Welcome.

Welcome to my first blog. It is being constructed for my ICS 691 course, which is an in depth look at Social Networking. I typically don't engage in this type of activity as I work, so it will be interesting learning about this stuff.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

AnswerBag

This weeks activity did not go well for me. I was unable to accomplish any of the goals. I finished the reading last week and I started lurking and crafting my strategy. I determined that most of the highest ranking questions were emotional, controversial and opininated. These are questions like, what would you name a pet rock? Is Obama a nitwit? I also noticed that certain topics had larger numbers of comments. So I decided to post these types of questions. I also eliminated any questions that had already been asked to death (ie How much would could a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?). I didn't want to come across as a complete pratt so I limited the number of question instead of throwing every single question and the kitchen sink. So here are my results.

The questions below are in reverse order. So my first question is the bottom question. I tried a varity of topics, some in educational some in conversational. All with no luck.

Category Question Answer Count Date Submitted Status Pts
1. US economy 1.5 Trillion dollars / 303,824,606 Americans = 4,937.05 per american. Wouldn't it have been better if the US gov't just gave us the money? 0 Feb 16, 2009 Active 0
2. Art Why is modern art still called modern art? Isn't that a bit of a misnomer by now? 1 Feb 16, 2009 Active 8
3. Visual Basic Has anyone used the compiler object in VB 2005? 0 Feb 15, 2009 Active 0
4. Relationship basics Why can't women remember to put the toilet seat down? 1 Feb 15, 2009 Active 5
5. Smoking Another dead smoker, smoked for over 40 years, why are the tobacco companies to blame? Where is the personal responsiblity? 1 Feb 13, 2009 Active 7
6. Consumer prices Some say that you get the best value if you buy a car 2 years old. When is the best time to buy a car? 3 Feb 13, 2009 Active 10
7. Religions Another suicide bomber (female) blows up 60 women and children, how is this justified? Is this really religous or more about Worldly power? 3 Feb 13, 2009 Active 0
8. Operating systems What is the best version of Unix for home use? 1 Feb 13, 2009 Active 0
9. Software Have you used the Enterprise Arcitect plub in for Visual Studio 2005/2008 and how does it work? What are the advantages and disadvantages? Is there are better piece of software in your opinion? 0 Feb 12, 2009 Active 0
10. Enterprise resource planning What happened to LeCASE (the Computer Aided Software Enginerring) software? 0 Feb 11, 2009 Active 5
11. Internet What is the best why to try online dating? 1 Feb 11, 2009 Active 0
12. California law What is the real root cause of California's Budgets crisis? 1 Feb 10, 2009 Active 0

So I got two questions that got 3 answers, and the best point score I could get was 10 points. Questions 3 and 9 were not answered, and these were the ones I was hoping would get answered, for my own selfish reasons. My responses faired no better. This leads me to the conclusion that in order to do well you need to be constantly on this site, have a large base of friends, or be really witty. Since I do not have much time, I don't care to be in constant contact with large groups of people I care little for, and I am not extremely witty, I am not terribly surprised at my results, consequently, I probably won't be going to this site after this assignment.

In terms of construction the site was fairly easy to use. Pretty intuitive to learn how to give points and reinforce others answers. It was interesting to feel the impact of the points, and watch the bag change colors. For a brief period of time I was thrilled to get some points, but then I woke up. The closest I actually came to a conversation was with the guy who responded to question 11. But I couldn't really think of anything to ask as the question was more contrieved for response then whether I was really all that interested in dating online. I have also joined some forum groups at facebook and myspace. The results have been fantastically disappointing. The problem is I am more interested in technical stuff then engaging in meaningless conversation. If I wanted to do that I would have remained married.

But there are several things that tied in with the reading. In the reading it was mentioned that many people come to sites to make friends, and the questions that seemed to have the most answers appeared to have a large number of friends. If you followed the trails of people it became obvious that there are groups of people that know (of) each other and respond frequently to each other. The readings also mentioned that many people come to these sites for entertainment and some of the questions and answers were entertaining. Many people feel that they are getting useful information on these sites. I thought that was questionable. Who cares what I would name a pet rock? And why would anyone on this forum be qualified to say whether Obama is a nitwit? Just because someone has an opinion doesn't mean it should be heard or given credence. I had a strategy worked out to engage with people, but there was little chance to use it. I think that basically I failed because I couldn't come up with questions that interested people (ie What would you name a pet rock? and Is Obama a Nitwit?), and I didn't have a large body of friends.

