You are complicit

Just so we are clear, you are complicit in this situation with Facebook. You were willing to be a heavy user of Facebook without understanding how Facebook works and how the company makes its money. You were willing to share your personal information in exchange for free access to the services of the social media company to share your pictures and comments about your family. You were also convinced that Facebook provided access to credible news and made this judgment because the news appeared in your feed so it must be accurate and well reasoned. You may have even forwarded the Russian propaganda to others with little personal analysis and related commentary. Now that some of the players – Facebook, Russia, you – have been identified, the big question is whether or not the list is complete. Were the characteristics used by Kushner and the RNC in targeting ads shared with Russian actors?

Related analysis from The Atlantic.

Please, just the links

While Twitter users try to put the service to all kinds of uses, I see the major value in Twitter as a way to surface news stories I have not located on my own. What if you could magically ignore all of the other stuff and just review the links. This is exactly what Nuzzel provides (news nozzle) provides. Nuzzel is free and available through a browser or for iOS and android.

I am a limited Twitter (and Facebook) so Nuzzel is mostly useful to me because I fail to check in from time to time and I do miss some things. Nuzzel does allow the number of sources to be expanded by allowing “friends of friends” as an option.

Nuzzel allows the user to control the amount of time the feed covers. What it offers is the list of links friends have provided during this time and orders the list by the frequency of citations.

My work flow with Nuzzel is to open the links that look interesting from Nuzzel and then save this content to Evernote.

the no caps thing

I think of danah boyd as a next generation Sherry Turkle (Second Self). danah writes about teen and social media from the perspective of an anthropologist/sociologist. I can recommend her most recent book (It's complicated). An introduction to her work can be gleaned from a recent interview with Leo Laporte. Her comments on teen online behavior should be reassuring to teachers and parents. I did also learn that danah has serious chops as a CS major.

BTW - the lower case thing is somewhat of a homage to her mother.

What I thought was important may not be what you thought was important.

I read a lot of Kindle books. My wife and I have written a book available for the Kindle. The "Kindle model" offers some capabilities that are under appreciated and often unknown to many readers.

For example, I am interested in the potential of sharing highlights and annotations. I have taken the time to highlight and annotate our own book and the books I assign for me graduate classes. 

I have a new fascination. I was searching our Kindle book for a specific reference and discovered that I can now view the most frequently highlighted passages by readers. Do the readers highlight the same content as I highlight? Do they highlight what I think is more applied content or content I would describe as conceptual and likely to be unfamiliar. There must be something here for deeper analysis. I had thought shared highlights was something I could share or readers could share with each other, but now I see value in the annotations as feedback to the author.