Institutional Innovation

It [the Internet] is as much a new opium for the people as a catalyst for democratic awakening.

This is as true in the “free” west as in the various “authoritarian regimes” identified. It is just that it is not the government regimes or apparatus of the states in the west that are producing and distributing mass opiates via the Internet. Chomsky would argue they do not have to: we manufacture our own consent and complicity, fomented by the media and marketing arms our corporate institutions.

Social Media Governance

Empowerment with Accountability

Now that is a useful link: a page of links to the social media policies of 82 organisations such as the American Red Cross, BBC, Cisco, EFF, Dow Jones as well as a host of universities and Web2.0 companies. Policy wonks, enjoy!

They’re so organized at America’s Next Top Model that we might consider asking them to inform people about the resurgent H1N1 flu virus.  We might also consider hiring Bravo’s producers as government public affairs consultants.

If you think I’m joking about that, you probably have no business working with social media for the government.

Asks all the right questions about egovernment and social media use by the various agencies of the state

Faviki is a social bookmarking tool that allows you to tag webpages you want to remember using Wikipedia terms. This means that everybody uses the same names for tags from the world’s largest collection of knowledge

If the wikipedia ontology: DBpedia and the ontologies from Delicious, Digg and Diigo could be mashed up into a tagging facilitation tool that plugged into WordPress, Blogger, etc I’d use it. Would you?

In the hallway
Black bin bags of VHS tapes
Remember when this was
Learning technology

I like it

in the hallway black
bin bags of VHS tapes
new technology

(haiku-ized)

Here I argue that the underlying mechanics of Twitter more closely resemble the knowledge co-creation seen in wikis than the dynamics seen with conversational tools like instant messaging and interactions within online social networks.

This article significantly deepens our understanding of Twitter, but I do not think the either/or structure or negation in the title of the piece helps.

He is splitting hairs (bloody academics, eh?). If you create a definition of “conversation” that doesn’t map onto Twitter, then it is a tautology to say Twitter is not a conversation platform. But it doesn’t really matter, does it? Indeed, better to say, maybe, that Twitter is as much of a conversation platform as Wikipedia: cast the argument as positive assertion of the affinities. Then the real light of the piece: that Twitter is a knowledge sharing and co-creation platform (as much as Wikipedia) shines through.

Unless the definition of conversation is crucial to some pragmatic end?

Prevention is better than cure. Structure101 allows you to define how the world should be, promote a shared vision through the team, and enforce (or just monitor) conformance.

Wow. How far would they go to do that?