In relation to last weeks reading, this was an example of a depressing Internet experience. But it was more depressing because my grade was tied to whether I could somehow provoke a bunch of people I neither know nor care about into responding to my questions and responses. And that just doesn't smell like computer science to me, more like sales and marketing. I have an MBA, I hate sales and marketing. However, I rate the experience positively it did reinforce why I hate sales, and why I like the technical.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Student: Thomas Harder
Instructor: Prof. Richard Gazan
Course: ICS 691 – Social Computing
Session 2: Assignment 1: Part 2
Introduction
All this talk about how people behave on websites really made me curious about why someone would actually spend so much time on them. And I wanted to know from an insider why people would participate in something like Second Life, and how a company like Second Life would handle antisocial behavior. So, I went online and asked. I joined Second Life and after several days, I made a contact with Beverly Montegomery.

The avatar to the right of me, in the green dress is Ms. Montgomery. I am the guy in the black shirt. Ms. Montegomery is a Second Life officer and a volunteer for the NCI organization. She gives classes for Newbies, mostly in the basiscs of how to modify the avatar and what to see and things to do with in Second Life. Her introduction to Second Life was from her son, who showed her how to login, helped her create an avatar, took her to an NCI starting place and then promptly left her there to find her own way. This was two years ago and she in now fully immersed in Second Life. Ms. Montegomery's take on the Second Life experience was that individuals come to Second Life to see what it is like and then stay for the friendships and for a feeling of importance.
Friends and a Feeling of Importance
I found this to be true with my experience, most of the people were friendly and very helpful, and I was able to make friends very quickly. I believe the feeling of importance aspect is created through 3 avenues 1) just the act of making friends 2)Volunteering to help newbies enjoy the game and become acclimatized, like Ms. Montegomery and 3)Creating Objects. The first 2 being obvoius I will focus a little on 3rd item Creating objects. Second Life promotes individuals creativity through the use of a monteary system, and by providing the tools to create and modify object in the world. Additionally there are free tutorials, on how to create these tools and how to sell them within Second Life. This has lead to the creation of many virtual cottage industries. This simple feature allows residents to become emotionally attached to the game, by creating, and seeing that others value the objects that they can create. Many of the individuals became involved in Photoshop and scripting just because of their involvement in Second Life.
My Cube! It says touch when I touch it. And Ouch wherever anyone collides with it.

Some of the Resident's Art!


Rules of Conduct
Second Life has had its share of antisocial behaviour. While they have a Terms of Service agreement, this contract is not always adhered to, and in these cases Second Life can ban users accounts. Ms. Montegomery admitted that there was little to stop such banned users form rejoining and personlly knew that several users had been banned 4 or more.In addition to the Conduct By Users of Second Life (see below) rules found in the TOS, an island or sim can impose additional conduct rules, which users must agree to prior to being able to access it.

Here is a small part of the TOS.

CONDUCT BY USERS OF SECOND LIFE
4.1 You agree to abide by certain rules of conduct, including the Community Standards and other rules prohibiting illegal and other practices that Linden Lab deems harmful.
You agree to read and comply with the Community Standards posted on the Websites, (for users 18 years of age and older, at http://secondlife.com/corporate/cs.php; and for users of the Teen Area, at http://teen.secondlife.com/footer/cs
In addition to abiding at all times by the Community Standards, you agree that you shall not: (i) take any action or upload, post, e-mail or otherwise transmit Content that infringes or violates any third party rights; (ii) impersonate any person or entity without their consent, including, but not limited to, a Linden Lab employee, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent your affiliation with a person or entity; (iii) take any action or upload, post, e-mail or otherwise transmit Content that violates any law or regulation; (iv) take any action or upload, post, e-mail or otherwise transmit Content as determined by Linden Lab at its sole discretion that is harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, causes tort, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable; (v) take any actions or upload, post, e-mail or otherwise transmit Content that contains any viruses, Trojan horses, worms, spyware, time bombs, cancelbots or other computer programming routines that are intended to damage, detrimentally interfere with, surreptitiously intercept or expropriate any system, data or personal information; (vi) take any action or upload, post, email or otherwise transmit any Content that would violate any right or duty under any law or under contractual or fiduciary relationships (such as inside information, proprietary and confidential information learned or disclosed as part of employment relationships or under nondisclosure agreements); (vii) upload, post, email or otherwise transmit any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, or promotional materials, that are in the nature of "junk mail," "spam," "chain letters," "pyramid schemes," or any other form of solicitation that Linden Lab considers in its sole discretion to be of such nature; (viii) interfere with or disrupt the Service or servers or networks connected to the Service, or disobey any requirements, procedures, policies or regulations of networks connected to the Service; (ix) attempt to gain access to any other user's Account or password; or (x) "stalk", abuse or attempt to abuse, or otherwise harass another user. Any violation by you of the terms of the foregoing sentence may result in immediate and permanent suspension or cancellation of your Account. You agree that Linden Lab may take whatever steps it deems necessary to abridge, or prevent behavior of any sort on the Service in its sole discretion, without notice to you.

