Posts

Microsoft’s future biz visions

GermanThis posting is also available in German.

Stephen Elop is the president of Microsoft's Business Division – naturally, he's more interested in business innovation than in shiny customer gadgets. In this 6 minute interview, Elop talks about the deep-rooted change companies currently face as the underlying question “how do we deal with this vast amount of information in an efficient way?” is an ongoin project:

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3 more Google Wave Invitation – who wants one?

Earlier today, I asked on Twitter if anyone of my followers wanted a Google Wave invitation. The number of responses was overwhelming, the 14 invitations I gave away were gone within 5 minutes. I'm not an evangelist of Google's latest collaboration service, as it's still lacking too many features. But the huge demand amazed me, so I'm giving away three more invitations each here and on my German blog datenschmutz. All you have to do is leave a comment until tomorrow, 12:00pm CET.

I'll randomly pick three names – please use the e-mail address you want your invitation sent to for the comment field. And I'm very curious to hear your opinions about Google Wave: is it just another time-consuming distraction or the perfect collaboration tool we've all been waiting for?

Guest post by Kim de Vries: Your Friend has just tackled you

Kim de VriesBite, lick, or tackle them back, or click here to theorize about what this all means. I'm very happy to publish the first guest posting here on datadirt. Kim De Vries, who I met via Facebook, wrote a very interesting paper about the symbolic kind of communication we all know so well from social networks like Facebook. “He who never superpoked shall throw the first rock” – enjoy the reading! Dr. Kim De Vries is working at the California State University Stanislaus, you can reach her at kdevries [at] csustan.edu

Introduction

Though Facebook was initially the province of college students, it has become popular with a broad range of users since opening its door to anyone with an email address in September 2006. However, until very recently, most research on Facebook has focused on the student demographic rather than exploring how Facebook is growing into a massive online society that is inhabited by many different groups using Facebook in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons. The academics studying Facebook generally join it and use it in order to observe students; now that more faculty are using Facebook outside the classroom, to organize events and to socialize, turning the focus to our own use of Facebook reveals that our own communities are being affected as well.

As of August 2008, Facebook is one of the most rapidly growing social networks, boasting 100 million active users, translated into twelve European and a growing number of Asian and African languages. The extent to which groups of people connected on Facebook can be defined as communities is highly debatable and a useful alternative has been suggested by Rieder and Sch

Video: Here & There by Eoghan Kidney

Here and there is not a music video in the strict sense and definitely not your average youtube short movie: the result of the collaboration between Eoghan Kidney and musician Simon Cullen is a very interesting hybrid with hypnotic qualities – watch for yourself:

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