Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
Assistant Vice President for Partnerships in Strategic Defense Innnovation and Professor of Communication at Purdue University, Director of the FORCES initiative leads research teams that study the relationship between technological and social systems using big data, simulation, and mapping approaches. He published papers and articles in Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Information Society, National Interest, and Foreign Policy. He is the author or co-editor of several books. The most recent is Structural differentation in social media. He also co-edited Ethical Reasoning in Big Data,Transparency in social media and Roles, Trust, and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets: Theory and Methods (Computational Social Sciences) , all three the product of the NSF funded KredibleNet project. Dr. Matei's teaching portfolio includes technology and strategy, online interaction, and digital media analytics classes. A former BBC World Service journalist, his contributions have been published in Esquire and several leading Romanian newspapers. In Romania, he is known for his books Boierii Mintii (The Mind Boyars), Idolii forului (Idols of the forum), and Idei de schimb (Spare ideas).
I wonder how does this theory of reflexivity apply to Internet supported meta engines of all sorts? I must state at the outset that I am in fundamental disagreement with the prevailing wisdom. The generally accepted theory is that financial markets tend…
6 pointers for online shoppers IMHO!
The department of communication at Purdue has launched this presentation video which highlights some of our main strengths. Speaking of which, have you heard of the latest news from the Chronicle of Higher Education? Our department has been ranked second in terms…
Amazon.com’s eInk technology is here. It is a wireless (piggybacking the phone network) device that can store or access remote content (books, blogs, etc.). The device costs something as well as the service, but is a valliant leap forward after the several…
It’s not a joke. Video social networking got religion! GodTube.com
Papers Written by Googlers Human-Computer Interaction 21 “Express yourself” / “Stay together”: The middle-class Indian family, Jonathan Donner, Nimmi Rangaswamy, Molly Wright Steenson, Carolyn Wei, Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies, 2008 to appear. Applying a User-Centered Metric to Identify Active Blogs, Adam…
While Google keeps marching on, danger looms. Google closed the week at $637.39, more than 50 times its earnings, giving it a market capitalization that nearly equals the total value of the three largest traditional media companies: Time Warner, Walt Disney and…
One of the most interesting resources for virtual reality modeling and research in archeology. Specific link to archeology About Intute: Arts and Humanities What is Intute: Arts and Humanities? Artifact and Humbul, two of the hubs of the Resource Discovery Network RDN,…
In China sharing as a social statement does not really work. A strong instrumental/exchange orientation would make Homans the happiest man alive. If he was still alive… Social media’s value proposition is different for the mainland Chinese than it is for Americans…
Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, today announced that Google accounted for 63.98 percent of all US searches in the four weeks ending September 1, 2007. read more | digg story
Right, they’ll teach this old pony a new trick… BBC NEWS | Technology | Online worlds to be AI incubators Online worlds such as Second Life will soon become training grounds for artificial intelligences. Researchers at US firm Novamente have created software…
Cosmic Log : Google funds $30 million moon prize Google is bankrolling a $30 million race for privately funded moon rovers – an endeavor that takes the X Prize to new heights. The Google Lunar X Prize, announced today by the search-engine…
While it’s still a teaser at the moment, John Nack (Senior Product Manager for Photoshop) has confirmed the development of Photoshop Express. It’s a free online photo editor that’s not meant to replace Adobe’s current offerings, but “make Adobe imaging technology immediately…
Buzztracker – World News – 2007-09-08
As you can see, I have set up a new Amazon.com Store for I Think. I selected a number of books I am using in my classes and I have linked them to the main page. The store is quite primitive, but…
A very handy tool for creating neat, round corner, smooth background gradient colored boxes for your webpages. It generates both the CSS and the picture files. RoundedCornr: Rounded Corner and Gradient Generator
