Perhaps unlike some of my colleagues and predecessors in this MA program, my intellectual story hasn’t been defined by distinct, earth-shattering moments of revelation.  In fact, very few people were involved in my scholarly formation in regards to this program.  But maybe that makes my story all the more unique.  Since childhood, my interests have always been shaped and informed by music, visual design, film, television and print.  In some ways it seems this course of study was inevitable. In any case, I know why I am pursuing this degree, and in this essay we’ll look at the progression of circumstances and choices that let me to this point.

In high school my interests always stood firmly grounded in the technical side of media.  As an audio technician I learned the skills of removing distraction to let whatever voice or message I was amplifying be understood as clearly as possible.  This philosophy was one I developed on my own and succinctly stated to as many people as would listen to my yammering.

I learned the basics of the art of video editing in an internship under Tony Mercado. His experience as both a cameraman and editor for various documentary films, along with his prowess for technical processes, further developed my love of multimedia.  At the same time, it definitely played up my computer geekiness.

That geekiness was where I outputted much of my creative energy.  A friend and I jumped into the computer modding culture that was beginning to gain steam in the late 90s, cutting up our PC towers and installing lights, windows, and gaudy paint.  We customized our operating systems, internal components, and cases, making sure no part was left untouched.  In photoshop I created abstract art pieces, submitting them at times to art competitions.  I never thought much of my graphic work, but happened to win second place at a contest sponsored by Scholastic and Otis College of Art and Design.  I never made a big deal of this to anyone (at times I was even self-deprecating over it), but I was secretly proud of this accomplishment.

As I entered college–what many consider the cusp of “adult life”–my choice in studies seemed obvious.  Four years later, in 2006, I graduated from Greenville College with a Bachelor of Science in Media Promotions and, to back it up, more experience than I ever imagined I’d have at only 21 years of age.

In four years I had become Executive Director of a mid-sized music festival and Station Manager of the school’s radio station.  But it was the summer between my Junior and Senior year that my love for new media took a solid form.

That summer I travelled back from the St Louis area to my childhood home of Southern California and took up an internship at the well known independent record label The Militia Group.  As soon as I stepped into their lime green offices and was sat down in front of their iMacs, I knew I had found my calling.

One of the bands on Militia, had a particularly smart guitarist named Dan. I am convinced now that Dan was a soothsayer, able to peer into the murky future and pull out the destiny of social media.  Dan had a plan to utilize MySpace that was brilliant and hadn’t been used by anyone, as far as we could tell.

The band, Sherwood, was going to be on a nationwide tour with the band Daphne Loves Derby. Dan told us to send a message to every Daphne Loves Derby MySpace friend. The difference was that the message we were sending sounded really personal.  It went something like this:

“Hey! We saw you’re friends with Daphne Loves Derby. We’re going to be on tour with them this summer and would love it if you checked out our music and tell us what you think. We’d love it if you added us as a friend too. We hope to see you out at one of the shows! Love, Sherwood”

Today, this sort of message seems obvious, but at the time no one was asking someone to check them out before friending them.  It was all, “add as many people as you can”.  We gave the impression of caring enough to contact each individual person with a “personal” message. And it paid off. We sold out every show on the West coast plus their entire first run of merch.

An accomplishment of that kind had me hooked.  I was fascinated with the culture of social media.  These relationships made, the limitless potential to make connections with other people, and the marketing possibilities excited me.

So, as I enter the next phase in my education, The New School is another obvious choice.   Not only does the university have a remarkable reputation among artists of all walks, but it is active in media today.  As a thinker and a doer, the inclusion of theory and practice fits my interests and goals perfectly.

The future is so infinitely enormous that I have always had a tough time nailing down one thing I want to do for the rest of my life.  With so many opportunities, how can I make that choice?  But rather than getting bogged down in the fantastical side of it all, I have created two goals that I would like to attain in the next five years.

At this point in my life I know two things: 1) I love sharing what I know with others.  Whether that manifests itself in helping an artist or an organization better use the resources available to them online, or in the classroom, teaching college students how to write clean and valid markup and wield the sword of Cascading Style Sheets to make a beautiful and effective website, I always enjoy myself most when I am giving back.

