OPEN

The “six minute version” of Howard Rheingold’s thoughts on social media literacies.

“Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part – the part a machine can do. The real difficulty kicks in when you click down into your search results. At that point, it’s up to you to sort the accurate bits from the misinfo, disinfo, spam, scams, urban legends, and hoaxes. “Crap detection,” as Hemingway called it half a century ago, is more important than ever before, now that the automation of crapcasting has generated its own word: “spamming.””

So gutted I missed Reboot Britain this year, Steve Moore organised a great event. Howard Rheingold’s speech is about literacy and 21st Century Literacies… Literacy is “skills+community” according to Howard…

The WOMMA presentation I did is “Required Reading” this week on FreshNetworks’ blog – chuffed!

A website which tracks pundits’ predictions and says whether they got them right or wrong.

“twibbon.com is the easiest way to promote awareness of your cause on twitter. Create a twibbon in 3 easy steps and soon all your supporters will be proudly wearing their twibbons on their twitter profile images. Simply describe your cause and upload a twibbon image and we will do the rest.”

“A couple of interesting things that came out of the study included the debunking of some social networking myths. Social networkers are not as interested in friending strangers or creating “fake” friends to boost their ego. Out of the group, 45% connect only to family and friends and another 18% will connect only to people they’ve met in person. In other words, two-thirds are connecting to people they actually know. Only 10% of those surveyed said they will friend anyone.”

“Perhaps underestimating their own ability to adapt — or pick up a telephone — just 29% of Facebook and LinkedIn users say they could “probably do without” the popular networks, according to a new study by Anderson Analytics.”

$100 for a Twitter background… “Why use one of Twitter’s stock backgrounds when you can have a custom background that will not only make you stand out from the crowd but also provide an excellent marketing opportunity? If you’re using Twitter to promote something you’re missing out on its full potential if you don’t consider the background as part of your promotion.”

“SAP recently announced a new set of Social Media Participation Guidelines and an internal forum to help employees make the most of new social media channels such as Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. In the spirit of Web 2.0, and like other organizations such as Intel and IBM, we would like to share our guidelines with the community.”

Great advice – I’m rubbish at packing.

“For Dummies” advice on Twitter. Very basic and straightforward.

Lots of good content from the “For Dummies” guide brand on all things internet.

A course in Digital Humanities laid out in links from the University of Maryland:

“DIGITAL HUMANITIES is already a vast and multi-faceted field, and during our week in Taos we will only be scratching the surface of the surface. Our primary orientation will not be procedural in nature, that is how to use specific software or complete particular tasks, but rather directed toward gaining a broad overview of the many different kinds of methods, practices, and scholarly and creative work currently being conducted under this aegis.”

“Advertisers are starting to target ads to you based on what you say on Twitter. And if you tweet something nice about a product, you might even see your blurb in bold type on an ad, just like a Jeffrey Lyons movie review. So says Seth Goldstein, the chief executive of SocialMedia, a company that has created advertising formats for Facebook, MySpace, and now Twitter.”

Bruce Sterling’s image stream around the concept of atemporality – being outside of time, “like steampunk with metaphysics”.

Concept cars: “”Concept cars” are more-or-less “real cars” never intended for mass production. They are propaganda items intended to influence public taste. They are promotional head-fakes toward an image of “futurity” that might move consumer demand in the direction of the manufacturer.”

Bruce Sterling speaking at Reboot 11. Wish I had been there… Includes:

* How FIAT is moving the FIAT 500 into emergent demographic groups (“scary and terrible”)
* Atemporality: “it’s like steam punk with metpahysics”
* The Twenty-teens will be a time of dark euphoria: things falling apart…
* Gothic high-tech…
* Favela-chic…
* Barack Obama: “he’s a Chicago machine politician, not Vaclav Havel…”
* Obama and Sarkozy are positioning themselves in the narrative rather than creating infrastructure…
* Favela chic: “You’ve lost everything but you’re still really big on Facebook”
* MySpace is a Favela: you can’t do anything there, but you have a hut (until they pull the plug)