Art, Technology and Death: A Love Story – Newsweek Society – MSNBC.com Truly, Madly, Deeply Theresa Duncan created acclaimed videogames. Jeremy Blake was a digital-art pioneer. They were talented, successful and in love. And then they committed suicide. How the technology that…
This is companion site to Weinberger’s “Everything is Miscellanous.” I am preparing this for a future review of the book. I start with a list of links to important concepts created through Amazon.com and Alibris. When I finish this list I will…
PC MAG list of the new and/or undiscovered Web sites that have grabbed their attention this year. You’ll see a large collection of Web applications and tech sites, excellent blogs, offbeat social networks, and, as always, a handful of addictive Flash games…
What does CIA call Wikipedia? Intellipedia. What does CIA call MySpace? ASpace. What does CIA call delicious? We don’t know yet, but it exists. For sure. CIA has embraced social techologies in a big way, says Financial Times ”Earlier this year, the CIA…
Facebook Grows Up: Can It Stay Relevant? – Kaplan College Guide – MSNBC.com Aug. 20-27, 2007 issue – On Tuesday, July 31, Shara Karasics world came to a temporary halt. Facebook was down. She could not follow the fortunes and foibles of…
If you have not heard of Erik Davies yet, you should read this article now. This is one of the most insightful articles on the countercultural religious impulses behind the idea of “cyberculture” and “cyberspace”. In the author’s words own words: My…
Andrew Keen, in his The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture, uses as evidence for the fact that the “democratic”, “flat” Internet is run by a kabbalah of insiders the article The Wizards of Buzz, published by…
I am getting ready to put together the new syllabus for Online Interaction. For now, I am toying with the idea of adding one of the books in this Amazon wish list to the reading list. Any suggestions?
An occasional series on Second Life. Subscribe to the series rss feed Second Life goes through a major growth crisis and its promises often fall short of expectations. Irresponsive servers, crashing software clients, and a lack of communication tools might significantly slow…
In the net neutrality debate Google is ready to concede these rights to the opposition (cable industry): # Prioritizing all applications of a certain general type, such as streaming video; # Managing their networks to, for example, block certain traffic based on…
Peter Ludlow’s (aka Urizenus Sklar) adventures in cyberspace, especially in what is now known as the Metaverse, are legendary and the stuff of legend. His latest book, coming up in October, which I had the privilege to read as a pre-print manuscript,…
A Content-Driven Reputation System for the Wikipedia We present a content-driven reputation system for Wikipedia authors. In our system, authors gain reputation when the edits they perform to Wikipedia articles are preserved by subsequent authors, and they lose reputation when their edits…
Right, academic papers can make billions. Here is a sample. Brin and Page’s technical report on a PageRanking method for determining web content relevance. In other words the “secret algorithm” behind Google’s success. The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web.
One important innovation in information and communication technology developed over the past decade was organizational rather than merely technological. Open source production is remarkable because it converts a private commodity (typically software) into a public good. A number of studies examine the…
Investigations into Trust for Collaborative Information Repositories: A Wikipedia Case Study Investigations into Trust for Collaborative Information Repositories: A Wikipedia Case Study Authors: Deborah L. McGuinness, Honglei Zeng, Paulo Pinheiro da Silva, Li Ding, Dhyanesh Narayanan, and Mayukh Bhaowal Book Title: Proceedings…
This site, a little bit too baroque and eclectic to figure out at first sight, is trying to deal with the touchy issue of the social affordances of wiki sites. The issues are important, the answers pending. CommunityWiki: WikiAffordances
Linguistic and Cultural Online Communication Issues in the Global Age Edited By: Kirk St.Amant, Texas Tech University, USA Chapter X: Cultural Cognitive Style and the Web: Toward a Theory and Practice of Web Design for International Users / Anthony Faiola and Sorin…
I got a friendly email reminding me that there is (intelligent) life in the wiki universe…. Top 7 Alternatives to Wikipedia | OEDb Touting itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”, its no wonder that Wikipedia has garnered so much…