And 2) I don’t like working for “the man”.  I don’t want to be a cog in the wheels a large corporation, helping them dupe customers or expand their portfolios.  I guess my humanitarian side comes out in wanting to help the little guy achieve his goals.

To these ends, the goals I want to achieve in the next five years include:

1. Freelance design and consultancy
2. Teaching at a college level

Being in the working world for several years has shown me that I really can’t enjoy myself unless I have the ability to create.  My goals above will allow me to combine the theory and practice methods gained at The New School and perpetuate them, hopefully instilling the same values in my students while reinforcing them in my own creative endeavors.  By teaching the principals behind new media communication I will learn them better myself and in turn be able to apply them to freelance projects — whether those be actual designs or consultations for organizations wanting to get in the new media game.

But before all of that happens, I’d like to make some contributions to the field.  I’d like to be published, I’d like to be respected.  However, I feel my literary contributions will have to be on a broader topic than social media and digital culture.  I will always tend toward communication and interpersonal relationships, as that is just how I think.

In any case, the path I’m looking at will include a lot of theory with production classes in focused design fields, mostly related to the web.  That’s where I work now and will continue to work.  At the end I’d like to have some sort of culminating work as an online installation piece.  But for me, it’s too early to know exactly what that will be. Who knows where the technology will be in even a year’s time, anyway?

I am excited to see where the new theories, ideas, and skills I learn during this degree program will take me.  Even in my current job, I am seeing immediate benefits. I’ve been applying many of the theories and discussions into my everyday web marketing strategies. As I shape my masters I know that my skills will only increase and my knowledge will only widen. In other words, this degree will also shape me.

Intellectual Autobiography – Joel G Goodman – Download the PDF.

Related posts:

1. I …
2. The Beauty of Social Media
3. Social Media & the Real World: There’s No Difference

When Conan O’Brien first created a Twitter account we students of social media had a fun new game to play: Guess how many followers Conan will have after each refresh. When I got into the game, he had around 71,500 followers and jumped up to over 72k in less than a minute. And kept climbing. That was eight days ago.

What’s really interesting is Conan’s foreshadowing:

Today, Conan has 535,275 followers as of this writing (and climbing, no doubt). Sarah, the one person he decided to follow, gained over 2000 followers in a matter of minutes. And, as in Conan’s case, that number is still climbing.

Behold the power of celebrity in participatory culture. This makes me wonder if Conan and his crew realize the amount of influence they have on the web. I’m sure they do. Now, Sarah Killen’s life probably isn’t changing all that much. But she has been brought up alongside Conan’s image and, holding onto his coattails, so to speak. Pretty fascinating. I wonder if NBC is noticing this and realizing how incredibly bad their move to get rid of him was…

Related posts:

1. Plugin: Twitter Tools
2. Digital Participatory Culture
3. QotD: Culinary Celebrity

Makes sure you go over to the Free People post and comment about how cool her cozies are. And (shameless plug) check out her shop on Etsy to pick a couple up!

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1. Jess on Etsy
2. 18 Days In
3. Designs, designs, everywhere

As this week’s topic is Digital Participatory Culture we (Neal and Joel) thought it only suitable to collaborate entirely on the discussion piece to kick this off. We used Google Wave to formulate our ideas and get a basic outline of what’s to come and then moved it into a shared Google Document to put the last formatting touches on it.

The discussion this week will break down what we took away as the most significant aspects of the new digital participatory culture and attempt to stratify all of these new ideas with your experiences, thoughts, ideas and research.

Many of us in this course have grown up with computers and the Internet present for most of our lives. Those of us who were recently undergrads most likely connected pretty distinctly with both the Jenkins and Watkins readings.

Jenkins defines this new participatory culture as,

“A culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.”
(pp. 3)

With so much of our day-to-day lives wrapped up in the digital world, at some point you have to jump in and start contributing to the discussion. As Jörg has mentioned, Jenkins has shown us that in order to stay relevant and alive in the digital culture, we need to participate in it. Today, that takes many forms.

First up, we’ve got the brave new frontier of social web.

The Frontline piece and the reading excercises all mentioned a phenomenon where many people don’t see the Internet as a thing to go to anymore. Instead, they see it as another part (or extension) of their everyday lives. In the PBS special “Digital Nation” Douglas Rushkoff notes, “It’s changed from a thing one does, to a think one is.”

