Is there a national cultural identity in a Facebook world?

An interesting article originally titled "Is there an Australian culture in a Facebook world?" published to-day in the Sydney Morning Herald could even more appropriately be entitled "Is there a national culture identity in a Facebook world?" Simon Letch Illustration: Simon Letch CULTURE and creativity are central to life in the 21st century. The global stakes have never been higher; never before have we been surrounded by so much information or so much art - high and popular, visual and aural, original and reproduced, amusing and challenging, bland and exciting. In cities the world over, tribes are instantly recognisable irrespective of country of origin, defined by the beautifully designed objects of consumer capitalism they wear and carry, the entertainment they download, the food and drinks they consume, the news they absorb. Spotting anything uniquely Australian in this wash of global brands is harder than recognising the distinctively laidback style of Australians abroad.

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Reading: Is It Being Changed by Technology? - Steven Johnson, NYTimes.com

THE point of books is to combat loneliness,” David Foster Wallace observes near the beginning of “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” David Lipsky’s recently published, book-length interview with him. If you happen to be reading the book on the Kindle from Amazon, Mr. Wallace’s observation has an extra emphasis: a dotted underline running below the phrase. Not because Mr. Wallace or Mr. Lipsky felt that the point was worth stressing, but because a dozen or so other readers have highlighted the passage on their Kindles, making it one of the more “popular” passages in the book. Amazon calls this new feature “popular highlights.” It may sound innocuous enough, but it augurs even bigger changes to come.

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Here's how to decentralize the web and reclaim your privacy from the IT Information Pariahs

Diaspora - the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network We are four talented young programmers from NYU’s Courant Institute trying to raise money so we can spend the summer building Diaspora; an open source personal web server that will put individuals in control of their data. What is it? Enter your Diaspora “seed,” a personal web server that stores all of your information and shares it with your friends. Diaspora knows how to securely share (using GPG) your pictures, videos, and more. When you have a Diaspora seed of your own, you own your social graph, you have access to your information however you want, whenever you want, and you have full control of your online identity.

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How Can Social Networks Constructed by Technology Understand Friendship?

When Google launched Buzz, a microblogging social network, several months ago, the company boasted that the network had been generated automatically, by algorithms that could connect users to each other based on communications revealed through Gmail and other services. However, many users balked at having what they perceived as mischaracterized social connections, forcing the company to frantically backpedal and make the Buzz service less automated and more under users' control. This incident notwithstanding, many companies are increasingly interested in automatically determining users' social ties through e-mail and social network communications. For example, IBM's Lotus division offers a product called Atlas that constructs social data from corporate communications, and Microsoft has investigated using such data to automatically prioritize the e-mails that workers receive. But researchers say there are a lot of unsolved problems with generating and analyzing social networks based on patterns of communication.

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Everything You Need To Know About Social Media Marketing In Seven Short Steps

Here’s everything you need to know about social media marketing in seven short steps: 1. The biggest risk with social media is in not engaging in public conversations about your brand. So, do engage yourself and encourage your employees to engage. Ask them not to do things that will embarrass themselves or you, but expect them to. All of us have embarrassed ourselves in public, more than once, so will they. It’s okay. 2. The only solution for negative conversations is more positive conversations. Responding to and resolving negative conversations is table stakes. The only way to win is by inspiring your evangelists to start and spread more positive conversations about you. So, put in place a process to track and resolve negative conversations, then focus on organizing and energizing your evangelists.

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