Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Twitter, hashtags, and implied trust

As the amount of information we are exposed to increases we will have to be more conscious consumers of information. The value of information is tied to its authenticity, source, and gravity. One aspect of social networking is the question of how much information can be trusted because it comes from your "friends." This is the idea behind facebook and its new search function as well as the ability to share links, notes, and other information. We trust information from our friends more than from people we don't know. There has been some research to show how important trust is when it comes to making decisions including Abram (2008, p.468) .
The interesting thing is that in social networking applications we are making contacts that aren't really our "friends." We're adding other contacts, brief acquaintances, or people with common interests. We may be adding celebrities or or people we may never meet and even marketers and representatives of brands. And yet, do we trust what they say and how much trust do we give them? McAllister stated that interpersonal trust is measured on a gradient and is "the extent to which a person is confident in, and willing to act on the basis of, the words, actions, and decisions of another" (McAllister, 1995, p. 25). So we don't trust these contacts fully, but we probably assign some amount of trust to them based on our experience with their communications and status. Is this amount of trust quantifiable by any tools such as twitalyzer or are we on our own?
The last trust question I have is about hashtags. They are very interesting little things in the twitter world. They allow you to tag your twitter posts with a topic, conference affiliation, or other category. Besides the occasional spamming this enables, which twitter is now combating, this provides for a certain authority to a post. No longer is a post just a random thought but it has been assigned a kind of meaning, and that meaning can be associated with some level of implied trust. Attendees of a conference may follow a hashtag for their conference and posts with that tag are attributed with the understanding that this person is at their conference. They are thus "experts" of some level on this topic. They don't even have to be contacts let alone friends of yours and yet you are subconsciously assigned this level of trust to them. Are they at the conference? Are they an expert in the conference field or a novice? Is their a difference to the quality of their posts if they are at either end of the spectrum or are both valuable? Hashtags are certainly valuable in this instance, allowing you to find posts about your topic of interest regardless if you know of the poster, but how much can we trust them?
To further complicate the trust issue we have hashtag retweeters. Each time a person uses the assigned hashtag the retweeter reposts the post under the retweeter name. This is used at conferences so everyone can follow one twitter account and yet profit from the information that any attendee posts with the hashtag. This is truly an implied trust that we're dealing with though, as now the posts of strangers are being posted under the name of a trusted source. Of course the original posters name is included, but how many levels of trust can the human brain factor in when scanning this nesting of information in a twitter stream? Is the repost more trusted than the original since it now has a trusted name attached? What attached values to a twitter post make you more likely to act or use the information in a decision?
There seems to be many more questions than answers when it comes to trust and social networking right now, but it seems important to consider how much you trust the information you are presented with now that the sources are getting more complex. Timely crowdsourced information can be a powerful tool, but how do we assign value to each post and source when considering the overall value of the information?

Abram, S. & Downey E. M. (2008). Our user experience: Puzzle pieces falling into place - workshop report. The Serials Librarian, 55(3), 461-468. Hunstville, AL: Mississippi State University Libraries.
McAllister, D. J. (1995). Affect and cognition-based trust as foundations for interpersonal cooperation in organizations. Academy of Management Journal, 38(1), 24-59.




Tuesday, June 16, 2009

ROI: notes #sla2009

no magic formula for showing value


determine what would be the unmet need if your position / department was eliminated


retail to other units / locations


have value added


initiative - step up: do CI, get out of comfort zone


impact: objective of generating new revenue streams


regularly revisit what you do - reevaluate


--


Utilization rate: accounting tracks, see how accounting reports to management, learn terminology


influence customers by writing articles


financial people know numbers - like spreadsheets


--


we need to be embedded


archive rss feeds, put it all in one email for executives - cuts information overload, allows subscribing to more information


provide wikis and blogs to allow executives to share unstructured content that would usually be emailed


--


improving reporting aspects of ROI


consider ROI reporting as an opportunity


if "they" don't understand how what you're doing affects them in the short term your long term vision won't happen





Sunday, June 7, 2009

Brightkite application for android

Brightkite (http://www.brightkite.com) has release an android application (for google phones). Just when I was starting to lose faith in brightkite they do something else right.


Note, to download the application you'll need a 2d barcode reader (for which android has several).




Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Skittles.com

Just days after I made a presentation about how companies can use twitter to show what people are saying about them on their own website http://www.skittles.com has gone and used a twitter search for skittles as their website. Whatever you say about skittles is now posted right there, on their site. They did have to implement an age question in an attempt to block under aged viewers from the questionable content that is present when you give people this kind of a forum. Overall it seems to be quite clever though. I think it is quite a coincidence.

Also, if you click on the link to their products via a little overlay they have set up, it directs you to their wikipedia page. This I find to be also clever and brave.

There's also some facebook integration going on here.



Thursday, January 22, 2009

The White House adopts creative commons

Just a quick note today. The white house has adopted a creative commons attribution license. Also of note they are referring to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and to "subscribers". That part I don't get.

from: http://www.whitehouse.gov/copyright/

Copyright Notice

Pursuant to federal law, government-produced materials appearing on this site are not copyright protected. The United States Government may receive and hold copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.

Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
DMCA Notice

The White House respects the intellectual property of others, and we ask users of our Web sites to do the same. In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and other applicable law, we have adopted a policy of terminating, in appropriate circumstances and at our sole discretion, subscribers or account holders who are deemed to be repeat infringers. We may also at our sole discretion limit access to our Web site and/or terminate the accounts of any users who infringe any intellectual property rights of others, whether or not there is any repeat infringement.






Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Brightkite to add an Android Application

Update: The application is now in beta http://knowtocompete.blogspot.com/2009/06/brightkite-application-for-android.html

My favorite location based social networking service, Brightkite, is said to be working on an application for Android, Google's new open source phone operating system. This should allow posts to twitter with location sensing and other services. I can only imagine that the Brightkite website will already work fine using Google's Chrome browser on the Android powered phones even without application.

It also looks like Brightkite is about to release an application for the iphone as well, and they are showing some screenshots.

The T-Mobile G1, android operating system phone, is supposed to be in Denver on about November 22nd, a month after the official release. This is also when T-Mobile is supposed to get 3G access.

Brightkite is based in Denver, CO but works anywhere through the web, text messaging, and through mobile browsers.



Thursday, September 25, 2008

KMWorld - Next Generation Communities of Practice

Next Generation Communities of Practice: Taking KM to the Next Level with Web 2.0


Eric Sauve - http://www.tomoye.com/TomoyeLeadership.html


notes from Eric Sauve's presentation:


communities vs social networking


design principle #1 - Communities need to prove a range of interactivity:


    options:     1) basic interaction - mouse only,


                     2) more advanced interaction - minimal typing,


                     3) power users or leaders


design principle #2 - They need to be simple


design principle #3 - They neeed to create ownership for engagement


    - enterprise idea: add a voting button similar to digg: helpful? yes /no


design principle #4 - Let the community do some of the heavy lifting


    - best practice identification



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