Tools and New Uses
What made my question session with Ms. Montgomery different is that she was carrying on several conversations at once. There was a group chat for the question and answer session, and she was carrying on an IM session just with me, and I am sure several other conversations too. This got me to thinking about how else these tools could be used in more "useful" ways. I decided that it would be quite possible to hold a business team meeting in Second Life. The program supports sound, and could support a normal conversation. There is the ability to have group chat and individual IM, for private side conversation. The software also has a blogging tool. And since it has its own scripting language it could be modified and extended for additional uses.


Summary
In summary Second Life is a fascinating, and different type of Social Networking Site then Facebook and MySpace. I found the content more appealing then Facebook and MySpace; where I very quickly became tired of staring at pictures and reading static text. I found it very easy to make friends, specifically because I was not starring at a person. Second Life is filled with conversation starters, imagine walking up to a 3D tiger avatar, that moves and growls, how did the person get it? Some of these are bought, but many things are created by players, and these people are interesting to talk to. For the more quiet types, the group chat allows you to lurk in the background, and doesn't interfere with the natural flow of conversation by the participants.
Check out the avatar on the left. I am still not sure what it is, but it looks fierce.

So, as nonacademic as it sounds, I think I found my SNS of choice. Now I have to go, I want to work on my cube. I want to make it make a whoopie cushion sound when I sit on it!


Sunday, February 1, 2009

Sesson 2 Assignment 1 - 7 Articles and My Free Response

Student: Thomas Harder

Instructor: Prof. Richard Gazan

Course: ICS 691 – Social Computing

Session 2: Assignment 1:


1) A free-response section with your overall reactions to the readings. Not just "I thought this or that was interesting" (which I of course hope you do), but point out specific connections or mismatches between concepts in the readings, examples and/or counterexamples from your research or experience, and a question raised by the readings that for you remains unanswered.

7 Articles and My Free Response
These weeks the reading started to give a more in-depth look at how individuals use Internet SNS and asks the questions; Can SNS address the social interactivity needs of humans? How? To William Galston, in the paper “Does the Internet Strengthen Community?” (Galston 1999), the answer depends on how well the SNS balances the conflicting desires of autonomy and connection. To begin with Galston uses Thomas Bender’s definition of a community and then looks at how the SNS will support the four main characteristics of Limited Membership, Shared Norms, Affective Ties and Mutual Obligation. In conclusion Mr. Galston summarizes that online groups can help individuals but should not be allowed to replace true communities. While I mostly agree with the spirit of Mr. Galston’s article, I still dislike the position that choice and community are competitors and that an individual can only seek one at the expense of the other. I believe that the argument is in how you perceive the little village in Portugal. I believe that more of us in the industrialized world would stay in a little village, if we were ever given the chance. But nowdays, in the “global marketplace” who grows up in a little village?
The second article “Social responsibility and the Web: A Drama Unfolds” by Linton Weeks, highlights how the more things change the more man remains the same; incidentally this is also proof that evolution is unfounded. What amazed me was that for all everyone’s complaints they just didn’t seem flat out ask her if she was okay, or if the child was okay, or if there was anything anyone can do for her. Everyone would have saved themselves a lot of grief if they would have just done the sensible thing, actually cared about her and her child and just asked a simple question. And she should know better in this age of offensensitivity (Yes, I got this word from Bloom County, I hope you are old enough to remember this ), that she was going to get blasted for posting such an “off color” joke.
I didn’t really understand the level of effort that went into the third article. In summary, if you can’t do something it will stress you out, and this will lead to depression. I suppose this is obvious. But I have yet to hear of anyone killing themselves over the fact that they have a hard time finding something on the Internet. More than likely I think the level of stress the Internet causes is a blip on someone’s stress level. I don’t think the study did a real good job at removing life’s other stressors, which I think would have a greater impact on an individual. If one places ones ego on their ability to do everything well, they are very likely to be depressed.
I found that I could agree with the first sentence of the fourth article “Strategies for a Discontinuous Future” by Umair Hague (Hague 2006), that is “bloggers blog too much”. But the article took a turn to decipher the definitions of usefulness and creativity. The author state that “usefulness is the enemy of creativity” and this is flat out nonsense. The author gives no examples to prove his point and this, in my opinion, destroys the authors’ creditability immediately. I believe that usefulness and creativity if properly draw would be perpendicular.



