I heart Wikipedia: How to use Wikipedia for academia

Here’s my latest slideshow on using Wikipedia for academia. It’s a half-hour presentation I’ve prepared for my talk with around 80 National Honors students at the Cheektowaga Central High School.

Big thanks to Jan Suda, Library Media Specialist, for re-inviting me after my last conference session with the SLAWNY librarians on using wikis in the classroom.

I’ll try to see if I can livestream the talk over Qik.com. If you’re interested, check out my Qik video page at 9am EST which is real soon. It’ll auto-annouce on my twitter feed as well.

It’s been a while my friend… exploring Myrl

It's been a while my friend...

It’s been close to a year since I last logged into Second Life (SL nick: Kevin Suisei). Ever since I terminated my paid account, I saw little reason to continue, seeing that I’ve got too few relationships with anyone in that metaverse.

I had wanted to own land and build my own home there, but just after I signed up, they canceled provisioning of free land to new users. Without a home, I was left to wander the islands like a ghost. Without a base, there was even less attachment I had for SL.

If you look around the interface screenshot above, I do have leftover Lindens which I was intending to convert back into U.S. currency, but with the real-world economy so bad now (L$16,954 = US$59.50), I’ll hold off that idea.

The reason why I came back was to explore this new social network for metaverses called Myrl. I saw ARG researcher Christy Dena joining it (ambient awareness through social networks), and followed suit since I’ve always been interested in cross-metaverse interactions.

From Myrl’s About page:

Welcome to Myrl: Cross-metaverse Social Network Myrl is a social network for the Metaverse, a cross-worlds platform aiming at bringing virtual worlds on the web and connecting users from multiple virtual worlds. Myrl helps users to share their virtual life, publish their avatar/organization profile and automatically update it in real-time. Myrl is all about collaboration and user controlled information: avatars can share, shape, show, vote and rank what’s important to them.

Myrl, which stands for “My Real Life and My Role Life”, currently lets you connect to users from worlds like Second Life and There.com (more to follow). A game-like motivator for using Myrl comes in the form of your avatar’s karma, where the higher the karma, the stronger your influence will be in the community. Your karma is fed by:

  • Life scrobbler: how much time you’ve spent inworld
  • Interaction points: how many items you’ve submitted onto Myrl
  • Networking points: number of avatar you have invited to join the community
  • Myrlit points: how many times your avatar has been myrled

Right now I’m already experiencing social networking fatigue, so until social networks start talking to one another, I’m not really going to start from scratch with another one. Meanwhile, I’ll just tabs on sites like Myrl, just to see if we can discover more in-depth interactions between metaverses.

Exclusive: Pre-Release Look at Comic Life Magiq!

Introducing Comic Life Magiq!

I love Comic Life. That’s why I’m delighted to have a pre-release hands-on with the new “pro” version, Comic Life Magiq!

Brian Caldwell, Senior Director of Plasq.com, notes that Comic Life Magiq took 15 months of development and is released as a new Leopard only application. The reason? Comic Life Magiq is built from the ground up to leverage the power of Mac OS X 10.5 core technologies, like Core Image and Core Animation resulting in photo-comics with unique visual effects and elegant layout. See more screenshots after the jump…

Continue reading…

Would you hire a social media strategist? Discussing emergent themes (Part 3)

Would You Hire A Social Media Strategist (Part 3)
Welcome back to Part 3 of “Would you hire a social media strategist?”. We’re halfway through, and I hope it’s been useful to you as it has been for me.

Episode Guide
Part 1 introduced the initial survey questions. Part 2 featured responses to my cross-industry survey on hiring a social media strategist. This is Part 3, which is an elaborate discussion of the emergent themes from survey responses. Part 4 continues with the interview report on expected qualifications and measurements (ROI) for social media engagement. Finally, Part 5 would complete the series with a short video documentary pulling together in-depth interviews with several social media practitioners as well as related communication professionals. The series should appear on a weekly basis.

Rationale
I wanted to be able to determine the sentiment and commitment of friends across industries towards social media use, and more significantly, to understand the kind of rewards they get from establishing relationships and conversations online. Since social media appears to be a rather intimate medium, there’s the confluence of personal and work relationships that I’m also interested to examine.

Emergent Themes
As seen from the survey interview responses in Part 2, after the jump we’ll discuss the emergent themes from my cross-section of respondents, which include how…
(A) not all industries would be appropriate for social media
(B) social media should be a portfolio fixture of every PR / Marketing executive
(C) social media should be a cultural shift for the entire organization
(D) there are social media consulting opportunities abound

Continue reading…

Singapore’s own 11yr old “John Mayer” in the making…

With all the high production videocasts I’m seeing on the web, it sure is refreshing to see something so heartfelt and authentic.

