Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
Social Media News
In a an extremely detailed report to be delivered to the computer security conference, Imperva, an IT security consulting company describes how the hacker Anonymous group launched Operation Pharisee to bring down the Vatican web site. The report is to be presented…
Prediction market Intrade evaluates The Artist’s chances to win the Oscar for best movie at over 90% and Dujardin’s chance to be awarded best actor at 70%. In the meanwhile, HSX indicates strong bets in the same direction. Sources Traders aim to…
privacy (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee) The Obama Administration proposed on February 24 a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights that would regulate how private corporations and business entities handle private data. The announcement includes: A Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights The Consumer Privacy…
A wonderful list of Twitter Sentiment Analysis Tools collated by Twittersentiment.appspot.com… Twitter Analysis Tools look at the meaning of the tweets and divides them into negative and positive communication items. Since the original list missed some sites, feel free to add yours…
Following the successful social media exercise of predicting the outcomes of the nomination race in Iowa using Google Searches and Tweets, here is a preview of what could be in store for the candidates in New Hampshire. Google search trends in the…
This self-updating chart provides the latest trends in Google searches for candidate names. According to this post, search frequency seemed to be related to candidate “pull.” Santorum was not a surprise at all for those that followed the social media buzz closely. What…
Mashable hints that Twitter might have caught a whiff of Santorum’s possible dash in the last straight line before the finish in the Iowa caucus. There is something to say about it. Romney lost the lead not only on Twitter but also in…
Via Scoop.it – Foreign AffairsRussians replaced half of their corrupt parliament with 30% old style communists and 20% brown-red nationalists… And some call this progress… This excellent The Economist analysis say it as it is: Russia is stuck between the past and…
Via Scoop.it – Foreign AffairsThe Stop Online Privacy Act would block traffic from sites that stream and disseminate on a mass scale pirated content. Many say that this an attempt to censor what people see and share online. Others say, however, that…
Digital Humanities Showcase: Walter Lord’s Day of Infamy mapped Walter Lord’s meticulously documented book “Day of Infamy” recounts the trivia of every day life at Pearl Harbor on that last morning of peace, December 7, 1941, when the Japanese planes attacked the…
Via Scoop.it – Foreign AffairsAstronomers report the discovery of an Earth-like planet about 600 light years from our solar system. It is probably several times greater than earth. Its year is 290 days long and it could be a balmy 72 degrees.Via…
Via Scoop.it – Virtual community and societies7 billion worth of vulnerability. Aircraft carriers are weighing just as heavy on the US amerd forces, as battleships did before Pearl Harbor. In this day and age of deficits, reconsidering the role of he aircarrier…
Via Scoop.it – Virtual community and societiesDoes social media lead to rich, networked lives and increased social capital? Or not? A Berkman center seminar featuring Professor Charles Nesson as Provocateur and Ellen Condliffe Lagemann (Bard College), Peter Levine (Tufts University), Harry Lewis…
Via Scoop.it – Virtual community and societiesSubscribers of Microsoft’s Xbox Live, rejoice. Starting on Tuesday, Dec. 6, you will be able to watch television programming from the Xbox 360 console. You will also be able to search Hulu and Netflix via voice.…
Via Scoop.it – Virtual community and societiesHow the new dimensions of information are transforming business — and life (David Weinberger speaks that the Berkeley School of Information)Via www.ischool.berkeley.edu
Via Scoop.it – Mapping current eventsUS drone downed and captured almost intact by Iranian air force… Not the first incident of this kind.Via www.guardian.co.uk
Via Scoop.it – Mapping current events N. Gregory Mankiw, an economics professor, has a message for students who walked out of his class at Harvard last month: The study of economics should be viewed as a method, not a doctrine.Via www.nytimes.com