This would give you 4 quadrants and is a more likely valid way of categorize things, into useful and creative items. There are many useful and highly creative things, and this leads me to believe that the author may be suffering from a stunted definition of creative.
The fifth article Albrechtslund, Anders “Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance.” ( Albercthslund 2008); highlighted the fact that whatever is put on the net, maybe on the net forever, and it might come back to haunt an individual. Because this information is “out there” it can be viewed by friends and family, or the government, snoops and criminals. I found this particularly true on all of the sites I viewed. Many sites have profiles that can be locked, but nevertheless this information is stored somewhere. Typically this type of data resides on in a database (Oracle or SQL Server) and this database could be hacked or mined. I posted another item that discusses a recent hacking of a database, and while the critical information was believed to be still secure, how could anyone believe that since the company was vulnerable to attack? Furthermore the company admitted that the information taken could be used in phishing attacks. Additionally the article stressed the concepts of hierarchical and lateral surveillance. The most interesting is lateral surveillance, that is peer-to-peer monitoring. People use this technique to “fit in”. The observe and mimic others speech and behavour in order to not appear to be the new guy.
“Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism” by Christine Rosen (Rosen 2007) was an interesting read. She used the d word, democratic. I am not sure I understand what is meant by calling this information democratized or democratic. In fact I looked up democratic and from the definitions I found no plausible interpretation. I strongly suggest that this word be dropped or better explained. I liked the major idea that connection has become big business, it has. And after spending 20 hours on Facebook, MySpace and Second Life, I liked her idea “of a conventional individuality, of distinctive sameness.” I found myself quickly bypassing anything that was, in my opinion, gaudy and overdone. It was exciting to see a simple or well crafted page, and I think this says a lot (positive) about the person who created it. I should point out that beauty is in the eye of the beholder so perhaps I was not the intended target of the gaudy and overdone. Ms. Rosen also stressed that the idea of a change in the meaning of the word “friendship”. This idea was pointed out in earlier articles, and Ms. Rosen takes a slightly different tack, however the message bears repeating that these new friendships are not likely to have the same depth as real life connections.
I didn’t get much out of Ryan Bigge’s article “The Cost of (Anti-) Social Networks: Identity, Agency and Neo-Luddites" (Bigge 2006). Perhaps it was written at too high a social science level, I am in Computer Science and have very little desire to change my profession. But I had a very hard time drawing a point to his article. The best I could come up with is that Mr. Biggie believes that SNS’s will evolve into haves and have not’s, that is you either have a site or you don’t, and that just seems so obvious to me, that it is barely worth mentioning.
Finally, I would like to know; what does Danah Boyd have against capital letters?

References
Galston, William A. (1999). Does the Internet Strengthen Community? In Elaine Ciulla Kamarck and Joseph S. Nye, Jr. (eds.), Democracy.com? Governance in a Networked World. Hollis, NH: Hollis Publishing Co.
http://www.puaf.umd.edu/IPPP/fall1999/internet_community.htm

Weeks, Linton (2009). Social Responsibility and the Web: A Drama Unfolds. 8 January 2009. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99094257

LaRose, R., M.S. Eastin and J. Gregg (2001). Reformulating the Internet Paradox: Social Cognitive Explanations of Internet Use and Depression. Journal of Online Behavior 1(2). http://www.behavior.net/JOB/v1n2/paradox.html

Hague, Umair (2006). Usefulness and The Banality of Business. (Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab blog post). http://www.bubblegeneration.com/2006/03/usefulness-and-banality-of-business.cfm

Albrechtslund, Anders (2008). Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance. First Monday 13(3). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2142/1949

Rosen, Christine (2007). Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism. The New Atlantis 17, 15-31. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/virtual-friendship-and-the-new-narcissism

Bigge, Ryan (2006). The Cost of (Anti-) Social Networks: Identity, Agency and Neo-Luddites" First Monday 11(12). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1421/1339