Community Mobilization

MyFoodPhone

MyFoodPhone is like having a nutritionist on call. Send in photos and camera photos of your meals and get help ascertaining the nutritional content of what you put into your body. There is a community build around this site as well for weight loss support as well as sharing of recipe and cooking information. I like the approach of connecting nutritionists with those eating the food via internet as a way to make the service more accessible. What would be most interesting if people were able to gain knowledge to help them fight Diabetes, or certain other nutritional ailments through the site. Moreover as we find that certain compounds are effective in fighting cancers dietitians and nutritionists can recommend health choices the help prevent certain ailments.

Shifting The Burden

Scott Allen, author of The Virtual Handshake, did a recent text interview on Ask Liz Ryan and it really gave me some perspective on why I find some business network systems so bothersome. He sums it up by saying in cases where people are looking to make connections, they are using these social software systems and in doing so shift the burden of research from the requester to the requested. Each time I get a generic invitation to link, or join a network from someone I do not already know I have the burden of evaluating either what the person wants from me or who they are. I pasted the interview below. Great read!

Video Egg

Video seems to be the new hot medium. More importantly sharing personal video is gaining speed, and the technology to support personal video as an integrated part of a social space has come to fruition on Video Egg. looking over the application it seems to enable users (social network sites) to allow their users to embed personal video content. I am curious to see how the existing video channel Youtube will work forward to ensure it remains the feed king.

UW Physics professor funds research through mircodonations

Seattlepi.com reports that John Cramer, a UW physics professor, if funding a rapid prototype of his work through micro-donations. To date he has received approximately $35,000 and plans of setting up a prototype of is experiment with lasers and photons. Cramer, a physicist, for decades has been interested in resolving a fundamental paradox of quantum mechanics, the theory that accounts for the behavior of matter and energy at subatomic levels. It's called the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. This is an exceptional example of how micro-finance and micr-funding can promote and make amazing things happen. This is all due to the distributed reach and community building power of the internet.

Blog Roll recommendations

I got a solicitation in the mail for a new blogroll widget called Criteo. It is sort of interesting to me because it tracks the blog visits of your readers. In short, my understanding, is that you will be able to see who your readers are going to visit. It has a lot of promise on the discovery side. I would be interested in the community action, swarm tendencies, of those who read my blog. Moreover I'd like to see and find others who, according to my readers, are worth checking out. Not ready to use it quite yet but do want to investigate it  a bit. Anyone using it and like it?

Ourstory

My old buddy Andy Hallidy has an amazing project going on called OurStory.com. I know that I have pointed to this before but here is a video demonstration of Ourstory and it is really moving. My favorite part of the system is that comments can be uploaded via a reply e-mail. I not only enjoy the very intimate nature of the system but also think it is a great way to encourage us as an inputer to catalog the most important events of our life in a bit more detail thank photos that end up in plastic bags, and old albums that sit in the basement.

Pop!Tech Content on Itunes

Pop!Tech has put all of the presentations form the 2006 event on iTunes for free. I have some personal favorites such as Kent Nichols's presentation on Ask A Ninja, and Sinikithemba Choir. Thomas Fiedman and Thomas PM Barnett, Richard Dawkins

, and Marianne Weems also have amazing presentation that are a must hear if you have never heard these guys before.

Twitter. Is it that big a deal?

I am just blown away by how big a deal people are making about twitter. It seems like everyone is either in love with it or wants to kill it. Here is a post by Andy Cavin on how people are using Twitter can save lives in emergency situations when used for communications. SMS has such a small footprint it can operate when cell circuits clog up. And over here Stow Boyd post why Andrew Kantor thinks Twitter is not good for anyone.
As a community tool it is simple and easy. As a target community tool it lacks sophistication and guided message delivery. I am eager to see how people hack it and to see if there is a development of twitter groups for different realms of social circles.

The Power of Online Community

In a sad turn of events Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users is considering leaving the blogoshpere after receiving death threats in comments and posts both on her blog and other blogs. The other blog, meankids.org, was set up by a few prominent bloggers who include Listics' Frank Paynter, prominent marketing blogger Jeneane Sessum, and Raving Lunacy Allen Herre.  The banter consisted of typical blogger back and forth but then turned violent and ugly. danah has a very long post questioning the ethics of leaving up a space that invites, nay, encourages such anonymity and mean spirited behavior.

As a community mobilizing tool the internet is mighty powerful, and in some ways magnifies the power of one person's thoughts and points of view many times over.  As committed as I am to the First Amendment and it's application to the virtual space I feel there are certainly limits that we must self impose. As a digital community we are relegated to self regulation before we are regulated by governance. To protect free speech is one thing, but t protect hate speech is another. I am glad to see the meankids.org site is gone, but the bad taste it left should certainly linger as a reminder to us all.

Life Publishing

Life publishing and its cousin Life caching seems to be on the verge of taking off. The short description is that you forward your e-mail to a life publishing site that helps you aggregate your life experiences for future publishing in a book format. Companies ofering the service include Life Trackers. Travel journals, a memoir, or even the first few years of a child's life ... all collected and stored for future use.  I love the idea and it reminds me of a number of bloggers who have turned their chronicles into stories and sold them as books. I have suggested to numerous people I have met to start a blog and use those writings as a base for a published text. One thing a blog can do that a closed site can not is offer free publicity and teasers. Nor can it engage readers in conversation. So as an archive I like the idea, as a conversation it has a long way to go.