Until recently, Bill Gates has been viewed as the villain of the tech world, while his arch rival, Steve Jobs, enjoys an almost saintly reputation. But these perceptions are wrong. In fact, the reality is reversed. It’s Gates who’s making a dent…
Microsoft’s cooking something really cool. The Photosynth project aims to organize large collections of photographs, especially those funnelled through aggregator sites, such as Flickr, using geographic models of real spaces. They have a demo collection of Piazza San Marco of Venice and…
At their most sinister networks are seen as fishnets, entangaling, suffocating and all seeing. A network that watches you actively is usually called something else. The Matrix. Feature – Working the Camera Feature – Working the Camera: Real-Time Grid-Powered Surveillance The inside…
Imagine a computing environment which interacts with objects physically. Put a camera in it and the pictures are downloaded on the fly. Microsoft says it has unlocked the mystery of ambiental, portable, devices. Microsoft unveils revolutionary device – Today: Money – MSNBC.com…
Very perceptive analysis and an elegant (albeit not very counterintuitive, right?) solution to Wikipedia’s woes: jettison it’s egalitarianism… The thermodynamics of Wikipedia || kuro5hin.org I thought about Wikipedia as a thermodynamic system. Some conclusions based on this trivial investment in the model:…
The Pew Internet and American Life poll on Wikipedia use highlights the obvious: Wikipedia is the most consulted reference website. It dwarfs everthing else. It even took over NY TIMES, as per this HITWISE CHART. It is at the same time driven…
Citizendium, and a subsidiary initiative which I cooked for it, Eduzendium, got Wired’s eye. The article gives Citizendium a mixed review, thumbs up, thumbs down, but overall positive… On a funny note, the article was produced by Assignment Zero, an initiative I…
The amazing Stumble upon social bookmarking service has one of the most intuitive and fun to use browser bars. I use it quite freqently. Yahoo and delicious seem to get a good run for their money…
They might even get married.
This series of Business Week articles maps out more than a year of high hopes and incredile public mood swings related to the newly minted Second Life 3D virtual reality environment (Update April 19: The Business Week search engine seems to be…
Image via Wikipedia The idea that cultures and societies stay the same is put again to rest by this little piece of news about the increase of the divorce rate in China. WP: Barriers to divorce fade in China – washingtonpost.com Highlights…
An educator’s perspective Students love Wikipedia. Convenience and deadlines remembered at the last minute conspire with immense success in making undergraduate students avid consumers of web content. Professors fight their pupils’ addiction with stern grading policies bolded, underlined or italicized in the…
Turns out one of Wikipedia’s editors is a major fraud. So major that the New Yorker had to make a correction. Read all about it in the New York Times.
Expert: Wikipedia wont go away, so learn how to use it WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The popularity of Wikipedia makes it important that users learn to use the online collaborative encyclopedia as a starting point for their research rather than as the…
Confirming the suspicion of those who, like myself, believe that social behaviors are similarly codified across social universes, a Stanford study found that online nonverbal communication patterns closely reflect offline communication strategies. Study: Virtual men are standoffish too – Yahoo! News NEW…
Com 435, Emerging Communication Technologies (150 enrolled students), will organize in the last two weeks of April an eight team soccer tournament in Second Life. Students will play use avatars and very funny names and I will preside as Cyclops Argus. The…
An update to the most accessed pages on Wikipedia. Adolf Hitler is now running head to head with Lisa Nowak, the astronaut in dipers, and the eternal adolescent fascination with self-satisfaction… At the top dominates Anna Nicole Smith (aka Vicki Lynn Hogan),…
The communist manifesto found its most appropriate medium: You Tube. A remixed cartoon collage brings out the best (and worst) in Marx’s little pamphlet. Personally I always found Marx’s prophetic vocation sinister and hilarious at the same time. Modernity’s most powerful man…
Second Life takes a toll on the campus administrator community. In an unmistakeable sign of linear project its members believe that the future will be 3D. Second Life, a increasigly unwielidy environment, victim of its own success, cannot be the solution to…