspace (blog) http://www.elearnspace.org/ Listen to entire conversation: http://cogdogblog.com/conversations/george-siemens.mp3

Technorati’s recent state of the web reports: 17 posts per second
 * 70 million weblogs
 * About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or...
 * 1.4 new blogs every second
 * 1.5 million posts per day, or...

http://technorati.com/weblog/2007/04/328.html

But for a different measure…

On March 23, 2006 I took and posted this photo of a daffodil to flickr ([|http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/431565191/)]. Later that day, some one from NowPublic.com (user generated news) found the image and asked to have it part of a news story on Ireland’s Daffodil Day (international event for cancer awareness). http://www.nowpublic.com/daffodil_day_in_ireland_calls_for_improved_services

Just for fun, I looked up how many flickr photos there were of daffodils over a week’s period-- almost 6000! http://flickr.com/search/?q=daffodil&d=taken-20070318-20070401&ct=6

Over the course of the last semester, I have been analyzing the behavior of UNC-Chapel Hill students in social network communities. In case you're not quite sure what social network communities (SNC's) are, they are services like MySpace, Friendster, Orkut and Facebook. I am particularly interested in Facebook, primarily because it is so heavily used on campus. In a previous study, I found that 88 percent of freshmen on the UNC campus had active Facebook accounts. As one might imagine, any service that reaches 88 percent of our freshmen is worth trying to understand, so I devised a system to sample the Facebook on one week increments. In this post (which will be long, and is available for download as a white paper - pdf), I'll explore some of my findings, share interesting data and trends, and provide some of my personal opinion on this Facebook phenomenon. (Fred Stutzman) http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/2006/01/student-life-on-facebook.html

Comscore has reported some interesting stats on Facebook, shedding light on the site’s growth after opening up last September and their demographics. Over the past year (May ‘06 - May ‘07), Facebook saw an 89% increase in unique visitors to the site at 26,649,000 uniques, with a 143% increase in page views at 15.8 billion. The site’s stickiness has increased and then tapered off at about 190 minutes per average user. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/06/facebook-users-up-89-over-last-year-demographic-shift/

In terms of total users, Facebook has approximately 18,000,000. In terms of page views, Facebook gets 30,000,000,000 page views per month. http://www.facebookinfo.com/facebook_statistics.html

11.4 million, or 33% of the Canadian population, has joined Facebook as of June 2007, making up over 10% of the total Facebook population. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070723.wgtfacebookTO23/BNStory/Technology/home

Facebook’s Australian population grew by 80% in June alone, http://www.abc.net.au/arts/news/artsnews_1955365.htm

55% of online teens have created a personal profile online, and 55% have used social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook. http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_SNS_Data_Memo_Jan_2007.pdf

EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 42, no. 5 (September/October 2007): 12-27 My Computer Romance by Gardner Campbell http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm07/erm0750.asp

Audio of Gardner reading http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/multimedia/erm0750a.mp3 Short clip used in this slide http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/cogdpgroo/world-is-our-wiki.mp3

A few years ago, for blogging workshops, I warned against practices demonstrated by “The Dullest Blog in the World” http://www.wibsite.com/wiblog/dull/

As a tangent, when I last visited this blog, I found a link to a site by the same person- We Blog Cartoons ([|http://www.weblogcartoons.com/)] Free cartoons by Dave Walker

Twiiter - telling everyone what you are doing, minute by minute ([|http://twitter.com/)]

User dan7 http://twitter.com/dan7

Twitter Cycle http://cogdogblog.com/2007/04/26/splj-20/ CogDog twitter (me) http://twitter.com/cogdog Dynamic, almost real time see people’s tweets from around the world, located on a Google map http://twittervision.com/ Converts RSSfeeds to a twitter account http://www.rss2twitter.com/ or http://twitterfeed.com/ TwitterCamp - free app for displaying a real time “board” view http://www.danieldura.com/twittercamp/

Casa Grande, AZ Library using twitter to post updates http://twitter.com/cglibrary International K12 student project using twitter for group status on projects http://horizonproject.wikispaces.com/Virtual+Worlds+Communication+Wiki US President Candidate has more than “2000 friends” http://twitter.com/johnedwards

Lifehacker on Twitter and Productivity http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/twitter-use-it-productively.html http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/03/15/eight-ways-twitter-is-useful-professionally/

