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Personal Blogging Groups

Applications of Social Networking to Medical Treatment

Tony Ferraro, President and CEO of 360Hubs and Dr. David Stone, a practicing psychologist, former Harvard Fellow in computer science and now a Visiting Scholar in GSAS joined us at the Berkman Center to speak about applications of social networking technology in the treatment of trauma survivors.

David began the presentation by discussing his experience with clinical services in technology, specifically Second Life. As a practicing psychologist, David has worked in Second Life within specialized communities, and took us on our a tour of Mormon community with a woman named Lois who has multiple sclerosis.

[ MOV ] play video » harvard.edu

Blogger's Code of Conduct - Tim O'Reilly's Draft

We celebrate the blogosphere because it embraces frank and open conversation. But frankness does not have to mean lack of civility. We present this Blogger Code of Conduct in hopes that it helps create a culture that encourages both personal expression and constructive conversation.

1. We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog.
   We are committed to the "Civility Enforced" standard: we will not post unacceptable content, and we'll delete comments that contain it.
   
   We define unacceptable content as anything included or linked to that:
   - is being used to abuse, harass, stalk, or threaten others
   - is libelous, knowingly false, ad-hominem, or misrepresents another person,
   - infringes upon a copyright or trademark
   - violates an obligation of confidentiality
   - violates the privacy of others
   
   We define and determine what is "unacceptable content" on a case-by-case basis, and our definitions are not limited to this list. If we delete a comment or link, we will say so and explain why. [We reserve the right to change these standards at any time with no notice.]
   
2. We won't say anything online that we wouldn't say in person.
   
3. We connect privately before we respond publicly.
   When we encounter conflicts and misrepresentation in the blogosphere, we make every effort to talk privately and directly to the person(s) involved--or find an intermediary who can do so--before we publish any posts or comments about the issue.
   
4. When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action.
   When someone who is publishing comments or blog postings that are offensive, we'll tell them so (privately, if possible--see above) and ask them to publicly make amends.
   If those published comments could be construed as a threat, and the perpetrator doesn't withdraw them and apologize, we will cooperate with law enforcement to protect the target of the threat.
   
5. We do not allow anonymous comments.
   We require commenters to supply a valid email address before they can post, though we allow commenters to identify themselves with an alias, rather than their real name.
   
6. We ignore the trolls.
   We prefer not to respond to nasty comments about us or our blog, as long as they don't veer into abuse or libel. We believe that feeding the trolls only encourages them--"Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig likes it." Ignoring public attacks is often the best way to contain them.

» Tim O'Reilly / radar.oreilly.com

über bloggers

It's no secret that bloggers are becoming increasingly influential. But Arrington is part of an emerging crowd of writers who use their narrowly focused blogs, such as hyperlocal real estate reports, green guides, or Web 2.0 startup reviews, to establish themselves as thought leaders. These new influencers are taking a page from the blog networks Gawker and Weblogs Inc. and turning rapid-fire, around-the-clock blog patter that makes and shapes the news into a hot new online media model.

Companies are directing more efforts toward buttering up these New Media players, often feeding them exclusives that play well with their targeted audiences. And for marketers who are increasingly comfortable with spending money on blogs, advertising with these opinion leaders provides instant cachet.

Think of these as the digital version of potent, passionate trade press writers. They swarm every novelty in areas like tech, creating problems and buzz for companies and innovations. They report news and publish it alongside analysis of newspaper stories and company releases. These posts are salted with strong doses of personality, sparking discussions across the Web. By melding their own insights and opinions with the aggregated views of others, they're starting to gain leverage. "In a time-starved world, people—especially decision-makers—have very little time, but do not want to miss being in the know," says Rishad Tobaccowala, chief innovation officer at advertising firm Publicis Groupe Media.

» Business Week

Mapping the Blogosphere as social network

Discover Magazine has an interesting article on mapping the blogosphere, reporting on the work of Matthew Hurst. Hurst put together a 3D map of the blogosphere, with bright spots represent sites with the highest number of links and isolated islands represent closed communities like LiveJournal. The study also identifies other islands like sociopolitical commentary, gadget hounds, sports fans, and, um, porn blogs.

The blogosphere is the most explosive social network you’ll never see. Recent studies suggest that nearly 60 million blogs exist online, and about 175,000 more crop up daily (that’s about 2 every second). Even though the vast majority of blogs are either abandoned or isolated, many bloggers like to link to other Web sites. These links allow analysts to track trends in blogs and identify the most popular topics of data exchange. Social media expert Matthew Hurst recently collected link data for six weeks and produced this plot of the most active and interconnected parts of the blogosphere.

