Social network sites: Migration or multiple residency?

People are buzzing more and more about the need to understand "social network migration," particularly in the wake of what looks like a

Understanding the Networked Audience

I spent the latter half of this week in Princeton. I was invited by the Center for Information Technology Policy and spoke on the topic "Understanding the Networked Audience." Here is a super-short summary of my talk:

The "audience" has been constructed in many ways: as …

Doing a Radiohead?

As we all know, Radiohead self-released their record, In Rainbows, let fans pick the price for the download, charged up the wazoo for the immaculate box set, and is planning to release the cd on plastic for people who like stores to make their purchase as well. While …

Happy Thanksgiving!

For those in the US, enjoy my favorite holiday!

I'll be back posting next week, I hope (!) -- crazy busy time of year here -- but in the meantime, I have to go make some stuffing and get going on that big bird.

If you were going to roast a turkey today (or for an …

Chicago

If you're reading this, I'm in Chicago at the National Communication Association meeting. This (Friday) afternoon at 3:30-6:15 at the Hilton, I'm speaking in a double-session roundtable on the future of human communication and technology research with some excellent …

Online Fans Buy A Team!

Last May I wrote about a UK fansite trying to organize football (that'd be soccer to my American brethren) fans to go beyond armchair coaching and webboard kvetching to collectively purchase a team. Today's big news is that they did it!

An Internet-based collective of …

Serious Doubts About Facebook

At the risk of becoming an all Facebook all the time blog, which I really don't want to be, I do have a few more things to say before hanging up the FB hat for the week.

Last week, they rolled out "social ads" which will be so delightfully targeted just at us that we …

Is Facebook A Fad?

The video is now up from [Canadian public television station] TVO's current affairs program, The Agenda's panel discussion of the future of Facebook that I participated in the other night with 4 other guests. For the first half I listened along thinking "everyone's got …

Internet Inquiry Goes to Press! (and me on TV)

Yesterday my co-editor Annette Markham and I sent the final manuscript of our collection, Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method, to our editor at Sage. The book is targeted at graduate students learning qualitative research methods (participant observation, …

What should a middleman mediate?

In yesterday's New York Times Magazine, Rob Walker wrote a piece about "Buddylube," a middleman agency that specializes in making widgets for pop bands:

"The artists need promotion," Eaton summarizes. "And all these new technologies of social media need artists." So …

Do all social networks suck at groups?

Web 2.0 is supposed to be all about harnessing the wisdom of crowds, playing simultaneously off the glorification of the individual via personalized profiles and services and the algorithmic magic that happens when individual data is mined.

But inbetween there's the …

The Place of Mystique in the Internet Age

The Detroit Free Press had a piece over the weekend by their pop critic, Brian McCollum, contemplating the loss of mystique in rock and roll now that there's so very much information available online. He writes:

There's a reason they call the Internet the great …

Social Network Panel at AoIR and Colbert pushes 1,000,000

The roundtable on perspectives and challenges in studying social network sites that I put together for the Association of Internet Researchers' meeting has been blogged by Sarah Ford here. You have to imagine the conversational flow, but the main points are all there. …

Life Online Means More Life Offline

In class this week I showed Stephanie Tuszynski's recent documentary "IRL In Real Life" about an officially-sanctioned online community that formed around Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The film raises a number of issues about how the cast and production team (not least Joss …

Adventures in the Pacific Northwest

I am back, finally, from my week of adventures. First I stopped off in Redmond at Microsoft Research, where I gave a talk called I Heard It On the Network: Recent Developments in Music Fandom, in which I used the example of the Swedish indie scene to argue that in an …

Radiohead Demonstrate the Value of Relationships

The Radiohead experiment demonstrates that the future of the music industry is forgetting about fans as customers of labels and instead recognizing them as people who want to have social relationships with bands. I'm not talking about pathological obsession. I'm talking …

Making the Morality Play of Pricing Visible

UK-based music industry news subscription service, Record of the Day, is running a survey asking people buying the Radiohead record how much they paid and why. You can read MANY sample answers. I have too much to say about their data to say anything and still get done …

The Future of Human Communication and Technology Research

In a month or so, at the National Communication Association meeting, I will be participating on a panel called Conversations with Leading Scholars: The Past, Present and Future Research on Human Communication and Technology. The other "leading scholars" are Susan …

Fans as Givers

Following up on my post about charitable fans, here's a nice article by Merlin Missy posted at Firefox news explaining the natural connections between fandom and altruistic acts toward others:

The truth is, we do have lives. We have jobs and classes and families and …

Before there was Radiohead...

Though it's been pointed out that they are not doing something new, they're just the biggest band to do it yet, Radiohead are still getting all the free press one could ever want with their take-it-for-free-if-you-want-it album release strategy.

I say, it's always good …