Is there a difference between “real life” and “digital life”? Or maybe a better way of asking that is, should there be?

The Social

Reading through Jenkins and Watkins, and watching the Frontline stories, it quickly becomes apparent how important the relational and social aspects of digital culture are. Indeed, in order to have a participatory culture, you need to have something to participate in. That necessitates other people. The rise of social platforms like Facebook and now Twitter help to facilitate and then reinforce those connections. The evolution of relational technology in the digital age is interesting, starting with the first bulletin board systems and moving into email, instant messaging, and later full blown social networks.

Out of these more basic relationship have come collaboration-specific platforms such as the bookmark sharing site Delicious.com, crowdsourced encyclopedia Wikipedia.com, and the production oriented hitRECord.com. Participation has invaded entertainment channels in the form of mashup culture. Glance and YouTube and you will no doubt see some video that’s been collaborated on.

Or at the site hitRECord.com, founded by actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a test bed for collaborative art pieces. One recent film had over 180 collaborators on it and was shown at Sundance Film Festival to rave reviews.

The Anti-Social

With a wide-reaching always-on culture there have no doubt been some negative developments. Cyber-stalking, bullying, even a more pronounced generational gap have popped up.

As we spend more and more time with technology, are we closing ourselves off from the real world? The two of us both work with computers for a living. Joel is a web marketer for a university and Neal is a researcher for Dow Jones. We may not be the typical tech-centric users, but we find the same issues of having to juggle our online social lives with our online professional lives. For Joel, sitting in front of a computer all day has certainly had its physical impact such as eye strain and back pain. Neal telecommutes, which sometimes makes it difficult to truly step away from his different online personas (personal and professional). The communications keep coming in throughout the day — via social networks, his “smartphone”, various email addresses, etc. By bedtime, he sometimes feels exhausted by the sheer volume of messages that he has had to sort through and respond to. From this perspective, it’s not hard to imagine how participation in new media environments can even lead to forms of stress.

But getting into the more dangerous side of being always one, the press has had its fair share of horror stories to lay on the public. Some people are taking up the cause to inform the public about the dangers of, say, sharing their location online. Has the participatory culture made it too easy for us to trust everyone with our data? This obviously gets into privacy issues, and we think this very much gets into the reality of what it means to be media literate in a digital world.

This new development illustrates one of the ways less than scrupulous users of Twitter and other big communication tools can exploit information that is shared within a social network.

Literacy In the Participation Age

In a more abstract way we are all faced with some of the same sorts of distractions as we are in the real world, though sometimes disguised much more cleverly. The advent of social media has given yet another avenue for big corporations to not only closely monitor consumer trends, but also to market goods and services through a direct channel, linking customers to their friends, neighbors, colleagues (i.e. other potential customers). For instance, on Facebook and Twitter it’s no longer Big Corporation advertising to us, but our friends (at least that what we perceive) who do the selling. And in some ways the participatory culture has helped businesses improve their image by joining the conversation. In the US, Comcast, one of the most hated cable companies in the country, drastically improved its customer relations after one savvy employee began replying to complaints over Twitter. Now, a company is lambasted if they don’t have a social media presence. At the same time, they are able to mine more data than ever by participating in the conversation. The trust gained, many times, turns into conversions and higher profits.

With so much going on, and so many news tactics to be aware of, how has the media literacy landscape changed? What are the new things we need to know?

Beyond that, how has literacy itself changed in this culture? We all have different levels of acumen when it comes to digital technologies. Does a person’s savviness or lack thereof create a participatory rift? What does a media literate person look like in the midst of digital participatory culture?

Digital Culture, Politics and Social Change

The participatory culture has also played an important role in politics and activism. The 2008 US presidential election saw the rise and widespread use of social networking to political ends. The Barack Obama campaign heavily used its own social networking platform to solicit donations, organize rallies, and stay connected with constituents.

Many would argue that this played a crucial role in the Obama win, especially looking at how Republican candidate John McCain’s campaign lacked severely on the social web front for much of the election cycle making his campaign less than relevant in the eyes of young netizens.

So in that light,

• How has new participatory media enabled grassroots political movements?
• How have emerging technologies aided those agitating for social change? How have these tools changed the political landscape in industrialized society?

