Digging through a few conference notes from the CTAM Research Conference of February 2007, I uncovered a few things I had jotted down while listening to Shari Swan, founder of Streative Branding and former global marketing executive at Reebok. Swan simply presented a timeline of human economic history, but I found it provocative enough [...]

Google meets Wikipedia-style crowd-sourced comments. Is this a good thing?

Are we giving away more personal detail about ourselves than we realize on Social media sites? A Boston Globe article discusses “Project Gaydar” in which two students were able to predict men’s sexual orientation through their Facebook friends list.

If you publicly announce (on the same day) a $2 million grant and the award of a board of trustees seat, people will assume that the seat was “bought” by the money-granting organization. No matter how well (or how poorly) you communicate the transaction, there will be skeptics. Gregory Kohs examines how the Omidyar Network obtained a seat on the Wikimedia Foundation board.

Group collaboration is not always a bad thing, especially when individuals perform specialized activities to produce a group advancement. The use of Twitter and Facebook during the recent Iranian electoral uprising also implies that a clearly defined common intent makes more effective use of these tools. Paul Wehage explores how these ideas might be more relevant to our own individual lives than we might suspect.

Iconoculture calls the new wave of social media “the real Second Life”.