Via Scoop.it – Virtual community and societiesA good example of having the cake and eating it too… Weinberg both decries the Internet’s unleasing of personal knowledge and cheers for it… “One of the authors of “The Cluetrain Manifesto” says the hyperlinked…
Via Scoop.it – Virtual community and societiesThe Book Review’s annual list…. A selection of titles.. FICTION THE ANGEL ESMERALDA: Nine Stories. By Don DeLillo. (Scribner, $24.) THE ART OF FIELDING. By Chad Harbach. (Little, Brown, $25.99.) THE…
Via Scoop.it – Virtual community and societiesDude, get a life… If you want Smashwords to beat CreateSpace, make sure that chikenshit does not get in the way of your success…. Give your authors a hand, do not make them do loop-de-loops around…
Via Scoop.it – Foreign AffairsIs this the smartest ad campagin ever, or what? via Mashable “Olla Condoms’ campaign, which sends unsolicited friend requests from their yet-to-be-born sons, is a violation of Facebook policy.”Via mashable.com
Via Scoop.it – Foreign AffairsOf note…. “Andrew Wilson‘s book, Belarus: The Last European Dictatorship (Yale University Press, 2011), is timely. Some are predicting that Lukashenka’s time is finally coming to an end, and eyes in Minsk and Brest are nervously following…
Via Scoop.it – Foreign AffairsIt goes like this: private banks borrow from governments, governments borrow from FMI, FMI gets its money from governments, banks buy tresasury bonds… In a more truthful world, this would be called a Ponzi scheme (rough translation of…
Via Scoop.it – Foreign AffairsMyanmar’s spooky capital. “NAYPYITAW, Myanmar – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could be forgiven for believing she’s visiting two different countries – one called Naypyitaw, the other Myanmar.”Via worldblog.msnbc.msn.com
Via Scoop.it – Media convergenceLet us reinvent the ebook by imagining a continuous horizontally scrolling canvass… (From one of the godfathers of http://pressbooks.com ). More details: “In printed books, the two-page spread was our canvas. It’s easy to think similarly about…
Via Scoop.it – Virtual community and societiesMalcolm Gladwell (of Tipping Point and Blink fame) puts the dot on the i regarding Steve Jobs’ real genius: to combine things that he found in semi finished state. “Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His…
Amazon’s investment in the new Kindle Fire, which includes almost free access to books that it bought on its own dime, seems to be for the long haul, which although a surprise, might or might not work. “Amazon is giving away books,…
Ai Weiwei, whose artistic vision partially inspired the iconic “bird’s nest” stadium, which changed the image of Beijing from a cookie cutter apartment building factory to an emerging world metropolis , has also been known for his vocal opposition to official Chinese…
Via Scoop.it – Mapping current events I am sitting in a wooden hut in a forest clearing near Tusnad, aware of a distinct tingling in a delicate area – the part of my body that touches the plank forming a seat. It’s…
Via Scoop.it – Virtual community and societiesReal problem are the homophily assumptions built in the selection filters (birds of a feather ought to flock together), not the filter themselves. What prevents us from creating filters that promote heterogeneity? “Eli Pariser…
Via Scoop.it – Virtual community and societies MANY mocked, but the money rolled in.Via www.economist.com
Via Scoop.it – Mapping current events“Researchers have discovered an underworld of genetic exchange among bacteria, one more vast than previously imagined.” Bacteria exchange genes to create superbugs, sometimes at very great distances. According to Wired Mag “A comparison of thousands of bacterial…
A list of principles for designing on-line communities created by Dr. Sorin A. Matei and his students registered in various versions of the Online Interaction Graduate Seminar at Purdue University Online / virtual community design principles Design guidelines are not guarantees. Many are necessary for…
Via Scoop.it – Mad Max Societies: Post Apocalyptic Technology and Society Astronomers suggest that artificial illumination creates a signature that could point to the existence of civilizations on other worlds — and they say we should get started on a survey of…
This is the title of the opening theoretical chapter of Francesca Comunello’s edited book “Networked Sociability and Individualism: Technology for Personal and Professional Relationships“. The chapter is the product of my collaboration with my former PhD student, Robert Bruno, now Assistant Professor…