This gets into some of the things we’ve talked about the past few weeks with regards to news media. For instance, does the “noise” of granting everyone a voice within the realm of social media inhibit or promote democratic ideals? What about for accuracy of information?

Further reading:
(available via NSOU Library)
“DIGITAL SPEECH AND DEMOCRATIC CULTURE: A THEORY OF FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION

FOR THE INFORMATION SOCIETY” by Jack Balkin, Professor of Law at Yale University and author of the blog “Balkinization” (http://balkin.blogspot.com/)

(available elsewhere)
The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online (Wired Magazine, 17.06)

Related posts:

1. The Anti-Facebook
2. Conan O’Brien Wields Some Power
3. Google Buzz: Is the Social Over?

JESS3 – the State of The Internet by JESS3 for AIGA Baltimore

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2. Mini-Review: Mates of State in St Louis
3. Designing for WordPress

Online search giant Google recently made its foray into the formal social media sphere with its Google Buzz service. Tied into the popular Gmail web-based email client, Buzz was rolled out to Google’s approximately 146 million most active users, the company saying that a social network has always been beneath the surface of its email technology (WSJ.com). But even with the current social-media craze, many users were unhappy with what seemed to be an intrusion on their everyday social routines. We’ll look at some of these users’ comments and I’ll espouse what I see to be some of the possibilities that we might not be hearing over the Buzz.

What’s That Buzzing?

Google Buzz is, basically, an aggregator. It takes posts you make to Twitter, Flickr, Picasa & personal blogs and posts them as your typical status update. Think along the lines of a Facebook status update. They look pretty similar. These posts get pulled into your Google Profile and show up in a sort of stream tightly integrated into Gmail. Your Gmail contacts are able to comment on your posts and share them with their own contacts.

We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don’t have to use different tools to share with different audiences).
~ Google Blog

Incidentally, when Buzz was first rolled out to users, it automatically created a social network based on their Google Chat buddies and most consistently emailed Gmail contacts. Good idea, right? Saving users time by pre-populating social network contacts? It might have been, if the end-users mostly used the service for personal contact. Or had any idea that these contacts would be able to see their updates by default. But that wasn’t the case.

…Google took a lot of heat for these pre-made networks because people didn’t know where the names came from or who some of the people were. Even worse, these networks were made public by default so every Buzz user could see everyone else’s closest contacts.
~ Walt Mossberg (WSJ.com)

The Problems

Instead, Buzz was received with criticism from not only its targeted end-users, but from many tech reviewers and competitors. Mashable.com quoted Microsoft as saying:

“Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.”

Interestingly enough, this is exactly what Buzz does with the added bonus of having its own status updates. But the main concern from users have been those of privacy. This has become a fairly common reaction to Google’s new introductions in the past, but nonetheless rings loud and clear in a digital world that sees privacy controls ever-shrinking.

Privacy Faux Pas

The privacy issues with the Buzz rollout span a couple of areas. First, the automatic network creation posed problems to a lot of people. Walt Mossberg, for instance, suggested that just because he emails his plumber back and forth, this does not mean he wants to interact with him all the time. This type of presumption on Google’s part completely disregarded normal societal relationships, seemingly by accident, and managed to be quite disruptive. [source]

Or, as Pete Cashmore reported to CNN, lawyers were concerned that their clients might be revealed, while doctors worried the same might happen with their patient lists. These examples are fairly serious breaches of public trust, and while Google rushed to fix these mistakes it made Buzz’s initial appeal limited.

Second, Google made the mistake of, by default, allowing anyone to follow anyone else. It made already-created Google profiles set to display publicly without any sort of notice to the end-user to opt-in. This was a particularly costly slip-up that has led to a class action lawsuit. According to the San Francisco Chronicle “the legal complaint accuses Google of breaking various electronic communications laws, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The plaintiff is seeking injunctions to prevent the company from taking similar actions in the future, and unspecified monetary relief.”

This type of thing isn’t without precedence. Tech blog TechCrunch gives a few examples of companies that have made similar messes in the past. These include AOL launching a Digg clone in 2006 (this eventually became Propeller.com); in 2008 Yahoo! followed suit with their own Digg clone called, interestingly enough, Yahoo! Buzz; and there was Facebook’s huge privacy debacle with their social advertising platform Beacon back in 2007 which took users’ profile information and used it in targeted advertising to their friends. Each of these stumbles has confused their respective members, if not leading ultimately to lawsuits.

