Social Media

Following a presentation I gave at the European Intersectoral Summit on Research and Innovation last month entitled ‘Engaging Citizens in Research and Innovation: Opportunities and Challenges Afforded by Social Media’, I was interviewed by Orlaith Finnegan from Digimind on this topic. A copy of the interview is below.

1) Can you start by telling us about your background and where your interest in social media comes from?

Visit the comments section of any online publication or scroll down to the activity beneath a popular YouTube video and you’ll see the full spectrum of human emotion, often expressions of anger, aggression and vitriol. Then there is the dark side of the dark side of the Web: cyberbullying incidents that have, in the worst cases, contributed to the suicide of the victims involved, such as Irish teenagers Erin Gallagher and Ciara Pugsley.

Bernardo Huberman heads up the Social Computing Lab at Hewlett-Packard. The emphasis of his work, according to the man himself, is to understand things by answering important questions. One of the main things he has been gaining an understanding of over the past three to four years is the "economics of attention". How to best get other people's attention in a world of information overload raises many important questions, as you can well imagine. So important that, even though we covered it once, you probably missed it, and we will try for your attention again. Hopefully the catchy headline helped...

Social discovery is an online space that has been emerging over the last couple of years. It is a throwback to some of the original ideas that the first social networks were built around. Friendster was about meeting new people through mutual friendships. Likewise, MySpace was a very social way of discovering new music.

In contrast, Facebook, with its multiple levels of privacy settings is very much about keeping in touch with people you already know. Social discovery is, in essence, a network that enables you to meet people.

For the moment, with Facebook’s star still in the ascendency, launching a competing social network is a task set aside for the brave and the foolhardy. A smarter way to address the need people have for meeting new people would be to integrate a social discovery application with the Facebook platform.

At the beginning of last year we ran a number of articles highlighting some of the fundamental challenges that face a tech startup and some ideas on how to approach and handle them. Two of these posts were based on interviews with Fergus Hurley, a Galway native who now resides in California. Fergus discussed the importance of design in the Role of Design in Getting a Product to Market and project construction in Developers and Product Development.

The Kno.e.sis Center at Wright State University is host to one of the largest Semantic Web working groups in the United States. Its most important task, according to Amit Sheth, LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar and the Center's Founder and Director, “Is doing world-class research and creating world-class innovators.

“The simplest way to describe what we do, is that we use semantics to empower a variety of things in Web 3.0: dealing with social data, traditional data, the web of things and cloud computing. For example, working on the interoperability of applications over the cloud using semantics — plus other interdisciplinary projects.”

Image source: commons.wikimedia.org

A daughter of a good friend of mine attends the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies (LACES) — A public school that has a particularly fine educational track record.

However, due to the difficult financial situation of the State of California funding for some of the school's programs are either being squeezed or are ceasing. While recognizing the need for cutbacks, concerned parents feel the cutting of the study group programs, in particular, are unfair and could possibly damage the educational prospects of their children.

The parents, working together, made this short campaign video, Help LACES Fight Budget Cuts

For Paul Quigley, news has always been his, “first love”. When he left a career as a lawyer in New York, he revisited his days of college journalism and started a satirical news site called NewsWhip.

However, he soon began to look beyond the traditional model of news distribution, and after meeting EasyDeals.ie co-founder Andrew Mullaney, the pair reinvented NewsWhip as a social news aggregator, which tracks the speed and volume at which stories are spread globally through social media, and lets the reader know what stories are piquing people’s interest around the world in real time.

When I first heard of Abair Leat! a few weeks back, my initial reaction was a cynical one. “Not another attempt to create a niche Facebook," I thought. However, after only a few moments speaking with Mícheál Ó Foighil, the man behind the Irish-language social network, it becomes immediately evident that this is no Zuckerberg wannabe, but a forward-thinking educator using the medium of our time to share his passion for his native tongue.