Twitter and notofication of earthquake in Mexico http://gracedavis.typepad.com/i_am_dr_lauras_worst_nigh/2007/04/why_twitter_may_1.html Andy Carvin on use of twitter http://www.andycarvin.com/archives/2007/03/can_twitter_save_lives.html

A chruch using twitter http://swerve.lifechurch.tv/2007/04/13/tech-you-might-want-to-use-twitter/ Notification of server status http://nonsmokingarea.com/blog/2007/04/14/using-twitter-for-server-monitoring/

Serialized novel via twitter http://twitter.com/zombieattack Daily quotes from books- entices readers? http://twitter.com/TwitterLit

http://twitter.com/booktwo

News organizations: http://twitter.com/bbcnews http://twitter.com/nprnews http://twitter.com/cnnbrk http://www.wwfeeds.com/twitters/

Rob Wall Twitter Mediated co-presentation: http://stigmergicweb.org/2007/05/02/twitter-mediated-co-presentation/

Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense 06.26.07 Individually, most Twitter messages are stupefyingly trivial. But the true value of Twitter is cumulative. The power is in the surprising effects that come from receiving thousands of pings from your posse. And this, as it turns out, suggests where the Web is heading.

When I see that my friend Misha is "waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop," that's not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.

It's like proprioception, your body's ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

Here’s another example that on its surface looks patently stuoid! LOLCATs are pictures of cats with poor grammar captions aiming to communicate a cute message. You can find hundreds of these on sites: http://www.lolcats.com/ http://www.icanhascheezburger.com/

There are user generated sites (e.g. [|http://www.cheezburgerfactory.com/)] that allow you to choose from a pool of ahred images, annote them with captions, and generate new content. So what it the same system was available, but not for silly cat photos? I have a favorite site within flickr called “Interesting Snippets” by LynnetteR- these a re a collection of high impact images, overlain with text as a quote, and supported in the captions for facts and links.

These are rather simple but powerful learning tools for communicating in both pictures and words.

Strange communities. I posted a flickr picture of a cactus I saw in Hawaii that was etched with someone’s initials. I got a comment later inviting me to join a flickr community (a group) called Vegefitti- people who collect images of graffiti etched into plants and trees-- there are 124 people in this community! http://flickr.com/groups/vegaffiti/pool/

A breed of web tools provides a stream of real time information covering what people world wide are doing online.

Blogger Play - displays the most recent images used in Blogger posts http://play.blogger.com Flickrvision - shows flickr photos attached to location in world where they were posed http://flickrvision.com/ Ustream.tv- gives anyone with a web cam the tools to give live video shows http://ustream.tv/ Live Marks shows in real time what people are bookmarking in del.icio.us http://sandbox.sourcelabs.com/livemarks/ Twitterrvision - shows twitter messages attached to location in world where they were posed http://twitter.vision.com/

Google Street view- combines maps with camera images on the streets, allowing a navigable view of a map. This is in selected cities (in the US??) but expanding- recently downtown Phoenix was added. This is a view from across the street of Chase field, home of the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball team.

http://tinyurl.com/2gr983

Commenting [|http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/blog/archives/000215.html] http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Francois+Lachance%22+blog Flickr comment comes 3 years after event- http://cogdogblog.com/2007/02/16/blog-seeds-sprout/ My annual week of no blogging, where I visit other people’s blogs and post in their space http://cogdogblog.com/2007/02/16/comment-blogging/ Track with http://www.cocomment.com/comments/cogdog

Being in Second Life My own “aha” Second Life experience was watching the space shuttle lift off on July 4, 2006. More than 60 people gathered at the International Spaceflight Center (a fabulous virtual museum of every space vehicle built to scale and educational spot) to watch the live video from NASA. I could have watched the video on the web or TV, but there was a much more enhanced experience of watching it in the company of 60 others who were chatting their own stories, feelings of excitement. It became a shared experience, an anamoly in a world where we often fight isolation http://sl.nmc.org/2006/07/04/third-time-charm/

Dan Zellner, Northwester University, leads an in world class in improv techniques. http://sl.nmc.org/2007/04/19/second-life-theatre-workshop/

Social Network Fatigue http://www.ired/com/wired/archive/15.05/st_jargon.html

iGeneration video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaQr9zXSY84