My buddy Michael Cho, an accomplished street singer and thinker behind Comiqs.com, recently emailed me about his 11 year old brother-in-law, “NickyRicky“.

You see, NickyRicky recently wrote his first song entitled “I saw love in front of me”. After watching it, I think he’s soon to be Singapore’s little “John Mayer“.

Michael mentioned that NickyRicky wrote the lyrics and composed the music, so all he had to do was to figure out the chords for his little one.

If you can’t get enough of NickyRicky, check out his Youtube channel “Remote Control Productions” where his other hilarious videos include one about a disease you get from doing too much homework.

Qik video: Meet Shady, Tour Buffalo, Head for Avenue Q

In this 20min Qik video, you’ll get to meet my ethical hacker buddy, Shady, as well as get a little tour of Buffalo while we drive downtown for the last awesome performance of Avenue Q.

Along the way we talk about mobile video broadcasting from the Nokia, possibilities of such a thing for the iPhone, and other random goodness.

You can also see what I had for lunch before the drive, and what it’s like inside the Shea’s performance art theater, like how you’d never expect an organ version of Madonna’s Spanish Lullaby.

How believable are socio-political blogs in Singapore? Give your two-cents!

Singapore Stopover
Damn it! Mention Singapore and Fried Kway Teow at Ghim Moh comes to mind…

Fellow Singaporean communication researcher, Linda Heng, would like your help in her Internet survey on “Internet Users’ Perceptions of Socio-Political Blog Credibility in Singapore”. Here are the details:

Much has been debated about the viability of the Internet (i.e. citizen journalism, blogs) as a credible alternative to mainstream media. In the arena of social and political discourse, the credibility debate has been dominated by key stakeholders of both sides and is fast becoming rhetorical. What is lacking is an understanding of how the general Internet community perceives Socio-Political (SP) blogs as a credible medium for political information and discussion. The objective of this research is to shed light on the Internet community’s (both readers and non-readers) perceptions of SP blogs credibility. If achieved, this would be a benchmark of the influence of the SP Blogosphere in Singapore.

As mentioned on Journalism.sg (awesome Singapore journalism blog BTW), the survey comprises of 19 questions and will take approximately 10 minutes to complete. This survey will run throughout May 2008 and respondents stand a chance of winning $200 cash. You can take the survey here.

Alternatively, you can learn more about political blogs in Singapore by watching our 20 minute video entitled “Introduction to Singapore’s Socio-Political Blogosphere

microcelebrity spotting: Keith Burtis the Woodturner

Last evening Shady and I went down to the 2nd Buffalo Tweetup, partly because we were meeting a new twitter / developer friend there, Joseph Hsu.

Organized at the Pearl Street Grill & Brewery, I got to meet Keith Burtis at the Tweetup again, who lets me know how far he’s gone with his woodturning art. Apparently he’s become quite a microcelebrity, with his blog, twitter and live shows of his woodturning sessions. He would often give out his work to viewers, which was in line with his mantra of being without attachment in life. I told him how he’s adopted a Buddhist thinking, where one finds contentment from within, not external source (at least that’s what I know).

If you’re wondering what woodturning is, according to Wikipedia (aka our alpha version of the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy)…

Woodturning is a form of woodworking that is used to create wooden objects on a lathe. Woodturning differs from most other forms of woodworking in that the wood is moving while a (relatively) stationary tool is used to cut and shape it. Many intricate shapes and designs can be made by turning wood.

As a fan of The 7th Son, Keith recently made a special gift to his favorite Sci-fi writer / podcaster, J.C. Hutchins. The 7th Son is an amazing podcast novel which has gained quite a following, and is a thriller centered around the concept of clones. J.C. surprised Keith by making an unboxing video of his package, which immediately made me see the power of passionate producers when they happen to be fans of each other’s work. It made me realize how this brings fans over as well, much like how comic book crossovers used to work in the early days (see DC vs. Marvel).

Keith will be on traveling over summer, giving talks and sharing tips with artists on how they can use social media to further their work, and gain fans as well as customers for their business. He’s set to give at talk at the upcoming Podcamp Boston. I remarked at the Tweetup group on how Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” fits into what’s happening today, as we’re really starting to realize how social technology only gets interesting when the non-techies start using it.

The unexpected relationships between traditional non-tech related work and social media is something most people fail to see the connect, yet is a milieu holds the an incredible untapped potential. In line with my recent social media strategist interviews, there is a general disbelief that it would work, when social media is actually quite agnostic to content genres, particularly non-tech related ones. As Jeremiah Owyang once answered me on how lifecasting could possibly make money, he said that as long “as it’s interesting, it’ll work”.

Are we live?
Original 4Chan image found on Liz’s wall…

Aside: As you can tell by now, I’m now able to videocast live anytime any place. I’ve got a Nokia E51 for review, and Daniel Brusilovsky provided me a Qik.com account for mobile video streaming.