In Google’s case, even Canada’s Privacy Commissioner is reviewing the public privacy concerns [CBC.ca] surrounding the service. This increasing anxiety has forced Google’s hand in making swift improvements to Buzz.

Of course, all of this nay-saying comes only from those who are critics of the service. There are many users who love the service. I sent out a Buzz asking, “Writing a paper for my Media Literacy class about Google Buzz. What do you think about it? Can I quote your buzz?” and got a few responses.

Dr. Michael Johnson replied saying,

I like Buzz, & think it has potential, Especially once they have implemented ways to filter out some of the noise. Even the ability to collapse threads would help immensely. I really love the integration with Reader, as well as the geolocation feature. [source]

Another friend referred me to a post by the photographer Thomas Hawke entitled, Google Buzz, Don’t Listen to the Naysayers, They’re Wrong. In this post Hawke describes his good experience with Buzz. He is able to overlook all of the mistakes, the confusing interface and chalk it up to growing pains. In his mind the fact that Google is *innovating* is enough for him. And I believe others are likely to agree.

We’ve seen what the main public concerns over Buzz are, but I believe there are a few underlying pieces that haven’t been addressed in the open. Google has set itself up to further dominate in online advertising and that raises a whole new set of issues in the way we interact socially online.

Erecting Walls and Selling Customers

The first issue I have with Google Buzz is not about privacy, but about inter-connectivity. Once upon a time, Google released a platform aimed at providing a common framework for developing social applications. It was called OpenSocial.

The idea was for “any social website to be able to implement” apps that let their users connect with the same API. Buzz is counter to this mentality. Instead of connecting across sites, it closes users off.

Buzz does a good job of pulling in content from other sites like Flickr and Twitter. It handles the conversations that ensue pretty well too. But then it turns bad.

See, there’s no two-way sync. For instance, Buzz may import a post from this blog and post it to my Buzz feed, and my 40 Buzz followers may read it and start commenting on it. But those comments will never go back onto my blog. They’ll stay locked inside Gmail/Google Buzz never to be associated with the original content. The same for Flickr photos. A comment made on a photo imported into Buzz will never go to the original photo on Flickr.

Even now, if I post a link to a blog post on Twitter and someone replies to that tweet, it can be pulled into the comments section in my original blog post. Buzz won’t do that. As Dan Coulter put it in his early Buzz review,

By commenting in Buzz, you’re removing yourself from the conversation on those other sites (my own blog included) and diminishing the value of my Flickr page, my Twitter feed and my personal blog.

Google Buzz essentially builds walls to hold in those conversations, not letting them be shared on the source channels. Even beyond these very apparent walls, though, there is the potential for a far more sinister temptation to be indulged. Google’s ever-expansive data mining and collection has just become more specific. Right when we thought the online advertising market was locked up, Google finds a way to further solidify their position.

What They’re Selling

We’re now getting further into the realm of speculation, but let’s take a look at what could happen if Google changed its mind and decided to “be evil“.

Google already has data on search terms, browsing habits, email content, and user location that it uses to target its AdSense text advertisements in search results, Gmail and on websites [source]. These custom ads are what have made Google as successful as they are. It has also allowed them to virtually dominate the realm of online ad serving. In October 2008 Google’s AdSense and DoubleClick technologies accounted for over half of all ad server calls online [source].

This data pool, as extensive as it already is, has increased exponentially in two ways. First, Google now has more content coming in from sites than it did before. Sure, the search engine spiders may have crawled Twitter and Flickr and used the words to help their search algorithms, but it was purposefully initiated by Google users. That brings us to number two. Google can now tie that content data directly to a specific user.

And, come to think of it, that sounds exactly like Facebook Beacon. The pitch can now come directly from your contact rather than from a nebulous entity. What you like, what you ate for breakfast, even the places you’ve visited now become the property of Google to be used for “Providing our services, including the display of customized content and advertising [source]“. When this data gets used for advertising purposes, you’ve become the product. And at that point Google has become no better than a television or magazine advertiser or telemarketer. They are selling an audience.

