35 Perspectives on Online Social Networking

Article about 35 perspectives regarding social networks.

http://www.socialcomputingmagazine.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=432

Social Networking

Online Social Networking is a website that provides a virtual community for people interested in a particular topic or just to "hang out" together. Members communicate by voice, chat, instant message, videoconference and blogs, and the service typically provides a way for members to contact friends of other members.

Friendster was the first social networking site, introduced in 2002, with Myspace starting in 2003. Facebook first went online in 2004, targeting college students, but it is now open to all. Currently there are 40 various network (according to wikipedia, see list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites).

MySpace and Facebook seem to be the most popular and well-known. Many others are just getting started and may soon gain popularity. Orkut, the newest network owned by Google, went live on January 22. It had so many hits it crashed. It is now up and running and I created a page. Its not much, I don't know anyone else who has a page, and I haven't searched for people.
http://www.orkut.com/Home.aspx?xid=402717561693593541 .

The next question is will all these sites last? Technology analyst Mitch Ratcliffe has studied social networks extensively. Here is what he says:

I don’t know if any one of these sites will be able to compete without buying and consolidating all the other network services. The problem with a social networking service is you can always go somewhere else and start another network. Most of the companies that are involved in this are going to have to do something that is open source, that allows people to share this information across networks, or no one of them are going to become a viable place for people to stay.
Retrieved from http://www.webtalkguys.com/020704.shtml

See all Google has to offer!

I'm not trying to advertise, was just surprised by all that Google offers. Check it out for yourself. I mentioned some things in a previous post, but only included Google Scholar. This links you to the main page with links to the extras.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/

By the Way...

I didn't need to do anything to have a feed for the blog and neither do you. At the bottom of the page is
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

This is a feed through Atom, so everyone can already subscribe to our blogs.

There are two common XML-based syndication formats for feeds and other data interchange on the web: Atom and RSS. RSS has been around longer, in various versions; Atom is more recent but has more features.

Blogger and many other google services use Atom feeds.

So now I have both a RSS feed and an Atom feed.

RapidFeeds works also!

Both RSS Feeds I created work! :)

How this project has helped me...

Before this class began I was trying to decide how I could possibly talk the staff at my school into creating, at the very least, a website for each grade level. Not only have I learned that blogging is a quick and effective way to create and update a website, I also learned how to syndicate a blog. My new goal for next year is to have each grade create a blog and update it, at the very least, once a month. I will assist each team in the creation of the blog. I am planning to place a link to each team's blog on the website I am creating for the new technology department. I will syndicate not only my website, but also the team blogs using RSS feeds. Hopefully I can convince my principal to purchase a RSS feed software program. Then we will inform the parents of the website and blogs. It will provide parents with regular updates about the happenings at the school.

Google Scholar

I was on google checking email and decided to finally take a look at all the extras google offers. Besides Gmail, Reader, and Blogger, google also offers goggle docs and spreadsheets, calendar, and google scholar.

What is Google Scholar?
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.

Features of Google Scholar

* Search diverse sources from one convenient place
* Find papers, abstracts and citations
* Locate the complete paper through your library or on the web
* Learn about key papers in any area of research

Maybe Google Scholar will help students use more valid information and resources. Check it out for yourself below.