Social Media: Who, Where, Why?

Now that I’ve turned my attention to social media, behold, there are actual data available! This link (http://www.steverubel.com/study-43-of-online-americans-addicted-to-soci ) goes to a blog entry by Steve Rubel regarding just how often people access their social networks. He uses the term “addicted” perhaps too cavalierly, but the Experian data he presents are pretty darn interesting.

In brief, use of social networking has tripled in three years, and nearly half of internet users in fact use social networking sites multiple times each day. Further, the proportion of internet users who accessed Facebook within the last month is again nearly half. Finally there is a breakdown of the reasons why people use social media, who they communicate with, and where they are concentrated geographically.

Rubel also suggests that Twitter is not so much a social medium as it is a “continuous public communications channel”, citing the fact that it “does not require mutual friending”. I will be interested to see if that criterion shows up in other definitions of “social media”.

DD.

Week 1: Getting Started....

Well, its day 3 of the class...
...and I have started a personal blog. Who'd a thunk it?

I expect the next month and a half to be an interesting experience as to date I do not have a Facebook or MySpace page, I do not have a Twitter account, and I do not have a blog. am only now making my first blog entry. This feels rather bold. I am not overly shy, but I am private and have tremendous respect for the persistence and "search-ability" of anything offered to the internet. And while I certainly have opinions and a healthy measure of conceit regarding them, I tend to "narrow-cast" them in personal conversations and sometimes appropriate public meetings; this is new territory for me, broadcasting to anyone with a search engine and a couple of hip search terms.

I expect that the technologies we subsume under the "Web 2.0" moniker are much like a good sharp knife in the kitchen, equally useful for mincing garlic and for slicing off the tips of your fingers. I hope to remain mindful of both the tools and purpose of the class, which is to investigate what Web 2.0 technologies have to offer those of us that want to help people and organizations do what they do, better. Or restated, what is the best way to hold the knife?

Thank you for reading. I hope to make this worth our mutual while.
DD.

(Since I’m actually posting to the internet, please forgive a little search engine mischief: Aphids, Brucellosis, Canterbury, Décolletage, Entropy, Foxtrot, Gagne, Hammerhead, Isis, Juniper, Klingon, Lemuria, Mica, Nebuchadnezzar, Optic, Persephone, Qumran, Resistor, Steganography, Titian, Ululation, Viceroy, Welterweight, Xenophobe, Yankeetown, Zulu. Okay, that was fun in an admittedly nerdish way.)