Obama & social media

The (new) US Government – and Barak Obama – are avid ict & social media users/producers. I found some cool stuff:

The Presidential Inaugural Committee 2009 YouTube Channel. It’s really good. Here’s their website and their twitter profile. The White House’s Blog.

What other info can you find out about Barak Obama, the inauguration, election, US government etc with respect to using social media. Obama is all about reaching people and connecting with him. How did he do it? What do you think of all this? (click the comment button to contribute).

Also, because I have limited experience with wikis, I thought I would try and play around. So, I created a wiki page with all course tasks, with some links and info: http://proftracy.pbwiki.com/comm2p26. Let me know what you think. handy? (tho it’s not interactive/collaborative at this point).

Blog Work

Find, read & explore some wikis
Marketing: http://www.stephanspencer.com/wikis/wikis-for-marketing
Educational: http://wikisineducation.wetpaint.com/page/How+we+use+wikis+in+class?t=anon
List of wikis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis

Businesses & wikis
How To Use Wikis For Business
Wikis Are Now Serious Business
Would Your Business Benefit from a Wiki?

Wiki:
Comment on the wiki’s you’ve looked at
What do you dis/like about the use of wikis?
Would you ever use/create one?
How are wikis good for businesses?

Twitter:
Comment on how tweeting is going for you, any interesting things you’ve come across, and the tweets you are reading. Find a way to tweet that works for you – check out these suggestions:
Top ten types of Tweets
Six Types of Tweets
Get Twhirl and try using that interface to tweet instead.

Experiment with #Hashtags at http://hashtags.org
Find something you’re interested in and see what’s being tweeted about it.

social media

Here are some cool sites I’ve found online with respect to social media:

16 Awesome Data Visualization Tools

Social Media & Marketing: Evolution or Revolution – nice slide deck on slideshare

What is social media – another slide deck on slideshare

Social Media Will Change Your Business

Social Media’s Good, Bad, Ugly and Unexpected

Check out this wicked presentation called “Learning from social media“  from Sarah Robbins, a friend of mine in Indiana. The prezi software looks really cool!

What other interesting things – information – can you find regarding social media & business and marketing?

Class lecture/work

Hi Folks,

Here are the lecture slides for today’s class. I’ve added some lecture notes to some slides to give some context to some of the bullet points – so make sure you have your ppt viewer to see the notes as well.

There’s also blog work posted on the last two slides – there’s two parts.

Here’s the stuff you will need for part one: one file contains tables, and the other file contains the circles. if you look at slide #19, you’ll see examples of how this exercise was carried out with participants in a research project. We used post it notes (instead of just writing it on the circles as 1 or A).

For those who haven’t done so – please get a twitter account and a blog and start posting. Reminder to tweeters – start tweeting – some are, but only a couple. I would recommend downloading twhirl – allows you to post and read tweets much easier than the web interface (that doesn’t refresh).

thanks. see you on twitter – and next week.
t

Class Canceled today

Hi Folks,
I have Bronchitis and am unable to come to campus today, so class is canceled. i will posting some material here in the next few hours. Please check back so that you can do some at-home-work.
thanks, and sorry.
Tracy

techno-landscapes

In class we talked about techno-landscapes and examples of where technology has replaced ‘human service’ (like ATMs, automated registers at grocery stores, big screens on campus and in retail stores and so forth), and the potential implications of this. Often technology in the workplace leaves people with jobs, media technologies incite purchasing behaviours in the consumer and more.

What other tid-bits can you find online that’s related to our conversation about this in class? Post in the comments below (i need a first name if your in as anon); you can post anything you find – like YouTube videos, Flickr pictures, media articles, blog posts – ANYTHING. Remember to give the link, and comment on it (briefly is fine). if you think of other examples, feel free to note that as well.

stuff to do

Set up your blog and email the URL to Tracy. complete your first post.

Blog Work: Due by next class –
Over the next couple of days, I want you to pay attention to your ICTs use in your daily lives;
Monitor and think about your personal (entertainment, leisure, social), work or school use of email, IM, internet in general, cell phones etc…
How often did you find yourself using ICTS?
What were you using them for?
Could you have used a traditional means to do you tasks? (ie face to face, go to library etc).
What role do ICTs play in your life?
What do your daily experiences tell us about the information society?

If there are other things you want to blog about – feel free! comment on stuff your finding and experimenting with etc. Posts like this don’t have to be long or formal.
Set up your twitter account, add me and other students (usernames are on this blog – right side bar.) Start twittering, reading them & interact. Search for others to follow: people, organizations you’re interested in, media, interest groups – anything.

Contribute to my next blog post. This is part of the “Course Blog Contributions: 10%”. more info on next post.

bits of stuff

My twitter feed is here: proftracy Just click the follow button. Also, have a look at how Twitter Hashtags work at this site. I started a hashtag for #comm2p26, which should allow you to see all the ‘tweets’ (posts/status updates thru twitter are called tweets) I send directly for the course. Right now I’m having trouble with the Hastag site, so I’ll keep you posted on this…

I would also suggest the RSS feed located here. Here’s wikipedia’s notation on what a RSS feed is in case you’re not sure. You can subscribe to it; at the bottom left of the window it gives this feed. You can use various ways to do this (there’s some listed in the drop down menu. You can use something like Bloglines to follow blogs in an ‘easy-read’ format. This might be useful to follow student blogs and this one (as soon as I find the feed, I will post it!).

Found this site: Cherple, which lets you send text messages to cell phones from a web browser – cool!

To do for this week

Hi Folks! Good meeting everyone in class today!

Your task for this week is as follows:

1. Create your own blog! You can use Blogger or WordPress – it’s up to you. Feel free to personalize your blog with pictures, media, news/media feeds etc. You’ll be spending some time on it so spend some time and play with it.

2. Introduce yourself! Who are you? What things interest you? What do you want to do with yourself after university? (note: you don’t have to provide your last name on your blog & please don’t put your student # on it).

3. Set up an account at Twitter and have a look at people’s status updates. You can also link your Twitter and Facebook (so when you do an update on twitter, it updates your facebook status as well) if you want (there’s an application for it). Decide if you want to keep your status updates as public, or if you want to approve people to follow you. I’ve created a new username for courses – it’s ‘proftracy’ – so search me and follow me

4. Email me the URL of your new blog! I’ll be making student blogs available to all of us so we can read and comment on them. Also include your twitter username

5. Do the readings for this week and jump into the course!

See you next week!

The Information Society

The information society (also referred to as post-industrial society, knowledge society & network society) is characterized by a significant increase in the use of information & communication technologies (ICTs) in day to day life. This course focuses on the internet and how ‘information’ has changed; the way we create knowledge and information, the way we search for it, and the way we circulate it has become a complex collaborative web of information building exchange (and sometimes overload) – but not without unintended consequences and social implications. We will look at information on two levels; information about the world and information about people in it. Students in this course will spend considerable time exploring and critiquing online information and social media applications in addition to creating and contributing to knowledge and information about the world we live in.