This gets worse when you throw in everything else a Google account is connected with. If Google’s widespread nature is taken to its extreme evil potential, a purchase one makes from an online store that uses Google Checkout could later show up to a contact as a recommendation from you to go and by that product.

What To Do

So what should our reaction be? If you’re reading this on my blog, then you’re most likely someone fairly active in the online social conversation. Perhaps you would consider yourself media literate. How then should you respond?

Unfortunately, I don’t believe there is a straight answer. In the case of Google the choice must be completely subjective. Do you care if your information is used for purposes you may not have originally envisioned? If not then you’re fine.

Are you trying to build a brand for yourself online? If so, weigh how important your own site, blog, Twitter feed, etc. is to your purposes. If you’re okay with Google having all of that info and then walling the conversation off inside the confines of Google Buzz, then by all means let them. However, if you’re like me you will want to maintain the integrity of your other channels; you will want the conversation to be open and boundless rather than stuck behind one corporate wall.

And if you care about the ethical implications of what Google could do, then you may want to consider your other options. When comes down to it, the more Google is encouraged, the more likely they are to keep pushing these privacy, data collection and information retention practices in new directions. Though Google seems to be making an effort [EFF.org] to educate people on the importance of taking their online privacy seriously, there is still that big “what if” about Google having all of the data they collect on the possibilities therein.

The easy answers on what to do is the line we routinely hear: Use the privacy settings. This is all well and good, but maybe one should go farther and simply use the built-in Buzz status alone without connecting any of the third-party sites. This is especially poignant in a situation where Google would not be deleting the content it imports. Not having your extraneous information directly connected to your Google Profile will keep your online activities away from Big Google’s prying eyes.

Of course, privacy on the internet is still much debated. Some people think privacy is pretty much dead. Other people say that the sheer fact of having a choice of what to share and what not to is privacy controls enough. I’d love to hear some discussion on this matter. Hopefully you’ll comment on Twitter or the original post so that a lot of people can benefit from the thoughts. But you have what I think. I think Google Buzz is a step backward in the social aspects of social networking, a pretty big privacy risk, and potentially evil (in a Google-sense).

Sources

Arrington, M. (2010).  Google Buzz warning: force feeding users can result in vomiting.  TechCrunch. Retrieved from http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/17/google-buzz-warning-force-feeding-users-can-result-in-vomiting/

Arrington, M. (2009).  Bing comes to Hotmail.  TechCrunch. Retrieved from http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/09/bing-comes-to-hotmail/

Arrington, M. (2008).  Yahoo Buzz launches: popular stories to go on Yahoo homepage.  TechCrunch. Retrieved from http://techcrunch.com/2008/02/25/yahoo-buzz-launches-with-massive-homepage-traffic-to-push-it/

Arrington, M. (2006).  AOL-Netscape launches massive “Digg killer”.  TechCrunch. Retrieved from http://techcrunch.com/2006/06/14/aol-netscape-launches-massive-digg-like-site/

Cashmore, P. (2010). Google Buzz: what is it good for?  CNN Tech. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/18/cashmore.google.buzz/index.html

Hawk, T. (2010).  Buzz, don’t listen to the naysayers, they’re wrong.  Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection.Retrieved from http://thomashawk.com/2010/02/google-buzz-dont-listen-to-the-naysayers-theyre-wrong.html

Jackson, T. (2010).  Introducing Google Buzz.  Official Google Blog. Retrieved from http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/introducing-google-buzz.html

Mossberg, W. (2010).  Google Buzz isn’t exactly humming along.  The Wall Street Journal Online: The Mossberg Solution. Retrieved from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704804204575069431705872038.html

Parr, B. (2010). Google Buzz: competitors and experts react. Mashable: The Social Media Guide.  Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2010/02/09/google-buzz-reactions/

Schonfeld, E. (2007).  Liveblogging Facebook advertising announcement (social ads + Beacon + insights).  TechCrunch. Retrieved from http://techcrunch.com/2007/11/06/liveblogging-facebook-advertising-announcement/

Temple, J. (2010). Local class action complaint filed over Google Buzz.  SFGate: The Technology Chronicles. Retrieved from http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_id=57438#ixzz0gVemerxK

Vascellaro, J. (2010).  Google adds ‘Buzz” to Gmail.  The Wall Street Journal Online: Technology. Retrieved from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704820904575055461073350410.html

Related posts:

1. The Beauty of Social Media
2. Digital Participatory Culture
3. Social Media & the Real World: There’s No Difference

1. What do I want to know?
2. Why does it matter? To whom?
3. What do we already know about the subject?
4. What is a workable research question?
5. How can I find the answer?
6. How can I analyze the results?
7. What conclusions can I draw?
8. What can I contribute to future studies?
9. How can I communicate the result to others?