“It’s staggering to contemplate how much the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs understood about modern America that those who govern it still don’t.” Steve Jobs was a master at simultaneously goading our sense of individuality and fueling our yearning for community (a topic…
Authors: Sorin Adam Matei, Eric Kansa, Nicholas Rauh. Abstract: The paper presents a platform for supporting academic collaboration and publishing created by flexibly linking Visible Past, a web collaboration and digital-print publishing with Open Context, a geo-historical data archiving and publishing service.…
Marc Smith, cyber sociologist, product developer, Connected Action Chief Scientist, and leader of the Social Media foundation will visit the West Lafayette Purdue campus between September 22-23 and will give a talk about one of his most important projects, NodeXL, on Thursday,…
Image by wolfgang.wedenig via Flickr The patent claims that a belt connecting to a network device “creates a sensation for a user similar to having guests in a remote location to be physically present as virtual guests,” allowing people to “concurrently experience the…
Via Scoop.it – Foreign Affairs Let us talk about the best tools, books, tricks and ideas for building online communities and fostering online interaction that is meaningful for people everywhere.Show original
ESRI has published a very nice map that shows Irene’s impact as captured in Flickr photos, Youtube clips, and tweets. If you get over the clutter at lower levels of resolution, it looks like a very nice idea. For some years ESRI…
Via Scoop.it – Media convergence“[Our] results suggest that processes of human memory are adapting to the advent of new computing and communication technology. Just as we learn through transactive memory who knows what in our families and offices, we are learning what…
Iceland surprised the world when it announced that it will include in the draft of its new constitution suggestions made by the citizenry via social media. A website and a special Facebook page were used as main means for collecting public input. The…
QR codes, which are a type of barcodes that can call up multimedia on cell phones (see Around the World in 80 Days example to the right), are now embraced by the art world. The MOMA art exhibit ““Talk to Me: Design…
Bryan Pijanowski, the head of the Soundscape Ecology Project at Purdue University, and Sorin Adam Matei, the author of this blog and the founder of the Ubimark publishing initiatives have set up a mapping site, http://Ubimark.info, to collect and map everyday sounds…
Via Scoop.it – Virtual community and societiesA Santa Fe Institute study looked at chains of social interactions online and it discovered that negativity online tends to spin out of control faster than positive interactions. “The world they’ve chosen is a massive multiplayer…
Via Scoop.it – Virtual community and societiesThe Information Society is a multidisciplinary journal intended to answer questions about the Information Age. It provides a forum for thoughtful commentary and discussion of significant topics in the world of information, such as transborder data…
Via Scoop.it – Media convergence A new, interesting Iphone App and project, similar to another Flickr project A few new apps will tell you what used to be nearby, or even what might have been nearby — less practical but often thoroughly…
According to a recent European Union study, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Cyprus lead social networking pack in Europe, with more than 2/3rds of Internet users accessing social networking sites frequently. On the other hand, the same countries are less concerned about privacy…
If you are rushed, as I was, to upgrade to the3.2 version of WordPress and if you are using the Arras theme, you might get the white screen of death. After upgrade you might not be able to see anything. The solution…
Via Scoop.it – Media convergenceIO5 revolution via All things digital (Wall Street Journal)… Physical buttons to control the camera Location aware notifications Itune-less connection to other devices Deep integration with Twitter Native support for newsShow original
Google+ is the search giant’s response to Facebook’s recent raise as the most visited site in the world. The tools aim to make the web experience of Google account users a little bit more like that offered by Facebook. The problem is,…
Via Scoop.it – Virtual community and societiesWhat is really at stake in the Google+ project “But as I learned in almost year of following the project’s development, with multiple interviews with the team and its executives, Google+ is not a typical release.…