Social networking technologies (Due Jan29)

In the ever expanding area of social networking we can see that there are new and exciting possibilities. sites such facebook and youtube have revolutionized the way we communicate. It is easier to be in contact with many individuals and many groups of individuals. These breakthroughs are important for areas of business and communication (i am an economics and business major). In the business world the most important thing is to have access to as much information as quickly as possible. in the ever changing business landscape new methods of producing, marketing and distribution are appearing every single day. With the new social networking age ideas can be shared and modified much easier and this information can be spread around large groups of people quicker increasing efficiency by a great margin.

When we also look at the technologies used in Second Life and World of Warcraft, we can see that a visual dimension has been added to the whole concept of social networking. They allow us to be in ‘direct contact’ with other people, while also using a different representation of us (wow players see the wow character and not the actual user). I feel this could revolutionize the way business is conducted. Meetings could be held in masssive virtual landscapes without requiring the actual parties involved to be there. This also erases sterotyping and other conceptions associated with seeing what a person looks like in person. Using this technology one could conduct several different meetings at the same time, while being in their most comfortable environment. One of the problems which might arise is the fact that people might not be conducting meetings with the people they think they are. Another issue is number of servers required and the security of servers. These are just a few ideas which could revolutionize the way business is conducted and the few problems will most probably be solved as time goes on and technologies are improved

Presidential Hopeful Websites

Hilary Clinton: her campaign site seems to be pretty well put together in a well oprganized manner. I also saw that she had some smart links to voice streams and other media which helps her campaign. This website also demonstrates the importance of the young vote as there are links to Youtube, facebook, Myspace and others at the bottom.
John Edwards : When first entering his website there is a page which pops up askink if i wanted to join his campaign. This tends to be annoying if you really just want to get to the actual website. On the other hand this is very clever as there will be some people who will end up joining because of this page. His site was also impressive in the way all the upcomming campaign events were clearly shown and easy to read. As with the clinton website the links to Facebook, Myspace and other similar sites were found at the bottom.

Barack Obama: as with the edwards site there was a pop up screen at the begining to try and net in campaingers. This site was very well put together and is very astheticaly pleasing to the eye. There are video stream links to all his most popular speeches. I also noticed a direct link to the obama blog which takes you to his personal blog. Once again effective linkage toall the popular sites such as Youtube and facebook occured. One thing that stood out with his is the map at the bottom (Obama Map) and links to whichever state you are in. This makes narrowing down relevant campaign information to your state possible.

John McCain: Site has helpful charitable information. There was no pop up page at the beginning asking for campaing joiners which was refreshing. However the page was a little confusing and lacked creative design. A big thing i noticed was the lack of any direct links to the popular websites such as Youtube and Myspace for example.

Mitt Romney: his site was fairly well put together and was an easy read. One of the things that caught my attention was the huge clearly visible link to his charities. This put an emphasis on charitable organizations and i feel this will help his campaign a great deal. Another feature on there was Mitt T.V. which provided a quick and effective way to access past videos of Mitt giving his campaign speeches and other interesting footage. The only down side was once again a failure to acknowledge the popular sites such as Youtube and Facebook.

James A Dewar and Steven Levy

There are many interesting and valid points brought up in the article. the printing press was a significant catalyst in the changing of the era in terms of relationship management and communication. Just as this one technology brought about such significant change i agree with james in the fact that networking computer technology has had a profound effect in our era. The fact that we have the world at our fingertips is an amazing accomplishment. the mere fact that anyone in any almost every single part of the world is available to speak to in realtime is significant. These technologies are further modified through live video feeds and sound technology. This means that you can litereally have a ‘face to face’ conversation in real time with people who are in parts of the world you dont have access to or just cannot go to immediatly.

I can see how this can have effects on authoritarian institutions such as seen during the era of the printing press. Mass communication is key in the fact that an immense amount of people can all recieve an idea of information at the stroke of a key. This instant communication will make it much much easier for movements to be assembled and revolutions to distribute their ‘propaganda’ with considerable speed and volume. The many-to-many networking technology makes it incredibly easy to target exactly who imformation goes to and when it gets to them. e.g. i can send a mass e-mail to 12000 different people in 12000 different locations in 10seconds.

In the Steve Levy article there are also some interesting concepts to consider. The notion of books disappearing and making way for digital technology is comprehensible but will not happen imediately. Rather than actually going away completely the most technology would be able to acomplish is to link all of these books together in digital libraries. On the other hand there are over half a billion PDF articles already being read by people already which does pose a threat to paperback and print copies. Scanning technologies seemed to have proved to be a problem for authors and ‘old school’ readers. Copyright enfringements may be seen to dramatically increase at the same pace as the technologies themselves.

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