» discovermagazine
» map graphic

A Cambridge company that pays doctors to post medical observations on its website, including reports of drug side effects, has quickly incurred the wrath of pharmaceutical makers.

Sermo Inc., founded by a surgical resident-turned-entrepreneur and backed by $3 million of venture capital, is promoting the website, sermo.com, as a novel Internet community. It's a password-protected private forum where raw postings by doctors can be viewed, for a fee, by Wall Street investment firms.

With its debut two weeks ago, the Sermo site generated debate by prominently featuring postings from several doctors saying that Pfizer Inc.'s cholesterol-fighter Lipitor induces vivid and repeated nightmares in some patients as well as a posting by one doctor that said the diabetes drug Byetta, marketed jointly by Amylin Pharmaceuticals and Eli Lilly and Co. , was associated with "sudden death" in 50 patients.
Via: Boston Globe
Via: Sermo

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Social Network

A social network is a map of the relationships between individuals, indicating the ways in which they are connected through various social familiarities ranging from casual acquaintance to close familial bonds. The term was first coined in 1954 by J. A. Barnes (in: Class and Committees in a Norwegian Island Parish, "Human Relations").

Social network analysis (also sometimes called network theory) has emerged as a key technique in modern sociology, anthropology, Social Psychology and organizational studies, as well as a popular topic of speculation and study. Research in a number of academic fields have demonstrated that social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals.

Social networking also refers to a category of Internet applications to help connect friends, business partners, or other individuals together using a variety of tools. These applications are covered under Internet social networks below, and in the external links at the end of the article.

Introduction to Social Networks

Social network theory views social relationships in terms of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors. There can be many kinds of ties between the nodes. In its most simple form, a social network is a map of all of the relevant ties between the nodes being studied. The network can also be used to determine the social capital of individual actors. These concepts are often displayed in a social network diagram, where nodes are the points and ties are the lines.

The shape of the social network helps determine a network's usefulness to its individuals. Smaller, tighter networks can be less useful to their members than networks with lots of loose connections (weak ties) to individuals outside the main network. More "open" networks, with many weak ties and social connections, are more likely to introduce new ideas and opportunities to their members than closed networks with many redundant ties. In other words, a group of friends who only do things with each other already share the same knowledge and opportunities. A group of individuals with connections to other social worlds is likely to have access to a wider range of information. It is better for individual success to have connections to a variety of networks rather than many connections within a single network. Similarly, individuals can exercise influence or act as brokers within their social networks by bridging two networks that are not directly linked (called filling social holes).

The power of social network theory stems from its difference from traditional sociological studies, which assume that it is the attributes of individual actors -- whether they are friendly or unfriendly, smart or dumb, etc. -- that matter. Social network theory produces an alternate view, where the attributes of individuals are less important than their relationships and ties with other actors within the network. This approach has turned out to be useful for explaining many real-world phenomena, but leaves less room for individual agency, the ability for individuals to influence their success, so much of it rests within the structure of their network.

Social networks have also been used to examine how companies interact with each other, characterizing the many informal connections that link executives together, as well as associations and connections between individual employees at different companies. These networks provide ways for companies to gather information, deter competition, and even collude in setting prices or policies.

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Wanted: Blog Talent - Opinion Leaders/Writers For BlogCircles

Are you ready to become an online leader of a community of people who share your interests? Every Blog Opinion Leaders's mission is to create an simple, intuitive and gratifying experience for people interested in this topic.

The Perfect BlogCircles Writer/Editor has...
- A true knowledge of and a passion for this topic
- Commitment to creating informative, "what you need to know" posts
- A dedication to building and updating a comprehensive links directory
- Strong writing and editing skills

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Social Software

Social software lets people rendezvous, connect or collaborate by use of a computer network. The term came into more common usage in 2002, largely credited to Clay Shirky who organized a "Social Software Summit" in November of that year. Shirky defines social software as "stuff that gets spammed."

The more specific term collaborative software applies to cooperative work systems. The study of computer-supported collaboration and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (the name of the major conference on these issues) are closely associated with the software design issues.

Examples

Blogs or Weblogs

Blogs, short for web logs, are like online journals for a particular person. The owner will post a message periodically allowing others to comment. Topics often include the owner's daily life or views on politics or a particular subject important to them. There are many websites that address the history of blogs, like The History of Weblogs and weblogs: a history and perspective.

