Friday, January 04, 2008

The degree zero of user intentionality on social media

I'm taking some time early this year to organize research for the months ahead. I spend some time over the holidays dipping back into the philosophers and sociologists I've always enjoyed reading. Habermas, Derrida, Giddens, Deleuze. There's nothing better than a chill, rainy, winter day with a stack of your favorite works.

I'm trying to crack the nut this week on the meaning of user activity on social media. It's a tough one. I suspect that there's more data collected by social media than we can understand. And a great deal of activity is in response to or anticipation of what's not there. For a medium that produces as much information as the social web, a great deal of our participation is a manner of coping with what's not there.

If I can come up with the linkages that couple the medium with psychological, linguistic, and sociological descriptions of meaning and explanations of actions, I'll be very happy. It feels close this time.

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Thursday, January 03, 2008

Scoble banished for botting Facebook

Folks who know me know that one of my interests last year was social analytics -- and that I'm interested in new ways of capturing and representing our online profiles and activities. Well the news that Robert Scoble's been kicked off Facebook for running scripts indicates, for now at least, that we're going to have to wait on the social networking sites to give us data after all. There's nothing unexpected in this, and I would be surprised if Scoble was caught by surprise.

http://scobleizer.com/2008/01/03/ive-been-kicked-off-of-facebook/

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