Why porn video games don’t work: The Uncanny Valley

I always get a kick when mainstream media (read: television shows) try their hand at talking theory. This time, Fleshbot (NSFW) pulls through with this golden nugget:

As readers of this site know all too well, there have been many, many, many attempts to meld interactive video games with hardcore porn, and despite the occasional interesting result it’s been pretty much a total failure. Why is this such an impossible task?

Writer Dashiell Bennett points out the above 30 Rock clip which tries to explain why porn video games don’t work using the Uncanny Valley theory. It’s funny, and quite succinct. If you’d like to know more, here’s a comprehensive video lecture by Karl F. MacDorman from the Indiana University School of Informatics.

BTW Trey, actually there is a “video game” that lets you get weird with each other for gold and points. It’s not realistic enough to face the problem of the uncanny valley, but it’s good enough for most.

So… Would you hire a social media strategist? (Part 2)

Would you hire a social media strategist (Part 2)

Two weeks ago, it started with a simple question we’ve probably all had at the tip of our tongues: “Would you hire a social media strategist? (Part 1)”

The motivation to asking this comes from how social media has such a fluid definition, that its legitimacy for concentration would often come into question. As users ourselves, we naturally feel some form of reciprocity from our participation online; we are social creatures after all. On the flipside, there are also many reasons to be critical about the hype, myths and evils of Web 2.0, even on how it could even negatively affect the media industry itself.

Today, I’ll be sharing a consolidated report from around thirty responses I’ve received my initial LinkedIn Q&A (private responses), previous blog comments, as well as through the one-on-one interviews I conducted via video Skype over the past two weeks.

The more I write, the more I realized that one simple question has spawned so many more. As such, for your reading sanity, I’ll be sharing the entire report over a series of blog posts. The parts are as follows:

Part 1 was the initial question. Part 2 is what you’re looking at now, which features initial responses to hiring a social media strategist. Part 3 will allow me to give an elaborate response to the emergent themes in today’s post. Part 4 continues with the interview report on expected qualifications and measurements (ROI) for social media engagement. Finally, Part 5 should complete the series with a short video documentary pulling together in-depth interviews with several social media practitioners as well as related communication professionals.

Please note that instead of interviewing just the social media practitioners (i.e. their line of work), I went for a “wisdom of the crowds” approach by asking professionals across the board, including industries of entertainment, broadcast, design, education, IT, non-profit, marketing, advertising and public relations. Consequently, understand that these opinions do not represent my own; my role in this report is to present any emergent themes.

For busy readers, these interview responses were found to mention how…
(A) not all industries would be appropriate for social media
(B) social media should be a portfolio fixture of every PR / Marketing executive
(C) social media should be a cultural shift for the entire organization
(D) there are social media consulting opportunities abound

If you’re ready, the first interview report is right after the jump…
Continue reading…

Waiting for the “social media strategist” interview report?

I’m quite done with Part 2 of “So… Would you hire a social media strategist” (see Part 1). Right now I’m just getting approvals for the quotes I’ll be using before publishing. While waiting for my upcoming interview report, why not follow up on a few interesting links interviewees have sent in?

Have you any favorite links about social media? Which links do you tend to give friends who ask you about blogging, twitter, etc?

Ethnographic: A Teenage Girl’s Facebook Friend List

Facebook friends list template

“The following event is real but the names have been changed to protect the innocent”

While some of us struggle to manage our online relationships, no one does it better than teenage girls who spend a lot of their online time on social networking sites. They’ve learned to micro-manage their lives with the level of detail certified accountants do with internal audits.

Always interested in how the experts do it, I got a chance to sit through a demo of how 18 year old Sarah sorts her Facebook friends. From using the limited profile feature to reduce exposure to specific colleagues, bosses or creeps (real-life creeps on the rise?), to using the Friend List feature in an extensive way to delineate clusters of relationships (as shown above).

Sarah does represent a heavy Facebook user, blogging via Facebook notes, picky with her Facebook apps, but a deep user of the platform nonetheless. She explores and utilizes every aspect of the social networking service until she has it is sufficiently under her control.

When asked of what she thought about Facebook Chat, she disliked it saying how it just makes it “too creepy”. She currently prefers bantering with friends via Wall-to-Wall, perhaps something to do with anticipation, surprise and reduced attention it requires compared to a live conversation. Sharing her sentiment, we compared the number of Facebook friends reported online through her Online Friends page with the number reported in the Facebook Chat feature, and discovered that a majority of her friends have indeed turned off their chat status entirely.

For the rest of us, maintaining our online relationships can be a lot of work, especially if you use Facebook sparingly just to maintain presence. If you want some basics on maintaining privacy on Facebook (or to help your child’s manage his / her online presence), this video tutorial gives a good demo of how to go about it. Just excuse the heavy British Aussie accent. ;)