Blogs mean many things to different people: ranging from "online journal" to "easily updated personal website." While these definitions are not wrong, they fail to capture the power of blogs as social software. Beyond being a simple homepage, or an online diary, some blogs also allow comments on the entries thereby a discussion forum, have blogrolls, i.e., links to other blogs which the owner reads, and/or have trackback which allows one blog to notify another blog, creating an inter-blog conversation. In summary, blogs engage readers and build a virtual community around a particular person or interest. Examples include Slashdot, LiveJournal, BlogSpot

Wiki

Examples include the original Portland Pattern Repository wiki, MeatballWiki, CommunityWiki, and possibly Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikisource. The status of Wikipedia and related projects as "true" Wikis or as "typical" wikis has been questioned.

Social Network Services

Social network services allow people to come together online around shared interests or causes. For example, some sites provide dating services where users will post their personal profiles, location, age, gender, etc, and are able to search for a partner. Examples include ArtBoom, Orkut, Friendster, Linkedin, Tribe Networks, Freecycle Network, 24eyesand Cybersocieties.

Realtime Social Networks

A hybrid of the web-based social networks and instant messaging technologies, realtime social networks have recently emerged and are beginning to take both shape and popularity. Some examples of this include Imeem, which allows users to share blogs, files and instant messages, which creates a social network dynamically, in realtime, depending on where the user is currently located.

Social Bookmarking

Some sites allow users to post their list of bookmarks—or favorite websites—for others to search and view. The object is for people to meet others with whom they share a common interest. Examples include blinklist, del.icio.us, furl, Spurl.net, and Connectedy.

Collaborative Real-time Editing

Simultaneous editing of a text or media file by different participants from different internet-accounts.

Virtual Worlds or Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Virtual worlds and Massively shared online games are places where it is possible to meet and interact with some other human in an virtual world which usually looks like the reality. Some popular applications are Second Life, The Sims Online, There. A recent free software and open-source initiative is Solipsis.

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Collaborative Software

Collaborative software, also known as groupware, is application software that integrates work on a single project by several concurrent users at separated workstations (see also Computer supported cooperative work). In its modern form, it was pioneered by Lotus Software with the popular Lotus Notes application running in connection with a Lotus Domino server; some historians argue that groupware was anticipated by earlier monolithic systems like NLS.

Software becomes more valuable when more people use it and thus Metcalfe's law applies. For example, calendaring becomes more useful when more people are connected to the same electronic calendar and choose to keep their individual calendars up-to-date.

The more general term social software applies to systems used outside the workplace, for instance, online dating services and social networks like Friendster. The study of computer-supported collaboration includes study of the software and social phenomena associated with it. These are covered in different articles.

Overview

Collaboration, with respect to information technology, seems to have many definitions. Some are defensible but others are so broad they lose any meaningful application. Understanding the differences in human interactions is necessary to ensure the appropriate technologies are employed to meet interaction needs.

There are three primary ways in which humans interact; conversational interaction, transactional interaction, and collaborative interaction:

Conversational interaction is an exchange of information between one or many participants where the primary purpose of the interaction is discovery or relationship building. There is no central entity around which the interaction revolves but is a free exchange of information with no defined constraints. Communication technology such as telephones, instant messaging, and e-mail are generally sufficient for conversational interactions.

Transactional interaction involves the exchange of transaction entities where a major function of the transaction entity is to alter the relationship between participants. The transaction entity is in a relatively stable form and constrains or defines the new relationship. One participant exchanges money for goods and becomes a customer. Transactional interactions are most effectively handled by transactional systems that manage state and commit records for persistent storage.

In collaborative interactions the main function of the participants' relationship is to alter a collaboration entity (i.e., the converse of transactional). The collaboration entity is in a relatively unstable form. Examples include the development of an idea, the creation of a design, the achievement of a shared goal. Therefore, real collaboration technologies deliver the functionality for many participants to augment a common deliverable. Record or document management, threaded discussions, audit history, and other mechanisms designed to capture the efforts of many into a managed content environment are typical of collaboration technologies.

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Keyword Tags

BlogCircles (tm) dot com / Personal Blogging Groups

• Collaborative Strategies
• Collaborative Tagging
• Social Bookmarking
• Social Systems
• Task Collaboration Software
• Folksonomy
• Community Collaboration + Consensus

tags: blogcircles, blog circles / blogcircles