This post is set up to be a reminder to me as I continue my masters degree. I need to be thinking about and answering these questions as I determine the research I want to do in this field.

Related posts:

1. Intellectual Autobiography

Interesting read. Talks about the way very small numbers of normal people are tainting the way the masses are perceiving brands. Deals specifically with the negative views.

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3. Moving On (Ain’t So Bad)

Puppy is going to stay with Audra for a few days while we take care of things. I can’t wait to be in our warm hotel room in Bannockburn tonight. Watching LOST. And relaxing a little. There have been a few hitches with this moving process, but I’m trying not to worry about stuff too much.

Tomorrow we’re doing stuff at Trinity; Thursday we’ll be moving in (as long as things go well); Friday we’ll be driving to Champaign to pick up Cors; Saturday we’ll have Jessica’s parents visiting.

It’s been a long couple of weeks.

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2. HighEdWeb 2008
3. we are in Dublin

The only problem is that we are still waiting to hear if the lease has gone through. We are supposed to have the movers here on Tuesday, but without a confirmation from the landlords, we don’t know if there’s a place to have our things delivered to. Hopefully we will hear tomorrow.

I’ve got a few things to take care of beyond the normal changing of address. For one, we’re in a Dish Network contract and I need to know if we’ll be able to have a dish installed at our new place. We’ll have to see what Dish will do for us if we have to terminate early. Hopefully it won’t be too bad.

Sounds like Jessica’s parents may come up on Saturday to help us unpack. I’m thinking IKEA for bookcases and Giordano’s for some pizza (they’ve never experienced Chicago-style stuffed pizza). In any case, there is a lot to do this week with finishing up work, meeting movers, moving, going to an inauguration, and getting all settled. I start my new job at Trinity a week from Monday.

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Jess and I have been praying hard for things to work out (as many of our friends and family members have been) and it has been pretty incredible to see how God’s timing has played out. In about two weeks we will be moving our things from the St Louis Metro-East to the North Chicago area — assuming everything goes to plan.

As you can imagine there is a lot to be done before that move, so things might be a bit quiet around here, though I am going to try and keep up with the writing so I have a record of this move.

It’s a little bit sad to be leaving so many great people here in Greenville, but Jessica and I have, for a long time actually, felt stagnant here. This move is something that is invigorating and hopeful for us. Expect great things! We both are.

Those of you that knew about this, thank you for your prayers, thoughts and support while we were going through this. It means the world to us.

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The Library of Congress has the absolute coolest Flickr photostream. They routinely archive old newspapers and photos. I saw this today and it got the history geek in me excited. It’s the New York Tribune with an article exploring where the city is going to store the Titanic when it docks…

So cool.

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I’m taking two required seminar courses and a design course that I am excited about. Color theory, typography, layout… it’s going to be great.

Can’t wait to start! Apparently orientation videos will be online on Monday and the processes to add me to Blackboard will also run. And allegedly I have no textbooks? That can’t be right.

I’ll have to check that out again later…

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My first task this weekend is to get the tea@elevensies site up and running. It’s taken too long and I feel bad. But I did have a rough stretch the past six months or so that deterred me from getting it all wrapped up — still, not a good excuse. This weekend is the weekend, however, to bust out this site for Ashley and Char. And then probably see what Ash wants to change (she apparently is over her design now). But at least it will be another project down.

The second issue I’m going to try to wrap up is this site. I’ve got most of a new design mocked up and sitting in Photoshop, just waiting for me to bring it to life in HTML5 and CSS3. So this site will change in the near future. And for the better, I think.

Third, I need get started on redesigning Jessica’s blog. Her new branding is amazing and I want to get it up and running for her, as well as a complete graphics package for her Etsy shop.

It is nice to have some time to work on personal design and coding. Stress is gone, and that goes a long way toward the proper motivation in these sorts of situations. Things are exciting!

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