How are we managing information? When 35% of BlackBerry and PDA users say they would choose their device over their spouse, it makes you wonder what we are finding ourselves bound up with and dependent upon for our life needs. I think of this now that my internet is back up and I can work on a research project on media, text, knowledge and our current communication and literacy shift.
Brian Solis' diagram, above (click to enlarge), illustrated his ideas of our online conversation, the digital shift in our literate lives. His conversation map "is a living, breathing representation of Social Media and will evolve as services and conversation channels emerge, fuse, and dissipate." The diagram was part of Ross Dawson's Visual Representations of the Social Media and Web 2.0 Landscape which takes some of these ideas further.
Bernard Lunn writes on ReadWriteWeb about sites like LinkedIn, a business networking site. "Web 3.0, aka the Semantic Web, is "the combination of mass collaboration and structured databases" (my definition) then I may have just seen the early signs of Web 3.0 in action," he writes. The site that provides a better search experience than Google? Business social network LinkedIn -- 361% year-over-year growth handily beats Facebook's 56% growth in the same period. LinkedIn is less useful to somebody without a deep network.
There is so much social networking out there that I've yet to set up some things and play with them. But how the semantic web is making information accessible made me stop at a site like ZoomInfo where you can manage your "personal brand" by creating an accurate, up-to-date Web profile that can be found all in one place and edited regularly, or so the site says. Some of these entities will shake out over time as LinkedIn would be better, I think, than ZoomInfo. Regardless, aren't you tired of all the different digital identities you have to keep up with? The consolidation of a single digital identity will help push us to Web 3.0.
How the media is using networking social platforms like Twitter is something I wanted to delve into. NYTimes writers are using Twitter. News has always been a narrative-in-construction so this is one more journalistic tool but with my internet down for days and days (forever, it seemed), that research will have to wait.
Ideas of literacy, digital text, symbols, signs and the representation of ideas and how we obtain, share and work with knowledge and culture are in continual flux, beyond a liminal moment. Knowledge in cloud computing and the semantic web are changing our ideas of literacy. My earlier post on the ABC's of Learning: Online Literacy, Textual Learning & Thinking had more to do with the ideas rather than the nuts and bolts of how we are working with the networking and social media and that is why I think the Solis Conversation Diagram might be important.
Being Digitally Literate is completely different from our textual ideas of literacy. We're born with a need to share, learn, relate and be in community.
Last year, I had several bloggers "invite" me to LinkedIn, but I couldn't figure out its value to me.
Posted by: tut-tut | September 17, 2008 at 01:54 PM
So here is one woman's perspective on the social aspects of blogging:
Blogging's a huge change in my life. I have a whole set of friends I've never met in person. I don't even know what some of them look like. Many people can't reveal their identities, for instance academics who blog. I seldom blog about my family and never post pictures of family members but am very frank on a host of other issues. I post under a pseudonym, not to conceal myself but to deflect unwanted attention in my "real" space.
Several people I met on the Internet have come into my "real" space, and it is quite a fascinatig experience. Often our perceptions of each other on line are totally different from face to face ones.
As in so-called real life, what to reveal and what to conceal is a big issue.
Posted by: Hattie | September 17, 2008 at 02:23 PM