Short Post - Twitter in the Mainstream

Twitter hits the mainstream. Despite what, 21 million REAL users, it's definitely memed itself out.

Why do I make this claim?

People are using hashtags as names.

I ran the Philadelphia Marathon this weekend and I saw people put their TWITTER HANDLES on the back of their shirts- - no not their names, but their TWITTER handles.

Along the course, I kept seeing signs that said #winning and #runlikeakenyan (always wonder how Kenyans feel about that)...

I was wondering whether next year I should try a potentially self-serving experiment: Could I get YOU students to organize a social media campaign for ME as I run my next marathon. E.G. could we test out Gladwell's weak ties, and see if you could get college students in another city to show up at EVERY water stop along the way of a marathon.

Some potential problems.

1) completely self-serving exercise of YOUR energy toward organizing

2) the big issue is can you actually MOBILIZE people OFFLINE v. ONLINE

This is the issue we saw with Last Airbenders, right with RaceBending

3) What's in it for you? This would be a huge test of the gift economy.

Thoughts?

What I learned in the UK- Social Media abroad

First, as you know I traveled to the UK to go to this

Embedded in all of this Mozilla Festival were so many of the things that we talk about in class - the head of the Mozilla Foundation talked about turning the world from "Media Consumers to Media Makers" -- we've moved way past production kids, and on to MAKING. Like, it's not just about submitting photos any more, it's about actually doing the mashups. But before it took a lot of effort, and now these hackers want to make it SUPER easy for you to do this.

So I went to the Web Science Festival at the Mozfest, as it was called, and saw all these neat things like Aps that will make it possible for ordinary high school kids do do what basically Imovie does now.

MIT has this thing called AAGO - which is a mobile app for Apple divices where teens and youth citizen journalists can figure out ways to make stories using mobile photos, videos and audio clips that they can arrange on their iphones and then put on the Web.

Pretty neat, right? I also heard more about Ushahidi, which we all know Dr. Livingston is obsessed with (some of the professors here, including Dr. Bailard, and Dr. Hindman) and it's back end for texting from your phone (that's right Sandi -you can text to the interwebs from your phone) -- it's a platform called Frontline SMS.

A little about Ushahidi:

Ushahidi is awesome - it allows people in crisis situations, or people monitoring elections in Kenya to have an impact, and people with #middleclassproblems, like when there are Tube Strikes in London to have that information easily visualized, and brought to the attention of the authorities and of news organizations. My interest is in, of course, how all of this collective intelligence (recognize this term) can be used for news.

So just some thoughts from the real world where things are happening in the world of social media and participation.

One of the reasons we're so interested in these platforms